Today

Sirens blared throughout the city. Some twenty floors below the ledge of our company building lay a man in a black suit—our uniform—on the pavement in a pool of blood.

And some twenty floors above him stood me, on the rooftop ledge, staring down from the spot that had served as his launch point.

I looked toward the horizon. The sky was clear, the sun already out. It would have been a good day.

He probably didn’t suffer long.

The wind moved past my back. I stepped away from the ledge and returned to the elevator.

It stopped and started. People came and went, as if nothing had happened—as if nothing was happening. It was like any other day. Someone would replace him.

I could not remember what he did. I thought I had seen him once at the printer.

I missed my floor and got off in the lobby. It was still early, but I felt finished with the day.

The train ride was crowded and quiet, packed with people staring into their phones or at their reflections in the windows. The sun was still out when I reached my stop, though the sky had begun to dim.

The company housing was only a few blocks from the station. It was the best part of the job. Restaurants and convenience stores were still open.

I had no appetite. I kept walking.

At my flat, I made a small cup of coffee and turned on the television.

Price hikes. Drone strikes. The usual.

I finished my coffee and wondered how many floors it would take.

Somewhere inside Amazon's sprawling corporate machine, a system called Clarity is watching. Not watching in the cinematic, red-blinking-eye sense, but in the quiet, spreadsheet-generating, dashboard-populating way that modern surveillance actually works. Clarity tracks which AI tools Amazon's developers use, how often they use them, and whether they are hitting the company's internal target: 80 per cent of developers using AI for coding at least once per week. Managers can see exactly who meets that benchmark. And who does not.

That data feeds directly into performance reviews, promotion evaluations, and career trajectory conversations. At Amazon, your relationship with artificial intelligence is no longer a matter of personal curiosity or professional preference. It is a metric. It is scored. And increasingly, it determines whether you move up, stay put, or find yourself on a performance improvement plan with the exits clearly marked.

Amazon is not alone. Across the corporate world, from Silicon Valley to the Big Four consulting firms, a new orthodoxy is taking hold: AI proficiency is no longer optional. It is the new literacy, the new typing speed, the new “must be proficient in Microsoft Office.” Except this time, the stakes are sharper, the surveillance more granular, and the consequences for non-compliance far more severe. Welcome to the era of the AI scorecard, where your career trajectory may depend less on what you know and more on how willing you are to let a machine help you do your job.

The Scorecard Economy

The shift did not happen overnight, but 2025 and early 2026 mark the inflection point when AI usage moved from encouraged to enforced. The companies leading this charge read like a who's who of global corporate power.

At Amazon, the performance review system known as Forte now integrates self-reported accomplishments with peer and supervisor feedback, producing an Overall Value (OV) score that influences raises, promotions, and the possibility of being placed on a performance improvement plan. The company recently mandated that its approximately 350,000 corporate employees provide detailed lists of their key accomplishments from the previous year. Managers use a three-tiered scale assessing how effectively employees demonstrate leadership principles alongside traditional measures of performance and potential. Matt Taddy, Amazon's Vice President overseeing supply chain optimisation technologies, framed the shift as a move away from measuring success by organisational growth, saying the company wants to “reward impact, execution, and individual productivity.” Within the Supply Chain Optimisation Technologies team, AI adoption is now a required evaluation category. Performance review questions ask employees how they used AI to drive innovation, improve operational efficiency, or enhance customer experience. Managers face even tougher scrutiny: they must show concrete examples of boosting results with AI without adding new hires.

Meta followed with its own declaration. Starting in 2026, “AI-driven impact” became a core expectation baked into every employee's performance review, regardless of role. Engineers, marketers, product managers, and designers are all evaluated on how effectively they use AI to deliver results. Janelle Gale, Meta's Head of People, communicated the change in an internal memo, underscoring CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of transforming Meta into an “AI-native” company where proficiency in artificial intelligence is essential for career progression. The company's biannual review platform, Checkpoint, now reassesses employee performance twice yearly rather than once, with AI-driven impact woven into each cycle.

Meta has even gamified the transition. An internal programme called “Level Up” rewards employees with badges as they hit milestones in AI tool experimentation, tracking their progress through dashboards that visualise adoption rates across teams. The company rolled out an AI Performance Assistant tool integrating its internal bot Metamate and Google's Gemini, giving employees multiple AI engines for review preparation. Some employees have already begun using Metamate to draft the very content used in the reviews themselves, a recursive loop that feels distinctly like the future eating its own tail. Meta has also indicated it will provide additional training resources for employees struggling to adapt, and has dangled performance bonuses amounting to up to 300 per cent of base pay for top performers.

Then there is Accenture, which took arguably the most direct approach. The Dublin-based consulting giant began collecting data on weekly logins to its AI platforms from senior staff and sent an internal email to managers and associate directors making it clear: moving into leadership requires “regular adoption” of artificial intelligence. Documents seen by the Financial Times confirmed that weekly login activity is being tracked on platforms including AI Refinery, Accenture's internal AI platform that CEO Julie Sweet has been heavily promoting to investors. Sweet herself warned last September that the company would be “exiting” staffers who could not be retrained, after the firm had already trained 550,000 of its roughly 780,000 employees to use generative AI. Investors, notably, reacted negatively to the aggressive AI adoption push, with Accenture's share price sliding following the policy announcements.

KPMG joined the movement too. Bloomberg reported that from 2026, the Big Four company would assess employees on how well they have met AI objectives during annual performance reviews. The firm had already been tracking how its workers handled AI data from tools like Microsoft Copilot. As Niale Cleobury, KPMG's global AI workforce lead, explained, the monitoring extends across the entire organisation, from senior partners to junior staff. Samantha Gloede, KPMG's global head of risk services, framed it as practical rather than punitive: “Monitoring is not for policing's sake. We need to make sure that all staff are using these tools because that is the best way to do the jobs.”

Even Microsoft, the company that arguably did more than any other to mainstream generative AI through its partnership with OpenAI, turned the lens inward. In June 2025, the company told employees that “using AI is no longer optional.” Managers were asked to include AI usage in performance reviews, and CEO Satya Nadella reportedly warned executives to leave if they did not support the company's AI plans. The message was unmistakable: if the company that built Copilot expects its own workforce to use AI or face consequences, every other company in the world is watching and taking notes.

The Numbers Behind the Pressure

The corporate urgency around AI adoption collides with a stubborn reality: most workers still are not using it.

Gallup's Q4 2025 workforce survey, published in January 2026, found that only 26 per cent of U.S. workers use AI at least a few times per week, while nearly half (49 per cent) report never using AI in their role at all. Daily usage sits at just 12 per cent, up from 10 per cent earlier in the year. The technology sector leads with 77 per cent total AI usage (31 per cent daily), but retail languishes at 33 per cent total adoption. Only 9 per cent of employees reported feeling “very comfortable” using AI tools, and just a quarter said their employer had clearly communicated how AI is supposed to be used in their work. Organisational AI adoption has not changed meaningfully either: only 38 per cent of employees said their organisation had integrated AI technology to improve productivity, while 41 per cent reported their employers had not integrated AI at all, and 21 per cent were unsure.

The divide between remote-capable and non-remote roles is also widening. Since the second quarter of 2023, total AI use among employees in remote-capable roles has increased from 28 per cent to 66 per cent, while frequent use has risen from 13 per cent to 40 per cent. Growth has been far slower in roles that are not remote-capable: AI use in those positions has increased from 15 per cent to just 32 per cent. Leadership also skews the numbers. In Q4 2025, 69 per cent of leaders said they use AI at least a few times a year, compared with 55 per cent of managers and only 40 per cent of individual contributors. The people most likely to set AI adoption policies are also the people most likely to already be using AI, creating a perception gap that colours every mandate they issue.

The gap between leadership enthusiasm and employee reality is equally stark at the strategic level. McKinsey's January 2025 “Superagency in the Workplace” report, based on surveys of 3,613 employees and 238 C-suite leaders, found that C-suite executives estimated only 4 per cent of employees use generative AI for at least 30 per cent of their daily work, when the real number was closer to 13 per cent. While only 20 per cent of C-suite leaders predicted employees would reach that level within a year, 47 per cent of employees said they already had or soon would. The report's bluntest finding: “The biggest barrier to scaling is not employees, who are ready to incorporate AI into their jobs, but leaders, who are not steering fast enough.”

Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index, conducted in partnership with LinkedIn and drawing on insights from 31,000 professionals across 31 countries, introduced the concept of the “Frontier Firm”: organisations with comprehensive AI deployment, high scores on a six-part AI Maturity Index, and active use of AI agents. The findings painted a compelling picture of divergence. At Frontier Firms, 71 per cent of workers reported their company was thriving (compared with 37 per cent globally), 55 per cent said they could take on more work (versus 20 per cent globally), and only 21 per cent feared AI would take their jobs (versus 38 per cent globally). The report also introduced the concept of the “Agent Boss,” describing a shift where employees build, delegate to, and manage AI tools to enhance productivity. Eighty-two per cent of leaders said 2025 was a pivotal year to rethink key aspects of strategy and operations, and 81 per cent expected agents to be moderately or extensively integrated into their company's AI strategy within 12 to 18 months.

PwC's 2025 Global AI Jobs Barometer, analysing close to a billion job advertisements from six continents, added another dimension. Productivity growth in industries most exposed to AI had nearly quadrupled since 2022, rising from 7 per cent to 27 per cent. Jobs requiring AI skills offered a wage premium averaging 56 per cent, up from 25 per cent the year before. AI-exposed jobs were growing 3.5 times faster than all other occupations. The skills sought by employers were changing 66 per cent faster in AI-exposed occupations, up from 25 per cent the previous year. Perhaps most strikingly, jobs were growing in virtually every type of AI-exposed occupation, including highly automatable ones, suggesting that the story is more nuanced than a simple narrative of replacement.

These numbers create a powerful narrative for corporate leaders: AI adoption correlates with productivity, wage growth, and competitive advantage. But correlation is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence, and the gap between a macro-economic trend and an individual employee's daily reality remains wide.

When the Score Becomes the Job

The most unsettling aspect of AI usage tracking is not that companies want employees to use new tools. Every technological transition involves some degree of mandated adoption. Organisations once required employees to learn email, to use enterprise software, to embrace cloud computing. What makes the current moment different is the granularity of the surveillance, the speed of enforcement, and the coupling of tool usage with career survival during a period of mass redundancies.

Consider the timing at Amazon. The company's intensified AI monitoring coincided with its largest workforce reduction in 30 years. Amazon cut approximately 14,000 jobs in October 2025, followed by an additional 16,000 in early 2026, bringing the total to roughly 30,000 positions eliminated, the largest in the company's 30-year history. These cuts represented nearly 10 per cent of its 350,000 corporate and technical workforce. CEO Andy Jassy framed the layoffs as a push to reduce bureaucracy and stay nimble, and said on the third-quarter earnings call that Amazon's rapid growth over the past decade had led to extra layers of management that slowed decision-making. Jassy also stated that efficiency gains from AI would “likely cause Amazon's corporate head count to fall in the coming years.” He noted: “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.” Meanwhile, the company announced capital expenditures expected to reach $125 billion for 2026, the highest spending forecast among the megacap companies, with much of that investment directed toward AI infrastructure.

Amazon's broader surveillance apparatus provides context for the AI tracking. The company had already introduced a manager dashboard aggregating employee attendance frequency, time spent in the office, and building locations in eight-week increments as part of its strengthened return-to-office policy. Those averaging less than four hours of daily office time are labelled “Low-Time Badgers,” while those with no building access records are classified as “Zero Badgers.” In the warehouse side of the business, the Associate Development and Performance Tracker (ADAPT) system monitors each worker's productivity in real time, tracking gaps in activity and issuing warnings for unexplained breaks, with automatic termination for unreasonable breaks of two hours or longer. The Clarity system for AI tracking, then, is not an isolated experiment. It is the latest extension of a corporate culture that has long believed in the power of measurement.

When AI usage becomes a performance metric in the wake of mass layoffs, the implicit message is impossible to miss: prove you can work with the machine, or you might be the next one replaced by it. Employees inside Amazon have confirmed that the pressure is real. Reports from inside the company describe a culture where “falling behind on AI means falling behind,” with staff interpreting the timing of AI adoption mandates alongside restructuring as a signal that leaner workforce structures are the goal.

The frustration runs deeper than mere anxiety. Some Amazon developers have expressed anger that the company prioritises its in-house AI coding assistant, Kiro, over external models like Anthropic's Claude Code. While Amazon sells access to Claude through its cloud business, internal staff are reportedly encouraged to rely on company-developed tools, particularly when AI usage metrics influence performance reviews. Critics argue that limiting tool choice undermines developer autonomy and could hurt productivity if employees are forced to use systems they consider less capable.

This tension surfaced dramatically when Kiro itself caused problems. In December 2025, engineers allowed the agentic coding tool to make changes that sparked a 13-hour disruption to Amazon Web Services. The AI had decided to “delete and recreate the environment.” It was the second AI-caused incident in months, raising questions about whether the pressure to use internal AI tools might be creating risks rather than mitigating them.

The Autonomy Problem

The research on workplace surveillance is unambiguous about its effects on human behaviour and well-being, and the findings are not encouraging for the AI-scoring model.

A policy primer published in the journal PLOS ONE, examining AI worker surveillance and productivity scoring tools, found that pervasive monitoring reduces worker autonomy, increases stress, and raises the risk of psychological harm. The authors noted that surveillance “works to discipline workers to conform to expected behaviour which can be measured,” and that when workers' autonomy and agency are reduced, so is their capacity for creativity. The paper argued that “the organisation sends a message to its workers simply by the tasks it chooses to monitor,” a point that lands with particular force when the monitored task is AI usage itself. By choosing to track how often someone logs into an AI platform, rather than the quality of the work that platform produces, companies are signalling what they truly value: compliance over competence.

The European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) has been equally pointed. In its analysis of AI in the workplace, the ETUC warned that AI-driven automation may cause, without appropriate regulations, “job displacement, deskilling, and precarious employment, threatening wages and job autonomy.” The confederation called for trade unions to be empowered to negotiate AI deployment strategies that enhance job quality and productivity while ensuring fairness, worker autonomy, and collective decision-making.

The UC Berkeley Labor Center's research on data and algorithms at work reinforced these concerns. Their analysis found that integration of AI and algorithmic management tools is changing the experience of work across different sectors, with increasing employer capacity to surveil and collect data on workers leading to a growing number of unfair labour practice charges and worker complaints. The report noted that the “almost complete lack of regulation means there are strong incentives for employers to use digital technologies at will, in ways that can harm workers.” Developers are largely free to sell untested systems, the researchers warned, exacerbating harms that “can take the form of work intensification, deskilling, hazardous conditions, loss of autonomy and privacy, discrimination, and suppression of the right to organise.”

There is a deeper philosophical tension here. The entire premise of AI in the workplace is that it should augment human capability, freeing people to do more creative, strategic, and meaningful work. But when AI usage itself becomes the metric, the tool stops being a means to an end and becomes an end in itself. Employees are not being evaluated on the quality of their output or the creativity of their solutions. They are being evaluated on how frequently they log into a platform. The distinction matters enormously. A developer who writes elegant, efficient code without AI assistance is, under these systems, rated lower than a developer who produces mediocre work while dutifully clicking through an AI dashboard.

The confidence dimension matters too. Research has shown that confidence in AI varies significantly across demographics. Baby boomer confidence in AI has dropped 35 per cent, while Generation X confidence fell 25 per cent, according to survey data referenced in reporting on Accenture's policy. The workers most likely to be penalised by AI adoption mandates are precisely those with the most experience and institutional knowledge.

The Legislative Scramble

Legislators are beginning to notice, though the regulatory response remains fragmented and, in many cases, several steps behind the corporate reality.

In the United States, a patchwork of state and federal proposals is taking shape. In Michigan, State Representative Penelope Tsernoglou introduced a bill that would regulate companies' use of artificial intelligence to monitor employees, requiring notification when tracking occurs and limiting certain forms of data gathering. California lawmakers are considering multiple bills, including AB 1883 on workplace surveillance tools and SB 947 on worker protections regarding AI and automated decision systems. Rhode Island's H 7767 proposes a comprehensive statutory framework addressing AI in the workplace, while New York's A 10251 would limit the use of automated decision systems in connection with employment.

At the federal level, the bipartisan AI-Related Job Impacts Clarity Act, introduced by Senators Josh Hawley and Mark Warner, would require certain companies to regularly report on personnel decisions affected by AI. The No Robot Bosses Act, introduced by Senators Bob Casey and Brian Schatz, would prohibit employers from solely using automated decision systems to make employment-related decisions and would require regular testing for discrimination and biases. Casey and Schatz also joined Senator Cory Booker in introducing the Exploitative Workplace Surveillance and Technologies Task Force Act, which would create a task force to study the use and impact of automated decision systems and workplace surveillance.

In Europe, the situation is more advanced but still contested. The ETUC strongly condemned the European Commission's February 2025 decision to withdraw the AI Liability Directive, arguing that without clear liability rules, workers affected by AI-driven decisions would face greater difficulty seeking redress. Colorado's Artificial Intelligence Act, delayed until mid-2026, introduces a risk-based framework in which employment-related AI systems are classified as “high risk,” and it is widely viewed as a bellwether for other states considering similar approaches.

The International AI Safety Report 2026 noted that AI systems can negatively impact human autonomy in several ways, including effects on cognitive skills, how humans develop beliefs and preferences, and how they make and act on decisions. Around 60 per cent of jobs in advanced economies and 40 per cent in emerging economies are exposed to general-purpose AI, though the report stressed that the impacts will depend on how AI capabilities develop, how quickly workers and firms adopt AI, and how institutions respond.

Notably, staff in 12 European countries are exempt from Accenture's policy of factoring AI usage into promotions, as are employees working on U.S. federal government contracts and some specific joint ventures. The geographic variation highlights an uncomfortable reality: the degree to which your AI usage can be tracked and used against you depends in part on where you happen to work and which jurisdiction's labour laws apply.

The Training Gap That Nobody Wants to Talk About

If companies are going to grade employees on AI proficiency, the logical prerequisite is ensuring those employees actually know how to use AI effectively. The data suggests this is not happening at anywhere near the required scale.

McKinsey's “Superagency” report found that 48 per cent of employees ranked training as the most important factor for AI adoption, but nearly half reported receiving minimal or no training. More than a fifth of employees reported receiving minimal to no support whatsoever. The disconnect is striking: organisations are building scoring systems for a competency they have not adequately taught.

Gallup's data reinforced the point. Only 25 per cent of workers said their employer had clearly communicated how AI was supposed to be used in their work. Just 30 per cent reported that their manager provides support for AI usage, yet employees who strongly agreed their manager supported AI use were more than twice as likely to use it frequently. Gallup argued that the growing divide between AI users and non-users points to a “use-case problem,” noting that “lack of utility is the most common barrier to individual AI use.” The issue, in other words, is not that workers are stubborn. It is that many simply have not been shown how AI is relevant to the specific work they do every day.

The McKinsey report identified four employee attitude archetypes toward AI: Bloomers (39 per cent, AI optimists who want to collaborate with companies on responsible solutions), Gloomers (37 per cent, more sceptical and wanting extensive top-down regulation), Zoomers (20 per cent, wanting rapid deployment with few guardrails), and Doomers (4 per cent, fundamentally negative about AI). Even among the sceptics, familiarity was high: 94 per cent of Gloomers and 71 per cent of Doomers reported some familiarity with generative AI tools, and approximately 80 per cent of Gloomers said they were comfortable using generative AI at work. Interestingly, employees outside the United States appeared more encouraged to use AI tools by their organisations. Respondents in India, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom were all more likely than those in the U.S. to report being encouraged by managers, C-suite leaders, and peers to adopt AI.

The problem is not resistance. The problem is infrastructure. When nearly half your workforce reports receiving minimal or no training, and then you tie their career prospects to AI usage metrics, you have not created a meritocracy of machine collaboration. You have created a system that rewards those with prior advantages (technical backgrounds, access to better tools, supportive managers) and penalises those without them.

The gender dimension adds another layer. PwC's AI Jobs Barometer found that in every country analysed, more women than men work in AI-exposed roles, suggesting the skills pressure facing women will be disproportionately higher. If training is inadequate and AI proficiency becomes a promotion criterion, the risks of widening existing workplace inequalities are substantial. The barometer also found that job cuts were more pronounced in larger corporations, affecting mostly entry-level employees. Smaller companies with fewer than 49 employees showed the highest staff retention with a 4 per cent net gain in positions, while larger firms with 501 to 1,000 employees cut 15 per cent of positions.

The Productivity Paradox

There is a final, uncomfortable question that hovers over the entire AI-scoring movement: does mandating AI usage actually improve outcomes?

The evidence is mixed. PwC's data on macro-level productivity gains is compelling, showing industries most exposed to AI experiencing nearly four times the productivity growth of less-exposed industries. Morgan Stanley's survey found productivity increased 11.5 per cent on average across regions and industries. But these aggregate numbers obscure enormous variation at the individual and organisational level.

A survey of 6,000 executives, referenced in reporting on Amazon's internal debates, found that over 80 per cent of companies reported no measurable productivity gains from AI despite billions in investment. McKinsey's report noted that 92 per cent of companies plan to increase AI investments, yet only 1 per cent of leaders describe their companies as “mature” in AI deployment, meaning AI is fully integrated into workflows and drives substantial business outcomes. Forty-seven per cent of C-suite executives surveyed said their organisations were moving too slowly, while 45 per cent felt they were moving at roughly the right pace. The gap between aspiration and achievement is vast.

Some Accenture employees have offered particularly blunt assessments of the tools they are being graded on, calling them unreliable “broken slop generators.” When the tools themselves are imperfect, tracking whether employees use them tells you something about compliance but very little about competence, creativity, or genuine productivity. The security dimension compounds the problem: Worklytics data shows that 57 per cent of employees are pasting sensitive company data into public AI tools, creating unprecedented compliance and data protection risks. Monitoring AI adoption without controlling how AI is used can introduce as many problems as it solves.

Amazon's own experience with Kiro illustrates the risk. The tool caused multiple AWS outages, yet the company continues to push developers toward it and away from potentially more capable external alternatives. The metric, in this case, appears to be serving corporate strategy (promoting internal products, reducing dependency on competitors) rather than employee effectiveness.

This creates a perverse dynamic. If AI tools are genuinely useful, employees will adopt them without coercion because useful tools tend to spread organically. If the tools are not yet useful enough to drive voluntary adoption, forcing employees to use them and then grading them on usage frequency does not make the tools better. It simply creates a compliance regime dressed up as innovation.

What Comes Next

The trajectory is clear, even if the destination remains uncertain. More companies will track AI usage. More performance reviews will include AI proficiency metrics. More promotions will hinge on demonstrated machine collaboration. The question is whether this transition will be managed with the nuance and investment it requires, or whether it will become another blunt instrument of corporate control.

Microsoft's “Frontier Firm” research offers one version of the optimistic case. At companies that have truly integrated AI into their operations, workers report higher satisfaction, more meaningful work, less fear of job displacement, and greater capacity to take on new challenges. The key distinction is between companies that have built genuine AI maturity, including training, clear communication, appropriate tooling, and supportive management, versus companies that have simply added an AI usage checkbox to the performance review form.

The McKinsey report's central insight bears repeating: the biggest barrier to AI's potential is not employee resistance but leadership failure. When 92 per cent of companies plan to increase AI investments but only 1 per cent have achieved meaningful integration, the problem is clearly not that workers refuse to adapt. The problem is that organisations have not created the conditions for successful adaptation. As the report put it, “the issue is not a technological one, but one of governance.”

For individual workers, the immediate calculus is straightforward. Learn to use AI tools. Document your usage. Highlight AI-driven accomplishments in self-reviews. The career risk of being perceived as an AI laggard is real and growing. But the longer-term question, the one that should concern everyone from boardrooms to legislative chambers, is whether we are building a workplace culture that uses AI to genuinely empower human capability, or one that simply measures obedience to a new set of digital overseers.

Nearly half of U.S. workers have never used AI in their jobs. Nearly half report receiving minimal or no training. And yet the companies at the top of the global economy are now tying promotions, bonuses, and job security to AI adoption metrics. The gap between expectation and preparation is not a detail. It is the defining feature of this moment.

The machines are not coming for your job. But the scorecard tracking how well you collaborate with them just might.

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29. CNBC. “Amazon upheaval: Andy Jassy looks for next big play after mass layoffs.” 5 November 2025. https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/05/amazon-upheaval-andy-jassy-looks-for-next-big-play-after-mass-layoffs.html

30. Worklytics. “Measuring AI Adoption on Your Team: 5 New KPIs for the 2025 Manager Scorecard.” 2025. https://www.worklytics.co/resources/measuring-ai-adoption-team-5-new-kpis-2025-manager-scorecard

31. International AI Safety Report 2026. American Society for Industrial Security. https://www.asisonline.org/security-management-magazine/latest-news/today-in-security/2026/february/2026-international-safety-report/

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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

• How does it feel like?
• Hm. Like I’m silently howling to the moon.
• And where do you feel it?
• Warm in my chest.
• Something else?
• Especially when I wake up in the morning. I like to put my hands in the middle of my chest and feel my heartbeats and think about things that I am thankful for. But there’s this sadness there too.
• I can see how your voice changed now describing it
• Yes, because I’m saying the truth
• How important for you is being able to say it?
• Means a lot to me.
• I can see it. Do you feel like you couldn’t before?
• I feel like it wouldn’t matter because I wouldn’t be heard anyway…
• Is this a recurring feeling you have?
• Yes
• And what would you say if you could say something?
• I don’t know. I just know it would feel like trying to describe water to a fish that has never known life outside it, but cannot understand it either.
• This must be overwhelming..
• For the other it must be. For me it’s just frustrating.
• And how do you normally deal with it?
• I write down silly things not related, or I play the piano. Sometimes I paint stuff..
• Does it help?
• I don’t know, it distracts
• But you still haven’t told me what would you say if you could say something.
• I think I wouldn’t.
• Nothing?
• No, I’d just share space, silence
• Would that make you feel better?
• Yes

/mar26

The book I finished earlier jumped straight from Sad Murder to Depressing As Fuck Murder. The main character has very very quietly snapped. She goes to work, she buys groceries, she cooks for herself and her younger sister who’s an heroin addict. And she’s been lowkey, systemically killing men who resemble the man who fucked up their lives as a kid.

I don’t know wheter it was the first time she pops over to her sister’s house (they live across the street from each other, the younger sister lives in the house they grew up in, which is full of awful traumatic memories, naturally) but somewhere early on, I knew the younger sister was dead, and the older one was clearly just denying it as hard as she could.

It would have been nice to have houses opposite each other. That, or the apartments in the same building or sharing a house, all the plans we made.

I didn’t keep you after your death. I suppose I could have tried, but that works better with a house you own, or at least an attic, and we didn’t have those. So when I found you, and you were so still, and still warm, and I hated that, I called E. I called Dad, I ran down and got B and her parents. I functioned.

After I had moved you, in the hopes that you were just fucking out of it, like I could wake you back up.

it didn’t work.

I am functional, for the most part. I go to work, I keep my job and I got another lovely review from my manager a few weeks ago.

I don’t know what to do with the fact that I can walk around like this and say things to people and act nice, and sound okay. I should have laid down on the floor and held you and wasted away from grief. Because what is this? Every day, day after day, nonfuckingstop. It was light outside when I got off work this evening, and still light as I walked home. It’s so nice, and I enjoy that even if I’m not okay with the weather getting warmer. Apart from the physical discomfort, the warmth means spring, and spring fades all too soon into summer. And then we’re back to August again.

And now I am changing, becoming something else A creature of longing, tending only to myself Licking my wounds Burrowing down in a house in the woods on the edge of town Well healing is slow It comes and it goes A glimpse of the sun then a flurry of snow The first green shoots and a sudden frost Oh something is gained when something is lost

The rot and the ruin The earth and the worms The seasons change The world turns The world turns

• Florence & the Marchine

I miss you, Eames.

In Summary: * This day has been about doing yard work and listening to basketball. I was so wiped out yesterday from working with those branches in the front yard that I resolved to take a day or two totally away from that chore. Well... I almost held to that thought. I did spend about 45 minutes picking up branches and stuffing them into the green bin after the city collected its contents earlier this morning. Didn't overly tire me, and it does look better out there now.

Listening to a game this afternoon from the NCAA men's basketball tournament was both relaxing and entertaining. Tonight I've got a San Antonio Spurs Game to listen to, and I expect this NBA game to be relaxing (because I'll be following it on the radio) and entertaining, too. All told, this has been one of the good Thursdays.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 227.52 lbs. * bp= 153/91 (63)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:30 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 08:45 – crispy oatmeal cookies * 10:00 – fried chicken * 10:20 – 1 fresh apple * 12:30 – bowl of lugau * 14:30 – crackers and cream cheese

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:00 – listen to local news talk radio * 05:00 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, yard work * 12:10 to 13:50 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:20 – finally listening to pregame for my game between North Dakota St. and Michigan St. * 18:00 – After Michigan St. won their game against North Dakota St., I've tuned into San Antonio Spurs Pregame Coverage ahead of their game tonight vs. the Phoenix Suns. Go Spurs Go!

Chess: * 11:25 – moved in all pending CC games

There are moments in history that feel too large to belong to one person. They seem to carry the weight of generations inside them. They do not just alter a life. They bend the future. They move through time like a crack of thunder that never really stops echoing. Christianity has one of those moments, and it did not begin in a temple filled with worship. It did not begin with a sermon. It did not begin with a crowd cheering because something beautiful was obviously unfolding. It began in tension. It began in rage. It began in the heart of a man who believed with all the fire in him that he was on God’s side, even while he was standing against the very work of God.

That is part of what makes this story so unsettling and so powerful. Evil is easy to identify when it arrives wearing cruelty openly on its face. We expect darkness to look dark. We expect rebellion to sound rebellious. But some of the most dangerous moments in human history have happened when a person was deeply convinced they were righteous while resisting the mercy of Heaven. That is where this story begins. It begins with a man of discipline, intelligence, and conviction. It begins with someone who was not careless, shallow, or drifting through life without purpose. He was sharp. He was serious. He was devoted. He was the kind of man who knew how to study, how to argue, how to defend what he believed, and how to act with total commitment once he decided what was true. He did not live half-heartedly. He did not move timidly. He burned with certainty, and that certainty made him dangerous.

He loved the faith of his ancestors. He loved the law. He loved the traditions that had formed his people. He loved what he believed was holiness. He could see the world in strong lines. Some things were clean. Some things were corrupt. Some things protected what was sacred. Some things threatened it. When the followers of Jesus began to spread their message, he did not see them as harmless seekers trying to find hope. He saw them as a threat. He saw them as a distortion. He saw them as a dangerous infection that would spread if no one strong enough stood up and stopped it. In his mind, he was not waging a personal vendetta. He was defending truth. He was protecting the covenant people. He was preserving what mattered most.

That is the frightening thing about religious certainty when it has no tenderness in it. A person can become merciless while calling it faithfulness. A person can wound the innocent while claiming to serve God. A person can confuse aggression with courage and hardness with holiness. This man did not think he was lost. He thought he was necessary. He thought Heaven must surely approve of his zeal because he was not acting for pleasure, money, or fame. He was acting because he believed the name of Jesus had become a threat to everything sacred. He heard stories of this crucified teacher being called Messiah. He heard the whispers that He had risen. He heard men and women speaking boldly in streets and homes, declaring that forgiveness, salvation, and the kingdom of God had come through the One many leaders had rejected. He heard people proclaim that this Jesus of Nazareth was alive and reigning. To him, this was not only wrong. It was intolerable.

The early followers of Jesus were not safe. We can read the pages of Scripture too quickly and forget the trembling that must have lived in ordinary bodies. These were not abstract events to the people inside them. They were real mornings, real footsteps, real knocks at the door, real mothers wondering if their sons would return home, real fathers scanning the street, real believers gathering quietly because they did not know whether this next meeting would be interrupted by force. The message of Christ was spreading, but it was spreading under pressure. Courage was required even to speak His name in certain places. The cost of discipleship was not theoretical. It had blood in it. It had grief in it. It had risk attached to every act of devotion.

And somewhere in the middle of that storm stood this unnamed force of opposition, relentless and brilliant. He was not drifting on the edge of the conflict. He was driving into the center of it. He approved of the crushing of believers. He participated in the machinery of fear. He did not mind if families were shattered in the process. He did not pause long enough to wonder whether tears mattered when doctrine was on the line. He believed the movement had to be broken before it spread further, and he was willing to become the instrument that helped break it. When some men raised their voices against the followers of Jesus, this man raised his life. He moved from opinion into action. He hunted. He pursued. He made himself a problem for anyone who dared to confess Christ.

There is a kind of person the world instinctively makes room for because they are so sure of themselves. Their certainty has force. Even those who fear them often step aside and let them pass because resistance feels costly. This man carried that kind of presence. He knew where he stood. He knew what he wanted. He knew how to justify it. There are people who do harm because they are unstable and impulsive. There are others who do harm because their conviction has become colder than compassion. That second kind can be harder to stop because they appear disciplined. They seem principled. They can even look noble to those who share their assumptions. But principle without surrender to God can become one of the sharpest weapons in the hands of human pride. A person can learn sacred language and still be untouched by sacred love.

The tragedy is that he likely believed he was close to God while moving farther from Him with every step. That possibility should humble every one of us. It is easy to listen to this story and cast ourselves immediately among the innocent, the faithful, and the misunderstood. It is harder to ask whether there are places in our own lives where certainty has made us unteachable. It is harder to ask whether we have ever defended our own position more fiercely than we have sought the actual heart of God. It is harder to ask whether we have ever mistaken being intense for being right. This story is not only about one man on one road in one ancient hour. It is also about the danger of building an identity around being correct while remaining inwardly closed to the voice of God.

He was the kind of scholar people respected. He was trained. He was formed in a serious tradition. He knew texts. He knew arguments. He knew how to hold a position and defend it with rigor. He was not a fool. He was not spiritually lazy. He had given himself to a system of belief and practice that demanded discipline, and he had become formidable inside it. That is what made the coming encounter so earthshaking. God was not about to interrupt a man who had no convictions. God was about to stop a man whose convictions had become his armor, his identity, and his blindness. He was about to confront someone who thought he could see.

That matters because many people assume transformation begins when a person finally admits they have no strength left. Sometimes it does. Sometimes brokenness arrives after exhaustion. Sometimes surrender comes after obvious failure. But there are other times when the soul is most unreachable not because it feels weak, but because it feels powerful. There are seasons when a person is hardest to reach precisely because they are succeeding inside the wrong vision of righteousness. They are organized, articulate, determined, and admired. They have reasons for everything. They can explain themselves cleanly. They can produce logic. They can show their work. Yet underneath all of it, something is deeply wrong. Heaven sees what human applause often cannot. God knows when a person has built a tower of certainty that keeps truth itself outside.

This man was moving through the world like someone on assignment. He did not drift into persecution by accident. He sought authority for it. He pursued legal ground for it. He wanted sanction. He wanted reach. He wanted the ability to carry his campaign farther than local outrage could take him. He was not content with private disapproval. He wanted action with force behind it. He wanted permission to move beyond one city and make sure the message of Jesus did not spread unchallenged into other places. That is how fear works when it disguises itself as righteousness. It does not stay contained. It expands. It insists. It pushes outward because it cannot tolerate the existence of what it hates.

Imagine the psychology of that moment. Here is a man with status, training, and authority. He is moving toward his target with letters in hand. He has mission in his chest. He has purpose in his stride. He believes he is carrying Heaven’s concern into the world. He does not feel conflicted. He does not feel morally uncertain. He is not waking up at night wondering whether he has misread the signs. He is moving with the terrible peace that comes when a person is fully persuaded and profoundly wrong. Those are dangerous people. They can move mountains, but they can also crush souls. They can build movements, but they can also become engines of devastation. And unless God stops them, their momentum only grows.

So much of human life is spent protecting the version of ourselves we have come to trust. We defend the identity we built. We defend the role we mastered. We defend the conclusions that helped us feel stable. We defend the worldview that made us feel clean, superior, safe, or chosen. This man had built himself around his understanding of God. That is why what was coming would feel like death before it felt like grace. God was not merely going to adjust one opinion. He was going to strike the center of a life. He was going to tear through a structure that had given this man meaning. He was going to confront him at the level of identity. That is why real encounters with Christ are never small. Jesus does not simply offer better decoration for the old self. He goes to the foundation. He puts His finger on what we thought could not be challenged. He speaks into the place we built our certainty, and suddenly the whole interior world begins to shake.

There is a mystery to how God chooses His moments. He could have judged this man in open finality. He could have removed him from the story. He could have answered violence with destruction. Nobody would have looked at that and called it unjust. This man had terrified believers. He had set himself against the church. He had made himself an enemy of the name of Jesus. Yet Heaven had something more astonishing in mind than punishment. God was preparing a mercy so disruptive that the church itself would struggle at first to believe it. But before mercy could be understood, pride had to be broken open. Before the future could be handed to this man, the illusion of who he was had to collapse. Grace does not ignore reality. It meets it fully. It brings a person face to face with truth so they can finally become someone new.

The road stretched ahead under ordinary light. Dust would have clung to sandals. The landscape would not have appeared to announce that history was about to rupture. That is one of the strange patterns of God. Life often looks normal just before everything changes. A person can be walking inside the most decisive hour of their existence without knowing the sky is already leaning over them. This man was traveling with companions. He was not alone in the practical sense, yet what was about to happen would isolate him more completely than solitude ever could. No crowd can keep you from the moment when God addresses you personally. No companions can absorb the blow when Heaven speaks your name into the center of your deception. No amount of preparation can steady your soul when the risen Christ decides the time for confrontation has come.

Then it happened.

Not gradually. Not symbolically. Not in the safe language of abstraction. A light exploded into the moment with a force beyond nature, beyond explanation, beyond anything the human mind could file under ordinary experience. This was not a flicker. This was interruption. This was invasion. This was Heaven breaking into a human mission and exposing it from above. The man who thought he was moving with clarity was suddenly overwhelmed by a brightness that did not ask permission to enter his world. What he had been pursuing in confidence was broken apart in an instant. The scene was no longer under his control. The road was no longer just a road. The mission was no longer his own. Everything was seized by a reality greater than argument, greater than scholarship, greater than institutional approval, greater than inherited categories. When God decides to reveal Himself, all human certainties become fragile in a moment.

And then the voice came.

This is where the whole story becomes more than dramatic. It becomes personal in the deepest possible sense. The light was overwhelming, but the voice was surgical. It did not speak in vague generalities. It did not deliver an impersonal religious lesson. It addressed him. It went straight to the point of collision between his life and the heart of Christ. It asked why he was persecuting Him. Not merely why he was troubling a movement. Not merely why he opposed a doctrine. Not merely why he was targeting a community. The voice identified the suffering of believers with the person of Jesus Himself. That is how close Christ is to His people. To wound them is to wound what He loves. To strike at them is to strike at something He claims as His own. In one sentence, the man on the road was confronted not only with the truth that Jesus was alive, but with the truth that he had been fighting the very One he thought he was defending God against.

Can you feel how unbearable that realization would be? Every argument he had sharpened. Every act he had justified. Every violent certainty he had carried. Every threatening step. Every house entered. Every trembling believer forced into fear. All of it now stood beneath a new light, and none of it could survive. This was not merely intellectual correction. This was moral collapse. This was spiritual exposure. This was the terrifying mercy of being shown who you really are in the presence of the One you cannot deceive. The man who had moved through the world like a judge was now being judged by truth itself.

There are moments when a single question from God can destroy a lifetime of illusions. Human beings often expect divine speech to come loaded with complexity, but God knows where the hinge is. He knows what question reaches the locked room. He knows what word will break the false story we have been telling ourselves. This question was not asked because Jesus needed information. It was asked because the man needed revelation. He needed to hear himself named inside the truth. He needed to understand that all his activity, all his zeal, all his righteous fury had brought him into direct opposition to the living Christ. You cannot stay the same after that. You cannot go back to your old self after that. Once the risen Jesus has stepped into your blindness and called it by name, the whole landscape of your life is forever altered.

The shock of the encounter was not only in what he saw and heard. It was also in what happened to his strength. The hunter became helpless. The man who had come with authority lost control of his own movement. The one who thought he saw clearly was swallowed by blindness. This is one of the most profound reversals in all of Scripture because it reveals how God dismantles pride. He does not merely argue with it. He empties it of the illusion of self-sufficiency. He lets a person feel their dependence. He lets them discover the fragility they spent a lifetime covering with competence. That is what happened on that road. The scholar who had mastered so much was reduced to need. The strong man became someone who had to be led.

There is deep symbolism in that blindness, but it was not merely symbolic for him. It was real. It interrupted his body. It changed his relationship to the world around him. He could no longer move through space as he had before. He could no longer rely on sight, strategy, and direction. He had to stop. He had to receive help. He had to enter silence not as a wise man choosing reflection, but as a broken man whose categories had just been destroyed. God had not annihilated him. God had arrested him. There is a difference. Judgment would have ended the story. Mercy stopped it. Mercy made him live long enough to face the ruins of who he had been.

For three days he sat inside darkness. Think about that. Three days. Not three minutes of shock. Not one emotional collapse followed by quick clarity. Three days where the world remained stripped down. Three days where he could not distract himself with motion. Three days where memory would have become unbearable. Three days where the words of that voice must have echoed through him again and again. Why are you persecuting Me. Why are you persecuting Me. Why are you persecuting Me. Every syllable would have worked on him like fire. Every recollection would have burned. Every moment of silence would have pressed him deeper into the awareness that the Jesus he had rejected was not dead, not defeated, and not absent. He was alive. He was speaking. He was Lord.

There are seasons in life where God does His deepest work not through public victory, but through private undoing. We do not like those seasons. We do not volunteer for them. We want immediate restoration. We want answers quickly. We want revelation followed by instant relief. But many souls are transformed in the dark before they are ever trusted again in the light. Sometimes the blindness comes before the commission. Sometimes the silence comes before the sending. Sometimes God lets a person sit long enough with the truth to let it move from shock into surrender. These three days were not empty. They were holy surgery. They were the dismantling of a false self. They were the mercy of interruption stretched across enough time for pride to lose its grip.

Imagine his thoughts there. The names of people he had terrified would have returned to him. Faces he had dismissed as dangerous would now appear differently. The believers he once saw as corrupters of faith might now seem like people he had deeply wronged. The crucified Jesus he had judged as cursed now stood before him as vindicated, living, radiant, and impossible to deny. Everything had turned inside out. The categories that held his world together had broken. This is what happens when Christ encounters a person in truth. He does not simply make life more comfortable. He reorders reality. He forces a soul to reckon with what is real, and only after that reckoning can the rebuilding begin.

Yet even in this darkness, something astonishing was already moving toward him. While he sat blind, vulnerable, and emptied, God was preparing the next step. Not through spectacle this time, but through obedience in another believer. That is how the kingdom often works. The great dramatic encounter can seize the headlines of history, but the tenderness that follows often arrives through the ordinary courage of a faithful servant. Somewhere beyond the blindness, beyond the silence, beyond the fear that still clung to the church because of what this man had done, God was speaking to one of His own. The hunted community was about to be asked to touch the one who had hunted them. The man who came breathing threat was about to be met by grace in human hands.

And that may be one of the hardest parts of the whole story to understand until grace has changed you personally. We often imagine redemption in grand personal terms. We think of the sinner and God. We think of the broken life and divine mercy. But here is the deeper miracle. The mercy of Jesus does not remain abstract. It moves through people. It asks the wounded to participate in healing. It calls believers to trust God’s work in someone whose past still feels dangerous. It brings tenderness into places where revenge would feel more natural. The very community this man had tried to crush was about to become the place where his new life would begin to take visible shape.

That is where we will stop for now, in the dark place between the shattering and the healing, between the voice on the road and the hands that are coming, between blindness and sight, between the life that was collapsing and the life that had not yet been named. Because sometimes the most important thing to understand is that God’s greatest turning points do not begin with human readiness. They begin with divine interruption. They begin when Heaven says enough to the false story, enough to the violent certainty, enough to the identity built on being right without being surrendered. And when Jesus steps into that place, even the fiercest enemy can become the site of one of the greatest acts of redemption the world has ever seen.

He was still sitting in the aftermath of the impossible when the next movement of grace began. The church knew his name, and not in a warm way. They knew what he had done. They knew what kind of fear followed him. They knew the damage a man like that could cause when he arrived with authority and certainty in his hands. So when God spoke to a believer and told him to go to this broken persecutor, the instruction would not have felt small. It would have felt costly. This was not a request to bring bread to a friend. This was not a request to encourage a familiar brother who had stumbled. This was a command to walk toward someone who had made himself an enemy of your people. It was a command to trust that God’s power to transform a person was greater than the memory of what that person had done.

That is one of the most beautiful things in the story because it shows that redemption is not sentimental. God does not ask us to pretend the past did not happen. He does not erase the reality of harm with shallow language. The fear was real. The reputation was real. The wounds were real. But the call of God was also real. The believer who was sent had to choose whether he would let the past have the final word or whether he would believe that Jesus can truly change a human being. That tension lives in every generation. There are always people who seem too hardened, too proud, too destructive, too committed to darkness for us to imagine them becoming gentle, humble, and holy. We talk about grace until grace walks toward someone we distrust. Then we discover whether we really believe in the power of Christ to remake a life.

This believer entered the room where the man sat blind. That alone is enough to pause over. He entered. He did not avoid. He did not remain at a safe theological distance. He did not say he would pray from afar while protecting himself from involvement. He entered the room. Sometimes the body of Christ is most like Christ not when it says the right things from a distance, but when it walks into the painful room and obeys despite trembling. It takes courage to do that. It takes surrender. It takes a heart soft enough to follow God beyond the limits of personal comfort. The man sitting in darkness did not merely need a message. He needed a human act of obedience. He needed grace to take form in someone willing to come close.

And then came one of the gentlest words in all of Scripture. “Brother.” That single word is almost too beautiful for the story that surrounds it. The man who had hunted believers is called brother by one of the believers he once threatened. Before the blinded persecutor could prove himself. Before he could build a ministry. Before he could write a single letter. Before he could preach a sermon. Before he could demonstrate years of faithfulness. He was met with a word that announced what grace was doing. Brother. Not enemy. Not suspect. Not cautionary tale. Brother. That is what the mercy of God creates. It brings people into a family they did not deserve to enter. It gives them a new name before they have had time to earn one. It declares a future over them while the dust of the past is still in the room.

That word alone had to enter him like light before the physical healing ever came. Think of what it means for a person who has built himself on opposition and violence to hear himself addressed with welcome. Not cheap welcome, not naïve welcome, but Christ-given welcome. There are people who have spent years punishing themselves inwardly because they cannot imagine that God would receive them with tenderness after what they have been, after what they have done, after the damage they have caused. Yet this story does not begin the new chapter with suspicion. It begins with belonging. That does not erase responsibility. It does not erase consequences. It does not erase memory. But it does reveal that grace moves faster than shame when Christ has decided to claim a life.

Then the hands were placed on him. Gentle hands. The kind of hands he had probably inspired fear of for others. The kind of hands that could have withheld touch in self-protection. The kind of hands that now became instruments of healing. This is the kingdom of God in one scene. Violence had moved through him, but tenderness moved toward him. Judgment had every right to stand over him, but mercy knelt beside him. He had come to bind others, and now he sat receiving a ministry of release. There is a kind of healing that only happens when the love of God reaches a person through another human being who obeys. The soul learns something there that no argument alone can teach. It learns that Christ is not a theory. He is alive in His people.

And then the blindness broke. Scripture says something like scales fell from his eyes, and the language feels right because transformation is often like that. The problem is not only that we lack information. Sometimes the problem is that a covering has formed over the soul. We look, but we do not see. We study, but we do not understand. We speak, but we do not hear what we are saying. Pride covers. fear covers. ambition covers. inherited assumptions cover. pain covers. self-justification covers. Then Christ comes, and what once seemed obvious is exposed as blindness. What once felt secure is revealed as illusion. What once seemed like strength is uncovered as weakness. The scales fall, and a person begins to see the world not merely with corrected opinions but with a different heart.

Light flooded his eyes, but something deeper flooded his life. Grace entered where certainty had ruled. Humility entered where pride had hardened. Worship entered where aggression had burned. This is why his story continues to thunder through Christian history. He was not simply converted from one religious position to another. He was seized by the living Christ and remade from the inside out. The persecutor became the preacher, but that sentence only matters because of what happened underneath it. A different center was put in him. A different Lord now governed him. A different love now drove him. His brilliance remained, but it no longer belonged to ego. His discipline remained, but it no longer served self-righteousness. His fire remained, but now it burned in service of the One he had opposed.

He was baptized. Even that matters deeply. The man who came with papers and authority entered water in surrender. The one who had carried strength like a weapon went down as someone confessing need. Baptism is never merely a ritual gesture. It is a declaration that the old life cannot remain the ruling life. It is the public sign that death and newness have met. He did not emerge from those waters as a polished hero. He emerged as a redeemed man with a past that would never stop proving the reach of God’s mercy. The church did not receive someone who had always been easy to love. The church received living evidence that no one is beyond the reach of Christ when Christ decides to intervene.

This is where the story becomes intensely personal for anyone who has ever believed they are too far gone, too tangled, too compromised, too ashamed, too contradictory, too damaged, or too late. We say those things because we measure redemption by our own imagination. We look at the history behind us and assume it sets the limits of our future. We assume God must prefer cleaner stories, simpler journeys, easier people. But the road to Damascus stands in history like a divine contradiction to human despair. It says that the Jesus who rose from the dead is not only able to comfort the wounded. He is able to confront the hostile, stop the violent, humble the proud, and transform the resistant. He can rescue a soul from the very direction that soul was fully committed to walking.

There is also something profoundly comforting here for people who are praying for others who seem unreachable. Some of the hardest grief in life comes from watching someone run hard in the wrong direction. They are intelligent enough to defend themselves. They are strong enough to resist advice. They are wounded enough to mistrust love. They are proud enough to reject correction. They are committed enough to make change feel impossible. And yet this story whispers hope into that ache. You are not the only voice that can reach them. There is still a Christ who knows how to intercept a life. There is still a Lord who can step into the road no human being can control. There is still a God whose mercy is not limited by the stubbornness of the human heart. We do not control that timing, and we cannot manufacture that encounter, but we are not wrong to keep praying because Heaven still knows how to interrupt.

His new life did not begin in comfort. That is important to say because people sometimes imagine that once God transforms a person, everything becomes smooth. It did not become smooth for him. It became true. Those are not the same thing. He began to proclaim the very Jesus he had opposed, and the reversal was so extreme that people were stunned. Some could not believe it. Some feared it was a trick. Some watched with suspicion because reputations do not vanish overnight in the minds of others. When God changes a life, the new reality is immediate in the soul, but trust in the community often takes time. He had to live long enough for the fruit to become visible. He had to walk in faithfulness, not merely claim it. He had to let grace mature into witness.

That is another word someone may need today. You may know that God has done something real in you, but there are still people around you who cannot see it yet. They remember your old patterns. They remember the old wounds. They remember how certain you once were in the wrong things. They do not know what to do with the newness because it feels too sudden against the memory they carry. Do not let that drive you back into despair. Transformation is real even when recognition is delayed. Keep walking. Keep obeying. Keep letting the life of Christ form itself in your conduct. The truth does not become false because others are still adjusting to it. Time and faithfulness will preach what your words alone cannot.

And what a life began to unfold from there. The man who once tried to silence the name of Jesus became one of the loudest human witnesses to the lordship of Jesus the world has ever known. He traveled. He preached. He suffered. He wrote. He reasoned. He encouraged. He corrected. He built communities. He carried the gospel across cultural and geographic boundaries that helped shape the global future of Christianity. His letters would become part of the New Testament. His theology, devotion, endurance, and insight would nourish believers for centuries. Churches would be strengthened by words written from prison cells, from aching places, from the middle of hardship, from the deep center of a life that now belonged entirely to Christ. The man who once tore at the church would help establish and strengthen the church with astonishing force.

That reversal is so dramatic that it almost feels too cinematic to be real, but that is part of why it grips the heart. God did not merely save him from himself. God redeemed the very capacities that once served destruction. The intellect that once armed persecution became a servant of gospel clarity. The discipline that once fueled violence became endurance in mission. The courage that once enforced fear became boldness in proclaiming grace. The leadership that once scattered believers became strength for gathering and guiding believers. This is one of the deepest patterns of redemption. God does not only forgive what was misused. He can reclaim it. He can consecrate it. He can take what was once bent in the wrong direction and turn it toward life.

That does not mean the past becomes meaningless. It means the past is no longer sovereign. There are people who think their worst chapters have permanently defined the ceiling of what God can do with them. They think the story has already spoken its final sentence because the damage was real and the failures were serious. But in Christ, the past can become material for testimony rather than a prison for identity. The scars remain part of the witness. The memory remains part of the humility. The history remains part of the miracle. The point is not that the past never happened. The point is that Jesus is now Lord over what happened. He is able to bring from the ruins something that magnifies His grace more powerfully than an untouched life ever could.

That is why Paul’s life has never stopped speaking. Yes, now we can name him. The hidden persecutor was Saul of Tarsus, the man history knows as Paul. But the power of the reveal is not only in the name. It is in the realization that one of Christianity’s greatest earthly builders once believed he was serving God by trying to destroy it. That is the level of reversal we are talking about. The one whose writings help shape Christian thought, doctrine, encouragement, and endurance was once moving in the opposite direction with full conviction. If God can do that, then despair loses some of its authority. Fatalism loses some of its grip. The sentence “people never really change” has to bow before the risen Christ who turned Saul into Paul.

And now we arrive at the question that stirs so many hearts. Did Paul ever walk with Jesus? The answer depends on what people mean when they ask it, and this is where the strength of the story becomes even more beautiful. Paul did not walk with Jesus during the earthly ministry in the same way Peter, John, Matthew, and the others did. He was not one of the Twelve moving beside Jesus through Galilee and Judea while the Lord taught the crowds, touched lepers, calmed storms, and broke bread in those earlier public years. He did not share that same daily companionship before the crucifixion. In that sense, no, Paul was not a disciple in the original traveling circle during Jesus’ earthly ministry.

But that is not the end of the answer. Paul did encounter the risen Christ. Not as rumor. Not as inherited tradition. Not as secondhand devotion. He encountered the risen Jesus personally and decisively. That encounter was not weaker because it happened after the resurrection. It was glorious precisely because it revealed that Jesus was alive, active, reigning, and still calling people into His service. Paul’s apostleship did not arise from imagination. It arose from encounter. The Christ who had been crucified was no longer confined to memory. He was present. He spoke. He confronted. He commissioned. Paul did not simply adopt a movement after reading about it. He was arrested by the living Lord of that movement.

That matters for your faith because it means the story of Jesus did not end when the earthly ministry ended. The resurrection was not a sentimental postscript. It was the beginning of a new order of reality in which Jesus remains alive and able to reveal Himself, call people, transform people, and send people. Paul’s life stands as a witness to the continued activity of the risen Christ. It tells us that Jesus is not locked inside ancient scenes, beautiful as those scenes are. He is Lord now. He still meets people. He still interrupts roads. He still dismantles pride. He still heals blindness. He still calls unlikely servants. He still writes stories nobody would have predicted.

For many believers, that truth lands in a tender place because there are seasons when faith can start to feel secondhand. You read the Gospels and feel moved by what Jesus did then, but your own life can feel quieter, harder, less obvious. You may wonder whether the Christ who walked the roads of Israel is still near in the roads you walk now. Paul’s story says yes. It says the risen Jesus is not trapped in yesterday. He is present in the lives of those who belong to Him. He may not always arrive in a blaze that throws a person to the ground. His dealings with souls are not all identical. But His aliveness is the same. His authority is the same. His power to reveal, restore, and redirect is the same.

There is another layer to this story that should steady us. Paul became one of the most powerful voices in Christian history, yet his story begins with humiliation. He was not introduced into true service through applause but through collapse. He did not enter his calling by proving himself stronger than everyone else. He entered it by being broken open before God. That alone challenges so much of what people chase. We want significance without surrender. We want impact without undoing. We want calling without confrontation. We want to be used by God while protecting all the structures of self that make us feel impressive and safe. But many of God’s greatest servants are formed in the place where their self-made certainty fails and only Christ remains.

If you are in a season where your own identity feels like it is being dismantled, do not assume that means God has abandoned you. It may be that He loves you too much to let the false version of you stay in charge. It may be that the blindness is not punishment but preparation. It may be that the silence is not emptiness but surgery. It may be that the road you thought would lead to one future has been interrupted because Heaven has another one. Those are painful seasons. They do not feel noble while you are inside them. They feel confusing. They feel exposing. They feel vulnerable. But Paul’s story reminds us that some of the holiest things God does begin when the person we thought we were can no longer survive the truth of Christ.

This story also speaks to the church itself. The church is not only called to celebrate redemption in theory. The church is called to recognize it, receive it, and participate in it when God is doing it in real people. That can be hard. It requires discernment. It requires wisdom. It requires patience. But it also requires that we never become more committed to people’s pasts than God is. Imagine if the early believers had decided that the persecutor’s history made grace too risky. Imagine if fear had the final word. Imagine if no one had entered the room. The church would still have belonged to Christ, but one of the most astonishing testimonies of divine mercy would have been missed by human hearts too afraid to believe. We must be careful not to become custodians of hopelessness in the name of caution.

At the same time, Paul’s story does not teach superficial optimism. It teaches deep confidence in Christ. There is a difference. Superficial optimism says everybody changes easily and everything is fine now. Deep confidence in Christ says real change is possible because Jesus is alive and able to do what human beings cannot. That kind of confidence is not naïve. It is rooted in resurrection. It does not deny history. It places history under a greater Lord. It does not erase wisdom. It keeps wisdom tender enough to remain open to miracles. It does not pretend every claim of transformation is genuine. It simply refuses to act as though grace is no longer capable of creating something radically new.

Think again about the scene on the road. A man moving fast in the wrong direction. A light from beyond the world he trusted. A voice that named the wound he was causing. A collapse of strength. A season of blindness. A gentle believer entering the room. A word of welcome. Hands laid in obedience. Sight restored. A new life begun. That is more than history. It is a pattern. Not everybody experiences the same details, but many lives know the same movement. First comes the interruption. Then comes the exposure. Then comes the emptiness where old certainty dies. Then comes the mercy that feels almost too tender to be true. Then comes the slow unfolding of a redeemed life. Christ still works like that. He still takes people through endings that are really beginnings.

This is why nobody should give up on their own story too quickly. You may look at yourself and see contradiction, waste, arrogance, confusion, compromise, spiritual failure, and years spent moving in the wrong direction. You may know what it is to be deeply sincere and deeply wrong at the same time. You may know what it is to defend things that later broke in the light of truth. You may know what it is to hurt others while calling your motives good. You may know what it is to wake up one day and realize the old self cannot be trusted anymore. Hear me clearly. None of that places you beyond the reach of Jesus Christ. The road to Damascus is permanent evidence that He can meet a life at full speed and redirect it completely.

And if you are the one who has been wounded by somebody else’s blindness, this story speaks to you too. It tells you that God sees what has been done. Jesus did not say, “Why are you troubling those people over there?” He said, “Why are you persecuting Me?” He identified Himself with His suffering people. That means your pain has not gone unnoticed. Christ does not stand coldly outside your story. He knows what has touched you. He knows how opposition wounds. He knows how fear drains the body. He knows how injustice clings to memory. He is not indifferent. And in ways beyond our understanding, He is able not only to comfort the wounded but to deal with the ones who caused the wound. Sometimes He judges. Sometimes He stops. Sometimes, astonishingly, He transforms. But He is never absent.

Paul would spend the rest of his life proving that his encounter was real not because he could retell the dramatic moment, but because the shape of his life changed. That is how real encounters with Christ are always confirmed. Not merely by the intensity of the moment, but by the fidelity that follows. He suffered for the name he once opposed. He labored for the communities he once endangered. He poured himself out for the gospel he once tried to crush. He did not simply have an experience. He entered a life of obedience. The road mattered because of the road that came after it. The encounter mattered because of the years shaped by its truth.

That may be one of the simplest ways to test the sincerity of our own spiritual claims. What road came after the road. What life came after the light. What humility came after the exposure. What obedience came after the emotion. Real grace does not leave a person untouched. It forms them. It matures them. It teaches them how to suffer differently, love differently, speak differently, and live differently. Not instantly in every area, not without process, and not without struggle, but truly. Paul’s life was not easy after Christ met him, but it was real. That is sometimes the better gift. Comfort can be temporary. Realness lasts.

So what transformed Christianity forever? It was not merely that a persecutor stopped persecuting. It was that the risen Christ revealed Himself in such undeniable power that an enemy became an apostle, a destroyer became a builder, and a man armed with religious certainty was remade into a servant of grace. It was the moment when Heaven demonstrated, with breathtaking clarity, that the church does not survive because human beings protect it perfectly. The church survives because Jesus is alive and able to intervene in history. He can defend His people. He can call His servants. He can overturn the plans of the powerful. He can convert the dangerous. He can raise up witnesses from the very places we would least expect. Christianity was not merely preserved in that moment. It was propelled.

And that is why this story still matters now. Because the same Christ is still alive. The same Lord still sees. The same voice still reaches places argument cannot. The same mercy still floods eyes and hearts. The same power still takes what looked impossible and rewrites it into testimony. You may not be walking a dusty road to Damascus, but you are walking some road. You are heading somewhere with your life, your wounds, your assumptions, your fears, your ambitions, your convictions, and your hidden grief. And there is still a Jesus who knows how to meet people on roads. There is still a Savior who can interrupt, confront, heal, and send.

So do not decide too quickly what God cannot do with a person. Do not assume the hardest heart is beyond His reach. Do not assume your worst chapter has become your final definition. Do not assume someone else’s hostility means their story is finished. Do not assume your own blindness disqualifies you forever. Christ is alive. That is the center of it all. The living Jesus is the reason persecutors can become preachers, the reason enemies can become brothers, the reason broken identity can become holy calling, and the reason your life, no matter how tangled it feels today, is not beyond redemption.

Saul of Tarsus set out to destroy the followers of Jesus. Paul the apostle rose to spend his life proclaiming Him. Between those two names stands a light, a voice, a blindness, a mercy, and a Christ who refuses to let darkness have the final word. That is the shocking moment that transformed Christianity forever. It was not merely the conversion of one man. It was the public unveiling of what the risen Jesus is capable of doing. And if He could do that there, then hope still has reason to breathe here.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

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Spurs vs Suns.

Choosing a second basketball game to follow today (well, tonight for this one) I'll be turning to the NBA next. The Phoenix Suns will be coming to town to play my San Antonio Spurs, and I intend to listen in. The game has a scheduled start time of 7:00 PM Central Time. I'll tune in to 1200 WOAI, the proud flagship of the San Antonio Spurs plenty early to catch the pregame coverage as well as the radio play by play.

And the adventure continues.

Two more things I wrote at Renfrew today. “Dear Diet culture” was an assignment during a group therapy session. “I’m scared of my body” is a personal vent.

---

Dear Diet Culture

Dear Diet Culture,

I would ask what’s wrong with you, but I already know. You have many roots, some more sympathetic than others. You were so afraid of food, once upon a time, and for good reason—too often, food was poison. What a horrible state of affairs. But that time is over, and all you have left is hatred. Hatred for health, for real bodies, for gender-nonconforming people and people of color and women. You crave money over life and trash decency everywhere you go. You are vile. And I know my disgust won’t kill you. But I will sever your strings, one by one, my own and others, and maybe by the time I die you will be weaker than when you first laid your blood-stained hands on me and my family.

I would say I hope you die a slow and painful death, but that would leave you in this world longer than necessary. No, I hope you die a quick and humiliating death. I hope you live only long enough to panic and fear for yourself, only to realize it’s futile, and you give up with your pride shattered.

I hope I live to see that day, but if I don’t, my ghost will enjoy it anyways.

Fuck You,

Junia

---

I’m scared of my body

I feel my body waking up, and it scares me. “No one has yet determined what a body can do.” There is no control, no safety, in that. My body paints fat and muscle and bone where it pleases, without my consent. It feels in turns hostile and bewildering.

I am told not to hide from my body. Day by day, I shrink from its assaults. I feel them, but cannot rise to meet them. I’m scared of my body. I’ve never met anyone as uncooperative as my metabolism.

Hunger, hunger, hunger. My body asks me to feed it more. I feel like I gave the mouse a cookie. It learned not to ask for things, before, but now it asks for so much. “It is fixing the damage done.” I liked how I had remodeled the place. It’s taking a sledgehammer to what I had built.

It doesn’t know how important this is. How it will impact how others treat us. Opportunities, care, self-esteem. It doesn’t care. Inconsiderate, disrespectful, insubordinate body!

Adding to the internet and hoping this will help someone.

I had a Zpool that wouldn't delete, so I asked AI for help. They ultimately did help, but it was a long process. It would have been longer if I had had to look for the answer myself.

The command that saved me was:

sudo zfs set volmode=none zroot/. This caused the OS to stop seeing the pool as a disk volume.

After issuing this command, zpool destroy worked as expected initially.

#FreeBSD #ZFS #zpool

What we touch becomes the water we live in... let us be carried together.

River Garavogue

Rushes, Rushes, And hushes, Hushes.

Swans, majestic, Float toward the gentle Shuffle of rocks That slip beneath Hyde bridge.

Slow, elegant Boats that know The feel of the Garavogue Like a lover knows A body

They slip along the nape of wet glory, their silence speaks In ripples only love can read, This blue reads them like verse

Painting a moment For this soul, That will define Splendor every time I glance at the memory.

But for these swans, It is only a Tuesday. And not really even.

It is just today.

They've no thought of tomorrow, And the concept of yesterday Is little more than feeling.

How great the chasm between The beauty of made things.

Here I sit with my dread, 
burdened to name
 what simply is.

Deceived
 that I am somehow 
in control.

Yet these simple swan, Elegant and graceful Beyond definition, Embrace each moment As it comes.

And this, This is how Life comes Not AT you, But FROM you.

Fellow master, mine, Hold my hand won't you? Let us ride our Garavogue snake

And be grace, witnessed. Beauty, longed for. Life, made. Together... and golden.

In the way He intended, Let you and I be players upon The stage together For all the world to see.

We will pass the rapids , And the bridges, The floods and the Droughts.

And our yesterdays Wont' be feelings, They will be stories Tales and Fables.

And our cygnets will Hang on every word Of how the swans we were.

And no matter Where the snake took us, We rode.

Oh, how we rode.

And because Of the journey

The worlds we build will long to be swans too.

Strong Style Pro Wrestling Vol. 38 results from Tokyo, Japan at Korakuen Hall on Thursday, March 19, 2026 live on Eplus JP pay-per-view:

Rina and Azusa Inaba defeated Big Haruka and Lady C when Inaba pinned Haruka in 11:04.

Tiger Mask and TAKA Michinoku defeated Kota Sekifuda and Ikuto Hidaka when Tiger Mask submitted Sekifuda with a Chicken Wing Facelock in 8:50.

Miku Kanae and Sareee defeated Kaoru Ito and Uta Shima when Kanae pinned Shima with a locomotion jackknife in 9:38.

Kazuyuki Fujita and Kendo Kashin defeated Hideki Sekine and Satsuki Nagao when Fujita pinned Nagao after a soccer ball kick in 8:57.

Hayato Mashita, Masakatsu Funaki, and Yoshiki Takahashi defeated Fuminori Abe, Super Tiger, and Masashi Takeda when Funaki submitted Abe to a Triangle Choke in 11:01.

SSPW Women’s Tag Team Champions Jaguar Yokota and Megumi Yabushita defeated Rina Amikura and SAKI when Yokota pinned Yabushita in 13:36. Yabushita injured her shoulder during the match but was able to finish.

SPPW Legends Champion Kuroshio TOKYO Japan pinned Daisuke Sekimoto out of a reversal in 16:05.

Awake, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee light.

Burn off the maelstrom and sit quiet with the morning.

Let the light tell me what kind of day the day has;

Does it wake sour and grey or break open, Shower the world with brilliance,

warm sunshine, Bring life and majesty to every surface touched.

The Designer sees that the work is done, gray or not—

but what majesty when the sky is miles of blue.

Then the Master’s work is fully on display.

If only these iron sheets weren’t so heavy.

Only a hero can throw them off and charge into the battle of life, seizing the crown of being awed.

Spring thee from thy slumber!

Heroine or hero, snatch your sword and shield and to battle in a world of indifference.

The fight will not be easy or short, but nothing worth doing ever is.

What it will be is glory.

And glory changes you.

So, let this small moment be the first step, the one that hurts, just a little.

But then, awe and wonder let you become. 


That you change into the person you need to be,

into the person the world needs.

And I think that’s beautiful.

---

#poetry #ireland #day #WYST

#002321 – 06 de Agosto de 2025

Na margem do rio pairam, revelando a direção da imperceptível brisa, partículas de dentes-de-leão, flocos de neve seca quase imaterial. Páro de ler e levanto os olhos, coço a barba e provoco uma nuvem de partículas mais pequenas mas mais pesadas, caspa, que ecoam a leveza a que não podem aspirar, pontuando de ridículo o meu sentimentalismo tão fácil e oportunista.

Bison vs Spartans.

My game of choice today comes from first round of the 2026 NCAA men’s basketball tournament. It features the Nunber 3 seed Michigan State Spartans vs. the Number 14 seed North Dakota State Bison, and has a scheduled start time of 3:05 PM Central Time.

And the adventure continues.