The Scourge of the M5

Debra
Jul 23
4 min read

Updated: 6 days ago

23 July 2025

Or perhaps it is the revenge of the M-5.

This morning, I did some light pruning of the roses in my raised-bed garden. The soil, or terrain, was what Buzz Lightyear would call “a bit unstable.”

Varmints have been digging holes amidst the garlic plants that I have planted to ward off deer from the rose bushes. The summer of 2021 was a blaze of glory on my part to create color outside my newly-built house.

Or, as I said that summer to Marc the Landscaper:

“I just don’t want to look outside this winter and see bare dirt as far as the eye can see.”

Marc himself was having difficulty getting hired help, materials, hope. He looked at me and said: “I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

“It’s called corruption,” I concluded.

And from the consensus on that opinion, we got along just fine!

I’ve been struggling of late to pin down The Routine That Works For Me, but I guess we’re all in this one, together, in Commie-fornia. You know, surviving the onslaught of Morons in the State House. It’s always been that way, though. My first, and extremely accurate, take, in 1979, as an Unwanted Citizen-Newcomer to California, was/is that the Golden State is corrupt and stupidly idealistic.

I’ve been doing workarounds so long that I probably don’t know how to operate, or at least function, any differently.

I was going to do a whole lot of sewing this summer/autumn, maybe even winter. I like variety in my activity schedule. It’s part of establishing a dynamic routine that works for me.

This past January, however, I noticed that the Disgronficators, or language-translation websites, had become ominously silly, stupid, and politically correct (the three adjectives go hand-in-hand). I put a bit more brain-muscle into my review of translating THE DAWN into L’AUBE.

This past month, the language s— hit the fury-fan. My Muse is not happy, and neither am I.

No, I do not want you to re-write what I’ve input. I don’t want to click a word to look it up. I don’t think You think better than I think. Actually, I’ve come to the conclusion that You do not think at all!

I’ve been looking at these websites for over a decade now, and have gotten to know their peculiarities well.

I’ve accepted the weirdness of a digital site based in Germany, where, after 10 minutes of my keyboarding absence, the Disgronificator reverts to transliterating everything in German.

I understand the digital screen-masters, based in France, go for a very colloquial lexicon.

And the Context-Reference Site, based in Florida, has been updated to include jargon from the COVID Prison Era, and the warnings about sexist and racist terms, now considered offensive, that were verbiage taught to me in the mid-1970s University as fine French littérature.

I cannot accept having anything — especially language — shoved down my throat.

I respond with a hacking noise, not unlike the way that idiot lush from San Fran pronounces her successor in the U.S. House of Representative:

HACK HACK HACK — eeeem.

The hacks in America are hacking at my sublimely calibrated life as a novelist. This AI-thing, aka GIGO, has become the Star Trek episode entitled The Ultimate Computer. It is the 24th episode of the second season.

This stellar installment features one of my favorite actors, William Marshall, as Dr. Richard Daystrom. It takes place during the mid-23rd century. The M5 is used to facilitate the necessary adventure known as War Games (aka in the USA of today as An Election).

The M5 multitronic unit is very advanced, very sophisticated, so sophisticated that even the oaf known as Captain Kirk must face his own gigantic ego and wonder:

“Am I afraid of being replaced?”

Well, no, Billy Boy. No one could ever replace a ham like you!

Of late, I have given much thought to the realities of the M5. I do my best to not let my attitude trip me up on my way to wherever it is I want to go. And my attitude, of late, toward this Artificial Intelligence, is that it is neither artificial nor intelligent. It’s begun to take on the memory engrams of our Word-Salad Expert from California.

There are times when I input a very complex string of words that I suspect will either cause the M5-Linguistic Spaghetti to force-quit, and tell me that my session has expired: LOG IN AGAIN . . .

Or it will fade to black.

I am not a sadist. I am a staunch defender of liberty and linguistic freedom!

The Silicon Valley Masters of the Universe must be so broke after their rip-roaring assaults on the First Amendment, heck, the Bill of Rights, along with the entire U.S. Constitution, that they’ve devised the M5 for Americans to: