Gavin Newsome

I love what Gavin Newsome, the current Governor of California, is doing. Basically co-opting Trump's over-the-top BS, showing MAGA how absurd it really is. While MAGA is probably collectively too stupid to realize what's going on, on a subliminal level, the message is getting through, and MAGA and Fox and the whole rightwing bullshittisphere is pissed. 

Gavin is taking a hatchet to Trump's cultish persona. Chip away. Not much has worked to counter Trump's bullshit so far, so why not imitate the bastard and have some fun with it?

The one above is good, of course, because Gavin is "strongly" defending the flag of the United Fucking States of America, with a look of determination and rippling muscles.

To me, Gavin has crossed the line a few times, but what the fuck do my boundaries have to do with anything? The one below is a little racy. Give it to her Gavin. After all, she was a party girl in Eastern Europe until Jeffrey Epstein plucked her out of the whorehouse and introduced her to the Orange Parasite. Now Melania is going to teach us all about the wonders of AI? LOL.

This next one is a little weird, with Kid Rock, Hulk Hogan and Tucker Carlson laying hands on Gavin.  

I look forward to what else they come up with. They seem to be shaking up the right. Trump's edifice is teetering. It won't take too much more to have it crumble and tumble down. It will take a while to rebuild after we exterminate the White House, but it'd doable, and some of the future charges will be quite interesting.

Hoo boy

Been away. Drove a couple thousand miles over the last couple of weeks. Got lucky and didn't hit any rain, flash floods, tornadoes or hailstorms. That's hard to do these days. Spent some time visiting good friends. Saw some beautiful country, some gorgeous hummingbirds, some wild donkeys, deer, javelinas, ugly vultures, Cooper's Hawks, and lots and lots of little green men all over Roswell, New Mexico. 

But it's always good to get home, even if home is a jumble of stuff crammed into a tiny space. 

I see SpaceX finally got Starship to run a successful mission from Boca Chica, Texas. I watched it on YouTube, and after the "Ship" "landed" in the Indian Ocean, Musk came on and gave a preview of the next several years and his Mars obsession. (Click the pic below)

Building 1000 Starships per year in Texas? And another 1000 in Florida? Having hundreds, even thousands, of ships in the air at the same time during the Earth to Mars window? I think it's madness. Sorta seems like an all-out dash for the exit (Mars). 

Meanwhile, in D.C., another Luckovich gem. You know clicking on the pic makes it get bigger and easier to read, right?

Hoo boy!

Coffman Chronicles

I've often thought, "Why do we even need AI?" Nobody asked for it. It's been foisted upon us, and it's starting to look like the biggest scam since the Bible. Every time you use it, large amounts of energy get burnt up. AI is only going to accelerate the already rapidly-increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. Just what we DON'T need.

The Algorithm Ate the Grid

Washington handed over your power supply to corporate server farms. Your lights are next.

GENERAL AZMUNDUS

AUG 10

The Hidden Cost of Artificial Intelligence

It’s not the flashiest image of the AI revolution. No robot writing poetry. No algorithm curing cancer. Just a row of dusty transformers on the edge of a small Virginia town, humming at full tilt, feeding electricity into a sprawling data center that locals can’t even get inside.

A year ago, the town’s biggest headache was a leaky water main. Now, it’s blackouts. Utility rates have jumped twice in twelve months, and the mayor’s inbox is flooded with complaints about outages, surging bills, and strange new construction on the horizon. More high-voltage lines, more substations, more fenced-off corporate compounds glowing at night like miniature cities.

If you live near one of America’s new AI “power hubs,” this isn’t science fiction. It’s Tuesday.

AI has an appetite. Not the poetic kind — the electrical kind. And the more it learns, the hungrier it gets. Training an AI model like GPT-4 burned through millions of kilowatt-hours. Running it for millions of users burns through millions more every single day. Add the image generators, the voice assistants, the autonomous cars, the “smart” supply chains, and suddenly, the energy demands of AI start looking less like a gentle uptick and more like a second industrial revolution wired straight into the grid.

The sales pitch is that AI will make our lives easier. The reality is that it’s already making our lives more expensive, and in some places, less reliable. The technology’s biggest winners — Meta, Amazon, Google, xAI — are locking in long-term power deals, building private energy empires, and muscling their way to the front of the grid while the rest of us get the leftovers. And Washington? It’s not just looking the other way. It’s rolling out the red carpet.

This is the story you don’t hear in the breathless press releases about “transformational AI.” The story where your monthly bill goes up because a company you’ve never met signed a deal you never heard about to run an AI you didn’t ask for. The story where the people and the planet are treated as afterthoughts in the race to feed billion-dollar algorithms.

And if you zoom out from those humming transformers and darkened kitchens, you see the same story unfolding across continents. Only the numbers get bigger, and the stakes get higher.

AI’s Power Hunger Is Exploding

Global electricity generation in 2025 is hovering around 30,000 terawatt-hours (TWh) a year, enough to keep every light, factory, and phone charger on the planet running. For decades, that number grew slowly, about 2% a year, tracking population and industrial growth. Then AI showed up like a hungry dinner guest who doesn’t just want seconds, they want the whole buffet.

Training a single large model like GPT-4 consumed millions of kilowatt-hours, the equivalent of powering thousands of homes for a year. And training is just the down payment. The real drain comes from inference, running the model for millions (or billions) of queries, image generations, and background processes. Every “generate” button you click, every AI-powered search you run, every autonomous agent quietly crunching data in a server farm somewhere. It’s all an energy bill.

Google’s AI-powered search uses 4–5× the electricity of a standard query. Multiply that by billions of searches a day, and suddenly you’re not talking about marginal costs. You’re talking about data centers consuming as much power as small nations.

If adoption continues at its current breakneck pace, analysts warn we could see AI’s electricity consumption increase 50-fold within 15 years. In a conservative scenario, AI’s share of global electricity jumps from about half a percent today to more than 1.5% by 2030, and nearly 3% by 2040. In a moderate-growth path, it’s 1% today, over 5% by 2035, and pushing 10% by 2040. And in the high-growth projection — the one we hit if AI becomes embedded in everything from search engines to self-driving fleets — we go from 2% today to over 15% of the planet’s total electricity output before the next generation finishes college.

Those terawatt-hours have to come from somewhere. Right now, they’re coming from a grid that was already creaking under the strain of electrification, extreme weather, and decades of underinvestment. The power that keeps AI’s virtual neurons firing is the same power that keeps your lights on, your groceries refrigerated, and your hospital ventilators running.

And the companies feasting on that electricity aren’t just plugging in. They’re rewriting the rules of the grid to feed themselves first.

Big Tech Is Building Its Own Power Plants

The power demands of AI aren’t just swelling. They’re concentrating. The companies driving the boom aren’t waiting around for public utilities to figure out how to keep up. They’re cutting deals, buying land, and in some cases literally building their own private power plants.

Meta has locked down about 1,800 megawatts of wind and solar power through Invenergy — enough to run more than a million homes — plus 150 megawatts of geothermal in New Mexico and a 20-year contract with a nuclear reactor in Illinois.

Amazon, through AWS, is banking on small modular reactors, backing projects in Washington, Virginia, and Pennsylvania with nearly a gigawatt of nuclear capacity planned for AI and cloud operations.

Google has partnered with Kairos Power for six planned SMRs due between 2030 and 2035, and secured priority access to baseline power through demand-response deals that also let it reduce usage for incentives during peak loads.

xAI is going all in, reportedly buying an entire 2-gigawatt power plant overseas to ship to the U.S., powering a data center designed for one million GPUs.

Exowatt, a startup, is selling modular solar-thermal systems built specifically for AI data centers, with a backlog of 90 gigawatt-hours of storage on the books.

And every megawatt they lock up for themselves is a megawatt the rest of us get to fight over and pay more for.

Who Pays the Price?

When Big Tech builds its own power plants, it sounds like the ultimate self-reliance story. Look, we’re not taking from the grid! We’re adding to it. That’s the sales pitch. The reality? These projects sit on land that could have hosted community solar, tap into public transmission lines, and lock up the cheapest electricity for decades before anyone else gets a shot at it.

Utilities still have to move that power around. That means new substations, high-voltage lines, upgraded transformers, and those costs get passed to everyone else. Your bill, your neighbor’s bill, the corner store’s bill.

In Texas, utilities are seeking double-digit rate hikes tied to “large industrial customers”, code for AI data centers. In Northern Virginia, residents face more increases over the next five years as utilities scramble to meet the data centers’ demand.

Even when tech giants sign “demand-response” deals, they keep priority access to baseline power. During tight supply, that means AI gets blackout insurance, and you get the blackout.

The only question is, are they working for the public, or for the companies with the biggest electric bills in history?

Congress Is Racing to Keep Up

If you listen to the hearings, you might think Congress is sprinting to get ahead of AI’s energy demands. In reality, it’s more like watching someone chase a runaway train.

In March 2025, the House Energy and Commerce Committee heard testimony warning that the U.S. may need tens of gigawatts of new capacity for AI alone. Sam Altman told the Senate in May that the figure could hit 90 gigawatts. For comparison, that is about all the electricity California generates in a year.

Rather than question whether AI should demand that much energy, lawmakers are clearing the road for more plants and more lines. The ADVANCE Act fast-tracks nuclear approvals. EPRA speeds permits for generation and transmission, fossil or clean. BIG WIRES connects regions, but without protections, the richest customers still get first pick.

At a June 2025 subcommittee hearing, DOE officials called gas and coal retrofits “AI-ready infrastructure.” That’s not oversight. That’s concierge service.

Whose Side Is Washington On?

The bipartisan energy “solutions” coming out of D.C. are being written with Big Tech’s wishlist in mind, not the public’s. Legislators frame AI’s electricity appetite as inevitable, something to accommodate, not question. Even bills pitched as “green” often contain carve-outs that fast-track fossil fuel plants or lock in 20-year contracts for nuclear projects whose benefits will flow straight to data centers.

This isn’t about ensuring hospitals have backup power or that rural communities get connected to modern grids. It’s about making sure AI companies never have to compete with you for electricity. And once these deals are signed, they’ll outlive most of the politicians who signed off on them.

Every kilowatt guaranteed to a corporate server farm is one less for a small business, a farm, or a school. And every time Congress calls it “modernization” without admitting who it’s modernizing for, it’s making a choice, one that puts billion-dollar algorithms ahead of human needs.

The Road Ahead: Innovation or Crisis

The fork in the road is clear: one path toward clean, efficient AI infrastructure; the other toward decades of fossil-fueled lock-in.

Optimists see a grid powered by renewables, advanced nuclear, geothermal, and storage, paired with efficiency gains in AI hardware and smarter load management.

Realists warn that once a fossil plant is built for AI, it’s unlikely to shut down early. SMRs, renewables, and storage face long timelines and high costs. Efficiency gains can be erased by sheer growth in demand.

Which is why the choice ahead isn’t about technology. It’s about power in every sense of the word.

Lights On for the Few

AI was sold as limitless, weightless thought. However, behind the marketing is a machine plugged into the same wires that power your home, wires being rerouted to serve a handful of companies first.

If this continues, access to reliable electricity will be tiered by corporate priority, not human need. And when the lights flicker, you won’t see a server farm go dark. It will be your kitchen, your school, or your hospital.

Outrage is only useful if it moves somewhere, and in a fight this big, it has to move fast.

What You Can Do Right Now

1. Call your representatives — Demand public-interest protections in all AI-related energy bills. Insist on community benefit agreements before permitting large-scale private power deals.

2. Push for transparency — Support state and federal rules requiring utilities and companies to disclose exactly how much electricity is being allocated to private AI use versus public needs.

3. Back community energy projects — Advocate for solar, wind, and storage projects owned and operated by municipalities or cooperatives, which keep rates stable and profits local.

4. Join energy justice groups — Organizations like the Energy Democracy Project, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and local climate action coalitions are already tracking this issue.

5. Use your platform — Whether it’s social media, a community meeting, or a letter to the editor, raise awareness. This problem thrives in the shadows.

Stay Informed. Stay Loud.

Bibliography

• “As Electric Bills Rise, Evidence Mounts That Data Centers Share Blame. States Feel Pressure to Act.” Associated Press, August 9, 2025.

• “US Data Center Electricity Demand Could Double by 2030, Driven by Artificial Intelligence: EPRI.” Utility Dive, May 30, 2024.

• “Google Cloud to Pour More Than $25B into AI Infrastructure Across PJM.” Utility Dive, July 15, 2025.

• “Data Centers Are Driving US Power Demand to Hard-to-Reach Heights.” Canary Media, December 9, 2024.

• “If the AI Boom Will Be Powered by Big, Slow Energy Projects.” Canary Media, July 18, 2025.

• “Who Bears the Burden for Energy-Hungry Data Centers?” Canary Media, August 4, 2025.

• “Power Hungry: Why Data Centers Are Developing Their Own Energy Sources to Fuel AI.” UCS Blog, July 10, 2025.

• “The AI Energy Challenge Is Coming to a Head.” Utility Dive, February 20, 2025.

• “Tech Giants Take U.S. Nuclear Industry to Next Level.” Reuters, November 5, 2024.

• “Kairos Power.” Wikipedia.

• “Exowatt.” Wikipedia.

  
  

  Original.

  
  

David Blight

A great read in The New Republic from David Blight. He identifies our biggest obstacle: The American Heritage Foundation. They are "Project 2025." The AHF wants to erase The Enlightenment, basically. And they have mostly been getting their way, thus far.

What if History Died by Sanctioned Ignorance?

We must mobilize now to defend our profession, not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion.

David W. Blight/August 7, 2025

The primary aim of the political right, said the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, in early 2024, should be “institutionalizing Trumpism.” He and his organization meant this especially for the writing, teaching, and dissemination of American history.

On March 27, President Donald Trump, echoing the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, issued an executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” The White House now believes it should pronounce on the nature of history and the purpose and substance of the nation’s treasures at the Smithsonian Institution. The order is nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historians’ profession, our training and integrity, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums. In other words, Trump’s team has declared war on free minds and free education in order to erase more than a half-century of scholarship and replace it with official triumphal narratives rooted in a brand of pickled patriotism designed to force the past to serve the present.

Public and political resistance to historians is nothing new; book bans, fights over textbooks and curricula, and battles over what a proper national narrative should be have long besieged our craft. Today, our foes like to wear red hats and rely on moral platitudes rather than research, ad hominem accusations rather than analysis, executive orders drafted at a think tank, funding restrictions, and a hatred of what they deem “liberalism” as their weapons in a war on traditional history. Trained historians and teachers are now the “traditionalists,” defenders of an honored practice, believing in evidence and research, against a barbaric effort to dissolve the institutional and moral foundations of those two important values. We have steadily opened the gates of historical knowledge to myriad new subjects and methods that have educated a largely curious and willing world. Now we have to mobilize to defend our profession not only with research and teaching but in the realm of politics and public persuasion. And we cannot surrender!

In Richard J. Evans’s trilogy on the Third Reich, he shows indelibly how the Nazis achieved power because of eight key factors: 

One, the depth of economic depression and the ways it radicalized the electorate; 

two, widespread hatred for parliamentary democracy that had taken root for at least a decade all over Europe; 

three, the destruction of dissent and academic freedom in universities; 

four, the Nazis’ ritualistic “dynamism,” charisma, and propaganda machinery; 

five, the creation of a cloak of legality around so many of their tactics, stage by stage of the descent into fear, terror, and autocracy; 

six, the public manipulating and recrafting of history and forging Nazi mythology to fit their present purposes; 

seven, they knew whom and what they viscerally hated—communists and Jews—and made them the objects of insatiable grievance; 

eight, and finally, vicious street violence, with brownshirts in cities and student thugs on college campuses, mass arrests, detainment camps, and the Gestapo in nearly every town. All of these methods, mixed with the hideous dream of an Aryan racial utopia and a nationalism rooted in deep resentment of the Versailles Treaty at the end of World War I, provided the Nazis the tools of tyranny.

In 2025, our own autocratic governing party has already employed many, though not all, of these techniques. Thanks to a free press and many courts sustaining the rule of law, Trumpism has not yet mastered every authoritarian method. But it has launched a startlingly rapid and effective beginning to an inchoate American brand of fascism.

These assaults on history have moved at a startling pace, if a bit under the radar of public attention. The Trump White House, with the assistance of Project 2025, has attacked the institutions that historians most cherish. They include the National Archives, the Library of Congress, the Smithsonian Institution and its 21 museums, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Fulbright fellowship program, and the National Park Service. This is only a partial list and should also include universities themselves and public schools, which many Republicans are determined to erode or destroy. All of these measures were in the name of eliminating historical content deemed by the White House to be “woke,” or in the service of “DEI,” both vacuous labels that have come to mean almost anything about race, gender, LGBTQ life, and history. The White House/Heritage Foundation axis has seized the word “patriotic,” as its cloak of legitimacy, and all who care about a pluralistic, meaningful American history must seize it right back. Their initial threats to the Smithsonian, indeed, according to Mike Gonzalez, one of their attack artists, is only the beginning of a long war some within the Heritage Foundation intend to wage until they can depose Lonnie Bunch as the institution’s secretary.

The Heritage Foundation has been an incubator of much of Trumpism in style and content. Indeed, if Trumpism is a grandiose media show, Heritage and Kevin Roberts are Trump’s history department, ready and eager to tell you what to think about the nation’s past.

On the eve of America’s 250th anniversary, Roberts leads an organization with hundreds of employees, $100 million on hand in 2023, and support from several extraordinarily wealthy conservative foundations. For more than 50 years, Heritage’s leadership has dreamed of this moment: a presidential administration willing to destroy and then remake the nation’s “heritage” in the service of right-wing triumphalism and now, via Roberts, Christian nationalism. Roberts has a Ph.D. in American history but has come to loathe the universities that bred him. His dissertation, “Slaves and Slavery in Louisiana: The Evolution of Atlantic World Identities, 1791–1831,” is a study of kinfolk and family patterns in the lives of Black people in his home state (he grew up in Lafayette, raised by a single mother after divorce). For this work, he drew upon the revolution in late-twentieth-century scholarship on the social and cultural history of the lives of the enslaved.

Not so his more recent political fare. On the eve of the 2024 election, Roberts published the book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington to Save America, with a foreword by then-Senator JD Vance. Roberts’s original title advocated “burning down” Washington and remaking it in the image of Christian nationalism. His stock-in-trade consists of vacuous platitudes that emerge from well-rehearsed sound bites. He wants “national renewal” forged “just as it was under Abraham Lincoln.” Lincoln’s presidency encompassed four years of all-out Civil War, during which he managed an extraordinary expansion of federal government power in order to defeat the Confederacy. He also signed legislation for an income tax and a new finance system to pay for the war; the Homestead Act to provide land for poor farmers; the Morrill Act to found land grant colleges across the nation; and the Pacific Railway Act, which authorized the first transcontinental railroad. Above all, Lincoln used unprecedented executive power to free the slaves and confiscate around $3.5 billion of legal property (worth around $119 billion today). National renewal indeed. With the presumed exception of emancipation, Roberts would denounce all of them, or their equivalents, today.

In a June 2025 essay, “America’s Golden Age: A Return to Permanent Things,” Roberts argues that liberalism has created a nation in which “liberty could survive without virtue.” Roberts seems to know nothing about the liberals who love teaching in great books programs rooted in classical works of all kinds. Moreover, Roberts loves lists of big ideas lined up like stations of the cross that can only be observed uncritically. Lincoln’s era was “pro-worker, pro-family, pro-God, pro-nation.” Somewhere in historical heaven, Lincoln ruefully chuckles at how today’s Republicans misuse his legacy of expanding government. The “permanent things” Roberts demands are “Faith. Family. Work. Worship. Sovereignty. Sacrifice.” I do not know any liberals who oppose those values and practices. Roberts has long since abandoned any responsibility to define his terms. He imagines a return historically to a political order defined by the Whigs, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay, without ever saying why.

Liberal academics have become “tyrants who shroud themselves in ‘academic freedom,’” Roberts blithely asserts. Well, liberals in universities in some quarters do have much to answer for in our hubris and our obfuscations that have made us easy targets for these assaults. In Roberts’s vision, though, liberals are little more than godless, cultural elitists who do not believe in anything permanent or any kind of truth. Such an absurd claim might apply to a few postmodernists steeped in the academic fashions of the ’80s or ’90s, but no one has condemned the products of that arcane theoretical persuasion quite as much as serious “liberal” research historians. Projection fuels Roberts’s passion, and slogans drive his prose. “Our rights come not from courts or constitutions, but from God,” he proclaims. One wonders how the United States would have survived this long if every lawyer in a courtroom arguing a Fourteenth Amendment case would make that argument before a federal judge.

Roberts constantly announces that America lacks the search for “meaning.” But what on Earth does he mean when he says: “liberty without order is chaos, and … without truth, even freedom becomes a mask for slavery”? Roberts’s “Golden Age” is one derived from “natural law and biblical wisdom.” Great! No one in the nineteenth century embodied those intellectual and spiritual traditions as much as the famed abolitionist and liberal political thinker, Frederick Douglass. So, since Roberts does not seek any “moderation” with liberals and prefers to “bury” them, I respectfully invite him to join a small group of historians in a series of discussions/debates. He can choose his companions, and we will choose our participants. I challenge him to a series of civil debates in major television or podcast outlets, or especially a public venue before the 2026 anniversary of American independence. What are and ought to be the big questions and answers about American history at this important marker in time? Roberts says he wishes to “catechize our children better than the culture indoctrinates them.” He says he wants to “outbuild” liberalism, “in education, in media, in law, and in the public square.” Then please come join us in the public square, and, as you continue to declare war on us, let’s try to have a civil discussion among historians before it is too late. We eagerly await your response.

Many great voices, living and dead, have called on us to engage this debate. In her speech accepting the Nobel Prize for literature in 1993, the writer Toni Morrison, in a moment less harrowing than now, warned about the threats made by people in power to how we think, write, and teach. Beware, she asserted, of “statist language, censored and censoring. Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining the free range of its own narcotic narcissism, its own exclusivity and dominance.” Prophetically, she pressed on. “However moribund, it [statist control of thought] is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential. Unreceptive to interrogation, it cannot form or tolerate new ideas, shape other thoughts, tell another story.” Such language, Morrison argued, exists “to sanction ignorance and preserve privilege.” She summoned us to wake up to these assaults on how we know the past. “Yet there it is: dumb, predatory, sentimental. Exciting reverence in schoolchildren, providing shelter for despots, summoning false memories of stability.” This was 1993, in the hopeful wake of the end of the Cold War! “When language” about truth and history “dies,” said Morrison, “all users and makers are accountable for its demise.” Do not commit “tongue-suicide,” she demanded, in fear of “infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of the human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience.”

With Morrison’s call to duty more than 30 years ago, we cannot drop the baton of today. We are all “accountable,” Mr. Roberts. All of us. Your fellow historians invite you to the public square.

Original.

David W. Blight

David W. Blight is a professor of history at Yale University and author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom.