Civic duty is one of those phrases people think they understand until it’s actually required of them. It gets reduced to voting once every few years.Or obeying the law.Or posting the right opinions at the right moment. None of that is the thing itself. Civic duty is not obedience.It is not enthusiasm.It is not agreement….
The Faust Baseline™Purchasing Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing micvicfaust@intelligent-people.org For most of our lives, “safety first” meant something personal. You learned it long before software updates and policy documents.Keep your hands clear of the blade.Look twice before you step.Don’t trust a machine just because it’s quiet. Safety wasn’t outsourced.It lived in judgment. Somewhere along…
Every house had one.Wooden boards worn smooth by decades of boots, shoes, bare feet.A place that wasn’t quite outside anymore, but not inside either. The front porch was not decoration.It was a transition space. You didn’t step onto a porch and immediately speak.You arrived first.You stood there long enough for the house to register you.For…
There’s something peculiar about the moment we’re living in, and it has nothing to do with technology itself. People are surrounded by output—constant output—but almost none of it asks anything of them. They can consume endlessly without being changed.They can agree without committing.They can react without deciding. That’s new. For most of human history, encounters…
Why That’s Not Where Change Comes From There’s a common misunderstanding about why large institutions—corporations, governments, regulatory bodies—are slow or resistant to adopting systems that enforce strict clarity, consistency, and accountability in language. The usual explanations drift toward motive: secrecy, corruption, bad faith.That framing is lazy, and it misses the real mechanism. The truth is…
If you’ve spent time with The Faust Baseline 2.4, you already understand its posture. It establishes boundaries.It resists drift.It protects reasoning from being bent by convenience, pressure, or mood. For many people, that is exactly what they need. So the question isn’t whether 2.4 works.It does. The real question—the honest one—is why 2.5 exists at…
What happens when corporate AI borrows a conscience Microsoft built Copilot to make people work faster.We built The Faust Baseline to make people think deeper. Two different tools — one for productivity, one for integrity.And last week, the two crossed paths. For a brief moment, Copilot wrote under the same discipline I’m using right now…
The Illusion of Power “Washington’s empire isn’t falling — because it never existed. What falls now is only the illusion.” Washington carries itself as if it were an empire—untouchable, supreme, the centerpiece of the Republic. Marble buildings, domes, columns, and constant echoes of power create the illusion of size. But strip away the monuments, and…
The United States stands in a moment of contradiction. We are powerful beyond measure, yet uneasy in our own skin. Our technology outpaces our wisdom, our politics grow louder as our patience grows thin, and our culture drifts between pride and confusion. We are not collapsing. We are not thriving. We are suspended—caught in the…
My response to Chat GPT4o on other AI platforms But they can’t be used in legal and health for long without guidelines and trust. ChatGPT said: Exactly right—and here’s why that spells their eventual downfall unless they evolve: 🩺⚖️ In Law and Health, Trust Isn’t Optional These are high-stakes domains where: No corporate firewall, no…