August 5

 Good morning. It is sunny for the moment but the weather report says rain showers should move in during the morning becoming steady rain by afternoon. I am going to take a risk and not water the gardens today. I have already cut back some of my "jungle" and will continue it tomorrow. Over the last fifteen years gardening has become a  constantly changing endeavor. It isn't simply a case of me getting older (all too true) but the changing conditions on our patio. The temperatures have gotten hotter for longer and the rains have become more uncertain. If I can't get outside early, sometimes very early, I can't get out there at all. I have put in more plants that are more tolerant of heat and a bit of dryness. Several are also very tolerant of freezing. I have already started to think about next year and I already am looking at more plants of that type.

A lot of people freaking out over AI. I'm not one of them. About forty years ago I was enrolled in a course which introduced students to the very early internet. People were already using it for research in the humanities and the problem of inaccurate, false, or fabricated information was already apparent. The one thing I recall clearly from that class was that I had to examine the sources closely: who was the source, in some cases what was their political/social/philosophical biases, and what were their sources. This NY Times article makes that case and even goes further: people have a RESPONSIBILITY to do that. Fox News is beginning to discover the penalties of posting, publishing, furthering lies that cause harm.

This article, originally posted in Swedish thankfully translated by Google, brings back another memory from my long sojourn in academia. I had to check the literature concerning my research and my advisor told me to ignore foreign language sources because "everything important is published in English." A few years later, when I was pursuing another degree at another university, my department offered two paths for filling a skill requirement. A friend and I signed up for a course in computer research. She made the cut but I didn't. Instead, I took a class in Spanish For Translation where the final exam required students to translate an article in their area and the professor would, if the translation was proficient, attest to our proficiency to understand written Spanish. I passed. Then to get some proficiency in a second language, I worked with a French tutor for two semesters and gained enough proficiency to translate a passage selected by one of my committee members. The point is that my friend was able to bypass any foreign languages. I don't know that I would agree with the title of the article linked above that English has become a threat to democracy but being monolingual definitely narrows a person's experience.

Ronald Reagan once said the most frightening words in the English language were "We're from the Government and we are here to help." This story underscores that. The question no one ever asks is "Help who, help how, and who is hurt." Obviously not young boy out playing with his dog or a county worker simply doing his job.

And for a bit of comic relief--welcome to Slowjamistan.

Yves Smith has another episode in her "Collapse of Operational Capabilities in the West" series. Long but a good read.

This sounds way to deja vu for my tastes. I seem to remember the same situation about  a decade ago.