Month: July 2026

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Holy Shit…Are They Thinking About The People Instead Of The Oligarchs For A Change?

The U.S. Department of Energy has ordered AI data centers to stop drawing electricity from the grid to prevent widespread blackouts.

As temperatures spiked past 100°F across the eastern United States, U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright issued an emergency directive to ease unprecedented strain on the PJM Interconnection power grid.

The order targets large-scale electricity consumers—most notably the dense cluster of artificial intelligence and cloud computing data centers in Northern Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentration of such facilities.

By forcing these high-demand tech centers to temporarily disconnect from the public grid and rely on their own backup energy resources, officials successfully freed up crucial megawatts so millions of homes could keep their air conditioning running without triggering severe power failures.

However, this quick-fix solution highlights a looming conflict between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and local environmental goals. Most industrial backup systems rely on diesel or natural gas, which emit significantly higher levels of local air pollutants than centralized utility plants. Furthermore, with the Mid-Atlantic region lacking the robust battery storage capabilities found in states like Texas and California, grid operators remain highly dependent on fossil-fuel-powered alternatives during sudden demand spikes. As the energy demands of artificial intelligence continue to skyrocket, experts warn that similar emergency measures may become a routine test of America’s aging energy infrastructure.

source: Nilsen, E. (2026, July 2). Energy Dept. directs data centers to use backup generators during heat wave, freeing up power for AC. CNN.

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Speaking Of Scouring Through Photos and AI Image Generation…

I was looking through all my old menz photos to locate this picture:

Back in 2001, it spoke to me for a variety of reasons. I liked it; I liked it a lot. So in a fit of creativity in 2001, I painted it and called it, A Man Who Knows His Place.

For shits-n-giggles, the other day, I uploaded the image of the painting to ChatGPT and instructed, “make it photorealistic.”

I would say it did an eerily accurate reproduction of the original photo.

And while I cannot for the life of me locate the original photo that inspired the next painting I did…

Probably my favorite piece from that whole period.

I do like what ChatGPT did to it with similar instructions:

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So I’m Going Through Old Photos…

…trying to track down something specific in my offline Menz folder. I have everything organized by year and month according to when they were originally downloaded, but that’s not helping me find what I’m looking for.

But while perusing the archives, what I’m discovering is a lot of old friendly, um—faces—that I’d forgotten about. I was also reminded that many of my favorite websites—cough—dudesoffcampus.com—cough—are long gone. I also realized that since I wiped everything in my original blog prior to 2011, I can repost a vast majority of these pictures now and if you ignore the date stamps or the year-specific names, no one will be the wiser.

Yes, I’m evil that way. 😈

Anyhow, one of these favorite faces I used to “chat” with back in the day was this cutie, “BryGuy”

I was going to say at the time I could never understand what this 25 year old found attractive in a pudgy 43 year old, but whatever. We both enjoyed our  “chats.”

Getting information out of him was a challenge—although he wasn’t shy about anything else, if you catch my drift. (Out of respect for his privacy I never screencapped those pictures.) As I recall he lived in Ontario and worked for a finance company of some kind. So if he was 25 in 2001, that would make him 50 today.  I wonder how the years have treated him.

Hmmm…

After uploading one of the photos to ChatGPT and using the command, “Age him 25 years,” it  offered up this view of him at 50:

Apple’s Image Playground came up something similar (it refused to accept the shirtless pic so I had to use a different one)

Still hot.

 

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You Could Probably Fit Four Of These Inside The Footprint Of A Modern House

With only a few minor updates, this could be a very livable house for a single person or couple in 2026.

I mean honestly, who needs this:

And that’s only the FIRST floor!

And yup…the entire top floorplan would fit inside the Great Room/Kitchen of the bottom plan. SMDH.

WHO NEEDS THIS?!

I case you’re wondering where I’m culling these monstrosities, it’s from reddit.com/r/floorplan.

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Fabulous 50s

I don’t like the idea of having to take my laundry outside to get it into the wash on the top plan. I’d have put a door directly from inside the house, closed off the one to the carport, and ditched that room’s “storage” designation. I also would’ve made it a double carport with storage on the outside edge that runs the length of the carport.

I understand the design philosophy behind the lower plan, but it seems that entry hallway is a tremendous waste of space.

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Someone’s On Crack If They Think They’re Going To Get That Amount

Insanity.

Yeah, at the time of its manufacture, this was Sony’s top-of-the-line high-end player, and even now it’s legendary and highly sought after by audiophiles and collectors—and even I would love to own one—but not at even a quarter of that asking price. No one in their right mind is going to pay that amount, even if it has the optional wood side panels and comes with the original box.

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The More You Know

Not a Plant, Not a Sheep. It’s a Photosynthesizing Slug!

But it’s dressed like a plant… and powers itself like one, too.

Meet the Leaf Sheep (Costa­siella kuro­shi­mae) — one of the small­est and strang­est marvels of the sea.

Barely the size of a grain of rice, this creature has black ear-like tentacles, bead-black eyes, and a back covered in tiny green “leaves.”

Those aren’t leaves at all — they’re cerata, filled with stolen chloroplasts from the algae it eats.

Through a process called kleptoplasty, the Leaf Sheep turns sunlight into energy, making it one of the few animals on Earth to photosynthesize.

[h/t to Rick]

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Listen Up ICE Employees, Lawyer Here…

You can and will be charged for murder, kidnapping and child endangerment.

The question is not if, but when.

Prosecution can occur years later, under an entirely different political climate.

You may have a defense (i.e. imminent threat of death) but it will be up to a jury to believe you.

A jury of the public you’ve been brutalizing. Good luck with that.

State homicide, kidnapping and child endangerment statutes remain operative even for federal agents.

The federal supremacy clause may delay immediate arrest, but does not erase state jurisdiction or remove prosecutorial discretion.

And if you’re in a state like Minnesota? You’re cooked.

You should know the law protects those who have moral integrity. Federal civilian employees are protected from retaliation when they refuse illegal orders.

That’s Whistleblower Protection Act, 5 USC 2302(b)(8).

Translation: the law gives you an exit ramp. If you choose not to take it, that’s on you.

Obedience is not a defense when the order was unlawful.

The “I was just following orders” defense died at Nuremberg. The US helped bury it, and domestic law reflects it.

There’s US v. Calley (1976) re the My Lai massacre: obedience to unlawful orders does not absolve criminal liability.

Murdering civilians, abusing detainees, and kidnapping children is illegal under both federal and state law.

You don’t need a JD to know that.

There are also standards under your own field manuals and policies. The ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Policy Manual, Use-of-Force Continuum, and Rules for the Use of Force (SRUF) all establish limits.

You have signed that you reviewed them.

“I didn’t know” is not a defense when your policies spelled it out for you.

There are also standards under your own field manuals and policies. The ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations Policy Manual, Use-of-Force Continuum, and Rules for the Use of Force (SRUF) all establish limits.

You have signed that you reviewed them.

“I didn’t know” is not a defense when your policies spelled it out for you.

“Everyone was doing it” “We didn’t have a choiceẠỊ

Well let me introduce you to some more recent history:

During the 2018 family separation directives, some federal employees refused to participate and were protected from retaliation.

Those who complied are now on the wrong side of history, and some of them will likely end up on the wrong side of future investigations.

Pausing in the face of legal ambiguity is not insubordination. It’s prudent self-preservation and self-protection.

This administration will one day collapse. They all do.

Your bosses will resign or retire. DOJ priorities change constantly.

Indictments outlive presidencies.

You can also be sued in civil court for a whole bunch of torts: wrongful death, false imprisonment, intentional

inflection of emotional distress, the list goes on.

Payouts on these claims run in the millions of dollars. The lawyers are already strategizing.

The law will outlast your recklessness.

The people will remember the terror you inflicted on them.

They will be sitting in the jury box.

Act accordingly.

[source]

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There’s A Story We All Tell Ourselves

In those internal autobiographies, we all tell ourselves that we’re one of the good ones, that our presence on this planet is yielding something beautiful, something that will leave this place better than when we arrived. In those stories, we are the heroes, the helpers, the saviors, or at the very least, we’re decent people just doing our best.

That self-reverential story has a way of bleeding over into the place we call home, the nation we claim as our own. There is a poisonous exceptionalism that most of us were born into; a curated mythology inherited by our parents, our politicians, our pastors that convinced us that as a collective, we were good or godly.

Some of us live our entire lives believing we’re better than we are, that our nation is better than it is, until we are faced with irrefutable evidence to the contrary. Suddenly, we realize that we might be the villains, the terrorists, the monsters, the accomplices.

We all grew up in this country learning of the horrors of the Holocaust, reading stories of Hitler’s unthinkable brutality against the Jewish people. We stared in disbelief at the images of walking corpses, emancipated from the concentration camps at the very precipice of death. We nearly vomited seeing jittery black and white newsreels of naked, indistinguishable human beings, stacked like cord wood. We read of an unrelenting barbarism against an entire group of human beings, whose only crime was existing in their skin.

And when faced with this sprawling inhumanity that defied our ability to hold it all, invariably we all thought about the German people, and we all asked ourselves, “What kind of human beings would allow this?”

We wondered what kind of morally broken people could stand by and watch generations of mothers, fathers, and children eradicated from existence, their communities razed to rubble, their cultures erased, their very humanity discarded.

From the safety of hindsight and the buffers of our own false stories, we’ve interrogated ordinary Germans from eighty years ago, lamenting their silence and inaction in the face of such horrors; condemning them as, at best, gutless cowards, and at worst, willing collaborators.

With stratospheric arrogance, we’ve told ourselves that we’d never have consented to such evil, that we’d have pushed back against it, that the abject terror unleashed on the Jewish people would never have happened on our watch.

And yet, there is Gaza.

Day after day, she testifies against us, documenting our indifference, recording our apathy, inventorying our inaction. She lifts our hands in front of us and shows us that her blood is all over them. She burns up the fictions of our goodness. She reminds us how easy it is for a nation to abandon its humanity, silence by silence, justification by justification, averted eye by averted eye.

Gaza is indicting the American people, and Iran and Lebanon are joining her. They are holding a mirror up to us as a nation, revealing exactly who we are— the truth about what we believe, about what we will abide, and what we will not stand for— and we should be ashamed and driven to our knees in repentance.

It would be damning enough to declare that many Americans now are as reprehensible as many Germans in the 1940s, but that wouldn’t be accurate; we are far worse.

We have access to America’s and Israel’s every vile deed in the palm of our hands. Donald Trump’s and Benjamin Netanyahu’s sociopathy floods our timelines. With the swipe of a finger, we can traverse thousands of miles and see the annihilation of a people in real-time. Unlike the German people in the shadow of Hitler, we cannot even attempt to plead ignorance. Through tiny screens that we are rarely more than inches from, we are 24-7 bystanders to the slaughter of children, to the bombing of hospitals, to the systematic extermination of the Palestinian people. We know exactly where the money is going, the politicians whose empires have been funded by terrorism, and the scale of the mass murders our tax dollars are funding.

And we are culpable for all that we allow or refuse to oppose.

One day, eighty years from now, generations of children all over the world will ask what kind of people would have allowed the genocide in Gaza to happen.

And it should break our hearts and boil our blood to know that unless we alter our course immediately and fiercely, we will be that kind.

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“I Could Live There”

 

From thearchmagazine:

Behind a quiet wall in Scottsdale, a different kind of desert residence begins.

From the street, it feels protective and sculptural, board-formed concrete, corten steel, black metal, sand-toned plaster, and desert stone shaped into a low industrial silhouette. But inside, the house softens into stillness: warm oak, limewashed textures, black reflective water, filtered courtyard light, and Japandi interiors guided by Wabi-Sabi calm.

This is a private residence designed around contrast, raw exterior, silent interior; urban edge, desert retreat; architectural strength, human warmth. Every frame is built for atmosphere: the corten entry portal, the courtyard pool, the rooftop terrace at sunset, and the living spaces that open quietly toward the Sonoran landscape.

A modern home for slow mornings, cinematic evenings, and refined desert living.

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