The Invisible and Expendable Grey-Hairs

For a long time, I have colored my hair because I wanted to look professional every day. But that changed a year ago when MS knocked at my door and the fourth neurologist consulted said that it is better not to add any more chemicals to my skin. Was that good advice? If you consider all the toxic MS drugs that can cause so much more harm than a hair dye on the scalp, the hair coloring interdiction was a bit over the top.

It took about five months for my natural hair color to express itself, free from previous years of dyeing it, and, would not you know, it is snow white in the front and salt and pepper in the back, my least favorite colors.

Suddenly, I became invisible and expendable everywhere. A lone gentleman would open a door for me instead of slamming it in my face or stepping on my toes. And on Mother’s Day a rose was offered “for grandma.” I happen to be a proud grandma, but there is no sign that I am one other than my grey hair.

I became the invisible and expendable white-haired senior on top of having to adjust to my new disabled state when walking short distances and balance are precious commodities. Was it easy to adjust to this unwanted and category?

In America, unlike other cultures who respect, praise, and care for their elders, senectitude is considered bad and the old, in most families, are thrown into nursing homes, never to be seen or heard from as long as the hefty bills are paid up.

Living in northern Virginia (NOVA) with a physical handicap and being old and grey-haired adds another layer of problems.

There are classes of bureaucrats and of foreigners from various countries, here legally and illegally, who follow their traditions from the culture they left behind where well-paid employment and generous welfare were not available.

The foreign workers treat their own elders with respect, but they abuse American seniors because they are the people they dislike. I have watched them over eight years, several times a week, abuse sick and elderly American patients in nursing homes.

Shopping in northern Virginia brings more evidence of foreign employees ignoring elderly Americans who often dislike shopping online. The associates are mostly foreign and help their own in whatever language they speak and ignore Americans waiting patiently in line.

Restaurant service in NOVA also ignores seniors waiting to be seated and gives preference to groups who do not speak English and are chatting in their native tongue.

Grocery shopping in NOVA has been a better experience since I have used Wegmans exclusively for eighteen years. They pride themselves with their “impeccable” service. Wegman is a private company with 110 stores in the northeast and $3-4 billion in revenue. They own buildings and parking areas.

Crime has been low at Wegmans except for the occasional grocery thief arrested by police or the bumper scrapes in the parking lot. But all went awry yesterday with my simple mistake.

I went inside for a 30-minute shopping with my grocery list in hand. I paid for my two bags of groceries and my two gallons of tea and left; except my car was no longer where I left it, a black SUV without a handicap sticker was parked in the spot.

Thinking that I did not remember well where I parked, I scanned all the possible places; it donned on me that I forgot to hang the handicap sticker, I left it behind the visor. Surely, they did not tow my SUV, I thought.

I went inside and talked to the assistant manager and the asset protection guy who had a bank of computer screens attached to the numerous cameras in the store and in the parking lot and asked them if they had my SUV towed. The answer was no, they did not, the towing company just randomly drives around all day to catch people like me.

I did not believe that, when gas is $4.50/gallon, a towing company would waste gas driving around. The store had called the tow truck and because their location was only 1.8 miles from the store, he was able to tow my vehicle in record time.

It was 96 degrees Fahrenheit, the hottest day so far, with a heat index, and here I was in the infernal heat and humidity, a grey-haired senior with MS, waiting for an Uber to arrive so I can retrieve my SUV.

After paying the towing company $210, and the Uber driver for the $13 ride (1.8 miles), I got my SUV and showed the tow truck driver my handicap placard behind the visor.

In my seventh decade on this earth, I got another lesson in being old and grey-haired. No matter how many times one shops weekly in the same store, the elderly are invisible and we get fully punished for being forgetful.

I asked the assistant manager at Wegmans why they did not make a PSA like, ‘the driver of such and such vehicle, your SUV is being towed.’  Crickets.

Wegmans made so many PSAs ad nauseam during Covid – ‘stand in line, wear your mask, enter and exit the right door, stay 3-6 feet apart, follow the designated yellow line on each row,’ etc.

I returned the groceries; the asset protection guy felt sorry for me and offered water, and then both employees disappeared to their office. I will never shop again at Wegmans because their touted service failed miserably to protect old and disabled people like me.

Iran War and the Energy Crisis

I pumped gas today for $4.49 a gallon at my local gas station. Before the war with Iran and the subsequent closing of the Strait of Hormuz, I bought gas for $2.67 per gallon, a dramatic difference in two months’ time. It is hard to imagine that nobody thought of the global energy crisis and the price escalation of everything that would ensue shortly after the attack on Iran on February 28, 2026.

The Strait of Hormuz is bordered by Iran and Oman who have international control over their territorial waters. Approximately 20 percent of the world’s oil and LNG passes through Hormuz.

The Strait of Hormuz is legally an international waterway, but Iran has taken control of it, regulating access, directing shipping routes, and imposing tolls to friendly nations who are allowed passage.

The rest of the ships experience shipping delays, the threat of explosions from anti-ship mines, missiles, and drones, and increased insurance, resulting in soaring global energy prices.

Iran restricted access in the international waters of the Strait of Hormuz for U.S., Israeli, and their allied ships. China, India, Malaysia, Pakistan, Russia, and Iraq have negotiated safe passage on routes near Larak Island.

It does not matter that the U.S. has a large navy, its large ships are vulnerable to more than 100,000 Iranian drones.

The burning of fossil fuels, petroleum (38%), natural gas (36%), and coal (9%) provided 83 percent of U.S. energy production in 2023. According to statistics, net electricity generation in 2025 amounted to around 4,430 terawatt hours. Natural gas was the most common fuel for electricity generation. Combined with coal burning, fossil fuels accounted for 76 percent of all power generation in the U.S. U.S. fossil fuel consumption 2025| Statista

Despite billions of dollars invested in and, at times wasted on various green enterprises that eventually went bankrupt, it was painfully evident that renewable energy never provided enough energy for the needs of such a large economy like the U.S.

In addition to the price of gasoline going up significantly, the price of electricity spiked, making everything produced or serviced much more expensive. “Cheap energy is the key to civilization.”

Calls for more fossil fuel energy production are coming from many of the former proponents of global warming who claimed previously that the “evil” fossil fuels were destroying the planet and thus had to be replaced at all costs with renewable energy, solar and wind.

Why the sudden change? Why the calls for massive expansion of exploration and burning fossil fuels, oil, gas, and coal? What changed? Isn’t CO2 destroying the planet anymore? What happened to the much-touted climate change industry? Did it die as quickly as it started? Is CO2 spewed from burning fossil fuels no longer a threat to the planet?

Enter AI and data centers that need a lot of water and electricity. Influencers, the media, and the moneyed class are trumpeting AI as the future of humanity. Nobody is quite clear about the thousands of jobs it will create. Could those jobs be like green jobs that never materialized with green energy?

The problem with AI is that, to perform well, it needs data centers, thousands of them and then some. It also needs water and land.

Which brings us to the latest fight against data centers in Utah where the proposed Stratos Project in Box Elder County, financed by Shark Tank star Kevin O’Leary, would cover 40,000 acres in Hansel valley, 2.5 times the size of Manhattan, using 9 gigawatts of power, more than double Utah’s current electricity use. The project is overseen by Utah’s Military Installation Development Authority (MIDA). The project is framed as an economic and national security necessity. Tax revenue and thousands of jobs are being promised. Commissioners OK controversial data center proposal for Box Elder County in northern Utah - East Idaho News

Tucker Carlson interviewed O’Leary recently and asked him poignant questions about AI and its huge need for data centers, electricity, and water.

O’Leary’s argument for more data centers was that “if we don’t do it, the Chinese will,” and we will be vulnerable in an asymmetric future war.

Liberty Utilities, which served 49,000 Lake Tahoe residents on the California side, told customers that they must secure a new primary power source by May 2027 because “NV Energy will end its long-standing wholesale electricity supply agreement.” Why would that happen? Because electricity demand from large-scale data centers has skyrocketed. Liberty Utilities generates 25% of its power from its solar facilities in Nevada, and 75% from NV Energy. Nearly 50K Lake Tahoe Residents Have to Find New Power Source - Energy  News Beat

Political pundits opine that the sudden increase in data centers, which require a lot of electricity and water, is the race for AI. Nobody wants U.S. to be behind China. But China already has less data centers than U.S. and has total control over its population with the social score. The oft-repeated question is, what exactly is AI producing?

What would happen to humans and their work if they were suddenly replaced by AI robots? Would that be healthy? Would AI robots become sentient beings and become our judges, jailers, and executioners? Could AI trigger a war and other disasters by malfunctioning or on purpose?

Old Age is Not for the Faint of Heart

If you ask people on the street, when do they consider a person to be old, the answers will be as varied as the people asked. Nobody knows exactly what makes a person old because they use different variables for their definitions. Some quote the life expectancy for men and women in their country, but the numbers are quite different as well. What exactly is life expectancy?

Isidore of Seville wrote in the seventh century that “there are six stages in a lifetime: infancy, childhood, adolescence, youth, maturity, and old age.” He defined old age as beginning at 70.

In the thirteenth century, Phillipe de Novare wrote The Four Ages of Men, in which he chose old age as sixty. He subdivided old age into two stages, senectus (Latin for old), elderly but still active, and senium (senile), a stage in which the mental and physical abilities waned to a level akin to dementia.

In our society, old people are spoken of as seniors. Seniors can be someone fifty-five plus, 60, or 65, depending on who makes the decision to put people into categories. And then, there is the unkind definition of old people as “units,’ enshrined into the Affordable Care Act.

If you are sixty-five or older, you are in the eighteen percent population group in America today. People live longer due to better medical care, better food, better housing, vitamins, medicines, vaccines, better education, more schooling, and overall information which humans across the centuries have lacked. Some live longer thanks to genetics and having children with a person who also has a healthier genetic code. Other groups interbreed which causes their heirs to have severe health issues which shortens their lifespan with or without proper medical care.

Most people believe that life expectancy before modern medicine was quite low for everybody, yet there are records of many people who lived to a ripe old age.

It is true that a lot of women died giving birth and many children did not live past a certain age due to unsanitary conditions, lack of proper nutrition, healthy food, water, and good shelters. Thirty to fifty percent of all births ended in the death of the newborn. Mothers and their newborn often died during birth or shortly after. If babies survived infancy and turned seven, their odds of survival increased considerably.

Men tended to go to wars either to make a living for their families or because they were indentured by their lords. Elite men tended to die in battle or from battle related injuries. Life expectancy was hard to calculate, and it depended on variables such as the person’s age, gender, and socio-economic status.

The richer the person, the longer their lifespans. They had better living conditions, better housing, better food, and a varied diet. However, if they married within the family, their children had serious health problems.

Looking at tax records, Lucie Laumonier, discovered that 885 inhabitants of medieval Florence were ninety and older. She wrote that in 1425 Florence, 20 percent of the population was sixty or older and, “in the Tuscan countryside, the percentage of elderly people would have been even higher, around 24 percent of the population.”

Elderly people were asked at times to remember how certain things were organized in the past in the area in which they lived. In 1330s a 70-year-old woman was asked to remember how the Montpelier herb market was organized in her youth.

To calculate life expectancy before our modern time, historians used archeological evidence, documents, and demographics. Wills, tax rolls, parish registers of births and deaths, and the age of those described in documents. Accounting of castles and manors described the population and the needs within. 

Skeletal remains were evaluated for tooth layers and cement layers, like tree rings. Spinal changes, hips, and joints were also analyzed for age determination at the time of death. Because they were not complete, census records gave an approximation of population and age distribution. The data was never accurate because nobility tended to have more documentation of death, wills, and general demographics than the rest of the population.

It suffices to say that life expectancy determination is a modern construct.

Invisible Force of the Grand Canyon

Two years ago, Dave and I visited the Grand Canyon, the South Rim. When the colossal chasm of rock and chaos, colored in purple, orange, pink, beige, and brown opened to my view I was overcome by a feeling of dizziness that I could not explain.

I was nowhere near the lip of the gorge, yet some invisible force was drawing me to it into this spell bounding rocky miracle and promising to slide me into the tranquility and silence of the sharp-edged gorge, pulling me with an invisible power.

While Dave, with his sandaled feet scampered below the rocks, a very dangerous move, I stayed as far away from the lip as possible. I got vertigo and could not explain why.

I learned since then that thousands of visitors experience a destabilizing force and adjustment when gazing inside the canyon for the first time. A number of them have become so dizzy that they actually toppled over the edge.

One example is a 1989 visitor from Japan, Yuri Nagata, who, when she was admonished that a German woman lost her balance and fell to her death three days earlier when she was watching the sunset, Yuri became wobbly and plunged over into the slope below, rolled several yards and then skidded over a 360-foot cliff. Yuri screamed all the way down to the horror of onlookers.

Conservatism Took A Serious Dive

Conservatism is on life support, and globalism is taking root everywhere like a rapidly propagating weed. The only thing left for globalists to do is to install digital currency across the globe while peppering urban areas with data centers for perfect control and their takeover will be complete.

The first Google search of the definition of conservatism is “commitment to traditional values and ideas with opposition to change or innovation.” A ridiculously biased definition, skewed towards the leftist belief and propaganda that conservatism is bad and thus opposed to change and innovation. Conservatives have patented many inventions and innovations across the centuries that contributed to the development of the western world and culture.

The second definition of conservatism from a Google search is that conservatism is a “political view in favor of free enterprise, private ownership, and socially traditional ideas.” The entire western world is built on free enterprise, private ownership, and the rich who advocate for socialism and communism live by and stay rich with the help of private ownership of the means of production, not the government ownership of the means of production, which is socialism, the steppingstone towards communism.

Michael Savage authored a book a decade ago in which he declared that “conservatism is dead.” He seems to have been proven correct, at least in Virginia, now run by a very leftist governor and the leftist Democrat Party.

Following the Commonwealth of Virginia referendum on April 21, 2026, in which Democrats have made a decisive and shrewd move to hijack the vote in the state of Virginia with a confusing wording, asking low information voters if they wanted to vote Yes on a gerrymandered map which would give Democrats a 10-1 advantage in future voting, thus assuring that Virginia would be an entirely blue state in perpetuity. The move is called gaslighting, ‘Blame what you are doing on your opponent!’

It was no surprise that the YES vote won and that 49 percent of Virginians who voted NO have lost most of their representation in Congress. This begs the question; how much effort have Republicans expended to inform the voters? In northern Virginia’s most populous counties the NO signs were rare, and nobody seemed to speak on behalf of reason and logic.

B.H. Obama and Hakeem Jeffries were busy, speaking all over Virginia, even in churches, in support of the YES vote and blaming the “evil Republicans” for trying to steal votes from the disenfranchised Democrats forced to bring I.D.s to vote and destroying democracy in the process. Supporters cheered.

Many voted YES in the referendum while loudly proclaiming their disdain for President Trump. It was not a logical vote based on facts; it was a vote based on the Democrats’ hate for President Trump.

The Republican side was hiding and remained silent. After they lost the referendum, the phones started ringing for donations to the RNC.As the Republican elephant is cowering more and more in the shadow of the mighty Democrat donkey, and the Democrat-controlled judicial system and the government bureaucracy are placing more rocks in the spokes of the conservative politicians' bicycles, it is more evident that President Trump will be the last duly-elected Republican President.

The massive cheating at the polls will allow the Democrat Party to install its totalitarian power around the country with the help of digital currency control and AI surveillance.

In such an environment, Republicans could eventually claim that they tried so hard, but, they are in a minority. At least, they will get a symbolic seat at the table that divides the political spoils. 

Gray, Concrete Gray, and More Depressing Gray

In 2020 I was looking to purchase a new SUV and, repeatedly, the dealers stocked only black, silver, and gray.

I attributed at the time the lack of color and choices to the reduced inventories and manufacturing shortages due to the Covid 2019 pandemic Necessary chips for cars were in short supply. It would be four years before I could buy my desired red color but not necessarily the make and model I wanted.

Perhaps car manufacturers want to move cars quicker and thus the bland choices of paint colors.

Perhaps Minimalism has blanketed the world, and we are just now noticing the trend. Maybe the many shades of gray indicate 21^st century sophistication.

Healthy subjects in a study conducted by the University of Manchester in 2010 chose yellow as the color that governed their mood. Anxious and depressed subjects participating in the study chose the color gray because it represented “a dark state of mind, a colorless and monotonous life, gloom, misery or disinterest in life.” Depressed people “tend to describe life as ‘monochromatic’ or as having ‘lost its color.’

Then I started seeing a lack of color in department stores and furniture upholstery – offerings were grey, beige, black, and greyer. The furniture, whether plastic or wood, was gray.

Accessories were gray, towels were gray, shoes and tennis shoes were gray, plates, napkins, carpets, backpacks, coolers, tapestries, plastic, and glassware were all gray. There was so much gray to give a survivor of communism a permanent headache and depression. The color gray was even declared the “color of the decade.”

It was apparent to me that corporate globalists have decided in the last few years to transform the face of our colorful society into a drab and communist-looking tapestry.

The buildings’ exterior, the depressing colors, the lack of colors and offerings in stores, the promotion of gray, ash, concrete gray, puke gray, drab gray, beige-gray, petroleum gray, black, white, and brown, became a bothersome uniformity which I recognized from my previous twenty years lived under communism.

Why would communism pick such drab, dark, dull, and uninspired colors? Because they wanted to keep the population under their control, oppressed, sad, and depressed. Everything became a soul-less gray and darker gray, light gray, medium gray, with barely lit train stations and stores as if to conceal the stains of gray misery.

After the lockdowns many public buildings, restaurants, fast food chains, and even apartment complexes and homes had undergone a similar transformation to dark gray, various shades of gray, black, brown, and beige. Maybe paint was only offered in gray and it was cheap?

Fast food buildings removed large windows and added small, prison-like windows, and the previously happy colors and signs disappeared. The choices of towels, furniture, cars, clothes, and other products have narrowed to the same basic hues of gray, black, beige, and brown. People excused this trend as minimalism. I knew it as Bauhaus utilitarian ugly.

Granted that lighter colors are less showy and easier to match more tastes, then why the previous opulence of colors and choices? Was it that the well-heeled wanted simpler and minimalist lines to show off their good taste? There is no denying that something painted in less showy colors sells much easier and quicker.

Austrian architect Adolf Loos said in his 1908 essay “Ornament and Crime” that “evolved people gravitated toward clean lines and plain surfaces,” unornamented and clutter-free.

Le Corbusier, the “father” of modern architecture, wrote that “color is suited to simple races, peasants, and savages.”  Well-to-do Americans call those who like bright colors, “Lilly Pulitzer people.” The Lilly clothing line is famous for bright hues of pink, blue, yellow, orange, and green.

The Bauhaus was a German art school which existed between 1919 and 1933. Its vision of mass production and function was adopted by all former Iron Curtain countries in Europe; they started churning out ugly concrete block apartments where the helpless populations were herded into from their former homes and farms which the Communist Party had confiscated. An occasional crumbling concrete piece looked like a loose tooth hanging from its dirty gray façade.

Walter Gropius’s (1883-1969) vision from Weimar spread into modern design, modernist architecture, graphic design, interior design, industrial design, and typography. The Bauhaus school was closed in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime who considered it “a center of communist intellectualism.”

Bauhaus spread internationally to the United States and to Tel Aviv via Jewish Bauhaus architect immigrants. According to sources, “The White City of Tel Aviv has the highest concentration of Bauhaus architecture in the world.”

As Bauhaus spread increasingly across the world, selected and pushed by globalist corporate controllers, it is no surprise that the color chosen for this decade is gray and the style is Bauhaus utilitarian.

When I visited my favorite department store which was always decorated with red, white, and green way before the Christmas season, decorations displayed a gray table with gray chairs, gray plates, black glasses, and white napkin holders. One solitaire painting of a red bush surrounded by green background was overlooking the funereal décor.

This is not just about depressing the population with ugly buildings, cars, and shades of gray, it is about the global transformation of the west into a socialist/communist society to better control the naïve population in every way. And the quickest way will be via digital currency sold as convenience.

How Useful is Gold

Gold is useful or useless, depending on who you ask. Gold serves its purpose for coinage, store of value, portability, collectors, medicine, chemistry, electronics, and on the finger of every engaged or married couple around the globe as a symbol of the circle of life and forever love.

Gold used to be a universal yardstick of coinage value in market exchanges. Gold was helpful because it did not die on the way to the market, held its relative value in any amounts, did not tarnish, and it was the gold standard around the globe since 2500 B.C., relatively speaking.

Gold stopped being the universal yardstick behind the value of every currency after 1971, when the U.S. discontinued redeeming its paper currency with gold. That is when money became valued by government fiat (Latin for ‘let it be’).

Major trading nations had a fixed, official rate of exchange (1944-1971) tied to the U.S. dollar. Each dollar could be redeemed for gold at $35 per ounce. In 1971, the Nixon administration abandoned the gold standard and, since then, currencies have floated daily in value against each other, influenced by supply and demand, and by the monetary policies of various governments in their efforts to ‘manage’ their specific currencies. Some countries pegged (linked) their currencies to the value of the U.S. dollar or used the U.S. dollar.

Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa) have agreed to trade in their own currencies and crypto currencies, via a payment called BRICS Pay.

There are countries that experience wild and rapid changes in the value of their currencies for various reasons, i.e., they cannot issue their own currencies, their economies are in turmoil, runaway inflation, deflation, defaults on loan agreements, huge balance of trade deficits, and bad economic policies that exacerbate the situation.

Gold reserves and a strong currency have always been stability goals. The value of gold has exploded to the highest level of $5,500 and recently to $4,600 per troy ounce (31.103 grams).

The spot price of gold represents the real-time market value for immediate delivery of 0.999+ pure gold. The global trading of exchanges COMEX in New York and the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) determine the price.

Price factors are supply and demand of gold, economic uncertainty, inflation rates, currency strength (especially the U.S. dollar), central bank policies, and geopolitical events such as wars.

Gold has always been a sign of wealth, a store of value, and a metal traded as gold bullion. According to Ed Conway, “Great Britain has no goldmining, no significant gold reserves, but is one of its biggest producers. That is because much of the world’s physical gold passes through London on its way somewhere else.”

How useful is gold in our modern society? Aside from store of value in the bank vaults of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, wedding bands, engagement rings with precious stones, and shiny jewelry, there are not many applications for gold.

One could say that we could live comfortably if there was no gold unearthed from mountains, a very toxic process with cyanide and mercury that hurts the environment, especially the rivers and soil.

A wedding ring required long ago one third or less of a ton of ore extracted from the earth in the traditional mining way, with a pickaxe. Experts say that today it takes 4-20 tons of rock blasted from a mountain to make one gold band.

After rocks are blasted from the side of a mountain in massive quantities, they are crushed and ground into a powder, then mixed with a cyanide solution which separates the gold from the rest of the dust. Do cyanide and mercury used in the process leech into the environment? Sometimes they do and low fines are levied.

John Maynard Keynes once called gold “a barbarous relic.”  Gold does play a small role in electronics and chemistry, about ten percent of demand.

There are so many other materials in the world besides gold, without which life would be much more difficult, but simpler as judged by minimalists, environmentalists, and conservationists - sand, salt, coal, iron, gas, fossil fuels, lithium, bauxite, and copper.