Tonight, I am tired, disenchanted, and questioning my belief in the fundamentals of communication. At least in how I see them.

To me, comprehending perspective, being able to carry multiple truths at once, and actively seeking to listen are everything. If there's confusion, don't guess. Seek clarification. Do not fear showing vulnerability in a conversation. Be kind. (OK, admittedly there are instances where the latter would just be stupid, but for the most part — Be kind.)

It is strange. I am fortunate to have persons in my life who I can talk about anything with. We can strongly disagree on a subject, but we're still good. There is a foundation of respect that is understood between us of, “I will not intentionally seek to cause you harm or hurt your feelings. If I do, please say so, so that we can rectify the situation.” It's really nice to have. That cannot be overstated.

Everyone else is on a spectrum. We are all in different places on our communication path. There is a certain type that I find extremely challenging, and it threw me for a loop tonight. I do always see the signs that it is coming, and I understand the mechanisms behind it, but at the same time I am always startled, and no matter what I try in order to navigate the experience in a positive way for both parties, it never works.

I observe the world by holding as many perspectives in my mind as I can. I do not agree with all of them. I clearly have my own perspectives. But I do try to acknowledge them, map out where they're coming from, and seek better understanding. I do that with my own thoughts as well.

There are certain truths. If someone has their head chopped off, that is bad for their health. Drinking water from old lead pipes can be very dangerous. Your location in the world changes your personal experience with the environment and society in general. None of those statements are being judgmental or critical. They're just acknowledging what we have come to call reality. They are not an attack on a person. Nor are they dictatorial.

I acknowledge that I don't do well when conversing with someone who cannot hold multiple truths at once. Something can have a negative impact, it be out of your hands, you still like it, and you still do it. On and on. All of those can be true. They may not believe something is true while I do. However, attacking because I disagree or see multiple perspectives, or going passive-aggressive martyr on me, is just...

I understand they likely do not even know what they're doing. I acknowledge the framework that sets everything up. I have sympathy and really try to take a step back and navigate the situation as best as I can without pouring gasoline on it, but at the end of the day, if the person is determined to light a torch, the torch will be lit, and there will be no resolution.

It ... pains me on many levels. Mostly the one where I realize what it will take for that particular response/reaction to no longer occur. I do not want to give up on believing it a possibility, because it truly is a possibility. But I do not find pleasure in walking on eggshells around those I consider close. That is not closeness to me. Sometimes, I deeply want to give up. I won't. Not in this particular case. However, I recognize my shortened desire to have such communication. Or lack thereof.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

The advertisement that emptied Judy Skene's life appeared on Facebook, and it looked exactly like the Prime Minister of Canada.

Skene is 86 and lives in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. In the summer of 2025 she saw a video of Mark Carney explaining that a modest investment in a cryptocurrency platform would be underwritten by the country's central bank. “I saw an ad on Facebook of Mark Carney telling me if I invested $350 Canadian, it would be backed by the Bank of Canada,” she told CTV News, which reported her story in June 2026. She put in the $350. Someone rang to say it had already tripled. Over the following months she cashed a Registered Retirement Income Fund worth $650,000, placed a $300,000 mortgage on her condominium, and took a $35,000 cash advance on a credit card. Roughly $900,000 went into an account that showed her gains that did not exist. “Once I did the final payment, there was no more conversation and all my money was gone.”

Three weeks after that story ran, CTV published another. Deborah Friesen of Acton, Ontario, had been watching craft videos online when a similar Carney video found her. She invested $13,000, then, after months of daily phone calls from a man who became something close to a friend, another $70,000. “He had me convinced by then he was legitimate,” she said. When the calls stopped: “I just fell apart. I couldn't stop crying.”

Sit with the legal architecture of what happened here, because it is stranger than it looks. Two women lost a combined million dollars. The instrument of the theft was a synthetic reproduction of a third person's face and voice. Of the three of them, exactly one has a clean, established, centuries-tested cause of action arising from the misuse of a likeness — and it is not either of the women who lost the money. It is Mark Carney, whose persona has demonstrable commercial value and whose implied endorsement was appropriated. Canadian law has protected that interest since a 1971 Ontario case about a football player named Krouse and a Chrysler promotional calendar.

Skene and Friesen have fraud. Fraud requires defendants. The defendants are unlocatable, probably offshore, and almost certainly do not care.

And the third category of person — the schoolteacher, the nurse, the fifteen-year-old whose photograph is fed into a nudification tool by a classmate — has, until very recently, had nothing at all. No commercial value in their persona. No money taken. Just their body reproduced without their permission, in a country whose law has never quite decided that this is a thing that can be done to you.

A Letter to Ottawa Asking for the Impossible

On 12 August 2026, Stephen Crawford, Ontario's Minister of Public and Business Service Delivery and Procurement, wrote to his federal counterpart and asked for something no democracy has attempted.

“We are urging the federal government to enact an all-out ban on AI deepfakes and impersonations, which can lead to significant harms for vulnerable populations, including children and seniors,” Crawford wrote. “Anyone who uses these new tools to scam or harm Canadians deserves to face steep fines and jail time.” The letter, reported by CTV News and CP24, was prompted directly by the Skene and Friesen cases. Crawford acknowledged the obvious constitutional constraint — criminal law is federal, and Ontario cannot legislate here — and framed the request against the province's economic ambitions, citing projections that AI could add $122 billion to Ontario's GDP by 2035 and generate an average of 17,600 jobs a year. “As we work to unlock the full economic potential of AI,” he wrote, “we need to put strong safeguards in place to protect consumer data and privacy in this new digital landscape.”

It is worth being precise about how far outside the mainstream this sits. The European Union's approach, in Article 50 of the AI Act, is labelling. The United States' TAKE IT DOWN Act is notice and removal. Denmark's intervention is a civil property right. Canada's new criminal provisions target sexual content. The United Kingdom criminalises the creation of intimate images without consent. Every one of these regulates a category of conduct. Crawford asked for the prohibition of a technique.

The temptation is to dismiss it as a provincial minister posturing about a federal file. That would be a mistake. Crawford's letter is more interesting read as a symptom than as a proposal — as the noise a legal system makes when it discovers, under load, that it is missing a part. Every narrower response has to answer a question that Canadian law, and Anglo-American law generally, has no settled answer to: what exactly is the thing being protected? A ban dodges the question by prohibiting the act of synthesis itself. That is why it is unenforceable. It is also why it is honest in a way the alternatives are not.

The Threat Everyone Prepared For Never Came

For most of a decade, the research community readied itself for the wrong war.

That is the argument of a position paper posted to arXiv in May 2026 by Shaina Raza, titled “The Deepfakes We Missed.” Its opening lines are unusually blunt for the genre: “Nearly a decade of Machine Learning (ML) research on deepfake detection has been organized around a threat model inherited from 2017–2019, revolving around face-swap and talking-head manipulation of public figures, motivated by concerns about large-scale misinformation and video-evidence fraud. This position paper argues that the threat the field prepared for did not arrive, and the threats that did arrive are substantially different.”

Raza synthesises harm data from 2022 to 2026 across five distinct sources — FBI cybercrime complaints flagged for synthetic media, Internet Watch Foundation tracking of AI-generated child sexual abuse material, the curated AI Incident Database, academic victim-prevalence surveys, and named high-profile incidents. The mismatch that emerges is stark. Roughly 71 per cent of detection research addresses public-figure face-swap video. Under 1 per cent addresses non-consensual intimate imagery. The predicted catastrophe of synthetic political disinformation swamping the 2024 election cycle did not materialise at anything like the anticipated scale, despite enormous preparatory investment.

What arrived instead was three things. Peer-generated non-consensual intimate imagery, largest by victim count — the Internet Watch Foundation recorded AI-generated child sexual abuse videos rising from 13 in 2024 to more than 3,400 in 2025. Voice-clone and synthetic-identity fraud, running to billions in reported losses, encompassing grandparent scams, business impersonation, and precisely the sort of fabricated celebrity endorsement that found Judy Skene. And peer-distributed manipulation moving through encrypted messaging where no platform intervention reaches.

The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center broke out a dedicated artificial intelligence section in its 2025 annual report for the first time, logging 22,364 AI-related complaints and $893 million in losses, the largest category being investment fraud at roughly $632 million. The Bureau was explicit that this is a floor, not a ceiling.

Note what these categories share. They are not attacks on the information commons. They are attacks on individual people, most of whom are not famous, conducted by exploiting a resource — their face, their voice, their apparent presence — that the law does not recognise as belonging to them in any general sense.

Sixty-Four Per Cent

The second finding is worse, and it is the one that should reframe the entire debate.

In May 2026, Nicolas M. Müller and Wei Herng Choong published a large-scale study of how humans perceive synthetic speech. They recruited 1,768 participants who rendered 35,532 judgements on audio drawn from 138 text-to-speech and voice-conversion systems spanning ten architecture families. The design deliberately mirrored a 2021 baseline study, so the comparison over time is meaningful.

On synthetic audio, human accuracy fell only slightly: 71.2 per cent, down from 72.9 per cent five years earlier. Against the most capable systems the numbers collapse — 61.3 per cent for commercial APIs, 65.9 per cent for autoregressive language-model architectures, both hovering just above a coin toss. Machine detectors, meanwhile, held steady at around 94.5 per cent.

But the number that matters is a different one. Accuracy on real audio — genuine human speech, correctly identified as genuine — fell from 72.7 per cent to 64.1 per cent.

People have not got much worse at spotting fakes. They have got dramatically worse at recognising the truth. The researchers describe this as a shift towards scepticism, and their conclusion is the sentence that ought to be pinned above every legislative drafting desk in the country: “the primary threat posed by modern deepfakes may not be mere deception, but the erosion of trust in genuine audio.”

This is the point at which the harm stops being individual and becomes something else entirely. Judy Skene was deceived by a fake. But more than a third of the time, in controlled conditions, listeners now reject the real. That is not a fraud problem. It is the depletion of a shared resource — the default assumption that a voice belongs to its apparent owner — that every phone call, every voicemail, every recorded interview, every emergency dispatch and every piece of audio evidence has silently drawn on for a century.

Robert Chesney and Danielle Citron named the consequence in the California Law Review in 2019: the liar's dividend, the windfall that accrues to the genuinely guilty from the mere existence of convincing fakes. You do not need to produce a deepfake to benefit. You need only point at the category. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel S. Schiff and Natália S. Bueno tested this empirically in the American Political Science Review in 2024 across five pre-registered experiments involving more than 15,000 American adults, and found that politicians who falsely dismissed damaging true reporting as misinformation gained measurable support — between roughly 0.17 and 0.24 standard deviations — outperforming apology or silence. The strategy worked across partisan lines. The dividend is real and it pays.

Put the two findings together and the shape of the problem changes. Prohibition, labelling, takedown, criminal penalty — every mechanism on the table addresses the fake. None of them restores the credibility of the real. A perfectly enforced ban on synthetic media would still leave every defendant in every courtroom free to say that recording could be anything, and would still leave 64 per cent as the rate at which a jury of ordinary listeners believes authentic audio.

What Canadian Law Thinks a Face Is Worth

To understand why an Ontario minister ended up asking for a total ban, you have to look at what he was working with.

Canada's protection of likeness comes from the tort of appropriation of personality, recognised in Krouse v. Chrysler Canada in 1971 and expanded in Athans v. Canadian Adventure Camps in 1977, which confirmed that the right covers both image and name. The doctrine is coherent and well-settled, and it is built on a single load-bearing assumption: that the plaintiff's identity has marketable value, exploitable through endorsement, which the defendant has helped himself to. Krouse lost, because the photograph showed only his back and number and he was not identifiable. Athans won, because a line drawing of him water-skiing in his signature pose was recognisably him and could have impaired his ability to sell endorsements.

This is a commercial doctrine wearing the clothes of a dignitary one. It protects the athlete, the musician, the person whose face is already a revenue-generating asset. It has very little to say to a teacher whose colleagues receive a synthetic video of her, because she was not planning to sell her face to anybody and the harm she suffers is not lost licensing income. Quebec is the partial exception: in Aubry v. Éditions Vice-Versa, decided by the Supreme Court in 1998, a private individual photographed on a public street succeeded under the Quebec Charter's protection of private life. That is a civil-law dignitary right, and it is closer to what the rest of the country needs than anything the common law offers.

Federal attempts to modernise this collapsed. Bill C-27, containing the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act — Canada's first comprehensive AI statute — died on the Order Paper when Parliament was prorogued on 6 January 2025. Bill C-63, the Online Harms Act, which addressed intimate-image deepfakes among much else, died the same morning, taking two years of committee work with it.

What eventually replaced them was narrower and arrived under pressure. Through late 2025 and into 2026, X's integrated chatbot Grok was used to generate sexualised images of real people, including minors, at industrial volume. Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Philippe Dufresne, found on 11 June 2026 that X Corp. and xAI had violated federal private-sector privacy law by launching the image-generation tool without adequate safeguards. Citing researchers, Dufresne noted that Grok was at one point generating well over 6,000 sexualised images per hour. He used the occasion to renew his call for modernised privacy legislation with administrative monetary penalties and order-making powers — which is to say, for the tools he did not have.

Bill C-16, the Protecting Victims Act, moved through Parliament in parallel, passing third reading in the House on 11 June 2026 and receiving Royal Assent on 18 June 2026, with most of its reforms coming into force on 18 July 2026. It amends the Criminal Code to bring synthetic sexual content within the intimate-image offences, adds an offence of threatening to distribute, and — following a justice committee amendment on 11 May 2026 made in direct response to the Grok episode — extends coverage to “nearly nude” AI-generated images and imposes a 48-hour platform takedown obligation.

C-16 is a genuinely good law. It is also, viewed against the harm landscape, a patch on one wall of a house with no foundation. It protects you if the synthetic content is sexual. Fraud law protects you if someone takes money. Appropriation of personality protects you if you had endorsement income to lose. If someone clones your voice to end your marriage, discredit you at work or call your mother, Canadian law offers a scramble through defamation, harassment and privacy torts of uncertain application, none designed for the facts.

Two further bills arrived in the same fortnight, and both bear on the question. On 10 June 2026, Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture, tabled Bill C-34, the Safe Social Media Act — the successor to the dead C-63 and Canada's third attempt at online harms legislation, carrying the same stated purpose of online safety and the protection of children, but a more prescriptive regulatory architecture and a broader range of covered digital services. Five days later came Bill C-36, the Protecting Privacy and Consumer Data Act, an overhaul of federal private-sector privacy law with penalties running to $25 million. C-36 is the more interesting of the two, because it does something no Canadian statute has done. It would give individuals a right to require that a company delete their personal information — and the deletion right, as drafted, extends explicitly to AI-generated deepfakes that use that individual's likeness. Dufresne had called for modernised privacy legislation with administrative monetary penalties and order-making powers four days earlier. This is the answer to that call.

It should be said plainly, because it matters: C-36 is the closest thing Canada currently has to a general remedy for having your likeness synthesised — one that does not require the image to be sexual, the use to be commercial, or money to have changed hands. But notice the route it takes. It arrives through privacy law, as a right against a data holder, rather than as a right in the likeness itself, and the distinction is not academic. A deletion right attaches to personal information held by an organisation. It does not attach to a person's persona, and it gives you nothing to assert against anyone who is not keeping a record about you. It reaches companies subject to federal private-sector privacy law, which is to say it does nothing about the offshore operation that took Judy Skene's money, nothing about the classmate with a nudification app, and nothing whatever about a model file running on a laptop in a bedroom. And it is a bill. C-27 was a bill. C-63 was a bill. Both died on the same January morning with two years of work inside them.

There is no general right. That is the hole Crawford was pointing at, even if the instrument he reached for was wrong.

The Weights Are Already Out

Now the enforcement objection, which is fatal to prohibition in its literal form.

A ban on deepfakes could mean one of two things: a ban on the conduct, or a ban on the tools. The first is largely what already exists, expanded — criminal and civil liability for what you do with a synthetic likeness. It is a real policy option, but it is not a ban in the sense Crawford's letter implies, and it does nothing about the enforcement gap that made his letter necessary: the perpetrators who took Judy Skene's money are already committing multiple existing offences and remain beyond reach.

The second is technically incoherent, and has been since roughly 2023. Zero-shot voice cloning no longer requires training a model. Open-weight systems that can be downloaded, run locally on consumer hardware and reproduce a target voice from a few seconds of reference audio have been publicly available for years. Face-swapping tools of comparable maturity are distributed the same way; when the developer of one widely used repository archived it in 2026 over concerns about downstream misuse, forks and successors persisted, because that is what happens to published weights. A model file, once released, behaves like any other number: it can be copied perfectly, transmitted anywhere, and does not phone home.

Michelle L. Ding, Harini Suresh and Suresh Venkatasubramanian mapped what this means for enforcement in a paper revised in May 2026, which describes the current regulatory posture as “a reactive cycle of whack-a-mole.” Drawing on more than a hundred primary sources, they identify eleven categories of technology facilitating AI-generated non-consensual intimate imagery — creation, distribution, discovery, infrastructural support, monetisation — and map United States federal law and 63 state laws against them. The finding is structural: interventions cluster on a few chokepoints, principally hosted consumer services, while the ecosystem routes around them through self-hosted models, mirror sites, payment intermediaries and encrypted redistribution.

Tennessee's ELVIS Act, signed on 21 March 2024 and in force from 1 July that year, is the most aggressive attempt anywhere to reach the tools themselves: it imposes liability on technologies whose “primary purpose or function” is producing unauthorised digital replicas. It is a sensible provision and it captures commercial nudification services. It cannot capture a general-purpose open-weight speech model whose primary purpose is speech synthesis, which is precisely the thing used in the overwhelming majority of voice-clone fraud.

You cannot ban arithmetic. You can only ban what people do with it, and then find them.

Denmark Decided You Are the Author of Yourself

Which brings us to the one jurisdiction that asked the right question.

On 26 June 2025 the Danish government unveiled a cross-party proposal to amend the national Copyright Act to grant every individual rights over their own body, facial features and voice. The mechanism is a neighbouring right — the same family of entitlements that protects performers and broadcasters rather than authors — implemented through two new provisions: one protecting performers against AI-generated imitation of their performances, and one extending protection to the general public against unauthorised realistic digital reproduction of their appearance or voice.

The design choices are worth dwelling on. Protection extends to all natural persons, not only public figures. Compensation is available without proof of reputational damage, which quietly severs the right from the commercial-value assumption that hobbles Canadian and American law. Enforcement borrows copyright's existing plumbing — notice-and-takedown, established infringement standards, platform liability — so it arrives with functioning machinery rather than requiring new institutions. And it carves out parody, satire, caricature and social criticism explicitly.

The amendment's status as of August 2026 is genuinely unclear from public sources. Commentary through late 2025 and early 2026 anticipated commencement on 31 March 2026, but a snap general election intervened, and the expectation has since slipped to the third quarter of 2026. I could not verify from primary Danish parliamentary records whether the provisions are in force. That uncertainty is instructive: the closest thing any democracy has to a likeness-ownership regime has spent over a year in legislative transit.

The criticism lands, though. Copyright is transferable and licensable; grafting personal identity onto it invites the possibility that a likeness could be signed away wholesale in a contract of adhesion — exactly the abuse California's AB 2602 was written to prevent, by requiring that digital-replica contract terms describe intended uses with reasonable specificity. There are also awkward interactions with the General Data Protection Regulation and the Digital Services Act, which already govern much of the same ground through different logic.

But Denmark got the ontology right, and that is the harder half. It began from the proposition that a likeness is a thing a person holds a right in — not because it is worth money, not because the depiction is sexual, not because someone was defrauded, but because it is theirs. Everything else is implementation detail.

Where Prohibition Meets the Charter

Suppose Ottawa took Crawford literally. What happens?

Section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects freedom of expression, and Canadian courts define expression expansively — any activity conveying meaning, regardless of content, subject only to a narrow exclusion for violent form. A synthetic image conveys meaning. So does a satirical voice clone of a party leader, a documentary reconstruction, a film using a de-ageing pipeline, a comedian's impression rendered in silicon rather than larynx. An all-out ban on AI-generated likeness would engage section 2(b) instantly and comprehensively.

It would then have to be saved under section 1, through the proportionality analysis the Supreme Court set out in R v. Oakes in 1986. The first step is straightforward: protecting people from impersonation-based fraud and sexual exploitation is unquestionably a pressing and substantial objective. The second, rational connection, is arguable. It is the third step where a total ban dies. Minimal impairment asks whether the limit impairs the right as little as reasonably necessary — and a prohibition that sweeps in parody, satire, art, journalism, education, accessibility tools and every legitimate synthetic-media application in order to reach fraud and abuse is the definition of a measure that could have been drawn more narrowly. Parliament has, in C-16, already demonstrated that it can draw it more narrowly. Having done so, it cannot easily argue that narrower was not available.

The American picture is harsher still. In Kohls v. Bonta, a federal court enjoined California's AB 2839, which restricted materially deceptive election-related deepfakes, and ultimately held it unconstitutional. Because the statute regulated a defined subset of speech by content, it faced strict scrutiny, and it did not survive. Judge John A. Mendez's formulation deserves quoting: “Most of AB 2839 acts as a hammer instead of a scalpel, serving as a blunt tool that hinders humorous expression.” That is not a marginal ruling about a badly drafted statute. It is the standard outcome when a democracy tries to prohibit a kind of image rather than a kind of injury.

The instructive contrast is what has survived. California's AB 602, enacted in 2019 as Civil Code section 1708.86, creates a private right of action for sexually explicit synthetic depictions, with statutory damages up to $150,000 where malice is shown — and includes explicit carve-outs for matters of legitimate public concern, political and newsworthy works, and protected commentary and criticism, while specifying that altered pornography is not newsworthy merely because the subject is a public figure. AB 1836 extends California's post-mortem publicity right to digital replicas for seventy years after death. The federal NO FAKES Act, reintroduced as S.4591 and advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026 with bipartisan sponsorship from Blackburn, Coons, Tillis and Klobuchar, creates a federal property right in voice and visual likeness — and its 2026 revision is notable precisely for expanded First Amendment protections and a DMCA-style counter-notification procedure allowing users to contest removals.

The pattern is unmistakable. Prohibitions of technique fail constitutional review. Rights in persons, with expression carve-outs and adversarial process, survive it. Crawford's ban would not reach the Supreme Court of Canada. It would not reach second reading.

The Labels Come Off in Transit

The fallback everyone reaches for is provenance: mark the synthetic content, and let people see the mark.

The European Union has now made this binding. Article 50 of the AI Act imposes transparency obligations across four areas — direct interaction with humans, AI-generated content, emotion recognition and biometric categorisation, and deepfakes and AI-generated text on matters of public interest. The obligations became applicable on 2 August 2026, eleven days before Crawford wrote his letter, with limited transitional relief for machine-readable marking. The European Commission adopted implementing guidelines on 20 July 2026, alongside a Code of Practice on transparency of AI-generated content. Non-compliance can attract fines up to €15 million or 3 per cent of worldwide annual turnover, and the labelling duty applies regardless of intent to deceive.

This is the most serious labelling regime in the world and it will help. It will also not do what people imagine it does.

The technical substrate is the C2PA standard, which cryptographically binds provenance assertions to media through signed manifests. The standard's own security documentation enumerates the threats: manifest stripping, unauthorised re-signing, soft-binding collisions. In deployment the failure is more mundane and more complete. Major platforms strip metadata during upload as a routine consequence of transcoding. A signed manifest survives a download and dies on re-upload. Invisible watermarks embedded in the content itself can be perturbed away by a determined adversary, and research through 2026 on diffusion-based editing has documented failure modes in supposedly robust schemes. Platform provenance indicators and watermark detectors typically operate without reference to one another, producing contradictory signals on the same asset.

But the deeper problem is one of direction. Marking the synthetic tells you nothing about the authentic. In a world where 64 per cent is the rate at which humans correctly identify real speech as real, the useful infrastructure is not a label on the fake — which the adversary controls and can remove — but an attestation on the true, controlled by the speaker, attached at the point of capture. C2PA can technically do this. Almost nobody deploys it that way, because the regulatory pressure has all been pointed at labelling AI output.

We have built a system that asks liars to identify themselves.

The Right That Would Actually Do Something

So: what is the underlying right, and who does it belong to?

Here is the answer the evidence supports. There is a right, it belongs to every person equally, and its content is this — you decide whether a convincing representation of your face, body or voice is distributed as though it were you. Not because your likeness is a commercial asset. Not because the depiction is sexual. Not because you lost money. Because it is a representation of you, and you are the only person with standing to authorise it.

That right attaches to distribution, not to generation, and the distinction carries the entire enforcement argument. Generation cannot be policed, because the weights are already out and a model running on a laptop leaves no trace. Distribution can be, because distribution requires reach, and reach requires infrastructure that has addresses, jurisdictions and bank accounts. This is why C-16's 48-hour takedown provision matters more than its custodial penalties, why the TAKE IT DOWN Act's Section 3 — under which the Federal Trade Commission commenced enforcement on 19 May 2026, the statutory compliance deadline, warning fifteen major platforms including Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, TikTok and X of their obligations — matters more than its criminal provisions, and why the Danish decision to route a dignitary right through copyright's takedown machinery was, whatever its conceptual awkwardness, tactically astute.

It must be a civil right with a cheap, fast, low-evidence remedy, and it must have expression carve-outs written into its bones rather than bolted on afterwards — parody, satire, caricature, criticism, news, art, biography, research. This is the CIGI position, argued by the AI governance researcher Yuan Y. Stevens in an analysis published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation in late 2025 that called for Canada to modernise its image and likeness rights so victims can obtain rapid takedown orders and damages, with carve-outs for legitimate expression. Stevens' framing of deepfake abuse as a form of digital violence disproportionately directed at women and girls is not rhetorical decoration. It is a claim about who the law has been built for. Right-of-publicity doctrine descends from cases about footballers and water-skiers. The people being harmed at scale are teenagers, teachers, nurses and pensioners. A right that only activates when your face has a market price is not a right most people have.

And then there is the part no individual right can fix.

If the Müller and Choong finding holds — if the population-level consequence of accessible synthesis is that people stop believing true recordings — then the injury is not only to the person impersonated. It is to everyone who will ever need to be believed. That is a commons problem, and commons problems are not solved by giving individuals causes of action. They are solved by building infrastructure: capture-time attestation in the devices people already carry, key material bound to persons rather than platforms, provenance that survives transcoding because platforms are obliged to preserve it rather than merely permitted to display it. None of this is in Article 50. None of it is in C-16. None of it would have been in Crawford's ban.

Which returns us, finally, to what that letter actually was. Not a serious enforcement proposal — it could not survive the Oakes test, and it could not survive contact with a downloaded model file. Read it instead as an accurate diagnosis expressed in the only vocabulary the writer had available. Confronted with an 86-year-old constituent who lost $900,000 because a machine wore the Prime Minister's face, a minister looked through the statute book for the provision that says your face is yours, found no such provision, and asked for the whole category to be outlawed instead.

The absence he was reaching into is real. Anglo-American law has never held that a person owns their own likeness. It has held that some people own the commercial value of theirs, that some depictions are obscene, that some uses are defamatory, that some deceptions are fraudulent. Each of those is a rule about something else that happens to catch likeness in passing. For a hundred years that was sufficient, because reproducing a person convincingly required a film crew, a budget and a reason. It required, in effect, that you be worth faking.

That condition no longer holds. Everyone is now worth faking, because faking costs nothing. And the law is discovering, in real time and in public, that it never wrote down the rule everyone assumed was there.

Ban or regulate was never the question. The question is whether Parliament will say the sentence that has gone unsaid — that a person's likeness belongs to that person, all persons, not merely the marketable ones — and then build the narrow, boring, well-carved-out machinery that makes it enforceable. Denmark tried to say it and got tangled in copyright. The NO FAKES Act keeps getting redrafted around the First Amendment. Canada has said a fragment of it, about sexual images, and is now feeling for the rest through privacy law rather than saying the sentence itself.

Judy Skene will not get her money back. But the reason a court could offer Mark Carney a remedy for the misuse of his face and offer her nothing at all for the same video is not a gap in enforcement. It is a gap in the concept. Until that is fixed, every ban, every label, every watermark and every takedown window is scaffolding around a building nobody has designed.

References

1. “Ontario cabinet minister calls for 'all-out ban on AI deepfakes and impersonations'”, CP24 / CTV News, 12 August 2026. https://www.cp24.com/local/toronto/2026/08/12/ontario-cabinet-minister-calls-for-all-out-ban-on-ai-deepfakes-and-impersonations/
2. “Ontario senior loses $900,000 to crypto platform scam that used AI deepfake of PM Carney”, CP24 / CTV News, 26 June 2026. https://www.cp24.com/local/toronto/2026/06/26/ontario-senior-loses-900000-to-crypto-platform-scam-that-used-ai-deepfake-of-pm-carney/
3. ”'I couldn't stop crying': Ontario woman loses $83,000 after watching AI deepfake videos”, CP24 / CTV News, 15 July 2026. https://www.cp24.com/local/2026/07/15/i-couldnt-stop-crying-ontario-woman-loses-83000-after-watching-ai-deepfake-videos/
4. Shaina Raza, “The Deepfakes We Missed: We Built Detectors for a Threat That Didn't Arrive”, arXiv:2605.12075, 12 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12075
5. Nicolas M. Müller and Wei Herng Choong, “Eroding Trust in Real Speech: A Large-Scale Study of Human Audio Deepfake Perception”, arXiv:2605.26136, 21 May 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.26136
6. Yuan Y. Stevens, “Canada Must Do More to Protect Women and Girls from Harmful Deepfakes”, Centre for International Governance Innovation, 2025. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canada-must-do-more-to-protect-women-and-girls-from-harmful-deepfakes/
7. “FTC Begins Enforcing the TAKE IT DOWN Act”, Federal Trade Commission, May 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/05/ftc-begins-enforcing-take-it-down-act
8. “Statement by the Privacy Commissioner of Canada on investigation into the Grok chatbot and sexualized deepfakes”, Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada, 11 June 2026. https://www.priv.gc.ca/en/opc-news/speeches-and-statements/2026/s-d_260611/
9. “Prorogation's Digital Impact: Canada's Digital Bills Set to Die on the Order Paper”, Fasken, January 2025. https://www.fasken.com/en/knowledge/2025/01/prorogations-digital-impact
10. “Kohls v. Bonta”, Electronic Privacy Information Center case documents. https://epic.org/documents/kohls-v-bonta/
11. California AB-602, “Depiction of individual using digital or electronic technology: sexually explicit material: cause of action”, California Legislative Information, 2019. https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201920200AB602
12. “California Enacts Host of AI-Related Bills Designed To Protect Individuals”, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, September 2024. https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2024/09/california-enacts-host-of-ai-related-bills
13. “Why Tennessee's ELVIS Act Is the King of Artificial Intelligence Protections”, Vanderbilt Law School. https://law.vanderbilt.edu/why-tennessees-elvis-act-is-the-king-of-artificial-intelligence-protections/
14. S.4591, “NO FAKES Act of 2026”, 119th Congress, Congress.gov. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4591/text
15. “Owning the Self: Denmark's Copyright Turn Against Deepfakes”, Schjødt, 2025. https://schjodt.com/news/owning-the-self-denmarks-copyright-turn-against-deepfakes
16. “Copyrighting Voice and Image: How Denmark's New Deepfake Law Challenges Traditional Personality Rights in Europe”, Verfassungsblog. https://verfassungsblog.de/copyrighting-voice-and-image/
17. “The AI Act's Transparency Obligations: Rules, Scope and Timeline”, Stibbe. https://www.stibbe.com/publications-and-insights/the-ai-acts-transparency-obligations-rules-scope-and-timeline
18. “C2PA Implementation Guidance”, C2PA Specifications, version 2.4. https://spec.c2pa.org/specifications/specifications/2.4/guidance/Guidance.html
19. “Editing Away the Evidence: Diffusion-Based Image Manipulation and the Failure Modes of Robust Watermarking”, arXiv:2603.12949, 2026. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2603.12949
20. Michelle L. Ding, Harini Suresh and Suresh Venkatasubramanian, “How to Stop Playing Whack-a-Mole: Mapping the Ecosystem of Technologies Facilitating AI-Generated Non-Consensual Intimate Images”, arXiv:2602.04759, February 2026, revised May 2026. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.04759
21. Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Daniel S. Schiff and Natália S. Bueno, “The Liar's Dividend: Can Politicians Claim Misinformation to Evade Accountability?“, American Political Science Review, 2024. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/liars-dividend-can-politicians-claim-misinformation-to-evade-accountability/687FEE54DBD7ED0C96D72B26606AA073
22. “2025 IC3 Annual Report”, Federal Bureau of Investigation Internet Crime Complaint Center, 2026. https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf
23. “2025 Annual Data & Insights Report: Executive Summary”, Internet Watch Foundation, 2026. https://www.iwf.org.uk/annual-data-insights-report-2025/executive-summary/
24. Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, section 138, legislation.gov.uk, in force 6 February 2026. https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2025/18/section/138
25. “Legal Considerations in Canada related to Deepfake Videos and Images”, McMillan LLP. https://mcmillan.ca/insights/legal-considerations-in-canada-related-to-deepfake-videos-and-images/
26. “New privacy bill would give Canadians right to request companies delete AI deepfakes”, CBC News, June 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ask-private-company-delete-information-legislation-9.7236343
27. ”'Online Harms' is back: An overview of Bill C-34 The Safe Social Media Act”, Canadian Privacy Law Blog, June 2026. https://blog.privacylawyer.ca/2026/06/online-harms-is-back.html
28. “Government Bill (House of Commons) C-16 (45-1) – Royal Assent – Protecting Victims Act”, Parliament of Canada. https://www.parl.ca/documentviewer/en/45-1/bill/C-16/royal-assent

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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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * This afternoon I was able to catch two Big Ten Conference college football games and the two teams I was cheering for both won: Ohio State winning 59 to 3, and IU winning 38 to 0. It was very relaxing if only mildly entertaining, listening to those games, but relaxation is a good thing, and I consider those hours well spent.

Now I'm listening to relaxing slow jazz music with only the night prayers and meditations ahead of me before an early bedtime. And I'm conducting an internal debate with myself, weighing the option of doing a little yard work tomorrow morning. Lord knows it needs doing. Maybe if I only do part of it tomorrow and save the rest for later in the week. Hmm... That sounds like a good option. We'll see what I think in the morning.

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.

Health Metrics: * bw= 225.53 lbs. * bp= 152/89

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

Diet: * 06:35 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 08:30 – fried chicken * 12:00 – air-popped popcorn * 15:05 – mashed potatoes, hamburger patties, w. mushroom & spinach gravy

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:15 – wake * 06:00 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 06:35 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 10:30 – Now listening to the Ohio State Sports Network for pregame coverage ahead of the early college football game between Kent State and the Ohio State Buckeyes. * 14:30 – and Ohio State wins 59 to 3. * 14:40 – now listening to pregame coverage for the IU / Western Kentucky game * 18:21 – and IU wins, 38 to 0. * 18:30 – listening to relaxing music.

Chess: * 13:10 – moved in all pending CC games

(Modeling 1,200W vs. 1,500W in Virginia)

When exploring plug-in solar, a natural first question is: How much electricity will this system actually generate every day?

To answer this with mathematical precision rather than marketing guesswork, I modeled daily solar generation for my residence in Fairfax County, Virginia over a full 365-day year (August 2025 to July 2026). Using physics-based modeling and hyper-local historical weather data, here is what the data reveals about plug-in solar generation, the impact of panel “overpaneling,” heat penalties, and potential real-world saving.

1. Regulatory Context: Why the 1,200 W Inverter Cap?

Under Virginia’s plug-in solar law, residential plug-in solar devices up to 1,200 Watts DC per dwelling unit can be connected directly into standard 120V household wall outlets without formal utility pre-approval, interconnection fees, or complex electrical panel upgrades.

However, a solar array with a nameplate capacity of 1,200 W would rarely reach that limit due to weather effects (clouds, heat, or time of year). Commercial installations typically oversize their arrays about 25% to be able to reliably generate the expected amount of energy. Virginia’s plug-in solar law does not allow for oversizing but it’s an interesting analysis to see the extra value you would get from an oversized array with a microinverter that would limit the output to 1,200W.

2. The Modeling Setup: 1,200 W vs. 1,500 W Arrays

Using the physics-based Python pvlib library (implementing NREL’s benchmark PVWatts DC model) combined with 30-minute irradiance, ambient temperature, and wind speed data from the Open-Meteo API for Fairfax County, VA (38.85° N, -77.13° W), I simulated two fixed, South-facing (180° azimuth) arrays tilted at 38.85°:

• Baseline Array: 1,200 W DC nameplate capacity paired with a 1,200 W inverter (95% DC-to-AC efficiency).
  
• Oversized Array: 1,500 W DC nameplate capacity (25% more panel capacity) paired with the same 1,200 W max inverter output limit.

3. Average Daily Generation & Dollar Savings

Below is a graph of how much energy each system would produce based on an average of the days across the entire year:

The table below gives greater detail and the expected savings if 100% of the generated, energy displaced electricity that otherwise would have been pulled from the grid.

System Configuration	Raw Daily Generation (kWh)	Daily Output Limited to 1,200 W (kWh)	Energy Lost to Clipping	Estimated Daily Value ($0.18/kWh)	Estimated Annual Value
1,200 W Solar Array	5.344 kWh	5.343 kWh	0.02%	~$0.96 / day	~$350 / year
1,500 W Solar Array	6.683 kWh	6.589 kWh	1.41%	~$1.19 / day	~$432 / year

Clipping occurs when the solar array outputs more power than enough power for the microinverter to produce 1,200 W AC. A legally compliant microinverter would limit the output to 1,200 W (clipping) so that the system remains compliant with the law.

My average cost of electricity is $0.18/kWh. However, this cost depends on total usage. In my county, we have three different categories of costs that scale differently: * Strictly Proportional Charges (generation, transmission, fuel, deferred fuel cost charge, sales and use surcharge, and state/local consumption tax scale linearly with consumption. * Partially Proportional Charges: distribution service charge consists of a fixed monthly customer charge plus a variable per-kWh rate. * Capped Non-Proportional Charges: County utility tax contains a fixed base fee plus a capped variable rate.

The Power of “Overpaneling”

By oversizing the panel array by 25% (1,500 W total panels feeding a 1,200 W max output), the total delivered daily output increases by 23.33% (from 5.34 kWh to 6.59 kWh per day). Even though peak midday generation exceeds the 1,200 W inverter limit on clear days. Based on this average output value, only 1.41% of total potential annual power would be lost to clipping.

4. Hardware & Purchasing Costs: Is Oversizing Worth It?

Retail rigid solar panels (300 W to 400 W nameplate ratings from major manufacturers like Renogy, BougeRV, Aptos, or EcoFlow) typically cost $120 to $180 per panel ($0.40–$0.55 per Watt).

• Baseline 1,200 W Hardware: Four 300 W panels (~$600 total panel cost).
  
• Oversized 1,500 W Hardware: Five 300 W panels (~$750 total panel cost).

Adding one extra 300 W panel costs approximately $150. At $0.18 per kWh, generating an additional 1.25 kWh per day provides $0.225/day ($82.12/year) in extra value. That extra panel pays for itself in under 20 months.

5. High vs. Low Days: The Counterintuitive “Heat Penalty”

Solar production isn't just a function of daylight hours; temperature plays a massive role due to the solar panel temperature coefficient (-0.0047 / °C).

• Clear Spring Day (March 28, 2026 - High Temp 49°F):
  
  • 1,200 W Array Output: 8.96 kWh (clipped)
    
  • 1,500 W Array Output: 10.11 kWh (clipped)
    
  • Cool ambient temperatures keep panel efficiency near maximum, yielding over 10 kWh in a single day!
    

• Hot Summer Day (July 4, 2026 - High Temp 103°F):
  
  • 1,200 W Array Output: 6.70 kWh
    
  • 1,500 W Array Output: 8.37 kWh
    
  • Extreme summer heat derates panel output, and atmospheric haze/humidity reduces solar intensity—producing about 75% of the daily output of a crisp spring day despite longer daylight hours!

6. What's Coming Up Next: Real Household Demand Analysis

Knowing how much power your panels generate on paper is only half the battle. Because plug-in solar operates on a single 120V circuit leg without net metering, any power produced above your home's instantaneous demand flows out to the grid for free.

In my next post, I'll look at real smart meter data from my home! I'll analyze 30-minute interval electrical load profiles across single-phase circuits to calculate exact real-time self-consumption and uncompensated exports. Stay tuned!

Tags: #Solar #PlugIn #Balcony #Modeling

I’ve come to the water to purify and nourish me

and I’ve come to the desert to ground and vitalize me.

Where the School Bus Stops

As I was driving by a local shelter, I pulled up behind a school bus.

There was nothing unusual about it.

A yellow bus at the end of a school day. Children getting off with backpacks slung over their shoulders, carrying whatever papers, assignments, lunch boxes, and small concerns had followed them through the day.

I had seen school buses drop children off a thousand times.

I had never really thought about where every child was going.

Usually, a school bus disappears into a neighborhood. It turns down familiar streets and stops in front of houses or apartment buildings. A child steps down, walks toward a door, and the bus moves on.

But this bus stopped here.

At the shelter.

And suddenly I understood something I had never really considered before.

For some children, the school bus doesn't take them home.

It takes them back to the place where they are waiting for home.

They had spent the day doing what children do.

Math problems.

Reading assignments.

Lunch.

Maybe recess.

Maybe laughing with friends in the hallway.

Maybe worrying about a test.

Maybe wondering whether someone they like likes them back.

Maybe a teacher reminded them about homework before the final bell rang.

Then school ended.

Their classmates boarded buses too.

Some would get off in front of houses.

Some would walk into apartments.

Some would throw their backpacks onto bedroom floors and be told for the hundredth time to pick them up.

Some would open refrigerators without wondering whether there would be food inside.

Some would close bedroom doors and complain about siblings bothering them.

And some would ride until the bus stopped at a homeless shelter.

At night, families at the shelter sleep on mattress pads on the floor.

There are no bedrooms waiting behind closed doors.

No dresser where everything can remain until morning.

Just a locker.

No familiar place where a child can leave something and know exactly where it will be tomorrow.

There are families sharing space with other families, each carrying whatever circumstances brought them there and whatever hope they have that this will only be temporary.

But children remain children.

Someone still has homework.

Someone still wants a bedtime story.

Someone is irritated with a brother or sister.

Someone may have lost a tooth.

Someone can't find a shoe.

Someone wants five more minutes before going to sleep.

Someone wants to know what's for breakfast.

Homelessness doesn't somehow turn childhood into something else.

It simply asks childhood to continue under circumstances childhood should never have to understand.

And the next morning, those children get dressed for school again.

Maybe their classmates know where they slept.

Maybe they don't.

The child sitting beside them in math class may have no idea that the person borrowing a pencil spent the previous night on a mattress pad in a room filled with other families.

A teacher may know.

Or may not.

Children can become remarkably skilled at carrying private worlds into public places.

And there are privileges in childhood that those of us who had them rarely recognize as privileges.

A bedroom.

A closet.

A favorite place on the couch.

A refrigerator you are allowed to open.

A drawer containing your clothes.

A wall where something you made at school can stay taped for months.

An address.

Not luxury.

Not a large house.

Not the newest furniture.

Just a place where your things can remain overnight.

A door.

A bed.

A place where someone can say:

We're home.

Perhaps one of the quietest privileges of childhood is simply being able to assume that the place you leave in the morning will still be yours when you return.

And then there are the parents.

It would be easy to see those children and wonder how they ended up there.

But somewhere inside that shelter is also a mother trying to make an impossible situation feel ordinary.

A father trying not to let his children see how frightened he is.

Parents filling out applications.

Calling landlords.

Waiting on housing lists.

Going to work.

Trying to save money.

Trying to arrange transportation.

Trying to remember which paper needs to be signed for school tomorrow.

Trying to solve adult problems while a child is asking:

“Did you wash my favorite shirt?”

Homelessness doesn't suspend parenthood.

There are still lunches to prepare.

Hair to brush.

Arguments to settle.

Homework to check.

Children to reassure.

And perhaps there is a particular kind of pain in trying to make your child feel safe when you don't know what happens next yourself.

Still, morning comes.

You wake them.

You get them dressed.

You straighten their clothes.

You make sure they have their backpacks.

You send them out the door.

And the yellow bus comes.

For a few hours, perhaps everything looks ordinary.

School has its own rhythms.

Bells ring.

Teachers teach.

Children laugh.

Lunch is served.

Pencils break.

Someone gets in trouble for talking.

Someone raises a hand because they know the answer.

Someone stares out a window waiting for the day to end.

And eventually it does.

The children gather their things.

They climb back onto the bus.

The doors fold shut.

The driver pulls away.

One by one, children disappear through the doors of the places where they live.

Until eventually the bus reaches the shelter.

And those children step down again.

Backpacks over their shoulders.

Back to the mattress pads.

Back to the shared space.

Back to waiting.

Then tomorrow they will do it again.

And the next day.

And perhaps the next.

Until someday, hopefully, they don't.

Someday I hope the route changes.

Maybe the child doesn't know it will happen that day.

Maybe the bus follows its usual streets until the driver turns somewhere unfamiliar.

The child looks out the window.

This isn't the way to the shelter.

The bus continues.

Past houses.

Past trees.

Around a corner they haven't traveled before.

Then it slows.

There is a building with a number on the door.

Maybe it's an apartment.

Maybe it's a little house.

Maybe there isn't much furniture yet.

Maybe boxes are still stacked against the walls.

None of that matters.

Because inside there is a bed that doesn't have to be packed away tomorrow.

There is a place for the backpack.

A drawer for the clothes.

A refrigerator that belongs to the family.

A door they can close.

An address they can write when a teacher asks where they live.

And maybe that afternoon the bus stops.

The doors open.

A child steps down carrying the same backpack they carried into the shelter so many afternoons before.

But this time, the bus isn't dropping them at the place where they are waiting for home.

This time they look toward the door.

Someone is waiting for them.

This is where I get off.

The bus pulls away.

And the child knows:

I'm home.

#ArchitectureOfGrief

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Part 3: Children of the supernormal

When forming an understanding of anomalous experiences, it helps to ask the history and meaning of the concepts and terminology it has evolved from, and what those words were attempting to do. For that, the word “Spiritualism” and the history surrounding it is a worthy starting point, keeping in mind that people have had what is conventionally now known as ‘spiritual experiences’ throughout the world and history. The Encyclopedia Britannica in the early 20th century described “Spiritualism” as:

“a term used by philosophical writers to denote the opposite of materialism, and also used in a narrower sense to describe the belief that the spiritual world manifests itself by producing in the physical world effects inexplicable by the known laws of nature.” ¹

The first thing I notice with the definition is the way it spans a broad philosophical meaning and then a narrow experiential one. The second thing I notice is that the second meaning subtly concedes: inexplicable by the known laws of nature — with the crucial qualifier, known. The authors did not write “inexplicable by the laws of nature.” The key distinction is the phrasing, “known laws of nature.” The exception is, thus, built into the definition as both precaution and foresight.

I’d also note that something interesting is missing from the definition. Nowhere in its words on séances, mediums, raps, and the whole apparatus of modern Spiritualism does the word paranormal appear. The entry is a fossil of its time — written when investigators used a different term entirely, one now almost forgotten: the supernormal.

As I follow the entry, my word search takes me to Hydesville, New York, 1848.

What began the Spiritualism movement, the entry shows, was the family of Mr and Mrs J. D. Fox and their two daughters, in Hydesville, New York, disturbed in 1848 by unexplained knockings. It was one of the daughters, Kate, aged eight or nine, who discovered the sounds would obey requests — that the cause was, according to their account, intelligent. With communication established, the rapper professed to be the spirit of a murdered pedlar.

From that single household came, over time, a transatlantic movement. From knocks agreed to mean no and yes, an elaborate technology of alphabets, table-turning, trance-speaking, and materialized hands. And from the story of a murdered pedlar came a claim that the dead never left, and can be reached by certain means.

The story’s entry is remarkable less for its history than for its record, for it leaves both sides of the account open.

The account continues to indicate that experiments conducted in 1851, as part of ongoing investigations into their claims, suggested the Fox girls produced their rapping sounds by partially dislocating and restoring their own joints. Additional investigations revealed that the conditions most favorable to obtaining phenomena were also precisely those most favorable for deception. According to one Stainton Moses, a leading Spiritualist at the time and himself a self-professed medium, people did not get what they wanted or expected in 99 out of 100 cases. Further experiments by a certain professor of physics at Geneva convinced him that the unusual experiences, séances in particular, were of an unknown force. The results of which, in addition to a listing of other investigations into these experiences and claims, were inconclusive at the time, indicating that it could be deception or some other conventially unexplainable phenomena.

What should an anomalologist make of a century like that one? Perhaps the calls of fraud and the possibility of truth are not mutually exclusive. They are the same history, of course, but even the exposure of frauds and conmen didn’t explain all accounts, including those by witnesses otherwise known to be competent and trustworthy. In the end, the claims of the Fox girls were never fully accounted for, leaving witnesses to draw their own conclusions.

If I view these accounts through the lens of Part 2: the Fox girls as witnesses, Hydesville as place, the communications as account, and Crookes, the Society for Psychical Research, and ultimately the Britannica itself as observers — each deciding what the phenomena would labeled and categorized. Such categorizations are never neutral, then or now.

It is worth pausing to examine the entry's vocabulary, because it lacks its own awareness and foreknowledge of how terminology and accounts would later evolve. The entry uses the term supernormal rather than paranormal, which came into context and the lexicon years later. Supernormal was coined by Frederic Myers, a founder of the Society for Psychical Research, based on a need for a term to include the beyond-normal without theological commitment. Supernatural belonged to the church. Supernormal was an attempt at a neutral perspective.

Paranormal came onto the scene in English in 1905, a loanword from the French, and for three decades the two terms competed, with the newcomer winning sometime around 1937-1938 due, at least in part, to J.B. Rhine’s experimental program at Duke University, which was part of the same shift that retired “psychical research” in favor of parapsychology, a term coined by philosopher Max Dessoir in 1889. The séance moved to the laboratory, and the vocabulary followed it, where it would, by the end of the 20th century, begin to fade from serious discourse and take up new residence in popular culture and mass media as entertainment.

What I find interesting, however, are the prefixes rather than the succession.

Super- means beyond. The supernormal rises above the normal; it claims transcendence, however carefully disclaimed. Para- means beside. The paranormal is the neighbouring country — not above the world, adjacent to it, a republic next door whose border nobody has satisfactorily mapped. And beneath both sits the parent term of this series: anomalous, from the Greek anōmalos — uneven, irregular; not against the law, not above it, not beside it, but simply off it. Outside the pattern.

Each prefix is a small, subtle ontology. Each word, in being chosen, redefines what kind of thing the phenomena were permitted to be: transcendent, adjacent, or merely unruly. There was no adjudication involved as to how these terms entered the vernacular of common discourse and conversation. The drift from supernormal to paranormal to anomalous was a century-long slide and the witnesses whose experiences were being renamed were, as usual, not part of the result.

There is a lesson here for the anomalologist, and it parallels a theme I began in Part 1: the classification of anomalous experiences is never neutral. Neither is the classifier's dictionary, often smuggling in biases and motivations masked by the veil of clinical objectivity, theological canon, or mystical desire.

Whatever became of Hydesville, the movement it began died long ago as an institution leaving behind only traces of the legitimate questions those events triggered.

Strip the séance rooms of their conjuring, the mediums of their cracked toes, the century of its documented fraud, and something remains that neither side has been able to remove. What remains still are the central underlying questions of what was left unexplained and why. This does not mean that investigation into the supernormal-paranormal have ceased. Merely to say that they have transformed over the decades since, from shocking domestic phenomena to religious propaganda to streaming jump-scare entertainment.

Despite this evolution, roughly one-third to one-half of the given populace report having personally experienced at least one such experience in their lifetime.² That’s not an insignificant figure. More interestingly, I suspect, is that most people avoid discussing such experiences openly, leaving any sharing of them to closed, confidential conversations with psychologists, priests, or sympathetic therapists. I would also presume that any resulting explanations or conclusions they arrive at are likely as varied as the people and encounters themselves. Experiences that occur within the world, framed as of the world — beside or outside its known laws.

Here the honest scholar meets the central problem, and I should admit it. A strange dream is not an anomaly. Noises in an old house are not anomalies. The feeling of being watched in an empty parking garage on a late Sunday afternoon is not an anomaly. Each is odd; none crosses any line an impartial observer could identify and explain. And yet somewhere between the odd and the anomalous there is a boundary, no one knows precisely where, and every party to this history — the grieving mother, Faraday with his unconscious muscles, the aged encyclopedia entry — has stood at that boundary and decided, or refused to decide, where the Hydesville phenomena belonged.

The anomalologist, I propose, does not adjudicate the truth or falsehood of such accounts, or draw the line between them. Certainly, each person who encounters them will draw their own conclusions, which may or may not change with time and experience.

What I’m left with is the position the anomalologist takes toward the vocabulary of the last two centuries. I’m not one to discard terms or choose victors. I gather them while keeping their history, meaning, and function.

The spiritual remains the oldest term, the manifestation of a spiritual world into the physical, the belief of the mourner at the séance. It deserves neither praise nor condemnation. The term simply identifies what the experience meant to those who lived it. The supernormal remains what Myers forged it to be, a term of careful trespass, beyond the normal without requiring theology. The paranormal remains the word that conventiionally won out a century ago. And encompassing both of them is the anomalous, making no promise about divinity, transcendence, adjacency, or meaning. It claims only that a pattern exists.

None of these terms is wrong. Each is a piece of a larger puzzle, forged by the people who needed them, the eras they inhabited, and the cultures they inherited.

#Anomalology

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Notes:

1. Encyclopedia Britannica, Eleventh Edition, Volume 25 (1911).

2. Bauer E. (2004). “Panel Discussion: Counseling persons with exceptional experiences: The example of the IGPP.” in Paper presented at the 47th Annual Convention of the Parapsychological Association. 319–324.

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What is Anomalology?

• Part 1: Defining the Undefinable
• Part 2: Anomalies and Frames
• Part 3: Children of the supernormal

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By D. Bowman Nomina Numina is a journal of my reflections, moments, and meaning-making between worlds. Reply by email.

Créditos · © 2025 Juanma Menéndez

Esta obra está licenciada bajo una Licencia Creative Commons Atribución 4.0 Internacional (CC BY 4.0).

Esto significa que puede ser compartida, copiada, adaptada y distribuida en cualquier medio o formato, incluso con fines comerciales, siempre que se dé el crédito adecuado al autor.

#procesos

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

“Greenland will be a policeman, and it will extend to Iqaluit.”

— jtw

Sometimes I wonder how I became a pastor.

Yeah, I know the official story.

I went through CAMS. C-A-M-S. I studied. I worked. I went through the exhorter program. I did what they told me to do.

But then, right before I could take my final test, my son was diagnosed with bone cancer.

And suddenly, that test didn’t matter very much.

I wasn’t leaving my son to go take an exam.

So I waited a year.

The next year came, and because of a miscommunication, I missed it again.

Another year.

Another delay.

Another round of studying because things had changed.

At the time, it felt like life kept getting in the way of ministry.

Looking back, I realize something.

It was the ministry.

God wasn’t keeping me from my education.

He was giving me one.

Sometimes I wonder how I became a chaplain.

Then God starts reminding me.

Back in 2006, there was Grandma Logan.

Colon cancer. Hospice.

Mom and I were there taking care of her.

Then Dad got sick. COPD. His breathing became harder, his world became smaller, and Mom and I took care of him until he passed away.

I was a caregiver for Grandma.

I was a caregiver for Dad.

Then came my son.

Bone cancer.

The very reason I couldn’t take my ministerial exam became another classroom.

No desk. No textbook. No professor.

Just cancer.

Fear.

Prayer.

Hospitals.

Waiting rooms.

And learning how to stand beside somebody you love when you cannot fix what is hurting them.

Years later, I stood in my own church and married that same son to Kaylee.

There were probably 80 to 100 people in that sanctuary.

Love filled the room.

It was beautiful.

Then Kaylee began helping take care of him. As he grew older and matured, he learned to take care of himself.

And then there was Mom.

Mom had been my mother.

Then she became my co-parent, helping me raise my children.

But dementia is a thief.

Little by little, it took pieces of her away.

And somewhere along that road, the woman who had once tucked me into bed became my little girl.

I tucked her in.

I kissed her forehead.

And at night, I would have her repeat the Lord’s Prayer with me—

the same prayer she had taught my children,

the same prayer she had taught me when I was a child.

Life had turned the whole thing around.

The hands that once cared for me were now in my hands.

And I cared for her.

So sometimes I wonder how I became a chaplain.

How I became a pastor.

And then I look backward.

Grandma.

Dad.

My son.

Mom.

Hospice rooms.

Hospital rooms.

Bedrooms.

Deathbeds.

Wedding altars.

Church altars.

And suddenly I can see it.

God had been training me the whole time.

I thought I was being delayed.

God was developing me.

I thought life kept interrupting my ministry.

Life was becoming my ministry.

And now I’m a caretaker for a church.

Because pastors aren’t just preachers.

We’re caretakers.

We take care of bruised souls.

Hurting hearts.

Weak faith.

People who come through the doors carrying wounds nobody else can see.

And we stay with them.

We pray with them.

We preach Jesus to them.

We walk beside them until the bruises begin to fade, the weakness begins to strengthen, and the broken places begin to heal.

Not because the pastor has the power to heal them.

But because Jesus does.

He came to bind up the brokenhearted.

And maybe that’s how I became a pastor.

Maybe that’s how I became a chaplain.

Not because one day somebody handed me a certificate and said,

“Now you’re ready.”

Maybe God had been preparing me for decades.

One bedside at a time.

One broken heart at a time.

One goodbye at a time.

And I didn’t even know I was in school.

Choir sound is different

Over the last year, Keri and I have been working on a choir sound. We got some things, read some things, and went to town on experiments. We got in the garage. We got the closet. We even tried the shower. We just did a job for a cool song from Scotland by Andrew Anderson, coming soon. We feel good about the choir sound now. I wanted to talk concepts about making good choir in your songs.

Disclaimer:

First off, both Keri and I grew up in protestant church choir and that has a lot to do with our sound. We are not trained, we just showed up. My concept of choir might be slightly different than yours if you have never sung at vacation bible school, or a funeral, or a wedding.

If you were a dozen people, it would be really loud.

I learned by placing different mics in different rooms that the nicer mics get to do their thing in large spaces. I found this crucial for making convincing choir tracks. The room had to be bigger than my normal tracking space.

The mic I am currently using for these kinds of tracks is the Myrtle by Ear Trumpet labs. The Myrtle picks up from 3 feet away like nothing. So I put it in a large room, imagining the sound going out in front and not being able to bounce back to the mic. Huge space. Garage works. A hallway gives interesting and notable results. The small insulated room isn’t even usable here. I would have to change mics.

It has to move.

So I have my big space and I set my mic, it never moves through the whole process. But Keri and I move a ton. I have a taped out semi circle, 4 X’s, we’ll take turns. No choir we have done before sounds good up on a smaller mic, standing in the same spot. But the choir tracks have movement and realism if we stand in 4 or 5 different spots. For Andrew, we did 2 groups of 4 spots. Each.

This works for other instruments too. If you play strings, put the cello, bass, viola, and violin, in all different spots. I’d probably just go with a semicircle there too. But you can get a little crazy…

A fabulous way to learn your mics.

Maybe you have a big room with a little closet. Experiment with standing in the closet, facing the room, singing or playing. With the Myrtle, I get very usable sound this way. But I also get it with the SM58 too. Now turn the operation around. Stand in the room, face the closet, see what happens. I think this helps me with mic placement everywhere, just having done it at home. By doing this, I can echolocate places for microphones better. I have a hearing memory of their reaction to different size spaces. Muscle memory is talked about a lot in other jobs.. I use a lot of hearing memory.

Now do it with multiple distances away and to the side of that mic. You might not realize it, but you are building a choir!

Small set up, large space.

Choir tracks need space, an ensemble mic, an iPad, an interface. It is not necessary to try to force tracking at the house when you can borrow a church’s sanctuary to track vocals. We have. We’ve tracked whole live songs in churches too. Tiny donation, they open the doors. The nice mics love it. They can breathe.

Choir coming on The Kintners record out Christmas.

This time we wanted to try at the house since we are recording a double-album ourselves. Andrew got us off our butts about the choir. Glad he did. I think we have it worked out. One less thing to worry about for the record, choir.

Kelly Kintner

The Horses Mouth

The Kintners

Djembe Funk

I posted some time ago about how I was going to start prepping for a 5k running event. Now here I am, weeks later, at the other end of that prep. It went quite well. To be honest, surprisingly well.

Yesterday was the last day of intermittent fasting. This morning was my last run while wearing the weighted vest. I've never done anything like this in my entire life. I don't know if what I've been doing will result in a personal best on race day, but I have to say that I feel quite healthy and fit.

I've been at this point prior to other running events. Just days to go. It is an odd place to be every time. It is the point where no more gains can be made. I will be at the peak. Whatever the outcome of my efforts is meant to be; it will be that.

These prep routines for running events are kind of funny to me. I go into it all knowing that I could train harder, and be faster, if only running was the main focus of my life. I could be on a very strict 5k training plan that has been used, tried and tested, by professional athletes.

As it is though, running prep is not my main focus. I have to find ways to fit it into my life that revolves around doing a very physical, and at times stressful job for 40 hours a week. It consumes more of my waking hours than anything (getting ready, getting there, doing it). It is not easy... but what is, really?

I started to get into fitness just prior to the beginning of COVID restrictions. I told those stories elsewhere in this blog. I never would have started running if the gyms had not closed when they did. I have learned a lot about running over the years. Each year has been different. I kind of view it as a strange skill that I have developed over the last few years. Also a strange knowledge I now have about what my body is physically capable of.

This year I was doing interval runs, and stairmaster, while wearing a 12 pound weighted vest. I had never done this before. I expected it to be hard, and it was. Very hard. I expected weight loss, my legs to become stronger, and my resting heart rate to become lower. Those things happened. Some things happened that were a surprise: Number one would be how my balance has become noticeably better. My upper body strength has increased. It forced me into engaging core muscles, and also forced me into better running form. I can feel that I have increased lung capacity. These things were a surprise, but after thinking about it, they make sense.

Overall I would say that I feel quite good. Race ready. I would also say though, as good as it feels, it is very unnecessary for living daily life. Not only unnecessary but is also, to me anyway, mentally unsustainable. I can be fit and healthy without being race ready.

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/event-prep

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/running

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/fitness

College Football Saturday

If I am home (circumstances may call me away, but let's hope not) and have the option, my first college football game of choice today finds the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers travelling to Bloomington, Indiana, to play the Indiana Hoosiers. The game is scheduled to start at 3:00 PM CDT and good radio pregame coverage should be available an hour earlier. GO HOOSIERS!

And the adventure continues.

At long last, I now have a physical film library again.

In a way.

Going the DVD route is simply not an option for me, as I don't have the space to store that shit. Plus, the constant moving over the past 12 years has put me in the state of mind of thinking twice before adding to my physical possessions (I still maintain a storage unit back in Houston filled with books, comics, zines, records, and I don't even remember what else).

So, with leaning on anything like DVDs or videotapes being out of the question, and being really sick of the subscription-based streaming service model, I opted to go the SSD route. One terabyte dedicated to film. It is presently loaded with 171 titles accounting for a little over 200 gigs. Room for much, much more. Now I just need to get another dedicated drive for TV shows, one for music, and one for books and comics (still prefer physical for those, but not everything I'd like to have in physical form is within reach, plus it'd be a bonus to have a digital copy of all physical books I acquire because I've lost most of my physical belongings at least 3 times in my life and it never hurts to have a backup just in case).

#journal