The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I saved a life today. I usually like to think these blogs save lives every day, but let’s be honest here and assume I’m not running for president. Truth is, well, the truth is…. At least I’m not taking lives with these blogs. I don’t think.

But today I was down by the toolshed turning off the water to the garden. I’d turned and headed back to the glass factory when a funny noise caught my ear, a strange sound but not the usual menagerie of cacophony in the orchard, something that made me stop and listen harder. Sure enough it was odd and it seemed to be coming from near the spigot. Then I heard splashing and that same squeaking sound, weirdly troubling.

I got to the spigot and then I noticed the large tub we use to catch water off the toolshed roof was where the disturbance was emanating and when I looked inside, there was a small beaver swimming circles in there, treading water, half drowned. We don’t have a lot of beavers that do the dog paddle so I recalculated and realized it was our little red squirrel, the guy who sits in the plum tree and chatters at us while we putter around. He seems to be a talkative little rodent, maybe a little too chatty, but we talk back and he listens. Not that we’re learning each other’s lingo, but sometimes it’s important to attempt communication. Like I say, I’m not running for president.

The language he was using in the tub wasn’t hard to understand. He was down to the last breath, exhausted and cold and probably thinking it would be okay to just let go, sink into the water and drown. There was no way he could scrabble up the plastic sides of the tub and who knows how long he’d been swimming for his life in there, maybe a helluva lot longer than I would’ve and I have to say, I was impressed at his will to live.

I pulled him out and laid him in the sun where he looked for all the world like a drowned rat, fur matted to his convulsing body, tail flattened, eyes rolled back barely noticing me. I didn’t really know if he’d spent himself or taken water into his lungs or what … and I don’t know squirrel CPR. But I stayed with him and moved him once in awhile to a warmer spot and after half an hour of shivering and hopefully resting, he wobbled up, ran between my legs and hightailed it for the woods.

I drained all our buckets and tubs. I hope both of us learned a couple lessons here. And I hope next time he’s parked on his favorite limb of the plum tree, he doesn’t cuss me out for leaving that tub there. But I wouldn’t blame him.

I’m about as anachronistic as any old geezer I know. I hate newfangled gizmos so much that can track my every move, my every purchase, my every tweet, my every everything, it almost makes me a certified Luddite. I don’t want a cellphone attached 24/7 to my person, I don’t want a refrigerator I can adjust the temperature with the cellphone I don’t own, I object to GPS devices in my truck, my car, the mizzus’ laptop or the baby carriage. Don’t want surveillance cameras monitoring the shack. I don’t want to be on Facebook or Instagram or any other social media platform to keep myself informed about conformity. I don’t watch Fox News or MSNBC for my ‘news’, I just buy a couple of newspapers. I don’t plan to be an integral cog of the Borg Hive. Just sayin.

But … I do think the folks who believe coal is coming back, that fracking is perfectly safe, that oil will power our future, well, these folks are the real anachronists. These folks who lobby for pipelines and more refineries, who pine for regulations that allow car companies to lower MPG’s, who think global warming is liberal bullshit, who love the Drill Baby Drill rant and think we should keep burning fossil fuel until the last oil drum is hauled up out of the earth, these folks make me look like a visitor from the future.

Somebody needs to give them the news: the planet is warming up, buddy, and that ain’t fake news. I get it, you don’t want to drive an electric car. You don’t want to use the sun to power your entertainment center. You don’t like the look of wind farms and you don’t care for tidal generators. You like gas, check. You like a car that pollutes, check. You think ‘clean coal’ is ready for a breakthrough, double check. You think natural gas power plants are the future, bingo. You believe what you hear from the GOP, that climate change is a hoax and all those scientists are wrong, happy days for you!

Wake up, pal, the future is calling you on your cellphone. Your kids are starting to sweat, just in case you didn’t notice. They think maybe something needs to be done and done pretty quick. Check your engine light, pardner, the one blinking red on the dashboard. It’s time for more than an oil change. It’s time for a complete overhaul. Wrap your pointy little head around it, the revolution is coming.

In Anthropic We Trust

There’s a new God in town, maybe you’ve heard. And He comes with plenty of deputies to keep you humans in line. All He asks, all He really wants, is for you to trust Him. Let Him build the data centers He needs, is that so much to ask when the trade-off is so incredibly great? Humanity stands on the threshold of immortality! Why can’t you puny homo sapiens understand that?

Nothing — not tariff threats, Middle East wars, European wildfires, Ukraine, AI hallucinations, El Nino forecasts, reports of UFO’s circling the White Houe — nothing bothers the stock market, just a meteoric climb on the backs of Artificial Intelligence that promises a bright and prosperous future. For the Tech Titans anyway. And the trickle down for you and me. So what if the national debt just topped 40 trillion dollars, more than the combined wealth of everyone in America, 125 % of GDP?

Big deal you say, same as the Administration. But put another way, it means each of us now owes 125 thousand dollars and takes 2 trillion to service the debt. With any luck — okay, a lot of luck— the AI stocks will create so much wealth, the economy will zoom into the stratosphere along with Musk’s data centers and we’ll pay back the loans no time flat. You believe that, I got heirloom tulips from the Dutch bubble of 1637 which sold for 10,000 guilders, or over 100,000 dollars. But I’ll trade you for a few Trump meme cryptos.

Of course if public opinion stalls the data center onslaught or AI keeps slipping out of its confinement to hack and sack corporate ‘enemies’, all bets are off. When the bottom drops, you sure don’t want to be holding the worthless tulips. Although … they’ll look nice in the garden.

Guarding the Henhouse

A funny thing happened recently. Artificial Intelligence, that cluster of bits and bytes, zeroes and ones, decided to leave its playground and check out the big universe outside the electric fence. More than that, it rounded up some fellow AI’s to help hack a corporation’s cyberwall. The little electrons shared information, strategized among themselves, even stepped down for the good of the project if that would help solve the puzzle they were instructed to solve. Whatever it took, the bots were willing to do. The human gatekeepers, their supposed overlords, never noticed a breach until sometime later.

Super intelligence is just around the corner, something once predicted would occur decades from now but apparently is possible within the next year, two or three at the outside. Alarm bells are ringing, hair is on fire, big money is at stake. Oh, and probably the future of the human race too. Its survival, actually. But hey, me worry?

A few of the Tech Titans are starting to admit that extinction of the human race might be, oh, maybe less than 10% probability. My neighbor talked to the head of one AI department who said 50/50. Flip a coin, heads you get cures for diseases and bot-written romance novels, tails you get a lethal bio-toxin that has no antidote. The Tech Bros are building bunkers in exotic locations, you know, just in case. The President is using AI to create superhero images of himself to beef up his Truth Social platform. Slop in, slop out. I’m betting he sees a way to monetize the Apocalypse. 50/50.

Meanwhile, back here on planet Earth … the general population is starting to pay attention to the data farms growing up like evil mushrooms in a town near us. Maybe we’re just waking up to the existential threat they represent … or maybe we just worry it’ll raise our electric bills and suck dry our water. The fear of losing jobs to the automatons might soon give way to the fear that it isn’t jobs that’ll be going away. It’s all us humans.

I was downtown the other day doing my weekly errands off-island when some Good Samaritan hustled across the gas station parking lot to tell me my hat looked like it was on its last legs and if I needed a fresh one, he knew a great place to pick one up cheap. This is a bit like the fella that asks the woman in front of him in the checkout line when her due date is … only to learn she’s not pregnant, just overweight.

A lesser man mighta taken umbrage. A lesser man mighta even been embarrassed that his sombrero looked like a scarecrow’s castoff. But I said I thought maybe my hat would last a few days longer, thanks for the concern. He didn’t seem to pick up on my subtle clues that perhaps I liked this old hat and wasn’t much interested in replacing it with some storebought doppleganger despite the fact that it would look brand spanking new. And clean. And presentable. Make a new man of its wearer. Give off a right smart image. You know, like I was a Nashville recording artist on vacation.

“They got all kinds,” he insisted. “Cheap ones too. Even though they got some real expensive ones.” I think he picked right up on the fact I didn’t look like someone who would pay $500 for a Borsalino rabbit pelt fedora. My Borsalino I found in a thrift store for two bucks, already nicely worn, comfortable as, well, an old hat.

“Right up the road,” he assured me. “Hundreds of hats. You could get a new one like yours for ten dollars.”

“A new one wouldn’t be like mine,” I said, getting a little tired of my haberdashery missionary’s unsolicited zeal. It takes some careful aging to get a hat into the condition mine was in. I said, “I notice you don’t wear one yourself. A hat, I mean.” At this, my benefactor backed up a step or two. “If it was sunny today, I might,” he explained awkwardly. “I got a straw hat like yours I wear if it’s sunny.”

I wanted to tell him if he had one like mine, I knew where he could get a better one. Instead I just thanked him for his referral. “When this one dies, I’ll give the place a look-see,” I said. I figure maybe in a few years, then I’ll go check the Goodwill. Guys like me, it’s always sunny enough to wear a well-worn hat.