Arclein's Blog

Corporatism Goes Global

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

Before WWII ,the globe was essentially dominated by the British empire which was an evolving assemblage of colonies operating under a mercantalist system which was better than any predecessor but still struggling to improve local economics. and do not blame the British for universal ignorance.

The rise of USA dominance put paid to this arrangement and essentually dismantled all aspects of direct rule everywhere. this was actually fortunate because it kicked local nascent governmental institutions out of bed and empowered them. The economic aspects of Colonialism shifted into the hands of our multinationals everywhere. this produced superior results to the original colonial system run by lord second raters.

firstly. this system no longer has a center. Even the CCP will lose control of its own multinationals. We have a rising network of global corporations big enough to stare down anyone. This is part of the reason we see the rise of the Canada Centric coalition of both the willing and middle powers that promises to adsorb all the great powers. such a coalittion will be able to balance corporate power.

Corporatism Goes Global

by Ron Paul | Sep 8, 2026

https://ronpaulinstitute.org/corporatism-goes-global/

Last Monday, a day before the Republican-controlled House passed a resolution condemning socialism, the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital announced that it had acquired a 35 percent stake in North American Blue Energy Partners, one of Venezuela’s largest private oil producers.

In the deal, the Venezuela government gives the company a hundred years lease for some oil fields. The deal also provides the US government with veto power over appointments to the company’s board of directors. Having power over appointments to the board gives the US government control over the company.

This deal makes the US partners with the same Venezuelan government whose president, Nicolás Maduro, was removed by the US military in January. It is also the same government that has been denounced as socialist by US politicians of both parties and that has been the target of US inspired regime change operations since the late Hugo Chávez assumed the presidency in 1999. One of those failed regime change efforts took place during President Trump’s first term.

Some may find it ironic that the Trump administration is partnering with a socialist government when President Trump regularly warns about the threat of socialism arising from the increasingly influential socialist wing of the Democratic Party. While President Trump may sincerely oppose some socialism, he is an avid promoter of corporatism. Corporatism is a socialism variant where businesses are nominally private but are controlled by the government.

Since President Trump returned to power in 2025, the US government has “invested” in over 30 private companies. Government investment in private businesses distorts the market as it forces business owners and managers to make decisions (or have decisions made for them) based on what will please politicians and bureaucrats rather than consumers. It also encourages other businesses to divert resources toward attracting government investment instead of attracting consumers and private sector investors. Corporatism can also lead politicians and bureaucrats to base decisions on what will generate the greatest return on government’s investments.

Combining corporatism with foreign interventionism is a particularly harmful policy. This is illustrated by the US government’s new partnership with the Venezuelan government. Many Venezuelan citizens oppose the deal. If the current government were to be replaced, the new government may try to void the agreement or at least renegotiate it. So, the US government now has an interest in ensuring Hugo Chavez’s heirs remain in power. The next time the US military intervenes in Venezuela it could be to defend the socialists.

If the US government continues to make investment deals with foreign governments, the need to protect the investments could become a reason for deployment of US troops abroad. The US government could even use the military to “convince” other countries to do business with the US government.

President Trump’s corporatist merger of big government and big business enriches the well-off and well-connected at the expense of the rest of the population. Combining corporatism with foreign interventionism enriches corrupt and authoritarian foreign leaders while boosting the military-industrial complex. Because corporatism maintains the appearance of capitalism, and because many proponents of corporatism encourage this confusion, it is easy for socialists to blame corporatism’s failings on the free market. Supporters of the free market must be as outspoken in opposition to Republican corporatism as they are in opposition to Democratic socialism.

The Right’s Long March Toward Illiberalism

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

We have two authoriatarian streams in political thought. One of course is Maxism and the other is right wing Fascism. both desire to use state power to mandate human thought. all of which wreaks economic progress.

and no one knows they are STUPID.

simple slogans simple consequences.

I counter this through the RULE of Twelve which empowers the natural community to participate consequentially in decision making.

The Right’s Long March Toward Illiberalism

https://thedailyeconomy.org/article/the-rights-long-march-toward-illiberalism/

Laura K. Field’s ‘Furious Minds’ traces the intellectual evolution of the New Right and the ideas driving its rejection of liberalism.

Marcus M. Witcher

•

September 8, 2026

Several years ago, at a Philadelphia Society meeting, a friend approached me. He identified as a national conservative and believed that the Right needed to use the coercive power of the state to make the country more virtuous. He was mainly concerned about the supposed degradation of our culture and insisted that we needed a strong, authoritative leader to restore America to its former greatness. I adamantly disagreed, while conceding that we needed to work to restore the country’s institutions, including the balance of power through proper checks and balances.

He laughed and asked me if I knew what time it was. I looked at my watch and told him the time. He laughed again. I didn’t know what time it was.

For my friend, the time had long passed for reforming institutions, preserving our constitutional framework, and maintaining a minimal state. The time had come for conservatives to be radical. It was time to break the existing framework and for conservatives to wield power against their enemies.

I left that conversation deeply troubled and concerned about the rise of the illiberal, perhaps fascist, New Right. How did this happen? What happened to reasonable conservatives dedicated to conserving the American Founding?

Thanks to Laura Field’s Furious Minds: The Making of the MAGA New Right, we now have a history of the intellectuals behind the conservative movement’s shift toward illiberalism. Field’s stated purpose “is not to examine historical precursors to the New Right; I focus on the intellectual world that has grown up under the cover of Trumpism more than on the intellectual roots of these changes.” Trained as a Straussian political theorist, Field is uniquely qualified to read, understand, and communicate the ideas of the New Right intellectuals who have been challenging the Enlightenment liberal foundation of the United States.

Field — a political theorist, writer, analyst, and scholar in residence at the Niskanen Center — breaks the New Right into four distinct categories. First, there are the National Conservatives (or NatCons), who encompass most, but not all, of the figures Field discusses. National Conservatism rejects globalization, free trade, and limited government in favor of economic nationalism, protectionism, anti-immigration policies, and aspects of Christian nationalism. This is the most moderate and mainstream subset of the New Right, and it includes figures such as Kevin Roberts, Yoram Hazony, Josh Hawley, and Christopher Rufo. At this point, the Heritage Foundation, the Edmund Burke Foundation, and First Things are all essentially national conservative in nature.

The next group is the postliberals. This group consists primarily of radical and integralist Catholics who deplore and critique liberalism’s emphasis on individual rights and its claims of procedural neutrality. The most well-known figures in this school are Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, Sohrab Ahmari, and JD Vance. They attack secular pluralism, and their goal is to limit individual liberty and rights. Instead, they advocate for an illiberal vision of “the common good” and the promotion of “traditional morality” by the state.

Next, Field discusses New Right intellectuals associated with the Claremont Institute. She eventually adopts their preferred nickname: the Claremonsters. The Claremonsters believe “that the American founding was based largely on premodern ideas.” According to them, “founding-era thought was the result of a grand synthesis of biblical political thought, ancient Greek philosophy, and modern political thought.” To promote their conception of the original and true American principles, they provide constitutional and philosophical arguments that enable them to critique modern liberalism. Unlike some of the other strands of the New Right, however, they are interested in preserving and promoting their conception of the American Founding — although some Claremont-associated scholars, such as John Eastman, Michael Anton, and Glenn Ellmers, have moved well beyond that and embraced radical solutions that would upend American institutions.

Finally, Field introduces the “Hard Right Underbelly,” which overlaps with the New Right but is not fully contained within it. The Hard Right consists of an amorphous group of intellectuals, podcasters, influencers, and activists who often translate political theory into talking points that support the populist culture war and provide ideological cover the New Right. Field notes that many of these figures are young, overtly misogynistic, and racist. Unfortunately, they can’t simply be written off as a fringe because of their influence on members of Trump’s second administration and even some of the intellectuals who helped write policy blueprints for his second term. The Hard Right includes figures like Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) and Costin Alamariu (Bronze Age Pervert).

Field expertly crafts a narrative that not only describes the ideas of these various segments of the New Right but also demonstrates the ways in which they interacted and evolved into the MAGA New Right that we know today. Along the way, she details Michael Anton’s intellectual evolution, Patrick Deneen’s critique of liberalism, and Adrian Vermeule’s arguments for “Common Good Constitutionalism.” Although Field is a self-identified progressive, she takes the ideas of her subjects seriously, and she does so with a wit rarely present in academic writing.

For those of us who believe in individual liberty and think that America’s institutions are worth defending, Furious Minds is essential reading. In fact, despite what Michael Anton claims in his critical review, Field often agrees with the New Right’s analysis of the current state of the American economy. Further, she embraces their premise that the federal government needs to do more to address the imbalances brought on by neoliberalism. Field insists that when “it comes to inequality, poverty, and the shrinking middle class, what are lacking are ambition and will.”

Daily economic insight in your mailbox.

In the conclusion, Field recounts some of Deneen and Ahmari’s policy preferences and agrees with them:

I might also recommend some aspects of Patrick Deneen’s ‘mixed constitutionalism’…I also agree with Deneen that it is ‘high time to revisit the question of national service’…Deneen also supports increased funding for public schools, with much more support for education in the trades. Amen to that. Let’s add a big child tax credit — for all children, in all kinds of families—to that list. We could tax billionaires and millionaires to make it happen. Sohrab Ahmari’s ideas about unions and workers sound good, too.

The specific policies that Field praises from Ahmari’s Tyranny, Inc. include proposals that were also well received by supporters of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. They include Ahmari’s “support for unionization” and the “achievements of the progressive past like the New Deal.” Field insists that she “tend[s] to agree with postliberals like Ahmari, Deneen, and Pappin — as well as with many liberals and progressives — that America is long overdue for serious economic innovation and reform, and I have appreciated some of their ideas about how to make it happen.”

The only problem with embracing the New Right’s narrative about the economic decline of the United States is that it is completely wrong and the solutions they suggest would simply make things worse for the very people they want to help. As I recounted in a review for Reason:

Real hourly compensation for all workers has increased by around 50 percent over the past 40 years. Middle-class incomes are up more than 60 percent in real terms since 1970. The percentage of Americans defined as poor or near poor has fallen since 1967 from 16 percent to 13 percent. The number of Americans in the lower-middle class has also shrunk, from 31 percent to 16 percent today. Where have they gone if they didn’t become poor? They moved into the middle-middle and upper-middle classes: The percentage of Americans in these two categories increased by 16 percent, and — even more impressively — the percentage of Americans in the upper-middle class rose by 27 percent. Meanwhile, income inequality has grown only slightly, once taxes and transfers are considered, and it is well within the twentieth-century average. And the share of national income going to employees is at about the same level now as it was in the 1970s.

In short, Field’s and the New Right’s narrative of America in decline is just wrong. Furthermore, the solutions that could address the affordability crisis aren’t found in more government involvement but less.

An effective reform effort should take the form of removing regulatory barriers to increase access to employment and health care. A plethora of evidence shows that this would lead to decreased costs, increased quality, and increased employment, all without compromising safety. It would also increase overall innovation and economic growth. Further, rolling back regulatory barriers at the state and local levels would encourage production and competition, which would improve affordability and enable Americans to flourish. It is no coincidence that the sectors where costs have risen fastest are often those dominated by services and characterized by heavy public provision and expansive government regulation. Additionally, a revitalization of American families and communities does not require federal government programs but a resurgence of civil society and voluntary associations. Field doesn’t seem to have considered this.

One of Field’s greatest strengths is her challenge to liberals (of all stripes, including classical liberals) to address the New Right’s criticism and establish more robust arguments in favor of liberalism. Field exclaims that “liberals have for far too long accepted a minimalist self-understanding that avoids all talk of virtue and ethical vision; they have similarly refused to acknowledge and cultivate the moral worlds and traditions that sustain our lives.” Field calls on liberals to “become more upfront about the core ideas and ideals of liberalism: about what liberalism values and why, in language that can be broadly understood.”

Despite its flawed prescriptions, Furious Minds is a well-written and enjoyable read. I recommend that anyone who believes in individual liberty and loves America’s institutions read it. Enemies of our constitutional order are among us, and they are willing to use any means necessary to upend the very institutions that have led to human flourishing. They must be defeated both at the ballot box and in the realm of ideas.

Market liberalism is the most successful political and economic system yet developed. Read Field’s book. Familiarize yourself with the illiberal Right’s arguments and become a better defender of the ideas and institutions we love. This is how we will keep America great.

Marcus M. Witcher

Marcus M. Witcher is a Teaching Assistant Professor of Economic History at West Virginia University where he also serves as Manager of Undergraduate Programs for the Knee Regulatory Research Center. He completed his PhD in history from the University of Alabama in 2017.

His first book, Getting Right with Reagan: The Struggle for True Conservatism, 1980-2016, was published by the University Press of Kansas in 2019 and was a finalist for the Reagan Foundation book award. Witcher is also the co-editor of seven edited collections and has been published in a diverse range of publications including: Reason Magazine, National Review, Modern Age, and the Washington Post. His most recent book, Black Liberation Through the Marketplace: Hope, Heartbreak, and the Promise of America with Rachel Ferguson and was published by Emancipation Books in 2022.

How Asia is redefining what BRICS really means

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

To start with, it is about demographics and the real demographics of modernism. Asia is modernizing and this is hardly going to stop. The usa and Western Europe represent almost one billion folks. Brics perhaps one billion who participate in modernity and heading for two billion.

so yes it is time to have a second fiat currency regime. however, think euro rather than the USA dollar for policy direction.

Otherwise it is evolving and growing in effectiveness and it is closing out the dominent role of the dollar and this is a natural evolution.

How Asia is redefining what BRICS really means

Washington continues to misread BRICS as chiefly anti-West, but real story is how Asian energy, tech and connectivity are moving to the fore

by Swaran Singh

September 9, 2026

https://asiatimes.com/2026/09/how-asia-is-redefining-what-brics-really-means/

BRICS is being reshaped by Asian forces that are less confrontational with the West. Image: YouTube Screengrab

Washington will watch this week’s BRICS summit through the lens of China, Russia and de-dollarization — and miss the more consequential story: Asian priorities on development, technology, energy and connectivity are quietly reshaping what BRICS has become.

India has long argued for looking past BRICS’ “anti-Western” rhetoric to see how the bloc’s expansion has shifted its focus — toward what it now considers urgent, and the institutional alternatives it wants to offer.

Start with the numbers. Six of BRICS’ 11 members — China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — are Asian. By purchasing power parity, they account for roughly 83% of BRICS’ GDP, or 90% including transcontinental Russia, with China alone supplying 58%.

China and India together account for 71% of the bloc’s population and 74% of its GDP. Together, BRICS represents about 40% of global GDP and nearly half of humanity.

Even those figures understate Asia’s pull. These six members sit at the intersection of manufacturing, consumption, energy, shipping, finance and technology. China is the world’s largest crude-oil importer; India is a close second and the fastest-growing major energy consumer.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are pivotal oil exporters, Iran remains a major hydrocarbon producer, and Indonesia brings Southeast Asia’s vast resource and consumer economy into the fold.

Energy changes everything

BRICS’ expansion has created an extraordinary energy producer-consumer architecture.

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Iran bring enormous hydrocarbon reserves that are lifelines for Asian members — China and India alone account for a 44% share of their exports. In 2025, the UAE exported about 3.2 million barrels a day of crude, with 99% going to Asia and Oceania; China imported a record 11.6 million barrels a day that year.

Gas sharpens the picture further. Qatar isn’t a BRICS member, but the UAE is, and the two countries’ combined LNG exports account for nearly 20% of the global LNG trade — almost 90% of it bound for Asian markets as of 2025. The implication is clear: energy security within BRICS is now inseparable from the safety of Gulf chokepoints and Indian Ocean sea lanes.

This is where India’s 2026 chairmanship could prove decisive. New Delhi is attempting something subtler, and potentially more durable: making BRICS known for delivery rather than debate.

Its theme — “Building Resilience, Innovation, Cooperation and Sustainability” — places energy security, technology, development, climate, trade, connectivity and institutional reform alongside traditional geopolitics.

The energy track, framed around “Energy for All,” ties security to affordability, sustainability and innovation. India’s foreign ministry has put global-governance reform at the center of BRICS deliberations — a distinctly Asian political vocabulary that fuses geopolitics with development rather than abandoning it.

The China-India paradox

This Asianization of BRICS carries its own contradictions. China and India, the bloc’s largest economies, are simultaneously collaborators, competitors and strategic rivals. Their combined weight gives BRICS its heft; their differences complicate it. But BRICS’ institutional culture allows members with radically different alignments to cooperate selectively.

India can engage Washington through the Quad while working with China and Russia in BRICS. Saudi Arabia and the UAE can deepen ties with the US while sitting in a forum that includes Iran. Indonesia can preserve its non-aligned tradition while joining a grouping increasingly shaped by China, India and Russia. This isn’t incoherence — it’s Asian strategic pluralism.

Indonesia’s membership makes that pluralism even clearer. Its entry has pulled Southeast Asia into BRICS’ institutional core, breaking the old assumption that the bloc is essentially a China-India-Russia-Brazil-South Africa conversation. Indonesia adds another Asian developmental model: an enormous archipelagic economy straddling some of the world’s most consequential maritime routes.

Its presence makes supply chains, critical minerals, maritime connectivity, food security and the Global South’s industrial transformation harder to treat as peripheral. Increasingly, BRICS’ geography mirrors the Indo-Pacific.

De-dollarization, reconsidered

The next Asian rewiring is technological. Asian economies have aggressively experimented with digital public infrastructure, instant payments, digital identity, artificial intelligence and technology-enabled welfare delivery. India, in particular, has shown how such infrastructure can become a developmental tool rather than merely a commercial one.

These experiences give BRICS an agenda beyond its familiar fixation on dollar alternatives. The more consequential question is whether the bloc can build interoperable digital systems, AI governance principles, cross-border payment networks and technology standards that reduce dependence on institutions designed elsewhere. That shift makes the BRICS story less about resisting the West and more about building alongside it.

The dollar remains the hardest piece of the puzzle — though here, too, Asian influence is pushing BRICS toward pragmatism. China and India have expanded local-currency trade. Gulf states have incentives to diversify their reserves.

Western sanctions have pushed Russia to develop alternative payment channels. Few of these countries want to replace the dollar overnight; the more realistic strategy is financial redundancy — more currencies, more payment routes, more settlement mechanisms, and fewer single points of vulnerability. That’s not revolution. It’s rewiring.

West Asia moves to the center

The inclusion of Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE has also redrawn BRICS’ strategic map. West Asia is no longer external to the bloc; it now sits at the center of its economic and security bloodstream, where oil, gas, shipping lanes, terrorism, maritime security and regional conflict all converge.

The weaponization of the Strait of Hormuz has shown how tightly Gulf producers are bound to major Asian economies, making any prolonged disruption a global event. For strategists accustomed to viewing the Middle East through a US security lens, this marks a conceptual shift: increasingly, it is Asian demand pulling West Asian energy eastward.

Asia is also broadening what “security” means inside BRICS. Terrorism, food security, energy resilience, supply-chain disruption, critical minerals, climate vulnerability and maritime connectivity now sit alongside traditional questions of war and peace.

Asian powers have long experienced security less as a discrete military category than as a continuum linking economic vulnerability to strategic vulnerability — a blocked shipping lane can trigger inflation, a disrupted semiconductor supply chain can become a national-security emergency, an energy shock can become a diplomatic crisis. BRICS has gradually absorbed this more comprehensive, Asian conception of security.

The real rewiring

The deepest transformation is institutional. BRICS is not becoming an Asian organization — Brazil, Russia, Egypt, Ethiopia and South Africa remain indispensable, and Asia itself doesn’t speak with one voice. China and India disagree; Iran, Saudi Arabia and the UAE have competing regional priorities; Indonesia guards its own strategic autonomy.

What has changed is that BRICS’ deliberations are now shaped by Asia’s developmental ambition, strategic autonomy, energy interdependence, technological experimentation, maritime consciousness and institutional pluralism. The result isn’t an Asian BRICS — it’s something more interesting: a BRICS increasingly defined by the problems and possibilities of the Asian experience.

The real question is whether a grouping once built around five emerging economies is being quietly rewired by Asia’s extraordinary concentration of population, production, energy, technology and connectivity. If so, BRICS isn’t simply expanding – it’s rewiring its circuitry.

This is China’s End-Game for Gold.

2026-09-12T00:00:00.000-07:00

so far they are integrating with the global gold market. i do tink that all metals need to be provided reserve status. They all have ready markets after all and obvious good delivery. Better yet it provides real industrial standby inventory.

We are all now learning about aluminium and making it bankble would help avoid real shortfalls.

all good though.

This is China’s End-Game for Gold.

by VBL
Wednesday, Sep 09, 2026 - 3:00

Delivery Connect: Linking China’s Gold Market With Hong Kong

Authored by Vince “VBL” Lanci and Eric “King Kong” Yeung

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2026-09-08/chinas-end-game-gold-what-it

China’s Delivery Connect program links the Shanghai Gold Exchange with Hong Kong’s bullion infrastructure. It provides a channel for eligible participants to deliver, store and transfer physical gold between the mainland and Hong Kong.

Reuters Breakingviews describes Delivery Connect as a physical-delivery conduit modeled on China’s Stock Connect and Bond Connect programs. Those systems provide regulated links between mainland markets and international investors operating through Hong Kong. In reality, Delivery Connect is actually Gold (and soon Silver) Connect

A Settlement Mechanism

A gold contract defines the price, quantity and settlement terms of a trade. Delivery Connect provides the infrastructure required to complete the physical portion of that transaction. It connects trading accounts, clearing institutions, approved vaults, bullion standards and delivery procedures across the mainland-Hong Kong border.

Eligible participants can trade gold through the Shanghai Gold Exchange or its international platform and settle the resulting obligation through connected facilities in Hong Kong. Ownership can be transferred through approved custody systems, while the metal can be stored or moved according to applicable delivery, assay and customs requirements.

The program reduces the operational separation between gold traded in Shanghai and gold held in Hong Kong. It may also support arbitrage between prices in Shanghai, Hong Kong and other international markets.

Hong Kong’s Function

China is the world’s largest gold producer and one of its largest consumers. Its domestic gold market, however, remains separated from international markets by capital controls and restrictions on bullion imports and exports.

Hong Kong provides an offshore interface. It has an open capital account, an established banking system and a large pool of offshore renminbi liquidity. Its location also makes it suitable for connecting mainland trading with international custody and settlement.

Under this structure, Shanghai provides the domestic exchange and physical demand. Hong Kong provides offshore access, vaulting and financial services. Delivery Connect links the two systems.

The Gold-Market Structure

Delivery Connect forms part of Hong Kong’s broader plan to develop a gold-trading center. Other components include expanded bullion storage, centralized clearing and proposed gold-futures products, including contracts denominated in renminbi.

Together, these components could create an integrated market structure:
Renminbi pricing → trading → clearing → physical delivery → custody → (Repo) financing

Each function is necessary for an institutional gold market. Participants require recognized bullion standards, secure custody, enforceable ownership rights, reliable settlement and the ability to transfer metal between accounts and jurisdictions.

Delivery Connect addresses the transfer and settlement component. It creates a process for converting a gold transaction into ownership of physical bullion across the mainland and Hong Kong systems.

Price Discovery

London and New York remain the main centers of global gold trading. London dominates over-the-counter bullion trading, while COMEX provides futures liquidity. Most international gold pricing, hedging and financing therefore operates through Western institutions and in US dollars.

China accounts for a large share of global physical demand, but its influence over international price formation has been limited by the separation of its domestic market.

Delivery Connect could narrow that separation. Easier movement between mainland and Hong Kong vaults may allow differences between Shanghai and international prices to be arbitraged more efficiently. Changes in Chinese physical demand could then pass into offshore prices more directly.

The effect will depend on trading volume, vault capacity, legal certainty and participation by banks, refiners and market makers. Infrastructure alone does not create liquidity. The system must attract enough activity to support consistent settlement and price formation.

Renminbi Internationalization

Delivery Connect also supports China’s efforts to increase the international use of the renminbi without removing mainland capital controls.

Gold can serve as a link between the renminbi and an internationally recognized reserve asset. Foreign institutions may be more willing to hold or use renminbi when it can be deployed in a market offering physical gold settlement.

This does not make the renminbi gold-backed. Delivery Connect creates no general right to convert currency into gold and does not establish a fixed relationship between the two. It establishes market infrastructure through which renminbi-denominated gold transactions can be settled in physical metal.

China can therefore strengthen the commercial relationship between the renminbi and gold without adopting a formal gold standard.

Gold as Collateral

The system may also support the future use of gold as collateral.

Institutional collateral requires more than physical possession. Lenders must be able to confirm the gold’s location, ownership, quality and legal status. They also need a process for transferring or liquidating the asset if the borrower defaults.

Delivery Connect contributes to these requirements by linking custody and ownership transfer across the mainland and Hong Kong. Central clearing and expanded vaulting could support the later development of gold-backed repurchase agreements, margin arrangements and secured financing.

The program does not designate gold as high-quality liquid collateral and does not create a gold-repo market by itself. It provides some of the custody and settlement infrastructure such a market would require. If/When Gold in this foramt is HQLA andRepo eleigibleit would make a formidable challenge to the UST global dominance.

When you think of it, now we know what the US has been crowing that it has all its gold. This is coming soon.

Billionaires Are Buying Into Psychedelic Companies

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

sixty years after real discovery, we are seein huge amounts of careful money show up and it is the type that can shut down political nonsense today.

This is very good news and it will be productive.

We may even get to understand just what wee have.

Billionaires Are Buying Into Psychedelic Companies

Tuesday, Sep 08, 2026 - 10:10 AM

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

Putting aside my skepticism of SpaceX for a moment, there is something worth paying attention to in the latest report about the people who made fortunes backing the company: they are now putting serious money into psychedelics.

And while I can’t necessarily get behind backing Elon Musk’s idea of elephants performing Les Miserables on the moon, or whatever other “lofty” goals are in the SpaceX S-1, I can get behind these follow up investment ideas.

Back in January when absolutely no one was talking about the sector, I officially hung my balls out there and name it my “Best Idea” sector for 2026. I was writing about these stocks years ago ago, first in January 2025, calling the psychedelic names “stocks to watch” for the year. Then, in July 2025, urging patience in these positions.

In April, after the administration’s executive order supporting psychedelic research, I reiterated my bullish stance and argued that we were moving from the phase where these therapies were ignored into the phase where institutions would be forced to engage with them seriously. That transition appears to be underway.

So far, the group has wildly outperformed the market, with the AdvisorShares Psychedelic ETF (PSIL) beating the S&P 500 by about +32% this year. Other individual companies I pointed out at the beginning of this year are beating the market by about +79% and +171%.

That doesn’t mean every name is going to work, or that the easy money hasn’t already been made in some of them. But the broader thesis continues to get validation, and the latest evidence suggests that capital is still finding its way into the space.

The biggest validation came in July, when Eli Lilly agreed to acquire AtaiBeckley for approximately $2.8 billion upfront, with another $1 billion contingent on development and regulatory milestones.

That is not a small biotech taking a flyer on an experimental treatment. That is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world committing billions of dollars to a psychedelic-derived drug pipeline. Lilly’s interest is centered on BPL-003, a treatment being developed for treatment-resistant depression.

To me, that is major commercial validation. It doesn’t guarantee that the drugs will work, that regulators will approve them, or that shareholders in every psychedelic company will make money. But it does tell you that Big Pharma is beginning to see enough potential in this area to write very large checks.

And now, according to the Wall Street Journal, more people with money are pouring into the space. The Journal reports that Antonio Gracias and Steve Jurvetson, both of whom made fortunes from early bets on SpaceX, have spent millions supporting efforts to bring psychedelic medicine into the mainstream.

Gracias put $25 million into Lykos Therapeutics after the FDA rejected its application for MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. The company was subsequently renamed Resilient Pharmaceuticals and has been working to address the issues regulators raised.

Gracias has also donated $16 million to support psychedelic research at Harvard. Jurvetson and his wife, Genevieve, have backed psychedelic research and drug trials, while other wealthy supporters include Steve Cohen, David Bronner, and members of the Pritzker family, the WSJ reported.

This is philanthropic money, not necessarily money buying publicly traded psychedelic stocks. But it is still capital being directed toward the same broader objective: getting these treatments researched, developed, approved, and eventually into the medical mainstream.

And that is what I find interesting. For years, psychedelics were treated by much of the investment community as a fringe idea…right up my alley. Now you have major pharmaceutical companies making multibillion-dollar acquisitions, wealthy backers funding research, and companies continuing to advance clinical programs.

The sector appears to be gradually moving from a speculative story toward something that looks more like a legitimate pharmaceutical industry.

Of course, there is still a tremendous amount of risk here.

Any time an investment thesis depends on the FDA, you are dealing with an outcome that can change quickly and dramatically. Lykos is a perfect example. Its MDMA application was rejected, and the company had to be recapitalized and restructured. Questions around trial design, adverse-event reporting, safety, and the difficulty of conducting blinded psychedelic studies are real issues, not details investors can simply wave away.

There is also a difference between a promising treatment and a successful commercial product. Even if a drug gets approved, companies still have to figure out reimbursement, treatment infrastructure, physician adoption, and whether the economics actually work. So I am not suggesting that every psychedelic name is a buy, or that the sector should be chased indiscriminately after its run.

But I do think there is still a long way to go in the sector.

The Lilly deal was a major milestone. The continued flow of private money is another. And the fact that people who have already made fortunes on “unconventional”, long-duration bets are willing to fund this area suggests that the opportunity is still attracting serious attention.

The market has already started to recognize that something is happening here. My view is that the broader story may still be in its early innings.

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and very often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning, meaning if I’m long I could sell or if I’m short I could cover at any time.

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Finally, and again, I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Argentina: Can Milei Wake a Dead Economy?

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

We all forget just how quickly chile turned itself around back in the day. Yet it still took time. We also live in a world in which ample capital exists and it not afraid.

Milei is getting the time and it is clearly turning.the corner.

All good actually. t is a major mining province and needs to expand operations.

Argentina: Can Milei Wake a Dead Economy?

Posted Sep 8, 2026 by Martin Armstrong |

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/international-news/emerging-markets/argentina-can-milei-wake-a-dead-economy/

Argentina is perhaps the most fascinating economic experiment taking place anywhere in the Western Hemisphere. This was once among the wealthiest nations in the world. Generations of political corruption, socialism, currency destruction, defaults, subsidies, and government intervention turned that enormous potential into repeated economic crises. Javier Milei came to office attempting something politicians almost never do voluntarily: reduce the size of government instead of expanding it.

The latest numbers show that the transformation is far from complete, but Argentina is no longer moving relentlessly in one direction toward collapse. GDP expanded 2.3% year-over-year during the first quarter of 2026 and increased 0.7% from the previous quarter on a seasonally adjusted basis. Economic activity has remained uneven, but June strengthened sharply, with growth exceeding expectations and most major sectors expanding from the previous year. Argentina is beginning to show signs that an economy suffocated for decades may finally be attempting to breathe again.

Inflation remains painful at 33.8% YoY, with prices rising 2.1% during July alone. Argentina entered the Milei era after inflation had exploded into triple digits. Inflation is still destroying purchasing power, but the government is no longer financing every political promise by endlessly expanding the deficit and then pretending money creation has no consequences. Through July, the national public sector accumulated a primary surplus of roughly 0.9% of GDP and a financial surplus near 0.1% of GDP after interest payments. July alone produced a primary surplus of nearly 3 trillion pesos and a financial surplus of about 245 billion pesos. Compare that with Washington, London, Paris, or Brussels, where politicians cannot even discuss balancing the budget without claiming civilization itself will collapse. Milei infamously stood at the podium with a chainsaw while campaigning, making good on his promise to cut down Argentina’s public sector.

Milei understood one basic fact that Keynesian economists refuse to accept. Government cannot permanently consume more than society produces. Eventually, the debt becomes the economy. Taxes rise to service the debt, borrowing costs increase, productive capital leaves, the currency weakens, and politicians respond by printing even more money. Argentina spent decades trapped inside that cycle.

Argentina and Chile recently revived their cross-border mining framework, opening the door to more than $20 billion in potential investment across major copper projects. Argentina has enormous reserves of lithium, copper, gold, silver, oil, and natural gas that were historically trapped beneath political instability and hostile investment policies. If investors begin believing contracts will be respected and capital will not simply be confiscated whenever government needs money, those resources suddenly become economically valuable.

The Vaca Muerta shale formation could prove even more important. YPF and international partners have submitted a proposed LNG project under Argentina’s new large-investment incentive regime with potential investment eventually reaching $51 billion. Argentina possesses one of the largest shale gas resources in the world, yet political incompetence forced a country sitting on enormous energy wealth to repeatedly struggle with energy shortages and foreign currency problems.

That is the insanity government creates. You can have oil and still import energy. You can have fertile farmland and still destroy agriculture with export taxes. You can possess mineral wealth and prevent anyone from developing it. Resources do not make a nation wealthy. Confidence and the rule of law determine whether anyone will risk capital developing those resources.

Private companies are beginning to notice the change as well. Chinese ride-hailing company Didi plans to invest more than $200 million in Argentina during 2026 after investing around $160 million the previous year. Uber has separately announced plans to invest hundreds of millions over several years. These may seem insignificant compared with enormous mining projects, but they demonstrate the same principle. Capital begins with small commitments, observes whether the rules remain stable, and increases exposure when confidence rises.

Argentina is still nowhere near being fixed. Unemployment remains elevated, industrial production is inconsistent, poverty remains serious, infrastructure needs enormous investment, and inflation is nowhere near acceptable. Anyone proclaiming victory already does not understand economic cycles. You cannot reverse a century of political destruction in two years. But Argentina is providing an important contrast to the direction of much of the West. Europe believes every problem requires another government program. Britain believes the solution to excessive taxation is another tax. Canada expands government while productivity deteriorates. Washington runs trillion-dollar deficits even during economic expansions.

Whether he ultimately succeeds will depend less on speeches than on whether confidence returns. If domestic capital stops fleeing, foreign investment continues rising, energy and mining projects move from announcements into actual construction, inflation continues declining, and the government maintains fiscal discipline, Argentina could enter a very different economic cycle. That is what makes Argentina so important to watch. India, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore demonstrate economies rising through industrialization, demographics, manufacturing, and international capital flows. Argentina offers another possibility entirely: whether a nation that destroyed itself through government can recover by finally getting government out of the way.

Erin Brockovich Maps Data Centers Across US. She Explains How Tech Companies Infiltrate City Councils

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

The speed of the build itself is stunning and just where do they get off having elected officials sign ndas? It will all be built before anyone even knows or understands.

all normal regulatory process is deep' sixed with NDAs which is an obvious circumvention of process. i thought China was awful but this matches it exactly.

We are no longer accepting a licensing process that allows for independent verification. how about a swift nuclear reactor build out?

in a way the old approcal protocols were organized around the glacial pace of actual real draftsmanship. Today AI can jump it all into a physical build overnight. soyes it is all speeding up.

Erin Brockovich Maps Data Centers Across US. She Explains How Tech Companies Infiltrate City Councils

September 7, 2026 Theo Von 1

https://needtoknow.news/2026/09/erin-brockovich-maps-data-centers-across-us-she-explains-how-tech-companies-infiltrate-city-councils/

Data centers are dependent on local governments for zoning and permits for construction and they are spending billions to build them across the US. Erin Brockovich is using data using community reports from the people to map data centers across the US, and her map shows 9,400 data centers so far (LINK for MAPD).

She told Theo Von that every state has been infested with data centers and that city councils may be duped into believing will increase jobs and commerce. However, data centers bring water shortages, higher energy bills, pollution, overuse of resources like trees, noise, etc. Some city council members sign non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) and refuse to give any information to their constituents. Some city councils have re-zoned areas or bent the rules for permitting.

.

Warning: some vulgar language

AI Data Centers Across the United States

A map of major AI data centers across the U.S. — operational, under construction, permitted, proposed and cancelled — overlaid with locations where community members have emailed in concerns. Click any marker for details, or use the layer switcher at the top right of the map to show and hide categories.

9,399
COMMUNITY REPORTED
locations nationwide

124 OPERATIONAL
built & running

152 UNDER CONSTRUCTION
ground broken

33 PERMITTED
approved, not yet built

145 PROPOSED
in pipeline / pending approval

Serious human illness transmitted by ticks has been identified

2026-09-11T00:00:00.000-07:00

the tick problem will increase steadily as our wild animal population expands.

This is a problem that truly needs to be formally addressed as a function of our wilderness animal husbandry. Yes it is our problem and not an easy one. We do need to work with the wild and it needs to really be thought out.

It is nnot just about harvesting a surplus which we stumble on at best. We need to run all deer species through a tick removal process at regualr intervals in order to control ticks themselves. this may well mean cattle processing every acre on a steady ctcle and encouraging deer to join herds. this includes woodlands.

Serious human illness transmitted by ticks has been identified

By Bronwyn Thompson

September 06, 2026

Scientists discover an entirely new tickborne virus

Scientists have uncovered a new pathogen transmitted to humans from ticks, reminding us that one of the biggest threats to our health is zoonotic disease.

Researchers from Beijing's State Key Laboratory of Pathogen and Biosecurity identified a novel virus belonging to the genus Orthonairovirus in the blood of patients with a history of tick bites; in particular, from the Asian longhorned tick (Haemaphysalis longicornis).

The study followed a screening of 3,163 people with symptoms of the known Dabie bandavirus (DBV). Perplexed by the fact that 10.4% of the patients tested negative for the virus, scientists dug further, discovering an entirely different pathogen delivered by the same ticks.

Now known as the Asian longhorned tick nairovirus (ALTNV), it produces symptoms that are akin to influenza A – fever, fatigue, and gastrointestinal upset.

"These findings provide evidence of ALTNV as a recently identified emerging tick-borne orthonairovirus associated with human febrile illness," the researchers note in their paper. "Coinfection with DBV appears to exacerbate disease severity. The co-circulation of ALTNV and DBV in the same areas, coupled with their shared tick vector, underscores the need for improved differential diagnosis between infections."

Why does this matter? DBV has a fatality rate as high as 30%, so a novel virus delivered by the same vector is a serious epidemiological concern, even if you don't live anywhere near these ticks. Also known as thrombocytopenia syndrome (SFTS), DBV is challenging to treat. Not being bacterial, antibiotics are useless, forcing the body to rely on its immune system to do the heavy lifting.

And as we learnt from 2020, novel viruses are not what scientists like to find – but it's also important that they do.

“The cocirculation of ALTNV and DBV in the same areas, coupled with their shared tick vector, underscores the need for improved differential diagnosis between infections with these viruses in regions where SFTS is endemic,” the authors write.

There were 38 patients found to be infected by both ALTNV and DBV, and they showed significantly more serious respiratory issues and kidney impairment. Seven patients died.

While H. longicornis is found across China, many of us may never come in contact with it. But given that we have no treatment for either ALTNV or DBV, and the new virus isn't a genetic mutation but entirely new, it's a reminder to take precautions when traveling and to seek medical help if you happen to experience what you feel might be the flu.

Having personally experienced emergency hospital treatment in China, it's not just affordable for tourists but, in this case, could be life-saving.

The Real Elites vs. The Ruling Elites

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

The whole problem with the elite idea is that it appears to at best to be an assemblage of folks who may or may not know each other. there is no indication of any underlying philosophy except what is put upon them by others.

yet a whole faux regime is drummed up out of almost thin air.

We may never know what is real or gfalse which is a shame.

The Real Elites vs. The Ruling Elites

Septem

ber 7, 2026

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/09/ryan-mcmaken/the-real-elites-vs-the-ruling-elites/

Always and everywhere, political institutions are controlled by elites. It doesn’t matter if the regime type is democratic or monarchical. It doesn’t matter if there is a written constitution or not. All political institutions—and certainly every sovereign state—are run by a group of elites who control the means of coercion.The myth of “rule by the people” is precisely that: a myth.

But this leaves a big question open: who are the elites? Wilfredo Pareto, that pioneer of Italian elite theory, convincingly suggests that elites are simply those people who are most skilled in their respective fields. Being skilled does not suggest any sort of virtue or beauty, of course, and we cannot assume that any member of the elite will be more moral or refined than any, say, middle-class mechanic.

In the case of political elites, to be “elite” simply means to be the most effective at organizing and commanding political action. This can be done toward both virtuous ends or evil ends. The political elites excel at the gaining and wielding of political power. Nothing more. In hereditary monarchies, for example, the monarch is a monarch because his ancestors were more effective at using violence—and at stealing and killing—than were their competitors. Their descendants are able to remain in the elite through effective political scheming to maintain their positions. In democracies, those who gain and maintain power are effective at deceiving the voting public and at currying favor with the ruling coalitions of various interest groups. They’re not “the elite” because they are especially virtuous or well educated. They simply excel at cultivating the knowledge necessary to wield the power of the state against their enemies and against potential rivals.

Economic Elites vs. Political Elites

There is, however, often confusion as to the difference between economic elites and political elites. One could say that economic elites are those who are most skilled at the management of property. Yet, the nature of the economic elites depends largely on what type of regime exists within society. In a society that has a mostly market system, the economic elites are those who are most productive in the free marketplace. These are the people who are skilled at entrepreneurship, sales, logistics, investing, and all other aspects of a freely functioning market. In a mostly free society, the economic elites are free to spend most of their time on their activities in the marketplace, and they are thus rewarded for spending their efforts in improving their own productivity. Moreover, all of society benefits from these sorts of economic elites. This is because rewards in the marketplace stem from delivering more goods and services to more people at a price that a growing number of people can afford.

Things are different in a society where the economy is dominated by the state—and thus by the political elite. In such a society, the economic elites are those who are most skilled at using the power of the state to achieve success in the state-regulated marketplace. In this case, the economic elites are those who are able to partner with the regime to obtain policies that benefit the elites through the manipulation and regulation of the market. These policies include bailouts, state-backed monopolies, and an easy-money-fueled financial system. In this system, the economic elites are able to maintain and enhance their positions and their wealth through effective political action, and by serving the political elites instead of customers in the marketplace.

When this happens, we cannot assume that the economic elites are there because they add value to society. Rather, the economic elites in this latter system are parasitical. They rely on the exploitation of others to maintain their positions and to expand their market share. One of the most dramatic examples of this can be seen in the response to the financial crisis that began in 2008.Aquatabs Water Purific...Buy New $34.99(as of 08:06 UTC - Details)

Had the marketplace been allowed to function, many large banks and other firms would have been bankrupted, and their property repurposed by other, more efficient owners and managers. Those new owners could have become a new economic elite. But thanks to the intervention of the incumbent political elites, failing firms were saved through the redistribution of wealth from the productive classes to hand-picked, politically connected incumbent firms and owners. Thus, firms like Citicorp and AIG were bailed out, new regulations imposed, and firms like JP Morgan greatly expanded their market share. The Federal Reserve’s mass purchasing of mortgage-backed securities rescued a large portion of the financial sector from insolvency. As a result, most of the economic “elite” we find in the financial sector owe their positions to political action rather than any actual skill in the marketplace. Sure, these people are fond of telling themselves that they are rich because “the market” values them so highly. In reality, they are successful because lobbyists have succeeded in propping up their firms and ensuring, through constant monetary inflation, growth in their portfolios.

But this is just one example. In any society where the political elites are prolific spenders, or engage in widespread regulation of the economy, the economy is continually distorted in a way as to favor the politically well connected at the expense of everyone else. For example, the economic “elites” who rely heavily on government contracts—e.g., Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, the founder of Flock Safety, et al—are not in the elite because they are especially productive in a free market. They are in the elite because they are adept at seizing the property of taxpayers through the tax-and-spend mechanism.

Note that in this interventionist system, the real economic elites—the people who would have risen to the top of an actually free economy—are crowded out and kept down by government action that favors certain firms. Who are these would-be elites? We’ll never know, and instead we are left with our counterfeit billionaire class which is “elite” only in their skill at exploiting people who do real work in the private sector.

Conclusion

Thus we have a merging of the economic and the political elite. Both types of elites generally rely on some sort of deception to buttress their claims.LifeStraw Personal Wat...Buy New $14.99(as of 08:25 UTC - Details)

The political elite, for example, claim their positions by virtue of some sort of mandate from heaven, or moral virtue, or because they allegedly reflect the “will of the people.” These are all lies, of course, but have nonetheless worked to fool and pacify the public for many centuries.

Under a regime of economic interventionism, the economic elites rely on lies as well. They claim they are elites because they are efficient or hard-working, or “serve the customer.” These are lies as well since, in the absence of a free—or even mostly free—market, the elites are, in fact, in their positions due to political maneuvering. They are, in effect, merely an extension of the political elite. The more interventionist the regime is, the more this is true.

The real elites have always been those who receive the voluntary and free support of others through the private sector, or through other non-violent means of interaction: through families, religious institutions, and other institutions of the private sector. On the other hand, those who become “elites” through the initiation of violence, and through the looting of others, have always been frauds and imposters.

The State Spins a New Idea for Recruiting in an Age of War

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

What is usual it is all around money which is actually a bad idea in terms of training and morale. Of course russia has not found a better way.

Ths item argues the war game.

not good.

The State Spins a New Idea for Recruiting in an Age of War

By Karen Kwiatkowski

September 7, 2026

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2026/09/karen-kwiatkowski/the-state-spins-a-new-idea-for-recruiting-in-an-age-of-war/

Have you ever watched cars in motion and thought the wheel spokes were rotating backwards? It’s the stroboscopic effect that occurs when we sample reality at an inappropriate frequency, making the unreal appear absolutely real. Similarly, an illusion of self motion can make us feel like we are moving when we are not, and not moving when we are.

Most economists sort and sample data to produce explanations and sometimes projections. Unless they adhere to the Austrian school, many of these economists suffer academic stroboscopism. For example, 40 years of Japanese stagflation is well-studied in the United States. Yet, Harvard economists assessed in 2010 that, among other things, Japan’s experience is not much of a warning, but rather a guide for Keynesians and MMT’ers. Their assessment in 2010 included this statement:

The Fed’s balance sheet went from $900 billion to $2.4 trillion: it nearly tripled. …[T]he Fed staff’s memos on an exit strategy have already been written,” [the author] says, and now everything hinges on “gauging the timing on when it is appropriate to begin withdrawing the fiscal stimulus.

Yet, over 15 years later, what they predicted would go down, or at least remain level, went astronomically up, and the Fed’s Balance Sheet looks like this:

Are we moving in the right direction? A better question is are “we the people” moving at all?

A recent opinion piece by a Canadian in the Jerusalem Post suggests we being moved, herded, and corralled into a better meatgrinder, to better support unnecessary wars now and in the future. It is a call for the “US taxpayer to fund ‘debt forgiveness for military service’ to enlarge the US’s standing army.”

Co-dependence between Israel and the US has become a modern academic specialty. Grok says “no other single-country focus in the U.S. matches the Israel ecosystem on all layers at once—lobby + PACs + campus + houses of worship + dedicated university field + multiple think tanks + decades of bipartisan congressional lock.

This, a course of action published in Israel carries more weight than one might assume, because it often indicates the ongoing thinking in both capitols. Shared language and messaging matters. This indentured military servitude idea comes on the heels of a US government official stating to Axios that recent strikes on Iran were just “mowing the grass.” Mowing the grass is an Israeli state metaphor for the murder of “excess” men, women and children, a population linguistically reduced and dehumanized into blades of grass on a manicured lawn.

The proposed “debt-forgiveness enlistment program” could help Trump and Bessent reset the US financial system, currently characterized by a boom-bust cycle on steroids, and unhinged nuclear brinksmanship in Washington and Israel. Crashing the massive AI/Data Center bubble, and the coming sell-off of those stocks among others, is expected to allow insiders to capture profits and assets, while the investment portfolios of cities, counties, corporations, retirees and working people lose 98% of their value. The buy high, sell low pattern of the digital Trump meme coin may have served as a test run for the multiple trillion dollar bubbles being manufactured and managed for purposes of a reset of the US dollar, likely into a digital format where debts may be erased on command, and permissions to access capital centrally and politically managed.

The US Government and its cronies need the elimination or repudiation of its debt (via war with creditors foreign and domestic and/or the destruction of the republic) without losing their own heads, property or power. Transforming a military draft into indentured servanthood in order to additionally “wipe out debt” is potentially quite elegant. Not only will a small amount private debt held by future “volunteers” be “paid back” by the government, absent a “draft” means those who dissent or disobey unconstitutional or immoral orders are just violators their own “voluntarily signed contracts.”

Astoundingly, our modern authoritarian government has adopted the values of Lysander Spooner, when he put forth in The Constitution of No Authority, that “…the Constitution, so far as it was [the founder’s] contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children.”

The law is whatever the state says it is, morality is the natural goodness of “mowing the grass” and a contract you sign with the government is, at least for the citizen, paramount and inviolable. One may quietly wonder which debtor class is more likely to abandon its debts – the one that owes the banks, or the one that owns the banks. Scott Bessent knows.

In any case, Israel remains remarkably interested in getting the US military to “man up.” It is a small country constantly at war, unable to draft from the only population in Israel that is increasing. West Jerusalem presides over the significant welfare-dependent Haredi population, which produces seven new Israeli citizens per woman, each one subsidized and protected for life by a tax-paying class that is only producing 2.5 children per woman; children who, over time, are also far more likely than the Haredi to permanently emigrate.

Not so in the US. While having a lower overall birth rate than Israel, we have 40 times the people, many of whom can be made – notwithstanding younger generations refusal to enlist and their dangerously low opinions of Israel – to fight and die for Israel because their alternate future is stagflation and job loss, more and more debt, and a permanent condition of being one accident away from medical-induced bankruptcy. Military service already covers medical costs and the need for a “job;” covering personal and school loan debt is the missing leg of Uncle Sam’s and Tante Shulamit’s milking stool

If the US Senate passes the 2027 NDAA as the lobbyists have written it, the IDF will be even more integrated with the Pentagon, US intelligence, US research institutions, and US weapon design, purchase and production. From Israel’s perspective, the need for a large, disposable standing US army is undeniable, as they are already inside the US military-political ecosystem and can shape its use.

More insidiously, indentured military service is extremely attractive to a United States looking at continued global war and potential martial law at home. Standing armies, as we are reminded by every single founder, are always and undeniably incompatible with liberty.

The political planet of thugs and thieves creates false war rationales and steal us blind, hoping that our sampling time is limited, out of whack, or inappropriate for the speed at which change happens. We are expected to see things that are not there, and feel like we are moving forward, or moving backward, when, in reality, we are solid as a rock. The state, with its wars and financial crimes, is a grim entity with an even grimmer future. The state inevitably fails in its compulsions, often spectacularly. Never forget that we the people are the only part of this equation of spin capable of real motion, true strength, and moral agency.

Triple-threat WIG hydrofoil aircraft makes maiden flight

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

This may start to make sense. first the build can be easily expanded at least four fold and we can imagine a large ferry able to first get up on hydro foils and then transitioning to ground effect to acheive speeds approaching one hundred MPH.

The hydro foils require a low sea state but that is the harbor. after that ground effect handles a high sea state.

this can certainly work on most if not all ferry routes because they are all sea state senstivie.

Triple-threat WIG hydrofoil aircraft makes maiden flight

By David Szondy

September 02, 2026

The Viceroy in the air

https://newatlas.com/aircraft/regent-craft-viceroy-wig-hydrofoil-aircraft-maiden-flight/

One of the world’s most unusual aircraft has taken to the air in its first crewed flight. Regent Craft's Viceroy is an all-electric "seaglider" that combines a floating hull, wing-in-ground (WIG) effect technology, and hydrofoils into a single vehicle.

Aeroengineering often spits out some fascinating innovations, but it isn't often that you see three rolled into the same aircraft at the same time – and in a seaplane at that. When the Viceroy prototype took off on September 2, 2026 from Narragansett Bay, North Kingstown, Rhode Island, it was probably one of the most unique test flights in recent history.

For one thing, the aircraft was an all-electric number powered by a dozen electric motors strung along the leading edge of the wing. This was a little bit unusual from a visual perspective, but not that unusual on its own – however, it is odd to see on a seaplane. It's even odder on a seaplane operating on a novel aerodynamic principle.

Viceroy

Officially, the Viceroy is a wing-in-ground effect (WIG) maritime vessel. That means it uses the wing-in-ground effect to increase lift. It does this, put simply, by flying low with a short, wide wing that traps a cushion of air between the aircraft and the ground, allowing it to carry a much larger payload than a standard vehicle of equal size.

It's an impressive idea and one that the Soviet Union invested a great deal of time and money in with the hopes of developing sea-skimming missile platforms. But this turned out not to be practical because of a number of drawbacks to WIG craft.

For one thing, they tended to suffer from pitch instability and poor handling at low speeds in rough, open waters. In other words, however well a WIG craft might perform once airborne, it would be an absolute bear between leaving dock and taking off.

The Viceroy being put in the water
REGENT Craft

To avoid this, the Viceroy introduces a novel solution. It has hydrofoils, which raise the aircraft out of the water at mid-speeds. This cuts wave drag, allowing it to run faster and with better maneuverability, providing greater stability and allowing a smoother takeoff.

For the maiden flight, the Viceroy had two pilots at the controls as it covered a distance of 1,956 ft (596 m) at an altitude of 33 ft (10 m) during a 30-second flight using a triple-redundant digital fly-by-wire system for automatic pitch, roll, and altitude control. That might not seem like much, but the idea of the initial test was to validate the fundamentals of the design.

New York Rediscovers Nuclear Power, With Plenty Of Political Fine Print

2026-09-10T00:00:00.000-07:00

ah yes.. turns out all those AI builds need continuous base load power provided best by a nuclear reactor.

what I have just understood though is that Cameco and Brookfield outright own Westinghouse which built the majority of reactors worldwide. This means that the core of the global Uranium business is vertically integrated and Canafian owned.

Understand westinghouse dominance made the candu a hard sell for decades.

this means that the riches Uranium deposits on Earth are Canadian owned but so is the majority of the technology as well. I wonder if anyone told Trump?

New York Rediscovers Nuclear Power, With Plenty Of Political Fine Print

Monday, Sep 07, 2026 - 05:30 AM
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/new-york-rediscovers-nuclear-power-plenty-political-fine-print

Five years after Indian Point’s last reactor shut down, Albany rediscovered the appeal of electricity that runs around the clock without burning fossil fuels.

Governor Kathy Hochul wants 5 gigawatts of new nuclear capacity, with at least 1 GW developed by the publicly owned New York Power Authority, plus a separate 4 GW initiative.

There haven't been any announcements for the technology of choice, but the most likely candidates are the large Westinghouse AP1000 and the smaller 300 MW BWRX-300 from GE Vernova Hitachi.

As Canary Media reports, the reversal follows this spring’s weakening of New York’s climate law. The state’s difficulties with delivering large renewable projects also hasn’t helped keep them on the pure-play renewables path, which was made worse with the Trump administration’s assault on offshore wind.

The construction of new nuclear power generation offers a governor facing re-election a unique win-win opportunity: nuclear offers dependable low-carbon generation alongside renewables while also offering industrial investment, construction jobs and promises of lower bills.

Eight upstate communities have expressed interest in hosting projects. With strongly Republican-leaning counties on the list of possibilities, including Jefferson, Oswego, and Schuyler, Gov. Hochul could use the new mega-projects to score political points.

NYISO’s 2026 Power Trends warns in their recent report that trying to replace over 4 GW of something that's almost always on (nuclear) with less than 3 GW of something that's almost always off (renewables) isn't exactly how you set the state up for future success.

The report from NYISO does highlight a common problem between nuclear and other sources of generation, which is the issue of actually getting the power where it needs to go. If most of the energy demand is downstate, then additional dependencies and bottlenecks come into play. Transmission capacity becomes a problem to get the power from upstate.

Then there is Indian Point. As we previously reported, Energy Secretary Chris Wright has pushed to revive the roughly 2 GW facility, whose retirement increased reliance on fossil generation. Hochul opposes reopening it while championing new construction upstate.

A restart would require substantial work, however, a precedent is already being set with other restarts around the country, most notably at the Palisades. If there is true concern in the state for meeting baseload needs, then outright rejecting the restart of a nuclear facility becomes confusing.

Opponents are arguing nuclear spending could crowd out faster alternatives, so Senator Kevin Parker’s pending legislation would impose a 30-month pause on taxpayer and ratepayer support for new or restarted nuclear facilities while a task force studies costs and alternatives.

As we have highlighted a few times now, selective nuclear enthusiasm extends well beyond Albany.

Texas committed $350 million to advanced nuclear development in 2025. Yet Greg Abbott fought the proposed Andrews County spent-fuel storage facility, and Texas enacted restrictions in 2021 on offsite high-level waste storage.

New Mexico similarly committed almost $5 million in development assistance and workforce support for Kairos Power’s Albuquerque expansion. Meanwhile, state officials battled Holtec’s proposed HI-STORE spent-fuel facility. Holtec abandoned the New Mexico project in 2025.

The common thread is an appetite for nuclear generation capacity accompanied by arguments over who carries the liabilities. New York’s pivot could strengthen its grid for decades, potentially even the next century, if it can follow through with its swing.

A New Observatory Concept for Imaging UAP Orbs

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

These orbs appear to react intelligently and move fast. I do think they are also the majority of UFO sightings as well. We do have over 200,000 such observations. These are not floresent gas bubbles and are not associated with active thunderstorms such as ball lightening.

The problem is that they emit light. sorting that out will be challenging.

We actually have several types of objects and it will take actual radar intercepts and plenty of them to get resolution over what we have so far. At least it is now happening.

I notice folks are rumbling a about gravity craft from the fifties. That MEME is gathering legs.

New Observatory Concept for Imaging UAP Orbs

Avi Loeb

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/a-new-observatory-concept-for-imaging-uap-orbs-748fc8b0d435

The most mysterious Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena in the five tranches of data which were declassified over the past four months in the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (PURSUE) are orbs.

These orbs are glowing entities, estimated to be on the scale of meters. The encounters are diverse.

The 2nd PURSUE tranche mentions a senior intelligence officer’s 2025 account of being left “virtually speechless” after an hour-long observation of orange orbs. The 5th PURSUE tranche provides a helicopter account of an orb swarm with “a series of close UAP encounters lasting over an hour,” plus two larger ones described as “oval-shaped, orange with a white or yellow center, emitting light in all directions.” The 5th tranche also includes infrared footage of a hovering black sphere. Some orbs are consistent with earlier historical reports on Tic-Tac-shape objects. They appear cold on thermal imagery in several infrared-sensor cases despite visual or radar-apparent motion. Some orbs were moving over the Gulf of Oman with a speed in the range of Mach 0.3–1.7 (250–1,300 mph) and a Syrian case reported instant acceleration.

Not all UAP are orbs. The 1965 CIA memo in the 5th tranche describes a delta-shaped object tracked at Mach 3 by the USS Gyatt radar near Puerto Rico and implying that some UAP have triangular morphologies. This UAP had radar tracking. However, many orb-specific reports rely primarily on infrared or electro-optical footage, hand-held recordings, or witness interviews rather than independent radar returns.

The 2nd tranche mentioned “countless orange orbs swarming in all directions against the backdrop of the mountain,” as well as formation flying UAPs in the Persian Gulf based on October 2019 footage. The 5th tranche mentions the AC-130J contacts in September 2021 over the Gulf of Oman with about 25 cold orbs maneuvering aggressively. The two large orange orbs beside the helicopter held position just above the rotor disk. The orbs appeared to react intelligently within 15 seconds to weapons fire. A 2025 clip shows an orb racing over a populated Middle Eastern city.

These orb reports represent the genuinely ambiguous residuals that remain unresolved by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon. How can we help AARO and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) fulfil their mission in resolving these cases? Today, I came up with the following new concept for an observatory that can accomplish this task.

My concept for the UAP Orb Observatory contains two components. The first is a radar system, capable of identifying objects of interest in the sky. The second is a meter-scale telescope, capable of resolving these objects on angular scales of order an arcsecond or better. This high angular resolution allows us to identify details on centimeter scales, comparable to the diameter of a garden pea, at a distance of 2 kilometers!

An example for a suitable, commercially available telescope is the meter-diameter CDK1000 Telescope System. The telescope dome can slew faster than the angular speed of a target moving at Mach 0.1 as long as that target is farther than 600 meters. The dome slewing rate of 3 degrees per second can easily focus on targets that stay in the sky for more than one minute. The reported hour-long orbs should be easy targets to focus on.

The radar system can be either active — namely transmitting its own radio beam and searching for reflections from objects, or passive — namely searching for reflected radio waves from ground-based radio, television or satellite transmissions. The radar should cover the entire sky and identify the sky coordinates of targets of interest to a precision much better than the field of view of the imaging telescope.

Once an orb is identified by the radar system, the telescope would steer to its sky coordinates and obtain a high-resolution image of it. Equipping the telescope with a spectrograph would allow it to determine the material composition of the orb based on its spectrum. In 2012, a natural ball lightning event was accidentally captured on video with a spectrometer running during a field campaign studying ordinary lightning. This gave scientists, for the first time, a quantitative emission spectrum of a real ball lightning event rather than a qualitative eyewitness description. The spectrum showed emission lines consistent with silicon, iron, and calcium, namely elements found in soil, supporting a physical model which associates ball lightning with silicon vapor (as discussed in a paper published here).

The Galileo Project will design its next observatory as an “orb imager” based on the above-mentioned concept.

'Not Simple': Witkoff, Kushner Meet Putin For High-Level Peace Talks Under 72-Hour Ukraine Air Truce

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

seriously, russia must be willing to call off its war. Both parties have lost too much to ever see recovery. So that is off the table. actual recovery coin must come from the west for both the Ukraine and russia.

Recall WAR is a wealth destruction program.

We observe that Canada has already pledged four billion for the Ukraine. One wonders obviously. Maybe the Ukraine needs to become a Canadian proto province. just saying. Imagine now that would change the local strategic calculus.

'Not Simple': Witkoff, Kushner Meet Putin For High-Level Peace Talks Under 72-Hour Ukraine Air Truce

Saturday, Sep 05, 2026 - 03:39 PM

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-envoys-witkoff-kushner-land-moscow-peace-talks-putin

Summary: Putin Tells Witkoff and Kushner that Ukraine War "Not Simple"

Putin Meets Witkoff and Kushner for Peace Talks

US Envoys Witkoff, Kushner Land In Moscow For Peace Talks As Putin Halts Attacks On Kiev

New details have emerged about the meeting between US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Russian President Vladimir Putin earlier today. The meeting began hours after Putin ordered Russian forces to suspend strikes on Kiev for three days.

Bloomberg reports that Putin opened talks with Witkoff and Kushner by describing the situation they were seeking to resolve as "not simple."

Putin asked them to convey his best wishes to President Trump.

The outlet continued:

Expectations for the visit are low, though, according to people close to the Kremlin. Multiple previous trips to Moscow by Witkoff and Kushner failed to achieve progress and there's no reason to believe they're bringing acceptable proposals now, the people said.

Putin is ready to stop the war only on his own terms, and Moscow's demands are getting tougher because it believes it has the military edge over Ukraine, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing sensitive matters.

People familiar with the thinking in Kyiv said Ukraine is also pessimistic about making meaningful progress around the Witkoff-Kushner visit. The US envoys are expected to push previous ideas like making Donbas an economic free zone, which Russia has already rejected, the people said.

Putin meets Witkoff and Kushner for Ukraine peace talks.

More footage from the meeting:

For now, the optics suggest that the Trump administration is reactivating high-level diplomacy in an effort to end the 4.5-year war, a grinding conflict that continues to impose severe human and economic costs on both sides. The renewed push also comes as Trump and Republicans enter the final two months before the Nov. 3 midterm elections.

After Moscow, Kushner and Witkoff plan to travel to Ukraine on Sunday, marking their first trip since the war began.

US Envoys Witkoff, Kushner Land In Moscow For Peace Talks As Putin Halts Attacks On Kiev

Roughly 11 days after CIA Director John Ratcliffe unexpectedly traveled to Moscow and reportedly floated a trilateral summit involving President Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner arrived in Moscow on Saturday morning.

"Dmitriev was deep in conversation with Witkoff and Kushner as they stepped onto Russian soil for key Ukraine talks," Russian media outlet RT wrote on X, accompanying the post with footage of the US delegation's arrival.

Russian outlet Sputnik reported that Putin had ordered a three-day pause in strikes on Kiev just as Witkoff and Kushner arrived in Russia for peace talks.

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov stated:The pause in strikes on Kyiv is linked to preparations for and the holding of meetings with American negotiators there.

The Russian president will meet US negotiators Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner at the Kremlin later Saturday.

Witkoff and Kushner are scheduled to meet Putin before traveling to Kyiv on Sunday, marking their first visit to Ukraine since the war began.

Bloomberg reports that expectations for a breakthrough peace deal to end the war remain low.

The Kremlin said there was "no talk of new ideas," while describing Moscow's negotiating position as "unshakeable." Russia continues to demand that Kiev surrender the entirety of four regions claimed by Moscow and abandon its NATO ambitions, conditions that Kiev rejects.

The diplomatic push comes as intensifying attacks by both sides around the Black Sea raise the risk of a global food crisis next year. Meanwhile, Ukrainian attacks on Russian energy infrastructure, combined with disrupted Persian Gulf flows, are pushing the global refined-products market toward crisis, creating twin food and energy risks.

The visit merely suggests an intensifying Trump administration campaign to reopen high-level negotiating channels ahead of the midterm elections in the US and end the Russia-Ukraine war after more than four years of costly fighting.

How the Law of Displacement Can Solve the Data Center Crisis

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

Displacement also means spending on advertising in order to shift your product forward and this can be damaging to established product lacking a counter advert program

The best examle was the push to place margarine into the butter market. now we know it was a bad idea.

yet it happened and it stuck wel enough that those products use shelf space.

How the Law of Displacement Can Solve the Data Center Crisis

To stop data centers from ruining communities, they must be displaced by something cheaper—and for once, cheaper is not only better, but the money also exists to build it and the green energy it needs

A Midwestern Doctor

Sep 6

amidwesterndoctor@substack.com

Story at a Glance

Throughout history, harmful products have rarely been removed because of the harm they caused consumers or the environment; they were removed once an equally profitable alternative existed. Here I will apply that principle to the largest deployment of capital in American history—the AI data center buildout.

Roughly $800 billion is being spent on AI infrastructure this year, $1.4 trillion next year, and data centers now account for nearly a quarter of all nonresidential construction starts in the country. Because they need city-sized amounts of power, they are being placed next to communities, which are experiencing rising electricity bills, constant noise, and a cluster of health complaints that closely matches what electrically sensitive people have reported for decades.

A Bloomberg analysis of 770,000 home sensors suggests why: data centers inject enormous amounts of “dirty electricity” back onto the grid, and the worst power distortion in the country clusters within 20 miles of them. Meanwhile, the administration’s response to the growing opposition (which has already recalled local officials and become a midterm issue) has been to override it rather than address it.

The industry’s proposed alternative, data centers in space, fails on physics and economics, and even if it worked it would leave nothing behind for anyone on earth.

A better option exists on U.S. soil, and the unprecedented need for power next to it creates the first real chance in fifty years to bring a cheap, safe, and abundant form of nuclear energy to market—one that was demonstrated at Oak Ridge in the 1960s but abandoned because it could not make weapons.

The decisions that determine whether America builds this or buys it from China are being made now, and this article lays out how taking that path can not only protect communities across the country from the proliferation of data centers but also at last make affordable and abundant green energy.

Much of what is written here is guided by the fact I spend a lot of time thinking about the problems the world faces and what solutions could potentially address them, either now or in the future when cultural circumstances change. This year I realized a few longstanding issues were converging into a potential long-term solution that I wanted to have this newsletter help bring to light.

The Law of Displacement

One of the depressing things I have come more and more to terms with as I’ve gotten older is how so, so, many things ultimately come down to money (e.g., a lot of medicine is structured into sales funnels that ensure robust sales of medical services and many seemingly irrational ways the practice of medicine is structured finally make sense once you see it through that lens).

As such, all throughout history, you can cite examples of people being exploited for profit (e.g., for most of human history in most societies slavery was widely practiced). Once science entered the picture, this frequently resulted in profitable technologies being deployed which advanced the national wealth but harmed a significant portion of the population in the process (e.g., Monsanto’s profitable chemical plants poisoning their community’s water supply).

In all the case studies I’ve looked at, a recurring process occurred:

•Industry was aware of health issues from their product, but buried all of it (with this frequently being revealed in subsequent lawsuits).

•The profit margins for the products were typically larger than the cost of keeping it on the market (e.g., they could afford to fund doctored science that cast sufficient doubt on health issues with the product). Likewise, typically a small enough number of people were directly harmed (e.g., an isolated community or less than 1% of the people who took a pharmaceutical) that it was easy enough for the industry to sweep everything under the rug—especially since until recently, corporate news controlled the media landscape and was structured to support narratives from large corporate clients.

•Government typically sided with industry, due to some combination of lobbying (e.g., bribes), the industry effectively controlling the narrative (so government regulators thought the product was “safe”) or the government viewing the product as a strategic national asset which justified a certain degree of sacrifice to promote the national interest.

Because of this, you would again and again see things that were clearly toxic be able to stay on the market for decades despite those harmed by them doing all they could to bring attention to the issue (and supportive researchers providing the data to substantiate their claims).

Note: the most extreme example of this is likely the COVID vaccines, as the scale of harm they have done eclipses arguably any other product in history, there is widespread public opposition to them (to the point a clear majority now refuses to take them) and more researchers have come forward to expose their dangers than virtually any other product in history—but nonetheless—the FDA continues to advocate for them. Why? Because there is so much money to be made off mRNA technology too many parties are simply not willing to let it go.

Rather, what typically gets these products off the market is a commercially viable alternative to them being developed, as at that point, the same profit can be made, but it is no longer necessary to bear the additional cost of defending the old product to keep it on the market (which, for lack of a better term, I call the “law of displacement”).

For example, almost immediately once leaded gasoline was created in 1922, serious health concerns were raised about it—the Surgeon General questioned it before a gallon had been sold, workers making it began dying within months of its 1923 launch, and the engineer who invented it wrote the industry’s reassurances to the government while recovering from lead poisoning himself. However, since GM held the patent and collected a royalty on nearly every gallon of gasoline sold in America, rather than be ethical, GM wrote into its contract with the Bureau of Mines that the government’s safety findings required company approval before publication, then funded a university laboratory that produced essentially all of the “safety” data on lead for the next forty years. When Caltech’s Clair Patterson proved in 1965 that Americans carried roughly a hundred times the lead burden of their ancestors, the industry tried to buy him and then had his government contracts pulled. As such, all of the efforts to get lead out of gasoline were unsuccessful (which is truly remarkable given the massive health consequences of it such as 256,000 premature deaths from cardiovascular disease each year in America).

Rather, what did was the catalytic converter as automakers needed them to meet the 1970 Clean Air Act, lead destroys them on contact, and in 1970 GM (which had conveniently sold its stake in the lead business a few years earlier) announced it was switching away from leaded gas. As such, once the world’s largest carmaker needed unleaded fuel, refiners had a product that was just as profitable to sell, and the same machine that had defended lead for half a century quietly phased it out. Notably, a non-toxic alternative had existed the entire time (GM’s own researchers had tested ethanol blends before lead); it lost because it couldn’t be patented (whereas by 1970 other patentable additives existed).

Furthermore, this is not an isolated pattern. For example, DuPont fought the science linking CFCs to ozone depletion for fifteen years, then abruptly reversed its position in 1988—once it held the patents on the replacement refrigerants. The Montreal Protocol had been signed the year before, and the “impossible” phase-out proceeded on schedule.

Likewise, many things in medicine have fit this pattern:

Seldane (terfenadine) was known from 1990 to cause fatal arrhythmias when taken with common antibiotics, but stayed on the market until 1998—eighteen months after the same company got Allegra approved (which is simply Seldane’s active metabolite without the cardiac risk). The FDA’s own withdrawal proposal stated the reasoning plainly: now that a safer alternative existed, Seldane’s risks were no longer acceptable.

Rezulin (troglitazone) caused fatal liver failure and was pulled in Britain in 1997. The FDA kept it on the market until 2000, and when it finally withdrew the drug, explicitly cited the fact that Avandia (rosiglitazone) and Actos (pioglitazone) were now available to replace it.

Bextra (valdecoxib) was withdrawn in 2005 for cardiovascular risk and rare, life-threatening skin reactions, with the FDA noting it offered no advantage over the NSAIDs already on the market—while Celebrex, Pfizer’s bigger-selling COX-2 inhibitor (with the same COX-2 class risk), was allowed to stay.

Phenacetin was one of the most widely used painkillers in the world and was linked to kidney failure in the 1950s. It wasn’t banned in the U.S. until 1983, by which point Tylenol (phenacetin’s own metabolite) had already taken over its market.

Barbiturates were known to be lethal in overdose and highly addictive by the 1930s, yet remained the default sedative for another thirty years until Librium and Valium (benzodiazepines) arrived in the 1960s with fresh patents and the same customers.

Halothane hepatitis, a frequently fatal liver necrosis, was recognized within a few years of halothane becoming the standard anesthetic in the 1950s. It was tolerated for three decades until patented replacements (isoflurane, desflurane, sevoflurane) captured the operating room in the 1980s and 90s. Tellingly, halothane is still widely used in poorer countries where those patented pharmaceuticals are unaffordable.

Tardive dyskinesia, an often irreversible movement disorder, was identified in patients on Thorazine and Haldol by the late 1950s and accepted as a cost of doing business for forty years. The older drugs were rapidly displaced once patented “atypical” antipsychotics arrived in the 1990s—which then turned out to cause diabetes and metabolic syndrome at rates that arguably made them no safer, only newer.

The whole-cell pertussis (DTwP) vaccine had a high rate of causing encephalitis and nearly bankrupted the vaccine industry in lawsuits, leading to the 1986 National Vaccine Injury Act being passed (giving the industry immunity from lawsuits). As activists had begged for years for the safer but more expensive Japanese acellular (DTaP) vaccine to replace the DTwP vaccine (which the industry refused to spend the money to do), the 1986 Act was structured to require HHS to promote safer vaccines (leading to the necessary research being Federally funded) and a few years later DTaP quietly replaced DTwP (except in poorer nations where the WHO continues to promote DTwP).

After the idea of X-raying a fetus throughout pregnancy was proposed in 1923, it was quickly taken up by the medical profession. Before long, evidence accumulated that this was very dangerous, but it was not until 1975 that the obstetric field shifted away from it—a shift that largely occurred because an alternative way (ultrasound) was found to conduct those routine exams.

Cylert (pemoline), an ADHD drug, carried liver-failure warnings from 1996 onward but stayed on the market until 2005, once the stimulant market was fully covered by other products and it no longer filled a gap.

OxyContin’s abuse potential was known to Purdue for a decade before it “solved” the problem in 2010 with a crush-resistant reformulation—which conveniently extended its patent protection and let the company argue the original (now unsafe) version should be blocked from generic competition.

So, while there are many harmful products on the market I believe should be banned, rather than continually emphasize how bad they are, I try to have my focus here be directed towards safer alternatives which can displace them, as I feel that is the most realistic way to get them off the market and have them stop harming people.

The AI Boom

One of the topics I’ve seen many people debate is how far AI is likely to go as on one hand, there are projections it will displace many people’s jobs and completely redo the economy, while on the other many argue that dystopian vision is simply hype the AI industry is creating to justify inflated stock values as the companies go public (and to obtain private investor funding prior to that).

Given the potential cultural implications of AI, I’ve hence put a lot of thought into how they actually generate their answers, the relative accuracy of the different types of responses they get, how AI can be a productivity increasing or decreasing tool, and the overall effects I expect them to create upon the society (e.g., a lot of the responses AI gives are terrible because its conversational style is tuned to please raters, which produces the same pretentious and obnoxious responses that dominates Reddit). From that, I’ve essentially concluded:

•A significant portion of the population prefers to follow the crowd, tends to defer to authority, and is somewhat averse to the hard effort it requires to think for oneself or deal with adversity. For these people, AI (as most currently understand it) will be irresistible, resulting in them being trapped in a bubble where they can’t grow or change (exemplified by the rising phenomenon of AI boyfriends and girlfriends) and it becoming increasingly easier for the system to manipulate them into compliance (in part because AI answers inevitably regress toward the orthodoxy of their training data and the preferences of the people who rate their answers).

•A smaller portion will recognize that AI provides a tool that allows them to greatly increase their productivity. This, I believe, will ultimately lead to a wealth explosion that will be concentrated in the upper classes (hence increasing the income division in society). However, I do not believe this benefit will be seen for many of the people pursuing it due to them failing to recognize what AI is and is not useful for. Put differently, AI will benefit users who make a point to keep their own agency while using it and harm those who hand it over.

•Since many of the things we are trained by the educational system to do are ultimately algorithmic (and hence possible for AI to do), AI will place an increasing pressure upon the population to shift to providing things which offer an inherent value that goes beyond what can be automated and trained (e.g., a genuine authentic human presence in medicine that is naturally therapeutic). However, I do not think many of the people who economically need to do this will do so, and as a result, AI will also amplify the income inequality in society from the opposite direction (by making the less wealthy poorer).

•A significant portion of the value of AI comes from things most users cannot see (AI interfacing with programs rather than individual users talking to chatbots), as this setup makes it possible for programs (or programs connected to physical systems) to do a lot of things that previously were not possible (e.g., to create a variety of highly profitable technologies or meticulously micromanage the population). Because of this, I suspect one of the main purposes of the chat bots (beyond creating positive PR for the AI industry) has been to provide free human training that can be used to develop these far more lucrative invisible systems.

To put all of that in more concrete terms; initially, I was strongly opposed to using AI as I felt it was highly inaccurate (due to it sharing the exact same subtle biases I was used to seeing on websites like Wikipedia) and found its pretentious and condescending style of conversation to be extremely obnoxious (until we realized you could stop a lot of that by telling the chatbots to stop “sounding like Reddit”). Later, I realized it was very useful for rapidly executing second and third order searches (e.g., I am going from point A to point B, based on my criteria, the possible routes I can take, and the time I am leaving, what is the optimal place for me to stop at midway) as it could quickly do all of that rather than requiring me to manually sort through each part of the decision tree (saving a lot of time).

Likewise, with writing, I was initially strongly opposed to using AI at all both because I could not tolerate the errors it continually introduced (e.g., AI hallucinations or regressions to the orthodoxy) and because I did not like the feel of AI writing (which beyond having a “Reddity tone” also just felt empty, which was a deal breaker as I am not willing to ask readers here to read things I myself would not want to read). I then switched to viewing AI as a good way to obtain “orthodox” perspectives (many of which are correct) and edit what you are working on (which for me works best by generating word document copies of articles with suggested edits highlighted so I can go through each one and manually add in the ones that make sense).

Later, I realized that while AI has a high rate of hallucination for anything it generates on its own (and pulls from fairly limited datasets), it’s fairly good with material you directly give it to process. So if you understand the entire pipeline that is required to create a finished output, it often makes sense to save a lot of time by having AI automate certain parts of the pipeline (rather than asking for the whole thing start to finish—which inevitably creates a highly erroneous and useless output). Because of this, one of the main things we’ve done over the last year has been to give them well over ten thousand studies (from all the databases AI systems do not look at) and have them process each one into a paragraph highlighting all the pertinent data in the study (and then sort those paragraphs by category and then sort those categories by overlapping information).

From doing this, it’s made it possible to compile a lot of information that simply was never accessible before and to do it in a very short timeframe (thereby making it actually possible to get all of this into the public domain while RFK is still HHS Secretary). For example, papers get exponentially harder to write the more sources they contain, and the capstone paper on DMSO for brain spine and heart injuries the top experts in the field wrote (after spending a decade researching the subject) contained 78 references—yet the four articles I released this year on this topic collectively contained nearly 5,000 references.1,2,3,4 So while doing these four articles was immensely time consuming, with the help of AI (and very careful vetting of the outputs), it was possible to do orders of magnitude more than anyone ever has been able to do before, thereby, at last making that forgotten literature base accessible.

One of the main reasons I did all of this, in turn, was because I knew it was simply not feasible for independent researchers to ever uncover most of the actual research that had been done with DMSO. As such, my hope was that by making it all easily available, other researchers could copy my work and use it as a foundation for their own works on DMSO (as prior to me beginning this project, I’d realized almost every DMSO book in print rather than independently research the subject had just copied what was in the previously published books and hence all were collectively drawing from a very limited pool of scientific studies). So, if a much larger body of compelling literature was made available to everyone, it would effectively promote the therapy and make something that could help a lot of people widely available, thereby creating the pressure to shift us to a better model of medical care (which is why I chose to start by the writing the longer and far more difficult articles which make that critical literature available rather than jumping to the shorter ones that have more commercial appeal).

This has basically happened, and over the last two years, a lot of books and articles have started to be published on using DMSO which are incorporating many of those forgotten studies that have never before been seen in print. However (and this is the key point), what I’ve noticed is that most of them were AI generated summaries of what I wrote rather than the authors using them as a scaffolding to assist in developing their own DMSO content. On one hand, this has been problematic as the AI summaries introduce a significant amount of errors or misinterpretations (so in cases where authors who did this credited me, many people have asked me why I said something I never actually did but the AI summary erroneously concocted).

However, what I feel is far more important (and why I shared this story) is that even in cases where I’d already done the vast majority of the work for anyone who would want to broach the DMSO topic (and held off on writing the shorter DMSO pieces so an economic niche was created for other people to do it), when authors were faced with the choice between doing the last bit themselves or letting AI do it with the errors doing so inevitably entails, they chose the latter. I mention this because I do not think this issue is at all unique to DMSO, but rather that (as I alluded to in the first bullet point of this section) if AI provides an easier and faster way to do tasks at the expense of quality, human nature dictates that a lot of people will use AI to do that (which amongst other things is why the amount of content on the internet is rapidly increasing while in tandem its quality is rapidly declining).

So to summarize, I feel AI is a very useful tool which makes a lot of things previously not possible possible. However, my fear is that the majority of users will treat it as a crutch and not utilize it in a manner that productively enhances their own lives (or their personal development). In contrast, there will also be a sizable number of individuals who will grasp how to effectively leverage AI, but I think there is a high likelihood most of them will not have the ethics (or wisdom) to prevent their projects from harming humanity (e.g., one of the current AI enabled gold-rushes is AI facilitated mass surveillance while another is using mRNA to cure illnesses by "rewriting the programs your body runs on"—neither of which is likely to provide a net benefit to humanity). Put differently, the tool amplifies whatever its user brings to it, but most people instead rely upon AI to do everything for them.

Note: since America’s tech industry originates from a very left-wing area, it exists within a cultural ethos where presenting the appearance of aiming to benefit humanity is paramount. Because of this, many people I’ve spoken to have collectively seen more investor pitches than I can count from Silicon Valley tech companies over the years that claimed the company would help humanity but in reality were entirely about profit and often later created a negative impact on humanity (e.g., Facebook’s first president recently admitted he deeply regrets what they did to children’s brains). Because of this, I am fairly skeptical about all the (repackaged) utopian language I am seeing being increasingly wrapped around AI—particularly since more and more military spending is going towards developing AI weapon systems, which I feel is very dangerous for humanity (as once human beings are no longer held back by being confronted with the visceral reality of killing another person it opens the doors to unspeakable horrors occurring).

Datacenter Proliferation

Despite unresolved questions existing on the inherent worth of AI, leaders around the world (who seem unable to grasp AI is well suited for certain tasks but not others) have made the decision to go all in on creating robust national AI frameworks as AI dominance has been equated with economic supremacy and being a superpower in the 21st century.

In America’s case, this has mostly meant the government clearing the way for private money rather than building anything itself. On his second day back in office (building on the precedent he established in his first term of expediting business projects he felt advanced America’s interests—such as Operation Warp Speed or obtaining massive amounts of ventilators and hydroxychloroquine), Trump hosted the launch of Stargate (a $500 billion, four-year private venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and MGX to build roughly 10 gigawatts of AI data centers—much of which has not yet come to fruition), and in July 2025 the White House released an “AI Action Plan” whose central pillar was “Build American AI Infrastructure.” The accompanying executive order designated any data center needing more than 100 megawatts of new power as a priority federal project, directed agencies to fast-track and narrow their environmental review, opened federal land (including contaminated Superfund sites) to them, and directed the Commerce Department to arrange loans and guarantees for qualifying projects with at least $500 million of private capital behind them. That same month's tax bill restored full immediate expensing for this type of investment,1 which David Sacks (who ran AI policy for the White House until this year) has credited as a key driver of what followed.

What followed has no precedent—Sacks told the G20 on September 2, 2026 that about $800 billion is being invested in AI infrastructure in the United States this year, that the figure is expected to reach $1.4 trillion next year, that the estimates keep being revised upward, and that the only comparable buildout was the railroads in the 1800s1 (it already exceeds the fiber-optic buildout of the internet era). The companies’ own numbers agree: Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta spent around $410 billion in 2025 and plan roughly $725 billion or more in 2026,1 with analysts projecting their combined spending will pass $1 trillion in 2027 and Goldman Sachs expecting $5.3 trillion from those four companies alone by 2030.1 In short, these are some of the most profitable enterprises in human history, and they are now spending so fast that Alphabet's (Google's) free cash flow went negative in the second quarter of 2026 for the first time since it became a public company.1

Much of this shows up as physical construction. The Census Bureau only recently began tracking data centers as their own category, and when it did, it found they had overtaken traditional office construction in the country.1 By July 2026 data center construction was running at an annual pace above $75 billion, up nearly 60% from a year earlier—during a month in which total U.S. construction spending fell (with residential construction down 7.3% from the previous year).1,2 Data center construction projects now account for nearly a quarter of all nonresidential building in the country (and the buildings are only about a fifth of a data center's cost; the equipment inside is the rest), with nearly three times as much spent so far this year as in the same period last year1 while nearly every other category of investment is flat or falling.1 In turn, one analyst group estimates AI capital spending is adding roughly 1.4 percentage points to U.S. growth this year,1 and Sacks has argued it accounted for about 75% of first-quarter GDP growth.1

Note: this spending is not confined to America. China, for example, is preparing to spend around 2 trillion yuan ($295 billion) over the next five years on data centers,1 the EU has announced a €200 billion "InvestAI" initiative,1 Saudi Arabia is deploying hundreds of megawatts of Nvidia and AMD chips through a state-backed company,1 and the UAE is building a 5-gigawatt AI campus in Abu Dhabi.1 One analyst group, in turn, puts global data center capital expenditure (by a narrower definition than Sacks's) at roughly $800 billion per year in 2026 and projects $31.6 trillion will be spent on AI infrastructure through 2050.1

Community Resistance

While understandable fears that AI will displace jobs have created public opposition to AI, the primary source of political pushback against the industry has actually come from communities AI data centers are being placed in. This is because:

•Data center processors require a massive amount of energy (a single facility can draw as much power as a mid-sized city), which in turn is spiking electricity demand1 and hence electricity costs in the areas around them (as the grid upgrade costs get passed to residential ratepayers—so a key fight in most states is over who pays for those upgrades). That said, the extent to which data centers are raising electricity prices is hard to quantify as estimates vary widely (e.g., some have found none, one found a 10-20% increase and others found far more; the clearest documented case is the PJM grid serving the mid-Atlantic, whose independent monitor attributed most of a ten-fold jump in capacity prices to data center demand), but even in the most cited extreme cases, other pre-existing factors could explain some of the increases that occurred.

Note: those upgrades also mean new high-voltage transmission lines being run through communities, which raises residential exposure to the low-frequency magnetic fields that IARC classifies as a possible carcinogen and which have repeatedly been linked to childhood leukemia at exposure levels far below existing standards (an association IARC considers real but unexplained, as no [accepted] mechanism has been established).1

•Since all that electrical usage creates heat, many facilities (particularly those using evaporative cooling) also require large amounts of water.1 As such, ia March 2026 study estimated that $10–58 billion of new water infrastructure will be needed by 2030 to meet this demand (assuming the water is even available), with data centers' additional peak-day requirement by then roughly matching New York City's entire daily water use.1 Presently, this translates to communities with robust water infrastructures being relatively unaffected, but smaller ones having challenges such as reduced water pressure and price increases, especially during surges (e.g., hot summer days). Furthermore, like the electrical cost increases, it’s hard to estimate exactly what degree of the increase can be attributed to data centers vs. pre-existing factors which were already increasing costs.

Note: evaporative cooling also produces blowdown (leftover water concentrated with salts, biocides, and corrosion inhibitors, plus traces of metals from pipes). This wastewater is usually sent to a municipal plant or a permitted discharge where poor handling can still stress a small treatment plant or creek.

•Data centers create a significant amount of constant noise (primarily due to the cooling systems, but also diesel generators during tests or outages, with some sites also having onsite turbines that run all the time). This noise makes it very unpleasant to live next to the centers and has resulted in many people who invested their lives into homes near the data centers wanting to move but having trouble doing so, with many saying the centers made their homes harder to sell (and as such, more and more heartwrenching documentaries are appearing on how communities have been negatively affected by data centers). Likewise, many are now reporting health effects from living in proximity to data centers (which is in part due to the air pollution their generators create1).

Note: since data centers need a lot of power, land, and fiber, many newer ones are being placed in less affluent communities, including in the Midwest, so this is becoming an increasing problem in my region (which is a large part of why I wrote this article)—while in contrast, it’s easy for people in more affluent areas that don’t host them (but often profit off them) to not notice as cheaper regions are favored for new data center deployment.

Because of this, there is increasing community pushback against the data centers, which has led to local politicians who approved them despite vocal opposition in their communities subsequently being recalled1 and data center opposition becoming one of the key issues in the midterms in certain affected districts.1,2 More than 300 state bills targeting data centers were filed in the first six weeks of 2026 alone,1 and in July New York's governor signed the nation's first statewide moratorium, pausing new hyperscale data center permits for a year."1,2

In response to this, the industry has become increasingly aggressive in buying up land for the data centers (and pressing landowners to sell), while utilities use eminent domain for power lines across private land to serve those sites, and the industry has both lobbied politicians at every level and sued municipalities to push the projects through—all of which is expected given how much money is being invested.

Note: the industry is also beginning to work on innovations (e.g., onsite power generation and closed-loop cooling), which illustrates the displacement effect is already beginning.

Likewise in response to the pushback:

•President Trump has recently taken the position it is against one’s interest to oppose data centers:

•Individuals like Vice President Vance have tried to find middle ground positions like emphasizing the necessity of tech companies needing to build the power generation for the data centers rather than take it from the local grid and spike local electrical prices.

•Fox News originally aired data center concerns (and claimed they could be solved with deregulation, infrastructure improvements or developers absorbing some of the costs). However, as public opposition grew (e.g., in March 2026, 71% of Americans opposed data centers being constructed in their areas) Fox pivoted to the position that supporting data centers was necessary for US technological dominance, and that opposing data center proliferation helped China’s interests (e.g., “You’re against data centers, you are for China”). In tandem, Republican leaders have pressed the position that opposition to data centers is (at least in part) a Chinese campaign against America’s interests.

Note: as I discussed in a recent interview with Pierre Kory, dealing in absolutes is immensely problematic for society. So, while it is true opposition to data centers likely helps China, and that some of that opposition is probably being egged on by groups that benefit from the Trump administration’s AI attempts being derailed, that does not negate the fact that the thing motivating most of the opposition to the data centers is the impacts they are having on communities.

•The large conservative influencers have become split on the datacenter topic (e.g., Ben Shapiro has said opposition to them equates to working for China and Russia, others have linked opposition to existing left-wing groups, Matt Walsh has rejected both panic-bans and a no-questions buildout, arguing there are real problems with how centers are being rolled out that require a serious public debate before the country sprints further, and Tucker Carlson has come out strongly opposed, arguing communities are being stripped of the power to say no while paying the costs and getting no convincing public benefit).

Data Center Health Effects

Thus far, in this newsletter, I’ve focused on one half of this equation: some individuals are much more sensitive to toxicity, and hence are disproportionately injured by pharmaceutical drugs but then gaslighted by their doctors and community when they experience those inevitable injuries. The way I make sense of this is by viewing injuries as distributing on a bell curve, where the severe injuries (that are unmistakeable) are fairly rare, while the less severe (but harder to recognize ones) are fairly common.

This distribution pattern sadly makes it easy to dismiss the injuries, as the extreme ones are rare enough that they can be written off as spontaneous coincidences unrelated to the pharmaceutical, while the common ones are minor enough they are either not recognized or attributed to something else. In contrast, the way I interpret this curve is that if I see a cluster of severe events, I immediately assume the agent is dangerous and there will likely be a massive number of less severe effects, and likewise, if I see a high rate of people reporting moderate reactions to something (especially in different parts of the body), that means there are severe ones hiding in the background.

The COVID Vaccine Bell Curve

Since the COVID vaccine is fairly toxic and was given to a massive number of people, beyond this bell curve occurring, all of it was amplified to the point people who are not trained to spot it could still tell it was occurring. As such, when the COVID vaccine was approved, I had concerns it would have issues (which led to me advising people to hold off on it until more was known), but I initially expected the issues to primarily be chronic problems like delayed onset autoimmune diseases, increases in cancer a few years down the road and future fertility impairments (the potential risk of which I felt would most likely exceeded the meager benefit the vaccine was likely to offer).

However, the week it was released to the public, I began seeing distant colleagues post on social media they felt absolutely awful after vaccinating (but still intended to continue) and having multiple patients each day (in the demographics the vaccine had thus far been rolled out to) complaining about fairly significant (but not life-altering) reactions to the vaccines they’d never experienced from other shots (which most of the other doctors wrote off as not enough to justify skipping the second dose—despite reactions typically being worse from the second one).

As such, within a week I realized I had significantly underestimated the toxicity of the shot, and began pleading with people I knew to not get it as I was fairly certain the reactions I was seeing meant there were also going to be a lot of more severe ones that likely would take a while to show up (after which I had to watch quite a few of the people I cared about who didn’t listen to me develop much more severe chronic complications from the vaccine). Likewise, after about a month, I started having people around the country (many of whom I had not spoken to in years) reach out to ask if the COVID vaccines could cause sudden death as this had happened to a relative or friend.

I share all of this to highlight both why I have been so upset about the whole COVID vaccine program (as with the extremely limited data I had access to at the time, I could tell within a month of their rollout they were one of the most dangerous pharmaceutical products in history—yet the regulators with orders of magnitude more data than me could not at that time—and instead have continued to double down on their safety claim regardless of how much evidence mounts against the vaccines) but also to give an illustration of how this bell curve functions in real life.

However, that is only one half of the story. The other is simply that people are more sensitive to stimuli in their environment (which often goes hand in hand with them being predisposed to illness following a toxin exposure). For example, one of the projects with this newsletter has been to expose the COVID-19 mRNA vaccine shedding phenomenon, something we were told was impossible based on the design of the vaccine, but nonetheless we saw more and more cases of as time went on and eventually collected enough data to determine there were clear reproducible patterns in what was happening that elucidated what was actually occurring (all of which I detailed here). With the shedding phenomenon, I was originally clued into its reality because a few highly-sensitive patients I knew told me they could tell if someone had recently been vaccinated (as it made them ill and they shared overlapping sensory observations) and because numerous unvaccinated women (closer to the middle of the bell curve) had shared with me being around a vaccinated individual significantly disrupted their menstrual cycle (indicating that while shedding reactions were less severe than COVID vaccine reactions, there were likely still rarer severe reactions I would likely later come across and eventually did).

The EMF Sensitivity Bell Curve

One of the areas where all these concepts best converge is with electromagnetic field sensitivity, as:

•A minority of people are “electrically hypersensitive” being both able to feel EMFs and becoming quite ill around them (which ultimately requires them to live in low EMF areas—which sadly are becoming increasingly rare).

•Some (myself included) are EMF sensitive (so we sometimes sense certain EMFs) and feel generally better in low EMF environments but can essentially tolerate everyday life (e.g., I will go to cities when I need to but prefer rural areas).

•Some don’t notice EMFs at all, but with careful deduction you can link certain symptoms they have to EMF exposure (which goes away once they go to low EMF environments or do things like turning off their wifi router at night and not keeping their phone by their bed).

•Many people really do not seem to be at all affected by them (but the data that would be needed to assess their longterm risks of things like cancer is not there).

As such, while a case can be made that EMF sensitivity is a primary contributing factor in many diseases (which has been observed by segments of the natural medicine field for decades), it’s also quite easy for someone who does not have a lived experience of the process to write it off—so that is what normally happens. Likewise, since so much of the economy revolves around EMF producing technologies, the necessary research in this area has been heavily suppressed (although a lot of it does exist if you know where to find it). Instead, the rebuttal typically is that EMFs are too weak to create ionizing radiation any biological effect must be thermal, and as all consumer devices are below the heating threshold, they are therefor harmless (whereas in reality the devices can still do many harmful things—particularly those in the microwave spectrum such as cellphones, bluetooth radar and wifi—which I suspect is due to their partial resonance with water). So as you might expect, the existing scientific consensus and mainstream research reject the notion of EMF sensitivity and the vast body of literature indicating it is harmful to life.

Note: two of the best books in print on the proven harms of EMFs are Devra Davis’s1 and Arthur Fristenberg’s.1 One of the most interesting studies I recently came across on this topic was one which discovered cell phones caused blood cells to clump together1 (a process I believe underlies many diseases and which “sensitive patients” are predisposed to).

Given this, the symptoms many reported from living next to data centers (and attributed to the noise they made) caught my eye:

Note: a * means there is also decent scientific support that chronic environmental noise (or, for air items, combustion exhaust) can cause or worsen the reported effect.

What people notice from the site (exposures):

Constant hum, high whine, or “vacuum left on,” indoors and outdoors* ¹ ² ³

Vibration or rattling in windows, walls, floors, porch, or sometimes the body ¹

A sense of pressure rather than an ordinary sound ¹

A tone or hum that still seems audible after going inside ¹ ²

Diesel, exhaust, “rotten,” or chemical odors when generators test or run ¹

Construction dust, dirt, truck traffic, and early-morning work

Bright site lighting / loss of darkness at night*

Most commonly reported effects:

Sleep disruption — trouble falling asleep, nighttime awakenings, waking early and being unable to get back to sleep* ¹ ² ³

Headaches or migraines* ¹ ² ³

Stress, irritability, anxiety, or feeling constantly on edge* ¹ ² (including feeling agitated even with earplugs or headphones ³)

Fatigue and poor concentration the next day* ¹ ²

Avoiding or no longer using the yard, porch, patio, or open windows* ¹ ²

More often reported around very loud cooling or on-site power:

Nausea ¹ ² ³

Dizziness or vertigo ¹ ² ³

Ear pressure, fullness, pain, or a “fluid” feeling ¹

Perceived hearing problems or hearing deterioration ¹

Feeling the sound or vibration in the head or chest ¹ ²

Tinnitus, or a tone felt in the head, skull, or behind the eyes; some with pre‑existing tinnitus report worsening during high‑noise periods* ¹ ²

Note: I have met a few EMF sensitive people who can hear EMFs and reported their tinnitus improves when they avoid EMFs (e.g., by turning off their house breakers at night).

Air and breathing:

Closing windows because of fumes or noise* ¹ ²

Asthma or breathing symptoms getting worse ¹ ² ³

Other common complaints:

Can’t sit outside, garden, entertain, or enjoy the property* ¹

Feeling like the house is no longer a quiet refuge* ¹ ²

Feeling trapped in the house* ¹

Worries about electricity bills, water, utilities, or infrastructure

Concerns about property value ¹

Pets becoming restless or behaving differently ¹

Fewer birds or other wildlife changes ¹

The reason this list caught my eye is that beyond it being immensely unfortunate for the people who have to deal with it, many of these symptoms (e.g., headaches, sleep disruption, fatigue, brain fog, anxiety or feeling on edge, nausea, dizziness, tinnitus) also overlap with what individuals with electromagnetic hypersensitivity (EHS) report1,2,3 and likewise, already EMF sensitive individuals report some of the other symptoms they experience (e.g., burning skin) near data centers.

This overlap in turn suggests:

•The same effects which trigger EHS are present with data centers, but, since they are stronger, rather than only the ends of the bell curve being affected, significantly more people (closer to the middle of the curve) are also being affected. So, much in the same way the COVID vaccines awakened the public to the dangers of the other vaccines (due to them being toxic enough large numbers of people were harmed the toxicity could no longer be covered up), the data centers could potentially do the same for the EMF issue.

•The overlap in symptoms is not due to strong EMFs being present by data centers, but rather due to the fact infrasound (sound below the typical threshold of human hearing which data centers generate and is a recognized hazard at high exposure levels) is a “harmful frequency,” and that some of the symptoms individuals experience from a variety of harmful frequencies have a significant overlap.

This hence made me curious about what was happening, as I did not see a reason why data centers would need to emit massive amounts of microwave radiation into their vicinity.

Note: with EMFs, the greatest effects individuals experience are typically from microwave sources. However, the fields generated by electrical wiring do also cause issues (particularly for more sensitive individuals) especially if “dirty electricity” (high-frequency electrical noise riding on household 50/60 Hz wiring) is present,1,2,3,4 a process that often is due to devices within the home (e.g., solar power inverters or certain types of bulbs sometimes need to be removed to provide EHS individuals with relief).

From looking this up, I discovered the actual issue appears to be that data centers draw their power through enormous non-linear loads (tens of thousands of switched-mode server power supplies, uninterruptible power systems, and variable-speed cooling), which inject harmonics and high-frequency voltage distortion (dirty electricity) back onto the grid—however rather than a few low output devices creating it, something which draws 10,000 times as much power as a house is doing it and affecting everything.1

Bloomberg News, in turn, in December 2024, published a remarkable study of 770,000 home power-quality sensors made by Whisker Labs (whose devices monitor the wiring inside homes to detect fire hazards, and which are dense enough that nearly 90% of American homes are within half a mile of one), cross-referenced against the locations of nearly 1,500 data centers.

Note: at the time this study was published there were far fewer data centers, far less pushback against them, and far less money behind them. As such, it is unlikely anything similar will be published again in the mainstream media despite the fact the issue Bloomberg highlighted has become much worse since late 2024.

Using the 8% total harmonic distortion threshold the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers considers damaging to equipment, Bloomberg consistently found:

More than three-quarters of the highly distorted readings in the country were within 50 miles of significant data center activity, and more than half of the households with the worst distortion were within 20 miles. The sensors with the cleanest power were typically at least 87 miles from any major data center. By the Census Bureau’s figures, about 3.7 million Americans live in the most affected areas.

The pattern held in rural areas as well as cities. In big urban areas the median distance to a data center was 14 miles for the worst readings versus 51 for the best; in rural areas it was 49 miles versus 103.

In Loudoun County, Virginia (home to “data center alley” and roughly 3,000 megawatts of capacity), the share of sensors exceeding the 8% threshold was more than four times the national average. In neighboring Prince William County, about 6% of sensors were over the limit, nearly all within 7 miles of a data center, with some readings reaching 12.9%. Around one newly opened Prince William facility, 78% of nearby sensors were above the limit in October. By contrast, in York County, Virginia, 80 miles from the nearest major data center, harmonics averaged under 3%.

In the Chicago area, more than a third of sensors showed sustained high readings over nine months, and over 9,300 of the county’s 16,000 sensors had at least one monthly reading at or above 8%.

The worst distortions occurred at night, when data centers make up a larger share of total demand (i.e., when everyone else is asleep and the servers are not).

Bloomberg tested whether large solar installations could explain the pattern and found they did not. It concluded that while the sensor data alone cannot prove a single cause, the correlation with data center proximity was too strong to be coincidence. As you might expect, the utilities questioned these findings (e.g., one company said its 200 grid monitors showed nothing unusual), but Bloomberg stood by them as numerous sensors across the same neighborhoods replicated the findings.

Note: this is also acknowledged within the industry itself, as data center engineering guides note that the harmonic disturbances these facilities generate can extend beyond the facility to anything connected to the same electrical infrastructure.1 Likewise, a 2025 industry piece concedes that customer loads can distort power for their neighbors.1

Bloomberg News also quoted a Bloom Energy executive explaining that AI workloads draw power in a sawtooth pattern of sudden swings rather than a steady line, which no grid was designed to absorb from one facility, let alone dozens (so given this and more importantly the massive demand being placed on the grid, a real risk exists our aging electrical infrastructure will not be able to handle the demands data centers are placing on them).

Notably, Bloomberg’s concerns centered on the health of electronics, highlighting that once AC power deviates from the ideal 60-cycle-per-second pattern, issues consistently emerge such as appliances running hot, motors in refrigerators and air conditioners rattling, lights flickering, increased fire risk during voltage surges, greater vulnerability to brownouts and blackouts, and billions of dollars in cumulative damage to home appliances and aging grid equipment.

However, as a limited body of research in dirty electricity has indicated, there are also consequences for the health of human beings, including many of the exact same symptoms individuals living by data centers have reported (e.g., sleep disruption, headaches or head pressure, irritability, anxiety or feeling on edge, fatigue, poor concentration or brain fog, dizziness or vertigo, tinnitus, worsened asthma or breathing, and nausea).1,2,3

Note: animal studies also corroborate certain effects of dirty electricity (e.g., a study of 1,705 cows across 12 dairy farms found milk production fell in proportion to the number of transients and harmonics on the farms' power, that the cows' behavior tracked the voltage measured on their legs, and that the distortion was coming from the utility lines rather than the farms themselves).

Furthermore, many of the symptoms reported near data centers that are not classically associated with dirty electricity (e.g., ear fullness or pain, hearing deterioration, feeling the sound in the chest) have been extensively linked to infrasound exposure1,2,3,4 (along with it being widely recognized certain animal species like elephants can hear infrasound or become more agitated when it is present).

Since Bloomberg’s data only showed what was reaching people’s homes, I also wanted to know what was actually coming out of the data centers themselves. It turns out this was measured in a 2026 study,1 where researchers put a magnetometer inside the server room of a university’s data center and recorded the electromagnetic field continuously for a month (although this was a small facility with 250 servers running at about half capacity, so nothing like what is being built for AI).

What they found was that the field itself was not particularly strong (around 0.5 microtesla), but it was very distorted. On a typical day, the distortion averaged 36%, during working hours it rose to 65%, and 41 times during the month it spiked far beyond that (in one case to 330%, at which point the “noise” on the signal was three times larger than the signal itself). To put those (likely conservative) numbers in perspective, the same instrument in an office in the same building measured 5–7% during the day and 21–24% at night.

Finally, like Bloomberg, the authors of the 2026 study were only concerned with what this did to equipment (e.g., they noted the type of harmonics data centers produce don’t cancel out on the wiring but instead pile up in the neutral line, overheating wires and transformers), and the study had its limits (one sensor, one small facility, and it couldn’t measure the higher frequencies where computer power supplies emit the most). Nonetheless, it confirms that the electricity inside these facilities is far dirtier than what a normal building produces, and hence why homes twenty miles away from an AI data center drawing a thousand times more power are being affected (but again, the research needed to conclusively determine what is really happening has not been done).

Note: utilities typically only monitor dirty electricity harmonics up to about 2–3 kHz (as did both the Bloomberg report and the 2026 study), whereas the dirty electricity health studies focused on higher frequencies (the filters used in the school studies work between 4 and 100 kHz), which fall within the 2–150 kHz "supraharmonic" band that switching power supplies emit most strongly. That said, while they are almost never monitored on the grid, a 2023 study demonstrated that data centers also make emissions in these higher ranges.

Solving the Datacenter Dilemma

At this point, the AI sector appears to be facing a few critical bottlenecks:

•Shortages of chips and rare earth elements they need to function (much of which China currently controls the supply of but the United States is making an effort to create supply chains for).

•Insufficient energy to run the data centers (e.g., in a recent talk Musk stated the consensus estimate among analysts that follow the AI space very closely is that there will be at least a 15-gigawatt shortfall of power in 2027 for AI chips1 and there is often a 2-5 year wait time for the major power components like generators and transformers data centers require1 along with grid interconnection queues that commonly run two to three years).

•Inability of the electrical grid to sustain the power loads AI data centers requiring external power are creating.

•Increasing public pushback against data centers that has the potential to block new constructions or shift elections.

These constraints make the industry’s forecasted exponential growth (which has fueled their rapid rise in stock values) unlikely on the advertised timeline as the deployable capacity is likely to cost more than projected and take a while to arrive.

As such, a few (non-mutually exclusive) possibilities exist:

•First, AI encountering structural limitations that make it fail to live up to its hype will prevent it from taking over our society, or at least give us time to adapt to it.

•Second, to aid AI in overcoming the obstacles it faces, there will be increasing pressure to support it (e.g., consider how much Fox’s positions on the topic shifted over the last year). To this point, it must be emphasized that changing the party in power is unlikely to impede the AI roll-out as while certain Democrats are beginning to publicly oppose the datacenter push, the major tech companies primarily support the Democrat party, and hence will ensure the push continues if the presidency flips in 2028 (much as Biden, days before leaving office, signed his own order opening federal land to AI data centers, which Trump simply revoked and replaced with a more aggressive version; and not unlike how Kamala Harris cast doubt on “Trump’s COVID vaccine” in October 2020 and then pushed it onto the public once elected1).

•Third, the pressures facing AI will force the industry to develop a better solution that allows the technology to scale without public pushback (which, given the law of displacement, I believe is the only realistic option to make things better here).

Since data centers need enormous amounts of power and are best placed where no one lives, Elon Musk has proposed an elegant solution that is very on-brand: use SpaceX’s launch capacity to put the data centers in orbit alongside Starlink and run them on solar power (which in the right orbit is nearly continuous and up to eight times more productive than on the ground). SpaceX, in turn, has filed with the FCC for up to one million data center satellites, Google is launching prototype satellites carrying its AI chips in early 2027, Nvidia announced a space-rated GPU, and China has already run an AI model in orbit on a small constellation.1,2

However, while this could potentially solve many of the problems we are facing, I do not think this can be scaled to the degree needed as:

Everything a data center does eventually turns electricity into heat. In vacuum that heat can be dumped to the environment only by thermal radiation. At temperatures chips can survive, each square meter rejects only a modest amount of power, so an orbital node is mostly solar arrays and radiators around a relatively small compute payload. However, getting that cooling to be light enough is a real jump from currently existing options (e.g., the international space station’s radiators are on the order of 13 watts per kilogram, while published orbital-data-center concepts assume something like 160–350) and nothing in that class of what will be needed has been built at data-center scale yet.

Unlike on land, once in space, the hardware most likely cannot be fixed or upgraded (satellites in low orbit are almost never serviced; they are replaced), which is a major issue as AI chips go obsolete every three to five years (and possibly faster in space due to radiation shortening the chip’s life). Given the cost needing to replace all the data centers every few years adds (unless we have an inconceivable paradigm shift like say UFO antigravity technology being discovered or functional servicing robots being deployed to space) I am hence, doubtful this approach will ever be able to economically compete with the land based model (despite Musk’s knack for making the impossible possible).

Getting large amounts of data down from orbit (or up to it) is much harder than sending the same data through fiber on the ground (making fiber much cheaper than space links).

Beyond the sheer cost of launching all of that into space, scale itself is a manufacturing problem. A million satellites of the size SpaceX describes would take many years at build rates far beyond today’s Starlink production, and with the demonstrations being scheduled for late 2027, this likely puts any meaningful space data center capacity in the 2030s.

As such, I think this proposal realistically could be used for niche applications (space-native data, some batch training, or a future orbital data infrastructure for colonizing Mars), but I do not see a viable path for it to beat terrestrial facilities on general-purpose computing.

However, there is another approach I believe can displace the data centers flooding our communities.

The War on Climate Change

I care immensely about the health of the earth, so for a long time I was a fairly committed environmentalist. However, in the early 2000s, I distanced myself from that movement due to a more unfortunate occurrence of the law of displacement: one prong of the environmental movement (reducing carbon dioxide to prevent global warming) becoming a lucrative thing to promote (e.g., by selling expensive hybrid cars or carbon credits) and rapidly taking over the movement. I objected to this because:

•It caused the other legitimate environmental issues I cared about and had fought for to be pushed out of the discussion.

•It was highly debatable if carbon dioxide emissions were causing global warming (or even problematic), so I felt the dire predictions were unlikely to happen, and if they actually were going to occur as forecast, the changes were so rapid it was unlikely anything could be done to stop them.

•Reducing global warming was an extremely nebulous target, so it could never be falsified and the goal posts would be possible to continually shift on it. As such, once the inertia behind this orthodoxy became established, it would be immensely difficult to overturn it, so as time went on, it would inevitably consume more and more of the environmental movement.

Note: in 2009, a series of hacked emails indicated that global temperature data had been distorted by climate scientists1 (with reactions, based on political leanings, ranging from it being treated as proof global warming was a hoax, to acknowledgments illegal scientific misconduct occurred but not questioning of the underlying consensus, to attempts to excuse everything).1,2,3 Around this time, the environmental movement pivoted from global warming to the even more nebulous term “climate change” (something I suspected could likely be attributed, at least in part, to solar cycles and weather modification programs).

•The measures being implemented to stop global warming and carbon dioxide emissions skipped the options that could produce clear tangible results (e.g., stopping slash and burn farming practices in the rain forests) and instead focused on technologies with their own host of issues that primarily served to centralize power and make money.

Note: this is commonly analogized to how leaders in the new environmental movement would tell people not to drive cars but then fly on private jets to climate change conferences.

That said, I do think an argument exists for shifting away from fossil fuels due to the (non-carbon dioxide) emissions they create, so I’ve spent a while looking at every alternative energy option which exists, particularly since I’ve held the longstanding belief technologies which reduce the profitability of large markets inevitably get sidelined (e.g., this newsletter is devoted to showing how better and far cheaper medical alternatives have existed for decades but been largely kept off the market by the medical monopoly).

Note: I also hold the minority view (detailed here) that petroleum is not biological in origin but continually upwells from deep within the earth (and contains biological traces because it was the birthplace of the earliest lifeforms)

Because of this, over the years, I’ve spoken to numerous people researching “free energy” systems and seen a few which, when demonstrated, were quite compelling. From looking at the existing options, I eventually concluded “green nuclear power” was likely the most practical and viable option we had available to adequately address the energy needs of humanity, but then as the decades went by, much as I’ve seen with many transformative medical discoveries, I watched the promising nuclear designs go nowhere.

However, much in the same way the data center moment is finally creating the potential window to bring widespread attention to EMF toxicity, the unprecedented need for massive power generation in the immediate vicinity of data centers (along with the current Iran war) is finally creating the window to bring green nuclear power to market as more money can finally be made off a cheap and abundant energy source than the energy industry has made by locking the world into a limited and overpriced commodity.

Nuclear Power Designs

Every atom is composed of a nucleus of positively charged protons and neutrally charged neutrons (with the common isotope of hydrogen being the only one lacking neutrons) along with nearly massless negatively charged electrons which surround the atom’s nucleus. In most chemical reactions, while electrons shift, the nucleus never changes. But when it does, a nuclear reaction occurs, and the total mass of the nucleus shifts.

Anytime an atomic mass shift occurs, the collective mass of the resulting parts typically do not exactly total to what they were before, as some of that mass is converted to energy. The famous equation E=mc2, in turn, quantifies this shift, illustrating that a tiny amount of mass being lost creates a massive amount of energy (as “c” equals the speed of light).

In stars, the immense heat and pressure primarily create these shifts by causing light nuclei to fuse together, whereas on Earth they occur naturally through radioactive decay. Very large nuclei (or those with the wrong number of neutrons to hold the nucleus together) are the least stable, so nuclear engineering focuses on the few heavy isotopes that can be made to split apart when struck by a neutron, releasing that stored energy on demand.

When the nuclear age began, uranium was identified as the optimal element for nuclear applications as beyond being intrinsically radioactive, one of its naturally occurring isotopes, U-235, could undergo fission (splitting into two much smaller nuclei), and the neutrons released when it split would trigger fission in adjacent U-235 atoms, thereby creating a chain reaction that quickly released a vast amount of energy. Nuclear power hence focused on using fuel with enough U-235 to sustain fission, plus neutron-absorbing control rods that could slow or stop the reaction so energy was released gradually enough to harvest for power rather than run away, while nuclear weapons (at least the early U-235 designs) focused on assembling a supercritical U-235 mass fast enough that the fission reaction ran away and exploded.

Note: a few natural nuclear reactors have been found in uranium deposits in Gabon, where two billion years ago, the ore still had enough U-235, and groundwater slowed the neutrons enough for a fission chain reaction. The reaction ran in pulses: heat boiled the water off, the reaction stopped, the deposit cooled, water returned, and it started again.

However, while U-235 is an optimal isotope to use for nuclear applications, it still has a few major problems.

First, only 0.72% of the earth’s uranium is U-235, whereas much higher uranium U-235 concentrations are needed for nuclear applications (typically 3–5% for nuclear reactors and around 90% for nuclear weapons).

Note: uranium enriched above 20% is called highly enriched uranium and is considered weapons-usable, whereas uranium enriched to 90% U-235 is called weapons grade uranium.

This, in turn, leads to two issues:

•In addition to uranium mining and milling creating large amounts of radioactive tailings to obtain uranium, since most of the uranium obtained is not U-235, concentrating the small fraction that is into usable fuel leaves the majority of it behind as "depleted" uranium. This waste is still radioactive, has piled up by the hundreds of thousands of tons, and some of it is used by the military for armor and ammunition, as uranium's density allows it to punch through other metals (but those rounds aerosolize into dust after hitting a target, which has been a major issue in many of the areas where these munitions were deployed).

•Concentrating the U-235 is challenging, as the uranium must first be converted into a fluoride gas (uranium hexafluoride) so its isotopes can be separated—originally through gaseous diffusion, and now with gas centrifuges, the difficulty of which has been a major barrier to smaller countries obtaining uranium-based nuclear weapons. The Iran conflict, in turn, was driven in large part by the fact Iran had developed centrifuges to enrich uranium for nuclear power and fears existed that this capacity could be pushed to the much higher enrichment required for nuclear weapons.

Note: many have wondered why something as toxic as fluoride is put into the water supply. The idea originated in the 1930s with the aluminum industry (Alcoa), which faced mounting lawsuits over fluoride pollution from its smelters and hence had a strong interest in the chemical being seen as beneficial. America’s Public Health Service was initially wary of it due to fluoride's toxicity. However, as documents declassified in the 1990s showed, the Manhattan Project needed enormous quantities of fluorine to enrich uranium, its workers were being injured and killed by it (deaths that were kept secret for fifty years), it was venting fluoride over the surrounding communities, and it was already being sued by farmers. So in 1944 the bomb program secretly organized and paid for a conference on fluoride's health effects while having the Public Health Service host it under its own letterhead, and its chief fluoride toxicologist, Harold Hodge, then chaired the advisory committee for the first water fluoridation trial at Newburgh, New York—which his classified program at the University of Rochester quietly monitored, collecting blood and placenta samples from residents to learn how much fluoride the body retains. Six years later, the official who endorsed fluoridation for the United States was Oscar Ewing, previously Alcoa's Wall Street lawyer (all of which is detailed in this 2004 book).

Second, once U-235 is obtained, the reactors still have a few key problems:

•The most well recognized is that both the chain reaction and the heat the fuel keeps producing after it is shut down have to be continuously controlled, so if the cooling or shutdown systems fail, the fuel can melt, destroy the reactor, and release radioactive material into the environment. This is what happened at Chernobyl in 1986 and Fukushima in 2011, nearly happened at Three Mile Island in 1979 (where the core partially melted but very little radioactivity escaped), and also occurred in a number of earlier military and experimental reactors that were barely reported at the time.

Note: these include a partial meltdown at a Canadian research reactor in 1952, another at the Santa Susana site outside Los Angeles in 1959 (whose extent was concealed for twenty years), a 1961 explosion at an Army reactor in Idaho that killed three operators, a partial meltdown at a breeder reactor near Detroit in 1966 (which most of the public only learned of from a book published nine years later), and several Soviet nuclear submarines whose reactors lost cooling at sea (most famously the K-19 in 1961, where crew members died of radiation sickness after improvising a repair), all of which were kept secret until the Soviet Union collapsed.

•The less recognized issue is that even “normally functioning” nuclear reactors release some radioactivity into their vicinity, and a number have had unplanned leaks of tritium and other material into local groundwater. The data I’ve seen, in turn, has led me to believe real health issues exist with this, but like many inconvenient things, the actual health effects on nearby residents have not been sufficiently researched and remain an open question.

Thorium Reactors

In addition to concentrated U-235 driving nuclear reactors, another alternative exists: exposing thorium to neutrons, which converts it into U-233, a uranium isotope that also undergoes fission (but being much shorter-lived than U-235, is much rarer in nature and cannot be procured through mining or enrichment). Thorium designs, in turn have a few major advantages over U-235 ones as:

•There is 3-4 times as much thorium in the earth as uranium,1 mining it is cleaner than uranium, and since all of it is an isotope that can be used (rather than only 0.72%), beyond far less needing to be mined, large amounts of depleted nuclear waste are not created (though, as discussed below, the reactor still needs a small amount of fissile fuel to start it).

Note: once mined, thorium is usually mixed with rare-earth elements it must be separated from. That is both an advantage (those rare earths are strategically scarce) and a disadvantage (the separation is complex and uses harsh chemicals). As such, we already “mine” thorium, but it is presently disposed of as an unwanted radioactive waste from rare-earth processing.

•In the molten-salt designs usually paired with thorium, the fuel is already a liquid at low pressure, so there is no solid core to melt (reducing the risk of nuclear meltdown); if it overheats, the salt expands and the reaction slows, and it can be drained into a dump tank to shut down without pumps (the trade-off being that a leak anywhere in the system releases highly radioactive liquid, and the salts slowly corrode the reactor's plumbing, which remains the main engineering hurdle).

Note: some thorium designs instead use a particle accelerator to supply the neutrons (so the reaction stops the moment the accelerator is switched off, and the reactor can also burn existing nuclear waste). The concept has been pursued for over thirty years (most notably by a Nobel laureate at CERN in the 1990s), and Belgium and China are each currently building demonstration units, but none has yet operated, as the accelerator required to drive a commercial reactor is so expensive it costs about as much as the plant itself—which is why molten salt, rather than accelerators (which may ultimately be the superior technology), has become the focus of thorium development.

•Thorium reactors make far less long-lived non-uranium nuclear waste (plutonium, americium, curium) than conventional reactors, because thorium is lighter than uranium and does not climb the ladder of neutron captures as easily (but at the same time still produce ordinary fission-product waste).

Note: some thorium reactor designs (e.g., the accelerator ones) claim to further reduce the resulting nuclear waste.

•Thorium reactors greatly reduce (but do not eliminate) the risk of nuclear proliferation. Thorium itself cannot sustain a chain reaction, so a reactor needs a small amount of fissile material to start it, but once running it breeds its own fuel (U-233) from the thorium, which means a country does not need the standard enrichment plants that are also the path to weapons-grade uranium, and the reactor produces very little of the weapon’s grade plutonium formed in uranium reactors. Nuclear weapons can be made from U-233 (the United States tested this), but the U-233 a reactor produces is typically contaminated with U-232, whose decay products emit intense gamma radiation, making the material dangerous to handle, difficult to fabricate into a weapon in secret, and easy for detectors to spot.

Note: since Iran has been adamant it needs nuclear power to address the (real) rolling blackouts the country faces, during the war a former congressman proposed offering Iran American thorium reactor technology in exchange for permanently ending uranium enrichment, on the logic that this would give Iran electricity while making the weapons pathway harder to exploit rather than dependent on inspectors (although without additional safeguards nuclear weapons could still be made). As far as I can tell this never made it into the actual negotiations (which centered on enrichment limits, Iran's existing stockpile, and IAEA access), and in any case it could not have been implemented on any near-term timeline, as no commercial thorium reactor yet exists.

This then raises an obvious question: if thorium was the superior technology, why was it never adopted? Simply put, because the entire American nuclear complex was built as a weapons program with a civilian branch attached, and uranium was the fuel that made weapons. Enriching it produced bomb material directly, irradiating it produced plutonium, and so the enrichment plants, production reactors, and reprocessing facilities were all built around the uranium fuel cycle (with the civilian reactors that followed adapted from the Navy’s submarine designs and fed from that same infrastructure).1 Thorium’s low proliferation risk, which is now its great selling point, at the time simply meant it did not offer what the nuclear establishment wanted. The decisive moment came in the early 1970s, when the Atomic Energy Commission (at Nixon’s direction) committed the country’s reactor future to a liquid-metal breeder that ran on plutonium, and its reactor chief pursued that program, in Weinberg’s words, “with Rickoverian dedication: woe unto any who stood in his way.” Weinberg kept arguing that his molten salt reactor was the safer path and was pushed out of Oak Ridge after eighteen years as its director; the program was cancelled in 1973.1,2 Once that choice was made (and other factors reinforced it such as the Navy's light-water experience, abundant cheap uranium, and later cheap gas), the rest followed: the supply chain for uranium reactors was firmly established (making it difficult to justify creating an entirely separate one), regulatory requirements became far tighter after Three Mile Island (making it much harder for any new design to enter the market), and the existing industry became large enough to have the clout to keep competitors that would displace its plants, fuel mills, and licensing framework from getting off the ground (mirroring the pattern I have watched play out with countless forgotten medical technologies).

Notably, when the program was cancelled, Oak Ridge had already demonstrated the reactor itself worked, but simply had not yet built the remaining pieces (e.g., the chemistry for continuously processing the fuel salt, a solution to the slow corrosion of the reactor’s metal alloy by the fluoride salts, and a way to manage the tritium the salt produces)—all of which researchers believed could be solved but which have never been demonstrated at commercial scale, because the work was never funded.1 After that, essentially no new reactor designs of any kind were built in America, and the regulatory framework hardened around the light-water reactors that already existed, so a design that used liquid fuel at atmospheric pressure did not fit any of the rules (and there is still no licensing framework for a thorium fuel cycle anywhere in the world).1 Meanwhile, the original rationale for breeding fuel from thorium (a fear that uranium would run out) evaporated as uranium turned out to be abundant, and cheap natural gas removed any economic pressure to try something new.

The result is that the technology now requires an entire supply chain that does not exist, so Thorium, despite being abundant, currently has to be extracted from rare earth ores through costly processing, no facility exists to fabricate it into fuel, and a thorium reactor still needs a small amount of fissile material to start it,1 which means either the high-assay uranium fuel America is only now beginning to produce or plutonium.1 Finally, the fluoride molten salt these reactors run on requires lithium enriched to over 99.99% in a single isotope (lithium-7), and the United States has not produced enriched lithium since 1963—the only suppliers are China and Russia,1,2 China has at times restricted exports to feed its own reactor program,1,2 and a single molten salt reactor needs tens of tons of it (compared to the roughly 300 kilograms a year the entire existing American reactor fleet uses).1,2 That said, the first serious commercial attempt to restart domestic production was a $7 million seed round recently closed (on 8/31/26).1

What this essentially means is that for thorium technology to take off, two things are needed: a relaxing of regulatory restrictions (which has already begun: in May 2025, Trump signed four executive orders that set a goal of quadrupling U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, ordered the NRC to decide new reactor applications within 18 months, created the Department of Energy test-reactor pathway described below, and invoked the Defense Production Act for the nuclear fuel supply chain1) and a very large investment (which is now possible for the first time, as an industry has emerged that needs enormous amounts of power and is willing to pay almost anything for it). On the cost side, while no one can know the actual number until a commercial reactor is built, the published techno-economic models place thorium power among the cheapest sources of electricity ($20–55 per megawatt hour),1,2,3 which is a fraction of what new conventional nuclear plants cost ($175–255)1 and well below the roughly $110-115 that analysts estimate Microsoft agreed to pay for twenty years of power from a restarted uranium reactor at Three Mile Island (the contract price itself was not disclosed).1

For this to happen, the regulatory opening and the money have to start now, because of how long every step takes. Building the early reactors under Department of Energy authorization rather than NRC licensing can get a test reactor running within a few years (this summer that path took four privately developed test reactors from construction to criticality, one in about eight months1), but it does not license a commercial plant, and even the fastest program still needs years of operating data on salt chemistry, corrosion, and tritium before anyone will build the next size up. Likewise, the supply chain the reactors depend on (lithium-7 enrichment, fuel salt, thorium processing) does not exist at U.S. scale and has to be built alongside the reactor rather than after it works, which is why “a few billion dollars” is the entry price rather than the total. Put together, a serious American program could have a molten salt test reactor running by the end of this decade and first commercial power in the mid-2030s, with more money shortening the timeline by a few years but not skipping it. As such, thorium will not power the data centers going up this year—those will run on gas, restarted plants, and (if their schedules hold) the small uranium reactors now under construction, which at best can be sited away from people—but a decision now decides the second and third waves of data centers in the 2030s. China already has a molten salt reactor running and a public ladder toward a 10-megawatt demonstration around 2029–30, a larger one around 2035, and commercial units by 2040.1 So if America waits until those are built to begin, it will be buying the technology from China rather than fielding it.

Note: thorium is not the only promising nuclear design to have been shelved for lack of permission and money. In the 1990s, Argonne’s Integral Fast Reactor—a sodium-cooled design that recycled its own fuel on site, consumed existing nuclear waste, and had been running as a prototype for decades—was cancelled by the Clinton administration in 1994 with roughly three years of work left, on the grounds that it had “no foreseeable commercial value” and undercut nonproliferation goals rather than for any technical failure.1,2,3 Later, Bill Gates spent over a decade arguing that his company’s nuclear reactor design was ready and simply needed someone to fund the first plant (a partnership to build it in China collapsed under export restrictions in 2019); it finally received an NRC construction permit in March 2026, with federal cost-sharing, Meta (Facebook) as a customer, and a first unit targeted for around 2030.1,2,3 That plant is one of a handful of small modular and advanced reactors now actually being built or licensed in America (the others include Google’s salt-cooled reactors in Tennessee, which broke ground this April but whose first unit has slipped to 2029, and a pebble-bed design for Dow in Texas expected to be permitted next year), and restarts of existing plants such as Three Mile Island (targeted for 2027) are closer still.1,2,3,4 These are being funded in a way earlier reactor designs never were—the major technology companies have contracted for roughly ten gigawatts of nuclear capacity in two years, and the announced U.S. nuclear pipeline now stands near 74 gigawatts, much of it from data center buyers1,2,3—and while much of that will slip, they are the most immediately viable nuclear option for data centers: slower than gas, but arriving around 2030, well before any thorium reactor, and building the licensing precedent and industrial base thorium will need (Google's salt-cooled uranium reactor developer, for example, is already building its own fluoride salt plant and lithium-7 enrichment—the very supply chain thorium requires).

The Space of Alaska

While space fits some of the requirements for America’s data center project, the ideal site would be cold (so the enormous cost of cooling largely disappears), on U.S. soil (which is why the Nordic countries and Greenland, despite coming up constantly, will never receive serious consideration for strategic data centers), sparsely populated (so the noise, water, and dirty electricity land on no one), rich in energy that can be used on site rather than pulled off a residential grid, wanted by its state government, and reachable by the transport and fiber needed to move equipment in and data out. Alaska meets all of these except the last, and that gap is both the entire problem and the reason this moment is different from every earlier attempt to industrialize the North Slope.

The climate case is straightforward: Alaska’s mean annual temperature is about 35°F against Texas’s 65°F (and Deadhorse on the North Slope averages 14°F), which the governor has been telling operators saves a one-gigawatt campus on the order of $150 million a year in cooling costs.1 Likewise, Alaska’s low population density (740,000 people on a landmass larger than Texas, California, and Montana combined) aligns with data center needs and political support for the centers is already in motion—the Air Force is offering 4,700 acres at three Alaska bases for AI data centers, the state has issued a preliminary decision to lease a square mile of North Slope land to a company proposing a 1–3 gigawatt campus (disconnected from the grid and fueled by a new gas spur, with initial operations targeted for late 2028), and the governor has courted Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft for years with no state income, sales, or property tax to offer because Alaska has none.1,2,3

Likewise, Alaska produces far more energy than it uses, and the North Slope holds 37 trillion cubic feet of proven natural gas that has been stranded for fifty years because no pipeline was ever built to move it, so the gas produced alongside oil is simply reinjected into the ground.1 That fuel hence could be what the early data center campuses burn on site—which matters as Alaska does not have spare electricity in the grid state residents depend upon as the Railbelt serving Anchorage and Fairbanks peaks at about 750 megawatts, Cook Inlet gas is running out, and the utilities have already told the Air Force they cannot power large data centers at the bases from existing supply,1,2 so a single AI campus’s demand would exceed the entire Railbelt (and residents are already protesting a planned data center). As such, the model that works in Alaska is the one the lower 48 states lack (and may need in the near future): generation built next to the servers, consumed behind the meter, and never touching a residential wire or threatening the power grid. This is also what makes Alaska the natural home for the reactors discussed above, as the upcoming modular designs (which could also eventually be done with thorium) are small enough to place next to the data centers. The state, in fact, rewrote its nuclear siting law in 2022 to accommodate microreactors, the Air Force’s first one is being built at Eielson (construction 2027, operation 2030), and villages across the state still burn diesel at electricity rates far above anything in the Lower 48, so Alaska has exactly the kind of customers that first-of-a-kind reactors have always needed but never had.1,2,3 The North Slope has the gas; the rest of Alaska does not, and for sites away from it—the bases, the Interior, a Mat-Su industrial district—a reactor next to a data center is the only way to get gigawatt-scale firm power without a pipeline, and the data center is the only customer that will pay for the first ones.

Note: data latency, which is usually cited against Alaska, actually sorts the workload sensibly. AI training (the gigawatt-scale load causing most of the harm in the Lower 48) does not care about distance, since nearly all its traffic stays inside the building (training data is moved in once; it is not streamed). Inference that serves users does, and Alaska is far enough from Seattle to rule out the most latency-sensitive applications in the Lower 48. But Anchorage is closer to Tokyo than California is, and a planned trans-Pacific cable landing through Alaska would make it the shortest path between the United States and North Asia.1,2 As such, Alaska could take the training load and Asian-facing inference, while the small inference sites the Lower 48 actually needs stay near their users at a fraction of the scale now being imposed on communities.

The state’s compensation structure is another piece the Lower 48 has never had. Alaska is already built on the principle that resource extraction pays the public: the Permanent Fund, funded by oil royalties, now supplies roughly 60% of the state’s general revenue and still pays every resident a dividend,1 and the Native corporations created in 1971 own 44 million acres and are required to share 70% of their subsurface resource revenue across all twelve regions.1 None of this applies automatically to a data center on state land, and the central dispute in the lease now under review for the North Slope campus is precisely whether the state collects a real royalty or leases a square mile of Arctic at pasture rates.1 But the tools exist (whereas they do not in places like Virginia’s data center alley) and a lease written with a percentage of gross receipts flowing to the fund and, where the land or gas is Native, to the corporations, turns the host from a victim into a shareholder—which is the only arrangement under which “no one fights it” is actually true.

Infrastructure is the final constraint that decides whether Alaska could be a national solution or a press release, and the best candidate to start is Prudhoe Bay as the North Slope was built by barge and hence does not require connecting railways to be built (since 1968, the industrial plant has arrived by summer sealift during the six-to-eight-week window when the ice retreats, with modules the size of ten-story buildings offloaded at the West Dock causeway, and the heaviest equipment still moves there way).1,2 Deadhorse, in turn already has the dock, the airport, the highway, fiber along the corridor, and a workforce accustomed to shift work at forty below, and it sits on top of gas with no other buyer. A pilot campus there does not have to invent an Arctic port or wait for an 800-mile export pipeline; it only has to prove the load, the lease, and the power. Fiber is the harder part: sea ice has cut the Arctic subsea cable twice, most recently in January 2025, when 20,000 residents from Utqiaġvik to Nome lost fiber for over seven months because repair ships could not reach the break until the ice cleared.1 So the training-first, Asia-later sequence depends on the redundant routes now being built (an overland link to bypass the ice-prone segment, a second Arctic cable, and the trans-Pacific landing).1,2 Rail comes after: a 471-mile extension of the Alaska Railroad from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay was studied before the oil pipeline was chosen and has been revived repeatedly at estimates of $8–11 billion (a fraction of the $40–55 billion gas line), and it would carry the transformers, modules, and eventually fiber and power that would turn an isolated camp into a district.1,2 It does not need to exist for the first barge-fed campus; it needs to exist if that campus is going to become the second and third waves. Build the pilot on the dock that already works, then spend the billions to pin it to Fairbanks.

Note: other locations in Alaska would also likely make sense once additional railroads were developed—many of which have already been proposed or worked on (which amongst other things, would make it much easier to transport small modular nuclear reactors to them).

That said, there are still real challenged with the initial Alaska deployment. The first campus’s own filings call for seven million cubic yards of gravel to build a pad on the permafrost (nearly twice what ConocoPhillips was permitted for its Willow oil project) and project 1,500 construction jobs but only 60 permanent ones,1 everything (and everyone) has to be shipped or flown much farther than at a typical site in the Lower 48, gas generation still creates local air pollution even when it’s off the grid, and the “$500 million” figure being cited for the campus is only the first phase. Likewise, some Alaskans are already asking if the public will turn on data centers the way the Lower 48 has,.1 which will be a valid concern if what gets built is a few gigawatts of gas turbines on a lease that pays the state almost nothing. However, provided the campuses are kept off the grid and the leases actually compensate Alaskans, this approach eliminates the main problems with the current model (forcing a massive electrical and acoustic load onto people who never asked for it), and more importantly, creates a customer for vital energy technologies that have never had one. A campus that starts on gas can then switch to a microreactor, then a small modular reactor, then a thorium plant, without ever raising anyone’s utility bills, and the rail and fiber built to support it will remain useful regardless of whether the AI boom lives up to its hype.

In short, Alaska shows that while no ideal solution exists to the data center problem, innovators are nonetheless coming up with viable options that are significantly better than what we currently have on the table (e.g., I was quite surprised to learn how much work the state had put into this once I began researching if Alaska could potentially work). That said, I can’t say with certainty if Alaska is the best solution we have for protecting the public from data centers, but I nonetheless felt it was important to layout exactly what the state attempted, as it provides a framework with the real potential to displace what is currently happening.

Conclusion

Throughout America’s history, “successful” industries have emerged that owed part of their success to exploiting the communities they resided in, and in most cases, regardless of how much the public fought it, nothing could be done to stop it. So, given that the finances behind the AI dwarf what’s happened in the past, it is unlikely protest alone with be sufficient to stop this—particularly since it is nearly guaranteed this push will continue regardless of who is in power.

However, while we can’t necessarily stop it (unless the AI business model collapses on itself), we can provide the public pressure to direct things towards a manageable compromise, and if we are savvy, simultaneously solve one of the greatest challenges humanity has faced—finding a clean source of energy which can affordably meet humanity’s civilizational needs far into the future. Likewise, while I never expected this, it’s quite possible giving people the language to explain why they are suffering from the data center push may, at last, be the thing that brings widespread attention to EMF toxicity—something I have long believe to be one of the most neglected foundational determinants of health.

Because of the timelines required to bring many of these options to market, decisions will need to be made in the near future to initiate them, and it is my belief the fundamentals behind them are strong enough that if we do not, competitors like China likely will.

The data center issue has been immensely upsetting for me, so I’ve tried my best to come up with realistic solutions to the crisis we are facing and I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to consider them. My hope, in turn, is that this article provided some insightful ideas on how we can tactically respond to the data center push to turn an appalling situation into something we can instead benefit from and I thank each of you for giving me the voice which makes this type of work possible.

When a gold mine dies, it leaves the one thing nobody wants: the hole.

2026-09-09T00:00:00.000-07:00

This is far larger than it looks. every open pit mine is opened on a twenty year time horizon and fro mday one reserve expansion is a priority because it extends mine life. Thus secondary pits are common. with paid ifnrastructure lower grades can be accepted.

but once mined out ,the operator is normally running away.. This is a massive alternative that can make the asset perpetual. Better yet, there is always massive amounts of low mineralized waste which releases naturally in water. Putting that waste into the bottom of one of your pits will produce metal bearing water that vcan be then run through a reaction towwr as well. This can be as simple as running copper rich water over tin cans. that green pit water can stop been green. Think butte montana. That always had a potential secondary pit at hand and here is a way to clean up the old pit.

what you need to understand is that these pits go down around 2000 feet. one full of water and one empty gives you all the hydraulic head you ever want. and the power can be used to drive electrolytic cells as a backup consumption.

every single two pit mine system is a potential powewr plant.

Australia's largest gold mine closed in 2001 and left two open pits in far north Queensland, and engineers have now filled them with water and joined them through an underground powerhouse, so the holes the miners dug work as a 250-megawatt battery that starts in under 30 seconds

A shuttered Australian gold mine transforms from environmental scar into a massive power bank, storing renewable energy by pumping water between two massive pits.

By Brendan Brown

Published September 6, 2026 ·

When a gold mine dies, it leaves the one thing nobody wants: the hole.

https://spacedaily.com/b-australias-largest-gold-mine-closed-in-2001-and-left-two-open-pits-in-far-north-queensland-and-engineers-have-now-filled-them-with-water-and-joined-them-through-an-underground-powerhouse-so-the-hol/

Kidston, 270 kilometers northwest of Townsville in far north Queensland, was once Australia’s biggest and richest gold operation. More than ninety years of digging ended in 2001, when the gold ran out and the town emptied, leaving behind an airstrip, worker housing, and two enormous open pits gouged into the outback — the classic stranded liability of the mining age.

Then somebody looked at the two holes and noticed the only fact that mattered: they sit close together, and one is much higher than the other.

A battery is just water and a hill

Pumped storage hydro is the oldest big battery there is, and the recipe is kindergarten physics. Put water in a high reservoir. When the grid needs power, let it fall through turbines to a low reservoir. When power is cheap and abundant, pump it back up. The water shuttles between two pools forever; the elevation difference is the battery.

The expensive part has always been building the two pools — dams, valleys flooded, decades of approvals. Kidston’s insight, developed by Genex Power, was that the mine had already dug them. The Wises pit became the upper reservoir, its rim raised with a ring dam built from the mine’s own waste rock. The deeper Eldridge pit became the lower one. Between them, engineers excavated what the miners never needed: a powerhouse cavern underground, with shafts and tunnels connecting the two pits, water from the upper pit falling some 220 meters through two reversible pump-turbines.

It is the first pumped hydro built in Australia in some 40 years — and the first anywhere on Earth built inside an abandoned gold mine.

The numbers on the nameplate

The converted mine, commissioned as K2-Hydro, stores 2,000 megawatt-hours — 250 megawatts of generation sustained for eight hours, enough to power on the order of 143,000 homes through an evening peak, making it the third-largest electricity storage device in the country.

And it is fast. From standstill, the plant can be generating in under 30 seconds — the rapid-response trick grid operators prize most, because it means the old gold pits can catch a sudden supply shortfall, or help restart a collapsed network, quicker than almost anything else on the system.

The mine’s leftovers subsidized the whole build. The workers’ accommodation, roads and airstrip were reused; the waste rock became the dam; an existing pipeline from the Copperfield Dam supplies the water. A 50-megawatt solar farm has operated beside the pits since 2017, with wind and more solar planned — the sun pumps the water uphill, and the pits give it back after dark. The $777 million project drew the largest loan in the history of the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, $610 million, plus $47 million from the federal renewables agency, and a new ~187-kilometer transmission line now ties the old mine to the coast.

There is even a dynastic flourish: the Genex co-founder who championed the project is named Simon Kidston — a descendant of the family line behind the town’s name, returning to switch the family hole back on.

The template in the ground

The reason agencies threw money at a remote dead mine is that Australia — like everywhere chasing high shares of solar and wind — has a storage problem measured in evenings: sunset removes gigawatts of solar just as demand peaks, and batteries of lithium can carry an hour or four, expensively. Pumped hydro carries eight, for decades, with machinery that outlives its financiers.

And the country is pocked with candidate holes. Australia has thousands of disused mine sites, and a national audit famously found many multiples more potential pumped-hydro sites than the grid could ever need. What Kidston proves is the conversion math: pits already dug, elevation already paid for in diesel and dynamite decades ago, infrastructure already standing. The knowledge from this build, the funding agencies note, is explicitly meant to be copied at other mines.

Which gives the story its clean inversion. For a century, the measure of Kidston was what came out of the ground — tonnes of gold, carted away until there was nothing left but absence. The absence turned out to be the second orebody. The miners dug a shape, and the shape was worth mining again: two voids and a height difference, refilled with the cheapest substance on Earth, now banking sunlight for north Queensland. The gold made men rich for ninety years. The hole may serve longer.

When Economic Stabilizers Destabilize the Economy

2026-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Here is the real issue. speculative bubbles cause major distotion and the political demand to print money to escape it all. We have watched cycle after cycle.

we actually had sound money from Reagan through clinton. Then the dot com bubble ended that.

today we have the unusual trump Wreaking Ball while a printing press turns it all into a stock bubble. tulip bulbs anyone?

When Economic Stabilizers Destabilize the Economy

September 4, 2026

https://www.schiffgold.com/guest-commentaries/when-economic-stabilizers-destabilize-the-economy

Mainstream economists insist that recessions can only be cured by increasing government spending, a doctrine popularized by Keynes and his followers and defended even by prominent economists who have only half-jokingly suggested manufacturing crises to justify it. Murray Rothbard’s Austrian analysis turns this on its head, showing that government intervention prolongs downturns by further distorting the economy’s structure of production rather than allowing the market to correct the excesses of the prior boom.

The following article was originally published by the Mises Institute. The opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect those of Peter Schiff or SchiffGold.

One of the standard holy doctrines of modern macroeconomics is the claim that the only way to end a recession is to increase government spending. John Maynard Keynes formalized this doctrine in his infamous The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money and his disciples then spread the word in the halls of academe and government.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman put an exclamation point on this idea as he claimed during a broadcast on August 14, 2011, that the best way to pull the economy to full employment in the waning days of the Great Recession was to “prepare for an imaginary invasion of space invaders.” While his idea was tongue-in-cheek, he was serious about the need for ramping up government spending, as he believed that even creating whatever was necessary to fight space aliens—even if none of it was ever used—would be valuable to the economy because it would increase spending.

Paul Krugman hardly is the only Keynesian economist who advocates massive spending to get out of a recession, but he had the best and most influential vantage point, being the main economics columnist for the New York Times for more than 20 years. Writes Robert Murphy:

There’s one saving grace about Paul Krugman’s column at the New York Times: when an Austrian economist wants to explain how mainstream economics leads to ruin, he can always trust Krugman to set up the target in a clear, concise manner. This saves us a lot of work, because we don’t have to first build up the position before knocking it down.

Like his other Keynesian allies, Krugman believes that a market economy naturally trends toward “underconsumption,” with consumers having the propensity to save too much of their income (the “Paradox of Thrift”), thus leaving too little money for spending, which then drags down the economy. Krugman has gone as far as to claim that recessions happen because consumers stop spending. He writes:

. . .one of the high points of the semester, if you’re a teacher of introductory macroeconomics, comes when you explain how individual virtue can be public vice, how attempts by consumers to do the right thing by saving more can leave everyone worse off. The point is that if consumers cut their spending, and nothing else takes the place of that spending, the economy will slide into a recession, reducing everyone’s income.

Keynesians hold that the economy is directed by “aggregate demand,” that is, overall spending, and that if consumers slow their spending, then the central bank can respond by lowering interest rates, which would encourage businesses to borrow money for expansion purposes, thus redirecting some of the lost consumer spending. However, according to Keynesians, if interest rates already are near-zero, then lowering rates is self-defeating and can lead to a “liquidity trap.” Murray Rothbard explains:

The ultimate weapon in the Keynesian arsenal of explanations of depressions is the “liquidity trap.” This is not precisely a critique of the Mises theory, but it is the last line of Keynesian defense of their own inflationary “cures” for depression. Keynesians claim that “liquidity preference” (demand for money) may be so persistently high that the rate of interest could not fall low enough to stimulate investment sufficiently to raise the economy out of the depression. This statement assumes that the rate of interest is determined by “liquidity preference” instead of by time preference; and it also assumes again that the link between savings and investment is very tenuous indeed, only tentatively exerting itself through the rate of interest.

Once the economy falls into a liquidity trap, according to Keynesians, then the only thing that can rescue it and restore full employment is for government to ramp up its spending. As Keynesians argued, the presence of a liquidity trap meant that consumers would indefinitely hold onto their money, waiting for interest rates to inevitably rise, and in the meantime, the economy would slowly grind to a halt. As Henry Hazlitt put it, this would be a “frozen disequilibrium” or, to put it in a more humorous note, it would be a situation resembling the band at the end of the movie Animal House trying to march through a wall.

The idea is that when the economy is in a liquidity trap, only outside intervention by government can reverse the slide. Mainstream economists speak of so-called automatic stabilizers in which government policies act in a counter-cyclical way to reverse harmful economic trends. According to the Tax Policy Center of the Brookings Institute:

Automatic stabilizers offset fluctuations in economic activity without direct intervention by policymakers. When incomes are high, tax liabilities rise and eligibility for government benefits falls, without any change in the tax code or other legislation. Conversely, when incomes slip, tax liabilities drop and more families become eligible for government transfer programs, such as food stamps and unemployment insurance, that help buttress their income.

The reasoning seems cut-and-dried. When the economy falls into recession, GDP falls, which means overall spending seems to have also fallen, so it would seem logical that boosting spending in any way possible would jumpstart things and reverse the trend. Likewise, in good times the government can raise taxes to offset the inflation created by an “overheating” economy and keep the excesses of the boom in check. (I remember in 1980 hearing former Newsweek financial columnist Jane Bryant Quinn claim that the US government should raise tax rates to help curb the double-digit inflation ravaging the economy at the time. The top rates were 70 percent, but she advocated even higher rates).

The Austrian Counter to Keynesian “Stabilization”

Keynesian economics was built on the assumption of factors of production being effectively homogeneous and interchangeable. I wrote in 2009:

If I can put the whole Keynesian set of fallacies into one statement, it would be this: the modern Keynesians believe that the economy operates like a perpetual motion machine, with government spending being the “grease” that keeps it from slowing down. The “friction” in this economic machine, according to the pundits, is private saving. Eliminate it, and the economy goes on forever, adding energy and expanding indefinitely.

The Austrian viewpoint, articulated by Murray N. Rothbard, does not see the economy as a homogeneous mass, but rather as an intricate set of relationships in which a structure of production that has both specific and non-specific factors are guided by the market rate of interest which itself is determined by individual time preferences within the economy. The longer the time preferences of the economic actors within the economy, the longer and more complex the structure of production.

Rothbard outlined the Austrian business cycle theory in America’s Great Depression in which he critiqued the Keynesian theories as being harmful, with the countercyclical policies actually being counterproductive to an economic recovery once a recession set it. Furthermore, Rothbard did not attribute a recession to a lack of consumer and business spending, but rather as an inevitable breakdown of the structure of production due to a wasteful boom.

The two camps could not be further apart, as Krugman noted in his 1998 article in Slate in which he derisively referred to the Austrian theory as “The Hangover Theory.” In his piece, he accused the Austrians of turning business cycles into morality plays in which a recession is “the idea that slumps are the price we pay for booms, that the suffering the economy experiences during a recession is a necessary punishment for the excesses of the previous expansion.”

Krugman went on to label the Austrian view as destructive:

The hangover theory is perversely seductive—not because it offers an easy way out, but because it doesn’t. It turns the wiggles on our charts into a morality play, a tale of hubris and downfall. And it offers adherents the special pleasure of dispensing painful advice with a clear conscience, secure in the belief that they are not heartless but merely practicing tough love. Powerful as these seductions may be, they must be resisted—for the hangover theory is disastrously wrongheaded. Recessions are not necessary consequences of booms. They can and should be fought, not with austerity but with liberality—with policies that encourage people to spend more, not less. Nor is this merely an academic argument: The hangover theory can do real harm. Liquidationist views played an important role in the spread of the Great Depression—with Austrian theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Joseph Schumpeter strenuously arguing, in the very depths of that depression, against any attempt to restore “sham” prosperity by expanding credit and the money supply. And these same views are doing their bit to inhibit recovery in the world’s depressed economies at this very moment.

Yet, there is nothing that any Austrian economist has written that claims that recessions are simply moral outcomes of excessive economic behavior. Instead, they have noted that, over time, booms that are triggered by artificially low interest rates created by central banks will lead to unsustainable malinvestments that eventually collapse under their own weight. When that happens, Austrians argue, trying to “stimulate” the economy through outside spending makes things worse by further distorting the economy’s production structure. Writes Rothbard:

The most important canon of sound government policy in a depression, then, is to keep itself from interfering in the adjustment process. Can it do anything more positive to aid the adjustment? Some economists have advocated a government-decreed wage cut to spur employment, e.g., a 10 percent across-the-board reduction. But free-market adjustment is the reverse of any “across-the-board” policy. Not all wages need to be cut; the degree of required adjustments of prices and wages differs from case to case, and can only be determined on the processes of the free and unhampered market. Government intervention can only distort the market further.

Contrary to Krugman’s claim that such a policy is little more than punitive and imagined “tough love,” Rothbard points out that non-intervention allows for the re-establishment of lower time preferences that the economy needs for the redevelopment of a sound structure of production. He notes:

There is one thing the government can do positively, however: it can drastically lower its relative role in the economy, slashing its own expenditures and taxes, particularly taxes that interfere with saving and investment. Reducing its tax-spending level will automatically shift the societal saving-investment-consumption ratio in favor of saving and investment, thus greatly lowering the time required for returning to a prosperous economy. Reducing taxes that bear most heavily on savings and investment will further lower social time preferences. Furthermore, depression is a time of economic strain. Any reduction of taxes, or of any regulations interfering with the free market, will stimulate healthy economic activity; any increase in taxes or other intervention will depress the economy further.

To put it another way, the so-called stabilizers actually destabilize the economy. In America’s Great Depression, Rothbard documents the various interventions that the Herbert Hoover administration imposed upon the economy following the stock market crash of October 1929. Contrary to the standard narrative that the economy collapsed under Hoover because he “did nothing,” Rothbard shows how Hoover’s interventions blocked the recovery that the economy would have made had the president done nothing as his critics have claimed.

This last point is important because the moribund economy which Krugman referenced in his “space invaders” account in 2011 had seen massive government intervention following the Wall Street Meltdown of 2008 and the subsequent Great Recession that followed. Far from the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations following laissez-faire policies after the government-induced Housing Bubble collapsed, both presidents had the government massively intervene both on the spending side and by unleashing the Federal Reserve System to purchase government securities, stocks, and mortgage securities on a huge scale, as shown by the figure below. Yet, even after three years of intervention, the economy was sluggish with high unemployment and a slow recovery.

Krugman argued that the government hadn’t intervened enough and that because he claimed the economy was in a liquidity trap, the actions by the Fed were going to be ineffective, anyway. Yet, there is another way of looking at this, using the analysis Rothbard developed in America’s Great Depression.

Contrary to the standard macroeconomic narratives, a free-market economy does not tend toward that imaginary state of underconsumption in which the propensity of consumers to save “too much” of their income and drive consumption into a downward, recessionary spiral. Instead, when left alone, market economies can recover from crises. The history of the US economy is replete with recoveries that followed downturns with no appreciable government intervention being involved. As Rothbard noted in America’s Great Depression, the economy recovers from the collapse of the wasteful boom when the structure of production is permitted to match the time preferences of the economic actors within the economy.

It is doubly ironic, then, that those measures that mainstream economists have labeled as “stabilizers” actually destabilize an economic recovery. Economies do not recover because of these spending and regulatory measures; rather, recoveries occur in spite of these policies.

Conclusion

The standard Keynesian narrative, for all of its widespread acceptance in the world of academics, business, and government, is simply wrong. Instead of offering sound analysis, it turns the truth of the economy upside down, turning it into a crude blob of perfectly interchangeable factors that need only more money to be stirred into the pot in order to make the economy work.

Instead, as Rothbard clearly demonstrates in America’s Great Depression, the best way to grow the economy is to keep government out of the mix. Should government intervene, however, and drive the economy into a downturn, the solution is simple: get the government out of the economy. Intervention does not stabilize the economy; it destabilizes it.

The world is forgetting how to fear nuclear war

2026-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

The military application of an A bomb is very doubtful unless it is war by genocide. flash Banging Tehran or Jerusalum is a horrid idea and tactical is as useless as underground mining proved to be.

mohenjo daro was flash banged along with other known sites. We know nothing.

hiroshima has recovered. Yet thousands died in a moment and none were combatants. Zero military value in effect. The Russian assault had made surrender truly necessary

The world is forgetting how to fear nuclear war

As borders erode and arms control collapses, nuclear deterrence is losing its grip. The danger may be not just catastrophe, but normalizationPublished 3 Sep, 2026 14:21

https://www.rt.com/news/645092-world-forgot-nuclear-fear/

By Fyodor Lukyanov, the editor-in-chief of Russia in Global Affairs, chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy, and research director of the Valdai International Discussion Club.

Russia in Global Affairs RGA on Telegram

For decades, mutual deterrence among major powers provided the world with a degree of predictability, with the nuclear factor lying at the heart of this system since the middle of the last century. The great powers restrained one another and, in doing so, restrained themselves.

They understood that overly ambitious geopolitical adventures could carry unacceptable risks, thus “strategic stability” was the reassuring term given to what was, in reality, the capacity for mutual destruction. International institutions grew around this balance like mushrooms around a tree trunk, but beneath all the agreements and diplomatic language lay something much simpler: the fear of the consequences of a direct conflict between major powers. Now, however, that system is falling apart.

Many posit that the problem is precisely the loss of fear as political elites have ceased to believe that nuclear war is genuinely possible and hence the declining restraint we see in the conflict in Ukraine, in the Middle East and, potentially, in Asia.

The apparent solution is therefore to remind everyone just how terrifying nuclear war would be. Restore the fear, the argument goes, and states will once again exercise restraint and become ready to negotiate new rules. There’s logic to this, but there’s also an enormous danger.

What happens if nuclear weapons are actually used? Either they produce precisely the catastrophe humanity has feared for eight decades, with irreparable consequences, or something quite different happens, such as there’s terrible destruction, but the world does’t end and the weapon doesn’t even guarantee victory.

In that case, nuclear weapons could cease to be primarily a political and psychological barrier and become simply another means of warfare, albeit an extraordinarily powerful one. Would this restore fear? Or would states instead accelerate the development of nuclear weapons designed for more effective battlefield use? Well, in the present atmosphere of growing recklessness, either is conceivable.

Nuclear weapons are the most powerful weapons humanity has invented and they were created to fight wars, but we discovered that they could perform another function by preventing the largest and most destructive wars from occurring at all. Today, however, perceptions seem to be returning to their starting point that a weapon is a weapon, even when it is nuclear.

Yet expecting weapons to solve the problems between states places impossible demands on them, particularly when warfare itself is becoming increasingly asymmetrical and all-pervasive.

States are finding it harder to hold on to what they can’t afford to lose. The erosion of borders, once celebrated as one of the great achievements of liberal globalization, is acquiring a much more alarming character.

The digital world is borderless by definition as drones cross dividing lines with increasing ease and mew technologies steadily undermine the ability of states to control and defend their territory and, in extreme circumstances, even to define where meaningful borders lie.

States won’t simply accept this loss of control, so every action produces a reaction, which means the struggle will become fiercer. More importantly, the battlefield will increasingly encompass almost every sphere of human activity.

Under such conditions, what does “strategic stability” even mean, and how can it be maintained?

War itself increasingly resembles not a means of resolving conflicts but a permanent form of interaction, even coexistence and there may be no decisive victory or defeat, but only repeated attempts to exhaust an opponent economically, militarily, politically, and psychologically.

However, prolonged attrition produces two contradictory effects. States become more experienced and capable of enduring confrontation, but at the same time, fatigue accumulates, along with the temptation to end an apparently endless struggle by reaching for the most decisive and destructive argument available.

The world is losing the systemic safeguards that once limited such impulses and it increasingly resembles a hunting ground during open season.

So what, then, can we hold on to? For now, perhaps only common sense and an accurate assessment of the relationship between our ambitions and our actual capabilities. It’s a fragile lifeline, but it may be enough to prevent us from feeding the flames and instead keep us clear of them.

At least until the value of restraint, including self-restraint, is once again understood by everyone.

What is Going On With Robotaxi and Cybercab? Here Are All the Answers

2026-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

All this is a steady roll out as regulatory hurdles are overcome. It should be common enough by 2030.

This will also displace uber traffic. however, many customers actually need a human attendent. that may become a competative edge.

all good though. it is happening.

What is Going On With Robotaxi and Cybercab? Here Are All the Answers

September 4, 2026 by Brian Wang

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2026/09/what-is-going-on-with-robotaxi-and-cybercab-here-are-all-the-answers.html

What is going on with Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi?

No clearly presented answers from Tesla.

Answers are scattered. But looking at what is happening.

We can put all the reports into context.

QUESTIONS

State of Rollout

How Much Ramp by Dec 2026?

What Cities?

How Many Cybercab?

FSD ? Tesla Cars?

When Will Robotaxi Revenue Matter?

220 Robotaxi – 9 Cybercab operating now unsupervised.

Registered 420 Texas -45 Cybercab, likely adding next week

2027 California safety drivers out for the 600-1000 robotaxi in SF Bay ARea

On track to 2000+ robotaxi by Dec 2026
Real Revenue mid 2027+

Trump Signs Order Allowing Ranchers to Process Their Own Meat, Sell It Across State Lines

2026-09-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

This is finally happening. bulk processing is actually a poor choice against internal farm proceswsing. The hardware needs are hardly a problem. ask any commercial restaurant with stainless steel everything and training standards.

all of it is available. My point is that a ranch harvesting just fifty animals can slaughter and hang the animals. And then cut over a few weeks and package. this captures the entire value chain to the farm using one trained farmer. Do it once and you are good to go.

Better yet customers can and will seek you out.

Trump Signs Order Allowing Ranchers to Process Their Own Meat, Sell It Across State Lines

Nick Gilbertson

4 Sep 2026773

https://www.schiffgold.com/guest-commentaries/when-economic-stabilizers-destabilize-the-economy

President Donald Trump signed two executive orders on Friday to empower American ranchers, one of which allows them to process their own meat and sell it to consumers across state lines.

Trump signed the order, and another authorizing ranchers to protect against Mexican gray wolves, while flanked by ranchers and Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins.

“Today, I’m thrilled to announce that my administration is taking historic action to help our nation’s great cattle ranchers and deliver American meat processed to the highest standard … there will be no standard higher in the world, and sold at the lowest prices directly to the consumer,” the president said.

“So for the first time ever, we’re going to give farmers and ranchers the right to process their own food. That’s a big announcement,” he went on to add.

Trump said he will establish a program through which ranchers can bypass the four major companies that hold what he called “a monopoly” on processing the food. Trump assured that “very strong safety inspections” will be conducted on the meat.

According to the White House, under the order, Rollins is directed to take a number of actions within the Department of Agriculture:

The Order directs the Secretary of Agriculture to prioritize investigations into potential violations of the Packers and Stockyards Act, increase federal resources for these investigations, and review existing policies under the Act to strengthen protections for producers and ensure effective deterrence.
The Order directs the Secretary of Agriculture to modernize meat inspections to focus on core safety, boost processing efficiency and technology, lower costs to add value for ranchers and consumers, and remove unnecessary and burdensome requirements that do not support essential food safety needs.
The Order directs the Secretary of Agriculture to create a “one stop shop” resource and coordinator position within the Department of Agriculture to expand federal licensing and connect producers to inspection options, provide additional resources and training for small and very small meat processors, expand interstate market access for eligible meat products, and streamline processes to increase State participation in the State Meat and Poultry Inspection Program, the Cooperative Interstate Shipment Program, and the Talmadge-Aiken Cooperative Inspection Program.
The Order directs the Secretary of Agriculture to establish a “Strengthening Processing for U.S. Ranchers” loan program to help small and regional processors continue their operations, expand their footprint, and increase diversity of animal proteins being processed.

The second order directs a review and modernization of all federal “agency regulations and policy to promote ranchers’ interests,” including a review of whether gray wolves can be delisted or downlisted as an endangered species.

Floating data center would provide water and electricity to 32,000 homes

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

the real innovation here is creating a large hull and building it all afloat. it eliminates the overhead of land based heat management which is a large capital outlay.

this has never been properly worked up. Static infrastructure can be pioneered in the Salish Sea and the Northern Adriiatic where a low sea state exists. beside urban demand.

Yet is all makes a solution to building a safe urban infrastructure able to be free of shocks.

Floating data center would provide water and electricity to 32,000 homes

By Etiido Uko

September 03, 2026

https://newatlas.com/energy/kraaken-ship-data-center-water-electricity/

A rendering of the planned Blue Economy VITAL 100 MW Kraaken

Some companies build a desalination plant and call it a day; others build a data center, while others, still, build power generation facilities. One project wants to build all three … into one facility … offshore … on a movable ship.

Introducing the Blue Economy VITAL 100 MW Kraaken, a proposed infrastructure platform developed by marine engineering firm InMar Technologies and energy systems developer OptiFuel Systems under their Optimal Transit maritime technology partnership.

The concept combines offshore power generation, a desalination facility, and an AI data center into one large floating vessel that can sail away when required. According to Optimal Transit, an onboard plant would generate up to 40 MW of continuous electricity, which would be sent ashore, enough to power roughly 32,000 homes 24/7. Another system would produce 30 million liters (7.9 million gal) of fresh water every day, enough for an estimated 150,000 people. On top of all these, the vessel would retain 60 MW of capacity for AI-grade data-center computing.

It would require no land, no grid connection, and, according to Optimal Transit, no conventional fuel for those operations.

The Blue Economy VITAL 100 MW Kraaken is the latest configuration of a concept Optimal Transit unveiled in July, primarily as a self-powered floating AI data center, with 10-, 20-, 50-, and 100-MW variants. Virtually all of its available output was intended to be absorbed by racks of GPUs. The new VITAL configuration uses the same basic 100-MW power system, hull, and mooring infrastructure, but splits the output between compute and utility services for nearby coastal habitats or disaster areas.

Now, you probably have a lot of questions about this wonder project, but let's start with the most obvious. Where is the proposed 100 MW of electricity supposed to come from?

At the heart of both versions is Optimal Transit's patented Digital Ocean Thermal (DOT) engine. Fundamentally, DOT is an extensively modified Ocean Thermal Energy Conversion (OTEC) system. OTEC exploits the temperature difference between warm surface seawater and much colder water hundreds of meters below. In a closed-cycle system, the warm water heats a low-boiling-point working fluid, such as ammonia, until it vaporizes. The vapor drives a turbine that generates electricity. Deep cold seawater condenses it back into a liquid, and the cycle starts again.

Kraaken adds an interesting second heat source: its own computers, repurposing the waste heat that other offshore data center concepts, such as China's “world's first” underwater data center, release into the surrounding ocean.

A diagram of Optimal Transit's OTEC process

Optimal Transit

Optimal Transit's published diagram shows warm seawater entering at around 25 °C (77 °F) and heating ammonia in an evaporator. Meanwhile, liquid-cooled servers aboard the ship send their waste heat, at roughly 45 °C (113 °F), through an integrated thermal bus to what the company calls an AHEB, which further heats, or "supercharges," the ammonia vapor before it reaches the turbine. After expansion, 5 °C (41 °F) deep seawater cools the ammonia in a condenser, and a pump returns the liquid ammonia.

The company additionally refers to a multi-stage Rankine cycle, enthalpy recovery, supercharging, and green-ammonia synthesis as parts of DOT. More specifically, its diagram claims the architecture can reduce turbine size by around 70%, cut the size of the cold-water pumps and condenser by 70%, reduce warm-water pumping and evaporator costs by 40%, ammonia pumping costs by 40%, and cold-water pipe size by 70%. Impressive, albeit yet-to-be-demonstrated thermoelectric power generation.

What is particularly clever about the Blue Economy VITAL is that the same thermal infrastructure also performs other heavyweight tasks, including desalination.

It would produce fresh water using vacuum-flash desalination. At sufficiently low pressure, warm seawater boils at a temperature far below the usual 100 °C (212 °F). The resulting vapor leaves its salt behind and can then be condensed into fresh water using the available cold-water stream. It is an established concept closely related to open-cycle OTEC, in which fresh water can be produced as part of the thermal process.

Kraaken therefore attempts to squeeze electricity, cooling, and fresh water from essentially the same hot-and-cold thermal infrastructure.

Now, you would expect such a facility to be anchored in place to the seafloor. Not the Kraaken. It’s itself a ship that uses a Small Waterplane Area Twin Hull (SWATH) design. Rather than putting most of its buoyancy at the wave-tossed surface, a SWATH vessel places much of it in two submerged hulls connected to the upper structure by relatively narrow struts.

The original 100-MW configuration of Kraaken

Optimal Transit

The original 100-MW Kraaken concept is a roughly 300-ft (91-m), 50,000-long-ton vessel, while the smaller 10/20-MW design measures around 250 ft (76 m). The modular data-center hardware is liquid-cooled and replaceable, allowing newer generations of GPUs and servers to move aboard without replacing the long-life ship underneath. This is one reason the creators call the ship scalable.

So, how do the promised utilities, electricity and fresh water, as well as the data connection, reach land? The entire system is connected to the shore through a quick-disconnect umbilical system, “quick-disconnect” being a particularly interesting word. Should a major storm threaten, Optimal Transit says Kraaken could detach from its mooring within hours, move away under its own propulsion, and return to reconnect once conditions improve. The earlier design specifies speeds approaching 16 knots (18 mph/30 km/h). It could similarly leave altogether if its contract ends, political conditions change, or a disaster zone needs it more.

Optimal Transit envisions deploying the vessels off islands and in poorly served coastal regions, industrial areas, and disaster zones. It also proposes clustering five VITAL vessels within a 2-mile (3-km) offshore area to create what it calls a "Sovereign Power Park." Such a cluster is claimed to provide around 200 MW of electricity to shore, 40 million gallons (151 million liters) of fresh water per day, and 300 MW of data-center capacity.

Next question: how much would the whole thing cost? Optimal Transit puts an all-in VITAL vessel at about US$587 million, roughly the same amount as or less than the price of Jeff Bezos’s data-center-less, non-freshwater-producing luxury yacht. The developers estimate that separately building a 40-MW power station, a 7.9-million-gallon-per-day desalination plant, and a 60-MW AI data-center shell on land would cost a combined $750 million to $1.33 billion. By the company's calculations, that makes Kraaken about 44% to 78% of the cost, while taking around three years to deploy rather than six to 10.

Now for the reality checks. First, there is an important distinction between Kraaken's components being based on established technology and Kraaken itself being established technology. There's currently no 100-MW Kraaken bobbing offshore, powering 32,000 homes, at least for now. In its July announcement, Optimal Transit said Series A funding would fund ABS-ready engineering drawings and comprehensive digital-twin validation of DOT. Production plans depend on a proposed Series B raise in 2027.

Secondly, 100 MW is a formidable number for ocean thermal power. While the physics of OTEC is well understood, the small ocean temperature difference makes it inherently low-efficiency. A 2026 study modeling a 100-MW-net OTEC plant obtained a thermal efficiency of just 3.75% at its best-performing 700-m cold-water depth. This translates into astonishing quantities of seawater. The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) estimates that a conventional 100-MW OTEC plant could move 10 to 20 billion gallons (38–76 billion liters) of seawater every day, with a cold-water pipe around 33 ft (10 m) across reaching approximately 3,300 ft (1,000 m) deep. The deployment of that pipe remains one of OTEC's major engineering challenges.

Optimal Transit specifically claims DOT can slash that cold-water pipe by 70%, which, if demonstrated, would be a very big deal. However, it also raises an obvious question for a vessel designed to disconnect and sail away from a hurricane. Exactly how does its deep-water intake connect, disconnect, and survive that process? The public material doesn't yet provide enough engineering detail to answer it.

There are smaller accounting questions, too. The advertised 40 MW of exported electricity plus 60 MW for compute already add up to the full 100 MW, while desalination, seawater pumping, and the ship's own auxiliary systems also need energy. The company describes the figure in terms of net output but hasn't publicly provided a detailed power balance showing exactly how it accounts for all those parasitic loads.

Optimal Transit also says DOT could operate from equatorial to Arctic waters. Traditional OTEC is overwhelmingly associated with tropical waters because NOAA says a year-round temperature difference of more than 20 °C (36 °F) is desirable. How DOT maintains useful output where that ocean temperature gradient doesn't exist is another detail we'd like to see explained.

Now, none of these limitations make Kraaken impossible. Its technologies – Rankine-cycle power generation, ammonia working fluids, waste-heat recovery, vacuum desalination, SWATH vessels, liquid-cooled data centers and offshore umbilicals – are hardly science fiction. However, the extraordinary part is putting it all together, delivering 100 MW net, fitting the system aboard a movable ship, and doing it for $587 million.

Chevron Expands Position in Venezuela

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

this is a positive outcome. It sets the stage for building it all back up. I was wondering how long it could take. still years but it stops the smash and grab crowd.

Understand that stealing an oil field just because you can just means you then sell the oil to the original owner at a discount that recaptures their investment..

If the political system starts to work, we will see new capital outlays.

Chevron Expands Position in Venezuela

https://energynow.com/2026/09/chevron-expands-position-in-venezuela/

September 2, 2026 EnergyNow Media

HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Chevron Corporation (NYSE: CVX) today announced agreements with Venezuela that establish updated terms for its joint ventures, supporting future investment, project development and production growth in the country.

The agreements set out provisions for Chevron’s joint ventures in Venezuela, including enhanced fiscal, commercial and legal terms intended to support durable and competitive long-term investments. As part of the agreements, Chevron has been assigned additional acreage in the Orinoco Belt, where the company has an established position. The enhancements underpin joint venture plans to invest over $7 billion over the next five years, more than doubling production to approximately 600,000 barrels a day compared to 2026. With total costs of less than $20 per barrel and a large resource base, Venezuela is a platform of differentiated oil growth under Chevron’s disciplined cash management model.

“Chevron’s history in Venezuela spans more than a century, and our expanded position reflects our confidence in the country’s deep resource potential and its ability to compete for investment within our portfolio for decades,” said Mike Wirth, Chevron Chairman and Chief Executive Officer. “With improved terms and additional acreage, we are strengthening a portfolio that we believe can deliver attractive low-cost oil growth, support energy supply and create differentiated long-term value. This progress reflects the dedication of our Venezuelan employees and our long-standing focus on the responsible development of the country’s resources.”

Under the agreements, the Petroindependencia, S. A. joint venture, in which Chevron’s subsidiary holds a 49% interest, has been assigned the rights to develop the adjacent Carabobo 1 and Carabobo-2-South-A areas located in the Orinoco Belt of Venezuela. The greenfield sites expand the joint venture’s existing operational footprint where it is increasing extra-heavy oil production.

The additional sites further strengthen Chevron’s growing portfolio in Venezuela following an agreement in April in which Chevron increased its working interest in Petroindependencia to 49% and received the rights to develop the Ayacucho 8 area adjacent to the Petropiar, S.A. joint venture. Collectively, Chevron’s three joint ventures have grown production by 15% year-to-date.

“We appreciate the leadership of the Administration, particularly the U.S. Department of Energy, and Secretary Wright’s partnership in helping facilitate the conditions for further investment and growth,” said Wirth. “Continued engagement between government and industry is essential to advancing projects that support energy security, economic growth and continued investment.”

Chevron is one of the leading energy companies in Venezuela, with a presence that dates back to 1923. Its joint ventures Petroindependencia and Petropiar, S.A. operate extra-heavy oil projects in the Orinoco Oil Belt, while Petroboscan, S.A. is located in the Zulia State in Western Venezuela.

About Chevron

The Persecution Of Christians In America Has Reached A Whole New Level

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

My my. Now we need to see masques also burning as well. just where are the voices standing up against this nonsense/

you do not burn anything without consequense.

And yes, our education infrastructure needs a complete rethink with a working underlying philosophy that is not nihilistic and pushing any form of mis named progressive thought which it is not.

The Persecution Of Christians In America Has Reached A Whole New Level

September 3, 2026 by Michael

https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/the-persecution-of-christians-in-america-has-reached-a-whole-new-level/

A lot of people out there never thought that things would get this far. In America today, churches are burning to the ground all over the country. This is happening because we have imported large numbers of people that are extremely hostile to Christianity from foreign nations and because multiple generations of our young people have been raised in our overtly anti-Christian public school system. From kindergarten all the way through college, kids are trained to view the Christian faith through a hostile lens. Meanwhile, they are brainwashed by anti-Christian propaganda in our music, in our television shows and in our movies. In such an environment, the fact that Christian persecution is increasing should not come as a surprise to anyone.

The legal system is one of the primary tools that is being used to persecute the Christian faith in the United States.

On Monday, the Maine Supreme Court unanimously ruled that a mother can be banned from taking her daughter to church and reading the Bible to her…

The Maine Supreme Court unanimously upheld a custody order on Monday giving a father veto power over a mother’s decisions to take their daughter to church or read her the Bible, largely barring the child’s religious upbringing.

As covered last year by LifeSiteNews, the dispute is between Emily Bickford and Matthew Bradeen, the unmarried, separated parents of a 13-year-old girl. The father maintains that their daughter has displayed panic attacks since the mother started taking her to Calvary Chapel of Portland, stemming from fears that the rapture is drawing near and her father and sister will not make it to Heaven.

He produced a witness whose assessment of Calvary Chapel’s sermons claimed that they were potentially psychologically harmful, prompting the court to transfer full control of the child’s religious upbringing from Bickford to Bradeen.

This is absolutely insane.

The couple was never married, and the mother has custody of the daughter.

But now she has been permanently banned from taking her daughter to church because that is what the father wants.

Are we still living in America?

The attorney that represented the mother says that he plans to take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court…

Liberty Counsel Founder and Chairman Mat Staver, who argued Bickford’s case before the Maine SJC, said he plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“This opinion rejects the First Amendment right of a fit parent to raise her child consistent with her Christian faith,” said Staver in a statement, calling the opinion “disappointing” and “a serious threat to religious freedom.”

“This opinion goes against other state court decisions involving custody in the context of religious free exercise rights and ignores precedent from the U.S. Supreme Court. We will ask the High Court to take this case and overrule the decision.”

Hopefully the U.S. Supreme Court will be receptive.

But there is no guarantee that they will even be willing to hear this case.

I really detest what has happened to our legal system.

All over the nation, we are seeing outrageous ruling after outrageous ruling.

The far left completely and utterly dominates our courts, and that is not going to change any time soon because our law schools are absolutely packed with radical leftists.

I want to switch gears and talk about all of the church burnings that are occurring in 2026.

Churches are burning to the ground over and over again, and yet the big national news networks barely pay any attention to this phenomenon.

Sometimes, authorities catch those who are responsible. For example, a 19-year-old man was just arrested for his role in the burning of a historic church in Ohio…

A man was arrested after a historic church in Ohio went up in flames.

A 19-year-old man is facing a felony arson charge in connection with a fire that destroyed a historic vacant church on Cleveland’s east side.

Court documents show John McManamon was arraigned Wednesday morning. He is being held on a $10,000 bond.

But most of the time the arsonists are never caught.

Last Friday night, a “massive fire” suddenly consumed a Presbyterian church in Florida…

Crews battled a massive fire at Buckingham Presbyterian church on Buckingham Road in Buckingham on Friday night.

According to the Lehigh Acres Fire Control and Rescue District, the fire went through the roof of the church, and crews are still at the scene working to extinguish the fire.

The fire district said the cause of the fire will likely be handled by the Bureau of Fire, Arson, and Explosion Investigations because it is at a church.

A large law enforcement presence was in the area and Buckingham Road was shut down for hours before re-opening on Saturday morning.

Hopefully they will catch whoever did that.

The way churches are erupting in flames this year, you would think that they must be the most flammable buildings in our entire society.

In Mississippi, a fire that suddenly spread like wildfire absolutely gutted the activity building of a local Baptist church…

Rocky Creek Baptist Church will hold its first service Wednesday night after a fire heavily damaged part of its campus a day earlier.

Firefighters responded to the Lucedale church around 9:30 a.m. Tuesday, after a fire broke out on the property on Rocky Creek Road.

The blaze gutted the church’s activity building, which houses the gym, kitchen and classrooms.

We have been witnessing incidents such as this from coast to coast, but things have been particularly bad in Michigan.

In Grand Rapids, four firefighters recently got hurt trying to fight a gigantic fire that suddenly roared to life at LaGrand Avenue Christian Reformed Church…

Four firefighters were injured while responding to a fire overnight at LaGrand Avenue Christian Reformed Church in downtown Grand Rapids.

A spokesperson for the Grand Rapids Fire Department told News 8 that the fire started around 11 p.m. Wednesday night on Oakes Street and Sheldon Boulevard. On social media, LaGrave Avenue CRC confirmed the fire happened at the former Seventh Day Adventist building on their campus and there was no risk to the church’s main building.

This sort of thing has been occurring so frequently all over the state of Michigan.

Here is another recent example…

A west Michigan church suffered major damage early Monday morning after fire broke out just before 4 a.m., destroying the gymnasium and causing extensive smoke and water damage throughout the building.

A passerby spotted the flames and called 911 at 3:41 a.m. Byron Township Fire, along with multiple mutual aid departments including Wyoming Fire, responded to the scene.

Pastor Chad DeJong of Byron Center Bible Church arrived around 6 a.m. and immediately knew the damage would be severe.

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to figure out why there are so many church fires in the state of Michigan.

Of course the same thing could be said about the dramatic increase in church fires in western Europe.

The big media outlets don’t seem to care, but if a mosque suddenly caught fire it would be front page news everywhere.

In this day and age, it is open season on Christians.

In Idaho, when the owner of a coffee shop discovered that a group of customers had gathered to discuss pro-life issues, he kicked them out…

The founder of a well-known pro-life organization has gone viral in recent days after reportedly being kicked out of an Idaho coffee shop after the owner learned she was holding a meeting there.

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life of America, shared a video of what purportedly took place at Wydaho Roasters last month — and that video went viral.

Hawkins told CBN News that coffee shop owner Jim Sheehan made his displeasure known after she, her son, and others met to discuss pro-life issues inside Wydaho Roasters. Her son’s goal has been to rally people against Proposition 1, an abortion measure that will be on the ballot in November.

This happened in supposedly “deep red” Idaho.

In blue states, the level of hostility toward Christian beliefs can be far worse.

Even if you don’t say anything, you can still get persecuted if you just try to live out your faith.

In Missouri, a Christian grandmother decided that she was going to serve her community by feeding people breakfast for free…

Kathy Kite, a resident of Harrisburg, Missouri, began welcoming locals into her home for breakfast back in May after the community’s convenience store stopped serving breakfast following COVID.

Kite works at H-Town, the local convenience store and gas station, and said residents had repeatedly expressed interest in finding a new place to have breakfast. She lives nearby, so she decided to offer an alternative by cooking for her friends and offering up the food for free.

“I told the old guys that come in there in the mornings that like to play cards, and drink coffee, and eat breakfast, and say they didn’t have any more — I’m like, ‘You guys can come to my house and I’ll do it,’” Kite told CBN News.

People that are willing to make hard sacrifices like that to serve others are the backbone of our nation.

Eventually, approximately 20 to 25 people (including young kids) started to come to her house for breakfast…

At first, it was just a few people. But others soon began to come after her loving act was advertised on social media, with 20-25 people regularly coming to her home in the morning; some parents even brought their kids to her house for food before school. Kite gets up at 3:30 a.m. to prepare for the day.

“And it just kind of exploded from there,” Kite said.

In the old days, going to grandma’s house for breakfast was a cherished tradition.

But now it is a crime.

The control freaks that run things in the area soon sent her a letter insisting that she needed to obtain a commercial kitchen license to continue feeding people breakfast…

But Kite’s breakfast gatherings eventually caught the attention of government officials, with Columbia city officials from the Columbia/Boone County Public Health and Human Services Department reportedly sending a letter telling her she needed a commercial kitchen license to continue operating.

This is a perfect example of what is wrong with this country.

In other parts of the U.S., authorities have literally made it illegal to feed the homeless.

Those that have made such laws should be ashamed of themselves.

Nobody is going to stop me from having compassion on a fellow human being.

And nobody is going to stop me from worshipping God the way that I choose.

I am sure that the legal system will continue to be extremely hostile to us, I am sure that more churches will go up in flames, and I am sure that the entertainment industry will continue to mock us in thousands of different ways.

But they will not win, because the God that created all things can never be defeated.

Putin Says There's A Chance Of Ukraine Peace Deal, Wants To Restore Full US Relations

2026-09-07T00:00:00.000-07:00

Is russia prepared to give up some portion of its war aims? This war ended the day Russia did a withdrawal to its start line.

Russia holds seized Ukranian lands all actively contested. Not a good look.

There is little indication that the Ukraine can break these russian forces as the Canada Corp did in 1918.

Putin Says There's A Chance Of Ukraine Peace Deal, Wants To Restore Full US Relations

Friday, Sep 04, 2026 - 07:30 AM

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/putin-says-theres-chance-ukraine-peace-deal-wants-restore-full-us-relations

Authored by Guy Birchall via The Epoch Times,

Russian President Vladimir Putin said on Sept. 3 that there was "a chance" of achieving peace with Ukraine and expressed a desire to rekindle relations with the United States.

Putin was speaking at a session of the Eastern Economic Forum (EEF) in Vladivostok when he made the comments.

On the subject of Ukraine, the Russian president said Moscow was "grateful to everyone who is trying to contribute to resolving this issue," and he said that in his opinion there is "a chance" of peace, according to Russian state news agency TASS.

He said that for hostilities to end between Moscow and Kyiv, "Russia and Ukraine must first reach an agreement" between themselves, and he acknowledged that "all other countries are ready to support and assist" in achieving that.

The Russian leader also revealed that contact between Moscow and Kyiv was ongoing via the two nations' intelligence services, but he said that it was difficult for him to say "to what extent these contacts are leading to a peace agreement."

Regarding Russo - American relations, Putin confirmed that Moscow was still in contact with Washington and said he hoped that such contact would continue.

Alluding to the recent trip by CIA Director John Ratcliffe to Moscow for meetings on Aug. 25, the Russian president said that everyone was aware of the cooperation between American and Russian intelligence agencies and administration officials appointed by U.S. President Donald Trump.

He said that the collaboration was "working" and expressed a hope that it will "ultimately lead to a positive outcome."

He further stated, "[Moscow is] in favor of restoring relations with the United States in full, but this does not depend solely on us; it depends on the American side."

However, he stressed that he believed that Trump is "determined to engage in such positive, constructive work."

On Aug. 26, Trump confirmed Ratcliffe's visit to Moscow for meetings on Aug. 25.

The president, however, dismissed all rumors about the purpose of Ratcliffe's trip, denying that he was sent to warn the Kremlin against testing NATO's resolve, striking England, or disregarding Iranian sanctions.

"John Ratcliffe is a fantastic guy. He's the head of the CIA, and he is not in there for any of the things that you said. Now, something may come out, you know, out of it. We're working very hard to get that war ended, and frankly, they both want to see it ended at this point," Trump said.

On the topic of meeting with Putin, Trump said on Sept. 2 that such an occasion would occur only after peace was achieved between Moscow and Kyiv.

"We'd do it if I wanted it, but I want to do it when we're ready to do a peace deal," he told reporters in the Oval Office.

He said that the United States wanted to have good relations with both warring parties, saying it would be "great for business."

"They ought to stop that stupid war," he said.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said that his country wanted peace but wouldn't surrender, in an Aug. 24 speech in Kyiv marking Ukraine's Independence Day.

On Sept. 1, Zelenskyy said Ukraine supports "every step toward peace," in a post on X.

"The war needs to end, and leaders are right to tell Putin this. So, for the sake of diplomacy and negotiations, whenever our partners approach us about this, we will ensure that Russian skies are cleared of drones for specified periods of time and along specified routes," he said.

"Safety will return to Russia's skies when there is real movement toward peace. For now, the skies over Russia are for drones - not for civilian aviation."

Where Are the Aliens? Right Here, But We Are Slow to Recognize That!

2026-09-05T00:00:00.000-07:00

Institutional denial is finally fading, though it will take a long time for the effects to die down.

understand something that is supported by conforming evidence and actual reports by creditable folks.

1 around 75 alien races maintain a presence directly on Earth. Deep undergound bases and actual mass control make this easy. The craft plunge into deep lakes or the ocean and enter through any cliff face to move deep inland to a safe harbor.

2 over 200,000 witnessed ufo reports in our atmosphere tells us they are there and also going somewhere. We all missed that point for years.

3 Part of that traffic is human and other earth originated species. We have had a long time to do this right and our particular species was engineered to TERAfORM TERRA starting after the Pleistocene Nonconformity.

4 A major DARK research program is MASS control. starting mid fifties and explains many UFO reports. I actually know how ti do this and have seen it demoed that is when i did the literature search. It was too easy.

5 MASS control allows transport at a real fraction of light speed making inter star transport possible in real lifetimes. None of this requres a Warp Drive which is aspirational

6 wormhole transit is plausible and costs to produce which means they are built and maintained. We have creditable reports in remote locales including watchers. These are not ever abandoned. we need to invent this tech obviously.

Where Are the Aliens? Right Here, But We Are Slow to Recognize That!

Avi Loeb

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/where-are-the-aliens-right-here-but-we-are-slow-to-recognize-that-9efa43391f32

Below is the transcript of an interview that I had last night with Jesse Weber Live on NewsNation, also available in video format here. Jesse’s questions are marked with JW and my answers with AL.

***

JW: It’s a big universe out there. Some scientists say it is infinitely large. So, with so much possibility, why haven’t any of our neighbors said hi yet? By neighbors, I, of course, mean extraterrestrials. The fact that none of them have decided to introduce themselves is very rude, at least to our knowledge. This is something that has puzzled scientists since the 1950s. I am talking about Nobel Prize laureate, Enrico Fermi, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb, who — given the number of possible planets and given the probability of those planets developing intelligent life, he theorized that Earth should have been visited by aliens with advanced technology not once, but several times over. So, this gap between the likelihood of advanced alien civilizations existing, and the fact that we haven’t been contacted yet, is what’s now called Fermi’s paradox.

Enrico Fermi (left) and Avi Loeb (right). (Image credit: NewsNation)

And there have been several theoretical solutions to this paradox. One says that aliens are talking, we just don’t have the proper technology to hear them. For example, they could be using gravitational waves. There’s also the theory that other civilizations may be too young to have the ability to travel or communicate between the stars, that some of them are advanced enough that they may have been stripped of their interstellar capabilities by war or disaster.

But what about all the footage of Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs or UFOs), as they’re also called? Well, another theory suggests that maybe because we are in this interstellar zoo, all these UAPs are just aliens on some sort of space safari. They are just not communicating with us.

So, there are a lot of proposed solutions to Fermi’s paradox. Who better to help us find the science fact and the science fiction than the Frank B. Baird Jr professor of science at Harvard University and leader of the UAP Science Advisory Council, Avi Loeb.

Avi, good to see you. Which theory do you like?

(

Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

AL: Thanks for having me. The theory I like the most in answer to Enrico Fermi’s question: where is everybody?” is: “They are here. It’s just that we haven’t realized that.”

The reason is obvious. We had only one century of modern science since the discovery

of quantum mechanics. Most stars are billions of years older than the Sun. They had plenty of time to develop science and technology well beyond our understanding. We recognize

that 95 percent of the mass budget of the universe is unknown to us. We are really ignorant about most of the constituents of the Universe, including technologies that are well beyond what we have.

Just imagine a cave dweller finding a cell phone. The cave dweller would look at the cell phone and say: “well, that’s a rock of a type that I’ve never seen before.” We have a lot to learn. We should be humble, and we should be looking out to find the evidence.

And guess what? The U.S. government is telling us they see things they don’t understand. In fact, on Monday, August 31st, 2026, I had the first in-person meeting of the UAP Science Advisory Council that I’m leading (https://uapsac.com/) at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. And I can tell you, first of all, that the government has some data that they don’t fully understand. Secondly, they are very interested in figuring them out using the scientific method. And it’s not obvious at all, based on what they know that we are definitely dealing with only human-made technologies.

(

Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

JW: So let me ask you this. Is there a plan in place to try to communicate with these things? Do we know that there is a communication system and we just don’t have the ability to know what that is or appreciate what it is, namely we don’t have the technology?

(

Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

AL: It’s work in progress. We imagine technologies that we possess right now. It started with radio communication back in 1960 until now with SETI observers trying to

find extraterrestrial radio communication signals. They did not see any so far.

I just co-authored this week a paper with James Guillochon, described here, that if they have something far more ambitious than Elon Musk’s vision of going from Earth to Mars, namely if they have a cargo transportation system between habitable planets within their planetary system, we might see flashes of light from the beamer of a light sail

Technology that we can imagine. We don’t have such a system as of yet, but they may have it.

In addition, they may also use for transportation a warp drive. That’s a bubble of distorted space-time that allows one to carry a cargo at an arbitrary speed across interstellar distances. And I just co-authored a paper, described here, a couple of weeks ago with Shaun Fell, where we showed that if a warp bubble passes through the Earth’s atmosphere, it would cause a disturbance and produce a glowing ball of air. In fact, there are reports in the Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters (https://www.war.gov/ufo/) from the U.S. government, including excellent work by the All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) in the Pentagon, about orbs. These are mysterious glowing spheres that they appear to be seeing and the FBI and other government agencies are reporting about. It’s not at all clear what some of these orbs are. Some of them might be drones but others are definitely not drones. And so it’s a detective story for us to figure out what technology might be employed if these orbs came from outer space.

I would argue we should look at it as a way for us to learn about new technologies rather than take the approach adopted by experts, as if we already know most of physics and don’t see anything new.

(

Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

JW: Well, listen. If this interstellar level of transport and delivery is a real thing, forget Amazon. Amazon can’t compete with that.

Avi Loeb, this would be a conversation for another day. Great work, by the way. Thanks. Keep it up. I’m so happy the U.S. government has you. It’s really good stuff that you’re doing. Thank you so much.

(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

AL: Thanks for having me.

(Image credit: Greg Wyatt)

***

In this essay, I featured seven beautiful watercolors from a series created by the celebrated artist, Greg Wyatt.