If you want to dig a little further into this subject I recommend reading the post written a while back on the subject of the USA civil war here. The book reviewed there is worth reading for a very different narrative. The book I’m reading now is much more comprehensive covering a lot more ground, and both are great.

I’m reading the book “Battle Cry of Freedom” by James M. McPherson. It’s a pretty long book and rich in content so it warrants multiple posts. I’ll likely do two to four posts on this book, maybe more. I want to start off saying that it is a very well written book. If you like history or want to learn more of the details on the civil war it’s a great one to read. Even though it is a lengthy book it flows well – at least so far from what I have read. The civil war that the USA went through is very important, more important than I think many give it credit for. It didn’t just shape the United States, I think it is shaping the world. This is primarily because the USA became the world “superpower” or the empire that began shaping the world. I think the world shaping happened primarily after WWII, but it started through ideas before that and it started by force after that.

I just want to lay out in the beginning here that I disagree with quite a bit of this author’s narrative. I don’t disagree with many aspects of this, it’s loaded with great quotes and information. It’s well worth the read even if I’m in disagreement. The disagreement I have is a bit more subtle than many may pick up on – and that is okay, it is still worth reading. Ideologies and narratives shape the human mind. They are extremely powerful strongholds, or protective layers, that shield one’s mind from thinking of alternative points of view. We are in an artificial prison containing our minds into a very narrow view of reality. I don’t exclude myself in this condition. I’d like to dig my way out, but as I do am I just surrounding my mind with new false constructs?

Since I’ve really started thinking outside the box of official or basic left/right paradigm mindsets I started having some problems with Abraham Lincoln and the civil war. The freeing of the slaves as a result is great, but what else happened? We always hear about the slavery narrative because that’s really difficult to disagree with. I’d say only extremely racist and somewhat insane people would be against Lincoln and the civil war because of the liberation of slaves in the USA. I came to a point that it seemed there was much more going on behind the narrative and it seemed terrible. But I couldn’t put my finger on it for many years. So as I tried to express the ideas I had and it didn’t resonate with people that I’d bring it up with, and it may not still but I hope you’ll continue thinking about it. The first thing I could point at as a problem with the USA civil war was that it set the precedent that the union was no longer voluntary. To me this dissolved the beauty of the union, what is freedom if it isn’t a voluntary association?

The beginning of the book I found fairly boring, but I find many books to be the same so I don’t hold it against it. If you are like me it takes a little while to get into the rhythm and style of the writer then just give it a little time. Something interesting mentioned in the beginning of the book is that the civil war is the most written about event in American history. Another pretty amazing fact is that they lost more lives during that war than all of the wars up to this point combined. It was a very bloody and dramatic event in American history.

I found chapter 3 section II very interesting and revealing. Some may find it a boring area of the book because it digs into economy and statistics. But to me those are important and if done well can reveal a lot on a subject. The author is primarily focusing on the pre-war 1800’s in this segment. What it shows is that high rates of white people were leaving the south and heading to the north. The north was advancing quickly into the industrial age and becoming major producers. The south was relying on slave labor and not advancing, they were in a rut. Like I mentioned in the post linked at the top of this, I believe that slavery as it was pre-civil war would have died on its own if left to try and compete with the new ways of production. If the south left the union and tried to compete with the north and the rest of the world it would have failed over time. Perhaps it would have lasted another 40 years or so, but it very well may have had a much less bloody and peaceful end – and I believe that would have been great. But that is not what happened. So what did happen? Was the civil war primarily about slavery? That is what this author focuses on and all other official narratives I’ve been taught. To me I believe it was about the federal government versus the state sovereignty. It looks to me like the intent in the establishment of the USA was that the people were the sovereigns, it was an abolishment of kings and lords over people. Next was the state sovereign under the individual sovereign. And last was the federal sovereignty under the state and individual sovereignty. The federal government was established to accomplish the things that the individual or the state could not accomplish very effectively – at least in the minds of the founders. Things like national defense and also international and even national trade systems. The other primary idea the federal government was to focus on was minting gold coins as the standard money. These things make sense.

The declaration of independence set the first primary standard. Then they put together their constitution. This was primarily to set up what the federal government could do, it was also established to limit the power of government, not make it all powerful. Then they added the bill of rights to protect the people and the states from the federal government. It seems to me if the founders of the USA came back and saw what this had become and they could do it over again, they would have drastically limited the federal government – maybe never even created it. They would have gone another path, because what they did did not work towards the aims and hopes they started with. At least most of the founders.

So what the federal government has done is taken back the seat of King, or Sovereign over the petty little people and states. In chapter 8 section II the author digs into this idea. Both the incumbent president Buchanan and Lincoln unify on this subject, that the states have no right to secession. That the states were created by the federal government, not the other way around. To me this completely disregards the words from the framers of the constitution and the declaration of independence. So their arguments are invalid. But what this shows to me is that there likely was a puppeteer behind the throne of presidency even at this early stage of the government. Perhaps it was just a desire for concentrated power by those sitting in the throne of presidency. That would mean that that puppeteer was just an ideology, the ideology of concentrated power and authority over all and everything.

All of those who rejected the right to secession ignored the first paragraph of the declaration of independence:

“The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

So close to disunion they got into the nuances of it all and split hairs. Some believed they did not have the right to secession but they had the right to revolution. To me this means that you cannot voluntarily leave, but you can violently leave. Which is a terrible precedent and promotes violent upheaval, not diplomatic and voluntary association. It also sets the stage for whoever is the biggest will likely win. Lincoln said, “The doctrine of secession is anarchy.” But he did not reject the idea that they could revolt. I reject that the doctrine of secession is anarchy. But it is peaceful and creates a more voluntary situation – which is threatening to a central governing body. It isn’t anarchy because the local or state government still exists.

There is a chance that the USA was created as the “New Order of the Ages” or “Novus odo seclorum” and the founders, or at least some of them, did mean it as Lincoln and Buchanan did. That the USA federal government was a supra government to control all its subjects. This precedent set through the civil war crushes the meaning behind the Declaration of Independence in my view. It sets the stage for a New World Order that will be a supra government over the entire world. Either coming from and of the USA, which I have my doubts, or submitted to by the USA which I think more likely. If and when that takes place the precedent is set. If the federal government says so, you have no choice but to obey, or have a revolution. Well, those are pathetic choices.

Even if the intent of the founders was to have an all powerful central force with some checks and balances, or if that became the intent after their civil war, why not choose a different path forward? The founders of the USA are not my god. They are men, smart men but they are only men. Why not have individual sovereignty top tier, then local, then county, then state, then nation, then world and have this association a voluntary thing? Perhaps it’s only worth breaking that pattern if someone becomes an aggressor on an other. You and I are an other, I don’t want us to be aggressed upon. The south was breaking that pattern, they were enslaving people and breaking the first level of individual sovereignty. But it has never been presented to me in that way. If that is why the civil war happened I would be much more supportive and it would make more sense. Let’s protect that individual sovereignty over that of the state or confederacy trying to enslave a race and it’s people. Instead they used the logic that the federal government was more powerful than the state… I disagree. However I would agree if they were using the standard that individual sovereignty trumps the desire to enslave others which breaks their sovereignty. They just never posed their arguments in such a way. That is likely intentional, they don’t want us to be free – they want to free. We are supposed to be inpatients to their insane asylum. And insane we must be if we enjoin ourselves to them and the precedents they have set with the imaginary narratives to lock us into their box. An imaginary prison with imaginary shackles that are getting heavier decade after decade after decade.

This book is long and it’s not winter time so I don’t read a whole lot each week. When I get through more I may add one to three more updates on this book, and then I may combine it all as one final post reviewing this book. Even though I disagree with some of the narrative it is a well done book so far.

Further reading:

Battle Cry of Freedom (Internet archive link)

Declaration of Independence

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript

Constitution of the United States

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/constitution-transcript

Bill of Rights

https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transcript

Audio: A Certain Smile, A Certain Sadness (1995)

I had kind, soft dreams last night. I remembered them, but I didn’t write them down. That’s part of the pattern and the mood of this week. Not being as good with time, and having to manage the consequences of that and also, remembering dreams when I wake up, but not writing them down and so I don’t have as many souvenirs from the dream world this week as I’d like.

Have you tried to do this? Tried to remember a dream, and you can even “see” the vague outlines of the dream, but you can’t really fill them in with any detail? When I close my eyes, there are literal outlines of forms, but if I don’t have a key word in mind, or a phrase from the dream, they remain that way. Very vague outlines. And then, just as easily as they come, even the outlines can disappear. In the past, I have been able to retrieve dreams, but like I’ve said, it requires a tremendous and focused effort.

—

Video: Molecular Physicist Visualised The Process of Dying | David Glowacki

This video inspired me to write a poem. I haven’t finished. I feel like I could still polish it, but I love that I’ve been writing poems again.

—

Happy Full Moon, wherever you are.

For a decade the romance scam has had a face, and it was grey. The widow who wired her pension to an oil-rig engineer she never met. The retired teacher who remortgaged for a soldier stranded somewhere hot and dangerous. Banks designed their warnings for that person. Charities built their leaflets around her. The rest of us, especially the young, filed the whole genre under things that happen to people who did not grow up online.

On 25 September 2026, figures from Lloyds Banking Group landed that should retire that picture for good. Reports of romance scams to the bank rose 24 per cent in the twelve months to the end of August 2026, compared with the year before. Within that rise, reports from victims aged 18 to 24 jumped 59 per cent. Those from victims aged 25 to 34 climbed 39 per cent. The older victims have not gone anywhere: more than half of the money lost, 55 per cent, still came from people over 65, and victims aged 75 to 84 lost an average of £9,051 each, the highest of any age group and 19 per cent more than a year earlier. But the fastest growth is now among people who were born with a phone in reach. According to Lloyds, those younger victims typically met the person defrauding them on dating apps and social media, while the over-50s were more often approached through traditional dating websites and social platforms.

In the same week, two economists at Central South University in Changsha posted a short paper to arXiv with a title that reads like a diagnosis. “When Trust Attracts Fraud: AI and Trust Arbitrage”, by Xieyu Yin and Fenghua Wen and linked to the journal Economics Letters, opens with a sentence worth pinning above every trust and safety team's desk: “Trust can attract fraud when it delays verification.” Their model says nothing about dating. It is a piece of abstract economics about sellers, signals and markets. But read it alongside the Lloyds figures and it describes, with uncomfortable precision, what is happening to a generation that was supposed to be too savvy to be caught.

The two releases together raise three questions. Why is the fastest-growing group of victims the one everyone assumed was immune? What does a flood of synthetic faces, voices and photographs do to the ordinary, decent habit of giving a stranger the benefit of the doubt? And if trust attracts fraud by delaying the moment anyone checks, whose job is the checking: the person swiping at midnight, or the companies whose platforms the fake suitors are built on?

The Generation That Was Supposed to Know Better

The assumption that young people are scam-proof rests on a confusion between fluency and scepticism. Someone who can spot a phishing text from a fake courier is fluent. That is not the same as being sceptical of a person who has spent three weeks being kind to you. And the evidence that the young were never as protected as their reputation suggested predates the Lloyds data. In September 2023, UK Finance and its Take Five campaign published a OnePoll survey of 2,000 UK adults. Young adults aged 18 to 24 were the most confident of any age group in their ability to spot a scam: 91 per cent said they were confident they could identify a fake request for personal information online. Yet just 27 per cent said they would always take steps to check whether an unexpected contact could be trusted, against more than 60 per cent of people over 55. Almost half of the 18 to 24 year olds, 49 per cent, said they had been contacted by an impersonation scammer, and of those targeted, 52 per cent said they had shared personal information or made a payment as a result.

That survey was about impersonation, not romance, and it is three years old. But its pattern, high confidence and low checking, is the one the romance data now reflects. American figures agree. The Federal Trade Commission has long reported that younger people who file fraud complaints are more likely than older people to say they lost money, while older victims report far larger individual losses. In one FTC analysis, 51 per cent of complaints from consumers aged 19 and under reported a financial loss, compared with 21 per cent of complaints from people aged 80 and over, although the median loss for the youngest group was far smaller.

The Lloyds numbers sit neatly on that fault line. Young people are showing up more often; older people are losing more per case. The average loss across all romance scam victims at Lloyds actually fell by 20 per cent to £4,078, which is what you would expect if the victim pool is being swelled by people with smaller bank balances. The fraud is not getting gentler. It is getting wider.

What the Numbers Do and Do Not Say

Some honesty about those percentages is in order. The Lloyds data counts reports to one banking group, not the whole country. A rise in reports is not automatically a rise in crime; it can also reflect victims feeling less ashamed to come forward. A 59 per cent rise from a small base can represent fewer people than a modest rise in a large one, and Lloyds did not publish absolute case numbers by age in the material reported by the press. So the figures are directional. But the direction is corroborated elsewhere. UK Finance's Annual Fraud Report 2026, published in June and covering the calendar year 2025, found that losses to romance fraud across its members rose 23 per cent to £39.2 million, within a wider picture of £1.28 billion stolen through payment fraud. The report described romance scams as relying less on technical intrusion and more on persuasion, emotional manipulation and the exploitation of trust, delivered at scale through digital channels.

In the United States, the FTC's April 2026 data release on social media scams found that nearly 60 per cent of people who reported losing money to a romance scam in 2025 said it started on a social media platform. Scammers, the agency noted, often tailored their pitch to people's profiles, later “inventing a crisis requiring money or casually offering investment advice”. That last phrase describes the hybrid now dominating the field: the romance that turns, gradually, into a cryptocurrency “opportunity”.

Confidence Is Not a Defence

Why would digital natives be caught? Part of the answer is exposure: fraud follows attention, and attention is on the apps. But the deeper answer lies in how trust itself works, and here the psychology is long established. Timothy Levine, a communication scholar whose work on deception has shaped the field, set out truth-default theory in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology in 2014. Its central claim is that people tend to believe others by default, and that this default is adaptive. Most communication is honest. We abandon the truth default only when something triggers suspicion strongly enough, and even then we are poor at spotting lies from demeanour alone.

Romance fraud is engineered to keep that trigger from firing. Monica Whitty, a psychologist who has studied the online dating romance scam for more than a decade, developed what she called the Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model in a 2013 paper in the British Journal of Criminology, based on interviews with victims. The model traces a sequence of stages: a carefully built profile, a grooming period in which intimacy deepens, a first small request, then escalation. Whitty also pointed to the “near-win” phenomenon, borrowed from gambling research, to explain why victims stay in the scam and why some are defrauded again. Each request comes with the promise that this is the last hurdle before the relationship becomes real.

None of those mechanisms care about digital literacy. Knowing how a phishing link works does nothing to protect you from someone who has spent weeks asking about your day, remembering your sister's name and sending good-morning messages at exactly the right hour. Confidence may even make things worse. If you believe scams look like clumsy emails from a prince, a warm, fluent, attentive stranger does not match the template, so the alarm never sounds. Liz Ziegler, fraud prevention director at Lloyds, put it plainly in the bank's release: “Romance scammers don't care how old someone is. They look for opportunities to build trust, create an emotional connection, then turn that relationship into a request for money.”

There is a cultural dimension too. For many people under 30, meeting a partner online is simply how dating happens. That normalisation is healthy, but it has removed the old social friction, the sceptical friend or the raised eyebrow, that once surrounded romance with someone you had never met. A generation that treats online connection as real connection has, reasonably, extended its truth default to the people it meets there.

A Person Now Costs Almost Nothing to Make

Now add generative AI. For most of the history of online romance fraud, the hardest part of the con was being convincing for long enough. Scammers stole photographs from real people's social media accounts, often soldiers, doctors or attractive models, and the countermeasure was simple: run a reverse image search and see whether the face belongs to someone else. Lloyds still recommends exactly that, alongside watching for intense declarations of love, newly created profiles, pressure and guilt, and talking to someone you trust before sending money.

The reverse image search, though, assumes the photograph exists somewhere else. A synthetic face does not. It can be generated fresh, consistent across dozens of images, placed in plausible holiday settings and aged or restyled on demand. The same collapse in cost applies to voice and video. In September 2024, Starling Bank published research, conducted with Mortar Research across more than 3,000 UK adults, warning that fraudsters could clone a voice from as little as three seconds of audio. More than a quarter of respondents said they had been targeted by a voice-cloning scam in the previous year.

Live video, long treated as the definitive proof that someone is real, has gone the same way. In October 2024, Hong Kong police arrested 27 people linked to a syndicate operating from an industrial unit in Hung Hom that allegedly used AI face-swapping to pose as attractive women on video calls, drawing victims across Asia into fake cryptocurrency investments. Police put the losses at around HK$360 million, roughly US$46 million. Earlier that year, WIRED reported, drawing on videos gathered by David Maimon, a criminologist at Georgia State University and head of fraud insights at SentiLink, that West African scammers known as Yahoo Boys were running real-time face-swaps on video calls with little more than two phones and off-the-shelf apps.

At industrial scale, the automation is even starker. In July 2026, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime published a threat assessment on South-East Asia's criminal economy. It estimated scam losses across East and South-East Asia, Australia and New Zealand at between $88.3 billion and $114.1 billion in 2025, and documented the use of generative AI and deepfakes in automated fraud. People from at least 80 countries and territories have been identified inside scam compounds in the region, many recruited under false pretences and held in conditions UNODC describes as human trafficking for forced criminality. Delphine Schantz, UNODC's regional representative for South-East Asia and the Pacific, described the model bluntly: “Their operating model looks like corporate franchising.”

That is the industrial base behind the investment-romance hybrid often called pig butchering. In August 2025, Meta said it had removed 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to criminal scam centres in the first half of the year, and disclosed working with OpenAI to disrupt a Cambodian network that had used ChatGPT to generate outreach messages. A human scammer in a compound could once manage a handful of conversations. With a language model drafting replies, translating fluently and remembering every detail of a target's life, the limit on how many “relationships” one operator can sustain begins to dissolve.

Here the Yin and Wen paper earns its place. Their model has three costs that generative AI pushes down at once: fabrication, making the fake face, voice and biography; targeting, reaching the right people; and verification, checking. They have not fallen at the same speed or for the same people. Fabrication and targeting have collapsed for fraudsters with industrial tools. Verification has become cheaper only for whoever actually holds the tools to do it.

The Benefit of the Doubt Was Always a Subsidy

What happens to the habit of giving strangers the benefit of the doubt in this environment? The honest answer is that it becomes more expensive, and the cost falls on the people who keep extending it.

Think of the benefit of the doubt as a subsidy. When you assume a new match is who they say they are, you save yourself the effort of checking and spare them the indignity of being checked. Across millions of interactions that saving is part of what makes online dating work at all.

The subsidy holds up as long as fakes are rare and costly to make. Truth-default theory depends on base rates: the default is adaptive because most people, most of the time, are telling the truth. When a stranger's face, voice and video can all be manufactured, the base rate on some platforms shifts, and the old cues that used to justify trust, a consistent set of photographs, a warm voice note, a live video call, stop carrying information. They were never proof. They were evidence that faking was costly. That is no longer true.

There are two bad ways this can go. People can keep extending the old trust to cues that no longer mean anything, and a growing minority are defrauded. Or they can withdraw trust wholesale, which would be a real loss, because trust is not a flaw to be engineered away; it is the basis of cooperation. A generation taught to regard every warm stranger as a probable criminal would be protected from romance fraud in roughly the way someone who never leaves the house is protected from traffic.

The more useful question is not whether to trust but where the checking should happen, and at what point in the relationship. That is exactly the question the arXiv paper addresses.

Trust Arbitrage and the Market That Forgot to Check

Yin and Wen build a model with two markets that differ in their “prior quality”, roughly how honest the average participant is believed to be. Honest sellers provide genuine evidence cheaply; dishonest ones fabricate it at a cost; buyers can pay to verify. As AI capability grows, fabrication, verification and targeting all get cheaper.

Their first result is what they call a trust valley. If fabrication becomes profitable before verification becomes worthwhile, credibility falls, because evidence that used to mean something can now be faked. It recovers only once checking becomes cheap enough to start. Their second result is the uncomfortable one. A market with higher prior quality delays verification, because when most participants are honest, checking feels like a waste. The better the reputation, the longer everyone waits before bothering to look.

Put two markets side by side and a window opens. In that interval, the lower-quality market has started checking, but the higher-quality one has not. If targeting is cheap enough, deceivers move into the reputable market precisely because it feels no need to check. In the words of the abstract, “deceptive sellers enter the higher-quality but less vigilant market, and their entry can initially reverse its reliability advantage.” The authors call this trust arbitrage. They also stress that it is self-limiting: the inflow of fraud eventually triggers verification in the trusting market too, and the gap closes. They describe the result as “an endogenous but temporary protection gap that redirects deception across markets”.

The paper is a formal model, not an empirical study of dating, and it would be overreaching to treat it as proof of anything about Tinder or Hinge. But as a lens it is sharp. For years, the market that did its checking was the one full of warnings: older people, their banks, charities, and the families who had been told to watch for Nigerian princes and stranded soldiers. The market that felt no need to check was the one everybody assumed was sophisticated: the young. By the logic of the model, that is exactly the market fraud should flow towards once fabrication and targeting become cheap. And the Lloyds data looks very much like an inflow.

The model's comforting conclusion, that the gap is temporary, deserves scrutiny. In the paper, the market that was fooled starts checking. In reality, the “correction” happens one broken bank account and one broken heart at a time. A temporary protection gap in an economics paper is a permanent loss for the people who fall into it. The policy question is whether we wait for that gap to close through victimisation or close it deliberately, earlier, by moving verification to where it is cheapest.

Why Young Users Sit in the Protection Gap

Mapped onto the Lloyds data, the model suggests young people are exposed not because they are foolish but because they sit where checking has been culturally postponed.

Older people have been the target of sustained awareness campaigns for years, and adult children talk to their parents about scams. The apparatus of prevention was aimed at the group everyone expected to be vulnerable. Young people received a different message: that they understood technology and the obvious scams were beneath them.

Tinder's own UK research makes the same point from the platform side. When the app launched its mandatory Face Check verification for new UK users in March 2026, it cited research that 63 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds said scams were harder to spot than ever. That is not a generation that thinks it is invincible. It is a generation that knows the ground has moved and has not been given better tools than a reverse image search and an instinct.

The Yin and Wen model also clarifies why “just be more careful” is weak advice. Verification is costly for an individual in a way it is not for a platform. A person on a dating app has almost no way to check whether a face has been synthetically generated, whether the same face appears on forty other accounts, whether the account was created yesterday from a device in a scam compound, or whether the text of the messages matches a script used on thousands of other victims. A video call can now be deepfaked; a reverse image search is defeated by a synthetic face. For an individual, the cost of meaningful verification is high and rising. For a platform, much of it is a database query.

Who Pays When the Check Is Missed

Britain already has an answer to the question of who pays when fraud succeeds, and it is instructive, because it does not include the platforms.

Since 7 October 2024, the Payment Systems Regulator has required banks and payment firms to reimburse victims of authorised push payment fraud, including romance scams, up to £85,000 per claim, with the cost split between the sending and receiving firms. Its dashboard shows around £316 million reimbursed in the eighteen months to March 2026, including £72.6 million in the first quarter of 2026 alone. The scheme covers Faster Payments and CHAPS; card payments, international transfers and other rails fall outside it, which matters because many pig-butchering scams move money onwards into cryptocurrency. Firms can refuse reimbursement where a customer was grossly negligent, a deliberately high bar, and only around 2 per cent of claims in the first quarter of 2026 were rejected on grounds of insufficient caution. The PSR itself is being folded into the Financial Conduct Authority.

The logic is that banks sit where money leaves the account, so bearing the cost gives them every incentive to detect fraud. But the transfer is the last moment in a romance scam, not the first. By the time money moves, the relationship has often run for weeks or months on a platform that took no financial share of the harm. In the language of the arXiv paper, the reimbursement regime assigns the cost of fraud to the one actor who can only verify at the very end, while the actors who host the fabrication and the targeting face no equivalent bill.

The platforms are not unregulated. Under the Online Safety Act, Ofcom's illegal content codes came into force on 17 March 2025, requiring services in scope to assess and mitigate the risk of illegal harms, fraud included. Ofcom's register of risks specifically identified romance fraud as one of the key risks associated with dating services. And on 10 July 2026, Ofcom opened a consultation on draft Fraudulent Advertising Codes of Practice, setting out nearly 40 measures for the largest platforms, including banning bad actors and blocking them from re-registering, with fines of up to £18 million or 10 per cent of global revenue for non-compliance once the codes are approved and in force. The consultation closes on 2 October 2026. But the advertising codes, as their name makes clear, cover paid-for advertising, not the user-generated profiles on which romance fraud actually runs.

The case for leaning harder on platforms is sharpened by what has emerged about their incentives. In November 2025, Reuters reported on internal Meta documents suggesting that the company had projected around 10 per cent of its 2024 revenue, roughly $16 billion, would come from advertising for scams and banned goods, and that its platforms showed users an estimated 15 billion higher-risk scam adverts a day. According to Reuters, Meta's own analysis found that universal advertiser verification would reduce fake adverts significantly but would cost revenue. Meta's spokesperson Andy Stone told Reuters the documents presented a “selective view”, that the 10 per cent estimate was rough and overly inclusive, and that the company had reduced user reports of scam adverts worldwide. The dispute concerns advertising rather than dating profiles, but it illustrates the structural problem: verification costs platforms money, while fraud costs them, at worst, reputation.

The dating industry has its own history here. In August 2025, Match Group agreed to pay $14 million to settle Federal Trade Commission charges relating to deceptive advertising, cancellation and billing practices. The FTC had alleged that Match sent non-subscribers notifications of interest that were in many cases from fraudulent accounts, without disclosing that fact, to induce them to subscribe. The following month, US Senators Marsha Blackburn and Maggie Hassan wrote to Match Group demanding answers on romance scams across its apps, which include Tinder, Hinge and OkCupid. Senator Hassan said that “Romance scams are robbing Americans of millions of dollars every year, and taking a devastating emotional toll in the process.”

What Platforms Could Verify That Users Cannot

To their credit, the major dating companies have started moving the burden in the right direction, and the early results support the argument that platforms, not users, are where verification is cheapest.

Tinder's Face Check asks new users to record a short video selfie during sign-up. The system checks that the face is live and matches the profile photographs, and it can detect the same face appearing across multiple accounts, which is exactly the signature of an operation running many synthetic suitors from one room. According to Tinder, the video itself is deleted after review, while an encrypted face map is retained to verify new photos and catch duplicates. Tinder said that in markets where Face Check is live it had seen a decrease of more than 60 per cent in exposure to potential bad actors and of more than 40 per cent in reports of bad actors. Yoel Roth, senior vice president of trust and safety at Match Group, called it “the most measurably impactful safety feature I've seen in my career.”

Bumble took a different route. In February 2024 it launched Deception Detector, a machine-learning system designed to identify spam, scam and fake profiles, and said that in testing it had automatically blocked 95 per cent of such accounts, with member reports of spam, scams and fake profiles falling by 45 per cent in the first two months. Bumble has also let users report profiles they believe use AI-generated photos or video.

These are company-reported figures, not independent audits. But they point to the central truth: signals that are invisible to an individual user are visible to the platform. A platform can see that an account was created minutes ago, that its device has hosted dozens of other accounts, that its photos may carry the statistical fingerprints of image generators, that its opening messages match a script sent to thousands of people, that it steers every conversation off the app to WhatsApp or Telegram within a day, or that it begins mentioning cryptocurrency platforms. A person on the other end of the chat sees only a charming stranger.

This is the Yin and Wen model turned into product design. If the danger is a protection gap in which verification lags fabrication, the fix is to make verification happen before trust accumulates rather than after money moves. Checking at sign-up, with a liveness test and duplicate detection, is verification at the cheapest possible moment: before the first message, before the grooming period, before the near-win. Checking at the bank transfer is verification at the most expensive moment, when the victim has been emotionally invested for weeks and will often override warnings to protect a relationship they believe is real.

The Limits of Putting It All on the Apps

None of this means the burden should move wholesale to platforms, and there are real costs to pretend away.

Biometric verification raises serious privacy questions. Storing face maps of millions of daters creates a target for attackers and a tool that could be misused. It also risks excluding people who cannot or will not submit their faces, including those with good reasons for caution, such as survivors of abuse or people whose sexuality could endanger them if exposed. Liveness checks themselves are a moving target: the same deepfake tools that fool a human on a video call are being aimed at the automated systems designed to catch them. And verification of identity is not verification of intent. A real, verified person can still be a fraudster, and the compounds UNODC describes are staffed by real people.

There is also the problem of where the conversation goes. Many romance scams begin on a dating app and move quickly to encrypted messaging, where the dating platform has no visibility. A fraudster verified out of one app will try another, and the arXiv model's logic applies here too: deception flows to the least vigilant venue. Uneven verification simply relocates the fraud, which is why cooperation across platforms matters as much as any one company's tools.

And individual judgement still matters. Lloyds' advice, to be wary of intense early declarations of love, to protect financial information, to resist urgency and guilt, and to talk to someone before sending money, remains good. The point is not that users should stop thinking. It is that users cannot be the primary verification layer for a threat that is industrial, automated and increasingly synthetic. Asking a 22-year-old to detect a real-time deepfake produced in a scam compound is like asking pedestrians to inspect the brakes on passing cars.

Keeping the Default Without Paying For It

The deepest cost of the synthetic suitor is not the money, large as the sums are. It is what the threat does to the ordinary human habit of believing people. If the only defence against fabricated romance is for everyone to trust less, then the fraudsters have taken something from people who were never scammed at all: the ease of meeting a stranger and assuming the best.

The alternative is to keep the truth default and move verification underneath it, into infrastructure, where it is cheap and systematic. Nobody inspects the wiring before switching on a light, because building regulations put the checking elsewhere. The benefit of the doubt survives there because someone with the tools and the responsibility has already done the doubting.

For online dating, that means treating verification at sign-up, duplicate-face detection, scam-script detection and friction when conversations move off-platform as baseline duties rather than optional features. It means Ofcom treating romance fraud on dating services as seriously as it is now treating scam adverts on social media. And it means asking, as British policy has not yet seriously asked, why the cost of romance fraud sits with banks at the final transfer, when the fabrication, targeting and grooming happen on platforms that currently pay nothing when it succeeds.

The Yin and Wen paper ends on a note of reassurance: trust arbitrage is self-limiting, because fraud eventually triggers the checking that stops it. In their model, the protection gap closes. The Lloyds data suggests it is still wide open, and the people falling into it are younger than anyone expected. The question is whether it closes because platforms verify earlier, or because a whole generation learns, one scam at a time, that kindness from a stranger is a warning sign. The first option costs companies money. The second costs everyone something harder to replace.

---

References and Sources

1. Shaw, Vicky. “Romance scam reports have jumped with a surge in Gen Z victims, Lloyds figures.” PA Media, published via the Evening Standard and AOL UK, 25 September 2026. Reporting Lloyds Banking Group data for 1 September 2025 to 31 August 2026, including quotes from Liz Ziegler, Fraud Prevention Director, Lloyds, and Patrick Hurley, Ombudsman Director, Financial Ombudsman Service. https://www.aol.co.uk/articles/romance-scam-reports-jumped-surge-230100000.html
2. The Independent. “Romance scams in UK rise by a quarter with huge surge in Gen Z victims.” September 2026, via inkl. https://www.inkl.com/news/romance-scams-in-uk-rise-by-a-quarter-with-huge-surge-in-gen-z-victims
3. Foreign Policy Journal. “Romance Scam Reports Surge 24% At Lloyds (LON: LLOY) As Gen Z Victims Spike By 59%.” 25 September 2026. https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2026/09/25/romance-scam-reports-surge-24-at-lloyds-lon-lloy-as-gen-z-victims-spike-by-59/
4. Yin, Xieyu and Fenghua Wen. “When Trust Attracts Fraud: AI and Trust Arbitrage.” Business School, Central South University. arXiv:2609.27404, submitted 23 September 2026; journal reference Economics Letters, DOI 10.1016/j.econlet.2026.113234. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27404
5. UK Finance. Annual Fraud Report 2026 and press release “Fraud remains a national security threat as criminals steal almost £1.3 billion.” June 2026. https://www.ukfinance.org.uk/policy-and-guidance/reports/annual-fraud-report-2026
6. UK Finance and Take Five to Stop Fraud. “Gen Z more likely to be tricked by criminals and fall for impersonation scams.” 7 September 2023; OnePoll survey of 2,000 UK adults, 18 to 22 August 2023. https://www.takefive-stopfraud.org.uk/news/gen-z-more-likely-to-be-tricked-by-criminals-and-fall-for-impersonation-scams/
7. Federal Trade Commission. “New FTC Data Show People Have Lost Billions to Social Media Scams.” Press release and Data Spotlight, 27 April 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/04/new-ftc-data-show-people-have-lost-billions-social-media-scams
8. Federal Trade Commission. “Consumer Sentinel Network Data Book 2024.” March 2025, covering 2024 reports; see “Reported Fraud Losses by Age”. https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/csn-annual-data-book-2024.pdf
9. Levine, Timothy R. “Truth-Default Theory (TDT): A Theory of Human Deception and Deception Detection.” Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 2014. SAGE Publications. DOI 10.1177/0261927X14535916.
10. Whitty, Monica T. “The Scammers Persuasive Techniques Model: Development of a Stage Model to Explain the Online Dating Romance Scam.” The British Journal of Criminology, volume 53, issue 4, July 2013, pages 665 to 684.
11. Starling Bank. “AI voice cloning scams could catch millions out.” Research conducted with Mortar Research among more than 3,000 UK adults, 18 September 2024; see also CNN Business, “AI voice-cloning scams could target millions of people, Starling Bank warns”, 18 September 2024. https://www.starlingbank.com/news/starling-bank-launches-safe-phrases-campaign/
12. CNN. “Deepfake romance scam raked in $46 million from men across Asia, police say.” 15 October 2024; and The Standard (Hong Kong), “Police arrest 27 for deepfake love scams totaling $360m, seizes scam-training documents”, October 2024. https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/15/asia/hong-kong-deepfake-romance-scam-intl-hnk
13. WIRED. Reporting on Yahoo Boys' use of real-time face-swapping in romance scams, drawing on material gathered by David Maimon, Georgia State University and SentiLink, 2024; see also AI Incident Database, Incident 911. https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/911/
14. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. “An Interconnected Criminal Ecosystem: Transnational Organized Crime Threat Assessment for South-East Asia 2026.” Launched in Bangkok, 21 July 2026; see also OCCRP, “UN Report Details Southeast Asia's Interconnected Criminal Economy”, 21 July 2026. https://www.occrp.org/en/news/un-report-details-southeast-asias-interconnected-criminal-economy
15. Meta and WhatsApp. Announcement of the removal of 6.8 million WhatsApp accounts linked to criminal scam centres in the first half of 2025, August 2025; as reported by the Associated Press via US News, “WhatsApp Takes Down 6.8 Million Accounts Linked to Criminal Scam Centers, Meta Says”, 6 August 2025. https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2025-08-06/whatsapp-takes-down-6-8-million-accounts-linked-to-criminal-scam-centers-meta-says
16. Horwitz, Jeff. “Meta is earning a fortune on a deluge of fraudulent ads, documents show.” Reuters, November 2025, including the response of Meta spokesperson Andy Stone; republished by Editor and Publisher. https://www.editorandpublisher.com/stories/meta-is-earning-a-fortune-on-a-deluge-of-fraudulent-ads-documents-show,258660
17. Payment Systems Regulator. “APP fraud reimbursement protections” and “APP scams reimbursement dashboard for Q1 2026.” https://www.psr.org.uk/information-for-consumers/app-scams-reimbursement-dashboard/
18. Payment Systems Regulator. PS25/5, Consolidated policy statement, APP scams reimbursement requirement, May 2025; and Consumer Standard of Caution guidance, December 2023. https://www.psr.org.uk/media/rhelv4op/ps25-5-app-scams-reimbursement-consolidated-policy-statement-may-2025.pdf
19. HM Treasury. “A Streamlined Approach to Payment Systems Regulation: Consultation response.” GOV.UK, 2026, confirming the consolidation of the Payment Systems Regulator into the Financial Conduct Authority. https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/a-streamlined-approach-to-payment-systems-regulation-consultation/outcome/a-streamlined-approach-to-payment-systems-regulation-consultation-response
20. Ofcom. Illegal content Codes of Practice for user-to-user services, issued 24 February 2025, in force 17 March 2025; and “Protecting people from illegal harms online: Register of Risks”, 16 December 2024. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/siteassets/resources/documents/online-safety/information-for-industry/illegal-harms/register-of-risks.pdf
21. Ofcom. “Consultation: Fraudulent Advertising Codes of Practice.” Published 10 July 2026, closing 2 October 2026. https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/online-fraud/consultation-fraudulent-advertising-code-of-practice
22. Tinder. “Tinder Launches Face Check in the UK, Setting a New Standard for Dating Safety.” Tinder UK Press Room, March 2026, including quotes from Yoel Roth, Match Group, and Mark Tierney, Stop Scams UK. https://uk.tinderpressroom.com/news?item=122625
23. Bumble Inc. “Bumble Inc. Launches Deception Detector: An AI-Powered Shield Against Spam, Scam and Fake Profiles.” Business Wire, 6 February 2024. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240206911584/en/
24. Federal Trade Commission. “Match Group Agrees to Pay $14 Million, Permanently Stop Deceptive Advertising, Cancellation, and Billing Practices to Resolve FTC Charges.” Press release, 12 August 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/08/match-group-agrees-pay-14-million-permanently-stop-deceptive-advertising-cancellation-billing
25. Office of Senator Marsha Blackburn. “Senators Blackburn, Hassan Press Match Group for Answers on Romance Scams.” 24 September 2025. https://www.blackburn.senate.gov/index.php/2025/9/crime/technology/senators-blackburn-hassan-press-match-group-for-answers-on-romance-scams

---

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

… if we have the courage to let change happen, the grit to take action and follow through, and the openness to explore beyond what we know.

In Summary: * This Saturday has been spent mostly with moving related chores, and trying to destress from those.

One moment of spontaneous prayer during the move came unannounced and our work afterward seemed to go much smoother. I was unlocking the front door for the first time, trying to fit the key into the lock, fumbling a little with my arthriitc fingers and wonky eyesight, and with the wife standing next to me. Without any planning or forethought, I said out loud, “Holy Mary, mother of God, give me patience. Please help.”

And the wife followed up with, “Yes, Mamma Mary and Santo Nino, help us!”

That is not something we do, burst out in spontaneous prayer like that. But it just came so naturally. We are both very much praying people, but we pray quietly and privately though frequently and often. And our work did go much smoother after that.

Listening now to relaxing music, I'm getting ready for my night prayers and meditations, and another early bedtime.

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= 224.65 lbs. * bp= 141/87 (71)

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

Diet: * 05:50 – 1 peanut butter sandwich * 08:00 – ½ peanut butter sandwich * 13:30 – mashed potatoes and gravy * 14:25 – home made meat and vegetable soup

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 03:00 – wake * 04:20 – bank accounts activity monitored . * 05:00 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, listen to music, nap * 09:30 – 14:00 – pre-move chores * 15:30 – continuing with mostly pre-move chores * 18:00 – listening to relaxing music

Chess: * 16:22 – moved in all pending CC games

Han entrado al escenario como Pancho Villa en Zacatecas. Literal. O sea figurado pero no. Han entrado así y yo ya era feliz.

Todavía no sabía lo que el vibráfono de Eva Catalá iba a hacerme. Pero quedaba poco para averiguarlo. Polvo de estrellas me ha hecho llorar de pura belleza. Ha sido un Silvia Pérez Cruz de manual que no habría existido sin la magia de las manos y la sensibilidad de Eva.

La canción siempre ha sido preciosa y profunda. Pero esta noche ha pasado eso alquímico del arte. Eso que ha pasado luego muchas veces en la noche. Me he conectado digamos que cuánticamente con miles de personas que no conozco (he vuelto a ver Fringe, no lo sé explicar mejor).

Primero había rabia en la voz de Drexler. Rabia de cuando el mundo no entiende lo obvio y todo está en peligro. Y luego el destello metálico de la percusión haciéndonos creer a todo el Arena que vamos a conseguirlo. Vamos a salvar lo sagrado. Que nunca es lo divino aunque intenten confundirnos. Había un eco que retumbaba en el centro de mis huesos. Y el final. Y el suspiro. Inmediatamente después de que el polvo de estrellas se posase ha llegado la bronca de Drexler porque damos palmas muy fuerte mientras habla.

Drexler llegó a Madrid en febrero del 95 y a mi vida en marzo del 96. Cuando Madrid era para mi un plan a dos años vista. Su disco me hizo entender que hay canciones que siguen mis procesos mentales. En octubre eran fiestas de Pucela, tocaba gratis en una movida de Condena Dial en la plaza mayor. Fui. Nos echó la bronca. Yo solo le consiento a Drexler que me eche la bronca desde un escenario. Os diría que no sé por qué pero lo sé de sobra. Es un maniático. Lo que hace le importa. A veces es puro nervio y si esperas un par de minutos algo pasa y todo se recoloca. Lleva literalmente 30 años siendo fundamental en mi vida y cuantos más pierdo en el camino a base de aburrirse a sí mismos hasta que nos aburren al resto, más valor tiene para mí que él siga poniéndolo todo, arriesgando tanto, aprendiendo, jugando con los instrumentos, los ritmos, las formas de componer.

Estábamos tan emocionados, sentaditos todos en nuestra butaca pensando si nos gustaba más Miryam Latrece homenajeado a Morente o Flor Gamba intentando que no echásemos de menos la crudeza tierna de Young Miko. Estaba yo diciendo que no a la chica de mi derecha que insistía en invitarme a una cerveza creo que precisamente por esa conexión de cuando la piel desconocida a tu lado se eriza exactamente como la tuya.

Estábamos en eso que pasa siempre en los conciertos de Drexler cuando él ha atravesado corriendo la pista hasta llegar a un escenario secundario ubicado en el mismo sitio que el botafumeiro disco de Rosalía. Pero Drexler ha conseguido todo lo que ella no logró en su propio viaje por el Movistar Arena.

Él era el sol, cada alma del público un girasol creciendo hacia su voz. Poniéndonos de pie como en trance. No queriendo sentarnos en la hora y media que quedaba. Guitarra y vos siempre fue un manifiesto. Sigue siéndolo. Fue la primera pista que nos dio de su negativa a enranciarse, envejecer asustado y mirándose el ombligo. Guitarra y vos tiene 24 años. Él 62. Sigue reluciendo feliz como un chiquillo. Sigue siendo energía que nos hace revivir. Bendita la felicidad del amor al arte. Algo ha vuelto a colocarse cuando todo el público hemos gritado al unísono “uno solo conserva lo que no amarra”

Todos lo hemos notado. Él también. Había risa en su voz. Risa como agua cristalina. Ha remado entre nuestras voces, disfrutando de nuestra armonía al cantar al otro lado del río. Hasta quienes cantamos mal hemos cantado bien esta noche. Porque estábamos cantando genuinamente juntos.

En la votación de la canción sorpresa ganó la más madrileña. Mi segunda favorita de las que se podían elegir. La trama y el desenlace es mi filosofía de vida. En serio. No es una forma de hablar. Y juro que la ha cantado para mi. Ajustandose a mi ritmo. Al vuelo de mi vestido que casi tocaba el suelo. Que me miraba solo a mi aunque ni me viese desde donde estaba. Así funciona la magia. Una lo sabe y con eso vale.

Luego se ha salido del guión para cantar la milonga del Moro Judío, que ha quedado segunda.

Algo ha vuelto a unirnos a los, yo qué sé, 8.000 asistentes? Los que fuesemos. Todos. Todas.

La loca que ha interrumpido todo para aplaudir el solo de contrabajo de Ale López como si el exWizink fuese una Jam de jazz he sido yo. Ya he dicho muchas veces que Alejandra es una bajista espectacular, una música brillante. Hoy ha vuelto a dejarme sin habla cantando y tocando más bonito imposible en Soledad. Estaban de punta a punta de la pista Drexler y ella y esa distancia física ha sido como un baile. Mirarse mientras cantaban y tocaban como si no estuviésemos todos allí gritando de emoción ha sido inolvidable. Hipnótico.

Seguíamos de pie. Con la boca abierta. Felices. En una conexión que no necesitábamos entender, que no queríamos terminar. Flamen le ha quitado la guitarra a Drexler y yo he pensado si él comprará la diferencia entre públicos apáticos y esta entrega absoluta. Empieza Viaje. Drexler vuelve al escenario grande. Queda una hora de tambores y baile. Vamos a seguir todas de pie. Vamos a sudar. A despeinarnos. A querer desnudarnos. Vamos a bailar como si lo fuesen a prohibir. Ante la duda baila. Baila en la cueva. Mueve el culo, grita tocarte. Tócate la piel que destella mientras la canta. Tiende y cruza todos los puentes. Haz un tratado rítmico mientras tus pies tocan tierra y la mano del tambor chico te hace volar. Grita que la vida es bonita como si estuvieses otra vez en el Samba un sábado cualquiera. Y que sea lo que sea. Y que vuelva a sonar Todo se transforma y tú sonrías pensando que esa canción es todavía más importante desde aquel puente en Salvador donde la felicidad te sacaba guapa en todas las fotos, donde llevabas puesto el primer vestido que el Nómada te regaló cuando iba y venía del desierto a Madrí. Cuando Brasil parecía una fantasía inalcanzable y no la realidad que te cambió entera. Un vestido con muchísimo escote. Morado y blanco. Uno que le hizo a cierta guía yoruba regalarte una cinta de Bomfin blanca como tu aura en medio del Pelourinho.

Cada uno da lo que recibe así que tú sales del Movistar Arena pensando cómo devolver toda esa euforia, calculando la hora de São Paulo. Marcando un número que suena a media tarde de un viernes de primavera con alerta por ola de calor y los mismos trentaytantos grados que en Madrí solo para contarle a alguien que sales de un concierto y has vuelto a pensar en aquellos 3 días inolvidables donde fuiste todo lo feliz que se puede ser. Y que nos quiten lo bailao. Y qué bien los que se quedan en tu vida y la mejoran. Y bendita la música que te recuerda que tú no crees en el aura pero sí en que las personas se comunican sin darse cuenta. Crean alianzas cómplices que nos salvan. Que tú no crees en el aura pero crees en el entrelazamiento cuántico, has vuelto a ver Fringe, a bailar con coreografía, no paras de escuchar a Drexler y tienes la absurda esperanza de que todo va a mejorar. De alguna forma. Aunque todo lo importante siga bien y lleves muchos años disfrutando de tu suerte.

Tags #música #Drexler #Taracá

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!

Raise The Alarm (National Gift)

Thoughts to hue Red and blue The nights unbumb and the same A fit to his lot This truce End of Summer by day The willfold at his view An oxymoron Full of life and goal The sympathy to laws Rest and the days A pile of good omen Fighting this figure roe And this and that Fight nights to olive The curse is what we knew Brave and oversteer The Earth was his angel Prebuilt to evident style The rock of strength in gold Petty Ford The difference to atone This hurt and all I, of twenty years,- saw lost regret Twelve and made Thoughts between this In cue of the overclass And simple award to free at nothing Vengeance in the night And game centre I was a hockey puck And I gave you the flu For year-get and acting tall Nice and nice actually Different pay by style And across the deep account You wrote me in- Magic to the tap

And as the point Verity of the day More for war than true I was the Defence Minister Harming the economy Hard and our people Nervous, anyway I lightened the load with Olof And therapy old There were games to pray for Final play,- in this neck of Sweden Finding uncure And she made me wept Crawling on Water And to this tap we threw Like the night of three men And wind that battered I was the only one,- And I knew.

When I was younger, I thought the choice women my current age made to be alone was strange and sad. Now that I am this age, I see it in a very different light. I think they just grew tired of constantly needing to tiptoe and wear masks around partners who claimed to like them as they are, but showed otherwise. At some point, it's simply no longer worth the energy.

Tonight, I am sad. I am tired. I am alone. But at least I can mostly be myself. It is too bad I prefer having a partner. I'm not sure I still believe one exists for me. Sometimes, it would seem, that knowing ourselves becomes a liability. This world breaks my heart.

Also, I still think macaroni is disgusting. It's mushy, cheesy, bland, and I don't like the way it feels on my teeth. I don't care if the world loves it or if it's been baptized by truffles and lobster. It's still gross in my book, and I refuse to pretty up my words so that someone feels better about themselves. It's macaroni! I'm sure there's plenty of food I like that another might find beyond disturbing. The utter ridiculousness baffles me to the point of a mind-numbing stillness.

© 2026 AnOublietteofThought. All rights reserved.

This morning we picked up keys to the house and have already moved a few things over to the new place: two small tables, two small chairs, some bottled water, a bit of food, paper towels, just things that could fit into one trip with her little Nissan Kicks. The big move, when strong, young men with a big truck come to move the furniture, will happen next Saturday. Until then, most of our “free time” will be spent boxing, bagging, and doing what in the way of moving chores we can manage.

And the adventure continues.

« Qu’est-ce qu’un artiste ?

Un philosophe qui n’a point besoin de philosophie. »

---

« What’s an artist?

A philosopher who doesn’t need philosophy. »

Tawsert

What is love? What are its ingredients? What is its formula for success? These are questions that have inspired scholars and philosophers alike, motivating some of the greatest human creative achievements and masterpieces, from Dante to Shakespeare, from Cohen to Cave. My contribution here is only a tiny contemplation, one among an endless line of such contemplations, from the start to the end of humanity — a drop of rain in the wandering river of life.

Attraction — the pull that draws one in as if recognizing a deep chasm and falling into it all at once, where the power of gravity prevails before reason can respond. It is unconscious, erupting overhead like a cloudburst. It carries delight and electricity to the one whom it has befallen, even if unrequited. When shared, it flickers before either party has consciously acknowledged their choice. It can initially appear as fascination, desire, or lust, confounding the most mature of us.

Care and affection — the subtle dimension of small but powerful acts. The healing hand that appears suddenly to soothe the suffering. The pleasure that feels selfish but is always reciprocal. The attention that remains when all other eyes have withdrawn. The hand that meets one’s own when the journey seemed solitary. The kiss on the forehead and warm embrace when the pain has nowhere else to go. Its beauty lies in its endless manifestations.

Respect and devotion — attention held steady long after the novelty is spent, and the initial spark of electricity has transformed into a new kind of energy that tightens and stabilizes the entangled orbits of two bodies. It is neither vow nor worship per se, but the integration of vows into routine, and seeing through the eyes of another as predisposition. It is satisfaction by another — and only that other — where all other doors remain open — unforbidden to both — and yet both always choose their same-shared door. Exclusivity that is neither confinement nor imprisonment, but a unique realm known only to two, co-created and cohabited.

Unconditionality — giving that expects nothing in return, where the fundamental connection between two cannot be transacted or commodified. This facet holds nothing back, showing up without pretense or mask, to be wholly known without fear of judgment, ridicule, or rejection. Two people, their bodies and souls stripped naked, standing before one another, both saying to the other, “I accept all of you.” A beautiful and unparalleled dynamic only of partners who are able and willing to see connection as effort may live to experience.

Sacrifice — spending oneself never seen as loss. The give of surrender that is never extracted or exploited by the other, paid out in presence and in absence alike through the grief and longing only love can create, across unimaginable distances and extraordinary circumstances. Of all the facets, this is the one where both parties willingly give of themselves in ways the outer world never sees, where joy and sorrow, togetherness and loneliness, contentment and longing are all one and the same.

Love may or may not be universally experienceable, but each experience of love is unique to the those involved — a special and specific dynamic they create by the nature of who they are and the energy born between them — appearing differently between what others outwardly see and what the partners experience inwardly, inside and in-between. The world sees two people sitting across a cafe table from one another, but hidden from sight is the realm shared between them, a whole universe only the two of them can enter. A place called love.

#Intermundia #Excultio

---

Notes:

1. This post may not look it, but its writing took nine months of patience and discipline. Love must be lived before it can be written.

2. Love is itself a bond, but not bondage — one that frees rather than shackles. Not two halves forming completion, but two wholes choosing something more in each other — interdependence rather than dependence, domestication rather than adventure, contentment rather than euphoria.

---

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

Note: event in Serbian, for local audience.

Shared Vision tokom jeseni povezuje Suboticu i Novi Sad kroz niz radionica, razgovora, predavanja i zajedničkog rada posvećenih novim oblicima umetničke saradnje, digitalnim alatima i kolektivnim modelima organizovanja.

Prvi deo programa biće održan od 18. do 20. septembra u prostoru Klara i Rosa u Subotici, gde će učesnici kroz razgovore i praktičan rad razmatrati načine na koje umetnici i kulturni radnici mogu da dele resurse, znanja i infrastrukturu, kao i mogućnosti za razvoj održivijih oblika zajedničkog rada.

Program se nastavlja od 19. do 21. oktobra u Galeriji SULUV u Novom Sadu. Poseban fokus biće na razvoju i testiranju digitalne platforme za umetničku zadrugu, na kojoj SULUV učestvuje kao partner iz Srbije. Platforma se razvija kao alat za kolektivno upravljanje, razmenu resursa i transparentnu saradnju među umetnicima i kulturnim radnicima, i predstavlja jedan od važnih rezultata međunarodnog projekta Shared Vision, koji se realizuje uz podršku programa Kreativna Evropa.

Tokom trodnevnog programa u Novom Sadu učesnici će kroz predavanja, razgovore, radionice i zajednički rad nastaviti da istražuju odnos umetničkih praksi, digitalnih tehnologija i zadružnih i drugih kolektivnih modela organizovanja. Cilj programa je da se kroz razmenu iskustava i konkretan rad otvore pitanja o tome kako mogu da izgledaju drugačiji modeli kulturne produkcije, na koji način se resursi mogu organizovati zajednički i koje vrste digitalnih alata mogu da podrže takve procese.

Rezultati rada biće predstavljeni kroz multimedijalnu izložbu u Galeriji SULUV, koja će biti otvorena od 21. oktobra do 6. novembra 2026. godine.

Program se odvija na srpskom jeziku i otvoren je za umetnike, kulturne radnike, kao i za širu zainteresovanu publiku. Učešće je besplatno, uz prethodnu prijavu zbog ograničenog kapaciteta prostora.

Prijava je dostupna putem prijavnog formulara.

JOURNAL 26 septembre 2026

Alors d’abord l'ex de shie était spécialiste en sécurité informatique. Il utilisait un vpn+un autre dispositif que je comprends pas, il est extrêmement difficile à pister même impossible. Il n’a jamais consulté de cartes et il devait utiliser un moteur de recherche qui n’enregistre pas les données. Les flics n’ont pas le disque dur, il avait disparu dans les deux ordis, et le mieux les caméras du quartier ont enregistré sa voiture trois fois avant jeudi et mercredi dans la nuit, mais jeudi la caméra de la rue est tombée en panne vers 4h du matin, pas toute seule, elle a été piratée. C’est frustrant mais ça donne quand même des informations sur la préméditation. Quand chie est sortie la caméra ne fonctionnait pas mais il était sûrement là avec sa voiture. Donc la voiture est au laboratoire ils vont la regarder à la loupe.

On est toutes fatiguées mais on tient Midori chan et asu reviennent demain, on se voit toutes demain après-midi, on va essayer dormir ça devrait le faire on est crevées .

#shieko

One week from now is my 5k event. I'm in the very final days of prep. I would say I'm in the second phase of it. I did all those interval runs, and stairmaster sessions, while wearing the weighted vest. Now I'm on to doing non-stop (no walking) runs without the vest. The plan for this all along was to do 7.77km runs. Intentionally longer than the event. I have done two so far. They went quite well. All the vest work has paid off. One more run to go on Monday morning, then stairmaster on Wednesday. Then that is it. Two rest days, and then the event day will finally be here. These last two sessions are really all about maintaining. Not gaining. The final run that is longer than the event is not necessary, but it is important to me anyway.

I do all my running here in the dark at around 3:00am. Nothing but me, and sometimes rabbits and skunks. A week from today I'm showing up at a start line in the daylight with over a thousand other runners. I'm quite anxious about anything that involves other people, so naturally I’m quite anxious about this. It is probably good for me even though there is a voice asking, why the fuck am I doing this?!? lol.

It feels quite good to feel this strong and fit. It also feels quite good knowing that after the event I will be off work until the 13th October. I find that the approaching event and vacation has pushed The News away from the forefront of my mind. It think it is healthy to allow all that to be on the backburner for awhile.

https://write.as/thingsleftunsaid/event-prep-2

Let today be sad. Breathe into it, feel the weight of it, and let it wash through you without judgment. You don't have to fix it. Sad days are perfect days too.