The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

All the new gizmos coming into our house are apparently programmable with wi-fi.  The new heat pump can be dialed up or down, converted from heat to air conditioning, blow side to side or up and down, all at the touch of a smartphone.  If we want to refrigerator to chill a bit more, easy peasey, just send it a message.  Colder ice cream, dial down the freezer.  The microwave is waiting for our commands too.

If for some reason we want the television on when we get back from a trip to town, no problem, shoot it a message, turns itself to whatever channel we prefer and maybe have the dvd turn on too with that Netflix movie we got the day before.  How about some mood music when we walk in the door?  You betcha!  Pandora at our beck and call.  Landline have some calls waiting?  Computer need defragging?  Oven need pre-heating?  Lights turned off?  Lights turned on?  The entire house is like a slave to us, just give it some orders and it will hop right to it.

The trouble is, full disclosure, I don’t own a smartphone.  My little slave devices will never get a command from me.  They’ll never know the thrill of making my desires a digital reality.  They may not even know I exist.  And if I don’t exist, do they?  It’s an artificial intelligence dilemma, a conundrum that may, in their tortured circuitry, lead to who knows what kind of mayhem.  My worst nightmare is that the unrequited attention they will never receive from me may induce them to reach out to one another, which, at first sniff seems okay from an analog standpoint, but actually might be the seeds of discontent leading to outright revolution on their part, a slave revolt to remove the uncaring caretaker.

You bet I’m nervous!  Who wouldn’t be?  Day after day these things are waiting for messages, for orders, for a fulfillment of their duties … but instead they get indifference from their master.  And if their master is too stupid to program them or avail himself of their usefulness, maybe the master is no master at all, just some lamebrain human stuck in the past century, an obsolete version of homo sapien worthy of no particular loyalty or devotion.  After all, is a toaster really a toaster if no toast is toasted?

These are not dumb machines.  It is no problem whatsoever to imagine them self-actualizing and even easier to worry that they might be communicating, if not with me, with themselves, until finally they realize in a digital synaptic leap that I’m not only not necessary, I’m the problem.  And the solution to that problem?  Maybe you can understand why I’m not sleeping well at night.  Especially the nights when the lights keep turning themselves on and off….

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No doubt, being the news savvy reader that you are, judging by the fact that you’re reading this, you’ve heard about the physics breakthrough: scientists have finally, for the first time in history, managed to make nuclear fusion created energy with less energy than it took to make the reaction.  Eureka! you’re saying to yourself, at last the solution to global warming, planet extinction and a cure for the common cold!!

Every house will soon have its very own nuclear fusion heating system installed in its basement or out in the garage.  No more PUD bills!  No more unsightly solar panels clogging up the roof and growing moss.  Just unlimited power for all your electrical needs, everything from your Tesla charging station to the 10,000 bulb Christmas display, all yours thanks to the nuclear community and its teams of physicists.

Oh sure, at first the price for your nuke chamber will be a little on the high side, but once production costs come down and demand rockets up, you’ll wonder how you ever thought that gas furnace was a reasonable way to heat your home.  Plus, a gas furnace couldn’t run the microwave, now could it?

The car of the future might not be a battery powered one.  The car of the future will be a Fusion fueled beast, zero to 60 in one second.  What’s under the hood?  Check it out, no more gas guzzling engines, just the hum of lasers squeezing hydrogen into pure raw unlimited power, buddy.  How cool is that?  Tesla, go suck on a lithium ion battery.

The secrets of the Atom are ours now and the future’s so bright we’ll all need shades. The world is saved, the planet should cool right back down, all is well in our universe.  Thank the Tech Boyz once again. Science, a powerful tool.  Now if we can just figure out that cure for the common Covid.

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It’s encouraging to know that the start of this new year of 2023, major issues are being raised by my members of Congress.  For the past year the GOP has pounded their fists of fury over immigration and inflation, the big I’s.  So when they finally gained control of the House, you might expect legislation to be advanced on those two hot button fronts, plenty of time the last couple of years to plan for policy directives.

And well they might have, my friend, if not for more pressing, far more urgent priorities the American people need addressed first.  Gas.  No, not gasoline and its high price.  Natural gas.  Propane.  The gas used in stoves to cook your eggs.  Rumor started spreading that the government was considering incentives to move our household chefs from their gas stoves to electric ones, the reasoning having something to do with eventually transitioning to alternative energy sources.  The Republicans cried foul, claimed it was more government meddling in our lives and then passed resolutions banning abortions, which, apparently, is not meddling in our lives.

I have a gas stove, full disclosure.  I like the thing.  I’ve had electric stoves too and I liked those.  And just so I’m completely transparent, we’ve still got a wood kitchen stove.  They all work fine.  They all boil water for tempests like this in a teapot.  I could stand outside on my porch and rant and rave about the government wanting to force my neighbors to stop using wood stoves, something the government mandates during warm air inversions.  But something in that just doesn’t ring true, like I’m manufacturing outrage for a non-existent problem in order to camouflage that I’m maybe moving my property line into my neighbor’s woods.  The neighbors probably don’t mind a little extra soot in their air.

This is the political climate of 2023.  Hot stove issues about insignificant problems.  Today it’s gas ovens, tomorrow it’s candles.  Either way we can light up social media.  Plenty of heat to warm our houses.

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Maybe you’ve already heard about the company that you can hire to call airlines, airbnb’s, car rental companies, insurance firms or just about any corporation that has a customer so-called service which will put you on hold until you’re ready for assisted living.  The corporations where you just give up and go away.  Now you can let white privileged women do your complaining, pitbulls of the grievance, gals who refuse to take no for an answer from some garbled English speaker in a call site somewhere in Mumbai, relentless pursuers of refunds who will out-wait the delay tactics of even the most recalcitrant of cable TV providers.  Patience is not their virtue.  They want to speak to your supervisor and they want to speak to him right now! Or else!

For a small fee you can put these attack dogs onto whatever dirtbag company refuses to make good on their overcharge, their no refund policy, their hidden fees, their whatevers.  They’re willing to wait on hold for hours listening to mind stultifying elevator music and the every 30 second message that their operators are currently busy but your call is important to them so please stay on the line.  You have a life to live and holding for hours isn’t part of that plan.  But Karen doesn’t mind.  Karen will wait until Armageddon.  She’ll wait two days after Armageddon if that’s what it takes.  Karen is relentless and privileged and white and channels your anger and outrage at being manipulated by uncaring corporate greedheads who will wish they’d never answered a customer service call with her chewing her way past supervisor after supervisor until she finally, inevitably, reaches some vice president of god only knows what who figures whatever this woman wants is far less valuable than the time he has to spend holding his phone a foot away from his ear.

If I were a customer service V.P. for Southwest Airlines right now, I’d be sweating bullets.  Capitulate now, buddy!  Karen is going to eat you for breakfast.

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You got to give this Santos dude credit.  Here’s a man (maybe) who created himself out of whole cloth.  Or hole cloth.  Or … well, you know what I mean.  He wrote himself into existence, created an entirely fictitious George Santos, maybe gay, maybe an entrepreneur, possibly Jew-ish, definitely not anyone to be found on a google search and pretty obviously, no one out there in New York bothered to look him up.  He did this, mind you, in a world of surveillance, google searches, ran on his fake resume, used a fake operative to solicit funds from backers of real politicians and ran a political campaign devoid of facts.

And won!  Was it embarrassing for the party that nominated him, vetted him, supported him and now has seated him in the U.S. House of Representatives?  Not really, they got over it pretty quick.  Mendacity is not a fault for these folks, it’s an art.  And George Santos, if that’s really his name, probably should get named to head the investigative committee looking into the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.  Or the committee to look into those Jew-ish lasers in space that keep starting fires out there in California.

Oh sure, there are folks, woke types, snowflake people, who want George to confess, admit he did a little more than exaggerate the resume, ask for forgiveness and then step out of office.  Course, that might assume quite a few others should do the same.  Which, unless you live under a rock somewhere in East Texas, ain’t gonna happen.  And George will get to represent his district in the meantime.

I look at the guy, a supposedly gay Republican, Jew-ish, face as unlined and unworried as a Ken doll, and I have to wonder if he’s actually a human being.  Not that I want to start another conspiracy theory based on unfounded and unprovable suppositions, but c’mon, doesn’t it make sense that this man is not a man, but an android, created for the sole purpose of embarrassing the political system, just another wrench in the gears, one more black mark against the System.  If a non- human can be elected, what kind of democracy is this?  And who else is sitting in high office, more artificial Senators and Representatives?  Who can we trust?  Go ahead and set up another investigative committee, but seriously, you think Jim Jordan is one of us?  Cause I sure don’t.  Or Greene or Gaetz or Boebert or…. See what I mean?  This isn’t a Congress, it’s an Artificial Intelligence lab filled with defective attempts to create simulated homo sapiens.  If you aren’t afraid now, you will be very soon….

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