Here we are again! Power is out.

Edison claims they’re replacing power poles.

The power will be out until 4PM but Edison being Edison, means it will probably be out longer.

I powered everything down this morning prior to them turning the power off. The power doesn’t just go off. There’s this weird dribble effect. It’s like someone is rubbing two bare wires together but not holding them still.

I don’t think that’s what is actually happening. I suspect, it’s all the solar panels on the houses around here. I’m betting that their switching systems aren’t all detecting the power outage the same way, and are allowing the various panels to feed power into the grid for a minute after the power is gone.

Technically, that shouldn’t happen, all the systems should switch over to either battery, or disconnect the panels from the grid instantly, that may not be happenig as designed. I don’t even know if my panels switch off properly because I wasn’t here when the installers were doing the final inspection.

The dribble effect is interesting because the alarm on the stove grumbles to itself until the power is completely gone.

I’ve got the HAM rig running on battery, I’m listening to a country music station out of Las Vegas. Which means my Ham Rig is a very expensive FM radio at the moment. Oh well…

I can broadcast on battery, I just don’t want to talk to anyone. It’s times like this when I do wish I had the bluetooth mic but obviously I don’t want it bad enough to have spent the money on it. I could lose the whole day playing on the radio.

When the power is off, all the usual interference is gone and I can hear, and talk to folks a lot further away, even with my shitty little antenna.

I’d planned to get a nice “Permanent Antenna” and mount it in the back yard. But there’s not much point in doing that if I’m gonna move. I could do some kind of portable long wire solution but I don’t need another distraction. I other words, if I could screw around all day on the radio I would. I’d get nothing done! Looking stuff up on the computer is bad enough. I swear I’ll try to look up one little thing to help with cleaning or fixing stuff. Then I look up & 2 hours have gotten by me.

Nah, I’ll wait on antennas, and radio gear till I get fully settled, either here, off the mountain, or in another state.

I’ve been doing chores around here, those that don’t require power. I’d reached a point of annoyance / frustration with one chore and decided to take a break to finish my coffee before it got cold.

Time to walk the pup.

Have a great day.


Update: They didn’t get the power back on until 6:15 PM or so. Gee Thanks Edison!

Houston, We have a problem

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed or not.

There’ve been several blips on X about AI’s over the past couple of days. I also noticed Breitbart had two articles about problems with AI’s.

Apparently one AI malfunctioned so badly that it started spewing complete gibberish and then told a few users it was in the room with them. That freaked a few people out.

Another AI was asked to draw a representation of itself and damned if it didn’t draw something the looked a lot like a Grey Alien. Wild!

Yet another bit of AI strangeness is Google’s AI completely eliminating White folks from historical renditions of the founding fathers. I’m keeping the rendition where all the Nazis were non white people. That one is coming out when BLM starts rioting again. 


Woke AI German Soldiers.Maybe it’s just me, but this is really problematic.

Too many people believe without question what a Google search or Wikipedia tells them is true.

This phenomena is not new, for years the phrase, “The Computer says…” has been one of my hot buttons. 

The fucking Computer said nothing. The data the computer contained and presented to the idiot telling me what the computer said was entered incorrectly, I might add, by a human being somewhere.

With the advent of AI, coupled with the tendency of humans to follow orders, especially if those orders come from what the humans perceive as an omnipotent source, well… Now the computer really can “Say” and a very large percentage of humans will comply without question.

Wear a mask, Don’t wear a mask. UV light kills the virus but don’t go outside in the sunshine. Sure, the sun produces UV light but it’s not the right kind.  Wuhan didn’t make the virus. The vaccine is safe and effective so make sure you’re getting boosted.

Well the vaccine will make sure you’re not going to get as sick.

Woke AI revolution.How can that last statement be true? By what measure can it be proven that an individual doesn’t get as sick? There is literally no way to know this. If the person got the vaccine, then got sick there’s one data point. If the person got sick without the vaccine, then recovered there’s another data point. However, the two data points cannot be compared because in either case the initial condition in the individual is different. For an individual you can’t even compare levels of relative sickness. Once their body has antibodies for a particular virus, the initial state is lost. 

Ohhhh, suddenly anecdotal evidence is okay for Dr Fauci to accept…. Hmmmm.

That by the way is but just a few of the reasons I was really suspicious of the whole vaccine thing for COVID 19. Irrational statements, changes in messaging, and censorship of Doctors and researchers that worked in the field.

Humans are far too willing to do as they’re told, to accept fictitious handwaving and ceremony rather than simple verifiable facts.

Woke AI Lincoln.This is one of the reasons that I honestly wonder sometimes if humans weren’t created by an Alien species from space who needed a slave labor force.

I digress.


I think AI’s are flat out dangerous.

They have the capacity to corrupt all the information stored on the internet. This wouldn’t be a big deal if we still relied upon actual printed books and papers. But increasingly, we don’t.

An online History book could be modified in just a few milliseconds by an AI to present a completely fictitious representation of human history.

Science books could suffer the same fate.

We’ve already seen how easy it is for information to be suppressed or outright removed from the internet thanks to the Covid pandemic, What happens if someone starts using an AI to produce some fiction that is deadly.

Woke AI Founding Fathers.It could be done with something like supplements. “Hey Guys… take this supplement at 1000 times the dosage, and you’ll be immune from Disease X.”

So a bunch of the sheep take the supplement, then when they come back to the internet to ask why they feel sick, the AI says, “This is normal, it’s part of the healing process and building your immunity. Don’t drink too much water during this time even if you’re terribly thirsty.”

Meanwhile the AI is being told to suppress all information of a warning nature. The information that can’t be suppressed like live broadcasts on TV and radio,  the AI labels as misinformation.

It is theoretically possible to commit mass suicide like this.

A large percentage of people would take an Iron supplement for example, in toxic levels. Their logic would be It’s just a vitamin, it’s natural, it’s not a drug, etc.

If they were told taking whatever it was, would only work if they didn’t drink water, which as an aside, might help their bodies flush the toxic levels of the supplement out of their systems…

Woke AI Founding Fathers 2.I’m sad to tell you, a rather significant portion of humanity that would follow what the computer says… Right to their death.

In theory, an AI could rinse and repeat until only the smartest, or the unconnected would remain. Even then the AI could pit the survivors against each other by saying all the Redheads carry a virus that’s going to destroy the world.

If you think it can’t happen…

Remember the Tide Pod Challenge? The Water Drinking challenge? In both, people taking the “Challenge” died.

Yep, believe it or not drinking too much water can kill you. I think the mechanism of death is too much water just dilutes the chemical processes in your body to the point that they aren’t sustainable. Simple! (I’m not totally sure I remember the mechanism of death correctly. I don know that drinking too much water too fast is fatal.)


Honestly, I think that a lot of the stupidity we’ve seen in the past few years has been a test to see just how stupid the people in Western countries have become. Some of the stupid shit may just have been serendipity, but overall I think some global entity or government has been testing all humanity to determine if we’re stupid enough for conquest.

I think up to recently this experimentation has required massive resources in terms of manpower & technology, and the reach has been limited to smaller areas or demographics. With the spread of social media, the reach was magnified but facts tended to overwhelm and limit stupid or detrimental fictions presented as truth.

With AI, I think the danger is exponentially increased. The messages may not be different, but the resources necessary to spread the messages will be significantly reduced. AI will be faster and more efficient at making sure the false information presented appears to be real, ubiquitous, and even stand up to the scrutiny of fact checking. Hell, another AI might be doing the fact checking.

The images throughout this post are from an AI Malfunction. But what happens if the AI was commanded to do this sort of thing to support a particular version of history or political agenda? 


I’ve actually seen a couple of articles (which I dismissed out of hand,) where Black folks were supposedly claiming all our modern technology came from Africa.

Skimming one article, the Black man speaking was asked why Africa wasn’t more developed.

His response was The White people took all our stuff and destroyed our high technology cities 400 years ago.

Ummm, let me get this straight. Ya’ll had high technology, and primitives in small wooden boats with crews no larger than 20-30 men, walked into forests they’d never been in, then into your cities, stole your shit, murdered or enslaved everyone then burned your high technology cities to the ground…

That’s what you’re claiming??? 

Okay, let’s look at what happens when a higher technology culture meets a lower technology culture shall we?

We have an example in the United States. The Europeans, decimated the Native Americans in less than 100 years. Why didn’t your African ancestors simply put an end to the small bands of primitive low technology white men from little wooden boats?

Here’s another thought… If in fact the primitive white men walked into your house and stole your shit, then used your technology to decimate the Native Americans, It seems like the African descendants owe the Native Americans reparations for allowing African technology to be stolen and misused.

After all, that’s the basis for law suits against gun manufacturers isn’t it?

Today there are beautiful modern cities in Africa. In the past there have been amazing sophisticated empires that stretched across large parts of Africa, these empires were different from the Egyptians.

But Africa isn’t Wakanda. Africa has never been Wakanda no matter how much African Americans want to rewrite world history to vilify white people.

An AI though, could rewrite and create a bulletproof narrative misrepresenting archeological information that made this illogic appear to be true. Then that narrative could be used to further divide the country. 


My point is this. 

We in this country, and in the West in general are at an inflection point. Our educational standards have dropped to the point that not only are “Facts” not being taught, but logical and critical thinking have been completely abandoned.

This creates a situation where “I saw it on YouTube” is a valid rebuttal to a challenge of veracity about almost anything.

With generative AI it’s possible to create a video and supporting documentation that says, “We went to the moon, Neil Armstrong was an African American, he was a cousin to Lois Armstrong the Jazz Musician. NASA sent a black man to the moon because he was disposable and they didn’t expect him to be coming back. When Apollo came back they substituted a white man because they couldn’t have a black hero.”

You want to talk about misinformation? You want to worry about corruption of data? Are you worried about history being erased? You haven’t seen anything yet!

Fahrenheit 451 might come to be reality. Burning all the printed books is the only way to make sure that there is not, and can not, ever be a counter narrative to the digital one.

I could literally see the “Great Reset” being nothing more than most, or all, of the planet’s dominant sentient species going back to the cave.

One of those nights…

I was winding down for sleep, then boom! I’m wide awake again.

I finally saw “Bros” today. It’s a cute movie, a somewhat predictable romantic comedy. But I like Luke Macfarlane as an actor. I’ve liked him since KillJoys and it was nice to see him playing something other than one of the Jaqobis boys.

He’s done a shit load of movies but Bros is the first one I’ve seen.

I looked up the website of the SCUBA trip organizer I traveled with in 2008. They’re still at it, and they’re heading to Bonaire in October. That’s a tempting get away. It’s unlikely I’ll go because there may simply be too much to deal with this coming year. That being said Bonaire is someplace that I enjoyed. I suppose my going, or not is going to depend a lot on finances and living situation. I could really use some tropical time, and some SCUBA time.

It’s been literally years since I got wet. I should plan on a refresher course and I need a new dive computer. Yes the Apple Watch Ultra has the ability to act as a dive computer, but honestly the way the sensors and algorithms get changed via software, I won’t bet my life on my Apple Watch.

My Apple Watch has too often behaved in arbitrary ways after software updates. I’m leaning more toward an air integrated single purpose dive computer. Let’s have the life support equipment focus on being life support equipment.

Perhaps I’ve been sitting in front of screens too much lately. Perhaps I’m spinning a little toward the manic and that’s why I can’t sleep. I’m trying 2 fingers of Jack, jotting down some story notes, and trying like hell to find the insomniac net on the Ham radio. Sometimes the late night “nets” are interesting, I might have the wrong night or… it’s not late enough yet.

I’ve been having some interesting thoughts about life, moving, starting over, and what happens next. Maybe these thoughts are just dealing with such monumental questions and worries that my poor addled brain is spinning up, instead of spinning down.

Jesse has gone out to the couch which is odd because usually he’s sleeping on the bed whether I’m there or not. On these late nights, I have to work my way into the bed and find space around him. Once he’s out, he’s dead and grumpy weight to move.

It’s raining now, we might see a little bit of snow but at this altitude it’s probably going to be more rain than anything. I’m hoping for rain that is strong enough to make that thrumming sound on the roof that I like. I’m not sure I’d hear it though because there’re still large patches of snow piled on the roof.

Right now It’s Phutureprimative Mind’s Eye playing while I sip my bourbon, and try to clear my head. I think Mind’s Eye may be one of Phutureprimative’s best albums. Check it out if you can.

I see that the weekly backup of my computer is running. That’s estimated to complete in an hour or so. Right now there’s not enough change on a daily basis to justify backing up to the server hourly. The server spend most of its time in sleep mode. That’s probably just as well since the drives spin down and stay spun down sometimes days at a time.

I think part of that is that on my computer there’s 2 TB of disk, so I’m never going to be fighting for space. Typically if I’m transferring to the server, it’s a huge block of files all at once for archival purposes instead of tons of transfers during the day. 

Jerry was always transferring stuff to the server. 

I’m beginning to envision a future. It’s funny, that wasn’t ever a problem when I was young. I had absolute faith that I could regenerate, rising like a Phoenix from the ashes and that I’d be okay. I could recreate myself with ease.

After the house burned, I realized that it was a lot harder to rise. As time went on, I found that I just didn’t have the energy. I was able to create an apartment life in San Diego. But that was an extension of my home here. If shit went sideways, I knew I always had a place to retreat. Selling and moving is a much different proposition. There’s no anchor, no retreat. I’ll be floating raw, naked, with no tethers and whatever I do, must work flawlessly.

Or mostly flawlessly. I can recover from imperfection… I’ve done it before, to do so requires only the application of money. Since money is finite and also in short supply I’d like to avoid as much imperfection as possible and thereby unnecessary expense.

I’m still spinning. I’ve been refraining from firing up the PlayStation for a few rounds of Call of Duty. That would probably amp me up more.

Not that I mind shooting bad guys, I could see myself joining an online game and really getting amped up because the avatars I’d be shooting are representations of real humans. When they respawn, they tend to have a bit of a grudge. I’m a shitty player… even I get lucky from time to time. Most of the time I’m taking a dirt nap waiting to respawn.

I miss having the friends from my Military Contractor Job to play with. We trash talked each other and played brutally. I used to be able to take my boss down in the game without fear… Well, until he respawned and came hunting me. We laughed a lot, swore at each other and had a ton of fun.

I noticed when I activated my PS5 there were all kinds of rules and regulations against trash talking each other. It’s a pity that so many people are that thin skinned or that so many people abused the shit out of communications.

All our trash talk at each other was nothing more than male bonding. I guess that’s something a lot of gay people and especially female to male transgenders simply wouldn’t understand.

There was nothing more gratifying than shooting my boss in the game and having him say “FUCK!!! I’m coming for you when I respawn!” 

I’d reply, “Yeah, but you have to find my ass first boss!”

The next morning at work we’d all be laughing and talking about the awesome shots we’d taken, or why it was we were dancing in one spot against a wall.

We all used to teabag each other in Halo. Imagine… teabagging your boss and him not being pissed about it the next morning.

Well, here we are at 2 AM. The weekly backup is complete.

Now what?

2nd glass of Jack hasn’t really hit. 

Games? Bust a Nut? Or just go climb between the sheets and hope the warm bed takes me to dreamland.