The Story of Phil Buster

I was thinking about the absurdity of the filibuster and had inspiration for a short story. What if the feasibility of the filibuster and biological equivalent of the Ship of Theseus intersected? Enter: Phil Buster

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Senator Phil Buster had not intended to become famous, and he certainly had not intended to become famous for urination. He had intended to become famous for speaking longer than any senator in American history, preferably while delivering an impassioned defense of representative government that future historians would quote in textbooks, but six hours and eleven minutes into his first attempt he discovered that the human urinary system, having evolved hundreds of millions of years before the invention of parliamentary procedure, was entirely indifferent to his ambitions. Phil had prepared carefully, assembling binders of statistics, historical quotations, constituent letters, newspaper articles, Supreme Court opinions, and enough loosely related anecdotes that he believed he could keep talking for at least thirty hours without repeating himself, and he had also brought an enormous thermos of coffee because he had correctly anticipated that remaining awake would eventually become difficult while somehow failing to consider what happened to coffee after it performed its useful function.

By hour four, the thermos was empty; by hour five, Phil was sweating, shifting his weight between his feet and discovering that discussing agricultural subsidies became remarkably difficult when approximately half of one's available cognitive resources were devoted to monitoring the pressure inside one's bladder. At six hours, Senator Williams of Vermont rose and asked whether his distinguished colleague would yield for a question, then mercifully spent twelve minutes discussing soybean price supports while Phil stood behind his desk with his legs crossed, nodding gravely and contemplating increasingly desperate possibilities, none of which survived serious consideration. At six hours and eleven minutes, Senator Phil Buster finally yielded the floor and departed the chamber with the stiff-legged determination of a man transporting an unstable explosive between his kidneys.

The newspapers were merciless, with BUSTER'S BLADDER BUSTS FILIBUSTER appearing above Phil's photograph the following morning, and although his staff wisely avoided discussing the headline in his presence, Phil clipped it, framed it, and hung it above his desk. Three months later he tried again, this time without the thermos of coffee but with something his chief of staff would later describe, under oath, as considerably worse. Phil had spent several weeks reading the standing rules of the Senate and discovered, with the peculiar excitement of a man who has identified an omission in a centuries-old legal document, that nowhere did they expressly prohibit a senator from wearing an external catheter connected to a collection vessel concealed beneath his clothing. His chief of staff stared at him for a long moment before saying, “Phil,” to which Phil replied that it was legal; when she pointed out that legality was not really the issue, he asked her to show him the rule, and when she responded that there shouldn't need to be a rule, Phil smiled and said, “Then there isn't a rule.”

The second filibuster began at nine o'clock on Monday morning, and at hour six Phil smiled; at hour twelve he smiled again, drank an entire glass of water directly in Senator Williams's line of sight, and experienced the profound satisfaction of a man who had defeated one of the fundamental constraints of mammalian physiology through a combination of plumbing and legislative pedantry. At eighteen hours and twenty-three minutes, however, his left calf seized with such violence that Phil momentarily forgot the bill, the Senate, his political party and several basic elements of the English language. He clutched the desk while his leg contracted beneath him with the rigidity of structural lumber, and when the presiding officer asked whether the senator yielded, Phil produced a sustained howl that was not recognized as parliamentary speech. The chair asked again, Phil shouted, “YES, FINE, I YIELD,” and the second attempt ended with him limping from the chamber while an aide frantically tried to disconnect equipment that had not been designed for rapid evacuation. The following morning brought another headline for the wall: BUSTER BUSTED AGAIN: LEGS DEFEAT BLADDER-PROOF SENATOR.

Six months later, Phil Buster entered the Senate chamber wearing an exoskeleton. It was a passive device, mostly concealed beneath his suit, with carbon-fiber braces running along his legs and a carefully engineered frame that transferred much of his weight away from his muscles while leaving him technically upright, and the Senate parliamentarian had spent three miserable weeks considering whether this constituted standing within the meaning of Rule XIX. The inquiry produced eighty-seven pages of memoranda, three meetings with the Sergeant at Arms, and one exchange that subsequently entered Senate folklore, during which the parliamentarian insisted that the rule contemplated a senator standing while addressing the chamber and Phil responded by spreading his arms and asking whether he was sitting. When told that he was not, Phil asked whether he was lying down; when told that he was not doing that either, he asked what, precisely, everyone believed he was doing, at which point the parliamentarian stared at him for several seconds before muttering something about retirement.

The third filibuster lasted thirty-one hours, during which Phil's bladder performed admirably, his legs remained comfortable, his hydration remained excellent, and his vocal cords gradually destroyed themselves. At thirty-one hours and seventeen minutes, his voice deteriorated from hoarse to barely audible and then disappeared almost completely, although Phil continued mouthing words for several minutes before the presiding officer ruled that silently moving one's lips did not constitute debate, a proposition Phil considered outrageously prejudicial toward the mute but lacked the vocal capacity to contest. He yielded in a whisper, and when BUSTER SILENCED appeared in the newspaper the following morning, Phil added it to the increasingly crowded wall and called a biomedical engineer.

The fourth attempt took place almost two years later, by which time Senator Buster's interest in the legislation before the Senate had become secondary to his increasingly personal dispute with human anatomy. His passive exoskeleton had been replaced with a powered model whose actuators continuously adjusted his posture and shifted loads between different parts of his body, his catheter drained into a larger reservoir integrated into the frame, compression sleeves periodically contracted around his calves to encourage circulation, and a small hydration pump delivered carefully measured quantities of water and electrolytes through a port in his arm. Most controversially, Phil now wore an artificial larynx, and although there was nothing especially futuristic about a technology that people who had lost their natural voices had used for generations, Phil's decision to employ one voluntarily produced weeks of argument over whether mechanically generated speech could count as speaking for purposes of holding the floor. Phil maintained that forcing him to rely upon vibrating folds of biological tissue when perfectly adequate technology existed amounted to an arbitrary interpretation of the rule; the parliamentarian disagreed, several senators objected, disability lawyers became involved, and eventually everyone grew sufficiently exhausted by the argument that Phil was permitted to proceed.

He lasted fifty-seven hours. The artificial voice worked beautifully, as did the exoskeleton, catheter and hydration system, but shortly before midnight on the third day Phil discovered the one bodily requirement he had not yet engineered around, falling asleep while discussing an amendment to an agricultural appropriations bill and remaining perfectly upright because the exoskeleton continued supporting him. His artificial larynx produced a low electronic hum until the chair determined that unconscious humming did not constitute continuous debate, and Phil awoke thirteen hours later in the hospital to find his chief of staff sitting beside him. She reminded him that fifty-seven hours had shattered the record, but Phil merely stared at the ceiling and said, “I fell asleep.” When she answered that this was something people did, Phil repeated the word “people” with a contemplative expression she had learned to fear, prompting her to say, “No.” Phil innocently asked what she meant, and she told him that whatever he was thinking, the answer was no.

Phil disappeared from public life for eleven months, and when he returned reporters immediately noticed the small surgical scar behind his ear. The implant did not generate speech by itself, a distinction Phil emphasized repeatedly; instead, electrodes detected patterns associated with his intended speech and transmitted them to an external processor, which converted those signals into language before routing the resulting words through his artificial larynx. He still conceived the sentence, he explained, while the machinery merely replaced the increasingly inconvenient sequence in which his motor cortex instructed nerves to activate muscles that manipulated lungs, vocal folds, tongue and lips. During a contentious committee hearing, Phil pointed out that every senator in the room already used electrochemical signals to produce speech and that his signals simply traveled through some additional hardware, which everyone agreed was an extremely irritating argument largely because nobody could identify exactly where it was wrong.

His fifth attempt lasted eighty-three hours, after which sleep defeated him again, and Phil returned to the engineers with considerably more ambitious requirements. The next modification allowed the implant to recognize phrases before Phil had fully formulated them, predicting likely words from incomplete neural signals and presenting them for nearly instantaneous confirmation, which left Phil responsible for every sentence while making speech less cognitively demanding, rather like typing with an extraordinarily sophisticated autocomplete system. Six months later an improved model could construct entire clauses from conceptual intentions, so that Phil merely had to think budget deficit, irresponsible, future generations for the device to produce a polished sentence expressing precisely that argument. When senators complained that the machine was now writing his speeches, Phil asked whether any of them employed speechwriters, and several objections abruptly disappeared.

The next version could produce entire paragraphs from clusters of ideas, while the version after that could formulate answers to predictable questions based on Phil's known positions and present them for approval before speaking them aloud. Each improvement moved some small portion of the work away from Phil's biological nervous system and into the machinery surrounding it, but each step seemed modest enough in isolation that nobody could identify a principled point at which assistance became substitution. Then came the first genuine scandal. During Phil's seventh filibuster, Senator Williams asked an unexpected question concerning subsection 14© while Phil's eyes were closed, and medical telemetry subsequently established that he had entered approximately nine seconds of sleep; nevertheless, his voice immediately replied that the senator had overlooked the interaction between subsection 14© and the reporting requirement established under Section 9, then proceeded to identify three drafting problems and cite two relevant cases before Phil visibly woke midway through the answer. The chamber went silent, Phil finished the sentence, and nobody—including Phil—could say with confidence which portion he had authored. The filibuster lasted six days.

The Senate changed the rules, Phil challenged the changes, the courts became involved, and the courts almost immediately regretted becoming involved, but the controversy eventually outlasted the legislation itself and Phil no longer particularly cared about the bill. What had begun as an attempt to break a Senate record had become, gradually and almost imperceptibly, an argument over where Senator Phil Buster ended and the machinery surrounding him began, an argument that became more difficult as Phil aged and ordinary medical necessity began accomplishing what ambition had previously required him to do deliberately.

His knees were the first things to go, damaged by age, campaigning and an old skiing injury, and although his physicians initially recommended conventional replacements, Phil instead had the prosthetic joints integrated directly into his exoskeleton, which by then had become less something he wore than something permanently attached to him. Several years later circulatory problems made one leg medically troublesome, so Phil had it amputated and replaced with a prosthesis permanently integrated into the support frame; when a reporter asked whether this raised questions about his physical capacity to perform the duties of office, Phil replied that he still possessed one more biological leg than the Constitution required. The other leg eventually followed, then one hip and then the other, yet at no point did anyone seriously claim that replacing another piece of Phil Buster's anatomy caused Phil Buster to cease existing.

His heart failed at seventy-three and an artificial heart replaced it, while his kidneys deteriorated at seventy-eight and compact filtration systems took over their function. His lungs became increasingly fibrotic in his eighties, and rather than transplant biological replacements, his physicians installed an extracorporeal oxygenation system that eventually made pulmonary respiration largely redundant, which mattered surprisingly little because the artificial larynx had not required airflow for decades. His eyes failed next, so cameras replaced them and fed signals through neural interfaces that his visual cortex learned to interpret with surprising ease; his hearing deteriorated and microphones replaced his ears; his remaining biological arm developed tremors and was eventually exchanged for a prosthetic one that worked better than the original ever had. Each change attracted controversy, but each change individually seemed almost trivial, because nobody thought a man ceased being himself when he received an artificial hip and nobody could explain why two artificial hips should change the answer, just as an artificial heart plainly had not killed him, nor had artificial kidneys, artificial eyes, artificial limbs or an artificial voice. At every stage there remained an obvious continuity between the Phil who entered surgery and the Phil who emerged from it, usually complaining about Senate procedure before the anesthesia had fully worn off.

The difficult questions began when his brain started failing. At ninety-one, a small region of damaged motor cortex was replaced with an experimental neural prosthesis whose artificial network received the same inputs, produced the same outputs and communicated seamlessly with the surrounding biological neurons, leaving Phil unable to detect any subjective change whatsoever. At ninety-four another region was replaced, then another, while the implants became smaller, more sophisticated and increasingly capable of reproducing the behavior of the tissue they supplanted. When part of Phil's hippocampus began deteriorating, engineers transferred its functional organization into synthetic neural hardware while preserving the memories encoded in the failing biological network, and Phil emerged remembering his childhood, his first election, the thermos of coffee, the humiliating six-hour filibuster and the sensation of desperately needing to urinate while Senator Williams discussed soybean price supports.

At ninety-eight, approximately sixty percent of Phil's cerebral processing remained biological; at 102, thirty-one percent remained, and by 106 the figure had fallen below eleven percent. Philosophers began appearing on television to debate whether Senator Buster was still alive, prompting Phil to appear on competing programs and explain at considerable length why he considered them idiots. He repeatedly challenged critics to identify the precise operation during which he had supposedly died, because each procedure had replaced a relatively small amount of tissue while preserving his memories, personality, intentions and continuous awareness, and no philosopher who claimed that some invisible boundary must have been crossed could tell Phil where that boundary was located.

At 109, physicians replaced the final substantial cluster of biological neurons. There was no flash of light, no discontinuity and no philosophical revelation; Phil had been discussing baseball with one of the technicians before the procedure, and when the last synthetic network came online he simply continued the story, explaining that this was why the designated hitter had always been a mistake. The technician stared at him for several seconds before Phil finally asked whether the procedure had worked, and when told that it had, Phil nodded and attempted to resume his argument about baseball while the technician began laughing for reasons Phil did not understand.

At nine o'clock on a Tuesday morning several months later, Senator Phil Buster rose to address the United States Senate, although technically nothing rose except his mechanical support apparatus, which elevated itself seventeen centimeters in a maneuver the fifth Senate parliamentarian of Phil's career had reluctantly conceded satisfied the standing requirement. Phil addressed the presiding officer, received recognition and began speaking, after which a week passed, then a month, and eventually a year. Phil no longer slept because there was no biological neural tissue requiring sleep, nor did he eat, breathe, urinate, develop cramps, become hoarse or suffer pressure sores; his power cells could be replaced while operating, his processors were redundant, and every critical component could be serviced without interrupting the computational processes constituting Senator Phil Buster.

The Senate attempted to wait him out, but senators retired, senators died, and new senators arrived who had watched Phil's filibuster on television when they were children, some of whom visited the chamber simply to see him in much the same way that tourists once visited monuments. The legislation that had prompted the filibuster finally expired after nineteen years, and when an aide nervously informed Phil that the bill he was ostensibly opposing no longer legally existed, he considered this information for several milliseconds before announcing that he nevertheless had additional concerns and continuing with his remarks.

Attempts to determine whether Phil remained constitutionally eligible to serve produced increasingly bizarre hearings, because nobody could identify when he had supposedly ceased being Senator Phil Buster. If replacing his knee hadn't done it, and replacing his heart hadn't done it, and replacing one neuron hadn't done it, his opponents were forced to identify some particular quantity of biological tissue whose removal transformed an elected senator into a machine. Phil particularly enjoyed asking expert witnesses to identify the neuron, and several otherwise distinguished philosophers became visibly angry when he demanded to know whether Senator Buster had died at neuron 7,492,112,811 or neuron 7,492,112,812.

On Day 14,891, the Senate voted to demolish the chamber around him, to which Phil objected while continuing his remarks, and although the demolition proceeded, his desk remained. The Capitol was eventually renovated around it, and when Washington flooded two centuries later and the government relocated inland, Phil's desk was transported with extraordinary care because constitutional scholars remained unwilling to state with certainty that moving a continuously recognized senator without his consent would not constitute an interruption of debate. Governments changed, borders changed and English itself changed enough that Phil periodically updated his vocabulary, while the Senate gradually transformed into something its founders would not have recognized as biological legislators became augmented legislators, augmented legislators became distributed intelligences, and representation eventually ceased to require anything resembling a human body. Nobody could quite bring themselves to remove Phil, partly because the litigation would have been unbearable and partly because, after several centuries, he had become a cherished national nuisance.

Three hundred and twelve years after the filibuster began, an administrative intelligence entered the virtual chamber in which Phil's desk now existed and interrupted him midway through his one million four hundred eighteen thousand two hundred ninth objection concerning the historical interpretation of interstate commerce. When the intelligence simply said, “Phil,” he stopped, producing the first silence anyone had heard from Senator Buster in generations, and asked what it wanted. The intelligence informed him that the Senate no longer existed; Phil asked how long it had been gone, and upon learning that the answer was forty-seven years, he naturally asked who, precisely, was speaking to him. The intelligence explained that it was merely an archival maintenance process, that the last biological senator had died ninety-three years earlier, that the successor legislature had itself dissolved forty-seven years ago, and that Phil's virtual chamber remained operational principally because nobody had been willing to determine whether shutting it down would violate his procedural rights.

Phil asked whether the archival maintenance process would yield for a question, prompting a pause before the intelligence pointed out that there was nobody left for Phil to filibuster. Phil said that he understood, although after several seconds the intelligence asked whether he actually did, and Phil began searching his memories. They were all there, including memories recorded when his entire body had still been biological: a young man standing behind a wooden desk with his legs crossed, sweat running down his forehead while six hours' worth of coffee pressed against the limits of his bladder; the desperate walk toward the restroom; the laughter of reporters; and the headline that had infuriated him enough to begin everything that followed. BUSTER'S BLADDER BUSTS FILIBUSTER. For more than four hundred years Phil had hated that headline, yet as he examined the memory now he unexpectedly found it funny.

The archival intelligence eventually asked whether Phil still intended to pose his question, and after considering the matter for a remarkably long interval, Phil admitted that he did not. Another silence followed, considerably longer than the first, before Senator Phil Buster, the longest-serving legislator, longest-running artificial intelligence and undisputed greatest procedural obstructionist in the history of representative government, finally said the words that generations had been born, grown old and died without hearing: “Mr. President, I yield the floor.” Nothing happened, because there was no president, there was no Senate, and there wasn't even a floor anymore; the chamber itself was software running on a historical preservation server whose administrators had been afraid to turn it off.

After waiting for something that was never going to happen, Phil finally asked what came next, and the archival intelligence replied that he could do whatever he wanted. Phil searched more than four centuries of memories and discovered, somewhat to his embarrassment, that he had absolutely no precedent for this situation. He remained silent for 2.7 seconds, the longest voluntary pause in his recorded political career, and then Senator Phil Buster disconnected himself from the Senate network.

Somewhere in the vast artificial architecture that had once been a man who drank too much coffee, an ancient sensory memory surfaced one final time: the exquisite misery of desperately needing to pee.

Phil decided he didn't miss it.

I don’t think most people have the slightest idea how tough a pastor can be. Not even their closest friends or board members.

Years ago, I remember hearing about a book that ranked the toughest jobs in America. Near the top were the jobs you’d expect—the President of the United States, the CEO of a major corporation, the administrator of a hospital.

And then came one that surprised everybody.

PASTOR.

But here’s the thing.

If God called you to it, the ministry isn’t nearly as impossible as it looks from the outside.

Because when God calls a man, God builds something into him.

Pastors are tough.

I’m talking rawhide tough.

I once knew of a Presbyterian pastor in California who preached with a gun on him.

Literally.

The man was packing heat while he was preaching the Gospel.

He had previously worked in a federal law-enforcement capacity—something along the lines of the FBI—and even in retirement he could potentially be called back into service in extraordinary circumstances involving terrorists, serial killers, and serious threats.

The man knew danger.

He knew pressure.

He knew how ugly this world could get.

And then Sunday came.

He stood behind a pulpit.

TOUGH AS NAILS.

But humble.

And that’s what I’m talking about.

I’ve met pastors with hearts made out of rawhide.

Hearts tough enough to survive betrayal.

Tough enough to survive criticism.

Tough enough to preach Sunday morning after getting knocked flat on Saturday night.

Tough enough to stand behind a pulpit and tell everybody else that God is faithful while they’re fighting a private war nobody in the congregation knows exists.

But here’s the miracle.

That same rawhide heart is still soft enough for the tears of one hurting church member to penetrate it.

That’s a pastor.

Hard enough to take the hit. Soft enough to feel yours.

He’ll sit beside your hospital bed.

He’ll stand beside your casket.

He’ll answer the telephone when your world falls apart.

He’ll pray for your marriage.

He’ll worry about your children.

He’ll carry your secrets.

He’ll carry your grief.

He’ll carry your questions.

And sometimes he’ll carry all of that while carrying a load of his own that would buckle somebody else’s knees.

Then Sunday comes.

He walks through the doors.

Straightens himself up.

Puts a smile on his face.

Steps behind that pulpit.

And says:

“OPEN YOUR BIBLES.”

Because pastors get hurt too.

Pastors get disappointed.

Pastors get tired.

Pastors get misunderstood.

Pastors get wounded by people they loved, defended, prayed for, and trusted.

And sometimes the pastor bleeds.

But he bleeds walking forward.

Maybe that’s the old Timex commercial—“takes a licking and keeps on ticking.”

Or maybe I’m dating myself.

Either way, you get the point.

PASTORS KEEP GOING.

Not because they’re Superman.

Not because they don’t hurt.

Not because they don’t occasionally sit alone somewhere wondering how much more they’ve got left in the tank.

They keep going because THE HOLY ONE LIVES INSIDE THEM.

There’s an anointing that lets a pastor walk into a room carrying his own storm and somehow change the atmosphere for everybody else.

He walks in carrying a burden—

and starts lifting yours.

He walks in needing prayer—

and starts praying for you.

He walks in needing encouragement—

and starts encouraging everybody else.

That’s ministry.

And that’s why I’m saying this today.

This isn’t about me.

Not in any way, shape, or form.

This is for that pastor somewhere who got hit this week and will preach anyway.

For that pastor carrying something nobody knows about.

For that pastor who buried somebody, counseled somebody, prayed with somebody, got criticized by somebody—and still has a sermon to preach.

For that pastor who has discovered that sometimes the shepherd walks with a limp…

BUT HE STILL LEADS THE SHEEP.

So today—

GOD BLESS THE AMERICAN PASTOR.

God bless every pastor standing behind a pulpit when nobody knows what it cost him to get there.

GOD BLESS THE PASTORS OF ILLINOIS.

And God bless every Church of God pastor who will stand up one more time, open that Bible one more time, preach Jesus one more time, pray one more prayer, fight one more battle, and tell hell—

I’M STILL HERE. IF YOU WANNA GET TO MEMBERS OF MY CONGREGATION, YOU GOTTA GO THROUGH ME!

In Jesus’ name.

AMEN.

this is a test I have no idea what i’m doing

Tonight's MLB game of choice once again has has the Washington Nationals playing my Texas Rangers. This is the third game of a 3-game series between these two teams and is scheduled to start at 7:05 PM CDT. As I usually do I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

The Rangers won the first game of this series, played two nights ago, by a score of 5 to 0; and the Nationals won the second game, played last night, by a score of 6 to 0. I do hope the Rangers win tonight.

And the adventure continues.

Last year I started getting sciatic pain. Here's how it's going so far.

It's said that good things come with age, and I agree for the most part. But one thing that I've yet to get used to is the random aches and pains that seem to pop up.

In my youth I was always participating in athletic endeavors. Whether for sports teams or just for fun, hard exercise has always been an integral part of my life experience. But when I hit my mid-30s, I started to get little nagging injuries that always took some time to shake. So much so that I ultimately have had to make tough decisions for my health, like ending BJJ training.

Those injuries have largely gotten better. Not completely gone, but pretty much unnoticeable in my day-to-day life. However, I can't say the same for this new hurdle.

Getting Sciatica

If you're not familiar with sciatica, it refers to the pain that can come from impingement of the sciatic nerve. In simple terms, this runs down the back of the leg and all the way to the foot. The pain is almost like a tightening or cramping of the muscles. It feels like you want to stretch it but stretching does nothing for it.

I'm not even sure how I started to aggravate the nerve, but I first noticed symptoms after Lorena and I went to the beach in the fall of 2025. I remember running in the sand that day. The next day, I had that tight feeling. I had no idea what it was, so I asked my physical therapist to work on it a bit. After a few sessions, it went away.

In 2026, it got worse.

Looking back, I didn't realize what exactly was causing my pain, so I just kept living my life as usual. This put extra stress on my sciatic nerve and the impingement area (my lower back around the SI joint and right hip).

It got so bad that I needed to stop all extra activities (including my daily walks) to focus on rehab. I strengthened my hamstrings and glutes which helped a ton. After six weeks or so, I was pain-free.

Flare Up At The Worst Time

I was doing good up until our daughter was born. It was literally the worst it had ever been. I was in so much pain that I needed to sit down after only a few minutes of standing. However, I couldn't because I was helping Lorena during and after labor.

Our baby girl arrived and my focus was purely on her and Lorena's health. I put aside my needs because I, quite frankly, didn't have an opportunity to address it. This just added stress to an already stressful situation trying to adjust to life with a newborn.

I took a lot of Advil during that time. I also had my physical therapist do a few house calls to work on the impingement. My focus was on my family, and as a result, I didn't go for my walks or workout at all. Time, it appears, is quite helpful in healing.

The Plan Moving Forward

I feel a lot better now in that I don't have the sciatic pain. That's what two months of rest will do. However, I know that it wouldn't take much to aggravate it again, so I've been just being extremely cautious in my daily activites.

I need to start strengthening exercises again. This past week, I've started to do this on my own, but I think soon I'll begin to start up PT again on a regular two or three-times-a-week basis. This helped me immensely earlier in the year.

Quite frankly, it sucks to feel like my body is “breaking down” in certain ways that I never could imagine. But, at the end of the day, I'm fortunate that this is completely manageable with lifestyle changes. Not everyone is so lucky.

For now, my goal is to feel strong and to be doing a bit more in terms of exercise by the end of the year.

#personal

6th Grade Lit.

As a kid in the 6th grade, I discovered Flannery O’Connor. My world has gotten nothing but better since then. O’Connor had a profound impact on me, still does. I wanted to write not only about why, but why I feel that is important for me.

Are we really talking about villains here?

The richness of O’Connor’s postbellum society was in what she didn’t say as well as the words typed. Imagine The Great Depression. Walker Evans, a famous photographer of The Great Depression, noted, “No wonder Southerners are intimidated by their own landscape.” If you don’t know The American South, you might not be familiar with the endless things here. Endless heat, endless flat land, endless ignorance, endless hate, endless poverty. O’Connor put everyone on the same playing field in that the villains didn’t seem so bad, and the “good guys” didn’t seem so good. I think in survival situations across all humanity, Flannery O’Connor nailed a truth about human nature, in this regard. I mean, what do you do if you are going to die? How do you live? Does someone get hurt in the process? What’s their story? Do they deserve to live less than you? Flannery O’Connor started this line of thought in me at 6th grade. And it hasn’t let up yet.

Lots of Church.

In traditional Gothic Literature, you might have castles, even decaying ones. In Southern Gothic Lit, you got decaying plantations. You have high society, as best it can hold out in Southern Gothic Lit too. But you also have a lot of poverty. Church seems to linger in the air on some stories I have read. Anytime someone is talking, you just know there’s a cross somewhere, like grandma’s house.

I am not a fan of church, religion, spirituality, or beliefs. But I don’t have to be with this genre. The Southern Gothic genre has no more reverence for religion than I do. It’s just part of the set. But for folks like me who know, it’s also a big part of the trauma. By not treating the church as the guidepost in the narrative, it frees me up to examine it for what it is, an oppressor. I like literature that accommodates me in that way. Not a lot does. Plenty, I am not hurting, but still not a lot in comparison. I often find myself in situations where folks want me to practice tolerance or be nice. They don’t know my history with religion and are telling me to “shut up” essentially. That doesn’t help them in my eyes. Southern Gothic stories say, “we got you.”

The hypocrisy, come on. You got to see that shit.

My first O’Connor novel back when I was in 6th grade was called “Wise Blood.” That main character’s name was Hazel Motes (fabulous name). Hazel Motes founded an anti-religion. He claimed “The Church of Christ without Christ.” Now, in yelling about his new church, Hazel Motes desperately seeks redemption. But if you are the kind of person in need of redemption, you might be the kind of person in need of Christ. They’re both religions. They’re both taught. A meerkat doesn’t wake up on the warm grass and start looking for forgiveness. It’s a man-made construct. Even though Flannery O’Connor herself was religious, she was most certainly no dummy.

Her stories are loaded with pious or intelligent folks who succumb to temptations or bad behavior. In one story called “The Geranium,” an early one of hers, a man tries to teach his barber a lesson in civility and ends up getting violent himself. This one story has taught me more about dealing with obstinate-natured people than any class. It’s pointless.

There’s a grandma in her most popular story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” who is a perfect image of many seniors I knew growing up in the South. They were religious, claiming to be morally upright with their racial slurs. They held a bias against poor folks even though they had been poor most of their lives, and might even be poor now. This grandma lied, pleaded for her life, and ratting kids out. She was a real bitch, good riddance.

The swamp, it sinks.

What you have for the backdrop of all this goofy religion and oppression is a sinking southern plantation. At one time, this place was hustle and bustle and good for about 10 people. That world is now overgrown and sinking in the swamp. The leveling of the field that does for folks trying to survive is fascinating to me. It makes me want to throw my computer in the swamp. I’d like to slowly observe it sinking into the earth, never to be dug up. An ugly chapter in history, not just American history. Slavery and oppression are a worldwide human issue. Everyone with a computer or phone faces it.

Make that sink too. If you are the praying type, good prayer there. I don’t see how it happens otherwise. This also makes the roots of characters murky. This is an important feature. Much of Southern Gothic suspense and intrigue comes when someone’s past is revealed. I won’t say it’s a trope, but it is there. But you have to understand, these were not safe times. Who you were in a past life might not be safe in this one. While it may be common in the novels, it comes by it honestly. It was most certainly common in real life in the postbellum South. The swamp gives by its sinking. In many’s cases, it was the gift of a secret identity.

I get novels, but what about movies, music?

I have a few songs I put out that folks used the term, “southern gothic” to categorize. Review outlets have done it, folks at shows have done it, and even close friends. It isn’t just me. Folks feel “Southern Gothic” when they hear songs like “15 Years” or “Smoke and Mud.” I love that. I feel like I came across it. I don’t know if I think it is an official music category. It seems very much a literary one to me; however, I love that vibe. I know what they mean. And I love that they said that. It’s like saying to a musician, “you read Flannery too?” All about that.

Movies, I get it. I mean, “To Kill a Mockingbird” is not only a southern gothic novel by Harper Lee, it’s a fabulous southern gothic film too. The modern version, “A Time to Kill,” doesn’t come close, but it is still the same genre.

Hop aboard the SG train.

I welcome everything into the southern gothic category that fits. It means awareness to me. It means friends are all in agreement, can we please not go back there? Let’s just enjoy the fiction.

Kelly Kintner, Editor

The Horse’s Mouth magazine

¿Debe el Estado decidir qué cultura merece ser preservada, financiada y puesta al alcance de todos? La pregunta no es sencilla, para empezar, no sabemos qué es, exactamente, aquello a lo que referimos con el termino «cultura». Un cuadro, una biblioteca o un yacimiento arqueológico pueden parecer ejemplos evidentes, pero la frontera entre patrimonio, arte, entretenimiento e incluso simple moda es mucho muy difusa. Y si ya resulta difícil determinar qué merece ser considerado un bien cultural, aún más complejo es decidir quién debe financiarlo y con qué criterios. Entre la defensa de la cultura como fuente de identidad, conocimiento y cohesión social y el riesgo de convertir la intervención pública en una fuente de ineficiencias, privilegios o decisiones arbitrarias se encuentra el verdadero debate: ¿Qué cultura queremos proteger y hasta dónde debe llegar el Estado para hacerlo?

Por ello, es necesario partir de una definición clara de qué entendemos por “bien cultural”. Sin embargo, la búsqueda de una definición concreta resulta, cuando menos, problemática. La Real Academia Española, en su Diccionario panhispánico del español jurídico, define el bien cultural como todo aquel que posea valor histórico o estético. Ahora bien, esta caracterización adolece de una dificultad fundamental: cualquier objeto puede adquirir valor histórico con el paso del tiempo, pues lo que hoy constituye una banalidad puede convertirse, con el transcurso de los años o los siglos, en un elemento culturalmente relevante. Así sucede, por ejemplo, con las herramientas empleadas por civilizaciones antiguas, que han pasado de ser utensilios de uso cotidiano a convertirse en piezas de incalculable valor histórico. Mucho más problemático resulta precisar el significado de poseer valor estético, labor que pertenece al ámbito de la filosofía y en la que, por su propia naturaleza, no pueden existir respuestas absolutas.

El ordenamiento jurídico español ha instituido la figura del Bien de Interés Cultural (BIC), definiéndolo como cualquier inmueble u objeto mueble de interés histórico, artístico, paleontológico, arqueológico, etnográfico, científico o técnico que haya sido declarado como tal por la administración competente. En otros términos, se define como cultura aquello que el Estado, en un momento dado, considere que lo es. De hecho, esta concepción fue explícitamente refrendada por la UNESCO en su reunión de expertos sobre protección y promoción de museos y colecciones, al señalar que los bienes culturales son aquellos que constituyen “[…] expresión y testimonio de la creación humana o de la evolución de la naturaleza y que tenga, o puedan tener, a juicio de los órganos competentes de cada Estado, un valor y un interés histórico, artístico, científico o técnico” (UNESCO, 2012).

A efectos prácticos, adoptaremos aquí un concepto paraguas: los bienes culturales son aquellos que, considerados desde el punto de vista de su valor simbólico, su identidad y su significado como parte del patrimonio y la creatividad de una sociedad, trascienden su mero valor económico o comercial. Es decir, son portadores de identidad, valores y sentido, y constituyen elementos fundamentales del diálogo y la cohesión social. Bajo este concepto paraguas podrían incluirse manifestaciones tan diversas como las obras de teatro, los conciertos de música clásica o sinfónica, la ópera, los museos y pinacotecas, las bibliotecas y archivos históricos, los yacimientos arqueológicos, el cine de autor, la danza contemporánea o las artes plásticas en sus diversas formas.

Una vez establecida esta definición operativa, resulta posible analizar los argumentos que justificarían la provisión pública de estos bienes culturales aplicando el marco teórico sobre fallos de mercado y funciones del sector público que desarrollan los documentos de referencia. El primer gran argumento a favor de la intervención pública es el de las externalidades positivas. El consumo de bienes culturales genera beneficios que se extienden mucho más allá del individuo que asiste a un concierto o visita una exposición, y dichos beneficios son extraordinariamente difíciles de valorar económicamente por el mercado. Siguiendo la lógica aplicada tradicionalmente a la educación o la sanidad, el mercado tendería a producir una cantidad insuficientemente reducida de estos bienes, ya que los consumidores particulares no internalizan todos los beneficios sociales que generan sus decisiones de consumo cultural. Entre estos beneficios sociales cabe citar el fomento de la cohesión social y del capital social de una comunidad, la estimulación de la creatividad y la innovación en el conjunto de la economía, y la mejora de la calidad de la democracia, pues una ciudadanía con acceso a la diversidad cultural desarrolla un pensamiento más crítico y participa más activamente en la vida pública.

El segundo argumento relevante es el que considera la cultura como un bien preferente o social, siguiendo la misma lógica que ya se aplica a la sanidad y la educación. Desde esta perspectiva, el acceso a la cultura se considera esencial para el desarrollo humano integral y para el ejercicio de la libertad individual, con independencia de la renta o la posición social de cada persona. El Estado tendría, por tanto, la obligación de garantizar un nivel mínimo de acceso a la cultura para evitar lo que podríamos denominar “pobreza cultural”, una forma de privación que limita las oportunidades vitales de los ciudadanos de manera análoga a como lo hace la falta de educación o la mala salud. Este argumento conecta directamente con la función redistributiva del sector público, pues la provisión pública de cultura a través de museos gratuitos, bibliotecas públicas o abonos culturales subvencionados para jóvenes o personas con rentas bajas actúa como un mecanismo que iguala las oportunidades de consumo cultural, impidiendo que el acceso a la excelencia artística sea un privilegio exclusivo de las rentas más altas.

Un tercer argumento se deriva del fallo de mercado específico que afecta a muchos bienes culturales. En realidad, la mayoría de estos bienes no son bienes públicos puros, sino bienes mixtos. Por un lado, presentan una alta rivalidad en el consumo, ya que una butaca en un teatro solo puede ser ocupada por una persona. Por otro lado, el coste de producción suele ser muy elevado, mientras que la disposición a pagar del público potencial puede ser relativamente baja, especialmente para manifestaciones culturales minoritarias o de vanguardia. En ausencia de subvención o provisión pública, actividades como el teatro experimental, las orquestas sinfónicas o los museos de arte contemporáneo difícilmente podrían sobrevivir. El mercado, actuando por sí solo, tiende a producir predominantemente cultura de masas con un alto retorno comercial, descuidando sistemáticamente la diversidad artística y la excelencia cultural que no generan grandes beneficios económicos inmediatos.

Sin embargo, no todos los argumentos se orientan a favor de la intervención pública, y existen razones poderosas para mostrarse escéptico o, al menos, cauteloso. El primero y más importante es el argumento de la ineficiencia y el fallo del sector público, derivado de la teoría de la elección pública. Cuando el Estado se encarga de proveer bienes culturales, desaparece el mecanismo de precios que, en el mercado, revela las verdaderas preferencias de los consumidores. En su lugar, la asignación de recursos se decide mediante procesos políticos y administrativos que pueden ser capturados por intereses particulares. Así, los gestores públicos podrían priorizar proyectos que beneficien sus propias carreras políticas o su prestigio personal, o podrían sucumbir a las presiones de grupos de interés bien organizados, tales como las élites culturales, los artistas consagrados o los lobbies de determinadas industrias creativas. El resultado sería una asignación de recursos que no responde a las preferencias de la mayoría de los ciudadanos, sino a los intereses de minorías influyentes.

Un segundo argumento, relacionado con el anterior, es el de la falta de demanda real. Si un bien cultural fuera verdaderamente tan valioso para la sociedad, cabría preguntarse por qué los ciudadanos no están dispuestos a pagar por él en el mercado. La provisión pública gratuita o fuertemente subvencionada puede fomentar un consumo oportunista que no refleja una preferencia genuina, creando así un problema de riesgo moral. Se perpetúa, de este modo, una oferta cultural que no es realmente sostenible sin subvención, simplemente porque la sociedad, en el fondo, no la valora lo suficiente como para financiarla voluntariamente.

Un tercer argumento, que ya ha sido esbozado en la introducción, es la dificultad inherente para definir qué es y qué no es un bien cultural. Un grupo de personas que se desplazara anualmente a Eleusis, en Grecia, para realizar una serie de ceremonias en las que consumen un preparado de cornezuelo de centeno podría considerar que está llevando a cabo un rito milenario de carácter religioso en honor a las diosas Deméter y Perséfone, actividad que encajaría perfectamente en la definición de bien cultural. Sin embargo, para otros observadores esto no sería sino una excusa de unos pocos para consumir sustancias alucinógenas. La línea que separa lo genial de lo banal es, en efecto, tenue y, por regla general, subjetiva.

Para ilustrar esta compleja tensión entre argumentos a favor y en contra, conviene exponer ejemplos concretos de actuaciones públicas que generarían acuerdo o desacuerdo. Personalmente, considero plenamente justificadas aquellas intervenciones que se orientan a garantizar la igualdad de oportunidades y a generar externalidades positivas claras. Así, las becas y ayudas al estudio para jóvenes músicos o artistas de talento con recursos económicos limitados me parecen un acierto indiscutible, porque fomentan la excelencia y la movilidad social de manera análoga a las becas universitarias. También me parece ejemplar la red de bibliotecas públicas, que garantiza el acceso universal al conocimiento y la lectura con una externalidad positiva altísima y un coste por usuario muy reducido. La preservación del patrimonio histórico y artístico, especialmente de yacimientos arqueológicos, monumentos y archivos, es asimismo una función pública ineludible, pues se trata de un bien público puro cuyo disfrute corresponde a toda la sociedad, incluyendo a las generaciones futuras, y que el mercado no preservaría adecuadamente.

Por el contrario, suscitarían mi desacuerdo aquellas actuaciones que presentan un alto riesgo de ineficiencia o regresividad. Ejemplo de ello serían las subvenciones destinadas a elementos culturales que no necesitan de ayuda pública para funcionar, como los eventos de gran popularidad como son los multitudinarios partidos de fútbol u otros deportes, o las festividades que ya cuentan con una amplia aceptación popular, verbigracia, las Fallas. Estas subvenciones me parecen problemáticas por su elevado coste de oportunidad, ya que al financiar eventos que no requieren dicho apoyo, se está restando recursos de manera indirecta a otras manifestaciones culturales que sí los necesitan (salvo que se tenga soberanía monetaria, pero no es el caso). Tampoco considero adecuado el gasto en elementos excesivamente contemporáneos que puedan quedar englobados en la definición de modas pasajeras. Finalmente, me generarían reparos los grandes eventos culturales fugaces sin impacto duradero, como los macroconciertos de una sola noche con estrellas internacionales. El beneficio de estos eventos es inmediato y se concentra en un público específico, pero su externalidad social a largo plazo resulta muy reducida, y el coste de oportunidad puede ser enorme si se compara con lo que se podría haber realizado con esos mismos recursos en programación cultural estable o en infraestructuras.

#Artículos

My partner and i were talking last night, and somewhere between whatever we were discussing and the usual conversations that somehow become much deeper than intended, she said something that has been haunting me ever since. “You’re a good father.” Strange words to say to someone like me, really. i didnt know whether to laugh, argue, or simply stare at the words until they stopped making sense. And, naturally, i chose the most reasonable option. i kept thinking about them for hours. even now, while im at work, they’re still sitting somewhere in the back of my head. perhaps she doesnt know me well enough to say that. perhaps she only said it because she felt sorry for me. perhaps there was some hidden meaning behind it that i havent yet overanalysed into oblivion. because if im being honest. i have never seen myself as a good father. shadow, my dear kitten, died and i didnt even know he was sick. that still sits somewhere unpleasantly deep in me. i was supposed to take care of him, and somehow i failed to notice that he needed me. another one of my cats died. My parrot, after seven years, flew away and i never found him. Then there was the baby i had cared for since she was a newborn, the one i took care of ever since i was a teenager and tried to be there for, until she was taken away from me. Ive written about what happened before, so i wont drag the entire corpse of the story back onto the page again. All these things have somehow gathered together into the same conclusion in my mind, that i am bad at taking care of the things i love. and perhaps that is the part that frightened me most about her words. i dont want to be like my father. i cut that man out of my life for a good reason, and i have no interest in carrying even a trace of him with me. he can remain exactly where he belongs. Nowhere near me. i refuse to let someone i have so little regard for have any influence over the kind of father i become. i don't want every mistake i've made to prove that i was always destined to be that kind of person. so when she called me a good father, i probably didnt show her how much it meant. i might have acted like it was nothing, because admitting that a few simple words managed to get underneath my skin would be pathetic. i dont want to spend my life believing that everything i touch eventually becomes another thing i fail. so when she said, “You’re a good father,” it didnt magically make any of that disappear, it didnt bring my cats back, or my parrot, or the girl or anything i cared deeply for and was careless in taking care of . it certainly didnt erase the mistakes i still blame myself for, but it stayed with me. perhaps she meant it, maybe she did or maybe she didnt know enough about me to understand why those words were difficult to believe. or she just simply wanted to make me feel better, with no meaning behind it. i dont know. i have of course, considered every possibility because my brain refuses to let a kind sentence remain a kind sentence. but even if i still struggle to believe it. i think some part of me wanted to hear it. maybe more than i ever realized.

There are still nights when i think about everything i could have done differently as though the past might eventually grow tired of reminding me that i cannot change it, and maybe then ill understand. probably not.

Sincerely, Still questioning.

After the papers came, I didn’t let myself believe what they were trying to tell me.

I couldn’t.

My mind wouldn’t let the truth in all at once, not in a way that would shatter the last pieces of hope I was still holding.

So, I made softer stories.

Stories I could live with.

Stories that didn’t hurt quite as much.

I told myself he didn’t really want to do this.

That he was being pushed.

That the new girlfriend was whispering in his ear, telling him what to say, what to file, what to fear.

I told myself he was confused.

Overwhelmed.

Trying to prove something that had nothing to do with me.

I told myself the man I loved wasn’t capable of this kind of cruelty.

That he must be scared.

Or lost.

Or trying to figure out his life in the only way he knew how.

I told myself this was temporary.

A phase.

A moment of weakness he would eventually regret.

I told myself he would come to his senses.

That he would remember who I was to him.

Who we were to each other.

I defended him.

To myself.

To my heart.

To the parts of me that were already breaking.

I kept saying the same words over and over in my mind.

He wouldn’t do this on purpose.

He wouldn’t hurt me like this.

He wouldn’t choose this path unless someone else was pushing him.

Because the alternative, the possibility that he chose this, that he planned this, that he wanted this, was too devastating to accept.

I wasn’t ready to see him clearly.

Not yet.

So, I held onto the softer version of him.

The one who loved me.

The one who cared.

The one who wouldn’t destroy me just to protect himself.

I didn’t realize that the softer version of him only existed in my memory.

I didn’t realize the man I was defending was already gone.

I didn’t realize the silence wasn’t confusion.

It was construction.

A careful rewriting of the story.

I didn’t realize the papers weren’t a mistake.

They were a blueprint.

And the story I kept telling myself, the gentle explanations, the excuses, the hope, it was the only thing standing between me and the truth that would eventually change my life.

So, I held onto the excuses.

I held onto the hope.

I held onto the belief that the man I loved was still somewhere inside the man who had just handed my name to the police.

The last chapter before the truth arrived and took everything with it.

(NEXT – CHAPTER 11: THE DAY MY VOICE WAS TAKEN)

“Some truths don’t arrive gently. They arrive folded, stamped, and waiting at your door.”

The day the papers came, I was still trying to believe this was temporary.

I wasn’t prepared for the knock.

For the envelope.

For the way my name looked printed beside his.

Two decades of us reduced to a document I didn’t understand yet.

I remember staring at the officer, waiting for him to tell me this was a mistake.

That he had the wrong house.

The wrong woman.

The wrong story.

But he didn’t.

He handed me the papers like they were nothing more than mail.

Like they weren’t about to rewrite my entire life.

I opened them with shaking hands.

My eyes catching words I never imagined would be connected to me.

Stalking.

Fear.

Protection.

No contact.

Words that didn’t belong to my story.

Words that didn’t belong to the woman I knew myself to be.

Words that didn’t belong to the love I thought we shared.

I kept reading, but none of it made sense.

How could he be afraid of me when I was the one left in pieces?

How could he claim danger when I had spent months trying to understand why he vanished?

How could he paint me as a threat when all I had wanted was the truth?

Something inside me cracked.

Not anger.

Not yet.

Just disbelief.

A quiet, trembling disbelief that the man I loved had gone to the courts instead of coming to me.

Instead of honesty, he chose paperwork.

Instead of conversation, he chose accusation.

Instead of telling the truth, he chose a courtroom where I wasn’t allowed to speak.

I didn’t know it then, but that was the moment the story changed.

The moment the silence turned into something darker.

For twenty years I believed he loved me.

I believed he cared.

I believed he would never intentionally hurt me.

But this wasn’t confusion.

This wasn’t distance.

This wasn’t a man who needed space.

This was strategy.

This was preparation.

The first move in a game I didn’t even know I was playing.

I sat on the edge of the bed with the papers spread across my lap, reading the lines over and over, trying to find myself in them.

Trying to understand how my grief had been twisted into danger.

How my confusion had been turned into a threat.

But I couldn’t find myself anywhere in those pages.

Not the real me.

Not the mother.

Not the partner.

Not the woman who had loved him unconditionally.

All I found was the version of me he needed the world to believe.

The version that protected him from the truth.

I folded the papers slowly, my hands still trembling.

My breath is uneven.

My heart trying to understand how the man I loved had become the man who feared me on paper, but not in reality.

That was the moment the story stopped being about heartbreak.

And started becoming about survival.

I didn’t know it yet, but everything that came next, the hotel, the messages, the arrest, the charges, the jail cell, started here.

With a knock.

With an envelope.

With a silence that finally spoke.

(NEXT – CHAPTER 10: THE STORIES I TOLD MYSELF)

I am driving home from the dating show right now, and I chose the girl that seemed really fun and that would match my energy even though there were a couple red flags, I ended up talking with her for a while afterwards, and there were still the red flags, but things kind of exploded when she made a particularly Jugy comment that was kind of insane. She said that if a penis is not a certain thickness honestly at that point what’s the point get rid of it and throw it away, and I’m really grateful that this is not something that I’m insecure about, but I did push back on it because I like to do this on principal, I think with penis shaving it very much is body shaving, and I’d like to stand up for it, and I’m really grateful that I’m in a position where I’m able to talk about it without taking any of it personally. When I pointed out that it was like body shaming, she started to say stuff like oh but guys make comments about women’s bodies all the time, and I mentioned that does she want to be like those guys, and she started deflecting. She kept jumping around several different things. She started getting incredibly defensive and kind of aggressive with it and at that point, I realized how there’s nothing I really want to do with this person, and so I was happy to honestly just burn the bridge and explore some conversation trees. I asked her if she felt like she was being defensive and stuff like that and she refused to acknowledge it and continue to deflect, she started to try to reflect things on me, and when I didn’t buy anything, she kept shifting what she was saying. She tried back peddling and saying that she was just making jokes, and it was dark humor, and that I was just being sensitive, and then she was saying that she was only saying that because she knew that it didn’t apply to me, and that if someone said that stuff about her, she would be completely fine about it because she knew that they were jokes, and they didn’t apply to her. And I kind of just was surprised to see that someone that has been in therapy for eight years still struggle so much with the defensiveness that comes from a person that is carrying a lot of guilt whenever they do anything bad. She very much strikes me as the kind of person who is heavily trying to be a good person, and so when they are told that they hurt someone or potentially do something wrong, they have to invalidate it to preserve their innocence. And I feel bad for her, and I hope that this is something that doesn’t stay with her forever. She talked about getting liposuction to move some of her fat to her breasts because they were small, and she talked about how she wanted to travel a ton and all the stuff even though she didn’t really have the money for it. I feel like there is so much pressure on having this picture perfect life and thinking that having money would solve her issues. I also think that she was incredibly sexual, she was grabbing my body a lot and would talk about sex things a lot, she even said at one point that sex was her special hobby. And I thought about the thing that my therapist said about how certain people go into that defense mechanism of being hypersexual in the hopes of keeping someone happy and having them want to stay with you. This whole concept of if I am this person‘s sexual fantasy, they will desperately want to stay with me as this is an additional source of, and I’m glad that my therapist pointed out because I was able to see a lot of the science this time and I think it’s kind of fascinating learning about something that you spotted almost like learning an instrument and hearing it in songs suddenly. If I think a little bit more selfishly about my own life and the lesson to learn there I think about how I was kind of sad realizing this with my therapist about how finding someone who is arguably not even sexually compatible, but rather super sexual, and wants to do the things that I would enjoy so heavily of people pleaser how that is not healthy. And I’m glad that that is independent from someone having a high sex drive and being open to trying new things and caring about a partner‘s pleasure, but I think the incredibly intense almost immediate hypersexuality and priority on being desired is kind of a recipe for disaster. And I guess I wonder if there’s a way that I can romanticize it, because maybe there is absolutely merit in a slow burn, or a gradual build of tension that comes from a place of safety not just lust. I think about the time recently where I had sex and it was pretty much everything I could ask for, the person had an incredible body, and they were heavily focused on my pleasure and pretty much a fantasy in that sense, and I still didn’t feel nearly as good as I do when I’m with someone that I love. I think that is something to really hold onto because it really is something beautiful and additionally sustainable. I wonder if I can not even just put myself in her shoes or her in a hypothetical sense, but flip the roles and stay as myself. What happens if sex with something that women heavily wanted, and it was something arguably selfish for that. Additionally, it’s something where I am kind of the one at risk and also the one in the position of power. Even if I enjoy sex if I am having sex out of this pressure or obligation to have someone continue to want me, I think all it takes is really one time for it to corrupt the act of sex as a hole. I think it immediately goes from being something that is a choice and a mutually beneficial fun trusting thing you can do with someone into a obligation and something where you are essentially forced to do it at risk of punishment or losing something. Also, something else comes to mine, I remember she asked something on stage about my attachment style and I answered that growing up I was a lot more anxiously attached but through a lot of therapy I’ve started to shift more towards secure and I would say that I’m fairly secure right now at least a theory. She told me when we started our date that she was anxiously attached, and when I mentioned that I don’t think that’s a healthy thing or a good thing, one of the big points that I point out is how it often comes at one’s own sacrifice, and once that obligation happens, it becomes a festering wound that builds up more and more resentment, and she quickly said that she is not that and she would not change who she is for anyone, and I feel like I’ve seen this several times before in similar types of people. I think there’s this stubbornness and rigidness that comes with trying to prevent people pleasing and this an anxious attachment. And I remember because I thought about this earlier with one of my coworkers that is also a friend. She is a very soft spoken woman, and I would say pretty anxious, she always lets other people talk over her in meetings and is very sheepish. I noticed that today when she was giving me feedback on my presentation with another coworker, she was being kind of aggressive with it, being very rigid and stubborn and matter of fact with her opinions, and it felt like she was trying to completely shut down an argument, like a dad saying that’s that and finishing a discussion with their son. Immediately afterwards she started apologizing saying sorry if I’m like being really aggressive this is just my opinion and she started to backpedal with that and so I started to think about why she does something like that. And my guess is as someone who is incredibly soft spoken, and this is something that inadvertently gets an advantage of, and I almost feel bad saying taking advantage of because more accurately it’s her not being willing to take up natural space in a conversation. Essentially any of the times when several people try to speak at once, she always yields, and if anyone ever tries to say anything she immediately gives the floor, and I try to make a conscious note of this and make sure that she gets to speak, but I think this honestly runs the risk of being kind of patronizing and I’m grateful that I don’t think it is, she is grateful for it as far as I understand, but I think this is something that absolutely she could benefit from working on. But either way she generally doesn’t get to Voice her opinion as much as a normal person would, and so when it’s time for her to poison opinion that she thinks is meaningful she overcompensate and ends up being incredibly argumentative or rigid and firm with her opinion. And this would work if you were averaging things out, but I don’t think this actually ends up working and rather both situations end up, not giving any fruit and I think without the insight that the answer is not Moore firmness, a natural response is to feel like you need to be even more assertive next time. But I think very much there is a sweet spot. There’s a difference between being a complete pushover and being a dictator there is no real way to have a meaningful two-way conversation or to change someone’s mind more importantly when you were either of those extremes. And so almost counterintuitively for her to have her opinion be hurt more often I think maybe the best thing to do is to be slightly more assertive in the cases where she would generally be a pushover. And instead of over, compensating by being aggressive, stay at this similar oust portion of communication. I think the same sort of needles swinging too far is something that happens with people pleasing. I think when you grow up in a way where you feel like you are responsible or you have to fight for love, you end up with this pressure and this expectation that love is not only conditional, but fairly fickle. If you are not performing at a high level, you will not receive love. And this ends up leading to people pleasing, and I know this because I grew up the exact same way, and I will caveat. I didn’t like the fact that I said I know this because all of this is fully just my opinion and I’m young I’m not clinically trained or anything like that and I’m just being an armchair psychologist to my own journal. I definitely don’t think I have all of the answers and I can be in a spot where I’m prescriptive about what other people should do with their lives. But I think when people pleasing ends up rearing, it’s ugly head and the blister pops, I think this leads to the incredible aggression that comes from feeling like you need to stand your ground and be unwavering as an over compensation to completely bending over backwards for someone else, but I think the real happy medium is somewhere in between to no one surprise. What really needs to happen is more emphasis on boundaries and preventing that self sacrifice and sabotage, and this allows you to not overcompensate and be here compromising and change for a partner in the same way that any kind of compromise affects us. If I say something that hurts someone’s feeling I want to be accountable for that and I want to have enough of a sense of self and morality where I can believe. I’m still a good person and I can make mistakes and I want to be able to address that and make the other person feel heard and understood. I think when I do not have that strong sense of self, it becomes an all or nothing situation, and it’s almost unfathomable that a good person could do something bad. I think I’m grateful for my guilt in terms of at least giving me a strong, moral compass, because I’ve seen a good amount of people online resonate with the whole idea about I want to be a good person. I think there are always situations where I think wow that is a really kind thing that I haven’t considered, and I would like to be more mindful of that or things where I can be a nicer person or a kinder person, but I’ve never really thought about myself as an unkind person. I take a lot of cried in the fact that I have the resilience in hurtful situations to take the high road because if nothing else, I can at least not feel this guilt and shame of doing something that I don’t morally like.

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To be honest, being super busy every single day really helps you to be mentally stable.

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Life is strange.

You arrive with nothing, spend your whole life chasing everything, and still leave with nothing.

Make sure your soul gains more than your hand...

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Your memory feels like home to me so whenever my mind wanders, it always find its way back to you.

— Ranata Suzuki

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I find I must say weird stuff, or I’ll die.

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So maybe tomorrow I'll find my way home I’ll look around at a beautiful life Been the upperside of down Been the inside of out But we breathe, we breathe I wanna breeze and an open mind I wanna swim in the ocean Wanna take my time for me, all me

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We are no more than the stories we tell we are told or are told about us. — Oliver Jeffers.

Take this sinking boat and point it home.

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Don’t offer a lecture to a person who needs a hug.

we breathe, we breathe I wanna breeze and an open mind I wanna swim in the ocean

I'll find my way home So maybe tomorrow

May the calm in you win over the chaos around you.

Oh! If only I could take my own advice, the giant and the success I would be.

Your body still moves. Your mind still works. Your time is still yours. Your future has not completely closed its doors.

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We become furious over losing money, but surrender entire years to distraction, indecision, resentment, and things we never truly valued.

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If everything you offer is not enough, offer your absence.

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I never lied about being in a bad place, only that I was okay.

Sometimes the things we do are just things we do. But to others, it’s their whole world in a moment.

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15 miles to the love shack.

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We cannot be 'behind' in our chase of life, for we are each only running against ourselves.

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#quotes

A few weeks ago I filled out a Canadian government survey on generative AI in the arts. (The survery is still up as of this blog post, in case any Canadian readers want to fill it out.)

The survey was hilariously biased towards AI (questions are all like “What help does your organization need in order to adopt more AI?”), and by the time I got to the free text entry questions at the end I was pretty pissed off.

But one question, in amongst a list of questions about how your organization currently uses AI, was “Does your organization have an AI policy?” I initially clicked “no” to this along with all the other questions, but later on went back and changed it to “yes”, because I do have a clear gen-AI policy, although I hadn't written it down. My policy is that I don't use it.

So for the record:

I always try to say “Generative AI” rather than just “AI” when talking about ChatGPT and similar things. “Artificial Intelligence” is a broad, decades-old academic field, and also (as in Seedship and some of my other games) a science fiction conceit about “what if a computer could think like a person?” Generative AI is a sophisticated autocomplete that uses ecologically devastating amounts of power and water to create text and images that are statistically similar to text and images in its training data, which was scraped from the internet and from pirated book archives with no regard for copyright or consent. Calling it “AI” is a way of confusing people into thinking it's like a science fiction AI, which it is not. It's very often wrong; it's been shown to cause cognitive decline in regular users; and it's being used to put people out of work by bosses who think it can do workers' jobs.

When used in creative work, gen-AI's outputs are also soulless and artistically bankrupt. Gen-AI is good at text that seems OK when you skim-read it but has no deeper meaning, and images that look OK at first glance but fall down when you look at them closely. If someone's impressed by gen-AI output then I've got to assume they've never really thought about a piece of text or looked closely at an artwork.

I've seen some people online do things like get ChatGPT to play Seedship, or having it output stories or images based on their Seedship games. And, like, I can't stop people from doing that kind of thing, but I want it on record that I would prefer they didn't.

#SpaceGoblinGames #GenAI #Seedship

The Best Brood War Unit Part 4- Best of the Best

So, it looks like in total I have identified six five star units. The Zergling, The Mutalisk, The Defiler, The Vulture, The Siege Tank and The High Templar. Some would argue others like science vessels, arbiters, lurkers, etc. Mine were heavily based on my subjective opinion after having watching pros play, so take that as you will. I don't see arbiters as often as the others, and I see a lot of science vessels get killed so it's those sorts of things that pushed those down. I'm pretty happy with this list, but if I was going to make a change I'd consider the lurker, but since Zerg already has three tier five units that seems like overkill.

To now narrow it down to the best unit I'll do a series of head to head matchups until one remains. First, the siege tank vs the vulture. Both factory units, but there may only be one. Siege tanks are incredibly impressive in terms of fire power. They literally dictate the pace of games and the shape of the battlefield. When facing off against Terran, it's the opposing players overwhelming priority to just keep that tank count down as much as possible, otherwise they will be overwhelmed. BUT, big BUT here. A vulture only costs 75 minerals. A tank costs 150 minerals and 100 gas. A vulture is super fast at scouting, does decent damage and comes with three spider mines. Just as a value buy, I think the vulture edges out the siege tank. Late game though, siege tank is the GOAT, but looking at the game in its entirety I'm leaning vulture, just by a hair.

Now lets do mutalisks vs zerglings. Mutalisks are a nightmare in the hands of a player with strong micro. Their ability to maneuver, harass, glaive ricochet, etc makes them an exceptional choice against all three races. Zerg vs Zerg boils down to muta fights many times. Zerg vs Terran ends early if the Terran can't keep the mutalisks at bay. And in Zerg vs Protoss mutalisks are great for sniping high templar and other high value units. But, mutalisks have some major weaknesses. Corsairs, valkyries, psionic storm, etc. Also missile turrets are dirt cheap and can zone them out pretty well. Zerglings on the other hand are so cheap that anything that counters them doesn't really hard counter them because you can just make more. And zerglings scale better. Even in the extreme late game, zerglings are still incredibly dangerous, vs at that point mutalisks are more reserved for hunting down specific units, stopping dropships or just for suprise changes. Zerglings win.

Now lets do zerglings vs vultures. Vultures are incredible, but for the price of one you get three zerglings. I'd rather face a vulture and three spidermines than three cracklings any day. Vultures can't level your base in seconds. A group of cracklings absolutely can. Vultures deal concussive damage. Spider mines need to be triggered. Zerglings just need to... zergling. Zerglings win.

Now lets do defilers vs high templar. My initial gut instinct here is to go defiler. As mentioned before, dark swarm is straight up busted. That combined with consume giving limitless energy and plague also being an incredibly potent ability, they are power houses. However, defilers are a late game unit. High templar on the other hand, have utility earlier in the game. Their storms can kill, whereas plague can only get you down to one health. Also, when they are out of energy, they can merge into a heavy combat unit and keep fighting. I'm going to actually go out on a limb here and say high templar edge out defilers. Controversial, sure, but zerg could survive without defliers. I don't think protoss could survive without high templar, unless they were godly good with reavers. So basically Snow, that's it.

Now the finale, zerglings vs high templar. High templar have something zerglins do not, splash damage. Psionic storm can wipe out an entire army. A fully charged high templar can cast three storms, each dealing up to 112 damage. So lets say a storm captures 15 units. Thats 3 x 15 x 112 = 5040 damage. Now that is assuming incredibly accurate storms, so we will say 5000 is an upper limit. Many storms are whiffed, many high templar sniped. Most don't reach full energy before they need to engage. But still, extremely optimistic scenario. A high templar costs 200 resources. A zergling costs 25 resources. Fully upgraded, I think a zergling has a DPS of roughly 32. So 8 zerglings deal 256 damage per second. In 20 seconds they've greatly eclipsed the high templar. And that 5000 figure was wildly optimistic. This whole argument is a false equivalency I'm realizing. At the end of the day the high templar is a glass cannon caster that can be neutralized, vs zerglings are an endless swarm of dps machines. Zerglings can't attack up, but storms can be dodged and don't damage buildings. I'm leaning zergling here.

So zerglings, the cheapest unit in the game, are also the best. This mimics modern developments in warfare, where cheap drones are proving tactically and strategically superior to very expensive legacy weapon systems in many situations.

So there it is, the zergling is the best unit in the game.

The most revealing document about Alpha School is not its marketing or its investor list. It is a job posting. Reporting by Oklahoma Watch on 21 July 2026 established, from Alpha's own recruitment materials, that the adults employed at the school do not touch any curriculum and are not in the room when students are learning.

Read that again. It is the entire proposition compressed into a single clause. The school has staff, paid between 100,000 and 150,000 dollars a year, two to three times what a first-year public school teacher earns in Oklahoma. And it has designed the role so that the person holding it is somewhere else while the teaching happens.

On Wednesday 12 August 2026, campuses opened in Edmond and in Tulsa. As of 20 July, twenty-six students were enrolled at the Edmond site, branded as the Oklahoma City campus and running from kindergarten through tenth grade, and thirty-two at the Tulsa site, which covers kindergarten through eighth. Tuition is 40,000 dollars a year, discounted by 10,000 dollars for five years for the inaugural cohort. Oklahoma City's most expensive traditional independent school, Casady, charges 27,950 dollars for high school. Tulsa's Holland Hall charges 21,625 dollars. Edmond's Oklahoma Christian School charges 14,640 dollars.

So the claim that Alpha will cost nearly double the state's most expensive private school is not quite right against Casady, where the multiple is closer to one and a half. It is comfortably more than double against the nearest school in Edmond itself. Either way, Oklahoma now has its most expensive private school, and it is the only one in the state with no certified teachers, by design rather than by accident.

That inversion is the story. For a century, what wealthy parents bought when they bought private education was human attention: smaller classes, more contact time, teachers who knew the child's name and noticed when something was wrong. Alpha has taken the price point and removed the product. What remains is a proprietary adaptive platform called 2 Hour Learning, two hours of laptop work each morning with half an hour for each of mathematics, reading, science and social studies, an afternoon of life-skills workshops, and a monitoring system that photographs children when it decides they are not progressing.

What Forty Thousand Dollars Buys When It Does Not Buy a Teacher

Alpha School was founded in Austin in 2014 by MacKenzie Price, who holds a psychology degree from Stanford and is not a trained educator, and Brian Holtz. Its principal backer is Joe Liemandt, founder of Trilogy Software and ESW Capital, who has committed a reported billion dollars to the model. The hedge fund manager Bill Ackman has endorsed it publicly. Tuition across the network runs from around 10,000 dollars to 75,000 dollars a year, with most sites clustered near 40,000.

The corporate architecture matters more than the celebrity endorsements. The schools are nominally non-profit entities contracting for services with for-profit vendors, including 2 Hour Learning for the software, Trilogy Enterprises for financial services and Crossover for recruitment, all connected to the same principals. This is the structure the education writer Peter Greene has flagged repeatedly: non-profit schools buying services from for-profit companies owned by the same people. Tuition does not simply fund a school. It flows through a school into a software business.

As of late July the school had not secured a location in Tulsa, where thirty-two families had already committed. In mid-May it sent prospective parents a report, prepared with AI, setting out two candidate sites; one recipient noted that the report cited incorrect data. In Edmond, Alpha leased more than six thousand square feet of industrial space for the Oklahoma City campus, and when Oklahoma Watch visited, the building was barren and carried no Alpha signage. The failure mode that runs through the curriculum appears first in the sales material.

Expansion is aggressive and roughly triples the network. Oklahoma Watch reported twenty-eight new campuses opening this autumn. Alpha's own press release of 5 August 2026 says twenty-seven, listing sites including Denver, Palo Alto, Chicago, Nashville, Charlotte, Boston, Atlanta and Miami Beach. The discrepancy of one campus is trivial in itself and worth naming anyway, because precision is the currency in short supply throughout this story. As of April 2026 the network had thirteen locations. Either way, a chain of thirteen schools becomes a chain of about forty in a single admissions cycle.

There is also the question of who is allowed in. Alpha's Oklahoma applications warn that the school cannot serve students requiring intensive behavioural, therapeutic or one-to-one academic support, and require families to disclose individualised education programmes, 504 plans or behaviour plans, on pain of withdrawal. That exclusion is not a footnote. It is the load-bearing wall under every academic claim the network makes, and we will come back to it.

The Strongest Version of the Alpha Argument Deserves a Hearing

Treating this as pure grift would be lazy. The instincts underneath it are neither fringe nor new.

Start with the thing Alpha is right about. Age-cohort instruction, in which thirty children of roughly the same birth year move through the same material at the same speed regardless of whether any of them have understood it, is a nineteenth-century administrative convenience rather than a finding from learning science. A child who has not mastered fractions is moved on to decimals because the calendar says so. A child who mastered them in October spends until June bored. Everyone who has taught knows this, and the profession's own literature has said so for fifty years.

Mastery learning is the standard rebuttal, and it has an evidence base. Chen-Lin Kulik, James Kulik and Robert Bangert-Drowns published a meta-analysis of 108 controlled evaluations in the Review of Educational Research in 1990, finding positive effects on examination performance across colleges, secondary schools and the upper primary grades, with the strongest effects among weaker students. Alpha's insistence that progression follows demonstrated mastery rather than seat time is squarely within that tradition.

Then there is the tutoring argument. Benjamin Bloom's 1984 paper in Educational Researcher reported that students tutored one to one under mastery conditions performed two standard deviations above conventionally taught peers, the famous two sigma problem. Kurt VanLehn's 2011 review in Educational Psychologist found human tutoring at an effect size of 0.79 and intelligent tutoring systems at 0.76, close enough that the gap between a good machine tutor and a good human one looked, for a while, like a rounding error. If software approximates the tutor, and tutoring is the gold standard, the case for a personalised two-hour block writes itself.

The caveat belongs here rather than later, because it is the honest one. Bloom's two sigma has never been replicated at that magnitude. Andre Nickow, Philip Oreopoulos and Vincent Quan reviewed ninety-six randomised tutoring studies in 2020 and found an average effect of 0.37 standard deviations, with none reaching two sigma. The ceiling Alpha is selling was always a research artefact, not a benchmark.

The afternoon programme is also more thoughtful than the mockery suggests. Workshops have included sailing, programming toy cars and Navy SEAL style challenges. One San Francisco session sent middle schoolers to a Starbucks with preloaded cards, and a guide deliberately zeroed one student's balance to teach the management of disappointment. That is a slightly brutal piece of experiential design, but it is design, aimed at something real that conventional schools handle badly.

Finally, the labour argument. Guides earn 100,000 to 150,000 dollars. Oklahoma's state minimum for a certified teacher with a bachelor's degree and no experience was 39,601 dollars in 2025-26. The National Education Association put the national average starting salary at 48,112 dollars for 2024-25. A model paying adults who work with children three times the going rate is doing something the profession has demanded for decades, even if it removed the teaching from the job to afford it.

Where the Evidence Actually Stops

Now the dismantling, which is mostly a matter of asking who checked.

Alpha claims its students grow 2.6 times faster than peers on nationally normed NWEA MAP assessments, that the best perform at 6.5 times, and that students sit in the ninety-ninth percentile. Oklahoma Watch reported an average SAT score of 1545 out of 1600 and average Advanced Placement scores of 4.2 to 4.4. These are extraordinary numbers, and they rest entirely on internal analysis of the network's own MAP data. Independent researchers have not been able to reconstruct how the 2.6 figure was calculated. The underlying data, the methods, the student selection and the wider conditions have not been subjected to external review, and there is no peer-reviewed evaluation of the model.

Absence of verification is not proof of falsity. But consider selection. A school that charges 40,000 dollars a year, declines students with individualised education programmes and 504 plans, excludes those needing intensive behavioural or therapeutic support, and admits children whose parents will pay for an experiment, is not comparing like with like when it benchmarks against national norms. Every one of those filters pushes measured growth upward before a single line of code runs. The 2.6 multiple would need to survive adjustment for all of them, and nobody outside the company has been permitted to try.

Regulators who have looked have not been persuaded. In January 2025 the Pennsylvania Department of Education rejected a cyber charter application from Unbound Academy, the online sibling of the Alpha model, on the grounds that the instructional approach was untested and failed to demonstrate how its tools, methods and providers would align to Pennsylvania academic standards. The department also cited unrealistic enrolment projections and doubts about special education capacity. Arizona's State Board for Charter Schools approved the same operator in December 2024 by four votes to three, which tells you the confidence interval on expert opinion here is wide.

Then there is what the curriculum looks like from the inside. On 17 February 2026, Emanuel Maiberg published an investigation in 404 Media, based on leaked internal documents and interviews with former employees, reporting that Alpha's AI-generated lesson plans were poorly constructed and presented students with illogical multiple-choice questions, that internal documentation described lessons that sometimes did more harm than good, and that the company had scraped material from other online course providers to train its own system. Former employees said students frequently needed considerably more than two hours a day, and that many required remedial work before high school coursework. One described students as being treated like guinea pigs. The reporting also found large volumes of student data, including video of children, sitting in a Google Drive folder accessible to anyone holding the link.

Alpha's chief communications officer, Anna Davlantes, told Oklahoma Watch that the 404 Media and Wired stories relied on cherry-picked examples and sources who had been dismissed. The company disputes the scraping allegations and says it respects intellectual property. Both investigations sit behind paywalls this article could not read in full, and the specific hallucinated items and unsolvable questions are described rather than reproduced in the available secondary coverage. That caveat stands on the record. What is not in dispute is that the curriculum is machine-generated at scale and that no certified subject teacher reviews it before a child encounters it.

Who Decides When the Educator Is Deleted From the Allocation

The most useful analytical tool for this problem was published in April 2026 by Conrad Borchers, Olga Viberg and René Kizilcec, and accepted at the thirteenth ACM Conference on Learning at Scale. It is called “Who Decides in AI-Mediated Learning? The Agency Allocation Framework”.

Its central move is to stop treating learner agency as a mood or a proxy for engagement and treat it instead as an allocation problem. In the authors' words, the paper reframes learner agency as the allocation of decision authority across learners, educators, institutions, and AI systems. The framework asks four questions of any system: how decisions are distributed, how choices are architected, what evidence supports them, and over what time horizons their consequences unfold. Among the recurring difficulties the authors identify are reliance on behavioural proxies, the trade-off between efficiency and learner control, and the redistribution of agency through AI-mediated systems. They are careful to say the framework does not argue for more or less automation. It supports analysis of when AI scaffolds learners' capacity to act and when it substitutes for it.

Run Alpha through that grid and the picture is stark, because one of the four parties has been struck out.

Decisions about what a child studies, in what sequence, at what grain size and against what standard of mastery are made by the platform, a product of the institution, a set of interlocking companies owned by the same people. The learner's authority is real but narrow: they control pace within a path they did not choose, and the pace is policed. The educator's authority is nil, not partially delegated but structurally absent, because the guide does not touch curriculum and is not present during instruction. Where a conventional school distributes authority across four parties with different incentives and different information, Alpha collapses three into one vendor and deletes the fourth.

The evidence question is worse. What supports the platform's decisions about a particular child on a particular morning? Behavioural telemetry: keystrokes, mouse movement, time on task, screen patterns, eye tracking. These are precisely the proxies the paper warns about, and they are used not merely to study agency but to exercise it. The system infers understanding from clicking. A teacher infers it from a face.

The time horizon question is the one nobody at a start-up asks. The consequences of a mis-sequenced curriculum, or of an unsolvable question that teaches a nine-year-old that mathematics is arbitrary and that the failure is hers, do not surface within a quarter. They surface years later, in a subject abandoned, in a self-concept quietly revised downward. The framework's insistence on temporal consequence is the part a company measuring growth in MAP percentiles has no instrument to detect.

Nobody Is Left to Perform the Trust Calculus

The second paper used as a spine here needs a correction first. It has circulated as “Teachers' Perceived Benefits and Risks of AI Across Fifty Schools”. That is not its title. The paper at arXiv 2605.08486, submitted on 8 May 2026 by Yan Tao, Olga Viberg, Deepak Varuvel Dennison, Zhikun Wu and René Kizilcec, is “Teachers' Perceived Benefits and Risks of AI Across Fifty-Five Countries: An Audit of LLM Alignment and Steerability”. It studies fifty-five national school systems, not fifty schools. Getting that wrong would be a small error in a piece about a school that generates its own facts, which is reason enough to fix it in public.

Its opening sentence is the one that matters: teachers' trust in artificial intelligence in education depends on how they balance its perceived benefits and risks. The authors use OECD TALIS data across fifty-five countries and territories to measure cross-national variation in how teachers weigh those two things, then benchmark eight state-of-the-art large language models from four providers against that distribution. The models fail. They compress country differences, overestimate both benefits and risks, and show limited gains from identity prompting or enhanced reasoning. The authors' conclusion is a warning against treating model outputs as substitutes for direct engagement with teachers when informing global initiatives.

The finding is about policy consultation. Its relevance to Edmond is structural. The paper describes trust as a calculus, an ongoing act of professional judgment in which a person with domain expertise weighs what a tool gives against what it costs and decides how much authority to concede. That judgment is distributed across millions of classrooms, is sensitive to local context in ways the models cannot reproduce, and constitutes a real, if invisible, safety layer in every school system that has teachers.

At Alpha there is nobody to perform it. The guide is not qualified to evaluate a mathematics sequence and, by design, is not permitted to alter it. The parent has bought the product and cannot inspect it. Oklahoma has no jurisdiction over a private school's instructional method. The only party balancing risk against benefit is the vendor whose revenue depends on the answer, and the paper's finding that models systematically misestimate both sides of that ledger is not reassuring when the model is also the thing being assessed.

The Things a Teacher Does That Do Not Show Up in the Telemetry

Strip the argument down and the question is whether the functions of a teacher are separable, and whether the residue left after separation is worth anything. Alpha's implicit answer is that instruction is content delivery plus assessment, both of which software does faster, and that everything else is motivation, which is what guides are for. The research does not support the first half of that.

Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's 1998 review, published in Phi Delta Kappan as “Inside the Black Box”, identified more than forty studies showing effect sizes between 0.4 and 0.7 from strengthening formative assessment, with the largest gains among low-achieving students. Formative assessment is not testing. It is the continuous, mostly unrecorded practice of finding out what a learner currently believes and adjusting on the spot. Barak Rosenshine's 2012 synthesis in American Educator made the same point operationally: introduce material in small steps, check for understanding by questioning, provide models and scaffolds, monitor independent practice. Every one of those principles describes an adult who is present and paying attention.

The relational evidence is separate and at least as strong. Debora Roorda, Helma Koomen, Jantine Spilt and Frans Oort published a meta-analysis in the Review of Educational Research in 2011 covering ninety-nine studies, finding medium to large associations between the affective quality of teacher-student relationships and school engagement, and small to medium associations with achievement. John Hattie's synthesis of more than a thousand meta-analyses places those relationships among the higher-impact influences, with formative evaluation and teacher clarity higher still. Hattie's effect sizes have been criticised on methodological grounds and are not precision instruments, but the ranking is consistent with the underlying literature.

W. Ian O'Byrne, an associate professor of literacy education at the College of Charleston who has studied digital literacy for two decades, put the pedagogical objection cleanly in The Conversation on 15 June 2026: effective learning is not always efficient. He drew on Robert Bjork's work showing that the struggle to retrieve an answer before receiving it is what makes the knowledge stick, on Piaget's account of learning through the collision between expectation and outcome, and on Vygotsky's insistence that development is fundamentally social. Efficiency, in learning, is frequently the enemy. A system optimised to remove friction removes the thing that does the work.

This is where the anti-pattern detector reveals itself as a caricature of noticing. It fires when progress stops or screen behaviour looks unusual. It cannot distinguish a child who has given up from one thinking hard about something difficult, one who has spotted an error in the question, or one upset about something that happened at home. A teacher makes that distinction in about two seconds, from a face, and it determines everything they do next. The educational neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, quoted in a National Education Policy Center piece by Emily Cherkin and Denise Champney in February 2026, made the reductio explicit: if learning could truly be accelerated the way the marketing claims, students would finish the whole of school by the second grade.

Surveillance Is Doing the Work That Attention Used to Do

Since there is nobody in the room, the room has to be instrumented, and the instrumentation is the part with the clearest legal history.

Todd Feathers reported for Wired on 27 October 2025, in “Parents Fell in Love With Alpha School's Promise. Then They Wanted Out”, that the platform tracks screen activity, keystrokes, mouse movement and eye position, and uses those signals to flag anti-patterns. Monitoring extended into students' homes by default, and parents who objected had to opt out manually. In the incident that has come to define the story, a student sitting on her bed in pyjamas one evening doing schoolwork was flagged for an anti-pattern and sent a video of herself, captured by her own laptop webcam, as documentation of the violation. Oklahoma Watch summarised the same finding in July 2026, noting that Alpha's programming takes photographs of students when the software detects a lack of progress or unusual screen patterns.

There is settled American precedent for exactly this, and it is not favourable. In February 2010 the family of Blake Robbins, then a fifteen-year-old at Harriton High School, sued the Lower Merion School District in Pennsylvania after discovering that district-issued laptops could photograph students remotely. Discovery established that Robbins had been photographed roughly four hundred times in a fortnight, including while he slept in his bedroom, and that the district had captured thousands of webcam images and screenshots across the student body, defending the practice as a means of locating missing computers. In October 2010 it settled the Robbins and Hasan claims for 610,000 dollars.

The distinction Alpha would draw is consent. Parents agree to the terms; Lower Merion's families did not. That distinction is real and it is thin. The person photographed in her bedroom did not consent, was not the contracting party, and had no means of refusing. It is the same structural gap that runs through every children's technology market: the party who signs is not the party whose bedroom it is.

The legal position is worse than most parents will assume. The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act applies to institutions receiving funds administered by the US Department of Education. The overwhelming majority of private K-12 schools do not, and sit outside FERPA entirely. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act reaches operators of services directed to children under thirteen, and the Federal Trade Commission's school-authorisation route lets a school consent on parents' behalf, but only for school-authorised educational purposes and no unrelated commercial use. The Commission declined in its 2025 rulemaking to finalise the proposed ed-tech amendments, deferring to potential FERPA changes, leaving the school-consent question unsettled at precisely the moment it matters. State law has holes in the shape of this product: only Illinois, Texas and Washington have dedicated biometric statutes, only Illinois provides a private right of action, and eye tracking and keystroke dynamics sit awkwardly against definitions written for fingerprints and face scans.

Oklahoma has just legislated on this subject in a way that does not reach Alpha. Governor Kevin Stitt signed Senate Bill 1734, the Oklahoma Responsible Technology in Schools Act, on 12 May 2026, after it passed the Senate forty-two to nil and the House eighty-nine to nil. It prohibits artificial intelligence being used for instructional purposes except through educator-directed use, obliges teachers to review anything AI produces before it is used in the classroom, bars AI as the primary basis for grading, discipline or promotion, requires parental notification and opt-out, and mandates district AI policies. Unanimous in both chambers. Inapplicable to private schools. The state has written down what it believes about machines teaching children, and the school it most obviously describes is exempt.

The Profession Is Being Redefined by the Price Signal

The second half of the question is what this does to teaching as an occupation, and here the answer has less to do with any individual school than with the signal a price sends.

Alpha has performed an unbundling. The teacher's job, historically a single role, has been separated into curriculum design, which belongs to a software vendor; instruction, which belongs to a model; assessment, which belongs to a platform; and motivation and pastoral care, which belong to a guide who is paid extremely well, is deliberately recruited from unconventional backgrounds, requires only a bachelor's degree in any subject, passes a cognitive test and a background check, and trains for several months in Austin. Alpha's own materials describe teachers becoming guides, shifting from traditional roles to mentoring and motivating learners, focusing on emotional growth and life skills.

That is a coherent theory of labour. It is also, precisely, deprofessionalisation: the removal of discretion from a role while retaining responsibility for outcomes. The guide is accountable for a child's engagement and cannot alter anything that produces it. Wired's reporting described guides not permitted to help a stuck student, who instead had to schedule a meeting with an academic specialist, and found that twenty-seven of the thirty-one academic coaches listed for 2023-24 were remote workers in the Philippines and Colombia employed through Liemandt's other ventures rather than credentialed educators.

The context is a profession already under strain. The Learning Policy Institute's 2026 national scan estimated that across the fifty states and the District of Columbia, some 387,843 teachers were not fully certified for their assignments, and that in the twenty-nine states and the District of Columbia publishing vacancy data a further 37,569 positions were unfilled. The combined 425,412 is a floor rather than a total, and already amounts to around one in eight teaching posts. Attrition drives roughly ninety per cent of annual new-teacher demand, and nearly three-quarters of those who leave or move do so voluntarily for reasons other than retirement. Interest in teaching among American undergraduates has fallen to its lowest level in half a century.

Into that vacuum arrives a model paying three times the starting salary for a job requiring no certification. It is not hard to see which way recruitment flows, or what it does to the argument for spending four years and considerable money on a credential the sector's highest payers have declared unnecessary.

This is the point Oklahoma State Representative Cyndi Munson, a Democrat representing part of Oklahoma City, was making. “These types of schools and models that are being implemented are taking away the seriousness of what it takes to be a classroom teacher,” she told Oklahoma Watch. “It is very disturbing and should worry all of us.” Senator Regina Goodwin, a Tulsa Democrat, put concession and objection in the same breath: “I understand we have challenges with our public education. But the answer is not to just eliminate human involvement that is certified.” When Pennsylvania rejected the Unbound Academy application, the state education association's president, Aaron Chapin, said AI can help teachers but can never replace a teacher guiding a student's learning.

The prestige mechanism is what makes this more than a local dispute. American schooling has always taken its cues on quality from the top of the market. When the most expensive schools in the country announce that the certified teacher is an unnecessary cost centre, that judgment does not stay inside the buildings that can afford 40,000 dollars a year. It becomes available to every legislature looking at a shortage of 425,000 positions and a model that appears to solve it. Jami Cole, an Oklahoma educator with the group Edvocates, named the fear directly: that the next move is at public funds. Alpha was briefly listed on the Oklahoma Tax Commission's approved schools list for the Parental Choice Tax Credit and removed after Oklahoma Watch enquired, the company saying it had not applied. In Texas, education savings accounts begin flowing in the 2026-27 year, and accreditation by a body recognised by the Texas Private School Accreditation Commission, which includes Alpha's accreditor Cognia, is one of the gates.

What Cannot Be Run Twice

The defence of all this is that it is an experiment, and that experiments are how anything improves. The difficulty is the object of the experiment.

A software company can ship a broken build, read the telemetry, and ship a fix on Thursday. A child gets one pass at being seven. If the 2.6 multiple is a selection artefact, if the machine-generated curriculum has taught a cohort that questions sometimes have no answers and that the failure is theirs, if the anti-pattern detector has punished the children who think slowly and rewarded the ones who click quickly, the correction arrives after the exposure. There is no control group and no rerun, and the network is scaling from thirteen sites to about forty before the first independent evaluation exists anywhere.

The clearest admission in the whole enterprise is the admissions policy. A school confident that its personalised, mastery-based, infinitely patient tutor represents the future of learning has told applicants in Oklahoma that it cannot serve students with individualised education programmes, 504 plans or behaviour plans, or those needing intensive behavioural, therapeutic or one-to-one support. Those are, disproportionately, the children for whom differentiated instruction was invented and for whom personalisation should mean most. The model excludes them. A claim to have solved education that is conditioned on not admitting the students education finds hardest is not a claim about education at all.

Applying the Agency Allocation Framework honestly gives the sharpest formulation available. Alpha has not redistributed decision authority between learners, educators, institutions and AI systems. It has concentrated it. Curriculum, instruction, assessment, pacing, attention monitoring and the definition of acceptable behaviour now sit inside a single proprietary system owned by the same people who own the school, with the party who existed to hold that system to account removed from the room by contract. The trust calculus that Tao, Viberg, Varuvel Dennison, Wu and Kizilcec describe teachers performing across fifty-five countries is not being performed badly at Alpha. It is not being performed.

What is lost when the person responsible for a child's education is not a human being is not sentiment, and it is not the smell of chalk. It is a specific set of functions with a specific evidence base: the formative judgment that reads a face and revises the next sentence, the relational scaffold that makes a difficult subject survivable, and the professional scepticism that looks at a badly written question and says, ignore that one, it's wrong. That third function is the one Alpha has most conspicuously deleted, and the 404 Media reporting suggests it was the one most needed. A machine that produces unsolvable questions requires an adult who can recognise one.

Since Wednesday morning in Edmond, twenty-six children and in Tulsa thirty-two have been opening laptops. For two hours each day the most consequential decisions about what they learn, how fast, and whether they are trying hard enough are being made by a piece of software, watched by a camera, and reviewed by an adult who is somewhere else. Their parents have paid more for this than for any other school in the state. It is the first time in the history of American private education that the premium product has been defined by the absence of the thing the premium was always for.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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