Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is betting on it. States are considering banning the data centers that run AI. Bret Stephens in the New York Times begs writers not to use AI. Pope Leo wrote an encyclical on AI, urging that it benefit all people, including the poor, not just the wealthy and powerful, as the prior Pope Leo urged industrialists to aid humanity and restrain their urges toward power and wealth. Pope Leo put AI on a level with revising just war theory.

What are we to think? My best answer is ho-hum boring: wait and see.

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However, it’s not too early to discuss what generative AI is and how it works. I can talk because my pre-retirement life was developing automated service desks and developing the precursors of generative AI for helping answer service questions were in my portfolio.

AI streamlines the creation and dissemination of information and knowledge, possibly as much as writing, printing, and broadcast media (radio, television, and the Internet), which were all world-changing. Predicting the future of generative AI may be crystal ball work, but the current hubbub is inevitable.

Pundits are predicting utopias, meltdowns, disasters, and everything in between. Plungers are snapping up AI stock like the cheap steaks at an old-fashioned Las Vegas buffet and skeptics are warning of a bubble burst dwarfing the dot-com bubble. While states consider laws against building AI datacenters; Elon Musk proposes building them on Mars.

The AI vendors would like you to think that AI is logical, the epitome of a logical mathematician who sets out a proof starting from an acknowledged known truth (an axiom), following a set of rules called logic, and arriving at a previously unverified truth (a theorem).

Generative AI is nothing like that.

Then how can generative AI produce the proofs of previously unproven mathematical conjectures (informed guesses) as we read regularly?

Instead of reasoning, generative AI searches for patterns in Large Language Models, big collections of text and images mostly gathered from the Internet, then remixes those patterns. Lo and behold, when the remix process becomes as refined as it is today, valid mathematical proofs pop out that no human had thought of before. This trick reminds me of a handcuffed Harry Houdini surfacing from the frozen Hudson River.

The trick works without a single logical principle coded into AI’s algorithms.

The same trick works for many other tasks, as everyone who uses generative AI services knows. Yet genAI does not understand the questions it is asked any more than it understands the mathematical logic in the proofs it generates.

Generative AI is amazing and wonderful, but it has limitations.

We know genAI is not reliable. It’s an astoundingly good guesser, but the best guessers are sometimes wrong. AI may be right ten times in a row, but the next go may be wrong. AI doesn’t know the difference. One guess is as good as another. GenAI is a great guesser, but it’s still only guessing.

Most of the time, AI will be right, but when it prompts you to do something you would seriously regret being wrong about, good judgement says double check.

AI responses are designed to be plausible, but there is nothing in genAI that guarantees its responses correspond to reality any more than its mathematical proofs are guaranteed to be logical and valid. AI’s directions could direct you to Everett when you want to go to Tacoma.

But with this caution, also notice something that genAI critics often miss: with genAI’s help you are likely to be right more often than you would be without its help. Just don’t expect perfection any more than you expect your friends to never ever be mistaken.

Even some atheists declare that humans are not machines, that humans have an essence, a soul if you like the term, that lawnmowers, sewing machines, brushless car washes, and computers all lack.

Do generative AI systems running on soulless computers in industrial data centers have souls? Can a soul arise somewhere in the vastness of data and processes pulsing with electrical energy? When chatting with a bot, imagining a soul out there is easy, especially for people who don’t think much about souls.

When I look out on the pasture behind our house, watching rain bring green to the fields, red-tail hawks hunt for mice, and rabbits graze on tender grass, I suspect souls dwell far outside their usually posited boundaries. Yet my experience with computing still says souls don’t come from datacenters.

For all the marketing chatter than surrounds them, genAI chatbots are only computer programs that run on hardware installed in datacenters; the same hardware you could purchase at Best Buy with a large enough bank account. So I maintain that chat generators do not have souls. They are complex computer programs, much closer to a sewing machine than a friendly Border Collie.

Therefore, don’t expect an AI result to have the verve that stems from the spark of life. There’s a lot of talk about AI slop detectors like ghostbuster Egon Spengler’s Psycho Kinetic Meter, but you can often spot AI by feel. It feels dead. If you use AI to write office emails, for example, you’ll come off as a zombie. If your colleagues all use AI to write their emails also, your office will resemble the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. As a happily retired person, this sounds about right.

Practically, what good is fallible and dead genAI? It’s a wonder for rounding up relevant data and opinions, although a human still might find more subtly connected information. Text generated by genAI will be as dead as yesterday’s cold mush, yet old mush will nourish you till lunch. The danger is that too much cold mush might dull your taste for a chef’s risotto.

What will chat generators offer in the future? No one knows; a golden age and the downfall of civilization both have their strident champions.

I’ll add one more speculation: I’m not investing in data centers. I doubt that genAI depends on them as much as current chatter asserts. Cryptocurrency miners are a thing of the past because the connection between cryptocurrency value and the expense of running currency mining data centers was an illusion encouraged by businesses itching to profit by building expensive projects. Watch out: AI data centers could be the same.

Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.

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Today, I’m enrolling Blind Man in Kindle Unlimited. If you subscribe to Kindle Unlimited, you will be able to read Blind Man on your Kindle without additional charge.

I invite you all to join Fenton Herzman, Reggie Haskell, and Fellman Biggers in their fight for the residents of a mythical South Side of Chicago in their struggle to thrive in a society that respects wealth and corrupt power and disdains kindness and justice.

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It’s a comic crime story set in the 1930s through the 1970s. The main character is a blind detective. As the first book in the series, it includes the main character’s early life. The main story portrays the rescue of an illegal and corrupt—but socially beneficial—gambling scheme run by a notorious crook.

The story is indebted to classic crime fiction, Raymond Chandler’s cynical Marlowe and Rex Stout’s wise-cracking Archie. The victim in Blind Man is not a person; instead society is ruthlessly assaulted by forces drifting out of control. Nothing is clear in the dark world of the blind detective. No one, not even the blind man himself, can be trusted.

The story takes place in mythical Chicago, beginning before WWII. Julius “Julie” Parnak is the nephew of the head of the Chicago franchise of Murder Inc., which Julie’s uncle took over from the New York outfit. Julie inherits his uncle’s operation, but he lacks his uncle’s administrative cunning and wit. The blind man, Fenton Herzman, a cellist who lost his sight in Julie’s presence, is an adjunct professor at South Side University. He has established a private detective agency to fund his expensive tastes in antique cellos and baroque music manuscripts.

The skeptical narrator, Reggie Haskell, is from rural Minnesota. He becomes the blind man’s eyes and hands on the streets. Haskell has a rabbit pistol, a flair for baroque musical ornamentation, and a jaundiced eye. Reggie’s dark and looming sidekick, Fellman Biggers, is a former NFL tackle with a PhD. in astrophysics. Reggie and Fellman are heroes; Herzman’s willing pawns in a storm-tossed sea of deception, greed, and spite.

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The Covid-19 pandemic, undoubtedly one of the greatest tragedies of the last hundred years, was in the news recently when Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the U.S. pandemic response, appeared at a hearing in congress. The hearing appeared to me to be a witch hunt, a search for someone to blame, not an effort to disclose facts.

In October of 2020, while the Covid-19 pandemic was still raging and the vaccine was just becoming available, I wrote and published a blog on U.S. plans for fighting pandemics. Ironically, I concluded that the U.S. had an excellent plan for fighting pandemics, but we did not use it. This Second Thought is an update of that blog.

In 2005, Republican President George W. Bush read a book on the 1918 flu pandemic. The 9/11 trade towers attack sensitized Bush and his cabinet to the potential disruption of improbable but highly impactful events. The potential devastation from a recurrence of a world-shaking pandemic struck the president powerfully; he immediately insisted that his cabinet begin work on a pandemic response plan. Eventually, this would lead to an unnoticed CDC triumph.

The CDC pandemic play book

Bush’s cabinet produced a nearly 400-page playbook detailing evaluation of dangers, limiting disease spread with travel bans and closures, stockpiling critical supplies, managing adequate health care facilities, implementing social controls and practices, tracing contacts, the discovery, production and distribution of treatments and vaccines, best practices for avoiding panic and promoting compliance to healthcare measures. Most important, the play book had plans for informing the public in an evolving crisis.

The playbook was tested and refined on Ebola, SARS, H1N1 and other infectious outbursts. The 2017 revision of this playbook still exists on a Center for Disease Control website.

Pandemic preparedness

The 2019 Global Health Security Index, a report produced by an international group of institutions, including Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and The Economist magazine, ranked the U.S. number one among 195 nations in pandemic preparedness, largely on the basis of the playbook. The Index was revised in 2021 and the U.S. still retained its high rank.

The week before the November 2020 general election, ten months after the initial outbreak of Covid-19, the U.S. has almost 230,000 dead, roughly 70,000 more deaths than Brazil, the next hardest hit country. Brazil ranked 22 on the Global Health Security List. The United Kingdom, ranked 2 on the Global Health list has almost 50,000 dead. Columbia, ranked 65, had only 30,000 dead.

Preparedness results

The U.S. was the most prepared and it had the worst results. The U.K. was second most prepared and their results were not good. Columbia gets a low B on preparedness and protected their people more effectively.

Preparation does not matter if it is ignored. Read the CDC playbook. The plans were ignored and neglected following the Bush administration.

Protective gear was supposed to be stockpiled. Congress refused to allocate funds and the stockpiles were under supplied. The play book calls for extensive testing and includes guidelines on developing and deploying tests. The U.S. flubbed this badly at the beginning. The official test didn’t work, which was an unfortunate but recoverable misstep. But the U.S. did not follow its own plans to correct and recover.

Over and over, the playbook was ignored. An explanation is that pandemics are “black swans,” events that seem so improbable that they treated as impossible.

The CDC playbook is not dead

Astoundingly, the plans developed by the CDC under Presidents Bush and Obama were followed and used. But not in the U.S. I looked at two countries that dodged the covid-19 bullet: Taiwan and New Zealand. Both have documents with nearly the same name and contents as the U.S. playbook. Taiwan has its Pandemic Influenza Strategic Plan. New Zealand has its New Zealand Pandemic Influenza Plan.

The plans of the three countries are long detailed documents and I confess that I have not read them in their entirety, but I have read enough to convince myself that all three are the same plan, close enough that a lot of cribbing must have occurred. I suspect New Zealand and Taiwan did most of the copying. The crucial difference is that both Taiwan and New Zealand followed their plans, the U.S. did not.

The day after I wrote the above paragraph, I stumbled on a video report from the New York Times that makes the same point far better than I.

Test of the CDC playbook

Two countries that executed the playbook and one that wrote the book but did not execute the plan is close to a gold standard test.

Results

Now let’s see the results in October of 2020. Taiwan, population 23 million, 554 cases, 7 deaths, no new covid-19 cases in the last 200 days. New Zealand, population 5 million, 1950 cases, 25 deaths. U.S., population 328 million, 8,990,196 cases, 229,141 deaths on the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 Dashboard.

That comes out to 24 cases/million for Taiwan, 390 cases/million for New Zealand, and 27,400 cases/million for the U.S.

If the U.S. had kept Covid-19 in check like Taiwan, we would have under 8,000 cases. At New Zealand’s rate, 125,000, instead of close to 9 million. If we compare deaths, 100 at Taiwan’s death rate, 1600 at New Zealand’s death rate, instead of 230, 000 deaths in the U.S.

The CDC triumph

There is a silver lining to this: the U.S. CDC playbook won. We didn’t use it, but it won. The scientists who wrote the playbook are still here. They have the same abilities they had under Presidents Bush and Obama. They are here for us to call on.

Was Dr. Fauci at fault for the U.S. failure? We may never know. The facts are buried deep in cross accusations that lead nowhere.

Let us hope to elect a government with the foresight to use our treasures to save us.

Hold fast. Be patient. Keep trying.

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Many people have accepted AI hype without understanding generative AI. Calling it Artificial Intelligence is marketing chatter. AI is certainly artificial, a contrivance of humans to mimic something from nature, but it is not intelligence in any usual sense.

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Some call AI “highly advanced typeahead,” but that diverts attention from its most important resource: the large collection of previously existing text that it uses.

An LLM explorer returns sentences that are likely to look intelligent because they are selections and rearrangements dipped up from the collected text of intelligent humans; AI does not use some fantastic super-intelligence to conjure replies from prompts. Its replies are chosen for their frequent appearance in its stored text , not from their logical or truth value. The explorer analyzes a prompt it receives and formulates a reply that is contrived to be similar to the text already in its text store . The explore replies with text that follows a response pattern that the explorer spots in its text store. For typical LLM explorers today, their text store is nearly everything ever published on the computer network (the Internet) and includes graphics and photos. Its results are like an essay you would expect from a diligent but not smart student.

The explorer cannot extract meaning from either its prompt or its text store. To the explorer, “night” and “mayonnaise” are associated because they both pair with jar to form “night jar” (the nocturnal hawk) and a “mayonnaise jar” (the kitchen counter encumbrance). The explorer does not recognize that one is seen flying erratically on summer evenings and the other moistens sandwiches, but it does recognize that “night jars” appear in pastoral poetry while “mayonnaise jars” show up in sandwich cookbooks.

The explorer’s sentences are not always correct or sensible, but LLM explorer developers work hard to make their results as reliably correct and sensible as they can. When successful, the explorer’s reply is a reconstituted sample of what is already in the language model. The developers don’t always succeed in creating reliable replies, in fact, some argue that complete success is impossible, but they have done amazingly well and are likely to improve in the future.

Nevertheless, as hapless lawyers have discovered, explorer responses have mistakes and must be checked before inserting them into anything in which correctness is important.

After all this debunking, I must also say that the code that runs LLM explorers is almost magic; it generates itself. A developer does not dream up a bunch of code to spot the patterns used by an LLM explorer; instead, the developer writes code to recursively generate pattern spotting methods. The developer’s code uses its own output to further refine the pattern spotting and result generation. In other words, the code creates itself.

LLM explorers now menace jobs, hold the economy in limbo, jeopardize education, and threaten to cause strife. Some folks use them with glee. Others are afraid that glee will drown us in generated slop. People either love them, hate them, or fear them. These are all subjects to explore in the future.

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I grew up on a small dairy farm on a dead end road, a hundred miles from any large city. I got as much manure as I could shovel and I was allowed to feed as many chickens and calves as I could find. I was surrounded by grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts.

But Epstein and I do share something: we were both smart. He used his wits, patently more facile than mine, to get teaching jobs and a place in the finance industry without bothering with much college. I won scholarships and fellowships to a university, worked hard, and eventually became over-qualified and under-employed, met a few billionaires, and saw up close the power and wealth I didn’t have.

I don’t like Jeffrey Epstein, possibly more than most people; I’m probably jealous of his privileged life. However, I’m not alone in my dislike. I read an interview with Melinda French Gates recently in which she said she had met Epstein once with her then-husband Bill Gates. She said she was repulsed by the evil she sensed in the man. Good on her.

I never met Epstein, but his emails appall me. His poor syntax, loose misspellings, and incomplete thoughts mark him as a mumbler who will not bother to be clear to his listeners. He shows no sense of reciprocity, no desire to treat others as he would wish them to treat himself. Instead, he reeks of dismal arrogance: I don’t care if you understand what I say because you don’t matter to me.

Who wants to know this person? Only those who hope to gain something from him.

The Epstein files extend from the Clinton administration through the George W. Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. Until the files began to trickle out, I doubt that most Americans were aware of the Epstein sleaze wiring up the power elite. Epstein traded in power and influence by facilitating contacts between powerful people that he attracted into his net with favors and wealth. He egregiously abused young girls and (presumably) young men, he imported and groomed attractive women from the hinterlands— possibly the current president’s wife—, and hosted dinners for the rich and famous; all to satiate the appetites of the powerful. This is more than I wish to know of Epstein’s life.

Epstein’s life ended hanging by his neck in a lower Manhattan jail.

Growing up surrounded by grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts is not so bad after all.

There is nothing new in the Epstein scandal. Salacious abuse of power goes back at least to Jael’s spike through Sisera’s head and the beheading of John The Baptist, but before Epstein, Americans lulled themselves into thinking that our country is better than Epstein.

We’re not.

Sad.

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At North Bellingham Elementary School in 1960, Mr. MacDonald, my fifth grade teacher, stood in front of our class with a wooden pointer next to an easel loaded with slick graphics that looked like PowerPoint slides 25 years before PowerPoint was invented. The packaged presentation, which circulated among classrooms in the Ferndale School District, gave us fifth-graders the low-down on the evils of Communism and the virtues of Capitalism with a side order promoting the domino theory that threw the U.S. into tragic exploits in Southeast Asia later when we fifth-graders registered for the draft. Separating socialist economics and authoritarian Soviet-style communism was far beyond Mr. MacDonald’s presentation.

Mr. MacDonald and the Ferndale School District board, which must have sanctioned the presentation, were well-intentioned, probably not well-informed, and likely the victims of a movement upholding the grotesque anti-communist McCarthy hearings a few years earlier. I won’t say explicitly that the John Birch Society’s hand was in the presentation, but I believe it was there.

The John Birch Society’s founder was a candy magnate, Robert Welch, the mastermind behind Junior Mints and Sugar Daddies, and veteran of cut-throat and conspiratorial candy wars.

Candy brands and packaging art can be legally protected, but ingredients, recipes, and processes, which are the real treasures of the industry, are free to steal without legal penalties. Candy factories, like Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, are secretive fortresses against industrial espionage. The struggles of these intrigue-wrapped bastions mirrored Welch’s vision of the cold war against world communism and inspired the thought behind Mr. MacDonald’s presentation.

North Bellingham Elementary School is in a remote corner of the nation and national communications did not penetrate as deeply sixty years ago as they do today. In my fifth-grade days, only the loudest ALL CAPs, candy war-inspired voices made it all the way to the Nooksack River plain.

Amazing that we’ve made it this far.

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I am not celebrating nationally this year, only planning to enjoy private and small community festivities, hamburgers and hot dogs for the family. No matter the national climate, there is always much to celebrate in a nation “of the people, by the people, for the people.”

Today I must remind us all that the vital strength of a democratic system of government is not that people whom you admire or agree with get elected. Happily, that happens sometimes, but frequently your choice candidates lose, which is always disappointing.

But then the real strength of democracy kicks in: the next election is coming and we have a chance to evaluate the last election’s winners performance and throw the bums out if that is what they deserve. Under other systems, you’re stuck with the bums.

Please vote.

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The pandemic has changed this country more than any event since WWII. Like many others, I’ve brooded over the number of deaths, the effects of closing schools, curtailing business, halting gatherings, and the breakneck charge to discover, test, and deliver a vaccine. Mostly, I’m dismayed by the rise in public distrust following the failure of the best-prepared nation on the planet to save its citizens.

I wrote a blog in October of 2020 when 230,000 excess deaths from COVID had been recorded and the death toll was still rising rapidly. Eventually, around 1.2 million American deaths were attributed to COVID. The question “could we have done better?” is only answerable with speculation, but in my blog, I compared the U.S. results with the results in countries that executed a pandemic response plan that created by the Bush administration.

In the NYT conversation this week, Stephens said offhandedly that the U.S. botched the COVID response by shutting the country down and closing schools, disrupting education for a huge cohort of students.

Stephens skirts over that the U.S. constitution assigns powers of quarantine and business restrictions to the states, not the feds. There were no federal lockdown orders, only optional recommendations from the federal health agencies.

Unlike in the U.S., lockdowns were national decrees in many countries, most notably China. China’s lockdowns initially held their death toll down but their strategy failed later when they were unable to relax the lockdowns safely.

What can we learn from the pandemic tragedy?

We learned that dealing with a deadly, highly infectious, and completely unknown disease is staggeringly difficult.

Ironically, before COVID, the U.S. was thought to be the nation best prepared for a pandemic; yet, it was one of the hardest hit.

How did that happen?

After 9/11, President George W. Bush read about the flu epidemic during WWI. Stinging with devastation from highly improbable events at the world trade towers, Bush initiated research on a plan for responding to a global pandemic. Subsequently, the Bush plan was successfully tested on Ebola, H1N1 and other epidemics. Unfortunately, during the Obama and Trump administrations, needed stockpiles of protective gear, testing supplies, and expertise in administering the plan were allowed to dwindle and languish. When COVID struck in March of 2020, the U.S. had a plan that the country was not prepared to execute.

Other countries, like New Zealand and Taiwan, cribbed the U.S. plan and, unlike the U.S., were prepared to execute. They came out well. They had the stockpiles of masks, other protective gear, and testing technology, which would have helped U.S. healthcare workers treat victims and control the disease; quite possibly substantially reducing the consequences of the epidemic. Instead, the U.S. was unprepared and COVID wreaked havoc.

I was very disappointed with the NYT readers’ comments because few of the readers had troubled to research and remember accurately events between March 2020 and May 2023 when the pandemic reigned. Instead, their comments reflected politics more than knowledge.

I fear the next pandemic will not go better than COVID.

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Pope Leo published an encyclical on artificial intelligence and the role of the technology industry in a Christian society. He called it Magnifica Humanitas (Magnificent Humanity) and declared that all technology, from steam engines to steel mills to generative AI, must promote kindness and justice toward fellow humans and all creation.

Magnifica Humanitas is not easy reading. It’s style is ponderous and it’s careful attribution is tedious, but its content is wonderful. Pope Leo harks back to his namesake in the 19^th century, Pope Leo XIII, who addressed emerging industrialization and state socialism in terms of traditional Roman Catholic social justice.

Leo XIV also declared the notion of just war obsolete, slapping down newly converted Catholic Vice President J.D. Vance’s attempt to mentor the Augustinian Pope Leo on the legitimacy of the war in Iran.

Saint Augustine of Hippo wrote about just wars in the 4th and 5^th centuries when the highest wattage weapon of mass destruction was a broad sword; today’s remote aerial bombings from drones guided by artificial intelligence were beyond the reaches of imagination. Later, in the 13^th century Saint Thomas Acquinas further refined the concept of just war. Subsequently, nation states have used just war theory repeatedly to limn their aggressions as acceptable Christian practice.

A key tenet of just war was that a war must do less damage than would occur if war were not pursued. Pope Leo’s encyclical declares the just war theory obsolete in the face of the destructive power of current weapons and practices.

To a smaller audience this Sunday, the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, Phil LaBelle issued a pastoral letter to all Episcopal churches west of the Cascades in Washington State denouncing the current administration’s green card immigration policies as destructive to families and anti-Christian, a remarkably vigorous political statement.

Is current extremism thrusting us into a revolution to replace wealth and power with kindness and justice? Lead by the most traditional of Christian authorities?

I hope so.

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A coyote killed one of our son Paul’s chickens and ate it out it the field. Ironically, the chicken would have soon been slaughtered on “processing day” as our son calls the day for decapitating, plucking, butchering, and packing a group of chickens for the table and freezer.

May is the month for feeding pups. The coyote probably regurgitated the half-digested chicken to its pups. Wildlife baby food. By full summer, the pups will learn to hunt for themselves and shift to a diet of mice and rabbits.

A coyote is a predator drawing its life from the suffering of smaller and weaker animals. This is a cruel life.

Is not all life cruel?

I once read a Buddhist essay on the cruelty of consuming vegetables, the suffering caused as we tear up plants and shatter the lives of the insects and small animals that live among plants. The point was not that we should stop eating, but that we should not forget that suffering is inevitable in this life.

The coyote nurtured its beloved pups when it killed the chicken. Can we say that our own acts of violence are also acts of nurture?

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Perhaps some Second Thoughts readers were not yet born when Y2K unfolded. In the mid 20th century, computer programmers had to decide how to store dates and times in computer business systems. That was before anyone forsaw the huge role of computer systems would soon play in enterprises and government. The new millennium was barely visible in the hazy and distant future.

After date storage patterns were established, they were repeated and baked into emerging programming languages and reusable libraries. Not using the established patterns invited extra work and errors. Unfortunately, the mid-century patterns were short-sighted and would fall apart in year 2000.

When I entered the computing industry in the mid-1980s, developers had begun to recognize the inadequacies of their practices in the approaching millennium. Powerful distributed computers, including desktops and new languages, like the deservedly vaunted C language, provided alternative methods for storing dates and times, which were readily accepted in scientific and engineering programming, but vast business and enterprise systems were already running on mainframe computers using dates and times which would inexorably fail on schedule.

Obviously, something had to be done.

Unless the flaws were fixed, at 12 am on January 1^st 2000, most of the software supporting the world’s business and government would crash or its results would become wildly incorrect and erratic. Bills would be misdated, interest calculations off, and accounting transaction would be out of balance and account entries wrong. Airline schedules would fall into chaos. The list of consequences was long and difficult to predict.

By the mid-1990s, the industry was fully aware of the looming catastrophe. By the late 1990s, something akin to hysteria over Y2K was making headlines and selling newspapers.

Something was done.

The multi-national software company I worked for was no paragon of virtue. A few years after Y2K, the company was kept alive under a federal consent decree and most of the corporation’s officers were sent to jail for securities fraud. Nevertheless, the company stepped up to Y2K, like hundreds of other software houses, and fixed as many Y2K issues as we could find.

On December 31, 1999, all of the company’s programmers and field technicians were in their offices or at customer sites in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, on standby, poised to fix unaddressed problems as they arose, staying at their desks until the millennium crossed the international dateline at 3 am pacific time. The facilities department provided soft drinks, sandwiches, and pizza, and I seem to remember a surreptitious beer run at 2:30 am.

It was a lazy session. I only remember one issue when some hapless outfit had neglected to install a required patch, which was fixed in minutes.

One big “meh.”

Y2K was one big “meh”. Not because Y2K problems didn’t exist, but because the industry stepped up and fixed them before they mattered. Because the crisis never happened, some called Y2K a hoax. Not so. It was an averted catastrophe, not a hoax, although much of the hysteria in the media was unwarranted.

A question.

I now have a question: If our current social, political, and business atmosphere had prevailed in 1999, what would Y2K have been like? Would the tech bros of today step up to the problems? Or would they sue each other for damages caused by their competitors in a circular firing squad?

I’ll leave that as an exercise for readers.

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In the Hebrew bible, relations between God and human creation were often dicey, especially in Genesis when humankind was still getting acquainted with itself. We started out living a life of innocent leisure in the Garden of Eden, but that didn’t last for long. Adam and Eve were demoted to gardeners, sent out to till, plant, fret over no rain and too much rain, weed, and harvest.

Humankind of the era were still young in the history of the species and, like teenagers, instead of keeping to their chores, they went partying with racy frat and sorority swells. This upset the boss, who decided to wash away the mess with a great flood, a notion many folks share cleaning up the day after a big party, but Noah rescued civilization. He followed the boss’s instructions for building an ark to ride out the flood.

The boss must have been a little disappointed with the rescue. When Noah’s descendants began to build a city with a tower, Genesis reports that the boss said, “As one people with one language for all, if this is what they have begun to do, nothing they plot will elude them. Come, let us go down and baffle their language so that they will not understand each other’s language.” [Genesis 11:6-7].

Jumping ahead three millennia, humans have solved the Tower of Babel language problem with technology: instant language translation. Jam the right wad of electronics into your ear and hear almost any language on the planet instantly translated into a language you can understand, whooshing us back to pre-Tower of Babel days.

Need we fear that “nothing we plot will elude us”? Not a chance.

Technology has gone beyond instant translation to chat bots that claim to translate your own thoughts into an understandable solution. Suppose you have a vague thought about using a quantum computer to pick an optimum sales route for selling coffee tables in Cincinnati. Ask a chat bot to clarify your thoughts. Quicker than passing the celery salt, the bot will oblige with a detailed program for a quantum computer.

Wonderful! If you accept the sales pitches of hucksters like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, this is what chat bots do and nothing we plot will elude us.

But it’s an illusion. The bots mix nonsense with sense. They hallucinate events that didn’t happen. They cite publications that don’t exist. They generate mathematical proofs mixed with gibberish. The bot’s quantum computer program won’t run on any real device.

Our plot eludes us as we waste hours, weeks, and months sorting the gold from the rubbish.

The Tower of Babel is back. It never left us.

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I must comment. I studied classical Chinese Confucianism, read classical Chinese well enough and a little modern Chinese (as different as Latin and modern Italian), can mumble a few phrases of mandarin, and keep copies and translations of the Confucian classics and histories within arms length in my study.

In my vision, Xi Jinping is a typical Chinese emperor right down from his benevolent half-smile to his rounded shoulders and tai chi-like movements. But he doesn’t have all an emperor’s trappings; for example, during the classic dynasties, perhaps back to the Zhou in about 1000 BCE., the use of the character for Xi, Jinping’s surname, would have been banned. Using the character for Xi in writing or printing would have merited a beating with a bamboo cane, at the lightest, to keep everyone reminded of who’s the boss.

For most of the three thousand year history of the empire, the Central Kingdom, Zhongguo, was the undisputed superpower of East Asia. When Europeans first encountered China, they were gob smacked by the wealth, power, literacy, and cultural sophistication of the empire. Until the 17^th century, it’s said that the books printed in a single year in China exceeded all the accumulated books in Europe.

For thousands of years, foreign delegations visited the Chinese emperor with gifts designated as tribute, notably silver, which was in short supply in China, and returned home with gifts like Chinese silks, spices, and artisanal goods. This was international trade with China for centuries.

When Europeans tried to sell manufactured goods like textiles and steel tools to the Chinese in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the Chinese weren’t interested; their own goods were superior and plentiful. The Europeans and, by then, Americans thought they had a solution: India readily bought European manufactures with chests of opium, which the Europeans tried to sell to China.

The empire declined in the 19^th century. The Qing dynasty, formed when the Manchus from the north successfully invaded China in the mid 17^th century, was not a native Chinese dynasty, and was notably inept at governance. They succumbed to gun boat bullying by Westerners in the Opium Wars when western powers forced China to purchase Indian opium, which Chinese officials had banned as debilitating. Westerners with names like Peabody, Astor, and Roosevelt forced the Chinese to trade chests of opium for silks, spices, and other treasures, which they could sell at outrageous profit in Gilded Age Europe and America.

When the Qing Dynasty ended in 1918, Mao Zedong eventually ascended to power in 1949. He frequently mentioned the Opium Wars as an emblem for the European and American humiliation of China.

Trump’s trip to China must be gratifying to many educated Chinese who look back to the glory of their three thousand year history. The trip harkened back to the days of empire. Trump with his entourage of tradesmen in supplication, seeking gifts of business, yet returning home with less than expected, and happy to get whatever scraps the empire offered.

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Last week, I was rummaging through some files I hadn’t looked at for some time and discovered a novel I started and nearly finished. And ten years later, I found myself smiling, and maybe, just maybe, other people might smile too. So I decided to polish it up a little, add a few details, and publish it serially on my web site, Vine Maple Farm.

It’s a mystery, but not serious. My sense of humor may not be for everyone, but such as it is, The Wrong Guest, Chapter One. I hope you enjoy it.

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In our age of the computer network, dozens of examples of this kind of latch appear online, but a century ago, he had to imagine and fashion a sliding latch without the aid of a picture in a magazine or a video on YouTube.

My grandpa put a lock on his smokehouse, which was filled with rings of summer sausage, slabs of bacon, and hams as big as tom turkeys suspended on poles threaded in the rafters.

A rusty old hack saw blade hung on the right side of the door, as high up as my short grandpa could reach. If you knew which crack, where to poke, and the exact sequence of moves with the old saw blade, the door would swing open to reveal the smoke house treasures. A curious six-year-old boy and his twelve-year-old cousin looking for illicit snacks could fiddle around for an hour failing to open the door.

The physical center of my grandpa’s inventiveness was a shed called “the shop.” I spent many hours with my grandpa in the shop.

The shop was my grandparents’ first house in a little clearing in the brush in the northeast corner of Vine Maple Farm when my grandparents were first married. Grandpa built their house about a hundred yards from my grandmother’s parents’ house and another hundred yards across the Aldrich Road from my grandpa’s parents’ house. They later moved it to the west side of the farm where they built a new farmhouse and the road now called Waschke Road.

The old house walls were vertical cedar board and battens. Half the floor was dirt. My grandparents replaced it with a story and a half farmhouse shortly before their second son was born. My dad and my grandpa slept their last night in the old house while a midwife, probably from the Salish Lummi Nation, helped my grandmother give birth in the new house. My dad said they ate bread soaked in milk and sugar for their last meal surrounded by cedar board and batten walls.

We stored potatoes in the basement of the farmhouse. Dad and grandpa would grade and sack the spuds in the basement, then carry the sacks up the stairs to the truck to take them into Bellingham to sell.

My grandpa’s final invention was an elevator which would pull the sacks of potatoes up from the basement with a rope and an electric motor. While he perfected his elevator, I fiddled with building a wooden road grader. He went to the hospital and died of cancer before he finished his elevator and I never again touched my road grader after grandpa quit going out to the shop.

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Sam Johnson’s 1773 dictionary declares “execute” to mean: “To put in act; to do what is planned or determined.” This was the meaning of “execute” when the U.S. Constitution was written a few years later, where Article II states: “The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the Un…

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A pair of red-tails nests near our house and hunt the twenty acres of open fields that stretch out to the east. As I am writing this, it’s the first day of astronomical spring. This year, biological spring has been well ahead of the stars. Our lawn is green and I’m thinking about mowing and pruning back a few trees close to our house.

Our hawks ignore the seasons. They are on the their perches at the top of the maple grove every day, hunting mice that tunnel in the dry grass in winter and green grass the rest of the year. Their appetites don’t change with the seasons although they usually have a nestling or two to feed in spring and early summer.

The red-tails remind me that politics and international affairs matter only to one species: mortal humans like me who fret over the news. We all should realize that we can change far less about this world than the vastness we can’t touch.

Oh yes, we do live in the Anthropocene, the age in which human activity changes the global environment and the climate. The world is in flames, but whose place is it to put out the fires? Would anyone blame a red-tail for ignoring the Straits of Hormuz?

Do your job with the earnestness of a red-tail pursuing mice and ignoring the Jersey cows in the next pasture.

We are all obliged to diligently do what we can, undistracted by urges to do what we can’t.

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