Sunday/Transfiguration

On this day:

752 BC
Romulus, legendary first king of Rome, celebrates the first Roman triumph after his victory over the Caeninenses, following The Rape of the Sabine Women.
1562
23 Huguenots are massacred by Catholics in Wassy, France, marking the start of the French Wars of Religion.
1692
Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba are brought before local magistrates in Salem Village, Massachusetts, beginning what would become known as the Salem witch trials.
1781
The Continental Congress adopts the Articles of Confederation.
1815
Napoleon returns to France from his banishment on Elba
1872
Yellowstone National Park is established as the world’s first national park.
1893
Nikola Tesla gives the first public demonstration of radio in St. Louis, Missouri.
1896
Henri Becquerel discovers radioactivity.
1917
The U.S. government releases the unencrypted text of the Zimmermann Telegram to the public.
1932
The son of Charles Lindbergh, Charles Augustus Lindbergh III, is kidnapped.
1950
Cold War: Klaus Fuchs is convicted of spying for the Soviet Union by disclosing top secret atomic bomb data.
1953
Joseph Stalin suffers a stroke and collapses. He dies four days later.
1954
Nuclear testing: The Castle Bravo, a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb, is detonated on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, resulting in the worst radioactive contamination ever caused by the United States.
1954
Puerto Rican nationalists attack the United States Capitol building, injuring five Representatives.
1966
Venera 3 Soviet space probe crashes on Venus becoming the first spacecraft to land on another planet’s surface.
1971
A bomb explodes in a men’s room in the United States Capitol: the Weather Underground claims responsibility.
1974
Watergate scandal: Seven are indicted for their role in the Watergate break-in and charged with conspiracy to obstruct justice.
1981
Provisional Irish Republican Army member Bobby Sands begins his hunger strike in HM Prison Maze.

***

“In 2013, I published RICH DAD'S PROPHECY, predicting the biggest crash in history was coming. Unfortunately, that crash has arrived. It’s not just the US. Europe and Asia are crashing. AI will wipe out jobs,, and when jobs crash, office and residential real estate will crash.”--Kiyosaki, on an economic disruption he has predicted for 12 years, although the AI component is new.

***

Chatellier's French Bakery in Millvale closed its doors for the final time Feb. 28th.

***

China buys more than 80% of Iran's shipped oil, data for 2025 from analytics firm Kpler showed. Iranian oil has limited buyers due to U.S. sanctions aimed at cutting off funding to Tehran's nuclear programme.
China purchased on average 1.38 million barrels per day of Iranian oil last year, according to Kpler. That represented about 13.4% of the total 10.27 million bpd of oil it imported by sea.

***

Dan Simmons, 77, award-winning author of 31 novels and short story collections, passed away on February 21, 2026 in Longmont, Colorado. Many of his books won honors ranging from the Hugo Award, science fiction’s most prestigious award, to two World Fantasy Awards, three Bram Stoker Awards for horror, a dozen Locus Awards, and the Shirley Jackson Award. His titles have been translated into at least 20 languages and published in 28 foreign countries.

***

Speaking about Dorsey and AI comments concerning layoffs, Joseph Brusuelas, chief economist at RSM, said:“This is a function of lax judgment during a period of rapid expansion and the retrenchment that follows. It should be understood within the unique context of that firm, and it does not signal risk to the broader U.S. labor market.”

***

Epstein was in the White House 17 times. What other private citizen was?

***

Sunday/Transfiguration

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Despite its drama, it was never formalized in the Church until after the Tenth Century. In it, Christ is transfigured on a mountaintop with Moses and Elijah while Peter, James, and John watch in amazement.

It is often seen as the point in the Gospel where Christ and the apostles are energized by this glimpse of heaven.

But it is a remarkable, almost posed, artistic, and philosophical moment. A distillation of the New and Old Testament conflicts and resolutions, it is a potent mixture of spirituality and humanity, Christ, the great prophets, and the apostles all swirling in opposition and conformity.

And light.

We have always had great respect for light. In Genesis, right after the creation of the formless heaven and earth, light displaces the dark. Even Lucifer (appearing only once in the Old Testament) means "the morning star" or "light-bringer."

The architect Wren, on deciding to avoid stained glass windows in his churches, said ""Nothing can add beauty to light." 

Edison's first commercial electric light system was installed on Pearl Street in the financial district of Lower Manhattan in 1882.

Before that, the world was lit only by fire.

The World
by Henry Vaughan

I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright;
And round beneath it, Time in hours, days, years,
Driv’n by the spheres
Like a vast shadow mov’d; in which the world
And all her train were hurl’d.
The doting lover in his quaintest strain
Did there complain;
Near him, his lute, his fancy, and his flights,
Wit’s sour delights,
With gloves, and knots, the silly snares of pleasure,
Yet his dear treasure
All scatter’d lay, while he his eyes did pour
Upon a flow’r.

The darksome statesman hung with weights and woe,
Like a thick midnight-fog mov’d there so slow,
He did not stay, nor go;
Condemning thoughts (like sad eclipses) scowl
Upon his soul,
And clouds of crying witnesses without
Pursued him with one shout.
Yet digg’d the mole, and lest his ways be found,
Work’d under ground,
Where he did clutch his prey; but one did see
That policy;
Churches and altars fed him; perjuries
Were gnats and flies;
It rain’d about him blood and tears, but he
Drank them as free.

The fearful miser on a heap of rust
Sate pining all his life there, did scarce trust
His own hands with the dust,
Yet would not place one piece above, but lives
In fear of thieves;
Thousands there were as frantic as himself,
And hugg’d each one his pelf;
The downright epicure plac’d heav’n in sense,
And scorn’d pretence,
While others, slipp’d into a wide excess,
Said little less;
The weaker sort slight, trivial wares enslave,
Who think them brave;
And poor despised Truth sate counting by
Their victory.

Yet some, who all this while did weep and sing,
And sing, and weep, soar’d up into the ring;
But most would use no wing.
O fools (said I) thus to prefer dark night
Before true light,
To live in grots and caves, and hate the day
Because it shews the way,
The way, which from this dead and dark abode
Leads up to God,
A way where you might tread the sun, and be
More bright than he.
But as I did their madness so discuss
One whisper’d thus,
“This ring the Bridegroom did for none provide,
But for his bride.”

Worrying/AI from the Workbench

On this day:

202 BC
The coronation ceremony of Liu Bang as Emperor Gaozu of Han takes place, initiating four centuries of the Han Dynasty’s rule over China
1784
John Wesley charters the Methodist Church.
1900
The Second Boer War: The 118-day “Siege of Ladysmith” is lifted.
1922
The United Kingdom ends its protectorate over Egypt through a Unilateral Declaration of Independence.
1939
The erroneous word “dord” is discovered in the Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition, prompting an investigation.

1947
228 Incident: In Taiwan, civil disorder is put down with the loss of 30,000 civilian lives.
1953
James D. Watson and Francis Crick announce to friends that they have determined the chemical structure of DNA; the formal announcement takes place on April 25 following publication in April’s Nature (pub. April 2).
1959 

Discoverer 1, an American spy satellite that is the first object to achieve a polar orbit, is launched.
1993
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents raid the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas with a warrant to arrest the group’s leader David Koresh. Four BATF agents and five Davidians die in the initial raid, starting a 51-day standoff.
1997
GRB 970228, a highly luminous flash of gamma rays, strikes the Earth for 80 seconds, providing early evidence that gamma-ray bursts occur well beyond the Milky Way.

***

‘Never trust someone who is unkind to those who can do nothing for him.’--Goethe

***

America has stepped into another's property to kill a mad dog threatening the neighborhood. Better for the world, they say. Now, to protect the world from global warming, would it be right for the Chinese to shield the world from the sun's rays by seeding the atmosphere with reflecting material, risking global cooling?

***

The New York office of the FBI was hacked several years ago, and Epstein information was stolen.

***

The Clintons are not sure Epstein killed himself.

***

President Trump said the federal government will stop working with the AI company Anthropic, acting on a deadline for Anthropic to allow the military to use its models in all lawful use cases, a concession the company has refused to make. “We cannot in good conscience accede to their request,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said yesterday. The company didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. Trump and administration officials have attacked Anthropic for being too “woke,” taking exception to its push for AI regulations and links to big Democratic donors. Meanwhile, federal agencies have raised concerns about the safety and reliability of Elon Musk’s xAI tools in recent months, according to people familiar with the matter.

Fascinating.

***

                              Worrying/AI from the Workbench

From a guy named Matt Shumer:

  I am no longer needed for the actual technical work of my job. I describe what I want built, in plain English, and it just… appears. Not a rough draft I need to fix. The finished thing. I tell the AI what I want, walk away from my computer for four hours, and come back to find the work done. Done well, done better than I would have done it myself, with no corrections needed. A couple of months ago, I was going back and forth with the AI, guiding it, making edits. Now I just describe the outcome and leave.

Let me give you an example so you can understand what this actually looks like in practice. I’ll tell the AI: “I want to build this app. Here’s what it should do, here’s roughly what it should look like. Figure out the user flow, the design, all of it.” And it does. It writes tens of thousands of lines of code. Then, and this is the part that would have been unthinkable a year ago, it opens the app itself. It clicks through the buttons. It tests the features. It uses the app the way a person would. If it doesn’t like how something looks or feels, it goes back and changes it, on its own. It iterates, like a developer would, fixing and refining until it’s satisfied. Only once it has decided the app meets its own standards does it come back to me and say: “It’s ready for you to test.” And when I test it, it’s usually perfect.

I’m not exaggerating. That is what my Monday looked like this week.

But it was the model that was released last week (GPT-5.3 Codex) that shook me the most. It wasn’t just executing my instructions. It was making intelligent decisions. It had something that felt, for the first time, like judgment. Like taste. The inexplicable sense of knowing what the right call is that people always said AI would never have. This model has it, or something close enough that the distinction is starting not to matter.

The last few months have shocked me. These new AI models aren’t incremental improvements. This is a different thing entirely.

And here’s why this matters to you, even if you don’t work in tech . . .

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from “helpful tool” to “does my job better than I do”, is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I’ve seen in just the last couple of months, I think “less” is more likely.

. . . [T]he gap between public perception and current reality is now enormous, and that gap is dangerous… because it’s preventing people from preparing.

Part of the problem is that most people are using the free version of AI tools. The free version is over a year behind what paying users have access to. Judging AI based on free-tier ChatGPT is like evaluating the state of smartphones by using a flip phone.

. . . Let me make the pace of improvement concrete, because I think this is the part that’s hardest to believe if you’re not watching it closely.

In 2022, AI couldn’t do basic arithmetic reliably. It would confidently tell you that 7 × 8 = 54.

By 2023, it could pass the bar exam.

By 2024, it could write working software and explain graduate-level science.

By late 2025, some of the best engineers in the world said they had handed over most of their coding work to AI.

On February 5th, 2026, new models arrived that made everything before them feel like a different era.

If you haven’t tried AI in the last few months, what exists today would be unrecognizable to you.

. . . Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, says we may be “only 1–2 years away from a point where the current generation of AI autonomously builds the next.”

Each generation helps build the next, which is smarter, which builds the next faster, which is smarter still. The researchers call this an intelligence explosion. And the people who would know — the ones building it — believe the process has already started.

Worrying: Anthropic/DoD

On the day:
1560
The Treaty of Berwick, which would expel the French from Scotland, is signed by England and the Congregation of Scotland
1812
Poet Lord Byron gives his first address as a member of the House of Lords, in defense of Luddite violence against Industrialism in his home county of Nottinghamshire.
1860
Abraham Lincoln makes a speech at Cooper Union in the city of New York that is largely responsible for his election to the Presidency.
1933
Reichstag fire: Germany’s parliament building in Berlin, the Reichstag, is set on fire.

***

The U.S. State Department announced on Friday that it started evacuating "non-emergency" government personnel from the embassy in Israel and their family members, citing "safety risks" amid growing tensions with Iran.

***

So is the federal government going to subsidize a New York economic plan whose homicidal philosophy is directly opposed to the underpinnings of the American founding and spirit?

***

Block, Jack Dorsey’s payments company, will cut 4,000 of its 10,000 workers as it embraces AI.

What jobs is the technology going to create?

***

                                                              Worrying  

This post-Christmas period is a time of Epiphany, and I've just had one. I am a tech illiterate. I know virtually nothing about computers. I don't even know the nouns. But I have come to a realization that has changed my opinion about society, the community of nations, and us. 

There have been periods in history where the world changed; not just was shaken or had supporting struts removed. Fundamentally disrupted and changed. Christianity, the Decline of Rome, Islam, The Plague, the Reformation, The Enlightenment, The American Constitution, Marx, WW1, WW11--all of these events disrupted common life to the degree that required rebuilding. A good example is WW1, where the problems were not grasped and wrestled with but merely continued, vindictively, for another generation to solve. 

Rebuilding.

There are several elements to the notion of a human crisis and response. One, of course, is assessing the potential threats. The Plague, for example, would be hard to anticipate, and its fallout hard to assess. The other aspect is the response. Politics, generally, but more importantly now, when individual leverage is so great, demands insight and courage that Vietnam, the national debt, and provoked social disruption imply are simply not available.

For the next couple of days, I'm going to have an internal discussion of the two threats facing the West that will demand a world rebuilding. My ignorance will limit the insightfulness of my concerns.


Anthropic/DoD

A primer on the Anthropic/DoD situation from Dean Ball 

DoD and Anthropic have a contract to use Claude in classified settings. Right now, Anthropic is the only AI company whose models work in classified contexts. The existing contract, signed by both parties and in effect, prohibits two uses of Anthropic’s models by the military: 

1. Surveillance of Americans in the United States (as opposed to Americans abroad). 

2. The use of Claude in autonomous lethal weapons, which are weapons that can autonomously identify, track, and kill a human with no human oversight or approval. Autonomous killing of humans by machines. 

On (2), Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s public position is essentially that autonomous lethal weapons controlled by frontier AI will be essential faster than most people realize, but that the models aren’t ready for this *today.* For Anthropic, these things seem to be a matter of principle. It’s worth noting that when I speak with researchers at other frontier labs, their principles on this are similar, if not often stricter. 

For DoD, however, there is another matter of principle: the military’s use of technology should only ever be constrained by the Constitution or the laws of the United States. One could quibble (the government enters into contracts, like anyone else), but the principle makes sense. A private company regulating the military’s use of AI also doesn’t sound quite right! So, the military has three options: 

1. They could cancel Anthropic’s contract and find some other frontier lab (ideally several) to work with. 

2. They could identify Anthropic a supply chain risk, which would ban all other DoD suppliers (I.e., a large fraction of the publicly traded firms in America) from using Anthropic in their fulfillment of DoD contracts. This is a power used only for foreign adversary companies, as far as I know. Activating this power would cost Anthropic a lot of business—potentially quite a lot—and give investors huge skepticism about whether the company is worth funding for the next round of scaling. Capital was a major constraint anyway, but this makes it much harder. This option could be existential for Anthropic. 

3. They could activate Title I of the Defense Production Act, an authority intended for command-and-control of the economy during wars and emergencies. This is really legally murky, and without going into detail, I feel reasonably confident this would backfire for the administration, resulting in courts limiting the use of the DPA. 

Option 1 is obviously the best. This isn’t even close, and I say this as someone who shares DoD’s principled concerns about the control by private firms over the military’s use of technology. Even the threats do damage to the US business environment, and rightfully so: these are the strictest regulations of AI being considered by any government on Earth, and it all comes from an administration that bills itself (and legitimately has been) deeply anti-AI-regulation. Such is life. One man’s regulation is another man’s national security necessity.

Exceptional

On This Day:

1815
Napoleon Bonaparte escapes from Elba.
1876
Japan and Korea sign a treaty granting Japanese citizens extraterritoriality rights, opening three ports to Japanese trade, and ending Korea’s status as a tributary state of Qing Dynasty China.
1935
Adolf Hitler orders the Luftwaffe to be re-formed, violating the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles.
1935
Robert Watson-Watt carries out a demonstration near Daventry which leads directly to the development of RADAR in the United Kingdom.
1936
In the February 26 Incident, young Japanese military officers attempt to stage a coup against the government.
1946
Finnish observers report the first of many thousands of sightings of ghost rockets.
1966
Apollo Program: Launch of AS-201, the first flight of the Saturn IB rocket
1993
World Trade Center bombing: In New York City, a truck bomb parked below the North Tower of the World Trade Center explodes, killing 6 and injuring over a thousand. A Pittsburgh mother of five is eventually part of the investigation.
1995
The United Kingdom’s oldest investment banking institute, Barings Bank, collapses after a securities broker, Nick Leeson, loses $1.4 billion by speculating on the Singapore International Monetary Exchange using futures contracts.

***

To be capable of embarrassment is the beginning of moral consciousness. Honor grows from qualms. -John Leonard, critic (25 Feb 1939-2008)

***

A sprawling Chinese influence operation — accidentally revealed by a Chinese law enforcement official’s use of ChatGPT — focused on intimidating Chinese dissidents abroad, including by impersonating US immigration officials, according to a new report from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI.

***

The FBI, during the Biden administration, subpoenaed Patel's phone records and those of the current White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles.

***

“She is making money off the murder of Charlie Kirk by literally implicating his widow and everyone else at [Turning Point USA] in that murder, and then trying to dig up pseudo-dirt on the wife of the person who was murdered. I don’t know what to call that, other than evil trash.” --Ben Shapiro on Candice Owens

***

Exceptional

Only 28 percent of NYC’s fourth-graders are proficient in reading, compared with 31 percent nationally. In math, fourth-grade proficiency is 33 percent, behind the national average of 39 percent, while eighth-grade math proficiency is just 23 percent, well below the 28 percent national rate.

Some questions arise. What are the dynamics here? How are these numbers tolerated? Not just by parents but by the teachers themselves? How could an average person be associated with something so awful without disrupting their daily life and that of the organization to improve it? Integrity, aspiration, excellence, and nurturing the young are not particular American virtues, but they are very human virtues, and it would be difficult to have a successful America without them.

And the norm to which New York is compared is terrible. The goal they seem to want to attain is not remotely even mediocre.

Why isn't this a crisis? What is it about us that allows us to be so casual with such inferiority?

How Will We React When We All Know the Truth?

"It is indeed brutal to kill one or two hundred million Americans. But that is the only path that will secure a Chinese century, a century in which the Communist Party leads the world." — General Chi Haotian, China's defense minister and vice chairman of the Party's Central Military Commission, reportedly secret speech advocating the extermination of Americans.

***

Bill Mazeroski has died.

***

Apparently, the animosity toward Melania is moral!

***

Archaeologists have discovered Paleolithic glyphs in a German cave that could potentially push back the history of written communication by over 30,000 years, per a rock-solid study in the journal Proceedings Of The National Academy of Sciences.

According to the researchers, the symbols were engraved on artifacts that dated back some 40,000 years to the Stone Age, when early humans arrived in Europe from Africa and encountered the Neanderthals.

Despite their age, these ancient etchings boasted a complexity comparable to the early stages of the world’s oldest writing system, cuneiform, which originated around 5,000 years ago, the New Scientist reported.

***

How Will We React When We All Know the Truth?

We have many news countdowns: the days Mrs. Guthrie has been missing, the days the Russians have been killing Ukrainians, and how long it's been since the U.S. won a gold medal in hockey. A new, highly symbolic one should be: how many days an open conduit of raw sewage has been draining into the river that runs through the national capital.

A serious issue has gradually become clear to Americans: with a $38 trillion national debt, the country faces enormous expenses, and the large taxes needed to cover these costs are either poorly managed or stolen. In other words, there is a conflict of interest between the country's needs and the personal desires and competence of the people's representatives.
 
A smaller view sometimes helps. New York City's budget is $127 billion. For perspective, this is similar to the annual expenditures of a mid-sized nation, with all the expenses a country requires, like Greece or Thailand, devoted to governing one city.

In little more than a decade, New York's budget has nearly doubled, growing faster than inflation and faster than the city’s economic growth.
The city's population remained below its 2020 baseline as of 2024.

New York’s general spending in 2023 was more than 30 percent higher per capita than Los Angeles, and more than double that of Houston.

In Los Angeles, the Homelessness Services Authority reported that in 2023, homelessness was up 9 percent countywide and 10 percent in the city. And a 2024 AP account noted that homelessness has surged 70 percent countywide since 2015, and 80 percent in the city.

All this amid a public frustration because, despite billions spent, an audit reviewed $2.4 billion in city homelessness funding and found that officials could not reliably track where it went or what it achieved. Read that again.

How hard is it to have safer streets, functioning schools, predictable sanitation, and adequate housing for the middle class in the world's richest nation? Apparently, very.

Solutions will not appear until the ostensible leaders put aside stupidity and avarice, and substitute some concern for the general good. But you can't teach stupidity and, ancient Greeks aside, teaching virtue to politicians has yet to be demonstrated.

The hard-working, good-natured American has shouldered a lot: intervention in strange, inexplicable wars, supporting non-productive but demanding fellow citizens and immigrants, hard-earned taxes stolen and/or redirected, third-world education for his kids, ridicule of his values, and his history.

One can only wonder what will happen when this governing model sheds her potemkin disguise, and the horrors of this dishonesty and neglect become fully understood.

Ghost students.

Essentially, it's a transfer payment. I basically believe that anything that would take Social Security payments below their present guaranteed level is a mistake. I think that in this country -- extraordinarily rich country -- that the people in their productive years can take care of those outside in both areas, even though the ratio of productive to non-productive has changed and is changing. But we take care of our young. And a rich country takes care of its young, and it takes care of its old.--Buffett on Social Security

He favors raising the cap. He doesn't explain how the demographics play into this opinion.

***

Abundance is about the specific puzzle of Gavin Newsom beginning his governorship by saying he wanted to build 3.5 million new homes in California and falling far, far, far short. Abundance is about why we never got high-speed rail, even though Californians voted to fund it and the federal government kicked in billions under Barack Obama. Abundance is about the reality that we cannot build enough clean energy infrastructure to meet the climate goals that virtually everyone on the Left believes we should meet under the laws we currently have.
Abundance is about the category of goods for which the government has lost the ability to deliver, even when the people who want to deliver in that way win power. --Klein, Abundance's author. 

So maybe incompetence is just a force of nature?

***

By as late as 1940, the federal and state governments’ investment in research amounted to only 23 percent of U.S. R&D and 10 percent of U.S. basic science, and the nature of that investment could have had little or no impact on rates of American economic or health growth: Defense R&D has almost no economic benefit, while the agricultural R&D was surplus to requirement.--Kealey


***

When people say Bitcoin has no intrinsic value, they are not making a metaphysical claim. They are pointing out that there is no external source from which its value is derived. Gold retains value because it has physical and industrial uses regardless of price. Equities derive value from businesses. Debt derives value from repayment. Fiat currency derives durability from taxation, legal-tender laws, and institutional enforcement. Bitcoin derives value only from the expectation that someone else will want it later. That expectation can sustain a price for long periods, but it is not a reference. There is nothing for valuation to converge toward.--Lincoln Square

And...Research cited by CryptoNews found that more than 60 percent of Trump-themed meme coins have effectively failed, losing most of their value and trading activity. CoinDesk has reported that at least one high-profile Trump coin is down more than 80 percent from its launch price.

***

Ghost students.

Community colleges cannot decline high school graduates under most circumstances. Imagine what can happen.

Over the past five years, the federal government has investigated more than $350 million in fraud perpetrated by "ghost student" schemes

The scammers will use stolen or fake identities to enroll in classes online and sign up for Pell grants and loans, then disappear once they get the money -- robbing the federal government of hundreds of millions of dollars and leaving an untold number of victims of the stolen identity. 

In California alone, nearly a third of all community college applicants in 2024 were identified as fraudulent, according to the California Community Colleges, the state's administrative body for the community college system.
Dr. Beatriz Chaidez, the chancellor of the San Jose Evergreen Community College District, told KGO-TV in San Francisco that at one point, a 50-person online class was booked in minutes and had 100 individuals on its waitlist. The school later learned that just six of those "students" were real people trying to get an education.

More than 200 investigations have opened nationwide, with some schemes suspected of racking up more than a billion dollars.
3 women, using prison inmates' IDs, made $1 million in one year.
Before their arrests in 2018 and 2019, a father and son in Arizona made off with more than $7 million from ghost student scams, and both served 12-month prison sentences after pleading guilty. And a Maryland man who used the identities of 60 people to take in more than $6.7 million in fraudulent financial aid was sentenced in 2023 to four years in prison.

California has been particularly vulnerable.
California does not require ID.
Pierce College's student body shrank 36% when ghost students were purged.

$9 billion stolen from day care centers by people who don't speak English.

Does anybody have a job anymore?

 

Sunday/Temptation

“What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

***

From Glanmore:

The corrugated iron growled like thunder
When March came in; then as the year turned warmer
And invalids and bulbs came up from under,
I hibernated on behind the dormer,
Staring through shaken branches at the hill,
Dissociated, like an ailing farmer
Chloroformed against things seasonal
In a reek of cigarette smoke and dropped ash.

Lent came in next, also like a lion
Sinewy and wild for discipline,
A fasted will marauding through the body;
And I taunted it with scents of nicotine
As I lit one off another, and felt rash,
And stirred in the deep litter of the study. (Seamus Heaney)

***

Sunday/Temptation

First Sunday of Lent

Today's gospel is The Temptation in the Desert. Christ is asked by the Devil to change stone into bread, is offered dominion over the earth, and is offered the opportunity to summon angels. 

Sustenence. Glory. Power.

The temptation of God is unsettling even if we can rationalize it under Christ's duality. This event has been translated as the temptation of Israel but there is a peculiarity here that does not go away: Who is Christ proving Himself to? He is not being asked to change stone to bread because He is hungry but to prove He can do it. Ditto the display of throwing Himself from the precipice. These are displays of proof, confirmation of His divinity. And, as Christ does not need the Devil for dominion, one thinks the Devil is superfluous.

What the devil is going on?

What this really looks like is a heavenly internal debate (and a joy to the Manichees): "I could do it this way, but won't. This way, but won't. Nor this way." 

But Christ is not being asked by the Devil for proof.

The Devil is us.