COLBERT: How dumb do you think it is for people to say that I should run for president?

OBAMA: Well, you know, the bar has changed. I think you would perform significantly better than some folks we've seen.

COLBERT: Is that an endorsement?

OBAMA: It was not

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) May 6, 2026 at 8:30 AM

Oh No The Capital Allocation System Allocated Capital Badly Again

Large banks including JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and SMBC are looking to offload risks linked to a glut of debt related to AI data centres, as they reach financing limits, the Financial Times reported.
...
Banks are reportedly approaching risk limits that restrict their exposure to individual borrowers or sectors, and are seeking to free up their balance sheets for further lending.

Brings back fond memories of the 1980s savings and loan crisis and the 2008 financial crisis.

Yeehaw!

Tennessee Valley lake levels low as drought continues.

"the region has only received about 69% of the rainfall it normally gets. Even worse, the runoff water, which is what fills up the reservoirs, is at just 45% of normal"

We're joining the Nashville area with low rainfall.

TVA has a website where you can select a lake to see lake levels with a chart that shows the previous year's lake levels. Fort Loudon is down almost 2 feet. That's a lot of water for a 14,000 acre lake. This not only affects usable water it also affects power generation.

Five major publishers — Hachette, Macmillan, McGraw Hill, Elsevier and Cengage — and the best-selling novelist Scott Turow have filed a class-action copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta and its founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg.

The lawsuit asserts that Meta’s engineers relied on pirated books and journal articles to train the program by downloading unlicensed copies through websites like Anna’s Archive, an open source search engine for piracy sites including LibGen and Sci-Hub. The suit also claims that “Zuckerberg himself personally authorized and actively encouraged the infringement.”
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The plaintiffs argue that Meta’s A.I. program poses a threat to the livelihoods of writers and publishers because the technology can be used to quickly produce A.I.-generated copycat books and to summarize the plot and themes of copyrighted books in such great detail that readers don’t have to buy them.

Be careful out there. Be ethical and respectful.

In the six months since a cychlorphine death in Oct. 2025 in South Knoxville, at least 50 fatal overdoses involving cychlorphine have been confirmed in the greater Knoxville area. The largely unknown compound is on track to be the third-most-common drug involved in the region’s fatal overdoses this year, after fentanyl and methamphetamine.

Over that period, Knoxville became a national hot spot for cychlorphine. But if it were not for Dr. Mileusnic’s [chief medical examiner for the greater Knoxville area] tenacity, the community would most likely not even know the drug was circulating.

Gov. Lee of Tennessee and Sen. Marsha, Marsha, Marsha want to redistrict Tennessee so there will be no Democrats elected to office.

It is being reported that what they are trying to do is against Tennessee law.

I guess they will repeal the law that does not allow them to redistrict at this time, then vote to redistrict.

Guess we Democrats have no representation.

I haven't posted here in a long time, but I wanted to share an article about my good friend Doug McDaniel who is actually the one who introduced me to Knox Views, and later Knox Blab. I'm really proud of the guy, he's out here doing the damn thing, as they say!

Here is a link from Inside of Knoxville regarding his new book! I'm going to read it soon.

(link...)

There was a shooting at a Washington DC hotel where the president was speaking. A location that should be one of the safest places on earth. The Administration decides there can be no safer place than the White House.

But, but, but... Maybe a High School gym is the safest place on earth. Huh.

"
Those then, who resist a confirmation of public order, are the true Artificers of monarchy—not that this is the intention of the generality of them. Yet it would not be difficult to lay the finger upon some of their party who may justly be suspected. When a man unprincipled in private life desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper, possessed of considerable talents, having the advantage of military habits—despotic in his ordinary demeanour—known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty—when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity—to join in the cry of danger to liberty—to take every opportunity of embarrassing the General Government & bringing it under suspicion—to flatter and fall in with all the non sense of the zealots of the day—It may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.”

Alexander Hamilton

Seven bills introduced to control data center uncontrolled usage of water, electricity, and fuel. Only one bill passed, stipulating that the owners of data centers (requiring at least 50 megawatts of power) must pay for any infrastructure upgrades needed to produce the electricity that the data center demands.

Tennessee lawmakers this year introduced seven bills aiming to set up guardrails for data centers in the state, but only one crossed the finish line.

Data centers house the computers, networking equipment and cooling systems used to manage digital data. As data centers proliferate across the nation and electricity demand rises, some states have taken steps to control the resource-intensive industry’s impact on their infrastructure.

Not Tennessee. The majority of our elected representatives don't seem to care about rising electricity costs, air pollution, or strains on water usage. Why would they? They don't care about public schools, Healthcare, or even if the less fortunate have food. Bah.

The ... administration inadvertently exposed the Social Security numbers of health care providers in a database powering a new Medicare portal, The Washington Post found.
...
a publicly accessible database used to populate the directory contains some of the providers’ Social Security numbers, linked to their names and other identifying information. For at least several weeks, CMS made the database available for public use as part of its data transparency efforts.
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The directory is part of a broader initiative that includes plans for a new national directory of health care providers, led by Amy Gleason, the acting administrator of the U.S. DOGE Service and a senior CMS official.

Inadvertently? DOGE? We were already able to do that pre-DOGE.

Chattanooga’s Moccasin Bend Environmental Campus is launching a project that will generate electricity from wastewater methane, a move expected to significantly reduce the campus’s roughly $300,000 monthly energy costs while turning a treatment byproduct into a reliable on-site energy source.
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Once fully operational at three megawatts, the installation will rank among the largest municipal biogas-to-power projects in the Southeast and represents a step toward stabilizing long-term energy costs for ratepayers while advancing Chattanooga’s broader sustainability goals.

MBEC selected Mainspring Energy to install six linear generators this year, producing an initial 1.5 megawatts of electricity using methane captured during wastewater treatment processes. Six additional generators are planned following campus upgrades, doubling total generating capacity.

1.5 megawatts could be equal to powering 300 to 1,000 homes, based on Google research.

The Mamas & the Papas 1966 hit lyrics.

In 2026, Ed Sullivan was inducted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Excessive use of limited resources. Yes that puts us in danger.

Developers plan to build six sprawling data center campuses in Archbald, Pennsylvania, covering about 14 percent of the town’s land. Residents are fighting back. A town of 7,000 planned so many data centers, it’s like adding 51 Walmarts.
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...as word began circulating last year about borough council zoning changes to allow for the development, residents rebelled and have launched one of the most contentious grassroots campaigns in local history. They are organizing on social media, overwhelming community meetings and calling for the ouster of some key local officials.

‘Hyperscale’ data center project in Utah — expected to generate and consume more power than entire state — nears final approval.
...
Still, questions remain about the broader impact. Experts emphasize that water use tied to electricity generation often overlooked can be substantial.

>em>“It’s great that we’re seeing less water use at the data center itself,” Hungerford added. “But we have to follow it upstream and ask what water use looks like in terms of power generation.”

Transparency has also been a concern. A nearby data center built in 2018 is not required to disclose its water usage, leaving gaps in public knowledge. That could change going forward.

Due to lack of substantial spring rainfall across the Cumberland River Basin, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Nashville District continues to manage seasonal low lake elevations at multiple lakes. District water managers balance recreation interests and water supply needs with hydropower and navigation requirements as the region faces ongoing drought conditions.
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"We are holding on to as much of that water as we can while still meeting our hydropower and navigation requirements,”
...

The lack of rain has resulted in spring elevations rarely seen in recent decades. Currently, several major reservoirs are below their historical mid-April medians.
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The Nashville District advises swimmers and boaters to be especially cautious when recreating at USACE reservoirs. Lower water makes boating much more hazardous in shallow areas where structures such as rocks or snags sit closer to the surface.

The Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill Thursday that “vacated and reconstituted” the membership of the Knoxville Airport Authority Board of Commissioners as the state took control of board appointments away from the local governments in Knoxville, Nashville, Memphis and Chattanooga.
...

It requires one member must be female.

Isn't that sweet? A little DEI though.

Wildfires across Georgia and Florida destroy more than 50 homes and force evacuations. Some of the biggest blazes were near Georgia's coast, while others were popping up in northern Florida, which is facing one of its worst fire seasons in decades.
...
It was not yet clear how the wildfires started, but the bottom half of Georgia is perilously dry and the conditions prompted the state's forestry commission to issue a burn ban for the first time in its history. Southeastern Georgia has seen just 11 inches of rain since the beginning of September — almost 15 inches below normal, the National Weather Service said.

The fires spread so quickly in that area that residents received no warnings or alerts.

Wasn't it the Republican president that said Californians need to sweep their forests to prevent forest fires?

The Justice Department charged the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that has long tracked hate groups, on Tuesday with financial crimes, accusing it of defrauding donors by using their money to secretly pay informants inside extremist organizations.
...
The indictment, however, offers little to support the notion that the group’s payments to informants was meant to aid the extremist groups they had infiltrated.

Whatta ya gonna do?

TVA awarded $18 million in credits to Knoxville cryptocurrency mine.

UT professor reveals TVA gave deep energy discounts to bitcoin mines

TVA basically enticed this crypto developer – Bitdeer – to Knoxville with the promise of energy discounts through credits...
...
Bitdeer is a cryptocurrency mining company. TVA was giving incentives to not just Bitdeer but a lot of cryptocurrency companies to come to the region. At one point, the then-CEO Jeff Lyash actually told me that he was meeting – I think this was in 2023 or 2024 – with about 300 cryptominers to talk about energy in the region.

...they were making energy incentives pretty attractive to the crypto miners because it's a huge revenue source

As reported previously, Melanie Faizer, a journalist and professor at the University of Tennessee, had to sue TVA to get this information.

The Emirati leaders said they have avoided the worst economic effects of the conflict but might still need a financial lifeline, the officials told the Wall Street Journal.
...
The discussions underscore UAE’s growing anxiety that the war could harm its economy and position as an international financial center, draining foreign currency reserves and triggering capital flight, according to the WSJ. Emirati officials haven’t formally requested a swap line, the Wall Street Journal said.

Something else the Administration did not consider? International financial center that needs our financial assistance? Will the funding be easily given with kick backs to the family?