An exploration of visceral hatred

I have always thought of myself as incapable of hatred, especially towards someone I have never met.

In my 65 years on this planet, I have lived through some pretty challenging moments where my patience and my faith in people have been tested. It has led to my intense dislike of some whom I have crossed paths with, but I can say with confidence, I have never truly hated anyone. Hatred, for me, represents a failure in me to be able to find a grain of redemption in the target of that hate. A point where I can find no redeeming fragments that might allow me to step away from bestowing it upon someone. It’s an admission that not even I, as a known ‘glass half full’ guy, can find forgiveness in me towards the lightning rod for my hatred.

Donald J Trump has defeated me in my aim of never sinking to the basement of my values structure reserved for individuals beyond exceptionally vile. Believe me when I say that is some achievement for someone I have never met. Many times on X, I’ve been diagnosed by graduates of Trump Medical School as suffering from TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome). After careful consideration without the need of a second opinion, I have managed to self-diagnose that my hatred is healthy, as it provides the fuel that drives my goal to dance naked in my back garden to celebrate what I hope will be his eventual, debilitating, prolonged and painful departure.

If that makes me a bad person, then I’m a bad person. You’ll be pleased to note that the naked dancing will be a private affair with no cameras present, so you will be shielded from being scarred for life, as he is laid to rest in his golden casket, dressed in a fire-retardant suit for his brief exchange with the man he claims sent him to save the world. Good luck explaining that doozy of a lie, I’m sure he’ll say nobody has lived a better, more religious life than him, before the fiery trap door opens to his new home, where all dictators live in eternal damnation. Too much?

I know it’s difficult to drag people away from the Epstein files and all the salivating at the thought that this will be the end of Trump. Which part of Trump is irrelevant are people struggling with? The MAGA agenda is locked and loaded, and while there may be debate over whether JD Vance can carry the base, the budget bill is now law, with the focus shifting to rescissions and redirecting already appropriated funds.

A lot is happening in our peripheral vision that should be ringing alarm bells everywhere. This is the first of another three-part post series aimed at focusing on that peripheral vision. The prevalence of what I like to think of as old ‘old man thinking’ is leading America back into the economic stone age. American arrogance and exceptionalism have led the US down the wrong path, driven solely by greed. It will not have escaped your attention that Trump is leaning into AI like a drug addict craving his next fix. There has been little to no consideration of what the expansion of AI requires to remain competitive in a global market. Trump is leading a reactive administration. It is being forced to react to China’s relentless progress in this space

The US believed, in its usual arrogant way, that the way to limit Chinese progress was to restrict their access to the US Chips. Not only was this approach naive, but it was also economically shortsighted. While China is unquestionably behind the US in terms of its AI Tech Stack, the attempted choking of access to US Chips has merely spurred China on to develop its own stack. This poses a greater threat because it pits the two tech stacks against each other in the global market. This is not a point lost on Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA, who has long claimed that attempting to choke Chinese innovation is counterproductive. So counterproductive that the US has now lifted restrictions on key NVIDIA chips supplied to China.

I think it’s too little, too late, but from Huang’s perspective, it doesn’t matter, because it will boost sales of his hardware regardless of who wins the AI Tech Stack race. The administration has committed a grave act of economic self-harm by undermining Biden’s green energy agenda, opting not only to expand Trump’s preferred fossil fuel option but also to hinder green energy innovation at a time when China and the rest of the world have embraced it. It’s like he’s trying to make America Polluting Industrialists again.

AI consumes energy and water at a rate that exceeds the current capabilities of the US infrastructure. Decades of underinvestment in infrastructure projects have enabled China to power ahead, and now Trump is reversing all the progress made since 2020, preparing America for the new green energy age, which supports tech advances. Instead, he opted to invest in outdated fossil fuel solutions in pursuit of short-term profit for his friends who donated to his election campaign. Transactionalism is not a policy; it’s bribery that has been setting back America's economic potential for decades.

Is AI the industrial revolution of our age? Absolutely, it is, and now it has become a runaway train, in which the fear of coming second exposes humanity to unimaginable risk. Trump has gone all in, as would any Democratic president. It’s the pursuit of unimaginable wealth and power that is now driving the agenda. But in this horse race, America has chosen to ride a dead horse in the form of a fossil fuel energy solution, while China and the rest of the world are riding thoroughbreds.

If you don’t believe what I’m saying, watch this disturbing clip from the excellent ‘More Perfect Union’:

This is the Trump administration's solution to supporting AI, which is why they are bending over backwards to deregulate and expedite the building of data centre infrastructure. They are being forced to do this at the expense of the environment and public health, and are deliberately targeting poor communities to locate them in, which are so desperate for even crumbs from the table, they are prepared to sell their residents into bad health and short life expectancies in pursuit of profit and building the dominant AI Tech Stack. They know that wealthy and middle-class communities will adopt a ‘not in my backyard’ policy, so these data centres will spring up in towns with less resistance, and they will target poor communities, such as the one Musk targeted in Memphis.

This administration is clearing the way to do whatever it takes to win this AI Tech Stack arms race, and anyone in the way will be considered acceptable collateral damage. Let me be clear: fossil fuel is not the answer. However, because the US is so far behind in energy infrastructure investment and development, it’s the only solution available in this moment. This is because this administration lacks a genuine understanding of what is required, to the point where they have handed China the biggest geopolitical win in modern history. As Ambrose Evans-Pritchard put in an article in the Telegraph on 3rd July: ‘Trump has dropped a big, beautiful bomb on America’s economy’, he opens with:

China’s leaders must be wondering whether they are hallucinating or whether America’s political class really has lost its mind, committing economic and geopolitical self-harm on a breathtaking scale.

Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill” marks a wholesale retreat from swaths of advanced manufacturing and energy technology. It abandons a central front of the Sino-American superpower contest without a fight.

I know America has a problem with stupidity, but this is next-level economic regression. As Elon Musk described it:

“Utterly insane and destructive. The bill will cause immense strategic harm to our country,”

My friends, this is village idiot lunacy that China is celebrating all the way to global dominance. The US is literally jumping into the AI ocean wearing concrete shoes, while Mad King Don is blathering on about the Epstein Democratic hoax, pretending he has a real budget surplus and that the Fed Chair is responsible for rising inflation. The terrifying thing is, half of America believes him. Can you hear that? Shhhh, there it is, that’s the sound of my head bashing against the wall. This is the very definition of gross fiscal mismanagement. What terrifies me even more is that Democrats are no better informed.

We are on the starting line of a race to control the future of global artificial intelligence. China has turned up in a Formula One car, while Trump has turned up in a stagecoach, gold-plated, of course. In AI, energy and water are the keys to dominance.

The reporting from the Telegraph lines up with all my research and expresses it far better than I could":

The big bill is the latest in a series of Luddite measures that let China run away with the electro-tech revolution and much of the future global market for cars, trucks, short-haul aviation, home heating and cooling, smart grids, power storage and the products that deliver the cheapest energy ever known to man.

The think tank Ember says China is electrifying its economy at a rate of 10 percentage points a decade. It has already surpassed 30pc of final energy, well on its way to becoming the world’s first electro-superpower.

The Biden administration at least had the good sense to recognise that America needed to be competitive in the green energy space, which the Inflation Reduction Act sought to address. Trump’s agenda has now handicapped energy production that falls foul of the MAGA fossil fuel-centred ideology. It’s lunacy on steroids. As the reporting describes it, “It rigs the market to defend the legacy status quo”

If you examine the current state of the global market, the US has lost all credibility; it is no longer trusted and is often pitied by its once staunch allies. Trump is like some fading one-hit wonder celebrity turning up at the opening of an envelope, hoping someone will recognise him. He’s mad uncle Don, who turns up to family events on his own, using his dad's dancing skills and his out-of-tune Karaoke voice, in an attempt to steal the limelight from the host. He’s amusing for the first 30 seconds, and then everyone buys him a drink, knowing he’ll eventually fall to sleep in a corner somewhere, farting for the rest of the evening.

Never has it been more critical for the US to be at the top of its game. Instead, it’s being captained by the global village idiot committing crimes against the English language.

In part two tomorrow, we’ll examine China and the US side by side in the AI Tech Stack arms race to gain insight into how this battle will unfold.