Presque Isle, Maine, celebrates the nation’s 250th all year, causing pain and suffering amongst the righteous

Presque Isle, Maine, has a full year of events to celebrate the 250th birthday of our nation, organized primarily by Kim Smith, the town's resource development and public information officer. The New York Times wrote about it, nicely conveying the enthusiasm despite a mocking headline for the hate bait. And here indeed are some of the killjoy comments, miserable in their TDS and betraying an utter disgust for democracy and their fellow Americans. Back in January, the Bangor Daily News had written about it.

SJH · Portland, OR:

One way to “celebrate“ our country’s 250th is to get politically active and help restore, democracy, and integrity to federal governance. If you’re ready to a member of the boots-on-the-ground effort, then Google “how to help the Democrats win the midterms” and sign up for active political duty. Then choose wisely, depending on where you live and who you are.

If you live in a blue or red area, then consider helping out in swing states and closely contested elections. Organizations like Swingleft, Movementvote, and Voteforward can help you direct your efforts to best effect. But if you live in a pink or purple area than consider getting active locally. Contact your state/local Democratic committee and ask how you can help. There are some very good books on running and winning local elections.

No matter what you choose, tell your people and ask them to help. And post your experiences on social media sites like Facebook and Reddit. There are seldom-voting Democrats, independents, Newbies, even patriotic Republicans who need to be prompted to vote and vote blue in these midterms. Our country is in a deep crisis. It needs you. Now. Please help. It’s the right time and the right thing to do.

Daj · Bellvue, Colorado:

Sounds like she has gone all in and managed not to politicize our 250th. I however will be mourning the steady demise of all that is decent and good about America.

Robyn · Out west:

Perhaps we could concentrate on returning to democracy for all. I don’t see anything to celebrate on the direction our country is going at present.

W · U.S.:

Good for them! I’m looking forward to our small town’s celebration as well. I certainly will not be watching our President celebrating himself.

Proud Liberal · Netherlands:

I wish I could share in Ms. Smith’s enthusiasm, but the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US feels more like a wake than a celebration.

Eeryn · Florida:

This is interesting because I and so many others will not be celebrating at all.

Howards End: Excerpts

By all means subscribe to charities – subscribe to them largely – but don’t get carried away by absurd schemes of Social Reform. ... there is no Social Question – except for a few journalists who try to get a living out of the phrase. There are just rich and poor, as there always have been and always will be. Point me out a time when men have been equal ... Point me out a time when desire for equality has made them happier. No, no. You can’t. There always have been rich and poor. I’m no fatalist. Heaven forbid! But our civilization is moulded by great impersonal forces and there always will be rich and poor. You can’t deny it, and you can’t deny that, in spite of all, the tendency of civilization has on the whole been upward.

· · · · · 

Reaction against the Wilcoxes had eaten into her life until she was scarcely sane. … Paul had faded, but the magic of his caress endured. And where there is enjoyment of the past there may also be reaction – propagation at both ends. 

· · · · · 

London was but a foretaste of this nomadic civilisation which is altering human nature so profoundly, and throws upon personal relations a stress greater than they have ever borne before. Under cosmopolitanism, if it comes, we shall receive no help from the earth. Trees and meadows and mountains will only be a spectacle, and the binding force that they once exercised on character must be entrusted to Love alone. May Love be equal to the task!

· · · · · 

Hilton was asleep, or at the earliest, breakfasting. Leonard noticed the contrast when he stepped out of it into the country. Here men had been up since dawn. Their hours were ruled, not by a London office, but by the movements of the crops and the sun. That they were men of the finest type only the sentimentalists can declare. But they kept to the life of daylight. They are England’s hope. Clumsily they carry forward the torch of the sun, until such time as the nation sees fit to take it up. Half clodhopper, half board-school prig, they can still throw back to a nobler stock, and breed yeomen.

At the chalk pit a motor passed him. In it was another type, whom Nature favours – the Imperial. Healthy, ever in motion, it hopes to inherit the earth. It breeds as quickly as the yeoman, and as soundly; strong is the temptation to acclaim it as a super-yeoman, who carries his country’s virtue overseas. But the Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer. He prepares the way for cosmopolitanism, and though his ambitions may be fulfilled, the earth that he inherits will be grey.

· · · · · 

Howards End, E. M. Forster (1910)

“Daring and Dazzling” in LA

Macaulay (14 April 2026) comments:

As the article states, "ancient Greek sculptures, Indonesian batiks, old master paintings and midcentury automobiles presented on equal footing." Pretending that mediocre and trivial artworks are exactly as important as great and masterly artworks is the same tired, even exhausted, narrative that our worthless cultural institutions have been pushing for decades. 

It's entirely predictable that the feather-brained progressives in charge of LACMA would celebrate the elimination of all the frameworks and categories that allow for actual understanding of artwork in its specific historical context, in favor of an empty and meaningless "equality." 

It's why progressives are determined to eliminate all of the orders and structures that give life meaning and integrity -- [because] they stand in the way of "equality." Also not surprising that this lavish new building is simply a shapeless, ugly, concrete blob. 

What a pathetic and exhausted civilization.

Wind turbine diesel generators

At Genesal Energy, we have a strong international presence in the renewable energy sector, particularly in wind power projects. From the early stages of wind farm development, our generator sets have been part of the support system to ensure continuous operation in any contingency.

Wind farms are usually located in highly exposed areas. If the wind turbines stop generating electricity or disconnect from the grid, it is vital they can continue to orient themselves to prevent structural damage. This is where wind farm backup generators come into play, powering yaw and control systems when no supply is available.

 

These systems are not only used in emergencies. In many cases, wind turbine diesel generators are employed during wind farm commissioning, maintenance works, or as a stable power source for SCADA systems, hurricane-control systems, or communications.

We design each generator set individually to adapt to the environment, wind farm topology, electrical configuration, and customer requirements. In wind installations, the reliability of the auxiliary system is just as important as the main production.

See also: Dozens of giant turbines at Scots windfarms powered by diesel generators 

Democracy and humor are dying of the same disease

“Have Americans lost their sense of humor?” by Nicholas Lynch, The Spectator, December 22, 2025

Humor has become serious business. A nation of anxious primates trapped in a silicon casino of likes, retweets and dopamine-soaked drudgery, America is suffering from what the comedian Norm Macdonald called a “crisis of clapter.” Terrified of saying the wrong thing, needing punchlines to be spoon-fed – what was once the funniest place on Earth has become a tight-lipped, tongue-twisted society where jokes are rewarded with polite applause instead of genuine laughter. It’s the old stink of a well-mannered aristocracy, and very un-American indeed.

From his beginning, the ugly American – wild-eyed and rabble-rousing – rankled the Old World. A pandemonious lot of yahoos set loose upon a land of virgin forests and free-for-all plenty, Americans were insubordinate, with a sense of humor to match. As Matthew Arnold, disgusted by a people with too many kings and not enough crowns, wrote:

“If there be a discipline in which the Americans are wanting, it is the discipline of awe and respect … In truth everything is against distinction in America, and against the sense of elevation to be gained through admiring and respecting it … The addiction to “the funny man,” who is a national misfortune there, is against it.”

The tall tale – distinct enough to, for the first time, qualify as an original art form – gave shape to a new kind of nation. Unlike the satirical critiques of the British essay or the witty comedies of French theater, the American tall tale was funny without a point. It wasn’t social commentary. It didn’t exist to prove genius. It was laugh-at-me tomfoolery. As Mark Twain saw it: “To string incongruities and absurdities together in a wandering and sometimes purposeless way, and seem innocently unaware that they are absurdities, is the basis of the American art.”

Meant to be heard rather than read, the tall tale was a kind of story that – pretending not to know – brags big, falls flat, gets in its own way, speaks past the point, wastes the audience’s time and doubles back to waste it again, concealing its punchlines and playing dumb all the while. Twain contrasted this with the self-important European habit of advertising comedic effect with “whopping exclamation points” and explanations in parentheticals.

It was a “very depressing” thing, Twain explained, to find joy in the sublime, the beautiful, the useful and the orderly and yet be unable to find it in the incoherent, the elusive and the unexpected. The American sense of humor, in his view, was animated by a frank affinity for the imperfect, making sense of a people who preferred the patchwork pursuit of a more perfect union rather than the sterile fixity of a perfect one to start.

This democratic sense of humor was not some dainty old comedy of manners – a museum of wrongly-held forks, counterfeit airs and the thousand other fragile trinkets of aristocratic life, all such cultured amusements of a buttoned-up society where social climbing was a passion. No – the American creation was instead what historian Henry Steele Commager called “comedy of circumstance,” that made fun of every man, who “at one time or another aimed too high, adventured too boldly, boasted too loudly.” It mocked rich people like poor people, made fun of smart people in the same way as dumb people – because in the US no man is allowed to stay king. Only here was humor let off the leash, divorced from the polite understanding that jokes ought to leave the order intact. In Europe, mockery operated within a fixed aristocratic structure – as a pressure valve in a system not designed to change its fundamental hierarchy. Here, ridicule was integrated into a self-correcting democratic project – an informal mode of checks and balances powered by short memories, mixed company and freedom.

Monarchy, oligarchy, theocracy, Plato’s philosocracy – every way of government the human species has thought to design was, in the beginning, born of utopian aspirations; and in the end, kept alive with nothing less than first-rate hypocrisy. Believing we could perfect it all, we sought to codify a world without error – by purging its flaws, cleaning its mess and setting it all in stone. But in 1789, a new generation of men on a new continent chose to work with our flaws and use the mess and admit that our Constitution could not stay unamended forever.

Few of their ideas were original. Most of their genius took up no more than a dozen seats at Independence Hall. But so different was the character of all the men in Philadelphia and New York and Boston and Virginia from any nation of men so far conceived that the old idea of democracy, long trapped on paper, at last found a people funny enough to make it work. A people who laughed at pretension, heckled certainty and made a sport of nonconformity.

But now: a Botox-bleached nation of caped crusaders wearing noise-canceling headphones, deaf to anything but our own theme music and the imagined sound of unseen eggshells cracking beneath, Americans are slipping back into the Old World habits we once escaped. Democracy and humor are dying of the same disease.

Folk culture, high culture, and industrial devolution to mass culture

From “America’s future looks vulgar” by Chilton Williamson, The Spectator, February 19, 2026:

The principal enemy of the supremacy of the intellect in a civilized society is not, as anti-democratic critics over the past 200 years have argued, democratic systems of government. It is, rather, industrial economies which destroyed aristocratical governments and cultures by creating the mass societies which emerged from the industrial ones and on which the latter depend, as high culture depended on agricultural societies and the aristocracies that shaped and controlled them.

It is true that agricultural civilizations of the past were comprised of an upper minority stratum, the cultural elite who were both the creators and, as we say today, the consumers of the achievements of a high culture, resting upon a majority lower one consisting of the ignorant and unlettered, just as the industrial ones of the modern era are.

The difference between the two – and it is a critical one – is that ever since the arrival of industrialism the division has been between a high culture and a mass culture, whereas in the countless ages before it the distinction was between high culture and folk culture, whose contribution to civilization throughout recorded history has been in every way as valuable, rich and significant as that of the former. Indeed, in many instances, the two are indistinguishable – Beowulf, for example, or the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, or the fables of Aesop and La Rochefoucauld, or the English madrigals and the French rondelays.

What differentiates the two – the folk culture of the aristocratic-agricultural past and the mass culture of the democratic-industrial present – is that the first was created spontaneously by the “folk,” the people themselves, whereas the second is artificially generated, carefully and cynically according to commercial calculation based on prevalent consumer tastes determined by statistical surveys consulted by “creative” hacks and their employers who expect to satisfy and profit from those tastes, after having created them themselves. 

The result is that while children in the not-so-long-ago invented their own games and entertainments and their elders wrote their own stories and composed their own songs and playlets to perform for their families and neighbors, today they buy them out of a box or imitate the popular “artists” they see and hear on television, radio and the antisocial media.

David Cannadine, the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, correctly noted that many British aristocrats were philistines. Still, the aristocracy constituted a socially and culturally stable class that was the chief preservative element in high British civilization over a full millennium; a role that the unstable financial and industrial plutocracies that succeeded the old aristocracies and whose members rapidly ascend to and as quickly drop out of them as business and social conditions fluctuate – thus virtually ensuring that they pass little if anything of tradition and high value on to their successors – cannot fill. 

Facebook and the creation of the cancel culture

“Dudley Newright” wrote on X:

I was there, in the 2010s, when they stopped hiring white guys. I worked for a big media company in the big city. Terrible pay, but fun to hang out with creative types all day. Everyone was white.

One day one of us wrote a snarkier headline than our usual fare. The piece triggered huge engagement from angry boomer conservatives. Where were they coming from? Facebook, it turned out.

Yarvin traces “woke” to a mutation of Protestantism. Others place it at the feet of Marx or Foucault or the Frankfurt School. I blame Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook was becoming something more than just a place to look at your buddy’s new girlfriend’s beach vacation pics. They had just IPO’d, and in order to keep growing they had to be a site you’d want to check when you woke up, on your lunch break, or for hours at a time. The “newsfeed” was already years old, but it was evolving from a collection of updates from your friends – people you actually knew IRL – to ALL news.

Facebook was not just a site that you’d visit, but THE site, an always-on portal to the rest of the internet. Before that, people used to actually type “gawker dot com” into their browser’s address bar and then peruse a listing of the most recent posts. Now, all content discovery was starting to happen via social feeds, like the one you’re looking at right now. Back then, it was happening mostly through Facebook, which controlled the biggest feed by far.

We writers knew that it was a losing game in the long term. We knew ad-supported media was a race to the bottom, but if you could please this thing we were starting to call “The Algorithm,” you could get millions of hits and a fat performance bonus for your story.

So hundreds of 20-somethings in Brooklyn began writing with the goal of trolling Facebook boomers to harvest their attention for ad revenue. Every site quickly became a politics site. If you were writing about tech or sports or celeb gossip or your first period (Teen Vogue), you had to be pushing at the boundaries of what older heartland dwellers found acceptable, so that they would flip out, leave a comment, and juice The Algorithm. A new ideologically-driven class of jumped up millennial journalists figured out that they could make a little money condemning and ridiculing their parents. They weren’t earning enough to establish themselves as adults, but they were “making an impact.”

Before this, your mother-in-law in Boise probably did not care much about politics. She just wanted to look at her niece’s baby pics. But Zuckerberg made her look at ten ragebait articles to do so. And after 20 years of this, she’s now a psychotic libtard. Now everyone’s psychotic about politics. Thanks, Mark.

Quite suddenly, every person in the developed world was exposed to a firehose of the political opinions of a few hundred Brooklynite hipsters with pretty fringe politics, all trying to outdo each other in how provocative they could be, because their rent depended on it.

It’s not like sensationalist news didn’t exist before, but this content flooded the feed so comprehensively that it was all you’d ever see. You weren’t looking at the front page of a newspaper with a bunch of carefully arranged stories intended to represent a broad look at current events anymore, you were getting drip fed the most unhinged content – one insane take after another. And if you were a normie, you internalized this, and began to see this extreme brand of politics as far more normative than it actually was, because it was all you and everyone else were seeing online. Thanks Mark!

This is when the deranged headlines began to appear ("Inspiring: Area Mom Holds Inclusive Beauty Pageant for Queer Toddlers"). A slew of clickbaity media startups (Mic, Buzzfeed, Daily Dot, Mashable) arose to exploit what was essentially a temporary infinite money glitch enabled by Facebook. Legacy media companies had to start playing the game too, lest they lose their audiences to edgier platforms.

One of the most reliable ways to get a ton of traffic was to “call out” an organization for not being sufficiently down with the cause. The massive global scale that Facebook had enabled made cancellations a bread-and-butter content genre. A new class of op-ed writers styling themselves as influencers created a new news beat, calling out organizations of all types for not being sufficiently down with the progressive cause. They even called out their own companies’ leadership, and for the first time, got away with it. A decade prior they would have just fired your ass. But the leadership of these companies shrugged their shoulders and let the kids run wild because the money was pouring in and they didn’t want to be the ones to get got.

As this escalated, it became increasingly untenable from an optics perspective for media companies to maintain majority-white-male staff when they were so busy calling everything out. It looked better to hire women to call out men, and blacks to call out whites. It wasn’t an official meeting, or an articulated directive, it was an off-hand comment made by an editor: “We gotta get some women in here, lol.” Then, “we gotta get some POC in here, lol.” Increasingly nervous laughter.

Almost overnight, nobody wanted to run an office with the “About Us” page featuring nothing but a bunch of crusty, musty white guys. You didn’t have to be the most diverse group, but you couldn’t put a target on your back by being the least. And then once HR hired a few nons, they didn’t want to be accused of bringing in a few tokens just for plausible deniability. So they hired more.

It was an especially cheap and effortless hack for media companies to do this because tons of VC dollars were sloshing around to try to capture all that Facebook traffic. The money flowed and the ratchet turned. Soon other industries with highly-educated, oversocialized employees likely to care about progressive issues – academia, Hollywood, tech – followed suit.

At first it was just blatantly discriminatory hiring practices ("C’mon HR, chill with the white guy resumes,” and within a few years it was institutionalized in fellowships, mentorships, employee resource groups – an entirely new HR superstructure built up with the implicit, and in some cases explicit, goal of de-centering the voices of creative-ass white boys. Everything in Jacob Savage’s viral essay about this is true, and it all shifted over the course of about a year. Everyone knew it was happening and either thought white guys had it coming, or didn’t dare protest for fear of total career annihilation.

At every step, the (white) leadership of these companies let the kids run wild, because the money was rolling in, and it wasn’t hurting the quarterly earnings report (yet). They knew they’d face annoying PR and legal problems if they fought it, so they let the ratchet turn. At every step, they did the math that it would be less risky to let the insane leftist egregore have a small bite of their company. Most of these brands have since been sold and re-sold and stripped for parts btw. It wasn’t just the abandonment of merit-based hiring that killed these companies – the Facebook money spigot couldn’t flow forever – but it didn’t help.

I remember visiting a media company around 2015 that was very “hot” at the time, and the news floor was a sea of very young and hip-looking faces, mostly women and POC. Every once in a while a Steve Ballmer-looking guy in pleated khakis would emerge grinning from a corner office for a coffee refill. He’d peer out over the open-plan desks and hear fingers busily tapping on Macbooks. I sometimes wonder if that guy was smiling because he took pride in being a force for change, or if he was just waiting out the clock, and thinking about that lakehouse on Zillow.

* * *

My favorite memory from this era is this picture of a dozen white women, which was tweeted out in 2016 with the caption: “Notice anything about this Huffington Post editors meeting? 💃💃💪🏼💪🏼” 

Some poor girl thought this was going to be an iconic image of a bold new media era, where finally women would have a voice, only for it to be roundly ridiculed across dozens of thinkpieces for not including enough POC.