"[Wisconsin] survives and takes Michigan’s Upper Peninsula with it."

When the states are redrawn based on social media friendship:

"Visitors in red, white and blue darkened with sweat stood in lines for hours, sometimes screaming in frustration and other times collapsing from exhaustion."

"The Independence Day parade was canceled and the Great American State Fair delayed. Steel fences and closed roads made photos of iconic monuments hard to capture. Both white supremacists and liberal activists marched through the city, each demanding their country back...."

I'm reading "America’s 250th celebrations marked by severe weather, political division/Officials ordered thousands of people to evacuate the National Mall after a severe weather warning that delayed President Donald Trump’s speech." That's in The Washington Post (not the NYT, as I'd accidentally had written).

"Small protests popped up throughout the day. One group lugged a 700-foot banner that read 'We the People' down Pennsylvania Avenue, condemning the president. About 50 people with another group, 'Refuse Fascism,' marched toward the White House, demanding that Trump leave office.... [H]undreds of uniformed members of Patriot Front, a white-supremacist group, marched toward the U.S. Capitol. Their faces covered in white masks, the men beat drums and carried flags — some upside down, others Confederate — as they chanted, 'Reclaim America!' Many gripped combat shields as they passed the Capitol building...."

How did the extra-important 4th look from your vantage point? 

"These are very, very special times. And this is a very special place. You live in a very special place. Congratulations everybody."

Those were the very very very special words of our President, Donald J. Trump, speaking at Mount Rushmore, on the eve of the 250th anniversary of the 4th of July.

"And we rededicate ourselves to being a nation as big, bold, noble, and as great as these American giants. And that's not easy to do, but we're going to do it. These men could only have been made in the USA. Their faces are engraved on these bluffs, not only because of what they did, but to remind us forever who we are. These heroes exemplify what is timeless, enduring, and eternal about the American character. And in the end, it has always been that character, our distinct and unique identity. It is a truly unique identity and it'll never change.... Liberty has prevailed here because of the culture and character of the people who declared it, defended it, and preserved it.... The identity of a nation is the destiny of a nation. And America has a destiny like no other because we are a people like no other. For whatever reason, that's just the way it is.

"I remember one of the first things my parents would say about Americans when we immigrated to America, was that they always seemed so unhappy..."

"... despite the fact that they were so much richer than us. We were living on government cheese for a time, and my parents and other Russians would say: Oni ot zhira besyatsa. Which translates very vaguely as: They’re wild with their own fat. They’re so juicy and fat, and yet they don’t know what to do with it. Just enjoy the fat. But sometimes this greater meaning combines with this egotistical impulse to have more and more and more. And to not die is one of those almost Protestant extensions of everything. And striving. Why should the striving ever end?"

Said Gary Shteyngart, in his interview with Ezra Klein, the "I" in the headline "I Keep Telling People We’re Living in This Dystopian Novel" (NYT). The novel is Shteyngart's "Super Sad True Love Story" (commission earned).

"And beneath the bluster, Trump’s limited view of the American Revolution is very familiar..."

"... it reflects, like so much else about him, the mainstream culture of the Cold War era, when museums and films did indeed tell a relentlessly upbeat story of American accomplishment — in vivid contrast to the plodding drudgery of communism. The leftist radicals of the 1960s and 1970s dissented noisily from this cosy view, but the majority accepted it unquestioningly. Since then a more extreme view has taken root: those who see the revolution not as the start of an unfinished project but as a fixed source of authority, a 250-year-old set of final answers. But as the US blows out its birthday candles, does it still have the capacity it once had for political renewal, while retaining its founding principles? It is always easier to start revolutions than to end them. This is why so many Americans have believed theirs was superior to others: it had been brought to an elegant conclusion by the constitution of 1787. Americans, it seemed, had escaped the spirals of radicalism and authoritarianism that beset France, or Latin American republics...."

From "Happy birthday USA. But is America’s revolution unravelling? When the USA turned 200, the nation came together as one. Fifty years on, what are the chances of the same thing happening under Donald Trump? A special series from The Sunday Times Magazine is dedicated to the 250th anniversary of the USA."

That's the London Times. The view from the losing side.

"You don't have to tip. You wanna tip."

An Aussie discovers Texas Road House for the first time. Epic!

The World Cup needs to be permanently held in the US. It offers the most for the teams and the fans. 🤣🇺🇸🇦🇺 pic.twitter.com/5AFbUVWrFZ

— Buzz Patterson (@BuzzPatterson) June 19, 2026

AND: Costco has your beans:

Culture shock… Europeans in America pic.twitter.com/fxxgdHqKng

— Meidas_Charise Lee (@charise_lee) June 19, 2026

"If this happened here there would be uproar, quite rightly. Yet Trump and his cronies can do whatever they like with total impunity, and indifference from the public. What is wrong with Americans?"

A comment on the London Times article "Kristi Noem spent $20,000 on horses for advert that got her fired/The contract for the Department of Homeland Security’s one-minute advert was worth $220 million — more than the budget for this year’s best picture Oscar winner."

Madison, better than those other cities.

I'm reading "See ChatGPT’s hidden bias about your state or city/The states with the laziest people according to ChatGPT" (WaPo).

That's a gift link, so you can check out your city the way I checked out Madison.

"If Democrats don’t reverse course, they may soon find themselves unable to win presidential elections."

"Increasingly, the party is made up of urban professionals who graduated from four-year universities and command relatively high salaries. Having more of these supporters has been a boon to the party’s finances, but electorally, the shift has been a disaster. The electoral power of high-income voters is limited: Not only are they a smaller demographic, but they are also concentrated in a handful of coastal states that do not decide presidential elections. By contrast, the lower-income voters lost by Democrats are dispersed across the battleground states that increasingly determine the Electoral College outcome. Under this system, no candidate can win the presidency today without galvanizing the working class...."

Writes Brody Mullins, in "How Democrats Became the Party of the Well-to-Do" (NYT)(free-access link, because there are some good graphs that show how the class politics flipped).

"Suggestions that the number of people wanting to separate is growing worries me.... [Premier Danielle Smith] is manipulating the people of this province..."

"... into believing that we should seriously look at separating. It is just ludicrous. Not all of us think like that. I absolutely disagree."

Said Kathleen Sokvitne, a citizen of Calgary, Alberta, quoted in "'We're Canadians': Some Albertans divided about separation in cross-province checkup/Republican Party of Alberta leader says membership has doubled since the federal election" (CBC).

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok:

1. What does "checkup" mean in this Canadian newspaper headline...? 

2. In the US, we'd just say "poll," right? (Or "survey") 

3. If Alberta became the 51st state, there would be a lot of odd language and spelling quirks that might make Albertans feel/seem like outsiders. 

In preparation for Alberta's joining us as the 51st state, I'm listening to Millennial Moron explain the Canadian love for Kraft Dinner Language (AKA K.D. Lang).

And it's great that Bob Dylan went on to become a popular musician in his own right. Some commenter over there says "This is the single most Canadian bit of humor I think I might have ever seen." I don't know, but I want to find out. Join us, Alberta! 

We'll give you more gold/Than your apron can hold.

Now, maybe you think I'm getting ahead of myself, and I am. I lived through the arrival of the 49th state and the 50th state, and — I was a kid — I just thought new states would be joining us every year or so. Alaska and Hawaii clamored to join the coolest place on earth, and I thought everyone else would just be piling in. Why wouldn't they?! Why didn't they? Here it is, 66 years later and not one new entrant. So it would really warm my heart — I literally had tears in my eyes — if Alberta would come on in.

I was reading "Should Alberta Become the 51st State? The Case for Secession, Statehood, and a Freer Western Canada" by Rod D. Martin. Excerpt:

"The predecessor who now inspires Trump in vivid oil paint served only one term, dying shortly after he left office in 1849."

"But in four years Polk nearly doubled the territory of the U.S. On the northern border, Polk’s supporters rallied around the expansionist slogan '54°40’ or Fight,' demanding the U.S. take over the entire Pacific Northwest up to that latitude, then the southern boundary of Russian Alaska, even if it meant going to war with Britain. Instead, in 1846 Polk negotiated a treaty that established the U.S.’s northern border at the 49th parallel. In the Southwest, Polk annexed Texas and fought the Mexican-American War, which ended in Mexico ceding more than 500,000 square miles to the U.S., including all of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, in exchange for $15 million. It was 'one of the largest land grabs in world history,' said historian Hampton Sides... 'He wanted it all, and he got it all in one term....' In terms of personality, Polk and Trump have little in common, Sides said. Despite his aggressive foreign policy, Polk 'was not this blustering, loud, bully of a person. He was morose, a kind of dark guy.' Polk was also known 'for being quite honest…He wasn’t this erratic, crazy person who was constantly throwing people off guard....'"

From "The Painting That Explains Trump’s Foreign Policy/James K. Polk expanded the U.S. more than any other president. Now his portrait hangs in the Oval Office, a signal that President Trump’s ambition to take over Canada, Greenland and other territory is more than just talk" (Wall Street Journal).

"We pay hundreds of Billions of Dollars to SUBSIDIZE Canada. Why? There is no reason. We don’t need anything they have."

"We have unlimited Energy, should make our own Cars, and have more Lumber than we can ever use. Without this massive subsidy, Canada ceases to exist as a viable Country. Harsh but true! Therefore, Canada should become our Cherished 51st State. Much lower taxes, and far better military protection for the people of Canada — AND NO TARIFFS!"

Writes President Trump, at Truth Social.

I like how he capitalized all the C words — Canada, Cars, Country, Cherished.

AND: There's one question — and I've raised it before — which is why would Canada be only one state? Why not 2... or 10... or more? The answer is:

Canada can't be the 51st state. It would need to be the 51st through 63rd state...

... Tom Green explains.

"No one can answer why we subsidize Canada to the tune of over $100,000,000 a year? Makes no sense!"

"Many Canadians want Canada to become the 51st State. They would save massively on taxes and military protection. I think it is a great idea. 51st State!!!"

Writes Donald Trump on Truth Social.

Discussed here, at The Hill:

His joking comes after the president-elect announced last month that he would impose a 25 percent tariff on products imported into the U.S. from Canada and Mexico.... Trump said the move would exert pressure on the trading partners to better crack down on the movement of fentanyl and other drugs into the U.S. and fortify border security.... He has also jokingly called Trudeau the “governor” of the “Great State of Canada.”

ADDED: BBC asks: "Will Trudeau Resign? Four paths Trudeau can take as political crisis deepens."

Fixing the state borders — not the borders with Mexico and Canada — the state-on-state borders.

They ought to have more to do with mountains and rivers — and give the Upper Peninsula to Wisconsin:

"The French Revolution looms large in the philosophy of crowds because it was the first time that a 'mob' or what looked like one..."

"... was responsible for a decisive turn in the history of humankind. The Roman Republic was always an upper-class affair, with the mob a mere chorus, and even the American Revolution was... very much a legislative revolution, made by the manor, with the crowds much smaller than they are remembered to have been. The Boston Tea Party was more a publicity stunt than a significant popular protest.... Americans celebrate a group of merchants and planters signing a document on July 4th; the French celebrate a crowd of citizens storming the monarchical prison called the Bastille on July 14th. There is a difference.... When you are 'taking democracy into your own hands,' what you have in your hands is not democracy, because democracy begins with the recognition that other people have hands, too....  Can we speak of the wisdom of crowds? Sometimes. The madness of mobs? Sometimes, too. Perhaps, within the winningly minute range of terms that Bobrycki captures, vulgus and populus and the rest, lies a truth that resonates through centuries, even millennia. We see the shifting varieties of human assembly and search to give them meaning, when the meaning lies exactly in the mutability.... A crowd can become a mob; a crowd can even become an army. To turn a crowd into a community? Ah, that’s the hard work."

Writes Adam Gopnik, in "What’s the Difference Between a Rampaging Mob and a Righteous Protest? From the French Revolution to January 6th, crowds have been heroized and vilified. Now they’re a field of study" (The New Yorker).

Bobrycki = Shane Bobrycki, author of "The Crowd in the Early Middle Ages."

The Washington Post Editorial Board pushes Kamala Harris to pay attention to the upcoming 250th anniversary of the United States.

I was surprised to see the Board highlighting the semiquincentennial, but here's the column featured on the front page today — 2 weeks before Election Day — "America has a big birthday coming. Kamala Harris should talk plans. The celebration is a chance to renew our nation’s commitment to the promise of its founding."

Is this an issue the people are clamoring for attention to be paid to? Donald Trump paid attention to it... a year and a half ago. He thought about it on his own and made a dignified speech detailing his multi-part plan for a full-year celebration. So for the WaPo editors to bring this up is to put pressure only on Kamala Harris. Is she supposed to jump at their prodding? There's zero hope of her sounding sincere responding to this one-sided demand. 

The editors say — in a tellingly passive voice:

Efforts are already underway to plan the semiquincentennial, but they got off to a slow start, mirroring much of the country’s political dysfunction.

In other words, the Biden Administration hasn't been doing enough?

The federal commission appointed to oversee the proceedings, writes the Atlantic, “swiftly descended into a morass of charges and countercharges over process, favoritism, hiring, gender discrimination, and budget decisions.”

So here's what cued up the issue. There's an article in The Atlantic, published a week ago: "America Is Suffering an Identity Crisis/In two years, the U.S. will mark its 250th birthday, and the left doesn’t seem to care—giving up on America’s symbols and its very meaning."

The left doesn't seem to care. But if Trump is elected he will preside over the occasion, and he certainly seems to care. I can now understand the WaPo editors' decision to forefront this issue. There's a horror of the Donald Trump Birthday of America Extravaganza and a chilling realization that his Make-America-Great-Again theme fits enragingly perfectly with the occasion. Quick! Present a left-wing alternative vision!

The WaPo editors lamely suggest that Kamala Harris "try to persuade skeptics on her side of the political spectrum that the United States is indeed something worth celebrating." It's a little late for that. But the editors say she's "well-positioned to make this pitch, because as the child of immigrants and a woman of color, she represents in her very candidacy the progress the country has seen." As if this big occasion should revolve around her: Celebrate me! Because I embody what's worth celebrating!

The Atlantic article says that Biden dealt with the "meltdown" at the commission by appointing Rosie Rios as the commission chair. Under her, the key concept seems to be a "radically decentralized" social-media concept called "America's Stories" — a website where anybody/everybody writes anything. This would be inclusive, but it would include all the hostility against America that we expect from the left. Would they resort to censorship? They would have to! 

The Atlantic writer, the Yale historian Beverly Gage, says:

For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths.

Next time you propose a toast at a birthday party, try exposing a darker story behind the self-congratulatory myths.

As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about.

So you and your fellow historians devoted yourself to telling the "darker story" and now, as the people look to celebrate a big birthday, you are worried that they aren't going to frame the event around your dark story but will look to the kind of characters — the "darker forces" — that you've been disparaging all these years? People are drawn to the good — to an uplifting idea of what the country means — and you see that very optimism as an embrace of the darkness.

Nearing the end, the historian comes out with: "[N]ow that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag?" Well, for one thing, flying a U.S. flag at your house is regarded as equivalent to having a Trump yard sign.

We have a U.S. flag at our front door. But I'd consider bringing it inside for the next few weeks, because I don't like exacerbating the anguish in the neighborhood as the impending Make-America-Great-Again victory comes into focus.

"You would have to hike for days to catch the same views they saw travelling through.... She likens a moving train to 'the ultimate dolly'..."

"... the wheeled cart that allows a film camera to capture travelling, panoramic shots. It was 'bonkers' to discover how close the tracks ran to the rivers; on the west coast they were so close to the sea they were practically in it. There’s a snobbery, too, about certain states, which is both political and aesthetic. The central states are often dismissed as the 'flyover states' — miles and miles of cornfields worth seeing only from 35,000ft. But, Edwards says, the 'middle of nowhere' often gave her the most exciting shots. 'You could just see such a long way.... And when you did see something significant, it made it almost more unbelievable that it might be able to exist so far from all other activities.' The emptiness sometimes made her feel anxious.... 'Have I got enough shots? Is this interesting enough? Where is everybody? Where are all the animals?'"

From "Why I spent 180 hours on a train across America (with my dad)/Katie Edwards travelled 10,000 miles on Amtrak, taking 20,000 photographs on the way. She tells Laura Freeman what she saw out of the window" (London Times).

Edwards grew up in the Lake District in England, which makes me think of William Wordsworth and his dedication to walking. Walking, you can always stop and look at whatever you want. It's easy to take photographs (or, if you must, write a poem in your head, stomping out the meter). But I like Edwards's train photography project. It was easy to catch sight of many more things, but difficult to get the shots at the right time (and to deal with reflections in the window glass). 

I like seeing the outsider's view of America:

"But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets."

"It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: 'Are we the baddies?' I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?...  The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing? ... The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.... A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.... I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II...."

Writes Niall Ferguson, in "We’re All Soviets Now/A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?" (Free Press).