This Rejoice & Praise God Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.

It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.

In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts, and not by agenda-driven accusations and pronouncements.

We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.

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In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.

Please also consider the Guidelines for posting and discussion printed here: 
https://www.theqtree.com/2019/01/01/dear-maga-open-topic-20190101/

On this day and every day –

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up

Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Pride

According to Dictionary.com, pride is a high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc. The opposite of pride is humility, a Fruit of the Spirit and a most desirable characteristic in Christians.

Pride is an elevated view of and a preoccupation with self. Pride is a fault we despise in others yet freely excuse and even justify in ourselves. Many theologians believe that pride, not drunkenness, adultery, or murder, is the deadliest of all sins, for it was pride that led to Lucifer’s rebellion (Isaiah 14:14) and the first couple’s attempt at usurping God’s authority in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3:5). Many other sins originate from pride.

God’s warning that pride goes before destruction and a haughty spirit before a fall (Proverbs 16:18) is illustrated again and again in the pages of Scripture. One particularly notable episode, the story of Babylon’s King Nebuchadnezzar, begins with his boasting, continues with his downfall, and ends with his confession. After being duly warned of his prideful nature by the prophet Daniel, King Nebuchadnezzar stood on the rooftop of his palace and praised himself, saying, “Is not this great Babylon, which I have built by my mighty power as a royal residence and for the glory of my majesty?” (Daniel 4:30, ESV). Immediately, God judged his pride, and for the next seven years, the once grandiose monarch groveled about on all fours in the manner of a wild beast while grazing on the palace lawn. From regal to rags and from banquet table to mouthfuls of fodder, King Nebuchadnezzar completed a seven-year course on the dangers of pride and the virtues of humility.

We must understand that pride, like dangerous narcotics, is addictive and detrimental to our well-being. The more we feed pride, the firmer its grip. Pride is a loathsome garment that is not easily shed, and it’s deceitful: those who think they have already achieved humility are probably mistaken. D. L. Moody used to pray, “Lord, make me humble, but don’t let me know it.”

Ethnic pride is the belief that one’s particular ethnic group is superior to others and other ethnic groups are to be subjectively measured in relation to one’s own. It is a system of belief that leads to an unhealthy level of pride and lack of concern for others. Since race is often a part of ethnicity, racial pride is usually related to racism, which has been a plague on humanity for centuries. There is no place among God’s people for the racially superior attitudes that lead to racism. Such attitudes are contrary to Scripture and displeasing to God.

Biblically, racial pride is sin. All men and women are made in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27; 9:6), although that image is corrupted by sin. God does not show partiality or favoritism (Deuteronomy 10:17; Acts 10:34). Jesus did not lay down His life for a particular race, culture, or tribe, but by His death He “purchased men for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9). The Scriptures tell us that Jesus came to save the world, both Jews and Gentiles. Paul bears this out by saying, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) and “There is no Greek or Jew, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave or free, but Christ is all, and is in all” (Colossians 3:11).

Jesus superseded all barriers of race, culture, and ethnicity with His death on the cross. Paul wrote of the uniting of Jew and Gentile in Ephesians 2:14: “For he himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility.” Ethnocentrism, whether based on historical grudges, erroneous assumptions, or overt human pride, is wholly contrary to God’s Word. We are commanded to love one another as He has loved us (John 13:34), and such a command precludes any discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or culture.

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I want to take another look at Data Centers because POTUS Trump and others indicated they are a vital security and economic concern. I am starting with this video because he has an excellent easily understandable explanation of the SCAM the City of London Financiers have been playing on the USA.

ROUGH PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

The economy, the real physical economy that enabled hardworking people like you to really thrive 30 years ago. Well, that’s gone. It’s been systematically eliminated. This all really started because of an owl. The spotted owl. Just look behind me. That closed mill means nothing to you right now. But I’m going to show you where your money is disappearing to and how that closed mill is the very reason you can’t get ahead anymore. Here’s the simple loop.

The timber industry used to create revenue for the government. That revenue paid for the government to operate. When the industry was destroyed, the revenue stopped. The government spending increased at the same time. And they printed money to fill the black hole of the new spending. Printing that money cut the value of dollars in your bank account, which made everything you buy cost more. You didn’t change. The system did. Now, you may understand the basics of inflation, but what you may not understand is that someone got rich and is still getting rich off of that very system. And I’m going to show you who that is so that you never let it happen to you again.

When this mill was running, it produced physical wealth. And that wealth paid the taxes that you now have to pay. And it funded a reality where a single inome family could do just fine. But in the 1990s, elites in the highrises decided they couldn’t control independent producers. So they used emotion to stop them. But here’s what you need to understand. The money didn’t just disappear. It went to someone. It went to someone sitting in a boardroom in a high-rise. It was an engineered transfer of wealth from you to a global elite. We’re going to call him Arthur. Arthur is a high-powered lawyer for a massive environmental NGO, which we’ll call the Evergreen Defense Fund. Arthur realized he could weaponize the Endangered Species Act, to make money for himself. So, he stirred up anger in the public over a perceived injustice to a cute little owl. Then he used that same injustice to file thousands of lawsuits to stop the logging on public land under laws like Equal Access to Justice Act.

When Arthur’s NGO sues the federal government and wins, the government is legally required to pay Arthur’s attorney fees with your tax dollars. Arthur got rich from donations and then got paid from your taxes to get even richer. Arthur didn’t save the environment. He stopped the flow of real wealth that paid to keep our public lands and our wild places open and well kept. So, every time you feel the sting of inflation at the grocery store, just remember that you’re paying Arthur’s bonus. Now, to really wrap your mind around this, let’s go through an economic example to show you how the money flows from you to Arthur.

Before Arthur’s lawsuits, federal law required that 25% of all timber revenue from timber sales on federal land to go directly back into the local counties. In a prime timber county in the 1980s, that meant 20 to 30 million a year of pure debt-free cash pouring straight into your public schools and county road departments. On top of that, the logging companies maintained thousands of miles of mountain roads entirely for free just so they could run their trucks. The Forest Service budget was green, filled with cash from an American made product that went directly to consumers all over the country. Remember, there’s two silos that always have to be filled. The local county budget, then there’s the Forest Service itself. If the Forest Service decided to sell standing timber for $10 million, a timber company would come along and pay it. 7.5 million of that would go directly into the Forest Service budget to help keep our campgrounds clean and our trail heads open and pay the people who take care of our Forest Service. 2.5 million of that went directly into our counties to fill their budget to take care of our school funding, keep our roads graded and maintained. When Arthur used a spotted owl to shut down the woods, that $30 million vanished overnight. The free road maintenance stopped, but the county still had to keep the schools open. So the federal government stepped in with bailout programs like secure rural schools, which is SRS, and PILT, which is payment in lie of taxes. And they replaced real physical timber wealth with your tax dollars and printed money. And the bleeding didn’t stop there. When these mills closed, hundreds of men lost their jobs. The local cafe went out of business because no one was buying lunch. But worst of all, the mill was the largest single taxpayer in the county. With them gone, who makes up the difference to fix the crumbling schools? You do. Government spending overall skyrocketed. Not only did they lose revenue, but they literally created a county welfare program that caused us to pay even more.

Arthur flipped the system upside down.

He got rich and all the hardworking people in the West are still paying the bills. Sadly, all of those people who held up a spotted owl sign or screamed in the face of a logger are paying, too. All of us paid to make Arthur rich. Whether you gave money to Evergreen Defense Fund or fought against it, we all lost. Add in the hundreds of millions that the government has to spend fighting Arthur and the millions that we pay him when he wins. It’s a massive black hole of spending, entirely funded by raising your taxes and printing more money. Bankrupting the American West wasn’t enough for Arthur because what he left behind was not a pristine wilderness. It was a ticking time bomb…

6:30: The people who engineered this transfer of wealth are relying on your ignorance. They want you to think that the economy is just very complicated so you don’t realize that you’re being robbed…

[Description of old decayed forests, forest too thick to feed wild life and massive out of control fires.]

16:51: When a mega fire breaks out now, the government has to fight it. The federal fire suppression budget was a fraction of what it is today. Now it is a multi-billion dollar black hole on top of all the other expenses. Who pays for the fleets of helicopters? Who pays for the thousands of firefighters? You do, of course. Your tax dollars are drained to fight a fire that never should have happened.

And Arthur, his lungs are perfectly fine. He’s sitting in a high-rise with hospital-grade air filtration. Arthur sells you the cure to the disease that he created. Your kids get to breathe in toxic ash every summer. And more of your tax dollars go up in smoke for fire suppression. While Arthur and his buddies each bought another vacation home. Arthur burned the system down. He bankrupted the counties and he scorched the timber. But he’s just a lawyer. He doesn’t want to actually own anything. But what he did was create a county system that is desperate enough to sell. And that’s when the vultures come in from Wall Street. You thought that was it? That was all the money and power and rights that they were going to strip from you. Well, if that’s the case, you don’t understand how the world works because there’s always someone left to pick up the scraps. To understand who’s taking from you now, you have to understand the concept of a mob boss takeover. How does a mob boss takeover work? Well, the first guy comes in to a perfectly healthy business and he breaks the kneecaps of the owner and then he drives away every one of the customers and makes it impossible for them to come back until that owner is literally in debt up to his eyeballs. Cannot make a dime. That’s when the second guy comes in and offers him pennies on the dollar for his business. Now, Arthur and his lawsuits are the first guy.

They have really driven everybody to the edge of insolvency. They have siphoned out a whole bunch of the industry. Anything that’s real economy has been removed, which opens the door for the second guy, the one who’s going to make the offer to make it all right. We’re going to call that second guy Eleanor. Eleanor works for a firm called Green Rock and they’re rolling out a new product. They’re going to buy the ecosystem services off the land that is now on the edge of bankruptcy in the name of protecting the environment and saving the ecosystem. They’re going to take the one thing you have left. Your access.

Do you understand what they’re doing here?

Arthur burned it down. Eleanor is buying it up for Wall Street. The trees and wildlife are no longer nature. They’re now a highly regulated financial asset. and Eleanor can’t afford to have you or your children hiking, recreating, or hunting on her asset. Arthur burned the system down. He bankrupted our counties and then he handed you an inflation bill. And now Eleanor is coming in to buy up the resources, what’s left on the dirt, to lock you out of the American West forever. If you want to understand the real mechanisms behind natural assets, nature credits, and the ecological services that they’re selling off the land, and how it’s going to really affect you and your children.

You need to learn the playbook. Go to the link in the description and join the high lonesome society. Now you know the reason you can’t go forward. It’s not about the spotted owl. It’s not about saving the timber. Every time you earn a dollar, it’s being taken from the back end. It’s all about extracting money from you to them. And they’re not going to stop there. The more we give, the more they take. And now you know about Arthur. You need to look out for Eleanor.

Until next time, I’m Trinity Vandenaker. God bless.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

This video starts at 2:30 minutes with a speech by POTUS Trump. It is about Data center companies pledging to build electric generation and promises no rate increase. In some communities the rate have gone DOWN and now they have NO PROPERTY TAXES! Critical comment on foreign Propaganda.

11 minutes — They have also agreed to invest heavily in communities where data centers are built ,supporting job training and local services.

11:40 — Other countries are trying to get us to slow down.

Badlands Media Special Coverage: 7/23/26 – Trump Expands Ratepayer Protection Pledge at EPA

POTUS Trump mentions foreign propaganda. Is this an example?

TEXT:

China has spent roughly $100 million on influence operations inside the United States, DOJ records show — spanning state-run propaganda networks, corporate lobbying and efforts to shape American policy at every level.

The spending includes $66.8 million funneled to CGTN America, Beijing’s flagship English-language media operation, between February and November 2025 alone. Dozens of American lobbyists have signed new contracts with Chinese-owned companies, including firms the Pentagon has designated as Chinese military companies. Tencent alone has spent over $10 million on lobbying since 2025.

And that’s just what’s on the books. Campus groups linked to the Chinese government and organizations under China’s United Front Work Department — a global network of CCP loyalists — don’t file disclosures at all.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/chinas-influence-machine-federal-records-expose-beijings-push-sway-america

President Trump Expands Historic Ratepayer Protection Pledge to Protect American Ratepayers, Lower Electricity Prices – epa.gov

This article covers parts of the President’s speech.

President Trump’s Ratepayer Protection Pledge Will Now Cover 80 Percent of All Power Delivered to American Homes and Businesses

President Trump first announced the Ratepayer Protection Pledge in his State of the Union address on February 24, 2026.  On March 4, 2026, seven leading AI companies and hyperscalers — Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI — signed the Ratepayer Protection Pledge at the White House. Companies that sign the pledge are committing to build, bring, or buy all of the energy needed to power their facilities and to pay the full cost of that energy and its supporting infrastructure, no matter what. Ratepayer Protection Pledge extends those obligations across the full chain of parties whose decisions determine what a family pays each month: the electric utilities that set rates, the developers that build the facilities, and the States that regulate both.   

“The United States never settles for second, and we don’t under this administration… we live by the motto ‘America First,” said President Donald. J Trump. “Thanks in part to this incredible [AI] technology boom, investments are pouring into the United States from all over the world.”  

“The global race for AI is underway, and America must win it — but not by asking working families to pay for it,” said EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin. “Communities that welcome these facilities deserve every fact in front of them and every protection behind them. That is what the Trump EPA has delivered, and that is what Ratepayer Protection Pledge builds on. Our Team at EPA is honored to host President Trump, Secretary Wright, and many other distinguished guests, for today’s important announcement.” ….

EPA has advanced this work by making the rules of the road public and accessible before a shovel goes in the ground. In December 2025, EPA’s Office of Air and Radiation launched the Clean Air Act Resources for Data Centers webpage, giving developers, local communities, and Tribes a single location for the regulatory information, permitting guidance, and air quality modeling tools relevant to these facilities. In May 2026, EPA launched the Permitting Authority Map, a public interactive tool that allows anyone to select a location and identify which agency — EPA, State, territorial, Tribal, or local — issues each environmental permit. EPA also published reuse considerations and a Redevelopment Mapper to help communities and developers evaluate Brownfield and Superfund sites for industrial reuse. Together these resources advance two pillars of Administrator Zeldin’s Powering the Great American Comeback initiative: making America the AI capital of the world, and permitting reform through cooperative federalism. 

A facility that generates its own power, returns what it does not use to the grid, hires from the community it joins, and stands ready to keep the lights on when the system is under strain gives back to its community. The States and localities welcoming these facilities are building new generation their regions did not have before, putting their own residents to work, and ensuring that the infrastructure of the next century is built here at home — by American workers, powered by American energy. 

I also want to add a Tweet by Barbara Boyd of Promethean Action. In a recent Question and Answer session she mentioned she lives in Virginia and that you can not drive a mile without tripping over an AI Data Center. She said nothing about noise or any other problems.

TEXT:

Barbara M Boyd @BarbaraMBoyd Jul 18

I know this will set some of my friends hair on fire but Sacks is right and I don’t want my nieces and nephews to be speaking Chinese. When you walk across Hoover Dam do you think about how many men died there constructing it. There were lots but they signed up for it because it was such a grand undertaking to provide both water and electricity to an entire area of our country for generations.

David Sacks @DavidSacks Jul 17

This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model Kimi K3 has taken #1 on the Frontend Code Arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks. Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI — while addressing risks in a targeted way — or we’ll watch our lead evaporate

1:42 The RAM chip shortage story

2:15 Who shut the memory lines down

3:13 The hyperscale data centre narrative

4:07 The collapse has already happened

5:11 Seven companies propping up the market

6:16 The alchemy engine and rehypothecation

6:55 Manufacturing a key dependency

8:36 Gödel, Goebbels and the chipset proof

9:46 Why the hyperscaler future isn’t coming

11:06 Hydraulic despotism and the debt

12:09 The TLDR: holding the general price level

13:08 What gold bugs and Bitcoiners miss

Generally I like Rich and his guests but this one has me doing suspicious cat. However there are a lot of interesting nuggets so I am bringing it to the QTree for discussion.The lead speaker is

EM Burlingame – 蒲 奕 言

The Chinese characters seem to indicate the last emperor of China.

Much of this is over my head but we do have these data points. We are already aware of ‘Managed Decline’ and the off shoring of our manufacturing, mining and REAL wealth producing industries. Some of us are aware of the gambling casino called the derivatives market — 81 Abstract notes “Some market analysts estimate the derivatives market at · more than 10 times the size of the total world gross domestic product, or GDP.”

EM Burlingame who starts off the following discussion, thinks the City of London’s Ponsi scheme has already collapsed and AI and data centers are the next Green-Swindle like wind turbines, that they are being used to drain the last wealth from targeted countries. I do not have the expertise to have an opinion on the information presented. However Burlingame mentioned physics when he talked. He also mentions Oracle being valued really low. That makes me thing of Game Stop and the Wall Street Apes. He says the flock cameras are not connected to anything but there are the cops caught stalking women.

There is also this Qtree discussion about the ‘new’ physics LINK:

Last night you [Wolf] posted a tweet with:

 …Physicists are rewriting the 200-year-old mathematics of heat and work, placing daily thermodynamics on a rigorous footing traditionally used for quantum fields…

a pioneering effort by physicist Bryan Roberts at the London School of Economics and Political Science 

Fabian LSE???

Boy does that stink of Psy-op. Smells like the Global Warming scientific diversion, especially when you are talking thermo and cooling and Quantum Computers.

…

Wolf responded:

YES!!! “nEt ZeR0 is QuANtuM!” LOL.

Thank you for taking a look at that. Yes, it sounds like they’re trying to spin science in a direction that might be more useful to their plans. At the very least, they are clearly trying to fertilize a “you cannot understand this science but you must respect it” position – one that is against “money follows science follows truth” – and into the much more dangerous realm of “science follows money controlling truth” which has created this phony “carbon economy” that was about to enslave all of humanity.

They may even be reacting directly to Trump’s highly Americanized “quantum” stuff by spinning this guy’s work into media focus right now.

“More work is needed” – yes – BY US.

…

ROUGH PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT:

Chapter 1: There is no RAM shortage

EM Burlingame:

My sense is that the financialist step seven collapse has already happened and the only thing that is preventing us from collapse, [a] sudden implosion is the illusion of the future value of technologies. For all intents and purposes, there are seven high technology companies that are propping up the markets. And over 80% of the companies in the exchanges are debt companies that only exist anymore because they can borrow money against their stock valuations. So what you do is you find a key dependency upon which all things are dependent. You create an artificial scarcity in it.

If we were having a real chip shortage, we would not be expanding the drone warfare in Russia. Every one of those drones gets blown up, blows up chips that you don’t get back. There is no RAM shortage. If there was an actual RAM shortage, we could deal with it in very short order.

Chapter 5: The hyperscale data centre narrative

3:14: Over in Idaho there’s some things happening but part of this is a story about this massive push for hyperscaler AI data centers. Another one of those narratives that’s out there that’s not real. It’s mostly been like the hypers scale data center threat is already in the past because we’re going to get to distributed workloads and a variety of other things that just don’t really matter. So a lot of this is just narrative control and that’s the way Dexter White and I have been seeing it. He’s been following the story a lot more closely than I have. I would say actually, at some point in the future if you really want to talk that kind of stuff, you might want to hit up Dexter because he’s written about it for the newsletter a couple times and it’s a focus of his. And he’s been following it very closely…

Chapter 7: Seven companies propping up the market

5:12 So let me just say for people who don’t know FANGS is Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Nvidia, Google, and there’s more. There’s Tesla and those kind of companies. So yeah, so terribly sorry, you know, there is for all intents and purposes, seven high technology companies that are propping up the markets and over 80% of the companies in the exchanges are dead companies that only exist anymore because they can borrow money against their stock valuations. And this is very well demonstrated.

Maverick of Wall Street does a great job. I haven’t listened to him in a while, but he does a great job modeling this stuff. So you have an illusion of an economy going all the way back to 2008, 2012 area. We have the illusion of an economy that is sustained by two things. Government spending. So inflation of government debt and inflation of stock valuations of these high-tech companies….

Chapter 11: Why the hyperscaler future isn’t coming

10:00 …We have vastly unused capacity right now in all of our computing personal AI. Personal AI is on your phone correct? I worked on how do you do distributed, I don’t understand hyper scale future. All these data centers, all these massive data centers. That was my first funded company. It was building out data centers. That’s what I did in the banking industry etc before. This hyper scale massive data center build-out future isn’t going to happen and it isn’t necessary. We’re not giving up that future productivity capability by getting rid of that. Tom’s exactly right. What’s going to wind up happening is it’s all already moving into here. [Points at phone] We will do the compute, the storage, the process and everything. And oh, by the way, you don’t need RAM here because you do what’s called a system on a chip and it’s edged right into this, the chip itself.

…

Burlingame then gets technical. You can go to his Substack and see the steps.

The Financialist Kill Chain: A Predatory Blueprint

The Financialist Kill Chain is a calculated strategy of exploitation:

1. Infiltration and Influence: Financialists embed themselves in a nation’s leadership and economic systems.
2. Debt Entrapment: Countries are enticed into unsustainable loans with punishing terms.
3. Asset Identification: Valuable resources—oil, infrastructure, or industries—are marked for takeover.
4. Economic Destabilization: Markets are manipulated to deepen crises and erode resistance.
5. Debt-for-Asset Swaps: Assets are surrendered in exchange for debt relief, stripping national wealth.
6. Extraction and Exploitation: Wealth is funneled offshore to enrich the Financialists.
7. Abandonment and Collapse: The nation is discarded, its economy a hollowed-out shell.

…

Chapter 13: The TLDR: holding the general price level

12:30 Tom Luongo:

So, yes, all what Em just said is a thing here... I’ve been saying this for a while because I mean, it’s a great note. What you said was great. I just want to make sure that the layman audience [understands] because Rich looks confused

…Which is the following. We have a general price level that we need to maintain in order to maintain credit markets around the world. Okay. that general price level, that inflation, all the deflationists need to get it out of their heads. We’re not going to have a 90% stock market crash. No one wants that. No one wants the the societal collapse that goes along with a 90% correction. Our enemies do, but we’re not going to allow it….

Chapter 15: The Austrian structure of production

13:35 – The point being is that the general price level of credit based assets, assets that derive their value from the credit markets, that’s the mortgage industry, the meaning your home price, that is your insurance, your life insurance, your homeowners insurance, your cars value, all of this stuff, all of those credit based assets that are at the long end of the structure of production, meaning the 20th or 30th order good, not the first order good like crude oil. Crude oil is a first order good. The basic refined oil is second and tertiary order goods. You know, plastics are a fourth order good. Pharmaceuticals are a fifth order good. Blah blah blah blah blah. Houses are a 40th order good. They’re at the far end of the structure of production if you were doing this from an Austrian perspective. Therefore, they’re also the most interest rate sensitive. Okay?

So in order to maintain the general price level while you convert the economy from 90% fraud, let’s just pick a number, it’s probably 90%, let’s call it 50% fraud, to 20% fraud, which is a massive paradigm shift. Yes, you’re trying to do that and maintain the general price level to maintain the general level of civilization.

14:52 EM Burlingame: Yes. Okay. without also giving your enemy an entry point with which to destroy and buy up all your real assets at 5 cents on the dollar.

Tom Luongo: Step number seven, which is what they’ve done to Argentina, you know, & everybody else.

So this is what we, Ian and I have both identified as what the general plan is. It’s what Trump has articulated. It’s what Bessant has articulated. It’s what others have articulated that’s what they’re going to do. And they’re willing, in the case of Donald Trump, to drop bombs on people who are the enemies to that plan. And they happen to be named things like the IRGC, Hezbollah, soon to be the Cuban Communists if necessary, the Sinaloa cartel, this one, that one, all of those people. And what we like to put under the big rubric of City of London. Okay. Now with all that said that is the framework for the war. Here’s one for you. My friend Matt Dyn.. who’s a bond trader and is watching all of this with the same eye that we are is noticing that oracles 10 year debt is trading at 6.1% and rising.

Chapter 17: Oracle’s debt and the junk bond signal

👉 We talked about this on episode 252 of the gold and guns podcast. Matt and I went through all this and he brought up Oracle’s debt and I’m like you do realize that JNK which is the junk bond ETF only pays 6.7. Now when junk bonds are trading 50 basis points higher than tier one capital company like Oracle at the core of the data center and database story, you have a problem in that market, not in the junk bond market, but in the AI market. Meaning the market is beginning to figure out that the future that EM just said is not going to happen. It’s we’re starting to see market signs of it. That’s the point, that’s why I’m bringing up.

17:00 EM Burlingame: Absolutely, Tom. Absolutely. So very much to your point, in the tech sphere, if we look at the very same articulation you did about oil, tier one, two or three, tier five product, layer, whatever you want to call it, Igen value mode. Oracle is one, two. You can’t run any of these other things without Oracle, You just can’t. So, it was chosen. It was chosen, He [Larry Ellison] was a made man….

…

There is a lot more that is quite interesting but I will leave it at that. Tomorrow I will do a look at POTUS Trump’s national security strategy which includes science.

This Rejoice & Praise God Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.

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On this day and every day –

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up

Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

God’s Patience

The attribute of God’s patience is evident in both the Old and New Testaments. One example comes from God Himself, who proclaimed to Moses, “The Lord, the Lord, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Exodus 34:6). The phrase slow to anger illustrates His patience. The psalmist also praises God as “a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness” (Psalm 86:15).

In the New Testament, the apostle Paul describes God as kind, forbearing, and patient (Romans 2:4). The apostle Peter also referred to God’s patience when addressing objections from scoffers then (extending to now) regarding the second coming: “The Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, as some understand slowness. Instead, he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9). These are just a few instances of God being described as patient.

When Scripture describes God as being patient, it means that He endures humanity’s flaws, does not easily get angry, and holds back judgment to make room for repentance. His patience is also demonstrated in how He condescended to work through imperfect humans to carry out His plans. Noah, Abraham, Moses, King David, and the prophets are some examples.

Additionally, we view God’s patience toward humans right after the fall, when God made clothing for His shamed creations (Genesis 3:21). He also patiently listened to Cain, even in the face of judgment (Genesis 4:15). Then there is the flood. Scripture describes the inhabitants of the world as being “corrupt in God’s sight and full of violence” (Genesis 6:11). Even with the moral depravity of our day, we would be horrified at the violence of the world in that day. Yet God did not execute swift judgment. Instead, He waited till Noah built the ark, which took a long time (1 Peter 3:20).

In God’s judgment of Sodom and Gomorrah, His patience was revealed when He promised Abraham He would not exercise judgment if there were at least ten righteous people in the city (Genesis 18:32). For context, Sodom and Gomorrah had not only sinned, but there was a great outcry against them (verse 20). Yet God was willing to show mercy to all of them for the sake of only ten people.

Other instances of God’s patience include His dealings with the Canaanites (Genesis 15:16), the Ninevites in Jonah’s day (Jonah 3:10) and the Israelites before their exile (2 Kings 17:13–14). His patience also explains the perceived delay in Jesus’ second coming (2 Peter 3:9, 15).

Perhaps the most exceptional display of God’s patience is in the Person of Jesus. The Son of God took on human flesh, lived among His creation, and endured challenges in His ministry. He also patiently succumbed to humiliation at the cross in order to accomplish His redemptive work for humanity.

Like any other attribute of God, His patience surpasses ours. While this is good news for the struggling believer or those reaching out to an unbelieving loved one, it can also lead to frustration. Like the martyred saints in Revelation 6:10, believers may cry out “How long, Lord?” How long will we remain in the broken world? How long till restoration? How long till we are free from the clutches of sin and suffering? How long do we endure? But even in our perplexed state, we trust that God is absolutely in control and infinitely good.

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There are Important Notifications from our host, Wolf Moon; the Rules of our late, good Wheatie; and, certain caveats from Yours Truly, of which readers should be aware. They are linked here. Note: Yours Truly has checked today’s post for any AI-generated content. To the best of her knowledge and belief, there is none. If readers wish to post any AI-generated content in the discussion thread for today’s post, they must cite their source. Thank you.

Do not forget to LABEL AI articles, video and such.

Again this is going to be very rough since I do not have time to do any editing, however I wanted to look at AI Data Centers since I have run into a massive anti-AI campaign. Many of the wild stories I am hearing sound like a Chinese (or British) Disinfo-op.

I view AI like I do nuclear. It can be a blessing (power stations) or a curse (bombs.) However there is no putting the genie back into the box so we need to harness it for good.

https://post.substack.com/p/against-claudefishing

I find this a balanced approach to AI. H/T barkerjim(@barkerjim): “Building trust in the AI age”

From President Trump.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116924979201330474

TEXT:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

One of the biggest Driving Forces in the Future for Jobs, are Data Centers. They are big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built. Governor Kathy Hochul, for political reasons, has terminated all Data Centers being built, or to be built, in New York State. These Companies are now being sought in Alabama, Florida, Texas, Arizona, and many other States. Both the Taxes and the Jobs amount to LIQUID GOLD! New York State has made a terrible decision. All of this Income, and other Benefits, will be going to Red States, and some Blue, where Data Centers are sought as Cash Cows, with Lower Taxes and Record Setting Jobs. They must pay for their own Water and Power, and any leftover goes back to the State and local Community. Data Centers are tremendous WINS for the States and Communities that are lucky enough to get them. New York should change its Policy, IMMEDIATELY. The Radical Left Dumocrats must not be allowed to cause us to lose Data Centers, AI, and all of this incredible new Technology, to China, and other countries!

President DONALD J. TRUMP

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116938511106455297

TEXT:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

Newly declassified documents show that over a period of years starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history — resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files.

That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences, and other sensitive data that would be needed to register to vote, and engage in other nefarious activities.

This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare. The intelligence even shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/election-integrity

This is important because 220 million voter files is pretty much the entire US voting base. According to Brave AI “..the U.S. Census Bureau estimates about 168 million registered voters, while the U.S. Election Assistance Commission reports more than 209 million active registrations on state rolls…”

Why do I bring up these stolen voter rolls? Because China is now using AI to analyse them and no doubt using other stolen data to build a profile of every American voter.

From Badlands:
China Preps Massive AI Buildout Plan, Framed as Part of a US-China Technological Arms Race

China is preparing a roughly 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) investment over the next five years to build a nationwide network of interconnected data centers and computing hubs.

The effort is designed to rapidly scale domestic AI infrastructure, support the development of frontier AI models, and position China to lead in a technology widely viewed as strategically decisive for economic productivity, surveillance, military applications, and industrial competitiveness through the 2030s.

The plan prioritizes Chinese suppliers—including Huawei—for at least 80 percent of core technology, notably AI chips, explicitly aiming to displace foreign providers such as Nvidia and AMD and accelerate the maturation of domestic alternatives.

This data-center push forms a central element of Beijing’s broader “Six Networks” infrastructure mobilization, which integrates computing capacity with power, water, and other foundational systems under state direction and financing.

It represents an aggressive, centrally coordinated response to U.S. advantages in AI hardware and hyperscale investment, seeking to lock in long-term technological self-reliance and shift the global balance in advanced compute resources.

Burning Bright: Beijing’s move to mobilize roughly 2 trillion yuan — nearly $300 billion — over the next five years for a nationwide network of interconnected AI data centers is being sold, predictably as the opening barrage of the next great power contest.

The plan, we’re told sits inside a larger ‘Six Networks’ mobilization that fuses computing power with electricity, water, communications and logistics, while on the American side, the hyperscalers are answering with their own staggering numbers, with Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft alone guiding toward $600–700 billion in combined capex for 2026, much of it pouring into data-center and AI infrastructure, even as power constraints seem readily apparent.

The surface-level narrative suggests an arms race between Washington and Beijing for frontier models and the industrial base that will deploy them, and yet, I believe this apparent contradiction actually ratifies the Sovereign Alliance between Donald Trump and Xi Jinping, with each leader deliberately leaning into the rivalry narrative because it supplies the other with the precise Narrative Shielding required to accelerate down a path whose true destination is not model supremacy, but the build-out of the infrastructure of the Golden Age itself.

What the Collective Mind can presently grasp — and what capital markets can price in — is ‘AI versus AI.’

But the deeper architecture requires energy abundance at sovereign scale and the physical rails that will carry human extension and augmentation into the next civilizational epoch, with the current generation of models is simply the rudimentary, investable endpoint that justifies pouring sovereign and private capital into that larger paradigm.

Trump’s AI Action Plan and related executive orders (most of them from 2025) are framing the effort in national security terms while simultaneously advancing the nuclear and permitting reforms that make AI-scale power possible.

Xi’s parallel national push is doing the same in keeping with China’s own sovereignty doctrine.

Both are executing Warp Speed buildouts.

In other words, the models are the justification layer; the energy and computing mesh is the actual payload.

Again, an AI infrastructure sprint demands one resource above every other: abundant, reliable and ultimately decentralized power.

That is also the non-negotiable precondition of the Age of Abundance the Sovereign Alliance has been telegraphing for years — replete with a nuclear renaissance, gargantuan data centers and the on-shoring of critical manufacturing, all set against the backdrop of the broader disentanglement from scarcity-based control systems narratives like the Iran War and the collapse of the Green New Deal in the West are facilitating.

The ‘AI Arms Race’ between the world’s two largest economies therefore functions simultaneously as both Narrative Shielding and as a Translation Layer.

I am not so sure I agree with Burning Bright. I do not trust China AT ALL!

And to go along with it in the same Badlands substack:

DOE Releases Finalized Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap to Accelerate Commercial Fusion Power

The U.S. Department of Energy has released its finalized Fusion Science and Technology Roadmap, a comprehensive national strategy to accelerate the development and commercialization of fusion energy.

The plan targets the deployment of fusion pilot plants and commercial fusion power in the mid-2030s through coordinated efforts across science, technology, infrastructure, workforce development, and commercialization.

The roadmap was developed with input from more than 800 scientists and engineers from over 15 private companies, 10 national laboratories, and 70 universities.

It is organized around three core pillars: building critical infrastructure to close materials and technology gaps; driving innovation through advanced research, high-performance computing, and artificial intelligence; and expanding the domestic fusion ecosystem via public-private partnerships, supply chain strengthening, workforce growth, and commercialization pathways.

It will be implemented through DOE’s newly established Office of Fusion and aligns with the department’s Genesis Mission.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

TRANSCRIPT

Doug in Exile: Ladies and gentlemen, this is the brilliant lady who got her urgent message to Trump. Katherine Herridge is the one who did the investigative reporting that exposed China, but not just exposing China and their involvement in the election, how they’re using AI. They’re using high technology to massively affect our elections. This has very long-reaching repercussions going forward. Here’s Katherine Herridge, watch this.

Katherine Herridge: China is one of the biggest collectors of data on the planet. So, if you take that 220 million voter rolls and you combine it with something called the SF86, those are the security clearance applications that were compromised back in 2015, 22 million files, and then you combine it with all of the health information that’s been hacked, you can really build this kind of digital composite of an individual, and you can use that for you know, voter registration fraud, you can use that for identity theft, and significantly, you can also use it to recruit American citizens to your efforts. So, it’s not just about the collection of the data around the vote.

Doug in Exile: It’s espionage. That is huge, guys. This is terrifying. I’m going to show you First of all, don’t be scared, cuz the answer is, of course, America has to beat China on the AI war, which now you can see how it affects our elections. You want us to have powerful AI. Here’s Dave Sachs, watch this. Dave Sachs is kind of making the logical conclusion out of the stuff. He says, “This is concerning. For the first time, a Chinese model, the Kimi K3, has taken number one on the front-end code arena and is scoring at or near the frontier on other benchmarks.” So, I’ll just translate this for you. It is the smartest compute in the world, the smartest AI in the world. That makes it the most effective, most aggressive is now China, the number one list. I’ll show you the list in just a minute. Let me finish this up.

Meanwhile, America is tying itself in knots. Politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers. You guys have heard this. You can’t let these data centers in, it’s ruining our water, our farmland, not in my neighborhood. China’s the one funding all of that sentiment to get you to think that it’s dangerous. Piling on state regulations, pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models. This is how you lose the AI race. The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI while addressing risks in a targeted way, or we’ll watch our lead evaporate. And remember guys, the only way you can fight Chinese AI with all of your social security, all of your login codes for your email, credit card information, the dossier they build about you, the only way you can fight it is with a more powerful AI generated in America to defend us. AI beats their AI, but right now they’re winning.

Here’s big news, Kimi K3 is now number one in the front-end code arena with 1679 points, surpassing Claude Fable 5. So, look, all this is, it shows the arena here. Number one AI in the world is this Kimmy K3. This is the Chinese one. Next one down, Claude Fable 5. These are like owned by Microsoft, Google, you know, Chat GTP and all those. Here’s Chat GTP 5.6, GLM, Claude Opus, and then here’s Grok owned by Elon Musk down here. Number six, in the amount of compute they can actually do. And I’ve used most of these programs. I do a ton of AI I work. It’s how I was able to beat the internet on all the Mitch McConnell stuff.

Now, I’m just going to show you one more time. This is the I have the link in the description if you guys want to do your own research on these documents that were released. You’re going to go here to the whitehouse.gov. There’ll be a link down there. And like you go down here to this is vulnerabilities in electronic voting and ballot counting systems. And you can go down here and you can download these files in a zipped-up folder. And you can look at the PDFs that were released by Trump yourself. Let’s keep going.

Here’s Liz Harrington. According to the CIA in 2020, Venezuela created virtual machines to replicate legitimate voting machine results, then substitute manipulated data while making votes appear to originate from legitimate machines. This sounds exactly like what happened in Fulton County in 2020. So, now do you see how manipulating data can affect our elections? And it’s too bad we didn’t have better AI. Here’s a guy who actually sits on the board of of AI and making the case why our elections have to be secured by better technology. Watch this.

” I don’t think the president left any gray area or area for interpretation. This was about getting the save act passed. It was the last thing he said. But let me just address some of what you said, Brian. It is a different era now than it was in 18 or in 20. This is massively different. I sit on the advisory board of two quantum cybersecurity companies and know something about this. AI and the threat of hacking using modern AI technology has made all of our systems, both public and private, more vulnerable than they have ever been. We know, it’s been proven both by our own intelligence agencies as well as the private sector, that China has been data farming, harvesting data, both public and private, from the United States, from US citizens. Data they cannot even access yet until their cyber techniques enable them to do so. It is a different threat today than it was in 2020, in 2018, and that’s part of why the president was so forward-looking. We didn’t hear the moaning and complaining and kvetching, if you will, to use a very New York term, about what happened in the past. This was raising alarms about what could happen in the future. The threat is different. The threat is very real.

Doug in Exile: Well, and a big way around this really would be voter ID. On paper really would resolve a lot of this. But wait, there’s more. Remember the Democrat Party is trying to convince you the opposite of what this guy just said. They’re trying to convince you that your elections are secure because they want them to be insecure. This is Chris Krebs from 2020. He said former United States Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, he said the 2020 election was the most secure in American history. There was no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised. We now know, through this evidence, that’s a lie. Here’s John Solomon on the big breakthrough. He was the big one who really figured this out, that on our presidential daily briefs, Trump, all the information about China was hidden from Trump.

John Solomon: Well, listen, I talked to the intelligence chiefs in the last few days as we got prepared for this. It’s very important to understand, the president said this tonight, every intelligence chief vetted this speech. They made sure it was accurate. They told me they had never had been briefed on the size of the breaches, the 230 million Americans, the 220 million Americans whose data was stolen, that they considered a security breach. How many times have you on your network ever reported that five countries are capable of hacking our election machines? When is the last time you reported that Venezuela actually succeeded in breaching a machine which has implications for our future security? You haven’t because it was never made public. It has not been made to Congress, has not been told to the president in the past. We checked the presidential daily briefs. Our president was kept from this information. Now we have a chance to fix a glass chin of election security, make the ’26 election more secure.

Doug in Exile: Yeah, this is future-minded stuff, gang. Now here’s Secretary Mark Wayne Mullen talking about what he’s going to do.

Mark Wayne Mullen: I’ll be giving remarks on DHS’s efforts to support election security in the Indian Treaty Room at the EEOB at 11:00 Eastern time today. And then finally, we’re going to wrap up with Catherine Herridge who started this whole show. Big picture, China and the Communist Party collects massive amounts of data buying, stealing, or hacking to exploit vulnerabilities. President Trump said tonight the CCP’s operations obtained 220 million voter records. This is a security breach. This can be used for fraudulent voter registration, identity theft, targeting US citizens for recruitment by China.

Doug in Exile: Now you guys know the AI tech angle that no one else, no other channel is covering, so I hope you’ll reward us with a subscribe to get more of this kind of need-to-know information. If you want to know more about this information, then make sure that you check out this video on the unexpected twist that Mark Wayne Mullen reveals about the media working with China.

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Promethian Action’s Section on Data Centers.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT I tried to get the speakers correct but I did not have time to go back and check on either of these videos.

PLEASE READ! I think this is the best discussion of AI that I have seen.

88:00

Adam: Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Barbara. And thank you, Susan Hogan, for joining us every week. I’m sure you’re getting our newsletter already. Thank you. , I’m jumping around in the super chats here. I want to take this one on data centers and flock cameras because this is coming up. So, thank you Eevee Funk. And I’m going to take this one here from number eight from our email newsletters. So, Eevee says, “Data Center Trump’s post, people not happy. very unpopular with both sides here in the here in Georgia. Georgia power [is] using eminent domain, seizing land, increasing costs, sucking up all the power, water, environment, and noise. Can you all provide some clarity?

And I’m going to pull this one from Streamyard … Ann says, “Americans do not want the data centers or flock cameras. Why does Trump not do anything to protect our freedom to move about the country without surveillance? This looks bad for him and all these tech companies and other billionaires belong to the group that means to control our country and our world. People are losing hope in Trump.”

Well, not everyone. “He needs to stand up and make this right and get rid of the surveillance data centers and tracking cameras are every move. And don’t let big tech control our country.” Thank you for your questions and concern and thank you Eevee Funk. Barbara and Susan your thoughts on this very popular issue at the moment.

Barbara Boyd: Well flock cameras will be litigated in court. I’m sure that’s what’s going to happen. Because to the extent that you have criminal cases based on the ability to see someone going somewhere to do something bad most certainly the lawyers for that criminal are going to be raising that on fourth amendment grounds. These are local decisions. And the police power in our country except for federal crimes actually exists with the state and that’s something people don’t take into account.

They assume the president can just do something on a national basis and overrule a state’s decision in the area of criminal justice or something else. That’s not so easy to do. We gave the states a whole lot of power for these particular situations. The same thing is true in terms of the architecture, I’ll put it, of the data centers. How eminent domain functions. How your electric bills are charged. The regulatory aspect of that primarily rests with the states. I live in the data center capital of the world uh Virginia, you can’t go an inch here without seeing a data center. Something that used to be pure country, 5 years ago is now data center, data center, data center, data center.

There’s a couple of myths out there. One is they’re not using a whole lot of water. Two, the way that Trump is talking about it, he wants them to actually be built, with their own power sources, i.e. They’ve got to set up their own electrical plant to get the permitting for this on a large basis, not on a state basis, but on a federal basis. Whether he can override what a state is deciding in terms of how they’re going to do this around the enforcement of eminent domain and other things, that’s again a legal question which he’s going to have to look pretty hard at. But his idea of doing this is to have the data centers actually build their own electrical inputs and take it off the grid because he says if we do this on a national basis, the grid isn’t even capable of handling it. That’s the result of of complete lack of infrastructure which has gone on for years and years and years. [Thanks to the Global Warming Psy Op. meant to hamstring the USA. – GC] So I understand that this is a big issue.

I think the key issue, the most critical issue which I think the president is fixated on is how is this going to all impact jobs? You know, what is the shift going to be in terms of jobs? Obviously, people who went to school and were told to learn to code as their future are probably going to be driven out of jobs in what was called by Obama the knowledge economy. That was the whole paradigm which we had during the Obama administration. People were laid off in manufacturing. We killed everything sent everything that was building something overseas to be built. And essentially what’s now happening is all the people who are were engaged in writing software or engaged in other [parts of] the knowledge economy so-called are being directly challenged by AI, because AI can in some respects do that a little bit better in that particular area of the economy.

So the question then becomes what are the jobs of the future? And that’s really depends on how we’re envisioning the future economy. And I look at all of this stuff as basically a kind of a way of generating fear in the population so that they get blinded to the real problem which is how does this actually impact the workforce of the future and what should my kid be doing now to assure that he makes a living. That’s the real challenge of the transition we’re going through. It’s a huge transition. People compare it to the industrial revolution. Those of us who are optimists also look at that and see that each of these major economic revolutions actually end up creating more jobs and more creativity if we actually navigate it the right way. So that’s how I’d answer this relatively complex field between state power under the constitution and federal power and how these things are actually going on right now.

Susan Kokinda: Yeah. Let me address another aspect of this because there’s an implicit assumption well it’s explicit I think in in the other question that we had, [That] data center equals surveillance state therefore all data centers mean we’re going to fascism. Well honestly to me that’s like saying this is a gun you can use it to shoot your wife therefore all guns will be used to shoot your wife. it’s just not the way that it works. Data centers [like] any technology can be used for good or ill.

The question is what what is the direction of your country? What is the intention of your president? You know, and the idea that because Donald Trump thinks that we need to have data centers so that we don’t fall behind China, which is a very real issue, means that he supports a complete surveillance state right out of 1984. It is just a it’s just a lazy argument.

I mean, people really have to sort of take a beat and put themselves in the real world because what the essence of psychological warfare again is in this sort of one-dimensional world where this equals that, therefore, if you’re for this, you are that, and your hair catches on fire. Rather than what is the world we’re actually living in? We’re living in a world where artificial intelligence is not going to be put back in the genie bottle. And as this president and JD Vance and many other people have made very clear, imagine a world in which China is way ahead of us in artificial intelligence. Think of that in terms of our defense. Think of that in terms of cyber attacks on our economy. Think of that in terms of the more positive side, you know, which is your ability to produce more, which you can if used properly. [If] you use artificial intelligence for advanced machine tooling, you still have a trained machine toolist who has to know how to use that. And by the way, those trained machine toolists make a quarter of a million dollars, right? Using AI to be more productive, to have greater dominion over nature. Now, is there a layer of the population of the people in that business who probably have a very different idea in terms of what to use AI for in terms of the surveillance state? Of course, there is. But, you know, and someone in the in the chat said, “Well, why doesn’t Trump express his concerns on this?” He has. [laughter] You’re just not, paying attention to what he’s saying. you’re paying attention to the explosion on the internet.

He’s made clear you can’t have data centers if they’re going to suck off local power. He’s made clear there are dangers and challenges in terms of AI, which is why he’s got whole sections of his administration working on this to make sure that there are the proper guard rails where it can actually be used in a way that benefits the country as opposed to not. Now, in terms of data centers, and again, these are direct local decisions. No, I don’t think it makes any sense to put one in some suburban area’s backyard, like here in Michigan, we have lots of brownfield sites, old industrial sites, which probably cost a little bit to clean up, which is maybe why some of your AI companies don’t want to do that. But, you could put through zoning kinds of things. you’re going to build one of these things, you got to provide your own power and you build it in a brownfield site, not in some suburban backyard or completely destroying the entire rural area of a county. But those discussions, to the extent that the federal government is involved in those discussions, they’re taking place to the extent that the state governments are in charge. [So] you better pay attention to your midterm elections and make sure that you have serious people who are getting elected to your legislatures your governor’s offices and so on so that they can make serious decisions not we’re banning all data centers forever and ever, in which case we’re all going to be speaking Chinese probably in a generation.

But how do we actually manage this important new technology in a way that does not hurt your population but still benefits the needs of the nation?

100:05 Adam: Thank you Barbara. Thank you Susan. . I have a few things to say on this because I am a computer native person. I think first off everyone says people don’t want data centers. Well, you know, people’s habits don’t really support that idea at all. The fact is that people are just spending more and more time on these devices.

There’s your data center.

Anything connected to the internet means data center. And we’re only increasing the amount of internet connected devices we have in the world. And that means we simply need more data centers. I’m always talk about Boston Dynamics, but I want to bring up Boston Dynamics again because again, first off, it’s an American company that’s 100% American ingenuity, but also they have really cool tech demos, probably the best robotic tech overall in the world right now. I know there are other players doing different things but let me just play this because all the data center infrastructure is also going to be supporting this which is literally robotics, and is about to be hitting society like a huge wave. Let me just play this one here for the spot robot.

[GO TO AROUND 101:00 for some really cool robot videos… I WANT ONE! -GC]

Don’t. All right. And one more really short clip here. [snorts] >> [applause] >> I mean, look at that first one. Isn’t that better than some poor Amazon or UPS driver having to sweat their balls off? [laughter] You know, it was 117 degrees real feel here yesterday in Michigan and there’s poor people out there delivering crap to people’s doors.

Yeah, you see the people just throwing boxes or Amazon packages across the thing. [laughter] Um, so thank you uh Ebie, thank you very much for sending

Liberty Bell says and I’m with her. It would nice to have a robot that cleans windows and scrub floors. Amen, [laughter]

Guys. That’s coming soon. So right now the work is being done on the dexterity of the hands. I could pull up other tech demos. So you have these companies that like have done all the tendons like the the arm works like on a tendon system like your fingers and the dexterity of these things are wild. So yeah, this is all coming very soon and it all has to be powered by data centers….

This Rejoice & Praise God Sunday Open Thread, with full respect to those who worship God on the Sabbath, is a place to reaffirm our worship of our Creator, our Father, our King Eternal.

It’s also a place to read, post, and discuss news that is worth knowing and sharing. Please post links to any news stories that you use as sources or quote from.

In the QTree, we’re a friendly and civil lot. We encourage free speech and the open exchange and civil discussion of different ideas. Topics aren’t constrained, and sound logic is highly encouraged, all built on a solid foundation of truth and established facts, and not by agenda-driven accusations and pronouncements.

We have a policy of mutual respect, shown by civility. Civility encourages discussions, promotes objectivity and rational thought in discourse, and camaraderie in the participants – characteristics we strive toward in our Q Tree community.

Please show respect and consideration for our fellow QTreepers. Before hitting the “post” button, please proofread your post and make sure your opinion addresses the issue only, and does not confront or denigrate the poster. Keep to the topic – avoid “you” and “your”. Here in The Q Tree, personal attacks, name-calling, ridicule, insults, baiting, and other conduct for which a penalty flag would be thrown are VERBOTEN.

In The Q Tree, we’re compatriots, sitting around the campfire, roasting hot dogs, making s’mores, and discussing, agreeing, and disagreeing about whatever interests us. This board will remain a home for those who seek respectful conversations.

Please also consider the Guidelines for posting and discussion printed here: 
https://www.theqtree.com/2019/01/01/dear-maga-open-topic-20190101/

On this day and every day –

God is in Control
. . . and His Grace is Sufficient, so . . .
Keep Looking Up

Hopefully, every Sunday, we can find something here that will build us up a little . . . give us a smile . . . and add some joy or peace, very much needed in all our lives.

“This day is holy to the Lord your God;
do not mourn nor weep.” . . .
“Go your way, eat the fat, drink the sweet,
and send portions to those for whom nothing is prepared;
for this day is holy to our Lord.
Do not sorrow,
for the joy of the Lord is your strength.”

Que Sera, Sera?

Determinism: The view that every event has a cause and that everything in the universe is absolutely dependent on and governed by causal laws. Determinism is related to fatalism, since determinists believe that all events, including human actions, are caused by something else. Determinism is typically thought to be incompatible with free will.

Fatalism: The belief that “what will be will be,” since all past, present, and future events have already been predetermined by God or another all-powerful force, such as “Fate.” In religion, fatalism may sometimes be confused with predestination, the doctrine that God chooses those who go to heaven before they are even born. It’s important to note that the Bible teaches predestination but not to the exclusion of free will; thus, the Bible does not teach fatalism.

Free will: The freedom of choice or self-determination that human beings possess; those who believe in free will believe that, given any situation, a person could have done other than what he did. Philosophers have argued that free will is incompatible with determinism and fatalism.

Indeterminism: The view that there are events that do not have any cause; many proponents of free will believe that acts of choice are independent of any physiological or psychological cause.

Theological fatalism or theological determinism is an attempt to demonstrate a logical contradiction between an omniscient God and free will, where free will is defined as the ability to choose between alternatives. In this it is similar in purpose to the conundrum “Can an omnipotent God make a rock too heavy for Him to lift?”

Theological fatalism’s premises are stated as follows: God is omniscient. Since God is omniscient, God has infallible foreknowledge. If God has infallible foreknowledge that tomorrow you will engage in an event (mow the lawn), then you must invariably engage in that event (mowing the lawn).

Therefore, according to theological fatalism, free will is not possible, since you have no alternative except to participate in the event (mow the lawn). If you do not mow the lawn, then God is not omniscient. But if you mow the lawn, then you don’t have free will, on account of your inability to choose an alternative.

Here is an opposing argument to theological fatalism: God is omniscient. Since God is omniscient, He is also infallible. If God has infallible foreknowledge that tomorrow you will mow the lawn, then you will freely choose to do so, not out of obligation or lack of choice. You still have free will to mow the lawn or not mow it; God merely knows your choice before you make it. You are not obliged to mow the lawn tomorrow any more than you are to play tennis or bake a cake. If you were going to change your mind, God would have seen that also, so you still have free will in all matters. Also, you will still make the same choices (exercising your free will), even if God chose not to see the future. God’s passive foreknowledge of the future does not alter your free will.

There is a vast difference between fatalism, chance (or fortune), and predestination.

Fatalism teaches that there is a blind, impersonal force over which no one has control—not even God—and that events are swept along by this blind, purposeless power.

Chance (or fortune) is a capricious force that supposedly causes things to happen “luckily,” without any control or direction by God. In a world ruled by chance, God can foresee what will happen, but that is all. Everything depends on mere luck. And if the advocate of chance is asked why or how things come to pass, he has no reply except to shrug and say, “It just happened.”

Predestination, the doctrine of the Bible, says that God has a purpose and He is working all things out according to His own will and purpose (Ephesians 1:11; Daniel 4:35; Isaiah 14:24; 46:10). Predestination teaches that God neither does nor permits anything except what serves His purpose (Psalm 33:11). This means that GOD IS the SOVEREIGN of the world, the One who does all things as He wills.

Those who blindly believe que sera, sera, or “whatever will be, will be,” are as wrong as the advocates of chance. It is true that events are certain, but only so because of the sovereign God who fulfills His own decrees.

Serious students of the Bible do not believe that things “just happen.” Christians reject fatalism and godless determinism. Rather, they understand that a wise, holy, good, and sovereign God has control of every detail of life (Matthew 10:29–30). The man who does not really want God to have this control or who despises the truth of God’s sovereignty does not love God and does not want God in his life. But God is sovereign, and He cannot deny Himself.
xhttps://www.gotquestions.org/fatalism.html

From Chuck Swindoll –

Predestination. Just the word appears intimidating. It is perhaps one of the most difficult concepts in all of Christian doctrine because it appears on the surface to rob humans of their most precious treasure: their autonomy.

Although the doctrine challenges our notions of self- determination, it is ultimately what separates Christians from humanists, who proclaim that the fate of the world is ours to decide. The past, they say, has been fired in the kiln of history and cannot be altered, but tomorrow is still soft and pliable clay, ready to be shaped by the hands of humanity. Individually and collectively, we—not an almighty figment of wishful thinking—will determine our own future. Put in today’s terms, “It’s all about us.”

God’s Word teaches exactly the opposite. God not only created humanity and directed our past, He has already shaped our future. “Our God is in the heavens; He does whatever He pleases” (Ps. 115:3).

Coming to terms with the doctrine of predestination requires a dramatic shift in our perspective. We emerge from the womb and progress through childhood viewing the universe with ourselves at the center. Then something wondrous happens at some point in the process of maturing—for most healthy adults, anyway. We suddenly realize that the world extends beyond the circle of our own horizon and that others see the same world from a different viewpoint. Soon, the universe no longer revolves around us, and we accept that our little circle is but a very small part of a much greater reality.

The same is true of salvation! We faithfully share God’s “plan of salvation” with individuals—as we should—but we too often fail to appreciate that Christianity is not “all about us”; it’s about Him. If we are to proclaim the complete gospel of Jesus Christ, we must recognize and embrace God’s masterplan of salvation. The almighty Creator is fulfilling His own agenda for His universe, which cannot be altered; therefore, those who have heard and accepted the plan of salvation have become a part of something much greater than themselves, even if they don’t realize it.

Take a few moments now and reread Romans 8:28-39 in light of God’s master plan of salvation. We tend to claim the promises of those verses as individuals. God does indeed love us personally and individually, but note that Paul used the first-person plural, “we” and “us,” throughout the passage. This does not promise that God will alter the universe to ensure the highest good of each individual. On the contrary, God’s “plan of salvation” is a mighty river of destiny into which a believer plunges. This river of righteousness will eventually flood the world, washing away the old order to make room for the new. And when Jesus returns to set all things right, our belief in Him allows us to become a part of that new order.

Make no mistake: Paul’s letter to the Romans is not about our salvation. His primary subject is the righteousness of God, of which our salvation is a part. The Lord is pursuing His own agenda, remember. It is to remove death from the throne of creation and give it to His Son so that the righteousness of God will rule all things. And He will do this whether anyone decides to join Him or not.

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers and sisters. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified. Romans 8:28-30