If a nuclear bomb went off in my neighborhood here near Altadena, CA, you’d never know the difference. The main thoroughfare is still a wasteland of twisted metal and collapsed building, on both sides of the street for block after block.

Barefoot, filthy zombies shuffle down desolate sidewalks, twitching and talking to themselves. The only residents our local governments are “fighting for” are the foreign nationals, whose children fill our public schools. My neighborhood is around 35% Hispanic; the local elementary school is 79% Hispanic and a “dual immersion” Spanish speaking campus.

But: summer has finally arrived here at the edge of the January firestorm.

Summer 2025 glimmered like a paradise for weeks—soon, there would be no more school pickups, lunch boxes, or uniform slips. No more missing homework assignments. No more tardies or APs or SATs to worry about. Finally, we made it to my son’s high school graduation! Congratulations to everyone who got a kid through to this moment. They were the kids who had suffer through eighth and sometimes ninth grade on Zoom and then try to crawl out of that grading hole and still somehow make it into a decent college.

Our elation was short-lived. A few days after graduation, my 14 year old called to tell me to prepare for an impending nuclear attack on Los Angeles.

Air Force Done

He told me this as I waited at a local urgent care with a very sick eight-year old. Hours among the city’s most wretched souls at the emergency room concluded that it was not in fact appendicitis.

A follow up visit at the pediatrician—which I had successfully avoided for two years thanks to their Covid rules and their gender questioning protocols—determined it was a stomach virus with fevers. My sixteen-year-old consulted Grok and told me it was E. Coli and that she had to get IV antibiotics or she would die of sepsis.

She is now much better and it looks like she won’t die from whatever nasty bug she picked up. Nuclear winter summer has potentially been averted for the time being.

But now I have a new, bulging sack of worries: will Atlantic hurricanes ruin summer travel? Will rogue Iranian terrorist attacks blow up people’s vacations? Are my kids getting too much screen time (yes) and not enough green vegetables (yes)?

Will we make it through another year in Los Angeles, where my DWP bill at the moment is $2000 (!) and there is still a big hole in my roof from where the fire windstorm tore off the tiles?

That reminds me: please don’t forget to become a subscriber.

A few weeks ago a 12 year-boy was crushed to death in a freak accident in the school pick up line at Campbell Hall, a private school in Studio City. The girl who accidentally killed him was home from college and driving her mom’s car to pick up her little sister. She must have stepped on the gas instead of the brakes, which is something young drivers sometimes do, and her family friend was killed in front of his own father.

Parenting tip: Tell your kids to never, ever walk between idling cars!

Two days ago, three Opus Dei numeraries drowned in a terrible accident in the Sierras. Matt Schoenecker ran the boy’s summer camp, the wonderful teenage leadership program, and was a fixture in their lives for many years. Every Catholic I know knew and loved these three men. Matt and five others were hiking near Rattlesnake Falls in a remote area and jumping into the swimming hole. One of them jumped and then called out for help: maybe he was caught in a current, or maybe the cold shock got him. Matt, who was a high school expert diver, and another hiker, Matt Anthony jumped in to help. All three vanished below the surface near a waterfall. Absolutely horrific.

Parenting tip: Tell your kids not to jump into flowing rivers near waterfalls. And never, ever approach someone your own size who is drowning unless you have a flotation device or are experienced in some way.

Is summer fraught with more danger than the school year? Is it because everyone is outside around large bodies of water, bees, and under less parental supervision than usual? Should I bolt the doors and keep us all inside all summer, preferably in a subterranean nuclear fallout shelter that has provisions for six months? Should we start the iodine tablets yet? I don’t have enough drinking water in the house—do I need to get MREs?

My daughter’s EpiPen refill (for bee stings) is waiting for me at RiteAid—and I just found out that RiteAid just went bankrupt and all the stores are closing in a few weeks.

We can’t have nice things anymore, I know. But RiteAid sucked. I guess we can’t even have crappy things now.

The Ayatollah has issued a cryptic fatwa against GE executives and called for the death of Jay Leno.

The real war is not between us and the Iranian regime. The real war is not even between Iran and Israel. The real war, the dangerous one, is the war between the faction that wants the United States to Hiroshima Tehran, bunker bust the underground nuclear facilities, assassinate the Ayatollah, and color revolution Iran by force—and the people who voted to end these endless foreign wars.

We are not going back.

Apparently the high-level pressure campaign on President Trump to pull the trigger is because of this absolute unit:

“The US is the only country capable of bombing a key Iranian nuclear site. The key Fordow Iranian nuclear site has facilities buried so deep it makes it very difficult to damage with conventional weapon systems. The United States is the only country known to possess a bomb capable of striking a target so deep: the GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator.”

Okay, let me stop you right there. Can we talk about that name for a second? Was it Pride week at Raytheon when they named this thing? The MOP sounds a little dirty: a massive penetrator? Really?

There’s a “your mom” joke in there somewhere but I will let you guys write it.

In theory neutralizing the Fordow nuke site in the bowels of Persia sounds great—one less crazy regime on the planet. The women of Iran can finally take off their hijabs—and charge people to watch them do it on Only Fans. Evin Prison will be opened, Israel will no longer be forced to live under the threat of Iranian-backed terror attacks, inshallah.

But things over there never seem to work out neatly. Americans have been running aground in the desert since Rick Blaine was misinformed on the quality of its waters. The Middle East will always be a “quagmire,” as the hippies used to say. I’m no expert but interventions by us in the Middle East have not worked out too well.

The only winning move? The one we learned from War Games.

Even killing Osama Bin Laden was sort of pathetic—the final act in a long line of American blunders on his trail. Clinton called off a sure-thing assassination of Osama in the 1990s. We lost him in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis were letting him live right next to one of their bases and we didn’t know. And the real dirty secret of Osama that no one likes to talk about is that the CIA basically created him in order to fight the Soviets. Another well meaning intervention gone terribly awry—one that ended on 9/11.

I voted for Donald Trump three times because I do not believe in war anymore. I mean, I believe in fighting for self-defense, and I personally would fight and die to defend my homeland and my family, but no, I don’t believe in war. Few wars have ever risen to the level of existential self-defense, and most should never have been fought.

If we carpet-nuke Iran, all it will do is let loose thousands of the “sleeper cells” I’ve been hearing about for year. What are those guys hiding up their sleeves, and under their turbans? I don’t feel like finding out!

Islamophobic? Moi? You’re damn right I’m afraid of them.

The obvious alternative to the Massive Ordnance Penetrators is to simply resist the urge to use it. Not because the mullahs don’t deserve it—but because it won’t work. If Iran did have nukes and then did try to nuke Israel, they would be instantly incinerated.

I hate to say this to my Israeli friends, but toppling Iran is not my highest priority. Can we please get back to egg prices, DEI in college admissions, getting illegals out of California, and arresting criminals?

Thanks for reading,

—Peachy

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