Squeezing Water Out of a Rock

I feel the hot air wafting across my face.  Washington Post (neutered) headline.  (How many employees did Bezos lay off?)  "Trump Aids have trouble figuring out how to spend 500 billion dollars on defense."  Evidently our President has no need to be fiscally responsible.  We are not at war, but the defense industry needs and wants a war.  What is the national debt?  If we are in debt  38 TRILLION dollars, then there is no 500 billion dollars.  When Donald Trump became President, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was active.  It is better known as the Iran Nuclear Deal.  This far reaching and in depth treaty limited Iran's enriched uranium in return for the lifting of financial sanctions.  In 2018 Trump withdrew the United States from the agreement leading to Iran exceeding the said limit on uranium enrichment.  Today's headlines in the Washington Post?  The President is considering a military attack on Iran.  They want a war, not peace.  The defense industry makes money from war, but they do not fight the wars.  Wars like Korea, Viet Nam, and the Persian Gulf are fought by our military.  The trade off of dead American soldiers for profit for the defense industry is evil.  The entire electrical grid could be rebuilt with 500 billion dollars.  There would be leftover changed.  In Fayettenam our Country Commissioners give away millions of dollars.  To be exact 30 million dollars for a cancelled performing arts center which now is a dirt mud hole.  A firehouse that sits uncompleted on Bragg Boulevard.  Another 15 million dollars down the drain, because they want to tear it down.  It will not cost 100 million dollars to renovate the Crown Theater and arena, but someone is going to get that money.  I predict it will be Walter Davis' architectural firm.  Those who hold elected positions get to choose where the money is spent.  Let's spend another 500 billion dollars on defense, when they have trouble picking up the trash at Fort Bragg.  I am paying $9.00 for 1.5 liters of California goat milk, because America's milk, beef, poultry, pork, and eggs are below quality standards.  Grocery and energy prices continue to rise, and average people cannot live without them.  Food and energy for heating and cooling, these things we cannot go without, and they know it.  Let's squeeze some spare changed out of rocks, and the rocks are us.  Immobile.  Under duress.  Lack of opportunity or financial advancement, but lets squeeze the people anyway.  

The Ensuing Poverty of America's Middle and Lower Classes

The overt thought in my mind is how Donald Trump is knee capping everyone except the wealthy.  The American plutocracy has emerged, and where is Robin Hood when you need him?  It has become obvious over time those seeking to make a living, not necessarily accrue riches, are being hobbled.  Every time I see another policy change or a new law enacted with nothing but an executive order from the President, the more livid I become.  Here are some examples.  Climate Change, Global Warming, or the "Big Hoax" means the Earth is getting hotter.  Any fool over forty knows this.  I can remember winters in North Carolina, snow skiing, and sledding down the Big Hill on McGougan Road in  Greenwood Homes.  We had seasons back then, and slowly these disparate seasons have melded into a fickle, manic depressive, irrational episodes of diverse weather.  How could any meteorological organization attempt to predict the weather today?  They don't.  They are told the weather by those in charge, and that includes the military.  How else can it be 70 degrees and 100 humidity in the Cape Fear River Basin?  The answer is because of the military.  It is not that Fayetteville is in a depression, the Cape Fear River Valley.  It is because Wilmington hosts Military Ocean Terminal Sunny Point at the mouth of the Cape Fear River.  When those huge cargo ships sit running along with the multitude of diesel/electric locomotives, military aircraft, and carbon emissions, it creates a vacuum that consumes the air and replaces it with noxious gases harmful to human health.  That vacuum is what I hate the most, because it is inhuman, living in a vacuum.  Your entire sensory system is rendered moot.  No stimulation for visual, aural, or tactile sensations.  It is not human.  Each time a policy change occurs or a new law is penned by merely an executive order, I fume.  Those who own and operate ski resorts in Western North Carolina, the little guys who toil and create a bit of human magic in the winter, are being screwed.  The entire hemp industry, which as grown exponentially and is a metaphor for the little guys, is on the brink of extinction.  All of the things that made America great by allowing small businesses to survive and enjoy a comfortable but frugal living, are being destroyed.  Only now is it about huge corporate monopolies that once were recognized, regulated, and forced into democratic compliance.  They paid taxes.  We are watching in real time the meat and potatoes of America starve.  It won't be long before everyone but the elite rich will be impoverished.  Many of the movies I watch on DVD from the last four decades acknowledge such a plight.  It is frightening, but worse now it is coming to fruition.  

The Rust Belt

Everyone who grows up in Fayetteville understands Fayettenam.  WE knew the 82nd Airborne was here, and they are training to deploy at short notice anywhere in the world.  That presents a dynamic of its own, but should civilians who live in Fayetteville but don't work at Fort Bragg assimilate the same daily routine?  Is the daily routine of active duty military personnel the same as civilians in the private sector?  The Civil Service (or Deep State) is active at Fort Bragg.  These are civilian employees that work on post.  How do their job requirements compare to active duty soldiers?  I would think it is obvious, that only certain specialized groups within the Civil Service are akin to active duty military.  Over the past few decades the privatization of many governmental functions has been recommended.  This has crept into the United States military, so the Civil Service has melded more with the active duty military.  This includes trainings of all kind.  The trend was lobbied strongly in Washington, and private owners and investors are the ones who benefit.  The Defense Contractor industry was flourishing in Fayetteville before President Biden pulled troops out of Afghanistan.  This "forever" war, promulgated by the Bush Clan, ceased and within weeks rule by the Taliban was restored.  Years of investment to try and change governmental or militaristic rule in the Middle East was rendered moot.  The same thing occurred when American troops left Iraq.  Much of their equipment was left behind and insurgents quickly organized and became ISIS or ISIL.  They began to use our own fighting equipment against us.  The wisdom in retrospect would have been to listen to Osama Bin Laden.  Only he asked that the foreigners get out of their countries, but the oil was to valuable and important to the Bush family.  Bin Laden offered his services to Saudi Arabia, and the royals declined his help.  This and bitter memories of the invading Americans began Arabic terrorism against the United States.  The lower Saudi royals were the ones responsible for the 9/11 attacks.  The United States has a disturbing history of creating conflict under false pretenses, especially in the Middle East.  The Viet Nam War was such an event.  Very specific contingencies of people wanted this war, and only was it for their personal financial gain.  The Defense Industry as a whole is the backbone of this atrocity creating conflict to sell their weapons.  How many healthy American boys and men were slaughtered in Viet Nam to sell Bell Helicopters?  Many Americans do not have the stomach to understand this evil, and they deny such history, because it interferes with their love of America.  This love really is a love for what America has represented since her inception, an escape from rule by a monarch.  Religious freedom was a major part of America's emerging philosophy.  Immigrants came to the New World so they could worship the God of their choice in the way they chose.  Robber Barons always have been a crucial fabric in the tapestry of America, and common citizens learned to respect the ruling clans because they recognized and supported average citizens.  Without these average working citizens, a Free Market where laborers are paid for their services, quickly we would revert to any of the other forms of economy and government including Communism.  Socialism bluntly never had a chance because of the greed of those in power.  What is happening today with the Trump Regime is no different.  It should be brutally apparent that our current elected leaders are seditious traitors and care not for the majority of the American people.  It is because this Free Market system all ready has been converted to a combination of Totalitarianism and Kleptocracy.  Our leaders, including Donald Trump, are stealing from the people, because to them the people don't matter.  The oligarchs in control have all of the money, so there is no need for the people, a Free Market, or sharing of their wealth.  They have amassed so much fortune in the last few decades the system for accruing this wealth no longer is needed.  We are alarmingly close having regressed backwards to a feudal system.  Any of these forms of government are the antithesis of America and what our founding fathers created in the United States Constitution.  We, as a nation, accepted the ruling clans who built America and their own personal fortunes.  I do not think it could be said these prominent families were contemptuous of the immigrant population of America.  Instead they knew they were the key to their fortunes providing goods and services in a new nation of freedom and opportunity.  This was Capitalism at its best, and America has seen it ebb and flow.  Today we are at a low point on every front.  We don't produce quality products.  Instead we produce the most cheaply made product and sell it at a great profit.  This includes beef, cow's milk, eggs, chicken, and pork.  Whose idea was it to pay American farmers NOT to produce fresh healthy food?  They were and are destroyers of America.  We have no real products, factories, or GNP.  We import most of our products from India and Asia with their cheap labor.  Would it not be possible again to invigorate these traditional industries like steel, timber, furniture, textiles, and agriculture?  The answer is no because those money movers on Wall Street also don't care about Americans.  Only do they want to exploit our economy as best and quickly as possible.  I am sure that many of these oligarchs now are of foreign origin.  A President who only knows how to build gilded ballrooms, golf clubs and hotels for the rich is misplaced.  It is time to oust this regime.  If we adhere to the same methodology they are using, it will mean civil or revolutionary revolt.  Congress, as it were, is not capable of discarding this joke administration. 

The Conundrum of the Flying Contact Lens

 It has been a strenuous week and rife with irony which in good faith could be construed as levity.  Firstly my musician friend acquired a second Hammond organ.  While I knew he had purchased some Hammond oil to lubricate the tone generator (which is similar to sewing machine oil),  he asked me to bring some over.  I had a little jar of this oil which got transferred out of its original white plastic bottle.  Even with its conical squirt top, to get to the oiling cups of a Hammond tone generator you must use an eye dropper or extension tube.  I remembered I had discovered several vessels of sewing machine oil while cleaning out my mother's room.  Now was the time to consolidate.  One was a tin of Singer oil, green and golden, covered in sludge.  The other was a white hard plastic small bottle that apparently had not been opened.  I had to snip off the tip of the squirt nozzle.  Squeezing the metal tin was not a problem, and it only took a minute or so to empty its contents into my little jar.  As I began to squeeze the rigid white bottle to get oil to come out, in a matter of a few seconds it decided otherwise.  My workbench, my hands, and my face became covered in oil as the bottle exploded.  Luckily I closed my eyes in time, but oil did get onto my contact lenses, and they proceeded to fog up.  This was the only casualty, but I did have to take one out and clean it.  Cleaning and inserting gas permeable hard contact lenses can be a challenge.  Since the Covid outbreak and a two year stint of infected eyes because of these said contact lenses, now I soak them in a diluted bleach solution as suggested by my ophthalmologist at Duke University, now retired Dr. Petrowski.  I only saw him a few times, but he was the most forthright and helpful eye doctor ever I have had.  Soaking the contacts overnight in this diluted solution kills the bacteria, fugus, or viruses, but also it removes the color tint from the lenses making them transparent.  The reason why they tint the lenses is for ease of use.  Having them clear makes cleaning and inserting them more difficult, and I have to be careful not to lose one.  It is the luck of the draw.  Usually one will fall off the tip of my index finger and land in the sink which is closed and full of water.  It only takes a few minutes to find the lens, although it likes to hide suctioned to the wall of the sink or the metal drain.  After receiving a text saying this Apple Macbook Pro was ready for pick up, I was putting in my contacts.  As the first contact balanced on the tip of my index finger, and it was filled with conditioning solution, suddenly the weight of the fluid (which evidently was too much) caused the contact to fall backward off the cliff of my finger.  My hand is raised in the air in front of the mirror like a doctor beginning to don a surgical glove.  Almost always the lens falls straight down into the sink, and I can either hear or see it.  This time the lens disappeared into thin air.  The games began, and they were Olympian.  Thirty minutes later no lens.  As I have learned in the past you need to be able to see to find a contact lens, and this is contradictory.  You have yet to put them in your eyes.  I have learned to put in my one spare to aid the searching process.  This I did, and the stored lens was caked in dried solution.  I cleaned it carefully trying not to disturb the sink full of water.  I spent an hour with a flashlight scouring the sink top, each bottle, the wall, the floor and the mirror.  There was no lens.  I decided to defer the search to a later date knowing that the lens could not have vanished into thin air.  It was not until hours later after Hooters chicken wings unpleasantly carved a tunnel through my intestines and into my rectum creating the quintessential ass fire, I told myself, "What is the one place you have not looked?"  The answer?  The toothbrush holder on the wall made of ceramic with six cutouts for such utensils. Could it be possible this small plastic lens could have teleported itself a foot and a half through the air full of liquid to this location?  It was the only place I had not looked.  It was on!  I looked, and there I saw the glimmer of a reflective piece of plastic lodged quietly and comfortably in the right second hole.  I fetched a Q tip swab and gently lifted it out.  I'm saved!!!

At the Expense of the Rail Industry, Human Obsolescence

 It is pointless trying to talk about the dangers of too much rail activity to any local, like it is pointless to try to convince a MAGA warrior Trump is not for him.  He is exploiting you, but in a sad and twisted perspective, the followers want his attention.  They have nothing else.  If his appearance, charisma and stump are in the ballpark of the discarded, unguided, but faithful minions, Trump becomes God.  The world has experienced this before like many things.  Unless we consciously look back, seek out, and study history, we won't know these things.  With the huge decline in support for public education (which is a conscious attempt to dumb down the population), most average American citizens don't know much of anything.  They don't follow the news, read, or question what is tossed at us.  That which was there in front of us on television, in newspapers, and to a small extent on Am radio, has dissipated.  It is startling to say the least.  For me it began with the eradication of God in media.  Today we use "media" as a broad term for internet activity, which is becoming Big Brother.  Traditional American media is all but gone meaning print media.  Magazines.  Weekly rags.  Newspapers.  Once in America these were a core component of our daily lives.  Then Time magazine declared its war on God, and over time the mainstream has become alienated.  It has been purposeful, and in the last few months as Epstein files rain down on Washington, distraction and the dissemination of false information are rampant on the internet.  To find the truth one must work at it.  Life in America has turned tribal.  There is very little perspective, historical reference, or wisdom.  It truly has become dog eat dog.  If I criticize the rail industry as a whole, those working for it will react negatively.  Ironically the amount of workers they employ at local levels has dwindled much like other corporations.  AI has threatened to lay off large swaths of America's work force, but tests of AI show it is not capable of building a product.  The most efficient method of building products is in factories with an assembly line, which could be partly or fully automated.  When we find and peruse old documentary footage of these factories in America's heyday, we should be amazed.  How can there be any greater technology than one of these complex assembly lines producing consumer-wanted products.  America has become just a weak and lazy poser.  We move money around on Wall Street, trade what is left of companies, and create investment capital bubbles.  We as a nation bear no resemblance to what we were, what built us, and who that was.  We were tough fiery, rebellious hellions with a taste for freedom and happiness.  Now we suck on the teat of the internet.  Covid did not help.  It should be clear that Donald Trump is not for America or her people.  It is a lie.  Everything he has done has hurt ordinary people.  It should be starkly clear he is on and for the other team, and they have been trying to disassemble America and her methodology for some time from within.  Like a great cult leader with deception and cunning, he has coerced a constituency to follow him.  In probably the most grievous and heinous American act, they reelected him to the United States Presidency a second time.  Now the shit has hit the fan.  What does this have to do with the rail industry as a whole?  First understand that in the 1980's freight rail was almost bankrupt, and tractor trailers and their drivers were flourishing.  They were carrying the freight.  Today the railroads to move coal, inasmuch as coal is a controversial source of energy.  The Trump Administration in one short year has wreaked havoc on America and her people eliminating protective regulatory agencies and their rules to protect us.  The most recent, which was in the last week, was the complete and total abandonment of any environmental  awareness and responsibility to preserve and save mother Earth.  They will exploit the earth until we are dead.  Only someone who lives in their own lifetime is capable of such irresponsible behavior devoid of any spirituality, respect for our planet, or God.  Nothing is important except for what I am feeling right now.  It is difficult to imagine any human being this devoid of empathy including children.  Born with a pristine pallet of emotional and intellectual potential, and a hefty percentage of inherited DNA from their bloodline, beings with no souls are an extreme anomaly.  They are modern day zombies, and I am beginning to believe that the majority of who I see each day are suffering from this ill.  Without a support system of some kind provided by our nation's leadership at the federal, state, and local levels we don't have a chance.  Again what does this have to do with the rail industry?  At my own personal expense I will reiterate why.  There is no other corporate entity that has the power to affect our lives more directly than rail.  A close second would be the commercial airline industry.  It should be obvious the reasons why.  In a now trite and anachronistic way, the Iron Horse did build America.  We must and do have a reverence for the railroads and their expansion westward across America.  The "Transcontinental Railroad" was a watershed event in America's history.  Likewise the steam locomotive and its importance in the everyday lives of Americans spawned entire genres of American Popular Music.  More than one you say?  Like the trot and gallop of horses, our primary mode of transportation before the internal combustion engine, the lifestyle which developed around train travel largely created American Roots Music and influenced the Blues.  Without that sound and rhythm America would not be the same.  In the 1960's though the transformation to diesel had different effects.  I contend that this change from the sentimental sounds of steam to the knock and roar of diesel directly affected American Popular Music.  Its cousin was Lyndon Johnson's War in Viet Nam.  Stir in the Civil Rights Movement and America became more emboldened, assertive, and loud.  Older American music could not compete sonically and acoustically with the sounds of war driven largely by diesel machines.  Amplification took the place of more quiet intimate venues as the fight for American Civil rights spread to the masses and thus stadiums.  In assessing America's current rail system, the "Spaghetti Bowl," the term Precision Scheduling Railroading necessarily presents itself.  A product of Canadian rail tycoon Hunter Harrison who transformed their rail into a viable profit yielding Fortune 500 entity, CSX was smitten.  His hiring single handedly drove up stock values before he died shortly thereafter.  Nothing much as changed and the company has continued unabated.  From a citizen's perspective it is easy enough to perceive changes in their operation, the major north/south East Coast railroad.  It is not good.  Since 2016, Trump's first presidency, the quality of life in America has declined sharply.   It has declined from increased rail activity.  In a nutshell Amazon's wealth and success is contingent upon intermodal container shipping provided by CSX and other Class A railroads.  It is long omnipresent freight trains that are delivering your packages and wreaking havoc on the everyday lives of Americans.  Even discounting the heinous accidents such as the Lac-Megantic rail disaster in Quebec and the East Palestine derailment in Ohio, the daily operation of freight trains has escalated since 1990 when John Snow created CSX-T.  To cut to the chase General Electric and General Motors embraced AC traction as a graven image using the Hewlett Packard computer to control electronics in newer locomotives.  Traction motors were changed from direct current to alternating current, and the beast was born.  The ramifications of this change have not been recognized or studied as a source of human pathology.  Instead as America began to decline because of the exponential rise in human disease and ailments including Restless Leg Syndrome, Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and more, we as a population have not recovered.  The outbreak of Covid 19 hammered nails in our coffins.  While Donald Trump's nefarious policies are our current challenge to resurrect democracy, without a change in rail regulations, the health and well being of average Americans will continue to decline.  There is substance in the adage of living on the wrong side of the tracks, and the highest incidence of prostate cancer in men in Rocky Mount, North Carolina is not an accident.  It is because one of CSX's largest freight yards resides here.  People and freight rail are not compatible, and if things continue as they are rail will win.  The human being will become obsolete. 

The Shitstorm of American Life

 Ironically I have not blogged much, because the machine I use was damaged by a pulsed energy weapon.  More likely it was static electricity in the air, and there has been much lately.  It could have been that the Magsafe charging port in my Apple Macbook Pro computer just bit the dust.  It was a refurbished unit, Mid 2012, but Affordamac was in full swing when I bought it.  It had a new Seagate hard drive and upgraded components, the most important of which was the Nvidia graphics chip.  My previous Macbook Pro was only a year apart, but it used a Radeon chip.  They fail!  I saw the strong blue arc when I plugged in the Magsafe charger.  I was not careful about it either.  It is magnetized, so you just get the plug in close proximity to the Mac's internal port and it seats itself like magic.  It is highly likely the little pins in either the socket or the charging port were bent, worn out, or loose.  I expected to have an issue with this computer in the near future, and this was it.  You are never prepared.  I will spare the details, but repairing and out-of-date Apple is a challenge.  Apple is not the company it once was.  You must find a dedicated PCB technician who can solder on computer circuit boards.  My first attempt produced a working computer at the cost of a new upgraded 140 watt charging brick and a USB-C to Magsafe 1 adapter.  This is what the repair technician suggested.  It worked for one week sitting on my coffee table, and I used it to listen to my extensive music collection.  The laptop computer has revolutionized the world, and if we stopped to count the many things it will do, living without a computer would suck.  It would also undermine the American economy, except that laptop computers magically have been shrunk to the size of ipods and cellular phones.  The tool of choice for most everyone today is this "Smart Phone."  Never was I a fan of this little device.  The first cell phones I had were a joke, and my identity was stolen with the purchase of my first Samsung flip phone.  The Nokia was better, but it needed a headset.  My sister insisted I buy my aging mother an iPhone, and I did.  She loved it, and it took me many hours of work to transfer her contact list and other data.  Only a few months ago I resurrected that exact phone and found a new more cost effective mobile carrier.  Interestingly I use it to text more than anything.  My second attempt at having my Macbook Pro repaired was successful, and only because I did most of the research myself on the internet from my other Apple computer.  Actually it also was my mother's computer, an iMac I bought for her when her Dell failed.  Also many hours transferring her pictures from that computer to the iMac.  Once they were there, she never looked at them again.  I still use this computer for business, and it functions well.  As it turns out when a Magsafe charging port burns it damages several protective circuits on the logic board including a fuse and eventually, as we discovered, a resistor tasked with "handshaking" the CMS to the charger itself.  It took several passes and two different repair shops to get to the bottom of this.  It was my information that helped the second tech isolate the remaining problem quickly in one day.  Needless to say it was a month of neurosis, worry about never finding another laptop that would serve my needs, and money.  It is interesting popular trends, and they do not always serve the professional community.  I use external webcams and audio interfaces to make music videos of myself playing a variety of instruments, so this computer is important to my work flow.  It would be difficult to drag a Mac Pro tower computer and a large monitor to different locations in the house.  (although you could with some effort)  The Apple Macbook Pro is a marvelous and useful tool for many things, and this is my first test of the new repair.  "Will the green light come on?"  Rest assured I have taken pains to be careful in the future about charging this laptop, which includes as close as the consumer can get to power conditioning.  A  home this is my age, 63, does not have 3 wire grounded receptacles, nor does it have the third ground wire installed in the junction boxes.  I have replaced many of these aging receptacles, and ironically and to my fault, this laptop was not plugged into one of the new ones.  The reason was other equipment was monopolizing the newer outlets including recording equipment for my Knabe grand piano and my DVD player and screen.  The Macbook Pro somehow took second status and was plugged into a normal outlet.  If there had been a ground wire, the static charge may have been sent to this ground harmlessly into the earth.  Immediately I bought my upteenth Furman "power conditioner," and it was a Series 2 which is the more expensive model with better filtering.  The repaired laptop now is getting as clean power as I can provide without spending thousands installing a 3 wire grounded system in the house.  The components that were damaged were the charging port itself, or "DC in board," the MOSFETS, a fuse, and a resistor.  They were replaced in that order with an ascending order of repair.  I also spent $50.00 on the new 140 watt charger which now is unnecessary, and I am afraid to use it.  In the meantime the battery got changed twice.  It is plausible that a "Pulsed Energy Weapon" could cause such damage, but most likely if you were targeted with such, it would fry everything.  America is in denial and headed down the wrong path for various reasons.  The first is obvious.  Donald Trump is trying his best to implement a Communist fascist system in America.  This is a system where an all powerful government and its oligarchs control everything.  They own everything, provide everything, and expect your allegiance to "The Party."  In these systems the people are secondary and neglected.  In the most dire cases in history we see what happens when a deranged dictator is allowed to progress.  Nations devolve in civil war and eventually mass murder of the people by the government.  We have seen these autocrats in our lifetimes including Saddam Hussein, Muammar Gaddafi, and Bashar al-Assad.  The sole directive of indoctrinating and exploiting the common people continues.  It is the services of the people, for the people that are being exploited, stolen, and embezzled in full view with no remorse.  This is Donald  Trump.  One only has to look at the mockery of the North Carolina Education lottery to see the metaphor.  Giving away hundreds of millions of dollars to an often uneducated common person, instead to allocating that equally and efficiently to the populace.  This is what it has come to be about.  No part of the lottery in North Carolina is going to education, unless a powerful, wealthy, and persuasive elite demands it. The majority of this money goes directly into the statehouse and into the hands of Phil Berger and his band of thieves.  Still we do not have a state budget, and they can't decide whether to rescind the Medicaid Expansion Program.  Depriving millions of North Carolinians of healthcare they all ready have it not in their political favor.  At least outgoing Senator Thom Tillis has been outspoken about this.  The continual rise of prices for everything soon will complete the decimation of America's middle class.  The traditional America economy, while at times has worked, all ready has been transformed into a huge federal govermental slush fund.  The tariffs Trump has placed on imported goods is collected by the Department of Homeland Security.  It is cash in hand, and there is no accountability for this immense monthly revenue.  With all of this uncertainty, there is one certainty.  No data center or AI complex will run without electricity.  If a huge Pulsed Energy Weapon is used, it will wipe out the power grid, and Americans will be left to fend for themselves.  This is a stark realization, but it is realistic.  It should give us perspective on AI and its need.  It will not be long before we will have a food shortage.  The herding of illegal aliens, working or not, has hobbled the food industry and the availability of quality groceries.  The problem is if President Trump is impeached or removed from office, his replacement is worse.  Pete Hegseth is in hiding, and the clown of an Attorney General puts Bill Barr to shame.  It's hard to believe through what we are living.