The instructions said “chew 4 tablets 2 times per day”. The product was a tube of topical medication.

That exchange sits in a 2026 research report from the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB), in the words of a survey participant who had pointed an AI visual description tool at a medication label and asked how to use it. “Luckily this was an obvious error,” the participant wrote, “but for now I will NOT be using AI for these tasks [and] will always confirm with a human.” Another participant in the same study used an AI tool to read tax forms that were not screen reader accessible, and reported that it “provided some very incorrect information that would have caused serious tax filing mistakes if I had not checked the information with a human.”

Neither story is a fringe horror. Phones now describe rooms in fluent paragraphs, apps read menus aloud and websites promise to fix themselves with a line of JavaScript. Underneath all that capability, a quieter question keeps surfacing from the people who depend on these tools: what happens when the thing that helps you is also the thing that makes things up?

The complaint has been circulating online for some time. One 2025 discussion on Reddit's r/ArtificialIntelligence forum is reported to have called the trend an “insidious form of ableism”, although that thread's exact wording could not be independently located for this article. The substance of the argument can, however, be tested against the record. As generative AI is positioned as a universal accessibility fix, the predictable tools that disabled and older people rely on risk being sidelined or replaced by systems that are more impressive and less trustworthy. If so, AI-first accessibility could widen the very gap it claims to close.

The evidence suggests that the worry is well founded, though not in the simple way a slogan implies. AI tools are delivering real independence to many blind and low vision people. The problem is not the tools. It is the temptation, among companies, website owners and even governments, to treat them as a substitute for the slow, unglamorous work of building things that are accessible in the first place.

Why a Mangled Word Beats a Fluent Fiction

A traditional screen reader is, at its core, a deterministic machine. It takes text that already exists in a document, an interface or a web page, and converts it into synthetic speech or braille. It can absolutely get things wrong. It may mispronounce a surname, stumble over an acronym or announce an unlabelled control as nothing more than “button”. But its errors have a particular shape. They are consistent: the same text produces the same mistake every time. And the underlying text is still there. A user who hears a garbled word can move through it character by character, check the spelling and work out what was meant. The error sits on top of a reliable source.

Generative AI does not work like that. A vision language model asked to describe a photograph or read a label is not converting existing text; it is producing a statistically plausible account of what it thinks it sees. When it fails, it does not usually fail with noise. It fails with fluency. A wrong instruction arrives in a grammatically perfect sentence, delivered with the same confidence as a right one. There is no underlying string to inspect, because the model's output is the only version of reality the user has been given.

Alex Katsarakes, a digital accessibility resident at AFB and a PhD student in human factors psychology, set this out in an October 2025 essay on alt text in the age of AI. Generative models, she wrote, “are prone to 'hallucination,' confidently asserting details that aren't actually present.” When a blind user cannot independently check an image, she argued, an inaccurate caption is not a cosmetic flaw. In her words, “it's a breakdown in trust.”

AFB's own survey data makes the point empirically. In its report The AI Quagmire, based on a survey of 1,735 US adults conducted between 1 July and 15 October 2025, 91 disabled users of AI visual description tools reported mistakes that harmed them or made their lives harder. When the researchers compared how disabled and nondisabled people rated the accuracy of AI output, they found a revealing asymmetry. Disabled users of visual description tools were more likely than nondisabled users to rate descriptions as “mostly accurate” (56.3 per cent against 46.4 per cent). With AI captions, the pattern flipped: disabled caption users, including deaf and hard of hearing people, were more sceptical than nondisabled users. AFB's interpretation is blunt: “This pattern suggests that disabled people are better able to detect captioning errors than visual description errors.”

Read that slowly. The people who most need image descriptions are, by definition, the people least able to verify them. A deaf user watching a speaker's lips and body language has some independent signal to check a caption against. A blind user listening to a description of a photograph often has none. Reliability is not one desirable feature among many in this context. It is the whole product.

What the Tools Genuinely Do Well

None of this means AI accessibility tools are a con. Pretending otherwise would be its own kind of disrespect to the many disabled people who use them every day and say they are better off.

Be My Eyes is the clearest example. The Danish company built its reputation on connecting blind and low vision people with sighted volunteers over live video. In 2023 it added Be My AI, an image description feature built on OpenAI's GPT-4 model. On 12 March 2026, the company announced that it had passed one million blind and low vision users and ten million volunteers across more than 150 countries. Its chief executive, Mike Buckley, called the milestone “a powerful reminder that accessibility is not a niche issue” and framed it as a global movement. Crucially, the human route has not been switched off: users can still tap a button and reach a sighted volunteer by live video.

Microsoft's Seeing AI, which began as a research project and launched on iPhone in 2017, made the jump to Android in December 2023. Saqib Shaikh, the founder and lead of the project, described it in Microsoft's announcement as “a free app that narrates the world for blind and low vision people”. The Android release brought generative features first tested on iOS, including richer scene descriptions and the ability to ask questions about a scanned document, such as the items on a menu or the total on a receipt.

Academic research confirms that the appeal is real. In a study presented at the ACM SIGACCESS ASSETS conference in 2024, Rudaiba Adnin and Maitraye Das of Northeastern University interviewed 19 blind people about their use of generative AI tools. The paper's title borrows one participant's description of the technology: “I look at it as the king of knowledge”. Participants used chatbots for writing emails and CVs, researching products and asking health questions, and they valued Be My AI's descriptions as more thorough than what sighted helpers usually offered.

AFB itself is not anti-AI. When it released its expert consensus report Empowering or Excluding in February 2025, Stephanie Enyart, the organisation's chief public policy and research officer, said the experts consulted had “shined a light on how AI can be a catalyst for access and inclusion.” Katsarakes, in the same essay that warns about hallucination, acknowledges that using tools such as Be My Eyes or Seeing AI “demonstrates clear potential for enhancing user autonomy.”

So the question is not whether these tools help. They do. The question is what happens when their help is treated as finished accessibility rather than as one layer within it.

The Verification Burden Falls on the User

What the research shows most consistently is that blind people who use AI description tools have become their own quality assurance department.

In a 2024 ASSETS paper titled Misfitting With AI, University of Michigan researchers Rahaf Alharbi, Pa Lor, Jaylin Herskovitz, Sarita Schoenebeck and Robin N. Brewer conducted a qualitative study with 26 blind people about how they verify and contest errors from AI visual assistance apps. They documented failures with complex document layouts, with languages other than English and with cultural artefacts. Participants had developed a repertoire of checks: testing the apps on familiar objects in low-stakes settings, drawing on non-visual knowledge, strategically involving sighted people and cross-referencing results between different apps and devices. The authors drew on the disability studies concept of “misfitting” to argue that these tools often carry assumptions that fail disabled users, and that disabled ways of knowing deserve recognition rather than replacement.

A diary study presented at CHI 2024 by Ricardo Gonzalez Penuela, Jazmin Collins, Shiri Azenkot and Cynthia Bennett tracked 16 blind and low vision participants using an AI scene description prototype for two weeks. The ratings were sobering. Average satisfaction came in at 2.76 out of 5. Average trust in the descriptions was 2.43 out of 4. The authors concluded that AI descriptions still needed significant improvement before they could deliver experiences that were both satisfying and trustworthy.

A 2025 CHI paper by Jingyi Xie, John M. Carroll and colleagues at Pennsylvania State University, which interviewed 14 visually impaired Be My AI users, adds texture. Four of its participants reported that Be My AI had described objects that were not there; one was told about an object behind her that did not exist. Eight reported inaccurate labels for gender or age. Several disliked the tool's habit of interpreting emotions and offering opinions. “Maybe I don't want it to editorialize, you know, maybe I just literally only want the facts of it,” one participant told the researchers. For live navigation, participants preferred human help over static photo descriptions, and they stressed that orientation and mobility skills remained essential. The tool, in their view, should augment those skills rather than replace them.

Chancey Fleet, the assistive technology coordinator at the New York Public Library's Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library, has described a subtler cost. Speaking on the Electronic Frontier Foundation's How to Fix the Internet podcast in May 2024, she catalogued the house style of machine descriptions: “Any scene that contains a child or a dog is heartwarming.” “Any sunset or sunrise is vibrant.” “Anything with a couch and a lamp is calm or cozy.” The flattening matters, she argued, because adequacy discourages improvement: “if you are presented with what seems on a quick read, like good enough alt text, you're unlikely to do much labor to make it better, more nuanced, or more complete.” She also put the stakes plainly. When she asks an AI a question about her own world, “I'm going to have to live with the consequences of trusting that answer”.

Put these studies together and a pattern emerges. The capability is shared with everyone; the risk is carried by the individual. Each time a developer, publisher or institution decides that AI description is good enough, the job of verification is quietly transferred from the organisation that produced the content to the disabled person consuming it.

Overlays and the Business of Automated Compliance

Accessibility overlays are third-party scripts that sit on top of a website and attempt to detect and repair barriers automatically, often marketed with the language of artificial intelligence. They promise compliance with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), the international technical standard, without anyone having to rebuild the site. Disabled users and accessibility professionals have been sceptical for years. In a January 2021 survey of 758 web accessibility practitioners by WebAIM, a non-profit based at Utah State University, 67 per cent rated overlays, plugins and widgets as “not at all or not very effective”. Among respondents with disabilities, the figure rose to 72 per cent, with only 2.4 per cent rating them very effective.

In January 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission turned that scepticism into enforcement. On 3 January it announced a proposed order requiring accessiBe, a company selling an AI-powered accessibility plug-in called accessWidget, to pay $1 million. The FTC alleged that accessiBe had misrepresented the tool's ability to make any website WCAG-compliant, and that it had formatted third-party articles and reviews to look like independent opinions without disclosing its material connections to them. The Commission voted 5-0 to accept the proposed consent order. Samuel Levine, then director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection, said: “Overstating a product's AI or other capabilities without adequate evidence is deceptive, and the FTC will act to stop it.” TechCrunch, reporting the action, noted that customers had also brought class action suits claiming the products did not work. The order was approved as final in April 2025.

AFB's Alexis Hubbard, writing in May 2025 under the title Missing a Human Touch, summed up the problem with automated fixes: “AI-powered accessibility overlays are just a band-aid solution for a bigger problem.” Because they do not change the source code of a site, she argued, they leave the underlying barriers intact. Her conclusion is worth quoting in full: “The only way to achieve an accessible and usable experience for all people is through people.”

Overlays show what AI-first accessibility looks like when it is driven by procurement rather than by users. A website owner buys the promise of compliance; a disabled visitor inherits the consequences, handed an interpretation instead of the thing itself.

When Governments Lean on the Promise of AI

The most striking recent example of AI's shortcomings being cited as a reason to delay accessibility comes not from a start-up but from the US Department of Justice.

In April 2024, the DOJ finalised a rule under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act requiring state and local governments to make their websites and mobile apps conform to WCAG 2.1 Level AA. Larger public entities, those serving populations of 50,000 or more, were originally due to comply in April 2026. Four days before that deadline, on 20 April 2026, the department published an interim final rule pushing compliance back by a year, to 26 April 2027 for larger entities and to 26 April 2028 for smaller ones and special districts. It took effect immediately, with public comments accepted until 22 June 2026. The technical standard itself was left unchanged.

Among the department's stated reasons was a striking admission about technology. “Advanced technology, such as generative AI, does not yet reliably automate the remediation of inaccessible content at scale,” the interim final rule says, “and staff resources and availability continue to pose significant challenges.” The rule also summarised correspondence from a member of Congress who argued that current technology, “including generative AI,” cannot reliably automate the remediation of complex science, technology, engineering and mathematics material at scale, and that human oversight is required.

It is an honest admission that AI cannot do the job alone. It also shows how the promise of automation can reshape policy. When the expected technological help did not arrive, the cost of the shortfall fell on disabled residents, who now wait at least another year for accessible public services.

Disability organisations were furious. Maria Town, president and chief executive of the American Association of People with Disabilities, called the delay “a profound disappointment and a serious setback for the disability community”, adding that “Years of notice have not been enough” and that the department was “rewarding inaction with more time.”

AFB's formal comments, submitted on 22 June 2026 and signed by Enyart, tackled the AI argument directly. “The absence of a fully automated accessibility solution does not justify extending the rule,” AFB wrote. It pointed out that generative AI can itself produce inaccessible content “because it is based on training data that contains accessibility barriers,” and that “Entities should not over rely on AI to produce content.” It also argued, drawing on its own research, that “AI adoption and effective use of AI is dependent on the accessibility of the platform.” In plain terms: “It doesn't matter how useful an AI-enabled service or tool is if the platform is inaccessible to blind users.”

That last line is the hinge of the entire debate. An AI tool is not a ramp into an inaccessible building. It is another door, and it only works if the corridor behind it has been built properly. AFB's comments also offered a constructive model: AI “can generate a passable first attempt at creating captions that a human can then edit.” Used that way, AI speeds up accessible design rather than replacing it.

AFB's research quantifies what is at stake. In a 2024 study cited in those comments, participants spent 55 per cent of their total task time dealing with digital barriers, and only 45 per cent on the task itself.

Across the Atlantic, the direction of travel is different. The European Accessibility Act, Directive (EU) 2019/882, began applying on 28 June 2025 to products and services including computers, smartphones, ATMs, e-books, e-commerce and banking. As Fredericka Argent of the law firm Covington & Burling noted that month, it reaches companies trading in the EU wherever they are based. The EAA is not an AI law, but it reinforces a principle that AI-first thinking tends to erode: the obligation sits with whoever builds and sells the product, not with the disabled person left to find a workaround.

Older Adults and the Gap Between Awareness and Use

The same dynamics extend to older adults, a group that overlaps heavily with disabled people and is often presented as a natural market for AI-powered help.

The latest AARP research, Tech Use and Adoption Keeps Surging Among Older Adults, written by Brittne Kakulla and published in December 2025, surveyed 3,838 US adults aged 50 and over between 9 September and 6 October 2025. It found that AI use in that age group had risen from 18 per cent in 2024 to 30 per cent in 2025. About half used or were interested in voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa. Two-thirds agreed that technology enriches life and makes ageing easier. Among adults aged 80 and over, agreement that technology enables a healthy life rose from 39 per cent to 46 per cent.

The same report records friction. For AI platforms such as ChatGPT or Copilot, 19 per cent used them, 21 per cent were interested and 59 per cent had no interest. Data privacy was the top barrier to adoption. Trust, privacy and data security were the top concerns for roughly half of the older adults who hesitated to adopt new technology, especially AI. And, in a line that could serve as the epigraph for this entire debate: “Three in 5 adults 50-plus say technology is not designed with their age in mind.”

Work from the MIT AgeLab sharpens the picture. A national survey of 1,008 American adults by Lauren Cerino, Joseph Coughlin and colleagues, published as a preliminary abstract in Innovation in Aging in December 2025, found that 73.7 per cent of respondents aged 60 and over were at least “a little” familiar with AI-enabled technologies. Only 28.3 per cent had used them. Some 34.7 per cent said they did not trust AI tools at all to give good advice, and trust scores declined with age.

Awareness, then, is not the main problem. Older people have heard of AI. The gap lies between hearing about a tool and being able, willing and confident enough to rely on it.

Research at Carnegie Mellon University points to why. In work presented at the ACM CHI 2026 conference in Barcelona and reported by the university in May 2026, Jodi Forlizzi, the Herbert A. Simon Professor in Computer Science and Human-Computer Interaction, and her colleagues found that older adults who use AI want it to recognise when they need plain information and when they need reassurance. A separate study based on 22 interviews identified shared values among older adults, including independence, curiosity, connection and continuity, expressed differently depending on where people lived. Older adults were open to AI when its purpose was clearly explained, especially for reminders, alerts and support at home. “There's always a mismatch between people's perceived abilities and what they can actually do,” Forlizzi said. “AI technology can be used to close this gap.”

That is the optimistic reading, and it deserves to be taken seriously. But it has a mirror image. If AI tools must be carefully explained and set up to earn trust, the people most likely to benefit, including those living alone or without technically confident relatives, are also the least likely to receive that support. AFB found that almost all its participants had learned to use AI on their own; only 9 per cent learned through an employer or online course. More disabled than nondisabled participants reported barriers in learning, most commonly inaccessible videos, hard-to-understand material and training that required a mouse.

The Northeastern study found similar problems in the AI products themselves. Blind participants encountered unlabelled buttons, missing headings and landmarks, no notification when a chatbot had finished responding, and clutter from adverts and sample prompts. The tools being promoted as accessibility solutions were not consistently accessible.

The Quiet Retirement of Predictable Tools

The sharpest version of the complaint concerns replacement: established, predictable tools being retired in favour of generative ones. In 2026, the most visible example is the end of Google Assistant on Android.

Google had originally planned to replace Assistant with Gemini, its generative AI assistant, during 2025. According to reporting by Matthias Bastian at The Decoder in August 2026, Google told users it would begin shutting Assistant down on Android and Wear OS from 4 September 2026, covering phones, tablets, watches, headphones and Android Auto. Once the rollout reaches a device, there is no way to switch back. Bastian raised exactly the concern at the centre of this article: that a probability-based language model may not match the reliability of a deterministic assistant for simple tasks such as smart home control and basic phone commands.

By late September, Mark Jansen at Android Police reported that the option to switch from Gemini back to Assistant had disappeared on the devices he checked, including a Pixel 10 Pro, and that smart home control was an area where Assistant still beat its replacement.

For most users, that is an inconvenience. For someone who cannot easily use a touchscreen, whether because of sight loss, limited dexterity or tremor, a voice assistant is not a convenience feature. It is how they turn on the lights, set a medication reminder or call for help. AFB's survey speaks to the stakes. Among users of voice-activated AI, 121 disabled participants described harms from mistakes, including texts sent with the wrong words and calls placed to unintended contacts, among them emergency services. “For many users, particularly disabled users, features such as voice dictation for text messaging are essential accessibility supports,” the report observes. “Failures or changes in these systems can result in concrete, disruptive, and sometimes harmful consequences.”

There is no evidence that Google set out to disadvantage disabled users, and Gemini brings generative capabilities that Assistant never had. The issue is structural. When a company replaces a predictable tool with a more capable but less predictable one, and removes the option to go back, the people with the fewest alternatives absorb the most risk. Capability is a fair trade for those who can fall back on other methods. Reliability is the whole point for those who cannot.

Is AI-First Accessibility Widening the Gap?

So, to the central question: if the people who would benefit most cannot find, set up or trust these tools, is AI-first accessibility widening the gap it claims to close?

The honest answer is that it depends on what “AI-first” means in practice.

Where AI is added on top of accessible foundations, the gap narrows. A blind person on a properly coded website who also has Be My AI or Seeing AI in their pocket has more independence than ever before. A deaf student who receives AI-generated captions that a human has corrected gets faster access than one who waits for manual transcription. These are genuine gains, and the AFB data confirms that most AI users say AI makes their lives easier.

Where AI replaces accessible foundations, the gap widens, and it widens along a predictable gradient. The confident, well-supported, technically fluent disabled user can verify outputs, switch between apps, ask a sighted friend and route around errors, exactly as the participants in the Michigan study described. The isolated, older, less confident or cognitively disabled user often cannot. The more a system depends on verification skills, the more it rewards people who already have them.

The evidence points to four ways in which substitution widens the divide. It shifts responsibility, transferring the work of accessibility from organisations to users who must detect errors they may have no way of seeing. It erodes incentives: as Fleet observed, good-enough descriptions discourage better ones, and the DOJ's interim rule shows the institutional version. It removes fallbacks, as predictable tools are retired. And it presupposes access to the tools themselves, when AFB and the Northeastern researchers both found that AI interfaces and training are often inaccessible.

None of this makes AI the villain. It makes the substitution the problem.

What Reliable Accessibility Would Require

If AI is going to close the accessibility gap rather than reshape it, the evidence points towards a set of concrete commitments.

Treat AI as a layer, never a foundation. Accessible design, meaning semantic code, human-authored alt text for meaningful images, accessible documents and keyboard-operable interfaces, must remain the baseline. AI description and remediation should sit on top of it. Katsarakes put it in a single sentence: “Let AI suggest or assist, but don't let it replace human intent.”

Keep the deterministic path available. When companies introduce generative assistants, they should keep predictable modes for core tasks such as timers, calls, reminders and device control, and they should not remove the option to revert until the replacement has been shown to match the original's reliability for disabled users specifically. A one-way migration is a design choice, not a technical necessity.

Build verification into the product. The Michigan and Penn State studies show users building their own verification systems from scratch. Products should do it for them: signalling uncertainty, separating what the model read from what it inferred, offering a factual mode without editorial colour, and making escalation to a human easy. Be My Eyes shows that a live human route can sit alongside AI.

Draw hard lines around high-stakes tasks. Medication instructions, financial documents, legal forms and navigation are not areas where a probabilistic description should ever be the only source. AFB's recommendations call for developers to “Improve the accuracy of AI outputs and tell users how accurate those outputs are.” Where accuracy cannot be assured, the interface should say so plainly.

Hold vendors to their claims. The FTC's accessiBe order established that overstating AI accessibility capabilities without evidence is deceptive. Regulators elsewhere should apply the same standard, and procurement teams should demand evidence of real-world performance with disabled users, not marketing claims of automated compliance.

Do not let automation set the deadline. Legal accessibility obligations should be pegged to what disabled people need, not to the pace of AI development. The European Accessibility Act's focus on the duties of manufacturers and service providers is a better model than one that treats immature automation as grounds for delay.

Fund support, not just software. Older adults are aware of AI but hesitant to use it, and CMU's research suggests they engage when the purpose is clearly explained. That explanation has to come from libraries, disability organisations and accessible community training. AFB's finding that only 9 per cent of AI users learned through formal routes suggests a large and fixable gap.

Include disabled people in testing and design. AFB's expert consensus report called for AI to focus “on expanding access and inclusion, not just on avoiding harm.” That requires disabled people in the room when products are designed, tested and retired, not consulted after launch.

What Is Lost When Reliability Goes

So what is lost when reliability is sacrificed for capability?

Part of the answer is practical: time, money, safety, and the occasional tube of medication with the wrong instructions. Participants in AFB's 2024 study already spent more than half their task time fighting digital barriers.

But the deeper loss is harder to measure. Independence is not just the ability to do something without help. It is the ability to rely on what you are told. A screen reader that occasionally mispronounces a name still gives its user a stable relationship with the text. A description tool that sometimes invents an object behind you, or turns a cream into tablets, asks its user to hold every answer at a slight distance. That is a different kind of life: one in which assistance is always provisional and confidence always has to be earned again.

Generative AI has given many disabled people extraordinary new reach, and nobody should want to take that away. The challenge for the companies building these tools, and the governments regulating them, is to add that reach without removing the floor. AI can help the people who build accessible things work faster and reach further. It cannot be allowed to replace the obligation they carry.

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21. Shaikh, Saqib. “Seeing AI App Launches on Android, Including New and Updated Features and New Languages.” Microsoft Accessibility Blog, 4 December 2023. https://blogs.microsoft.com/accessibility/seeing-ai-app-launches-on-android-including-new-and-updated-features-and-new-languages/
22. Bastian, Matthias. “Google will shut down Google Assistant starting September 2026 as Gemini takes over on Android and Wear OS.” The Decoder, 5 August 2026. https://the-decoder.com/google-will-shut-down-google-assistant-starting-september-2026-as-gemini-takes-over-on-android-and-wear-os/
23. Jansen, Mark. “Google Assistant is officially gone, and people aren't happy about it.” Android Police, 29 September 2026. https://www.androidpolice.com/the-google-assistant-kill-off-has-arrived/
24. Argent, Fredericka. “European Accessibility Act: June 2025 Deadline Has Arrived.” Covington & Burling, Inside Global Tech, 10 June 2025. https://www.insideglobaltech.com/2025/06/10/european-accessibility-act-june-2025-deadline-has-arrived/ (see also European Commission, “European Accessibility Act,” https://commission.europa.eu/strategy-and-policy/policies/justice-and-fundamental-rights/disability/union-equality-strategy-rights-persons-disabilities-2021-2030/european-accessibility-act_en)

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

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

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

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

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If they truly cared about player safety, they would ban people for repeatedly leading with their head. It's truly that simple. How many times did I see a certain player do that last night with no penalties... and the one flag they did throw inexplicably got picked up? Please. It's dangerous, it's unsafe, and it's unprofessional. Things like this going on without being addressed is why it is time for a Brand New Shield.

This is another player safety rant. On top of the nonsense I saw last night, another genius team decided to let their starting quarterback play with blood clots. Blood clots can potentially be a fatal issue and are nothing to play around with and worst of all, let the guy fly back on the team plane! So, if they care so much about player safety, why did they play around with a blood clot issue and why is the league refusing to punish the team? If you're going to talk about player safety being a priority, act like it! Sheesh! Again, this is why it is time for a Brand New Shield.

If you don't have players, you don't have a game. If you don't have a game, you don't have fans. If you don't have fans, what do you actually have? Nothing! Player safety for any sports organization should be a primary concern, especially for a sport like football. If you have a group of people with competing interests chasing the almighty dollar, the last thing that group of people is going to care about is player safety. This is where a single ownership model comes in.

What does a single ownership model have to do with player safety? Well, everything. If you have one entity with a common goal that has a positive relationship with the players, there is no limit to what can be accomplished. The players should be treated well to the point that a player's union isn't even necessary. Unfortunately, as it pertains to the player safety crisis that exists in a certain league, the players are responsible for some of it as well.

The practice and training camp rules the players are responsible for putting in place have contributed to more serious injuries during games. The issue now is that the practices are easy which makes the games hard. If the games are hard and the body is not properly ramped up for that degree of physical activity, the body will get injured and injured severely. We are seeing that happen more and more with all these major injuries taking place.

So there is a balance to be had... Practice enough so the body gets ramped up for the game but also not overdo it to prevent other situations. One of the reasons I have long suggested the indoor game for this kind of venture is to eliminate the elements from the equation. Even if you did an entire 11 on 11 league in domed stadiums, you'd take the elements out of the equation and prevent injuries related to heat and/or cold. You also have 2 bye weeks per season instead of one during the season per team. The bye weeks could be staggered or universal depending on the situation.

I could go on and on about player safety and how it is a whole league thing from the top to the bottom and from the bottom to the top. However, I will stop this entry here. If we protect the players, we will protect the game.

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!

Peace, Peace Ukraine! Journey from the depths of war This is the abyss of hitler What tidings front to call Your history to unfold Making after Misery the hold God hereafter

Paying for the bill Your children will grow old The Virgin to your call In sweet reunion tiding Wear of Earth and time undone The simple seeds have fallen The lattice as we spoke To vines atremble high In time to disafall The quite and union deep All the folds are closing The query that we keep Dust after your day In highs renew to ever

Go the crosses high The stars upon your train For Virgin’s Victory hold All the lands will call Ukraine in early peace The synthesis of night To beckon be Your call of light St. Michael and his call The journey isn’t grand To city made alight A chasm Fight amend To heights ahead Fading into rest Your cross and benediction The veil and the river Currents into battle What flotsam keep- but sui generis To growing old Alight St. Peter’s night Here and to half-skip In gold alone Yours the only pay To you we show our hold- The distant right Too much to say too little Additions to your now This Holy might

Redemptorists will know Your tears in fight Taking to the path The evidence we are- your best friend and your ear Each tiding roam Abundant near The distance European

In us the distance abandon Untying new History headwater Sights between to temper In tithing rain- to your Heaven As we grow old Your together-know In final heal Places by and well

Two crosses appear Making day in night The process of amends In life appeal Hurry work and wonder

Yours to keep The blossoms fighting Winter In every breath The willows keep On paths behold The very holds of war Founded to your call We are witness To make anew Assign renew Dnieper The sight, your rose The Virgin’s call In us your care Abiding keep The promise of our star The Victory hold

To many, they World work in wonder The babes anew- to time adore In History taking then The time that beckons now Your Holy place Consoled to enter In your command- the moss of day And carousel And rights of power Sending urgent call The price of peace Within an angel

Victory in peace The fable known The truth of Man’s repentance Those away to take the call Sending then- your favour Your peace is new If going home- alone in suffer Beseach our call- The European Union.

In Summary: * A challenging Tuesday, this. On the updside, now I know that not only Amazon delivery, but also Walmart delivery can locate our trailer without any trouble. On the downside, we're still waiting for maintenance folks here to get our a/c unit running, and we're now waiting for them to fix the venetian blinds in a bedroom here.

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= 212.86 lbs. * bp= 124/77 (62)

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

Diet: * 05:00 – 1 banana, pizza * 09:45 – 5 hot dogs * 12:30 – beef chop suey, fried rice

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:40 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:50 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:10 -read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize * 07:00 – rearrange furniture * 15:00 – have spent hours working with the wife trying to fix windows in her room.

Chess: * 17:05 – moved in all pending CC games

يمكن البعض منكم كيعرف نظام الدفع PIX، اللي تم انشائه من طرف البنك المركزي البرازيلي.

هاد النظام قلق ميريكان گاع! علاش؟ لحقاش مسح فضربة وحدة ارباح بالملايير ديال عمالقة الدفع : VISA و Mastercard

هاد النظام كيتيح تحويل الأموال مجانا بين الناس فالبرازيل 24/7، فقط العمليات التجارية اللي خاضعة للاقتطاع، اما بين الأفراد مجاني.

النظام ملك للدولة، و ارباحه كتبقى فالدولة، داكشي علاش غضبانين منو الوحوش الأمريكية.

و الأجمل : مفتوح المصدر، هاهي الrepo:

https://github.com/bacen/pix-api

المغرب محتاج و بشدة نظام مشابه، او حتى بناء نظام انطلاقا من PIX نيت، اللي يدفع بالبلاد لقدام و تولي عندنا سهولة اكبر فالدفع عوض الأنظمة التقليدية.

زعما زعما؟

Rebellion Against the Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Dr. Raymond Thoss is a peculiar book in a narrow niche of its own. I finished reading it this weekend. Its title references Thomas Ligotti’s treatise The Conspiracy Against the Human Race, the volume of essays in which the horror maestro expounds his profoundly pessimistic worldview. Ligotti maintains that consciousness is a unique burden borne by mankind. His argument, briefly summarized in the Wikipedia article about the book runs thus:

The more conscious one is of the meaningless and often horrifying nature of the world [...], the more one wishes not to be aware of this fact, and so overly conscious beings must constantly engage in exercises which limit their awareness of the negative aspects of existence, either intentionally or instinctively.

Dr. Raymond Thoss is a pseudonym drawn from a character in Ligotti’s fiction. It’s used here by “a clinical psychologist who works primarily with trauma patients”, a vocation he says he was drawn to having suffered major trauma of his own from abuse throughout his childhood. Thoss credits an encounter with Ligotti’s book The Nightmare Factory with saving his life when he read it as a deeply disturbed and suicidal youth. Internalising Ligotti’s nihilistic outlook proved paradoxically therapeutic for him, and has informed his own thought ever since, providing foundations on which he has built a decidedly idiosyncratic view of trauma and of therapy.

Thoss forcefully stresses the irony of treating abuse survivors as sick in a society where child abuse is distressingly commonplace yet still seldom openly discussed. To those cognizant of the sickness of society & the uncaring nature of the world, Thoss says “You are not insane. The world is. You are simply awake.” One hopes he can judge when such thinking will be useful for his patients and when it might be more appropriate to gloss things over a little.

The writing style is often hyperbolic and becomes all the more so in the final chapter when we spend more time in the writer’s troubled mind. This is not a comfortable place to be. Thoss declares himself insane, and his text gives the reader little with which to push back against this assessment. The phrase ‘physician, heal thyself’ comes to mind: but perhaps too much damage was done to him from too early an age for that to be a realistic prospect. One is impressed all the more with his ability to function at a high level — and moreover to provide comfort to others — in the light of the bewildering turmoil of his inner life.

Have you ever, as a fan of a artist or a creative work, been disconcerted to hear from a ‘superfan’ whose attachment to the object of your affection is that much deeper & more intense than your own? I’ve admired Ligotti’s work for decades, and some part of his pessimism has undoubtedly chimed with my own, further tinting my own outlook. Here though is someone for whom Ligotti’s thinking has been profoundly life-changing. It’s good, I’m thinking, but is it really that good: evidently the answer for Dr. Thoss, is yes; while for me, maybe not. That faintly discordant feeling was just one of several overlapping responses this book provoked in me. I’d never read anything quite like it. Fascinating though it often is, it’s a text I would hesitate to recommend. Prospective readers must decide for themselves whether they think it worth picking up.

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I was delighted when a recent visit to one of my customary record-buying haunts yielded a copy of Nancy Wilson/Cannonball Adderley, the 1962 album by the singer and the saxophonist (plus the other four members of the latter’s quintet). Wilson sings on six of the record’s eleven tracks, with the remainder instrumentals. I’ve owned a CD copy for some years, but this is one of those records better savoured on vinyl (or it will be once I’ve cleaned this one up). It’s a bright-toned record beautifully-performed by all concerned. The song-choice isn’t entirely to my taste — ‘Happy Talk’, for example, has never been a favourite of mine — but I can readily forgive that. A good example track: the opening number, ‘Save Your Love for Me’, which kicks things off in style. My copy is a later-’60s issue pressed for the World Record Club (who erroneously printed the title as The Swingin’s Mutual on its labels, this being the name of the similar record Wilson had made with the George Shearing Quintet).

Meanwhile, recent arrivals in the post have included a second copy of Dakota Staton’s ‘Round Midnight, as mentioned in the entry before last, this one in much better condition than the first; and, in a similar vein, an album by the singer Ethel Ennis called God Bless The Child, which is an early-’70s compilation bringing together four tracks from albums first issued in ‘64. It's a fantastic-sounding record, very well re-mastered. While a few of the tunes on it (such as the title-track) are familiar old standards, Ennis’s interpretations of them are well worth hearing.

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Cheese of the week: Carreg Las, yet another Welsh-made blue cheese. This one is made from ewesmilk by those experts at Caws Cenarth. It’s well-blued with a strong suite of flavours reminiscent of Roquefort: if anything perhaps a little bolder still. Its texture on the other hand is a little firmer and drier than the French classic. It has been an immediate hit with me & I hope this is a first taste of many.

Depuis quelques jours, je ponce les podcasts de David Perrell. Il y invite à chaque fois des écrivains de tous horizons, exceptionnels, tous.

À un moment, David révèle son mot préféré : la sérendipité.

Il a cette sensation que le mot en lui même, sa sonorité, porte déjà en quelque sorte la beauté de sa définition.

Ce n’est pas la première fois que j’entends ce mot. Et ce n’est pas la première fois que j’entends quelqu’un dire qu’il aime profondément ce mot.

Je t’avoue que je ne savais plus ce qu’il voulait dire.

Mais si tu veux tout savoir : c’est cette capacité à saisir de la valeur dans une situation inattendue. Autrement dit, c’est réussir à voir le beau lorsque celui-ci ne fait pas de bruit, qu’il passe presque inaperçu.

Pourquoi ce mot fascine ?

Parce que je crois qu’il arrive à capturer une vérité profondément abstraite que l’on cherche tous à embrasser ou ne serait-ce qu’à toucher du doigt.

Faire preuve de sérendipité, c’est donner à la vie sa vraie valeur.

Alors ouvrons les yeux, soyons attentifs.

Governor is the only office Massachusetts republicans have shown that they can win, though only if they run someone who is tall, handsome, and not a politician. Their current candidate for governor, Mike Minogue, is tall (I assume, as he’s a former CEO, and C-suite jobs are pretty inaccessible to short men) and not a politician, but he’s currently running over 20 points behind incumbent Democrat Maura Healey in the polls.

He’s going to get crushed in the election. This is a foregone conclusion. And he sunk 17 million of his own dollars into this vanity campaign. Which presumably isn’t real money to him, but think of what else he could have done with it!

So imagine my surprise when I got a mailer sort of supporting his campaign yesterday!

It’s…well, see for yourself.

(alt text: Maura Healey is a liberal. But Andrea James is a SUPER liberal. Some pictures of James supporters holding signs that say “Free Palestine” and “Free Child Care” and a list of James’ policy priorities, each with an X next to it: End all State Cooperation with ICE/Implement Rent Control and Tax the Rich/Provide free child care and health care/Mandate electric buildings and vehicles/Ban Israeli companies from Massachusetts/Stop construction of new state prisons.

(alt text: Stop sign with an arrow pointing at Andrea James. Below, “Stop the Massachusetts Mamdani. We can’t afford socialist Andrea James!”)

Now, why would Mike Minogue be advertising against Andrea James, who is polling at between 8 and 17%? She’s not a threat to him!

Well, first of all, this isn’t from the Minogue campaign—it’s from the Massachusetts First Independent Expenditure Political Action Committee, which is primarily funded, to the tune of a million bucks, by Robert Neuner, a Connecticut resident and CEO of a company that sells “recreational oxygen.” I am not making this up. (It’s also got funding from local sneaker fascists Jim Davis and Paul Fireman!).

And second of all, this isn’t really an anti-Andrea James flyer. Because even the rich idiots running this super PAC in support of a doomed vanity candidacy can use a voter registration list and know that nobody in my house is voting for Mike Minogue. They’re sending this flyer to registered Democrats not to warn us against Andrea James, but to point out that she better represents our priorities than Maura Healey does.

They have to know that we’re out here waiting in vain for the “Massachusetts Mamdani”, and that the bulleted list of priorities mostly reads like a wish list for Democrats. Free child care and health care? Horrors! She must be stopped!

So clearly the desperate play here is to try to divert enough Democratic voters from Healey to James to allow Minogue to win the election.

It’s not going to happen, but here’s what makes me sad about the whole thing: fascists know exactly what Democratic voters want, and they can spell it out in clear language.

Democrats, on the other hand, continue to run away from what Democratic voters actually want. Maura Healey’s campaign website is basically “she’s queer! She played basketball!” No, that’s not actually all—if you dig around you can find some accomplishments she touts, some of which are good, some of which are less good (millions of dollars in grants to state and local law enforcement for programs that have netted 500 arrests. So let’s say it’s 2 million, which is the smallest amount you can call “millions.” That’s $4k per arrest. Not sure that’s the best use of taxpayer money, but whatever.). And she doesn’t fundamentally address the climate crisis or the affordability crisis or the healthc care crisis or…well, you get the idea.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m going to vote for Healey, because I certainly don’t want Minogue and I have some concerns about Andrea James’ past legal difficulties. But I wish there were a Democrat running on the mostly common-sense priorities that Massachusetts fascists correctly identify as appealing to voters.

Spurs vs Thunder, Tonight.

Though it'll certainly push past my preferred bedtime, tonight's NBA game between my San Antonio Spurs and the Oklahoma City Thunder with its scheduled start time of 8:30 PM CT will be my game of choice tonight. With my bedside Bose radio tuned to 1200 WOAI, flagship station for the Spurs, I'll find it easy to listen to the game then turn down the volume and drift off to sleep when the brain fogs over and lets me know it's time.

And the adventure continues.

by Tijana Cvetković

In May, the Shared Visions consortium and friends gathered in Nikšić, Montenegro, for the Founding Assembly of our cooperative. As part of the program, we picked a name: O.U.R. COOP. Curious how and why we settled on this name? Read Tijana’s report below!

When unable to decide, suspended between possibilities, a shift is needed. Change the scenery, change the rhythm, change the rules, and the answer could appear by itself.

For months we've been trying to name the cooperative. The task was simple. A name is only a name – until it isn't. A name becomes a story, a declaration of intent, an invitation, and occasionally a burden. It carries expectations, creates associations, determines what people imagine before they know anything else about us.

The cooperative is founded by artists and cultural workers from different countries, backgrounds, languages, and experiences. We all had some name ideas. As the months passed, suggestions accumulated, some were poetic, some practical:

The list was long enough to suggest either a diversity of imagination or a complete inability to make a decision. Eventually, the moment arrived when the cooperative needed to be named. We had reached the point where either we would decide on a new name or remain indefinitely attached to the working title inherited from the Shared Visions project, an administrative placeholder. The problem was that the program of the Founding Assembly and 5-day in-person meeting of coop founders held in Montenegro was already full. Since no time slot was left for naming the cooperative, the decision was relocated to a place where decisions are rarely made – to a bus! A bus travelling through Montenegro on the third day of the meeting.

We had one hour available in total: 30 minutes from Nikšić to Grahovo, where we were having group lunch, and 30 minutes on the way back. Around 30 participants were enclosed together in a moving vehicle. A perfect environment for a social experiment. A laboratory in motion. The rules were simple. On the way to the restaurant, a sheet containing all proposed names circulated through the bus. Each participant could distribute three votes, assigning first, second, and third preference points. On the way back, a second round took place. This time we could vote only among the names that had received at least one point in the first round. By then, one proposal had already begun to separate itself from the rest by the majority of votes – OUR COOP.

The second vote merely confirmed what had already become visible during the first. The decision was made. The cooperative will be called O.U.R. COOP – or, in its original form, NAŠA ZADRUGA, but with a twist hidden inside the name. The proposal originally emerged in BHS as NAŠA ZADRUGA, literally meaning Our Cooperative. When translated into English (the common language of our international cooperative) it naturally became OUR COOP. What happens if, instead of reading “OUR” as an English word, we read it as an acronym in BHS? Then it has additional meaning O.U.R. – Organizacija Udruženog Rada, translated into English: Organisation of Associated Labour. The acronym unexpectedly connects the cooperative to the Yugoslav legacy of self-management socialism. An O.U.R. was a basic organisational unit in which workers in all areas, including culture, collectively managed production, governance, and the distribution of resources. Rather than operating through a conventional top-down corporate structure, these organisations were intended to be governed by their workers.

Whether by coincidence or not, the name carries several layers: shared ownership among its members, a reminder of the self-management legacy, and a bridge between local histories and international collaboration.

What remains is not simply a name but a question of how a collective comes into being. Not through a single act of foundation, but through a succession of encounters, decisions, reflections, and shared efforts. The bus eventually stopped. The Montenegro meeting ended. The cooperative got the name. Yet none of these marked a final form. Any living collective or organisation continues to exist only in motion between what it has inherited and what it will become.

What matters is not the point of departure or arrival, but the capacity to keep working together!

Join us on 27 October at 17h CET for an O.U.R. COOP Reading the Scene session with the CEO of a large cooperative bank!

oran Jeras is the CEO and Chairman of the European Ethical Bank (ZEF), based in Zagreb. A former mainstream banking consultant with years of experience in the Netherlands, he became an ethical finance visionary and founded ZEF, Croatia's largest cooperative. ZEF believes in a future society whose economic system is democratic, transparent, solidary, inclusive, rooted in cooperative principles, serving the real needs of communities and caring for the planet. It aims to build tools that enable a sustainable and just transformation of financial infrastructure; to develop members' capacities for active contribution to a good economy, and to change the institutional framework toward greater recognition of the cooperative model.

During our session, Goran will explain ZEF’s banking models and how they support cooperative development.

Yesterday, at lunch I met with an old friend,

He was getting old, feeling that he was losing his beauty, feeling spent, seeing no escape, just the endless grind, and for every day, the feeling that everything he so painstakingly built now is slowly slipping through his fingers, even though he’s holding onto it for dear life

And still, retirement is so very far away

And he asked me, do I notice too now people in general seem to be struggling these days

And I said, that truly I have, truly

But, I said, maybe it’s always been like this, only now we see ourselves reflected in these other people

They just didn’t use to be us, is all.

منين كتشوف الهول ديال الباسووردات و المعلومات الحساسة ديال مختلف الادارات و المؤسسات ديال بلادنا كتتسائل شنو السبب؟

كاين جوج اسباب، اللول ما تقدرش تتحكم فيه و الثاني ممكن يتقاد.

اللول هو بشري، بنادم كيأنسطالي برامج ولا كيحل ملفات Malware مصيفطين فالايميل فيهم

واخا تعيا ما توعي و تقرّي فبنادم راه غيدير الغلط و هادشي كيوقع فگاع دول العالم.

السبب الثاني هو ويندوز، هاد النظام المشؤوم الخاري على دينمو هو سبب أغلب الكوارث الأمنية.

لهذا الحل كيف ما دارو بزاف ديال الدول فالسنين الأخيرة Linux هو اعتماد

اما شي اصدار واجد او كتكلف ادارة معينة تصمم و تعمل التحديثات لشي اصدار محلي خاص

من بين الدول اللي دارت هاد الخطوة :

Pardus تركيا : صممات لينكس خاص بيها سميتو

فرنسا : الدرك الفرنسي كيستعمل واحد الاصدار خاص GendBuntu بيه سميتو

اوروبا : كاين برنامج ممول من الاتحاد الاوروبي لنظام EU OS شامل سميتو

الصين : سنين هادي باش الدولة كتحارب استعمال ويندوز OpenKylin و كتدعم اصدارات محلية فحال

Astra Linux روسيا : الدولة كتشجع على استعمال نظام

Maya OS الهند : وزارة الدفاع تبنّات نظام

هادشي غادي يهنينا من بزاف ديال المشاكل الامنية و يخلي الناس تنفتح على أنظمة اخرى عوض ما يبقاو فالحبس ديال مايكروسوفت.

ملحوظة : خوتي الصغار هادي اكثر من عشر سنين باش علمتهم يستعملو لينكس، و اذا عندكم خوت او وليدات Elementary OS عطيوهم يبداو فشي اصدار ساهل فحال

Temperance ~ All flowing together naturally. The consciousness working together with sub-consciousness. The inner and outer.

3 of Swords — Seeing the truth

The card came first after Temperance. I ignored it but I am realizing it’s an important piece of information to reflect on. I am coming to terms with how that one client, really needs to go. It’s so draining. I’m overworked, and undervalued. That’s the truth of what I’ve been seeing. I am not working 3 hours a day for the company as per my contract. I’m working way more, plus guilt. With my time now even more limited, I need to be on top of this and noticing.

3 of Pentacles

-Meaningful work -Collaborative -Getting paid your worth for your work -The mind, body/material, spirit -Trinity, triad, harmony -Mother, maiden, crone -Things coming together, for the pentacles—people coming together -Finding your dharma, planning and creating

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I’m aware that my body needs sleep. My body, having only done this for 2 days, is already craving rest. This week has been a challenge because though I’ve gotten rid of the tiny project—the OG client that doesn’t value my time or worth—had a website launch yesterday. The person we hired to be on top of this project, is unfortunately undergoing medical things and therefore understandably, hasn’t been as meticulous as he needs to be—and because his work technically falls under my scope, I’ve had to take some of his things. It’s been two consecutive days now where I sleep super late and wake up early-ish. I won’t let that happen today. I’m tired, bro.