Not to sound like a Luddite, but these AI data centers have gotten out of control. I live in Coweta County, Georgia. I've lived here for decades. In all that time, we've had zero data centers. At the current moment, there are plans to build five. I'm no statistics major, but that seems like a big increase.

The locals are not particularly happy about this sudden spurt of this particular kind of development. To be honest, the locals are rarely happy about any development that doesn't bring them a new restaurant, but they are very not particularly happy about this. Last weekend, people stood in line for hours at the park up the street from my house (on Jefferson Davis Parkway, if that gives you any idea of my county's usual politics) to sign a petition they hope will force their suddenly development-friendly elected officials to quit ignoring our torches and pitchforks and finally have a public referendum on the matter.

It's noteworthy that most of the land those data centers want was until recently zoned "Rural Conservation." For refence, the Coweta County Georgia Code of Ordinances Appendix A Article 7 defines a "rural conservation district" as... oh, hell, just read it:

The rural conservation district is intended to provide for agricultural land use, and low density single-family residential land use in an area of Coweta County shown on the future development map as the rural conservation area. Agricultural land uses include farming, forestry, horticulture, wholesale plant propagation, dairying, ranching, and equestrian activities. Rural residential land uses include rural homestead lots, and low density rural residential developments designed to preserve woodland and open land along Coweta's roadways, to preserve primary conservation land: river or stream corridor, areas of vulnerable groundwater recharge, floodplain, steep slopes, habitat of endangered species, archeological sites, cemeteries, and burial grounds, and to provide neighborhoods with their own private, yet common, recreation areas.

Does any of that sound like the place anyone was ever planning to put a resource-intensive information warehouse? But who doesn't want a shiny new water-guzzling, 800-acre data center next door to their low density single-family residence? And as for preserving river or stream corridors and areas of vulnerable groundwater, the developers themselves have asked for 1,010,000 gallons of water per day. If that sounds like a lot, that's because it is. It's 13% of the Coweta County Water & Sewerage Authority's current production ability for only five new businesses, which is the equivalent of all the existing CCWSA customers donating 33 of our gallons of water per day to our thirsty new AI overlords.

In defense of the Board of Commissioners, the data centers are promising that once they are up to speed, they'll pay an astonishing $176 million in property taxes. Considering that the county took in less than $76 million in property taxes in 2024, that also seems like a pretty big increase. Assuming the data centers are telling the truth — AI would never lie to us — that's a lot of money to turn down. Who needs equestrian activities when you can ask a computer to turn you into a cartoon character for a social media post? With all that money, at the very least the county will be able to afford to pay the CCWSA to find us some extra water somewhere. I hear the arctic is melting.*

*Superman Month Sidebar: Speaking of "our national water crisis," Eric Brockovich (heard of her?) has lately been crusading against data centers like these in large part because of their "substantial" water usage. Her 2020 book on the subject of is titled Superman's Not Coming, which is both disheartening and, I hate to say it, accurate.

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Question I didn't realize I was going to have to ask myself when I started a blog, #8326: If I post a picture of seashells spelling out that I don't want to pay federal taxes anymore so long as the money is going to be used to fund insurrections against my own democracy, is the FBI going to come knocking on my door?

Better to be safe than sorry. No picture. I can't afford lawyers.

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Did you know that print journalists are trained to put the most interesting bits of any news story at the very end of the article?

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Ok, so if I posted a picture of myself as, say, Jesus, complete with seamless tunic and red shawl, that would be cool with you, right? I mean, people dress up as Jesus all the time. Have you ever seen a passion play without a Jesus? You can even buy Jesus costumes on Amazon. No big deal.

What if I imagined myself healing the sick with my touch? Jesus did that. It'd just be cosplaying. People love to pretend they're shooting webs like Spider-Man or flying like Superman. No one ever complains about that. Emulate your heroes. It's cool.

So long as I'm pretending to be someone with superpowers, I might as well surround myself with people in need, on their knees and begging for my help with their hands together. They do that for Superman, right? You can't really be a hero if you're not helping anyone. That's just common sense.

While I'm at it, how about some sunbeams and angels in the background? Jesus wouldn't have any supernatural pick-up-your-mat-and-walk powers without the Holy Spirit. You gotta have your winged boys at your back, or you'd just be some tent-revival faith-healing huckster. There's no mistaking the real thing.

And then if I then told you that I didn't know what Jesus looked like, I just thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with the Red Cross, you'd believe me, right? Don't you know a doctor when you see one? Who the fuck even knows what Jesus looked like? Jesus? Never heard of him. Where do you get these crazy ideas?

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The headline in today's The Athletic begins: "Ted Ginn, Jr, ex-NFL receiver and UFL coach...". Ted Ginn Jr? Now that's a name I've not heard in a long time. A long time.

Ginn, for those of you who haven't wasted the past few decades following the rotting corpse of a once great football team called the Miami Dolphins, was the 9th overall pick in the 2007 draft. He played his college football for Ohio State, where he set a record for scoring on punt returns. I presume that's why GM Randy Mueller (who had been installed as something of a figurehead GM during Nick Saban's head coaching tenure only to find himself in over his head when Saban abruptly skipped town) drafted Ginn as high as he did. Ginn had great foot speed but hands of stone. He was an immediate bust.

I happened to be in the stands when Ginn finally scored his first NFL punt return touchdown following the Eagles' opening drive in week 11. The Dolphins were to that point winless on the season, and I had already soured on Ginn. My brother, an Eagles fan, knew it. So when Ginn scored, he immediately taunted me with "Who's your fav-rit play-er? Ted Gin Jun-ior!" He would repeat that whenever Ginn's name came up in NFL broadcasts in the following years.

Admittedly, the 2007 coach and roster Mueller assembled didn't do Ginn any favors. (Can you name any of the three quarterbacks who started for the Dolphins in 2007? There will be a quiz later.) But after just three years in Miami, he was traded to the 49ers. Thereafter, he spent equally short terms with the Panthers, Cardinals, Panthers (again), Saints, and Bears. That's actually a pretty good career by NFL standards, and he wouldn't be widely considered as a bust if he hadn't been drafted so high by a team that needed so much help.

Anyway, all that is what I think of when I read the rest of that headline: "...arrested on DWI charge in Texas." I have to say that it's nice to know that some things don't change. Nearly twenty years later, Ted Ginn, Jr. continues to disappoint.

Pop quiz, hot shot! The Miami Dolphins 2007 quarterbacks: Trent Green (5 starts), Cleo Lemon (7 starts), John Beck (4 starts). Lemon was the only QB on the roster when Ginn was drafted. Later-career Trent Green was signed in June on a one-year deal to shore up a terrible roster. John Beck was the rookie QB taken after Ginn with the 40th overall pick, after JaMarcus Russell, Brady Quinn, and Kevin Kolb. There's a reason 2007 is considered one of the all time worst QB classes.

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Why is my Google News feed full of stores about how rampant commercialism and inept governments are leading to the impending collapse of Earth's ability to sustain life? Is this inspired by the current moon mission? Earth Day? AI data centers? War in the Middle East? Or just my particular doom scrolling preferences?

I'm a downer. I get it. But how about a nice link to dogs eating ice cream? Or Kpop Demon Hunter memes? Or news about cabinet members being fired for being terrible at their jobs? You know, the sorts of things that give hope that the universe isn't bent towards the worst possible outcomes.

Maybe if I just keep scrolling, I'll get to the good stuff....

Aw, geez. Now it's "I'd like to buy only America a Coke"? Fine, you win, universe.

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Recently, (as one does) I was perusing the Tustin (California) Area Historical Society website (tustinhistory.com) devoted to the closed (but not decommissioned) Marine Corps Air Station Tustin, commissioned in October 1942 (as Naval Air Station Santa Ana) to house "non-rigid lighter-than-air" airships for Navy Fleet Airship Wing Three, Squadron Thirty-One (ZP-31) in two wooden 17-story 1,088-foot long blimp hangars (one surviving), listed on the National Register of Historic Places since 1975.

That's where I found an image of this aging stencil painted on an interior wall of the (surviving) south Hangar 2 (Building 29):

A little more research teaches me that these are the fourteen leadership traits taught by the United States Marine Corps. Even more research reveals that the Marines borrowed those fourteen traits from the Army, specifically from the 1961 Department of the Army Field Manual FM 22-100: Military Leadership, which ordered them alphabetically. When the Marines integrated the traits into Department of the Navy Marine Corps Warfighting Publication MCWP 6-11 in 1995, they kept the alphabetical order, though the 2014 version of that publication (now designated MCWP 6-10) re-ordered them into the very sensible mnemonic "JJ DID TIE BUCKLE".

(In point of fact, a fifteenth trait, "Empathy" was added in the 2024 version of the MCWP 6-10, which now calls them "JJ DID TIE BUCKLEE". I'm not going to tell the Marines their business, but that's a terrible mnemonic. I assume they were sticking by tradition—Semper Fidelis!—but why just tack on an extra E when "KID BLED JET JUICE" is right there for the taking?)

However you order them, I have to say that I find them to be very good traits for effective leadership. Pretty good traits for everyone, actually. Too bad I don't see many of those traits being exemplified by the current Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States. Maybe someone should give him a tour of the South Hangar at MCAS Tustin.

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I first referenced this chestnut on my post January 7, 2020, shortly after the United States, at the order of an historically unpopular current president, launched a surprise drone strike that killed Iranian General Qasem Soleimani under the pretense that terrorist actions were imminent.

Given Saturday's events, in which the United States, at the order of an historically unpopular current president, joined Israel in a surprise bombing campaign that killed Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei under the pretense that nuclear strikes were imminent, now feels like a good time for a callback.

If at first you don't succeed, bomb, bomb again.

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I was recently gifted several issues (Volume CXLV, Numbers 3-6) of The Saguache Crescent, the newspaper of record for Saguache, Colorado, for 145 years and counting. (Still just 35¢! Cheap!) It has a delightful engraved, four-column masthead of the sort they just don't make anymore.

I've been told that natives (by which I mean the descendants of white settlers who now populate the region) pronounce "Saguache" much the same as I pronounced the name of the ubiquitous Swiss wristwatch of my 1980s childhood: Sa-watch. Wikipedia says there's a bit of confusion about what exactly the word means in the original Ute language. It's either "sand dune," "green place," "blue earth," or "blue water." Maybe all of the above? In any event, it sounds like a nice place. No wonder people have been writing and reading about it for so long.

Wikipedia also alerted me to the fact that The Saguache Crescent is the only known newspaper in the world still printed on a 19th-century Linotype machine, something that's pretty obvious when you have one in your hand. Back before you watched the news on your phones, kids, they used a keyboard to assemble physical letter molds into lines that became the printing slugs that were inked and applied to paper. Because the final slugs were a single block of lead, typos—which might have been your fault but just as easily could have been the fault of a finicky machine, something no computer will ever admit to—were forever. It's charming in hindsight.

Once you go looking, you'll find plenty of web articles explaining that The Saguache Crescent is run by one man, "DEAN I. COOMBS, Publisher," as a labor of love. He prints one paper a week for his modern community of about 500 people, obviously reusing slugs as often as possible. All of which explains why all four editions of the paper in front of me contain the same misspelled headline:

"VD Love Lettesrs at the saguache public library."

And I know I'm old-fashioned, but I'm going to blame the lingering nostalgia inspired by this Old West newspaper for causing me to wonder why in the world the Saguache, Colorado, public library is getting love letters from Venereal Disease.

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If you've read the news in the past few weeks, you may have a little trouble figuring out what the word "terrorism" actually means these days. It's being thrown around a lot to cover a lot of situations. So let's see if we can help clarify.

Merriam-Webster.com: ter·​ror·​ism, n: the systematic use of terror especially as a means of coercion.

Wiktionary.com: terrorism (usually uncountable, plural terrorisms) The use of unlawful violence against people or property to achieve political objectives.

Kids.Britannica.com: (under ter​ror​ism) Terrorists are people who use fear to try to change society.

As you can see, performing "terrorism" generally requires intent that the act would intimidate others into compliance with your desires out of a sense of fear. Darth Vader was a terrorist; he made his Imperial officers watch him kill their leaders so they would be too afraid to question his amoral orders. On the other hand, Freddy Krueger was not a terrorist; he was just a monster who enjoyed killing people.

The October 7 attack on Israel was an act of terrorism. The September 11 attack on America was an act of terrorism. Wearing white sheets and burning crosses in front yards has always been terrorism. Shootings on school campuses can be terrorism, but they can also just be murder. Trafficking drugs is itself not generally an act of terrorism, but in the right situation with the wrong sorts of people (like The Joker), it could be. Holding protest rallies is not terrorism (so long as there's no threat of violence). Fleeing across political borders, while illegal, is not terrorism (because people themselves are not inherently terrifying or seeking to force societal change by standing on one side or the other of an imaginary boundary).

Trying to escape police, while possibly unwise, is definitely not terrorism. Likewise, shooting someone in self defense, even if you were wrong to think you were in danger, is not terrorism either. But a hypothetical case of encouraging lethal force to subdue a fleeing suspect so others will think twice about trying to escape if they find themselves in the same situation? That's Darth Vader territory.

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