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  I will spare the details, but repairing and out-of-date Apple is a challenge.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.