I’ve been thinking about AI for a while now, since I am increasingly being surrounded by AI tools at work, with Microsoft adding a Copilot button everywhere I look. But that’s a topic for another time.

What inspired me to write here was the recent controversy within the Blaugust community about the use of AI-generated images and text. And I knew about this controversy after reading Andreas’ post: Are we becoming too paranoid about AI slop? And then the contribution to the topic by Joel: Not paranoid, but respectful.

I read the Blaugust Statement “Use of AI as a Blaugust Participant” and I found it made total sense, allowing AI assistance but not using it to substantially generate text. I believe most bloggers cherish the writing craft: having an idea, a thought, an emotion and putting it all into words for other human beings to read.

I occasionally will use AI to “proofread” a text that I wrote to catch grammar and vocabulary mistakes, since English is not my native language. Other than that, I avoid using AI chatbots. I don’t like chatting with them. And that’s just me, I think the systemic harms these tools are causing to our society greatly outweigh the benefits right now.

It seems the real Blaugust controversy was about the use of generative AI images. The Blaugust Statement actually accepts the use of some AI-generated images:

An AI-generated image accompanying a human-written article is acceptable; a post whose only substantive creative element is an AI-generated image would not meet the spirit of the event.

And that’s okay, since the main work is focused on the text, not on the image itself.

Now some strong opinions.

As of today, I don’t consider that AI-generated images with the use of prompts are human art. Or craftsmanship. Or anything that can be considered art by human standards. There is no soul behind it; there is no human brain that made big or small deliberate choices to craft that image. It’s like using a slot machine to randomly generate something. Can that be considered an artistic choice?

Maybe these artifacts will become something different in the future, but today I feel that AI-generated content, be it image or text, is slop. I don’t like it when I see it; I can recognize this uncanny feel to it, and I basically avoid it at all costs.

And that’s just my personal stand at the moment. I have the power to choose what I consume online, and I just stay away from places or services that “serve” this type of content.

—

Note: I didn’t have time to proofread this with an AI tool before posting, so all mistakes are my own.

Post 03 of #Blaugust #NoisyMusings #AI

In mid-September 2025, people who had just been robbed online went looking for the place where you report being robbed online. Some never arrived. Instead of ic3.gov, the Internet Crime Complaint Center operated by the FBI, they landed on ic3-gov.com, or ic3gov.org — domains carrying the Bureau's seal, the IC3 banner and the same institutional blue as the real thing. Analysts identified the first wave on 18 September; the Bureau published a warning the following day, telling the public to type the address manually, check the domain ends in .gov, and ignore sponsored search results.

Ten months later, on 20 July 2026, the same centre issued a further alert, numbered I-072026-PSA, describing something more elaborate. Criminals were no longer merely cloning the website. They were building fake social media profiles for FBI personnel, opening conversations with fraud victims on Facebook Messenger, then moving those conversations to Telegram, where they sent links to spoofed complaint portals harvesting names, telephone numbers, email addresses, the type of scam suffered and the amount lost, before issuing a fabricated reference number and asking for more. And they were circulating AI-generated video of senior FBI officials, urging viewers to file complaints at an address that was not the FBI's, and generating synthetic video for real-time video chats in which the person on the call appeared to be a law enforcement official.

The Bureau's central corrective was blunt and slightly melancholy: the IC3 does not maintain a social media presence, does not contact individuals directly through messaging platforms, and will never ask for payment to recover lost funds. An agency whose entire function is to be the trustworthy destination for people who have just been deceived now spends its public communications explaining the circumstances under which it does not exist.

This is not a new category of crime. Refund and recovery fraud — a stranger promising, for a fee, to retrieve money you have already lost — is old enough to have generated decades of consumer warnings. What has changed is production quality and the precision of the targeting. The question is not whether people should be more careful. It is who, among the platforms carrying the contact, the agency whose face is borrowed and the legislators who have not written the relevant law, is responsible for the second wound.

What the Bureau Has Warned About, Twice Before

The July 2026 alert is the third in a sequence, and the escalation is clearer in retrospect.

The first came on 18 April 2025, reporting that between December 2023 and February 2025 the FBI had received more than one hundred complaints about people impersonating IC3 employees. Contact arrived by email, telephone, social media or online forums. Almost every complainant said the impersonator had claimed either to have recovered their lost funds or to be able to assist in recovering them. The Bureau described one recurring pattern in which scammers created female persona profiles, joined online groups for fraud victims, presented themselves as fellow victims, then referred members to a supposed senior official reachable on Telegram. The tactics were essentially conversational: someone lied to you in writing.

The second, in September 2025, concerned infrastructure rather than personas: look-alike domains intercepting traffic intended for the real portal, and deceptive emails purporting to confirm complaints victims had never submitted.

The third fuses the two and adds synthetic video. Security analysts characterised the scheme as considerably more polished than the earlier warning had described, evolving from text-only approaches into something resembling an official government process from beginning to end: a video of an official, a website that looks like a government website, a form, a reference number, a follow-up. Each element is individually unremarkable. Assembled in sequence, they reconstruct the ritual of reporting a crime to the state.

One detail deserves precision. Reporting describes deepfake videos of senior FBI officials, but neither the alert nor the press coverage appears to identify which officials were depicted; any description of the scheme as targeting a specific, named executive should be treated as unverified.

The FBI's detection advice, repeated from a December 2024 alert on criminal use of generative AI, tells you a great deal about the state of the defence. Look for distorted hands, unrealistic eyes, implausible jewellery, inaccurate shadows, lag between lip movement and voice. These were reasonable heuristics in 2023. As guidance for someone confronted with a short, compressed clip on a phone screen in 2026, they are closer to ritual than method. The July alert concedes as much, noting that AI-generated content has become so sophisticated that it is increasingly difficult to detect. The checklist degrades further still when the synthetic face is on a live call rather than in a recorded clip: nothing can be paused, rewound or examined a second time, and the ordinary pressure to answer while someone waits on the other end removes the interval in which scrutiny would happen. A heuristic that assumes the viewer can look twice is of limited use to a person who cannot look twice.

Why the Freshly Defrauded Are the Most Valuable Targets

The strategic insight behind recovery fraud is that a person who has just lost money is not a worse target than a person who has not. They are a better one.

This is counterintuitive only if you assume that being scammed produces caution. The consumer protection literature has long documented so-called sucker lists — records of prior victims containing name, telephone number, scam type and sum lost, traded among criminal operators on the theory that someone who paid once may pay again. The Federal Trade Commission has warned about these lists and the approach they enable, in which the caller already knows what happened to you — itself the most persuasive credential available.

The academic evidence is stronger than generally appreciated, because one dataset is unusually good. Marguerite DeLiema of the University of Minnesota and Lynn Langton of RTI International analysed two decades of records seized from fraud organisations by the United States Postal Inspection Service, covering more than two million victims. Because this was transactional data rather than survey responses, it recorded what people did rather than what they would admit. Revictimisation rates rose with age in certain scam categories. The ten thousand most frequently responsive individuals had responded to fraudulent solicitations between 82 and 562 times each. Their average age was 78.

That is not a portrait of gullibility. It is a targeting system working as designed, applied repeatedly to people identified as responsive and who are, by the fiftieth approach, in a psychological state the fraud itself produced.

A 2025 qualitative study in the journal Victims and Offenders, based on interviews with twelve cyberscam victim-survivors and eight of their friends and family members, found pervasive impacts: distress, shame, decay of trust, conflict within families, support needs largely unmet. Shame does specific structural work. It discourages disclosure to family, removing the most reliable circuit-breaker in fraud — a second opinion from someone not emotionally invested in the outcome. It also makes the victim receptive to any approach that treats them as a legitimate claimant rather than a fool. Layered on top is escalation of commitment: the more a person has lost, the more expensive it becomes to accept the loss is final. A recovery scam is an offer to undo the first fraud, aimed at someone for whom that has become the organising priority of their week.

What the July 2026 alert adds is timing. The scheme targets people who have recently reported financial fraud or expressed an intention to do so — a window in which two conditions coincide and neither lasts long: financial desperation peaks, and trust in law enforcement is momentarily very high, because the victim has just voluntarily reached out to it. Filing an IC3 complaint is an act of hope. The scheme is built to intercept it.

The underlying market is not small. The Global Anti-Scam Alliance, in a report with the analytics firm Feedzai published in October 2025, surveyed 46,000 adults across 42 markets: 57 per cent had encountered a scam in the previous twelve months, 23 per cent had lost money, and only around 30 per cent of those who reported to their payment provider recovered anything. That gap is the space recovery fraud occupies.

A Record Year and the Cohort Absorbing It

The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, published in April 2026, supplies the backdrop. The IC3 received 1,008,597 complaints, the first time in its twenty-five-year history that annual volume exceeded one million. Reported losses reached $20.877 billion, a 26 per cent increase on the $16.6 billion recorded in 2024.

Investment fraud remained the largest driver at more than $8.6 billion, followed by business email compromise at more than $3 billion and technical support fraud at $2.1 billion. Cryptocurrency featured in more than $11 billion of losses across 181,565 complaints. For the first time the report used AI-related as a formal descriptor, recording 22,364 complaints and roughly $893 million in losses — a floor rather than a measurement, since it captures only cases where the victim knew, and thought to say, that artificial intelligence was involved.

The elder fraud figures make the recovery scam legible as a strategy. Americans aged 60 and over filed 201,266 complaints in 2025 and reported losses of $7.75 billion, an annual increase of 59 per cent. The average loss in that group was around $38,500, and roughly 12,400 individuals lost more than $100,000 each. Investment fraud accounted for $3.52 billion of that total and technical support fraud for $1.04 billion. Complainants over 60 made up roughly a fifth of all complaints but close to 37 per cent of all reported losses.

The Federal Trade Commission's data tells a compatible story by a different method. Consumers filed more than a million imposter scam reports in 2025 and reported $3.5 billion in losses, making impersonation the most-reported fraud category for the fifth consecutive year. Around $920 million was attributed to government impersonators, up from $789 million in 2024, with such reports rising about 40 per cent year on year.

What the Evidence Actually Supports About Age and Synthetic Media

It is tempting to close the loop between those datasets by asserting that older adults are least able to recognise AI-generated video and audio and are therefore uniquely exposed. The claim is plausible. It is also more slippery than it looks, and the published research supports a narrower version than the one usually stated.

Start with what is reasonably well evidenced: awareness. A study by the biometric authentication firm iProov, based on 2,000 consumers in the United Kingdom and United States exposed to genuine and synthetic images and video, found that 30 per cent of respondents aged 55 to 64 and 39 per cent of those aged 65 and over had never heard of deepfakes at all, against 22 per cent overall. You cannot look for something you do not know exists.

The same study cuts against any simple generational framing. Only 0.1 per cent of participants correctly identified every genuine and synthetic item shown, participants were around 36 per cent less likely to identify a synthetic video than a synthetic image, and adults aged 18 to 34 displayed the largest gap between measured performance and self-assessed confidence. If detection is the defence, the defence is failing across the age range, and the group most likely to over-trust its own judgement is not the oldest.

Direct experimental evidence on age and accuracy is thinner than the discourse suggests. A study of audiovisual deepfake perception by Ammarah Hashmi and colleagues, which asked 110 participants to judge forty videos, reported that its oldest age band performed less accurately than younger bands — but that band was 41 to 50. It says nothing directly about people over 60, because it did not measure them separately. It also found every AI model tested outperformed every human, and that people systematically overestimated their own ability.

Qualitative work has looked specifically at seniors. Research by Zhiwei Tang, Dion Goh, Chei Sian Lee and Yang Yang, based on interviews with twenty participants aged 55 to 70, found they gravitate towards judgements about the authenticity of the video's subject rather than peripheral technical details, preferring intuition over consulting other people or verification resources. A comparative study in the International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction found both groups drawing on similar cue categories, with seniors leaning more on accumulated life experience.

That is more useful than an accuracy ranking, and it explains the scheme's design. If older adults assess a video by asking whether the person in it seems authentic, rather than inspecting shadows and hand geometry, a synthetic clip of a plausible official speaking plausible institutional language defeats the strategy at the point it is applied. The vulnerability is not primarily perceptual. It is that the heuristic in use is the one generative video is now good at satisfying.

One further consideration is lost in the focus on detection. The FBI's Operation Level Up, which proactively identifies people being defrauded and telephones them, notified 3,780 victims during 2025 and estimates it prevented $225.9 million in losses. Seventy-eight per cent of those contacted did not know they were being scammed. Detection was not failing at the margin. It was absent.

First Contact Happens on Someone Else's Platform

Every version of this scheme begins somewhere. In the July 2026 alert it begins on Facebook Messenger and migrates to Telegram, with deepfake videos circulating on social platforms to drive traffic. That is a specific, addressable fact about infrastructure, not an act of God.

Meta has not been idle. In March 2026 it announced a package of anti-scam measures, reporting that it had removed 159 million scam advertisements during 2025, with 92 per cent taken down before any user reported them, and disabled 10.9 million accounts across Facebook and Instagram linked to organised scam centres. In February 2026 it filed lawsuits against deceptive advertisers in Brazil, China and Vietnam, and set a target of raising the share of advertising revenue from verified advertisers from 70 to 90 per cent by the end of 2026.

Those are not trivial numbers, but they concern advertising and mass-scale account networks. The IC3 scheme requires neither. It requires one fake profile, one direct message to a person who has just posted in a fraud victims' support group, and a link. Direct messaging between two consenting parties is the hardest surface on any platform to police, and it is where this scheme lives.

Telegram is the second half of the pattern, and the conversation is moved there deliberately. The platform's posture shifted after the arrest of its founder Pavel Durov in France in August 2024, part of an investigation into insufficient moderation of illegal activity, after which Telegram began cooperating with law enforcement and expanded takedowns. Security researchers report enforcement at extraordinary scale — tens of millions of channels and groups blocked during 2025. The same research finds criminal ecosystems on the platform are not shrinking: groups use join-request gating to defeat automated moderation and maintain pre-built backup channels allowing near-instant reconstitution after removal.

This is the recurring shape of platform enforcement statistics: volume of removals measures activity, not outcome. A scheme that needs one working channel at a time, and can rebuild it in minutes, is largely indifferent to a takedown rate expressed in hundreds of thousands per day.

There is also a structural blind spot no enforcement budget resolves. Once a conversation moves into an encrypted direct message the platform has no view of its contents, and the design decision producing that blindness is the same one producing the privacy guarantee users are entitled to expect. Any proposal to fix scam contact by giving platforms visibility into private messages is a proposal to remove encryption. Direct-message fraud must therefore be addressed through weaker signals — account age, behavioural patterns, the profile claiming to represent a federal agency.

Two Continents and Two Answers on Platform Duty

Whether any of this becomes a legal obligation depends enormously on jurisdiction.

In the United States, Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act has historically meant a platform is not the publisher of a fake FBI profile created by a user, and that losses flowing from it are not the platform's to answer for. The precedent most on point is unhelpful to victims: in Herrick v. Grindr, involving an impersonating profile used to direct strangers to the plaintiff, the court dismissed the claim even where the harm was framed as a product defect, because the injury still originated in content supplied by another user.

That settlement is being tested. On 10 April 2026 the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled unanimously in Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms that Section 230 did not immunise Meta from state consumer-protection and tort claims where the alleged harms stemmed from the company's own conduct — the design of platform features and misleading statements about safety — rather than from third-party content. The case concerns Instagram's effects on children rather than fraud, but the reasoning is portable: if a claim can be framed around how a service was built and what its operator said about it, the immunity does less work. Litigation directly about scam advertising is under way, including a class action filed against Meta in April 2026 alleging that the company profits from scam advertisements while misleading users.

Europe imposes systemic duties instead of litigating individual harms. Under the Digital Services Act, large platforms must maintain effective mechanisms against fraudulent advertising and mitigate the resulting risks. On 21 May 2026 the European consumer organisation BEUC, with 29 member groups, filed complaints against Meta, Google and TikTok with the European Commission and national Digital Services Coordinators. Between December 2025 and March 2026 the groups flagged almost 900 advertisements suspected of breaching EU law. The platforms removed 27 per cent; 52 per cent of reports were rejected or ignored. BEUC estimates the fraudulent advertising still running reaches more than 200 million European consumers a month.

The United Kingdom's approach under the Online Safety Act reached a concrete stage almost exactly as the FBI published its alert. On 10 July 2026 Ofcom opened a consultation, running until 2 October, on a draft Fraudulent Advertising Code of Practice containing close to forty measures for the largest categorised services: banning fraudulent advertisers and preventing re-registration, verifying advertiser identity, and testing AI-driven ad creation tools for misuse. Non-compliance carries penalties up to £18 million or 10 per cent of global revenue.

The limitation is written into the scope. The draft code covers paid advertising. It does not cover user-generated content, and it does not cover organic search results. A deepfake video posted to a feed rather than bought as an advertisement, followed by a direct message from a fake profile, falls outside it. The most advanced fraud-specific platform regulation in the democratic world addresses the part of the IC3 scheme that is optional, and not the part that is essential.

The Domain Nobody Can Quite Protect

The FBI's advice — type ic3.gov manually, check the .gov — reflects a real structural advantage and a real structural limit.

The advantage is that .gov is a genuinely controlled space. Under the DOTGOV Act of 2021, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency administers the top-level domain, restricting registration to verified United States federal, state, local, tribal and territorial entities, mandating multi-factor authentication and enforcing HTTPS. Nobody registers a fraudulent .gov domain, because nobody can.

The limit is that this forces the fraud one character sideways. The September 2025 spoofs used ic3-gov.com and ic3gov.org: ordinary commercial domains, registrable in minutes by anyone with a payment method, and no mechanism exists by which CISA or the FBI can prevent their creation. Suppression happens afterwards, through abuse reports to registrars and hosting providers, and the timing is unfavourable. Academic analysis of phishing domain lifecycles finds that although some malicious sites vanish within hours, the average interval between detection and deregistration runs to roughly 11.5 days, and squatted domains impersonating a specific brand persist on the order of three weeks. A scheme that needs the site live only long enough for a victim who received a Telegram link this morning to complete a form this afternoon is entirely compatible with an eleven-day takedown.

Provenance signalling is the technology most often proposed for the video half of the problem. The Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity has assembled a substantial standard and a very large membership, and the idea is sound: cryptographically sign content at creation so that origin and edit history travel with it. But C2PA manifests are removable by design and fragile in practice. Embedded manifests are lost whenever a file is re-saved by a tool that is not provenance-aware, and mainstream platforms routinely re-encode media on upload, stripping credentials as a by-product of transcoding rather than by deliberate act. Durable variants combining watermarking and fingerprinting improve matters, but the asymmetry remains: provenance proves that something is what it claims to be, and cannot prove that unsigned content is fake. Where most authentic video also carries no credential, absence of provenance signals nothing.

Detection is the other proposed answer, and the honest reading is discouraging. Deepfake detectors routinely report accuracy above 99 per cent on established academic benchmarks. Evaluated against Deepfake-Eval-2024, built from synthetic media actually circulating on social platforms, state-of-the-art open-source models fell precipitously, with reported reductions in area-under-curve of around 50 per cent for video, 48 per cent for audio and 45 per cent for images. Detectors are good at recognising the generators they were trained on. The generator used to make next month's video does not exist yet.

An Impersonation Statute Written for Badges, Not Pixels

The legal position in the United States is not that impersonating an FBI official is lawful. It is that the statutes were written for a different medium and scaled for a different volume.

Section 912 of Title 18 of the United States Code makes it an offence to falsely pretend to be an officer or employee of the United States and either act as such or, under that pretence, obtain anything of value. The maximum sentence is three years. It is adequate for the person who flashes a false badge, and adequate for whoever runs the IC3 scheme — assuming they are within reach of American jurisdiction, which offshore fraud infrastructure makes unlikely. What it does not reach is the production of the synthetic video, or any duty for the intermediaries distributing it.

The Federal Trade Commission's Government and Business Impersonation Rule, in force since 1 April 2024, is more modern. It prohibits fraudulent impersonation of government agencies and their officers, and lets the Commission seek monetary redress directly in federal court. When it finalised that rule the Commission simultaneously proposed extending the prohibition to impersonation of individuals, citing AI-generated deepfakes as a technology threatening to turbocharge impersonation fraud, and floated a provision imposing liability on parties supplying goods or services — including AI tools — with reason to know they would be used for unlawful impersonation. After an informal hearing in January 2025 the Commission indicated it would not proceed with that means-and-instrumentalities provision, and as of mid-2026 regulatory trackers record the extension to individuals as unfinalised. The proposal that would have reached the toolmakers is the one that was dropped.

Federal deepfake legislation exists but is narrow. The TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed on 19 May 2025, criminalises knowing publication of non-consensual intimate imagery including AI-generated digital forgeries, and requires covered platforms to remove reported material within 48 hours; platforms had until 19 May 2026 to build the process, and the FTC began enforcement that month. It is a real law with real teeth and nothing to say about a synthetic FBI official, because its subject is intimate imagery. The NO FAKES Act, which would create a federal property right in an individual's voice and visual likeness against unauthorised digital replicas, was advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee on 18 June 2026 and is closer to enactment than in any previous session, but is still not law — and would primarily empower the depicted individual, here a serving federal official suing over a video that has already emptied someone's savings account. State law is dense but uneven: most states have enacted legislation addressing AI-generated media, roughly thirty have election-specific provisions, and every state has non-consensual intimate imagery protections, though many predate generative AI. The coverage is real; the coherence is not, and none of it binds a criminal operating from outside the country.

The European Union is about to attempt transparency at scale. Article 50 of the AI Act imposes obligations applying from 2 August 2026: deployers producing deepfakes — content resembling existing persons or events and falsely appearing authentic — must disclose it, and outputs of generative systems must be identifiable as artificially generated in machine-readable form. Under the Digital Omnibus agreement the general transparency duties bite on that date, while the machine-readable marking obligation is deferred to 2 December 2026 for systems already placed on the market before it. Infringements can attract penalties up to €15 million or 3 per cent of worldwide turnover. The gap is obvious. Criminals will not label their output, and the penalties are calibrated for corporate non-compliance rather than criminal enterprise. What Article 50 may achieve is a norm in which unmarked synthetic content becomes anomalous. That is worth something. It is not protection.

The Case for Restraint

There are decent arguments against every intervention above, and they deserve stating properly rather than as formality.

Criminalising synthetic impersonation of officials in broad terms would collide with the First Amendment. Depictions of government figures are core political speech, and satire, parody and criticism routinely involve putting words into the mouths of public officials. A statute drawn tightly enough to catch a fraudulent recovery-scam video, and loose enough to survive drafting by a legislature under pressure, is likely to catch protected expression too. Fraud-specific framing — requiring intent to deceive for financial gain — narrows the problem, but largely duplicates fraud statutes that already exist.

Platform liability rules carry a documented failure mode. Where a service faces penalties for content it fails to remove and none for content it removes wrongly, the rational response is aggressive removal, and the material caught in that net is disproportionately produced by people without resources to appeal. A 48-hour takedown obligation is defensible for a narrow category. Generalised to impersonation — which includes every parody account and every critical commentary adopting an institutional voice — it becomes something else.

Provenance and detection both invite over-reliance. If the public is trained to treat a content credential as proof of authenticity, the first successful credential-laundering technique produces harm greater than the tool prevented, because it exploits a trust the tool created. And a detection system right 95 per cent of the time tells five per cent of victims their genuine evidence is fake.

There is also a case that resources are better spent elsewhere. A randomised controlled trial by DeLiema, M. Daniel Brannock, Edward Preble and Langton, published in Innovation in Aging in 2024, tested mailed interventions with prior fraud victims. A single warning letter from the Postal Inspection Service reduced revictimisation by 8.6 per cent over four months; the same letter followed by five further mailings achieved a 22.4 per cent reduction. That is an unglamorous intervention delivered by post, and it protected a population no deepfake detector has ever helped. The cheapest thing demonstrably working is a letter.

Where the Cost of Vigilance Actually Lands

The advice at the end of the FBI's alert is sound, and worth reading for what it assumes. Type the address manually. Avoid sponsored search results. Verify the .gov. Do not trust social media profiles or messaging apps claiming to represent the IC3. Look for distorted hands and inaccurate shadows.

Every one of those instructions transfers a cost onto the person least able to bear it. The recipient has just lost money. They may be in their seventies. They may not know what a sponsored search result is, or why a domain suffix matters, or that ic3-gov.com and ic3.gov are not variants of the same thing. Asking them to perform forensic analysis on a video asks them to succeed where 99.9 per cent of iProov's participants failed.

There is a deeper incoherence in the advice, and it is nobody's fault. The IC3 says it will never contact you. But Operation Level Up exists precisely because the FBI does contact victims — proactively, by telephone, unsolicited — and 78 per cent of those it reached in 2025 had no idea they were being defrauded until the Bureau told them. The public is asked to hold two rules at once: an unsolicited approach from the FBI is a red flag, and an unsolicited approach from the FBI may be the intervention that saves your retirement. Distinguishing them requires exactly the institutional literacy this cohort has least of, and that the scheme is engineered to exploit.

That incoherence is the argument for shifting the burden. Not because individuals bear no responsibility, but because the current allocation is arithmetically absurd. On one side is a person defrauded once, in the worst week of their financial life, asked to authenticate synthetic video. On the other are entities that can act structurally: the platform that can require verification before an account claims to represent a federal agency; the registrar that can decline to sell ic3-gov.com; the agency that can establish a single cryptographically verifiable channel through which victims confirm a complaint's status; and the legislature that can extend a mid-century impersonation statute to the medium in which impersonation now happens, and finalise a rulemaking it began in 2024.

None of these is difficult in the way detecting deepfakes is difficult. They are difficult in the way assigning liability is always difficult, which is to say politically rather than technically. The IC3 scheme is not a story about the frontier of artificial intelligence; the tools involved are commodity products. It is a story about an institution whose credibility is its only real asset discovering that credibility is cheap to counterfeit and expensive to defend, and about a legal architecture that has not decided whose problem that is.

The scheme's designers have already answered the question. They decided it was the victim's problem, and built accordingly.

References

1. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, “FBI Warns of Scammers Impersonating the IC3,” Alert Number I-072026-PSA, 20 July 2026. https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2026/PSA260720
2. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, “FBI Warns of Scammers Impersonating the IC3,” Alert Number I-041825-PSA, 18 April 2025. https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2025/PSA250418
3. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, “Threat Actors Spoofing the FBI IC3 Website for Possible Malicious Activity,” 19 September 2025. https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2025/PSA250919
4. FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center, “Criminals Use Generative Artificial Intelligence to Facilitate Financial Fraud,” 3 December 2024. https://www.ic3.gov/PSA/2024/PSA241203
5. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Cryptocurrency and AI Scams Bilk Americans of Billions,” April 2026. https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/cryptocurrency-and-ai-scams-bilk-americans-of-billions
6. Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Operation Level Up,” accessed 25 July 2026. https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/victim-services/national-crimes-and-victim-resources/operation-level-up
7. Federal Trade Commission, “FTC Data Show People Reported Losing $3.5 Billion to Imposter Scams in 2025,” June 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/06/ftc-data-show-people-reported-losing-3-point-5-billion-imposter-scams-2025
8. Federal Register, “Trade Regulation Rule on Impersonation of Government and Businesses,” 1 March 2024. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/01/2024-04335/trade-regulation-rule-on-impersonation-of-government-and-businesses
9. Congress.gov, “S.4591 — NO FAKES Act of 2026, 119th Congress,” 2026. https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/4591/text
10. Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, “Commonwealth v. Meta Platforms, Inc.,” SJC-13747, 10 April 2026. https://law.justia.com/cases/massachusetts/supreme-court/2026/sjc-13747.html
11. Gibson Dunn, “EU AI Act Omnibus Agreement — Postponed High-Risk Deadlines and Other Key Changes,” 2026. https://www.gibsondunn.com/eu-ai-act-omnibus-agreement-postponed-high-risk-deadlines-and-other-key-changes/
12. BEUC, “Consumer groups file complaints against Meta, TikTok and Google for failing to protect consumers against financial scams,” 21 May 2026. https://www.beuc.eu/press-releases/consumer-groups-file-complaints-against-meta-tiktok-and-google-failing-protect
13. Ofcom, “Consultation: Fraudulent Advertising Code of Practice, Volume 1 — Context,” 10 July 2026. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/consultations/category-3-4-weeks/consultation-fraudulent-advertising-code-of-practice/main-documents/volume-1-context.pdf
14. Meta, “Fighting Scammers and Protecting People With New Technology and Partnerships,” March 2026. https://about.fb.com/news/2026/03/fighting-scammers-protecting-people-with-new-technology-and-partnerships/
15. Check Point Research, “Telegram's Crackdown in 2026 and Why Cyber Criminals Are Still Winning,” 2026. https://blog.checkpoint.com/research/telegrams-crackdown-in-2026-and-why-cyber-criminals-are-still-winning/
16. Marguerite DeLiema and Lynn Langton, “Older Victims of Mass Marketing Scams: An Analysis of Data Seized From Scammers,” Innovation in Aging, December 2021. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8679313/
17. Marguerite DeLiema, M. Daniel Brannock, Edward Preble and Lynn Langton, “A Fraud Awareness Mail Campaign Significantly Reduces Rates of Revictimization Among Older Victims,” Innovation in Aging, 2024. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11689558/
18. Cazanis, Carminati, Chew, Cross, Ponsford and Gould, “'Falling into a Black Hole': A Qualitative Exploration of the Lived Experiences of Cyberscam Victim-Survivors and Their Social Support Networks,” Victims and Offenders, 2025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15564886.2025.2481267
19. iProov, “Study Reveals Deepfake Blindspot: Only 0.1% of People Can Accurately Detect AI-Generated Deepfakes,” 2025. https://www.iproov.com/press/study-reveals-deepfake-blindspot-detect-ai-generated-content
20. Ammarah Hashmi, Sahibzada Adil Shahzad, Chia-Wen Lin, Yu Tsao and Hsin-Min Wang, “Unmasking Illusions: Understanding Human Perception of Audiovisual Deepfakes,” arXiv:2405.04097, 2024. https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04097
21. Zhiwei Tang, Dion Hoe-Lian Goh, Chei Sian Lee and Yang Yang, “Understanding strategies employed by seniors in identifying deepfakes,” Aslib Journal of Information Management, 2026. https://www.emerald.com/ajim/article/78/2/430/1248679/Understanding-strategies-employed-by-seniors-in
22. “Understanding Deepfake Detection Strategies Among Young Adults and Seniors,” International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 2025. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10447318.2025.2607571
23. “Deepfake-Eval-2024: A Multi-Modal In-the-Wild Benchmark of Deepfakes Circulated in 2024,” arXiv:2503.02857, 2025. https://arxiv.org/html/2503.02857v1
24. “Registration, Detection, and Deregistration: Analyzing DNS Abuse for Phishing Attacks,” arXiv:2502.09549, 2025. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.09549
25. Global Anti-Scam Alliance and Feedzai, “Global State of Scams Report 2025,” 7 October 2025. https://gasa.org/knowledge-base/reports/global-state-of-scams-2025

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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

There is something an old evangelist once said that has stayed with me for years.

He said, “The pastor’s job is really the job of a bus driver.”

That’s it.

The driver doesn’t decide who gets on the bus. He doesn’t decide who stays for the whole ride. He doesn’t decide who gets off. His job is simply to keep driving.

That’s the calling of a pastor.

I don’t own the church. Jesus does.

I don’t choose who walks through the doors. I don’t choose who leaves. I simply try, by the grace of God, to keep pointing people to Jesus and keep the bus headed toward home.

But if I’m honest…

There are people who left years ago, and I still think about them.

I remember their faces. Their laughter. Their tears. The prayers we prayed together. The victories we celebrated. The burdens we carried. Then one day… they were gone.

I don’t say their names because this isn’t about guilt. It’s about love.

I simply wonder…

Are they happy?

Have they found a church family that truly loves them?

Have they found a place where their gifts are being used for the Kingdom of God?

Most of all…

Have they tasted and seen that the Lord is still good?

I pray for them.

Not because I want to fill pews.

Because I love people.

If they’ve found a church where they are growing in Christ, serving with joy, and flourishing, then my heart rejoices. Praise God! That’s exactly what I want for them.

But if they’re wandering…

If they’re hurting…

If they still haven’t found where they belong…

Then I quietly ask the Good Shepherd to bring them home—whether that’s here at the Lord’s Table or wherever He knows they will grow best.

Then I pray for the people who are here today.

Lord, let every person who walks through these doors discover the place You created just for them. Let them find their calling. Let them uncover the gifts You’ve placed inside them. Let them become part of something eternal. Let them know they are loved.

And then my heart reaches even farther.

It reaches for the people we’ve never met.

The husband who’s about to give up.

The wife crying herself to sleep.

The teenager wondering if anyone notices.

The widow eating another meal alone.

The family searching for hope.

The man convinced God could never forgive him.

The woman carrying burdens no one else can see.

Lord…

Bring them to Your table.

Let them taste and see that You are good.

Not because our church is perfect.

Not because our pastor has all the answers.

But because Jesus Christ is still saving, still healing, still restoring, still forgiving, and still preparing a place at His table for everyone who will come.

My prayer has never been that this church would simply become bigger.

My prayer is that heaven would become fuller.

May every person who walks through these doors seek first His Kingdom and His righteousness. And may they discover that everything they truly need is found in Christ.

There will always be a place at the Lord’s Table.

And if you’re looking for home…

We saved you a seat.

Chapter 1: After Everyone Else Has Gone to Bed

It is nearly midnight, and you are standing in the kitchen packing tomorrow’s lunches. The dishwasher is running. A work email remains unanswered, a prescription needs to be collected in the morning, and someone in the house has already asked whether you remembered the appointment. You did. You usually remember everything because everyone expects you to.

Your phone lights up with a message from a friend: “God bless you. Please get some rest.” You smile, type, “I’m fine,” and place the phone facedown. That quiet reflex sits at the center of this Christian video about receiving God’s blessing when you are always the strong one. You know how to give encouragement, but receiving it makes you uncomfortable.

This hidden weariness belongs beside this reflection on allowing God to care for the person who cares for everyone else. Somewhere along the way, being dependable became part of your identity. You began confusing usefulness with worth. If you are solving the problem, organizing the schedule, or holding someone together, you know where you belong. When you need help, that certainty begins to shake.

So you keep moving. You wipe the counter, check the calendar, and decide sleep can wait. No one has ordered you to carry all of this alone. Still, asking someone else feels risky. They may do it differently. They may see how tired you are. Worse, they may say no, confirming the fear that your needs are inconvenient.

“God bless you” sounds simple until you realize blessing must be received with open hands. You cannot control the form it takes. God may answer through another person carrying part of the load, through a boundary you need to set, or through the humility of admitting that your body and mind have limits. Help can feel like loss of control before it feels like care.

The dishwasher finishes, and the kitchen becomes quiet. You pick up the phone and erase “I’m fine.” This time you write, “I am more tired than I have admitted. Could I call you tomorrow?” The message is not a collapse. It is a small opening. Perhaps God’s blessing has already reached you, waiting for permission to enter.

Chapter 2: What Happens When You Say “I Need Help”

At lunchtime, you sit in your car with the engine off. The parking lot is bright, but you have reclined the seat as though a few quiet minutes might repair weeks of exhaustion. Your friend calls exactly when promised. You consider letting it ring, then answer with the cheerful voice you use when you do not want anyone to worry.

She does not accept “I’m just busy” as the whole answer. She waits through the silence until you admit that you have been sleeping poorly and feeling angry with everyone. Saying it aloud embarrasses you. You expect concern to become judgment. Instead, she says, “That sounds like too much for one person.”

There is relief in being believed. You do not have to prove your exhaustion with a dramatic collapse. God already knows the weight carried behind your capable appearance. Sometimes His care begins when another person sees the strain and does not ask you to justify it.

Your friend offers to collect the prescription and bring dinner. Your first instinct is to decline because accepting will disrupt her day. She reminds you that you have rearranged many days for other people. The sentence lands gently but firmly. You have treated giving as love and receiving as inconvenience, though both require trust.

Receiving help also means accepting that it may not arrive exactly as you would have done it. The meal may be different. The errand may take longer. Someone else may forget the coupon or choose the wrong brand. If care must meet your standards before you accept it, control will keep disguising itself as responsibility.

You finally say yes. Nothing dramatic changes in the parked car. The workday still waits, and the deeper exhaustion will require more than one meal. Yet one burden has moved from your hands into willing hands nearby. “God bless you” begins to feel less like a pleasant wish and more like something God can deliver through the people you once kept outside the door.

Chapter 3: Loved Before the Work Is Finished

That evening, a covered dish sits on the counter, and the prescription bag rests beside it. Someone else has handled both. Your first impulse is to use the extra time to answer email, fold laundry, or clean the refrigerator shelf you noticed that morning. Instead, you carry a glass of water to the porch and sit down.

Rest feels unnatural when your mind has been trained to search for the next unfinished thing. The chair supports your body, but your thoughts keep standing up. You remember tasks, conversations, and future problems. For several minutes, doing nothing feels less like peace and more like guilt.

This is where God’s blessing reaches beneath your schedule. He does not love a future version of you who finally completes everything. He does not wait for your productivity to make you worthy of care. In Christ, you are invited to receive grace before the work is done, while the inbox is full and the kitchen remains imperfect.

Receiving that truth may require small acts of surrender. You let someone else load the dishwasher without correcting the arrangement. You decline one request that can wait. You go to bed before every problem has been solved. These choices may look ordinary, but they challenge the belief that the world is held together by your constant effort.

The evening air cools, and you remain in the chair. Tomorrow will ask something from you, but tonight does not need to be turned into another assignment. “God bless you” can now mean, “May you know that God cares for you even when you are not carrying everyone else.” You do not have to earn the right to receive what His love is already willing to give.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

It's a big enough umbrella, but it's always me That ends up getting wet

Originally published November 20, 2024

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Butterflies rest when it rains because the droplets can damage their wings.

It is okay to rest during the storms of life.

You will fly again.

I will fly again.

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Seek shelter in the warmth and safety of your memories. If you cannot move forward, it is here you must learn to survive.

The present is already consumed, becoming the past as we experience it. Time will gild these moments and they will shine and light your way forward. Watch as they are brighter than you ever saw through the experience.

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Ahhhh, the storms of life… how they affect us all. We tend to think of a storm as a destructive force that ruins our hard work and takes from us.

But in reality, we need storms to reset the environment, flush out the collected litter and rubble that settles in the proverbial gutters of our life.

Like the forest fire that burns away the clutter and undergrowth and releasing nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium back into the soil, the moments that make us pause give us time to reset and enrich ourselves. Our past is forged into fuel for the future.

This is especially important for you, as you likely do a poor job of self-care and focusing on refilling your spiritual and emotional tank.

When this storm passes, do not lament the changed landscape or what you have had to become; focus instead on the snap of the crystal clear air, the brilliant blue of the sky and the fresh smell that a summer torrent leaves behind.

You, little butterfly, are beautiful. Delicate and brilliant. Rest and celebrate your renewal! Relish the new landscape and revel in your day.

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build an irresistible garden

#poetry #confession

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wrinkled pages

In Summary: * Tuesday's main event (so far, anyway) had me cutting my hair and shaving my beard. Both had become unbearably shaggy and bothersome. No longer. That operation, conducted mostly out on the back porch this morning, was the only time today I was out in the weather. Other than that I've been inside with a/c and ceiling fans running.

Listening now to the Angels pregame show ahead of their game tonight with the Orioles. That game and the night prayers are the only things between me and bedtime. I can handle that.

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= 230.49 lbs. * bp= 136/81 (67)

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

Diet: * 05:15 – 1 banana * 06:25 – 1 ham and cheese sandwich * 11:30 – hambutger patties with mushroom gravy, white bread and butter * 15:50 – 1 fresh apple * 16:20 – dish of ice cream

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:30 – listen to local news talk radio * 04:05 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 04:20 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap * 10:00 – haircut and shave * 11:30 to 13:00 – watch old game shows and eat lunch at home with Sylvia * 15:00 – listening to The Jack Show * 16:30 – listening to KLAA Angels Radio AM 830 ahead of tonight's Angels / Orioles game

Chess: * 07:50 – moved in all pending CC games

You are my dream ... Just not come true

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!

The apiary be Scottish run to mute Late December this hugger And seeing simply rise What time in Hearst for Will Enough of oak And seeming simpler For five octet and lane And pasture by the law Economy forever- and nines to the Moon Giving ray to God And night shall let us be- the end of war.

Sudden And Unusual (Fire Me)

For the time this week And known purchases to comply Based on a long trip It was Eesti and Reunion But to Marshall the pretend And signs of rupture to Maghreb We were the universe And the dollar bill and its army And the anguish of a hundred And of an angel And a country To see the solemn survive To review And to take rest In timely we view The place in need of secure To feel and not pretend That enemies lay unprotected So surely to invoke The night of one regret Sitting and careful then On the twentieth we have war And made amends- to the grief of an aging course The repetition in union And solely reported by men And to the new unlabour speaks might There was something of May about Nothing says to the incline Of a past to restruggle the evident To the Eastern laity of war Thoughts for the tide and umber sea The days to King and Commonwealth We stayed upon the open sea And to retract all returning The West at due May course To front every place but our prism And sailing to the better of men Portions inland The legacy of war And returning our inland sea To the abode of a distant and weary men This water to the knees and on time In Justice, youth re-une In highly react-to at war And the sympathy of maiming still What is war and whatever is LCD To discourage the damage And to be fine with the greatest of men We will not live underground And we will have Victory at last.

To the Blessed Virgin Mary, our Patron and Saint at war.

And in the time of supposition We were weary for a few The working wheel And signs to ransom A day of pages like before A prayer for peace For feeding first to Beckham The litmus of a daygood And in this column,- thirty voids An Ark of the Covenant For Geert Wilders to atone And in this dying hour The lights refused to dim For the Good Lord And letting last to fieldsright Preternaturally decayed But all the wooden collections And the sturdy ones denote A place for Earthen Heaven And in it to avoid As the days are made for good And in this verse were lines Of the uncontaminated view That God is good to land And great to better seas And in a line of Crosses Perchance to see Saint Peter Adjusting to the schism Of the stalwart incantations And in this poem, an America That is bursting at the seams Of a dream for Oprah Winfrey Days of flight unto the night And every golden sister Has a drop of Mothers’ land- the only noise, abound Freedom tines in air For near to fortune time forgot In separated view This September to the stream Of every mannequin’s name Shall be blessed into the fold

I sit and nightly view The forms and future words And dreams, and stalls of gear In the separations of time For broken hearts to beat Every fragrant will and rose- and I adore the forms of depth To a star unto its range The polylacrymal Sun Fighting views unto the Henge And days do not infer to wreck The Son of Man upon a ship For all the distant passages Of their Holiness of time- of great departure And of Christ Jesus- Celebrant of creation If the mighty blackened locks Innovations free and bare A fissure to the leaf would happen fast- in lights if too much Heaven But never they- our honest World And beguiling sense of Wonder Distant Women And a song for better free- Heights of weight and worship ever Raptured then To Her night of trystic joy And off in ten To Chicago’s year of wheat And tribulations- But we hear And cast despondence Insofar as knowing every June There is distance unto our walk And every Man can solify These days are meant for Blackness And futures, and escape Barren lands to heave with rain In nine steps out of ten We were with her- and still know The aching of a star Dispossessed of heights of mutiny To her as much as more In mystery ten and then The Persephone and a floor Rigs for light and ship The sound of Earth and solemn Away with every star To the Good Women clad in wise Bearing Winter afraid And in the night unsure Turning to God’s Children Who will count one Oprah Winfrey Always standing nights in Gayle, Coretta, and Luther King Every drop of Earthen Water Filling hands of grateful then Today is unaccounted For the souls of Christ at will In barren dust to Dover Lighting stars to form and see Hallowed journey to this talk- of expectations And experience And of land becoming full In solemn flame And made of Water And the supplication free On our journey to this side Where days are rife And sustenant breathing Escaped to here- our land for us And a joy- to solemn roads And this is what we have And share to Royal as the Other Witness, Lord, of us In flying high The clouds of effervescence Light the isle- and what is right And offer downpour- for the livid- who will not see the sky- as Oprah would- and just for you And we will walk on- on this day As men will render- verdant bliss Into our own To solemn be And hopeful here Chicago keeping For this land..

..In solace and prayer For peace and gratitude Light of Heaven- Christ the Lord First and last In all who seek.

Tuesday's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse has the Angels facing the Orioles. This game is scheduled to start at 5:35 PM CDT. As I usually do, I'll follow the game's score and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

Hi blog friends!

Hope this update finds you well. I’ve been flying low since a few days after  I posted my last weekly update. Unsure if it’s a regular cold, an air conditioner induced cold or some other mystery crud I picked up from something. Whatever it is, it’s left me not feeling up to doing very much – even getting the basic basics done has felt real difficult.  I haven’t had the energy or strength to take a proper shower in a little over two weeks.

Grocery orders and deliveries have run smoothly and felt happy this week. And those technical issues with our blog server have been solved. 

Enjoyed another guac’d up taco and a warm cup of ramen with Paul by flower light, and learned that Ted Knight was one of the original narrators of the Super Friends cartoon. “Meanwhile, back at the hall of justice…” I used to watch it religiously until I started going to able-bodied school and felt I had to drop all the kid stuff that I enjoyed in order to be welcomed into the fold. Of course it didn’t work – and at exactly one month away from celebrating my 54th, I’m still actively recovering and not apologizing for it one bit. Whee! 🤗

I also received a phone call letting me know that my new power wheelchair will be delivered on 8/13.  Paul and I are both looking forward to getting back to our morning strolls  and weekend outings. We really, really miss just going to Target or Walmart, getting a coffee or something to eat and just strolling around people watching and seeing what’s for sale.

How are you doing? Let me know in the comments or via message, text or email.  

FREE Cute Snail cards and coloring pages are still available for download  to anyone who would be interested. Some offer prewritten text, and others offer lines to write your own notes, quotes or affirmations. All art is original to me and hand drawn on an ipad with my own fingers. I prefer not to use a pencil or stylus because they keep me from feeling what i’m drawing.

For those who enjoy word search puzzles, a Cute Snail back to school themed word search one, as well as back to school themed coloring pages are available in this blog post.

IMAGE ID: A picture of the flower light (and the plant plushies) that Paul and I ate ramen to the other evening. I like this light because it’s cute and fun, casts a comfy bright light, has 3 light settings, is rechargeable, and has good reviews. If you like to check it out, you can find it on Amazon here —- > https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FY52HR61?ref=ppxyo2ovdtbfedasintitle&th=1

See you again next Tuesday!

❤️ Juliet

Oh! Like leaves we touch, we learn. Now and forever we know the story. As winter calls, we will starve But dance will keep us warm.

July 2024

There is a storm in me tonight.

As two atmospheres collide, one cold, one hot, resulting in turmoil and powerful disturbance, my mind and heart are in disarray.

In me, the HEAT of joy at completing our building project, with its weeks and weeks of worry — worry that I will forget, disappoint, discourage... that I will fail my friends and Father. Though I KNOW they are all the model of patience and love, my heart seems blind to reason and logic.

Suddenly, crashing unexpectedly into the satisfying completion of a job well done: the COLD realization that these same days, days that have delivered tearful joy, laughter and loving touches, moments of intimate camaraderie and bonds forged more deeply by being together… they are over.

As the sun is setting over the glowing golden fields tonight (oh my god they are beautiful), the air after the storm is so absolutely perfect and crystalline that it defies poetry. But my heart understands. A heart overflowing with happiness and joy, and tears at parting from my friends.

I thank my Father that we have this lifetime and these fellow souls, though it is too short and I beg for another and another and another so that we may again suffer the tempest of love and loss that gives so much.

I want this feeling forever.

On Saturday I took delivery of a ream of hand-made Amatruda writing paper (Fig. 32). It's very likely of recent manufacture, with the firm of Cartiera F. Amatruda still a going concern, continuing a tradition of papermaking in Amalfi that goes back to the 13th Century. The ream has the look of a solid book-sized block, wrapped only in a simple paper band. Within are a hundred or so folded, watermarked sheets in a size they call A5+. That’s arguably a little misleading as the unfolded leaves are significantly larger than A5, at about 22 x 17cm (8.7” x 6.7”), i.e. similar to the British Post Quarto format (9” x 7”).

The writing surface is soft and smooth without the hint of oiliness that some hand-made papers have. Its behaviour with fountain pen inks varies: some work very well, while with others there is obvious feathering. I imagine it will be excellent in a typewriter, though I’ve yet to try that. Buying the same quantity of paper direct from the makers would have cost me 25€ plus another 15€ for postage, so the £23 I paid for the second-hand ream wasn’t too bad a bad bargain. The delivery was timely, as I’d lately used the final sheets from a box of old hand-made paper I bought about six years ago.

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In newly-arrived music this week, two albums on CD from the ‘10s: which are no longer new but not yet properly retro. Although, having said that, both incorporated retro 20th-Century ingredients when they were freshly released. Coming to me from 2010 was I Learned the Hard Way by Sharon Jones and the DAP Kings. I’d heard a few songs of theirs on the radio here & there, and was familiar with some of the Kings’ contributions to the likes of The Olympians’ debut album, and, famously, to Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black. This strong collection of songs, several of them — in time-honoured style — concerned with problematic romantic relationships, is my first album-sized exposure to the group. Initial favourite tracks include ‘Better Things’ and ‘She Ain’t a Child No More’. Also very effective is the closing combination of ‘If You Call’ and ‘Mama Don’t Like My Man’, where the former boasts one of the fullest arrangements on the album, and feels akin to the climax of a live show; while the latter is simple and stripped down, like an impromptu encore.

And, from 2015, The Bad Plus Joshua Redman. I first became aware of The Bad Plus back in 2003 when their major-label debut These Are the Vistas caught my ear. I bought their subsequent album too, but then failed to keep up with the rest of their career (which now I learn is, alas, approaching its end). Redman, on the other hand, I only first heard the other week. The saxophonist fits in seamlessly with the trio’s forceful, rock-&-pop-tinged style. Hear, for example, ‘As This Moment Slips Away’. The tracks are all original compositions by the four players. Jazz albums quite often forego any dramatic concluding flourish. Here, though, the closing number ‘Silence is the Question’ does have a satisfyingly climactic feel. It’s a re-tread of a composition that also featured on These Are the Vistas, though augmented by Redman’s presence, and with a thirteen-and-a-half minute duration, this version has even more impact.