April 15

 Should be another sunny day with temps in the low 80s. That is considerably warmer than normal for mid April. And we might get SNOW on Monday. Update: sunny now and most of the clouds have moved off.

The other day I linked to an article where a person used ChatGPT to check a medical diagnosis and came up with something the doctor didn't which turned out to be correct as later tests showed. However, this story is about a doctor who decided to checkout ChatGPT for himself with some real patients histories after he had removed any identifying information. He found the program was about 50% right in that the right diagnosis was among the six it listed. In one case, the patient might have had a lethal experience because the right diagnosis wasn't listed. The program couldn't ask the questions the doctor would have asked and depended on the doctor providing complete and accurate descriptions of the symptoms. Computer docs are a ways off yet.

Bill Astore has a succinct and very accurate evaluation of all of America's wars since the end of WWII. The lessons we should have learned and probably haven't:

What can we learn from the Iraq War, then? Let’s start with these basic lessons: Don’t fight a war based on governmental lies and unfounded fears. Don’t fight illegal and immoral wars. Don’t fight undeclared wars. Don’t meddle in the societies of other people where you are seen as invaders and about which you are ignorant. Don’t wage war, period, unless the domestic security of the U.S. is truly threatened.

Those seem like the right lessons to me, not lessons about how to recognize insurgencies or how to respond more quickly to asymmetries like IEDs and ambushes.

In sum, learn this lesson: Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, were and are countries with rich pasts and proud peoples who were not about to submit to American invaders and agendas, no matter how well-intentioned those invaders believed or advertised themselves to be.

The problem: we still have rush in as though we were rescuing the poor deluded peoples of distant lands we don't know anything about--not the language, the history, or the culture.