I saw in the news that they were tearing down the old Lindy Boggs Medical Center in midtown New Orleans.  I have to admit I didn’t know where this was at first.  It had been abandoned since Katrina.  I learned this was the old Mercy Hospital, where I was born.

Most people of my generation know Lindy Boggs as a member of the US House of Representatives from Louisiana.  But she only held that seat because her husband, Hale Boggs, went missing in a mysterious airplane crash in Alaska.

At the time of his disappearance, Hale Boggs was the House Majority Leader, probably the most powerful person in Washington.  He was a long time Democrat, but had shifted his views, especially on race, to line up with LBJ’s Great Society programs.

He was also notably a member of the Warren Commission, which investigated the JFK assassination.  He was said to have disagreed with its findings and made himself unpopular with J. Edgar Hoover.  He was also at odds with the president, Nixon.

Hale Boggs plane crashed in October 1972, just a few months after the Watergate Scandal broke. I still remember the news of his disappearance but I was all of 9 years old at the time. It was a big mystery and people expected the wreckage would be found in the spring after the snow in Alaska melted. But no wreckage was ever found.  And Boggs faded from the public memory, especially given the events of those years.

If it weren’t for the recent demolition of the Boggs hospital I don’t think I would have thought about Hale Boggs and his disappearance again.  You would think the strange disappearance of such a powerful man in such times would be remembered, at least by the conspiracy theory crowd, if nothing else.  But today, reading the Wiki pages, his disappearance is more suspicious than ever.  Maybe it’s time to look for that plane wreckage again.

Hale Boggs

So let me see.  Billionaires are building huge, noisy, polluting buildings in a most secretive way.  Mostly unchallenged reports are that they will be using vast amounts of water and electricity.  The owners publicly state part of the goal is to eliminate huge numbers of jobs.

The only real paying customer today seems to be government surveillance organizations.  One billionaire has already cashed out making himself the world’s first Trillionaire, before ever showing a nickel of profit or even explaining what these data centers are supposed to be used for.

I’m trying to think of one positive thing to say about the current big data center boom.  Perhaps construction jobs, but they are temporary. Unpopular?  I’m wondering why they aren’t even more unpopular.  From Wired.

How Data Centers Broke American Politics

The Baffler on the Texas mega-gas station / convenience store.

Leave It to Beaver

In Texas (where else would you expect this?). People need to stop using Amazon.

Planned Amazon data center could become the biggest climate polluter in the U.S.

There have been lots of changes at Google,  mostly as it re-orients to AI.  I have been a user of Google News for as long as I can remember and always found it adequate.  Lately, however, it seems to be harder to control, giving me stories on subjects I don’t want, and most annoyingly, clickbait.

I decided to try a self-managed newsfeed, which is really what I want.  Some reading lead me to Feedly.  You select news sources that you like and it collects the stories and groups them for you.

I was going to wait a week or so before posting, but after one day, I’m more than ready to dump Google News.

I also find I’m spending less time reading news and focusing more on things that interest me. Google (lets face it) is in the business of keeping you looking at their pages.  So I was getting lots of content that was meant to keep me engaged (I’m thinking things like celebrity gossip) that really don’t interest me.  Well, I suppose they must interest me at some level because I do click on some of these stories.  I will now be less well informed about pop culture, but I have a lot more time.

Unavailable in the US. Read it and weep.  From Electrek.

Forbidden fruit: Buick Electra gets 435 mile range and 376 hp for $25,000

A collection of articles from Boston Review.  The last one by Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Freedom Foundation (and coiner of the word “enshittification”) is a must-read.

What Was the Internet?

Epstein had a big ranch not far from here.  The state of New Mexico is investigating a large number of crimes that happened there.  Initially the federal government agreed to share its information on Epstein with the state of New Mexico to aid in prosecution.  Now they are backing out of that pledge.  Let that sink in.  Federal law enforcement is (still) blocking this investigation.  This time they aren’t just stonewalling victims and the public, but the state of New Mexico.

State of New Mexico sues Justice Department and Todd Blanche, saying they blocked its Epstein probe

From Yale University.  The interesting part:

It took nearly seven decades, after the invention of the silicon solar cell in 1954, for the world to install 1 terawatt of solar capacity, conceivably enough to power the entire United States. After passing that milestone in 2022, the world added its second terawatt in 2024 and its third in 2026, Bloomberg reports.

The World Adds a Third Terawatt of Solar Power

In spite of the photos you see on the news of household waste, the vast majority of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch seems to be from commercial fishing, mostly nets.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is not an island of trash: its plastic averages roughly 50 kilograms spread across each square kilometer, and a 2022 study found 75 to 86 percent of the large floating debris by mass came from fishing gear, not household waste