And that's where I'm running into what most Americans have to deal with these days. Companies who give you a warranty and then ignore you when you call. Case in point, the solar panel installation company that installed my solar panel system a couple of years ago.

Part of my contract was that they would be available to lift the panels off my roof when I needed to replace my roof someday. Well, that some day is here. I have the insurance adjuster all set to go, with money on the way to my bank. I have a roofing contractor ready to do the job, but no one can do anything until the solar installers can get out here to remove and reinstall the panels for the roofing company. They're stonewalling us.

I need an estimate from them to pass on to the home insurance company. I need a date and time from them in order for the roofing company to schedule their project and here we sit, waiting on these people to do their job.

I'v heard stories like this from other people through the years here in the U.S. How it's like trying to herd cats when trying to coordinate companies to work together to complete a project. Now it's my turn and it makes me want to scream sometimes.

In other news, I see that the price of a gallon of gasoline at the local Costco has gone up a dollar a gallon now. It's gotten so volatile that their usual sign with the daily gallon price is gone because they couldn't keep up with the fluctuating prices anymore.

Yesterday, I showed my wife an added charge on a store receipt for a gas surcharge and she was flabbergasted. She had never noticed anything like that before. Just another sign of the times. How many people actually check their receipts for line items like that? I can't tell you how many times I've gone through a checkout somewhere and people refuse their receipts. I always figured that they must not care how much they spend or that the store might make a mistake and over charge them. Must be nice not to have any financial cares in the world. I have always checked my receipts since forever. I have also always said that I have trust issues.

I explained to my wife that it was probably due to Trump's tariffs and the rising price of petrol and that the delivery truck companies are now passing that on to their customers, who are passing that on to their retail customers like us. This the world we now find ourselves in because we have a mad king in charge of the U.S. government.

It's gotten so bad that even the normally polite and deferential British MP's are calling Trump a gangster in their parliament now. I will save the world politics for my weekly podcast but you have to admit, this is a telling moment in world history.

I truly don't think the Americans will ever recover sufficiently from all of this, no matter what happens in the near future. Trump will have ruined the U.S. economy at a minimum, if not the global economy at his worst before anyone can curtail him.

In today's news, he has gone back to antagonising the Chinese again. Threatening a couple of their banks and ships if they do business with the Iranians. China won't stand for that and all of the economists and financial journalists I listen to are wondering what China will do in retaliation? As an old soldier, I would torpedo one of the U.S. destroyers in the gulf and watch what happens but China is too polite to do that unless they're directly attacked first. They will probably enact some trade sanctions on the U.S. that will hurt their economy even more. Then Trump will go ballistic and escalate even more until China finally does something that causes Trump to TACO again. We've seen this before so we know what to expect.

The Iranians are going to have to get creative to continue to stand up to the bullying United States. I heard in another interview this week with an Iranian professor, that the Iranian negotiators had to get creative just to find their way home from last weekends failed ceasefire talks as they were very concerned about Israeli and American assassins killing them once they left Islamabad, Pakistan.

We all know that Israel doesn't care about international law and being tried for war crimes but now, the United States is openly committing war crimes and breaking international law, along with international maritime law. The United States under Trump certainly doesn't care but the congress should. Most of the politicians will still be in office after Trump is gone and some of them could be brought up on charges at the ICC in the Hague. Especially Lindsey Graham.

We won't see anything like that for many years yet but we can hope, can't we? I mean we do have a ray of sunshine from the U.S. state of Minnesota after being so brutalised by Trump's ICE paramilitaries last winter. Their states attorney has issued a warrant for the arrest of an ICE agent for breaking state laws. Now whether they will actually be able to arrest this agent and extradite him to Minnesota to stand trial is another thing. That will be the test for Minnesota and other states to see if they can go up against the federal government and win in cases like this. I hope they get him and put him on a very public trial. Then maybe other states attorney's will find the balls to do the same in their states. I read The Existential Republican nearly every day and that is what the author, Chris Armitage advocates for constantly. For the states to exercise their sovereign rights under the U.S. constitution to protect their citizens from the federal government. I'm all for it, if we the people can manage to convince the states to stand up for themselves. A couple are starting to come around but there are no where near enough of them to thwart Trump and his Project 2025 cabal people yet.

To change the subject once again and wrap things up for tonight, I'm going to be remodelling this website again soon. I will be removing some of the picture galleries and creating something different with the pictures I am leaving. I'm also going to remove all of those digital photos from the online store as well. None of them sold and I don't think anyone really has any interest in them anyway. Once I'm finished, the only items for sale in the store will be my books and my youngest sons books of poetry. Maybe I will include some of my landscape photos in the new galleries. If so, I will watermark them just to keep people honest.

I hope things look marginally better next week when I return with more of what I'm thinking about here in the Crann na beatha blog. Sláinte