Zeros

Five Years Down Ben Hill Road Somewhere over the rainbow, Summer Moon Utah Wells is still five years old. Five years ago this June , a little girl in a pink shirt and gray pants walked out of a house on Ben Hill Road in Hawkins County, Tennessee , and did not come back. She was five years old . Her name was Summer Moon Utah Wells , and she would be ten years old right now . She would be finishing fourth grade. She would know how to read. She would have a best friend and a favorite song and an opinion about things. She would have gone to school. I have been following this case since the day it broke — June 15, 2021 — when the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation issued an Endangered Child Alert that escalated into a statewide AMBER Alert within twelve hours. I have five years of YouTube history to document it. This case is, frankly, the reason I started watching True Crime content at all. And I say that not to center myself in a child's tragedy, but to explain what dra...

The AI Economy's New Consumer Class (IN MY OPINION) For years, people have debated what happens when artificial intelligence starts replacing jobs. Not all jobs, of course . There will always be plumbers, mechanics, electricians, artists, consultants, and countless professionals whose experience, reputation, and human touch still matter. Free market capitalism isn't disappearing . If anything, it may become even more vibrant. But something else may emerge alongside it: a new consumer class. Imagine millions of people whose traditional employment opportunities have been reduced by AI automation. Customer service, data entry, scheduling, basic accounting, content moderation, and many other routine tasks are increasingly being handled by software. That's not science fiction anymore. It's already happening. The question isn't whether AI will replace some jobs. The question is how society adapts. One possibility is a compensation system built around digita...

The Lizard Got Here First Both climbed through our windows looking for crumbs. One got a velvet cushion. The other got a broom! Here is something worth thinking about on a warm afternoon when you have nowhere particular to be: Cats and lizards are, in the broad sweep of natural history, doing basically the same job. They are both heat-seekers. They are both hunters of small things. They both figured out, somewhere along the evolutionary timeline, that human dwellings were warm, generously stocked with insects and rodents, and only intermittently guarded . They both climbed in through the window . And yet one of them is currently sleeping on a cashmere throw in an air-conditioned apartment with its own Instagram account, and the other one is a problem you call a guy about. It does make you wonder what the meeting was like. At some point in ancient history — Egypt, probably, since Egypt gets credit for most of the things that happened before anyone was writing th...

When the Grid Becomes a Target: Appalachia Rewind When communities feel steamrolled by industrial buildouts they never asked for, what happens next? And could infrastructure incidents near contested development zones be more than coincidence? West Virginia is ground zero for that tension right now. Gov. Patrick Morrisey and the West Virginia DEP have been pushing hard toward a data center buildout, backed by House Bill 2014, passed in April 2025, which prohibits counties and municipalities from enforcing or adopting regulations that limit high-impact data center projects . [ West Virginia Gazette Mail ]  In Tucker County, a Virginia company called Fundamental Data applied for an air quality permit for what it's calling the Ridgeline Facility — a natural gas power plant and data center complex proposed to be built between the tourist towns of Thomas and Davis, covering potentially 10,000 acres . [ West Virginia Watch ]  Residents there created a grassroots coal...

Back To The Future  Three stabbings on two continents, teen mobs reclaiming the streets, and a war with Iran nobody seems to have time to process. Have we been here before? If you have been watching the news this week with the vague, unsettled feeling that you fell asleep in 2001 and woke up somewhere much older, you are not imagining it. Three stabbings in three days. Teen mobs are overwhelming city centers. A military confrontation with Iran. The decade has a familiar rhythm, and not a comfortable one. Start with Texas . Today a Collin County jury convicted Karmelo Anthony , 19, of murder in the 2025 stabbing death of Austin Metcalf at a high school track meet in Frisco. Both teenagers were 17 at the time. The case drew enormous national attention — not primarily because of the stabbing itself but because of the racial dimension that social media forced onto it , fairly or not. The jury deliberated roughly three hours and sentenced Anthony to 35 years. Two families...

When the Data Center Moves In and the Water Follows Residents along University Lane in Mason County, West Virginia didn't sign up to be a cautionary tale. But that's where they landed on the weekend of May 23rd , when a construction site for the Monarch Compute Campus — a data center initiative between AI company Nscale and energy infrastructure firm Fidelis New Energy [ MSN ] — contributed to severe flooding that damaged their homes. Site manager Jason Bechtle acknowledged that the storm dropped roughly a month's worth of rain in two days, and that while the site's stormwater measures had passed inspection the prior week , a stretch of silt fence gave way under the volume of water. [ The Cool Down ] The company said it would cover cleanup and repair costs. That's something, at least . But one resident noted the damage started earlier than the flood — during tree clearing, he says workers took down 12 to 15 trees on his property . [ WCHS ]  The floo...