Arclein's Blog

Batteries That Use Sodium Instead of Lithium Could Be Low-Cost Rival to Tesla’s

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

This is ongoing research hype. not to be taken too seriously. I wonder how any of these batteries do a negative 50. or negative 40 for that matter.

again hype heavy.

It has been a long march, and there never was anything novel about sodium or lithium

Batteries That Use Sodium Instead of Lithium Could Be Low-Cost Rival to Tesla’s

https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/batteries-that-use-sodium-instead-of-lithium-could-be-low-cost-rival-to-teslas/

A new study shows that a low-cost sodium-ion battery currently used in cars and large-scale energy storage systems in China matches most performance parameters and production quality found in Tesla’s lithium-ion batteries.

Since sodium is much more abundant and widely available than lithium, using it for batteries could cut raw material costs for manufacturers and reduce supply chain risks that surround critical minerals.

Conducted by a German university, the research published on May 28 in the Cell Press journal Physical Science, looked at the battery designed by Hina, a spin-off company of the Chinese Academy of Sciences that has partnered with automakers like JAC to provide EV batteries.

It shows that “once the sodium-ion (or Na-ion) battery is tweaked to charge more effectively at low temperatures and function better at high energy densities, it could provide a cost-effective alternative for future electric vehicle batteries”.

“The combination of good uniformity, high power capability, and strong low‑temperature performance makes these cells attractive for stationary storage, grid services, and shorter‑range or commercial vehicles where potential lower cost and resource availability matter more than maximum driving range,” said Moritz Schütte, a battery researcher at RWTH Aachen University in Germany.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following unedited text is taken from the Cell Press media release:

To assess how HiNa batteries compare to more advanced Tesla batteries, Schütte’s team used a non-destructive technique called impedance spectroscopy to measure the uniformity of 120 sodium-ion battery cells. Next, to map out the power and energy performances of individual cells under real-life conditions, the team tested the batteries at varying currents and at temperatures from −20 °C to 45 °C. They also used X-rays to see the battery’s internal structure, then opened up the cells to measure their electrode dimensions, compositions, and microstructures.

They found that the battery uses a tabless (design), a double-aluminum current collector design that reduces resistance and ensures a uniform temperature distribution—and also mirrors the current design of Tesla batteries.

“We were positively surprised by how uniform the cells are,” says Schütte.

However, the sodium-ion battery has some limitations when it comes to energy density and charging at low temperatures. “The high‑power performance was better than one might expect from an early commercial sodium‑ion product,” says Schütte.

“For applications that require frequent charging at low ambient temperatures, appropriate thermal management or operating strategies will be important because low-temperature charging remains a clear weakness.”

The researchers also found unexpectedly high, unevenly distributed levels of copper in certain cathode regions of the battery, which “raises interesting questions about its role in performance and aging,” said Schütte.

“It will be exciting to see future sodium-ion technologies that are free of nickel and copper, as well, while achieving competitive energy density.”

Sodium-ion batteries also perform well under load at low temperatures, making them an appealing option for both stationary power storage and mobile applications in cold climates.

“However, today’s commercial sodium-ion cells generally have lower energy density than the best lithium-ion cells, and the technology is less mature overall,” said Schütte.

Next, the authors plan to better understand and improve upon the battery’s charging capabilities at low temperatures so that they can charge more safely and efficiently below 0°C. Further research should also focus on optimizing the materials used to make sodium-ion batteries, added Schütte.

“Advances in hard‑carbon anodes and electrolyte formulations may be especially promising,” he said.

This work was supported by Germany’s Federal Ministry of Research, Technology, and Space and the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.

PhD dropout’s exposé forces an academic fraud reckoning in China

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

I actually welcome this. It is way to easy to produce original research in our data driven scinces that is of no consequence. I recall checking a russian professors doctoral work and opening up multiple papers by multiple scholars all grinding the same method with minor variations. that was fifty years ago and it has not become better.

far worse my important paper in Mathematics and also Physics remain unread, let alone ever understood. My discoveries are truly important. No one else has ever imagined the 3D pendulum. Or higher ordered Pythagoreans.

Wat we have is hardly convincing scholaraship but jumped up lab work any of which will be replicated first by any serioos scholar who wants to progress.

PhD dropout’s exposé forces an academic fraud reckoning in China

Commentator says China’s paper boom and bureaucratic evaluation system have rewarded output, titles, and grants at the expense of originality.

Qingqu Yuan and Yuxuan JIA
May 28, 2026

A former doctoral student turned blogger has shaken China’s academic establishment by publicly accusing prominent university scholars of fabricating data and manipulating papers, triggering investigations at several leading institutions and drawing rare attention from state media.

The most visible fallout came at Tongji University, a leading Shanghai university, which removed the dean of its School of Life Science and Technology after finding academic misconduct in a Nature paper the blogger had challenged. Nankai University, Sun Yat-sen University, and Shanghai University have also opened investigations into scholars he questioned.

A Geng Tongxue video thumbnail alleging serious fabrication in a Tongji University paper backed by millions in funding.

The blogger, known online as “Geng Tongxue Tells Stories,” is a former doctoral candidate at Beihang University in Beijing. He left the programme in 2025, citing growing disillusionment with a publish-or-perish research culture that, as he put it, rewarded flashy papers more than meaningful science.

From April 9 to May 12, Geng publicly questioned papers involving five prominent scholars at four universities. Some of those named hold some of China’s most coveted academic titles, including recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars.

The videos quickly spread far beyond academic circles. By 14 May, his Bilibili account had more than 1.8 million followers and about 230 million total views, while his Douyin [China’s equivalent of TikTok] account had 1.34 million followers. What might once have remained a narrow dispute over figures, images, and laboratory data has become a public reckoning over how Chinese academia rewards papers, grants, titles, and institutional prestige.

The controversy has since reached China’s state media, a sign that the issue has moved beyond a handful of disputed papers and is increasingly being treated as a symptom of deeper problems in the academic system. Xinhua News Agency, China’s official news agency, gave Geng a platform, publishing an interview that appeared supportive of his efforts to expose academic misconduct. People’s Daily Online also weighed in, pointing to weaknesses in academic oversight, pressure from rankings, project targets, opaque review procedures, and some institutions’ tendency to protect their own reputations.

In China’s academic system, papers, journal rankings, and grants often decide who wins elite labels such as Distinguished Young Scholar or Cheung Kong Scholar, with election to the Chinese Academy of Sciences or the Chinese Academy of Engineering standing at the top of the hierarchy. Those “talent hats” can then bring larger laboratories, more public funding, greater institutional status, and wider control over academic resources—but often, too, less scrutiny.

The same concern has echoed in the Chinese public debate. One influential expression of that view came from Wang Mingyuan, a researcher at the Beijing Reform and Development Research Association, who published a commentary on 21 May on the WeChat account Fuchengmen No. 6 Courtyard (阜成门六号院). In Wang’s view, once universities are run like factory production lines, academic life is reduced to a bureaucratic ledger of papers, projects, grants, and titles—a system that compacts the soil of academic life and drains it of the nourishment needed for originality.

Wang Mingyuan

Lastly, an update on Geng Tongxue. In a video released on 27 May, he made fresh allegations of misconduct involving papers by prominent academics, among them Distinguished Young Scholar recipients, university deans, and a candidate for membership in the Chinese Academy of Engineering. He said he had reviewed only about one-tenth of Distinguished Young Scholar recipients and had already found, in his words, a “bumper harvest” of problems. But he also said he would stop reporting alleged misconduct directly to the scholars’ institutions, citing concerns over his family’s safety.

—Yuxuan Jia
中国学术的泡沫化、绩效网格化和板结化

The Publication Bubble, Bureaucratic Metrics, and the Stifling of Chinese Academia

Strip away the thick froth of inflated academic rankings, and a harder truth emerges: despite China’s extraordinary progress over the past two decades, the country still trails the United States by a wide margin in basic research, frontier technologies, and top-tier scientific achievements. In many respects, China remains in the second tier of global science, alongside countries such as Britain, Germany, and Japan.

The greatest value of academic and intellectual work lies in originality, not in the sheer volume of output. By nature, it resists precise measurement and is especially ill-served by fixed quantitative indicators. An overly bureaucratic, metric-driven evaluation regime risks compacting the soil of academic life, stripping it of the nutrients needed for intellectual growth.

The blogger “Geng Tongxue Tells Stories” has criticised prominent professors at elite universities, including recipients of the National Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars, for padding papers and fabricating data. His criticism exposes academic corruption and the “Great Leap Forward” in paper production. Judging from close observation of people around me, as well as from my broader analysis of China’s science and technology data over the past two years, these concerns feel deeply familiar.

Over the past two or three decades, treating academia like a factory production line and reducing scholarship to the manufacture of papers has become a common malaise in global higher education. In 1990, the world produced roughly 620,000 SCI-indexed papers. By 2024, that figure had risen to more than 2.3 million. The number of papers published over the past fifteen years exceeds the total output of the previous five thousand years of human civilisation. The number of papers included in Nature Index journals rose from around 56,000 in 2014 to about 100,000 in 2024, nearly doubling in just a decade.

Needless to say, this does not mean that science and technology have advanced dramatically in such a short period, or that humanity has suddenly discovered far more truths and created far more knowledge. It means, rather, that the academic factory has produced more standardised parts to bureaucratic specifications, many of them with little real novelty. Indeed, genuinely original and intellectually substantive work may have become much less common. The attacks on universities by American conservative politicians, along with repeated calls by some entrepreneurs to do away with universities, especially the humanities, are in part a reaction to the corruption and declining quality of global academia.

In China, this distortion has reached an extreme. During the Cultural Revolution, the country swung to the opposite pole, denouncing academic publishing as part of the “bourgeois white expert line”—a label used to attack technically competent but politically unreliable intellectuals. Most academic journals in the country were shut down, and China went an entire decade without publishing a single international paper. After reform and opening up, China became acutely aware that it had fallen behind. To improve university rankings, it began actively encouraging faculty members to publish papers. Over time, this turned into publishing for the sake of publishing and ranking for the sake of ranking. Backed by China’s enormous pool of human resources, the number of papers then expanded explosively.

Take SCI-indexed journal articles. In 1992, China published just over 6,200 of them. By 2024, the figure had reached 867,000, an almost 140-fold increase, far outpacing GDP growth. To be fair, China’s publication output was unusually low in the early reform period, and part of this rise reflected a genuine process of catch-up, until around 2010. But by 2015, China was already publishing 229,700 SCI papers a year. In the next nine years, that figure nearly tripled, adding about 640,000 papers, roughly equivalent to the entire annual publication output of Europe. This does not mean that the research capacity of Chinese universities tripled, nor that China produced, in just nine years, scientific progress equivalent to the output of the whole European research system.

In the CWTS Leiden Ranking Traditional Edition, Chinese universities take 16 of the world’s top 20 spots when institutions are ranked by the number of publications among the top 50 per cent most cited in their field and year. This is an unparalleled quantitative advantage, even greater than the dominance enjoyed by American universities in the second half of the twentieth century. Zhengzhou University, for example, already ranks 25th globally by publication volume, ahead of Stanford and Oxford. And this ranking is based on data from 2020 to 2023. If the latest data were used, China’s advantage would likely appear even more pronounced.
The number of Chinese papers ranked within the global top 50 per cent by citation count is already far ahead of any other country, and roughly comparable to the combined output of the entire Western world. Source: Global Times

The same ranking also shows that Jiangsu University, hardly regarded as one of China’s elite universities, has already surpassed long-established global institutions such as the University of Chicago, McGill University, Purdue University, and the University of Hong Kong in terms of publication volume. Jinan University, little known even in Shandong Province, ranks only one place below the Chinese University of Hong Kong internationally. One might ask whether those top-scoring students from Shandong who chose to study in Hong Kong should now regret their decision.

Looking at the Nature Index, which tracks higher-quality papers, from 2014 to 2024, China’s publication count rose from 5,022 to 32,122. In 2024, 892 universities in the Chinese mainland published papers included in Nature Index journals, accounting for 17 per cent of all institutions globally and more than 30 per cent of total papers. Among the world’s top 100 universities in the Nature Index, 42 were from the Chinese mainland. The rankings produce revolutionary scenes: Sichuan University ranks above Stanford, Jilin University above MIT, South China University of Technology above Oxford, and Nantong University appears broadly comparable to National Taiwan University and Northeastern University in the United States.
China’s share of the Nature Index has risen rapidly and has now surpassed that of the United States. Source: Global Times

Global university ranking organisations and leading academic publishers have also profited handsomely from the Chinese market. Web of Science established a consulting company in China, Clarivate Analytics Information Services (Beijing) Co., Ltd. Nature has set up a dedicated Chinese-language website. In the first half of 2025 alone, Chinese authors reportedly paid around RMB 140 million in article processing charges to Nature Communications. China has become both the most obedient participant in this academic evaluation system and its richest market.

Yet if one adjusts the parameters in scientific publication databases even slightly, the true quality behind China’s supposed status as the “world’s No. 1 research power” becomes much clearer. Measured by the proportion of SCI papers ranked in the global top 10 per cent by citation impact, the top five institutions are all American universities. Among the global top 20, 11 are American and four are British. From the Chinese-speaking world, only Hong Kong Polytechnic University and City University of Hong Kong enter the global top 50, while the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology rank between 50th and 60th. Tsinghua University ranks 73rd globally, while Peking University ranks 164th. This is also one reason many outstanding students still choose to study in Hong Kong.

If the standard is made stricter still, and only papers in the global top 1 per cent are counted, Chinese universities and research institutions remain far behind their American and European counterparts. Between 2020 and 2023, the Chinese Academy of Sciences published more than 100,000 SCI papers, but only 1,525 entered the global top 1 per cent, a rate of just 1.4 per cent. Stanford University, by contrast, had a top-1-per cent rate of 3.8 per cent. Although Stanford published only 47,168 papers in total, 1,813 of them reached the global top 1 per cent. Among the world’s top 20 institutions by the number of top-1-per-cent papers, 11 are American and four are British.

Measured by the proportion of top-1-per cent papers, the performance of Chinese universities and research institutions becomes even more sobering. Only Bohai University enters the global top 100, but this is largely due to statistical distortion. Bohai University publishes relatively few papers overall, ranking outside China’s top 350 institutions, and its small base artificially raises the probability of a high top-1-per cent ratio. In practical terms, the highest-ranked institution from the Chinese-speaking world is the Chinese University of Hong Kong, which ranks 109th globally with a rate of 2.7 per cent. Tsinghua ranks 204th, Peking University 327th, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences—the world’s largest producer of papers—ranks only 765th.
Source: CWTS Leiden Ranking Traditional Edition

Among the global top 20 by this metric, 10 are American universities and five are British. The top three are MIT, Stanford, and Princeton.
In sheer publication volume, Chinese universities are far ahead. But in highly cited papers and citation ratios, the United States still dominates.

Take papers published in Nature itself. To generate commercial value, Springer Nature has in recent years promoted the so-called Nature Index, an expanded ranking system in which China’s position has risen rapidly. China’s Nature Index score has now exceeded 60 per cent of the U.S. level and is roughly four times that of the United Kingdom. But if one looks only at Nature itself, China still trails far behind the United States and remains below Britain. Last year, U.S. researchers published 1,431 papers in Nature, compared with 506 by British researchers and 471 by Chinese researchers, only slightly ahead of Germany’s 422.

Strip away the thick froth of inflated academic rankings, and a harder truth emerges: despite China’s extraordinary progress over the past two decades, the country still trails the United States by a wide margin in basic research, frontier technologies, and top-tier scientific achievements. In many respects, China remains in the second tier of global science, alongside countries such as Britain, Germany, and Japan.

The basic structure of global scientific competitiveness has not fundamentally changed. That is a reality China should confront with more sobriety.

Over the past couple of years, some scholars and experts have repeatedly claimed that the global centre of science and technology has shifted from the United States to China. The claim does not stand up to reality. Thanks to its vast market and dynamic technology companies, China has indeed become one of the world’s major centres for industrial R&D and technological application. But in science and technology research, the gap with developed countries remains large. Industrial rise depends on economic-system reform, which China has managed remarkably in the past. The rise of basic research and original innovation, however, depends on reforming the education system and the governance institutions of scientific research. On that front, China has made little progress over the past two decades.

No country in history has possessed scientific human resources on the scale that China does today. In 2025, China admitted more than 170,000 new doctoral students, roughly equal to the combined total of the United States, the European Union, and Japan—about 60,000, 100,000, and 12,000, respectively. To fundamentally overcome technological chokepoints, China must reform its university hiring systems, evaluation mechanisms, and student training models to genuinely encourage originality.

Academic and intellectual work, by nature, resists precise measurement and is especially ill-served by fixed quantitative indicators. Laozi produced the roughly 5,000 characters of the Tao Te Ching over a lifetime. Goethe spent forty years completing Faust. Several Japanese Nobel laureates over the past decade did not speak English fluently and had not published papers in international journals. Under today’s academic evaluation system, they would all have been filtered out.

The deepest value of academic and intellectual work lies in even the smallest measure of originality, not in piles of standardised papers and monographs. But originality needs unhurried time, independent thought, and an open intellectual and social environment in which it can take root.

If academia is managed like a factory assembly line or a bank-teller system, with bureaucratic indicators covering project rankings, funding, publication counts, titles, and countless other metrics, the result is a profound distortion of scholarship and a serious insult to intellectual creativity. Applied to teachers, researchers, and graduate students, such a box-ticking, metric-driven evaluation regime risks compacting the soil of academic life, stripping it of the nutrients needed for intellectual growth.

The current evaluation and training system will only reduce the efficiency with which China uses its intellectual resources. China may train more than three times as many PhDs as the United States, but its capacity for research, invention, and original creation will hardly rise by anything like the same multiple. Such a system only produces “professional practitioners of academic and research activities”—people skilled at managing relationships, chasing research grants, winning national projects, and accumulating titles. It does not help truly gifted minds emerge. Under such a system, figures such as Qian Sanqiang [father of the Chinese nuclear programme] and Chen Jingrun [Chinese mathematician] would very likely have been buried.

Europe BEGS for MORE Canadian Aluminum — Trump's Tariff Backfire Just Got WORSE

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

This is a huge self inflicted crisis now hammering the whole USA manufacturing ecosystem. The only way out for the manufacturers is to transition into Canada. This instantly solves the tariff problem internally while opening up global access.

they still face a charge selling into the USA but ultimately the tariffs must disappear. The takehome though is that Wall street is now doing those numbers. just as they did outsourcing to China.

The better psitioned have already made real moves. that usually means expanding Canadian operations after a false move or two.

Europe BEGS for MORE Canadian Aluminum — Trump's Tariff Backfire Just Got WORSE

92 Jun 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFIbJpQ83hc

Trump's 50% tariffs on Canadian aluminum were supposed to protect American industry. Instead, they pushed Canada's biggest producers straight into Europe's arms — and now Europe is paying record prices to lock in the supply America threw away.

Aluminerie Alouette, North America's largest smelter, went from sending 4% of its production to Europe to 57% in a matter of months. Alcoa diverted 100,000 metric tons away from US buyers. Rio Tinto stopped cross-border shipments entirely. And the US Midwest aluminum premium just hit an all-time record of $2,182 per tonne — meaning American manufacturers are now paying nearly 70% more for the same metal their European competitors are buying at a discount, using Canadian supply Washington pushed away.

Then the Iran war knocked out the Gulf State producers the US had been quietly leaning on as a replacement. The UAE and Bahrain, which together had come to account for nearly a quarter of US aluminum imports, went offline simultaneously. Bank of America now estimates a 3.8 million ton US aluminum deficit in 2026, a 5.6 million ton European deficit, and a global shortfall of 2.2 million tons. Everyone is short. Canada is sold out. And Europe got there first.

The first new US aluminum smelter since 1980 is planned for Oklahoma — but production isn't expected before the end of the decade. American manufacturers are paying the price right now.

This is what a tariff backfire looks like when the numbers finally catch up to the policy.

#Aluminum #TrumpTariffs #Canada #TradeWar #GlobalTrade #Manufacturing #SupplyChain #Energy #Geopolitics #IranWar #Economy #USEconomy #CanadaUS #Europe #CriticalMinerals #IndustrialPolicy #Commodities #TradePolicy #NewsAnalysis #Explainer

The coalition of the willing

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Wed, 03 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The coalition of the willing

The USA triggered the process of coalition assembly, however do recall that china was and is right there as well.

the natural leader was always Canada for two reasons. One is geographic and the second is resources which have been slowly becoming larger.

The first fact is that it is geographically the transport buckle between europe and Asia. It was already quite effective and now it gets the investment to be efficient. it is not obvious until you understand what is possible. The second fact is that it is the default supplier for just about everything needed for manufacturing. The oil is not the cheapest ,but it is both plentiful and safe.

The energy surplus naturally provides a aluminium ecsystem that is now huge.

all this supported the USA under what is best understood as a gentlemans agreement. The trump kicked it over. Now the USA must replace those resources globally.

i understood all this when it did not really matter. that was 1965. and here we are. That is why his tariff war left me gobsmacked because i understood what was likely to happen. It was far faster and not through trend lines

that is the trade equation. and it can never get better for the USA. In fact USA manufacturing has now a massive incentive to steadily expand in Canada. just in Aluminium.

This coalition also provides a natural platform for an expanded military alliance of middle powerrs already cooperating whose combied population hugely surpasses either China or the USA and is eadsily trained and asseembled in Alberta if necessary. forty countries can each deliver multiple regiments and a million man expeditionay force can be imagined.

none of this has to ever become real, but it will rise if challenged. now imagine a million man fully trained and equipped army landing in Taiwan, or south Korea or the Himalayas or the Baltic, or even the Ukraine. This is possible and this makes aggression unthinkable as foreign policy.

Can ecosystems malfunction?

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Well yes. in fact this is an ongoing problem. Recall the carboniferous when bioloogy; did not know how to break down lignon. recall any rainforest in which the seed bank remains undisturbed.

my central problem is discovering ways in which any biome can be at least activated. Reczll biochar retains working nutrients and it is human produced with intent. Canada needs to manufacture fertilizer blended with biochar in order to optimize and ultimately minimize application. al these intervention matter to produce a thriving ecosystem.

agriculture is now discovering and fully embracing rotational grazing and even working up chickens, let alone cattle.

Can ecosystems malfunction?

We are told the natural world is ‘breaking down’. But forests don’t work like airplanes or human hearts

https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-need-to-think-again-about-ecosystem-failure?

he Amazon rainforest, according to a 2021 study, is losing its capacity as a carbon sink and now emits more than it absorbs. In the tropics, marine scientists are reporting that coral reefs are in decline, threatening fish stocks. Equally concerning is research into the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, a vast system of ocean currents that helps regulate the climate and is at risk of collapsing this century. The entire global ecosystem appears to be losing its ability to function.

We find this view in newspapers, magazines, technical reports and the journals of learned societies. But thinking about the environment in terms of its functions is also how many of us tend to understand the world. We may think that forests exist to produce oxygen, wetlands to filter water, and bees to pollinate our crops.

There is a problem with this way of thinking: ecosystems don’t exist to perform goals. The Amazon absorbs carbon, but it doesn’t ‘aim’ to do so. It simply exists. Any standards of operation we find in nature have come directly from our own desires for things like climate stability, abundant fisheries, beauty or cultural meaning.

So why do we keep thinking ecosystems have functions they could fail to perform?

I came to this puzzle as a graduate student in the late 1990s, a time when research into biodiversity and ecosystem function was rapidly increasing. Initially, I thought I would write my dissertation on a conventional ecological topic: whether species richness drives productivity. Instead, I fell in with the philosophy of science crowd, attended their seminars, and eventually earned a master’s degree in philosophy alongside my work in ecology. There I encountered a rich debate over the concept of function – what it means, when it applies, what work it does. But no one seemed to be connecting that debate to the way ecologists were using the same word, unreflectively, to describe what ecosystems do. This essay is an attempt to bring those conversations together.

However, my concern with ecosystems and function was never just academic. I am an environmentalist, unsettled by the loss of natural places. And as a father, I am concerned that my generation will leave to our children a planet depleted in both richness and resilience. These commitments also drive my interest in debates about function. If the way we think about ecological crisis is conceptually shaky, we risk obscuring what’s really at stake.

I worry that the ways we often conceive of the problems before us are inadequate. For if ecosystems have no intrinsic ends and cannot truly ‘break down’, then how do we repair them? How do we respond to environmental crises in a world of aimless ecosystems?

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Approaches to conservation have long been shaped by debates about whether nature has a purpose or whether we are projecting our own aims onto it. Behind every attempt to justify new protections lies an implicit answer to the question: what is the environment for?

In the United States and the United Kingdom during the 19th century, these answers were rooted in game laws and hunting traditions that sought to maintain populations of species valued for sport or resource use. By the mid-20th century, the American forester and early conservationist Aldo Leopold offered a more expanded answer by proposing that our moral community should include ‘the land’ itself: soils, waters, plants and animals. In the 1970s and ’80s, the answers of conservationists were increasingly grounded in the intrinsic value of specific species, reflected in legislation such as the US Endangered Species Act. But a decade later, the species-focused approach of ‘conservation biology’ was seen by many as lacking. It targeted only rare organisms that contributed little to the circulation of their ecosystems – species like the spotted owl and the snail darter fish. In doing so, some researchers worried that the species approach might have overlooked more consequential concerns, such as the major ‘services’ provided by ecosystems, such as food production, clean water, drought mitigation, storm protection, timber and fibre.

The answer to ‘What is nature for?’ had become this: nature is for the services it provides to people

In the late 1990s, this crisis led to a new research agenda, which crystallised around ‘biodiversity and ecosystem function’ (BEF). This approach presented itself as a scientifically rigorous framework while simultaneously serving as a rhetorically powerful justification for conservation. In contrast to a hyper-focus on individual populations of rare species, BEF embraced all biodiversity, a holistic value.

In the early decades of the 21st century, this logic scaled up. The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) embedded an ecosystem services framework in international policy. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services adopted a similar structure. National governments began commissioning natural capital accounts, attempting to assign monetary value to pollination, flood regulation, carbon storage and other ecological phenomena. The answer to the question ‘What is nature for?’ had become this: nature is for the services it provides to people. The language of ecosystem function was the conceptual bridge that made this answer sound scientific rather than merely political.

As a result, the idea of function now pervades how ecosystems are described and understood. Consider for a moment how you think about the ecosystems around you. If you have ever described a forest as a carbon sink or a wetland as a natural filter, you have inherited the ethic of BEF. If you’ve ever thought of a rainforest as something that provides oxygen for humans, or a reef as something that helps provide us with protein (in the form of fish), you’ve inherited the logic of ‘ecosystem services’.

What do we mean when we use the word ‘function’? Sometimes, it refers to designed purposes. For example, when we say that the function of a clock is to tell time, or the function of a carburettor is to mix air and fuel for combustion. In these cases, the object (or one of its parts) was intentionally made for a specific end. The same logic applies up a hierarchy of wholes and parts: the carburettor is part of the engine, the engine part of the car, the car part of a transport system.

Other kinds of functions arise through co-option rather than design. Writing at a picnic table, I might use a book or a rock to keep my papers from blowing away. The rock was not designed and the book was intended for another purpose, yet both can serve the goal I have in mind. I give them their function by using them in a certain way.

Still other functions emerge without any intention, particularly in nature. The philosopher Karen Neander offers a striking example: penguins are myopic on land. Their eyes are not defective but optimised for underwater focus, where penguins feed. Land myopia is a byproduct of a visual system shaped for a different environment.

Though there are several ways that ‘function’ is used, there are two main theories that guide (and justify) the ways scientists typically think about it: causal role theory and selected effects theory.

Everything exists for something else, from this perspective

Robert Cummins developed the causal role theory in response to Ernest Nagel’s argument in The Structure of Science (1961) about how science should avoid teleological language. That is, scientists should not explain things in a way that suggests the influence of specific goals or purposes. Such explanations appear to directly conflict with the scientific aim of explaining things in terms of laws. Nagel tried to explain that functional claims can and should be made without reference to goals or purposes. For example, rather than saying: ‘The function of the lungs is to oxygenate the blood,’ Nagel might say: ‘Given the structure of lung tissue, the properties of gases, and the pressure differences during breathing, oxygen diffuses into the bloodstream and carbon dioxide diffuses out.’ This becomes a scientific explanation based on laws and initial conditions. Cummins, however, thought this missed how scientists actually think about function. He saw that references to function could be a useful explanatory shortcut when talking about how things work, and so proposed a different approach. According to Cummins’s argument, ascribing function to anything is simply a way of identifying a component’s contribution to the ‘capacity’ of the system that contains it. Functional language, from this view, is fine. For example, the carburettor in a car enables the engine to convert chemical energy to mechanical energy; the engine enables the car to transport passengers; and so on.

It is easy to see why this theory would be attractive to ecologists who are typically interested in tracing causal chains. The function of bacteria and other decomposers, in their view, is to break down dead organisms into smaller particles and transform their chemical composition; the function of green plants is to convert carbon dioxide into bioavailable carbon for herbivores. Everything exists for something else, from this perspective.

However, Cummins’s causal role theory has some serious limitations. First, it provides no real way of determining which processes count as genuine capacities. The capacities we select depend on what phenomena scientists happen to be interested in, rather than those that are objectively important to the system. The philosopher Ruth Millikan illustrates the difficulty this way: the heart pumps blood, but it also makes a thumping noise. Doctors may use this noise diagnostically, yet they do not treat it as a function of the heart. Why not? In the causal role theory, there is no way to distinguish genuine functions from incidental effects. For this reason, Millikan and others have developed an alternative to causal role theory.

Another limitation is that causal role theory cannot account for how something could malfunction. As the philosopher Ema Sullivan-Bissett explores in her essay ‘Malfunction Defended’ (2017), any adequate theory of function must be able to explain how biological items can fail to do what they are supposed to do. Though the causal role theory can explain that a heart with a defective valve is still doing something (moving blood, albeit inefficiently), it cannot say that the heart is doing its job badly. It offers no way of describing what the standard for doing a good job is supposed to be.

The ‘goal’ of photosynthesis is not imposed from outside, as if nature must have had a designer

The alternative to causal role theory, and probably the dominant theory among philosophers of biology today, is the selected effects theory, developed by Larry Wright along with two philosophers I’ve already mentioned: Neander and Millikan. The selected effects theory is an etiological theory of function: to say that a trait has a function is to give an account of its history, identifying the cause for which it exists and persists. According to this theory, any biological function is the effect for which the trait was selected in the process of natural selection. It’s likely that you have understood the world in this way, too. You may understand that the function of the heart is to pump blood because pumping blood was the reason proto-hearts were favoured by animals in the evolutionary past. Likewise, chloroplasts carry out photosynthesis because that was the effect that contributed to the reproductive success of the organisms that possessed them long ago. This historical anchoring distinguishes selected effects explanations from causal role accounts, which focus only on present-day contributions and not on how the trait came to be.

Selected effects theory has two important consequences. First, it explains what it means for something to work properly or fail. A heart is not just something that happens to move blood around. It was shaped, over evolutionary time, because moving blood kept organisms alive. That history gives us a standard. This matters because the idea of malfunction depends on having such a standard. Without it, we could describe what something does, but we could not say whether it is doing it well or badly. Second, selected effects theory shows where this sense of purpose comes from. It gives a naturalistic grounding to teleology: the ‘goal’ of photosynthesis or blood circulation is not imposed from outside, as if nature must have had a designer, but is implicit in the evolutionary history that produced these traits. In this way, biologists can talk about purposes without appealing to intention or design.

This theory matters because it provides scientists with a standard against which something can succeed or fail. If a trait has a function grounded in evolutionary history, then it can malfunction when it fails to do what that history selected it to do. The question is whether ecosystems can also have this kind of standard.

As we’ve seen, ‘function’ doesn’t mean the same thing in all cases. Across all the examples and theories above, some uses of the word ‘function’ simply describe how a system works – how parts contribute to a larger process. Other uses imply a normative standard. They explain what a system is for and how it can fail at that. To keep these two uses apart, we can distinguish between two broad uses of ‘function’. The first sense is descriptive: explaining how a system works. The other is goal-directed (or teleological): it specifies what a system is for (and how it can fail). This distinction becomes particularly important when we turn to rainforests, coral reefs and other systems that have effects we can describe but no ends that we can point to – and without ends they’re meant to achieve, the idea that an ecosystem can ‘malfunction’ begins to unravel.

Where did the idea of malfunctioning ecologies come from? This way of thinking about ecosystems did not arise from ecology itself. It draws on a much older habit of thought: treating complex wholes as if they were organisms, with parts working together toward a common end. To understand that inheritance, we need to return to the 17th century, at the dawn of mechanistic physiology, when the English physician William Harvey would often combine a mechanistic ‘how’ with a teleological ‘why’ in a single thought.

In his treatise on the ‘motions of the heart’, Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (1628), Harvey concedes to Hippocrates that the heart is a muscle:

Finally, it is not without good grounds that Hippocrates in his book, De Corde, entitles it a muscle; its action is the same; so is its function, viz, to contract and move something else; in this case the charge of the blood.

– translation by Robert Willis (1847)

Here, Harvey offers a clear ‘how’ (contraction) and at the same time a ‘why’ (propel blood through the body). By articulating both modes together, Harvey illustrates how early modern physiology could accommodate purpose-driven language while advancing a causal, anatomically grounded science of life.

Are we describing how ecosystems work, or quietly importing a sense of purpose that may not belong there?

Even as our mechanistic understanding of biological systems has grown vastly more sophisticated, the teleology in our descriptions of physiological function remains unmistakable. We may say that pattern-recognition receptors detect pathogens and trigger inflammatory pathways (the how) while serving as the body’s ‘first line of defence’ against infection (the why). We may say that neurons in the hypothalamus respond to the hormone leptin by suppressing food intake (the how) to maintain energy balance (the why). We may say that endocrine systems coordinate the secretion of hormones from the pituitary with target tissues (the how) to ensure healthy postnatal growth (the why). In all these cases, it does indeed seem that receptors, neurons, hearts and polymerases have purposes.

This matters because it shows where our intuition about function comes from. In organisms, combining how and why feels natural. Parts appear to have roles, and those roles can be fulfilled or not. But this raises a larger question: when we use the same language for ecosystems, are we describing how they work, or are we quietly importing a sense of purpose that may not belong there?

In the early 20th century, the ecologist Frederic Clements proposed that ecosystems develop through predictable stages of succession toward a stable ‘climax’ community, much as an organism grows and matures. Other ecologists even used the metaphor of a ‘superorganism’, implying that ecosystems had an intrinsic trajectory and a kind of unified purpose. While influential for decades, this view has long since been abandoned. Nowadays, ecologists think that ecosystems, for the most part, are not like organisms at all. Ecosystems are not shaped by selection; they do not reproduce, and it’s debatable whether they are even identifiable biological entities such as hearts or cell receptors. Instead, they are open, dynamic systems composed of countless interactions among organisms and their local microenvironments – contingent combinations of organisms that we identify and name primarily for the purposes of our understanding. If you haphazardly throw together a bunch of organisms in a place, you have an ecosystem.

And yet, ecologists continue to borrow the language of function to describe ecosystem-level processes. Wetlands ‘function’ to filter surface water; forests ‘function’ as carbon sinks.

The establishment of the journal Functional Ecology in the 1980s marked one moment in this conceptual evolution. Articles in this journal began investigating how individual species within ecosystems used their ‘functional traits’ to influence major ecological processes. Consider the ways that vultures scavenge animal carcasses. For the vulture, scavenging provides sustenance. At the level of the ecosystem, however, this same behaviour can be described differently: thinking in terms of ‘trait-based ecology’, scavenging becomes just one process of many by which organic matter is broken down. That is, it contributes to the large-scale processes usually defined by ecologists as ‘ecosystem functions’, including nutrient cycling, primary production, and decomposition. By describing the behaviour of vultures this way, ecologists turn a goal-directed function in the organism into a contribution to the ecosystem. But it is easy to slip from this description into a stronger claim about function.

The Amazon may be described as ‘the lungs of our planet’, but it has nothing in common with human organs

Once species are assigned roles in this way, they begin to resemble carburettors in an engine or organs in a body. This is where the language becomes unstable.

From the perspective of function, descriptions of how biodiversity shapes ecological processes can start to merge with judgments about what those processes are for, and whether they are being sustained or lost. For example, a decline in insect populations can be described as a change in pollination rates but also recast as a loss of the ecosystem’s ‘ability’ to support crops. Likewise, reduced microbial activity in soils can be described as leading to slower decomposition but also framed as a failure of the system to maintain soil fertility.

The distinction between describing how something happens and making normative judgments about what the resulting processes are for is one that matters if we want to think clearly about what’s taking place when ecosystems change. When these two are not kept apart, the idea of ‘ecosystem function’ begins to carry more weight than it can support.

What about the standard justifications for using functional language? For ecosystem processes, the conventional selected effects theory account will not work. First, ecosystems are not shaped by natural selection as cohesive units; they are assemblages of interacting organisms and abiotic components, governed by dynamic processes. A forest such as the Amazon may often be described as ‘the lungs of our planet’, but it has nothing in common with human organs, or any other cohesive unit shaped by natural selection. Rainforests, like all ecosystems, don’t have selected effects. They do not reproduce. Their boundaries are often impermanent. It is debatable whether they are even identifiable biological entities.

Plants fix carbon, microbes decompose organic matter, and forest animals redistribute nutrients. These processes can be described straightforwardly. But it is so easy to take the further step and say the rainforest is for storing carbon or maintaining stability. At that point, a description of what happens begins to look like a claim about what the system is meant to do. Any such claims are necessarily anthropocentric. And so, if we say an ecosystem is malfunctioning, we must also ask: malfunctioning for whom, and for what purpose? These questions reveal the assumptions embedded in our language and highlight the risks of conflating ecological processes with human-centred goals.

Were ecologists aware of the normative and teleological connotations of functional language when they began using it for ecosystems? The answer is yes.

I asked Peter Calow, the founding co-editor of Functional Ecology, how the journal got its name and whether he had misgivings about applying ‘function’ to ecosystems. He told me he was ‘comfortable with the notion of function applying to adaptation within species through natural selection’ – that is to say, a selected effects account of the biological functions of traits in organisms – but ‘less comfortable with it being applied to ecosystems’. The British Ecological Society’s publication committee, which oversees the journal, debated the matter at length before, in Calow’s words, ‘getting tired of discussing it’ and adopting the title. He recalled that ‘functional’ terminology was not an unthinking carryover; it was chosen despite conceptual unease and largely because the kinds of papers the journal was seeking to publish connected ecology with physiological research, where functional concepts were well entrenched and largely understood through the selected effects account.

Another place to look is the landmark book Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (1993), based on a 1991 symposium in Germany and supported in part by UNESCO’s ‘Man and the Biosphere Programme’ – tellingly gendered, and unabashedly anthropocentric. Both the sponsorship and the volume itself bear out this orientation. In the foreword to the book, the late Paul Ehrlich justifies its intellectual premise:

Of special interest to humanity is the relationship of biodiversity to the variety of services provided by ecosystems and, in particular, to the stability of the flow of those services, such as the maintenance of the gaseous composition of the atmosphere, preservation of soils, recycling of nutrients, and provision of food from the sea.

He then revisits the ‘rivet popper’ analogy, which he had previously introduced in the environmental classic Extinction (1981), co-authored with Anne Ehlich. They described each species in the ecosystem as a rivet in an airplane wing: remove one rivet and the plane will fly on, but remove enough rivets and the plane will fail, typically catastrophically. The presupposition is that ‘failure’ matters because the airplane’s value lies in safely transporting people. The metaphor is rhetorically powerful but imperfect. Rivets are static, fully interchangeable, and single-purpose; species are dynamic, unique and exhibit a vast diversity of behaviours that shift across contexts. Importantly, rivets were placed by design engineers. The analogical slippage smuggles in the idea that ecosystems, like machines, have a proper configuration, and that deviation constitutes malfunction.

The car analogy frames ecosystems as objects with optimal configurations and latent points of breakdown

Ernst-Detlef Schulze, co-editor with Harold Mooney of Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function (1993), has since rejected the term ‘ecosystem function’ altogether. He calls it ‘anthropocentric’ and ‘vague’. Nonetheless, in their conclusion to the volume, Schulze and Mooney extend this engineering theme with their own analogy. I will share it in full, as it conveys a way of thinking that is still common today:

Everyone has experienced the breakdown of a car. Opening the hood will not enable one to recognise the function of most components. One needs to know the function of the components in detail for any repair. There are very simple components, which are absolutely necessary for the function of the total automobile, such as the gasoline line that connects the gasoline tank with the motor. Other components improve the function but are not essential to the use of a car, such as the exhaust, but its malfunction will result in increased cost, noise, and pollution. There are parts which are not essential for immediate function, such as the bumper, but it is this part which may save lives under extreme conditions. Brakes are used intermittently and for emergencies. Their importance is such that cars contain two independent systems of braking fluid, ie, a redundancy exists as a back-up for this very important function. Last but not least, there are parts that make the car more attractive, such as chromium parts, which have nothing to do with function, but which may become important when selling the car. Even if all components of the car are present and are all intact, the car may still not run properly, if it is not well-tuned, ie, if the assembly of individual components is not acting together.

What follows is a retreat: ‘Obviously, the automobile analogy is not totally applicable to an ecosystem. An ecosystem is not a machine constructed to accomplish a given function.’ The issue is that, even with the caveats, function isn’t the only problem with the broken-car analogy.

Schulze and Mooney may have disavowed the teleology, but they left the normativity fully intact. Their metaphor imports an evaluative schema: cars have proper working states, deviations from which are malfunctions, and there exists some critical but unknowable threshold at which the system fails. In this way, the imagery frames ecosystems as objects with optimal configurations and latent points of catastrophic breakdown.

Another approach comes from David Tilman, who was a central figure in biodiversity-ecosystem research during the 1990s. He tells me that he resists the term ‘function’ for ecosystems, preferring the ostensibly non-teleological ‘functioning’. For Tilman, ‘function’ implies the ‘evolutionarily and logically unsupportable view that ecosystems are designed to benefit people,’ while his alternative – ‘functioning’ – simply describes processes without ascribing purposes. Yet, as Neander reminds us, removing teleology does not necessarily remove normativity. Even ‘functioning’ invites judgments about whether an ecosystem is doing well or poorly (‘How well is the car functioning?’)

For all their misgivings about function and teleology, Schulze, Tilman and many other scientists concede that functional language has strategic advantages. In some contexts, thinking in terms of ‘function’ can allow for flexibility, especially when working with people in other disciplines. In the 1980s and ’90s, that flexibility – combined with the communicative punch of ‘function’ and ‘functioning’ – helped bridge ecological science with the burgeoning discourse on ecosystem services, where the benefits of ecosystems to people could be emphasised without spelling out the value assumptions. What began in UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Programme as studies of the ‘structure and function of ecosystems’ evolved into a research agenda on biodiversity and ecosystem function that blurred the line between describing how ecosystems work and prescribing how they ought to be.

During the past few decades, this kind of metaphorical scaffolding has done important political work. Framing biodiversity loss as akin to losing rivets from an airplane wing or parts from a car makes the stakes vivid for policymakers and the public. It can also harmonise neatly with the ‘ecosystem services’ agenda, which links ecological science directly to human welfare. In this policy context, ‘ecosystem function’ becomes a conceptual hinge: it can be presented as a purely scientific measure of ecological processes, while simultaneously serving as a proxy for the benefits those processes deliver to people. That duality (straddling the descriptive and the normative) made the term powerful but also ensured that the teleological and value-laden connotations scientists worried about in private (and sometimes explicitly denied in their writings) would persist in public discourse.

Functional language allows ecologists to describe how ecosystems work while also gesturing toward what they are for. That ambiguity has been useful. It has helped connect ecological science to human concerns. But it has also obscured a crucial distinction between processes and purposes, which we can no longer afford to ignore.

The possibility that something can malfunction implies a failure to achieve a purpose. In the case of human-designed systems, this makes sense: a broken clock no longer fulfils its intended purpose of keeping time. However, ecosystems are neither designed nor evolved systems. They have no intrinsic goals, only dynamic processes that reflect the interactions of their components.

What shall we do with the notion of ecological function? From my perspective, ecosystems can only malfunction when they are appropriated or co-opted. Just as I might select a stone to serve as a paperweight, a wetland may be designated as a water filtration system, in which case a disruption in its ability to filter water is correctly seen as a malfunction. Similarly, if a forest is managed for carbon sequestration, a decline in its carbon storage capacity should be considered a failure. In these cases, the notion of malfunction arises not from the ecosystem’s intrinsic properties but from its role in meeting human-defined goals.

‘Malfunctions’ reflect human values and priorities by framing nature’s worth in terms of utility, aesthetics, or cultural and spiritual value. Examples of undesirable ecological events such as algal blooms, coral bleaching and deforestation illustrate the complexity of these judgments. An algal bloom caused by fertiliser flowing into the ocean from rivers might disrupt aquatic ecosystems, yet whether that disruption counts as a ‘malfunction’ or a ‘natural’ response to nutrient inputs depends on the standard we apply. Coral bleaching may be described as a failure of reefs to support marine life, but this framing reflects human concerns about biodiversity or fisheries production rather than intrinsic purpose. These cases underscore that our reasons for repairing ecosystems rest on human ideas – such as duties, norms and objectives – that are external to the ecosystems themselves. So, how can we think about ecosystems, and our obligations to them, more clearly?

Recognising that value-free science is a myth does not weaken the case for environmental action

To more fully move beyond teleology in their descriptions of the world, ecologists could focus simply on characterising the interactions in an ecosystem and quantifying changes of state, without any reference to purposes or goals. We could think of this as a positivistic, process-oriented stance. Such an approach respects the autonomy of the nonhuman world to be what it is without imposing human values and priorities. But conceptually moving beyond teleology doesn’t stop us viewing ecosystems through the lens of our duties, norms and objectives. Even when scientists engage in apparently objective research, human values always come along for the ride.

This point can be sharpened by turning to the philosophy of science. In The Empirical Stance (2002), Bas van Fraassen argues that empiricism – the view that the world is known through observation and experience – is not a doctrine about what exists, but a stance. It is a set of attitudes and commitments about how to conduct enquiry. The same is true of what is sometimes called ‘value-free science’, the ideal of describing the world independently of the enquirer’s perspective. To adopt that ideal is itself a choice, shaped by values about what counts as knowledge and what is worth knowing. It is a commitment, not a discovery. When ecologists study ecosystems, they cannot escape the values that guide their attention.

I am not saying we should purge those values. Understanding the ways that we are bound to our values is an invitation to examine carefully and honestly how they enter into and engage with scientific practice. Likewise, recognising that value-free science is a myth does not weaken the case for environmental action. It clarifies that the task of thinking about ecosystems, and our obligations to them, is both descriptive and normative.

When we say that natural systems exist to provide services for us – oxygen, protein, climate stability – we appropriate certain processes for our own purpose. In doing so, we are actively privileging one ecological process over others. We are not merely observing a function. We may value pollination, for example, for its role in sustaining crop yields while ignoring or even suppressing other equally ‘natural’ processes, such as herbivory by pests. When we then perpetuate that chosen process by intervening in an environment, through conservation or technological design, its continued existence is no longer solely the product of natural conditions but also of our deliberate selection. These functions become selected effects: they persist because they are chosen by us in the present, not because they were favoured by natural selection in the past.

Ecosystems cannot malfunction on their own. They may change, reorganise or even collapse. But these should be understood as natural processes, not failures. Teleological framings can be deployed, but only if we are explicit about the anthropocentric commitments they involve: whose needs are being served, and to what ends. Used in this way, appeals to ‘function’ can make the value of ecosystems legible to human concerns while avoiding the pretence that such purposes belong to nature itself.

What is at stake here is a question of intellectual honesty. Environmental arguments often present these purposes as if they were natural facts, rather than human commitments. When we say an ecosystem is ‘breaking down’, we risk disguising our own values as properties of the world. That move can be rhetorically effective, but it is conceptually misleading.

By reframing our understanding of ecological functions and malfunctions, we can advance a more rigorous and reflective ecology. We can directly state those reasons when we recognise that our reasons for caring about ecosystems come from us (our needs, our ethics, our futures). In doing so, we arrive at an ecology that joins scientific description with explicit moral responsibility, rather than blurring the two.

The work ahead is not to repair nature’s purposes, but to take responsibility for our own – and for the world they shape.

Flickering Enlightenment

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The true enlightenment arose through the implimdentation of universal literacy as a basis to society. this allowed all rare talent to be identified and then supported. That was the enlightenment and suddenly plougboys could read the bible and by extension create and sell new knowledge.

Recent manipulation of the universal knowledge base can only choke in its own contradictions. Recall feminism and eugenics and climate change. really! The top tier intellect never bit.

Those todays are merely promoted intellectual fashion and will all die natuaral deaths.

Flickering Enlightenment

Attacked by the Left and Right, the Enlightenment can only be saved through use of its greatest legacy: permanent critique

https://aeon.co/essays/lets-save-the-enlightenment-baby-from-its-muddied-bathwater?

The Enlightenment is going through a dark time. Critical race theorists on both sides of the Atlantic are following the philosophers Emmanuel Eze and Charles W Mills in holding the Enlightenment responsible for modern racism. In The Age of Empire (2021), the British sociologist Kehinde Andrews says that it is time to stop revering ‘dead white men’ such as Kant, Locke and Voltaire. Last year, the University of Edinburgh, which is widely seen as having had an ‘outsized’ historic role in promulgating racist scientific theories, undertook an excoriating process of self-examination, publishing a Race Review that acknowledged that the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment were responsible for propagating ‘some of the most damaging ideas in human history’, including the idea that human societies exist on a hierarchical ‘ladder’, from ‘savage’ to ‘civilised’, with Europeans at the top. The Review highlighted the role of David Hume, who, in a notorious footnote to the 1753 version of his essay ‘On National Characters’ (1748), stated that non-white races are ‘naturally inferior to the whites’. The university admits that it still has bequests totalling many millions of pounds from donors linked to the slave trade and other colonial conquests. At the same time, the city is embroiled in a long dispute over what to do with a statue of Henry Dundas, who most historians hold responsible for delaying the progress of abolition through UK Parliament.

Censured by the Left for its philosophy-washing of Empire, the Enlightenment is further under fire from the populist Right who see the long arm of its influence in the foundations of our established political institutions and the traditional architecture of representative democracy and professional expertise: those who stand up for Enlightenment values are liable to find themselves castigated as members of a ‘complacent liberal elite’. Writing in The Observer in 2025, Will Hutton bemoaned the fact that, in an era of populist autocracy, what were once taken-for-granted goods – ‘justice, accountability, social fairness, scientific progress, international order’ – have become associated with a ‘Brahmin class – who are the new civilisational enemy.’ Attacks on this new enemy are fuelled, Hutton wrote, by ‘the need for vengeance on the standard-bearers of Enlightenment values.’ Right-wing critics of the Enlightenment are supported by Silicon Valley tech bros. In fact, the so-called ‘Dark Enlightenment’ pioneered by the far-Right software developer Curtis Yarvin, championed by the likes of J D Vance and Peter Thiel, seeks to obliterate the Enlightenment values of equality and democracy.

Famously, the linguist and psychologist Steven Pinker has rushed to defend the Enlightenment, subtitling his 2018 book on the subject: ‘The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress’. These core values, says Pinker, have led to measurable improvements in human health, prosperity and peace. Although it’s good to see prominent commentators stand up for agreed facts and the pursuit of knowledge, especially at a time when scholarship, politics and the media are being eroded by post-truth, conspiracy theories and a mistrust of experts, I cannot align myself wholeheartedly with this big-beast bandwagon. In the midst of glaring economic inequalities, climate breakdown and widespread poverty in the Global South, Pinker’s faith in civilisational progress seems optimistic to say the least. Besides, I believe there is something to the Leftist critique of the Enlightenment as either intrinsically or circumstantially racist. If we don’t engage with the Enlightenment’s complexities, it will continue to be weaponised by the culture wars, and for extremist polemical ends. Leftists can cancel, wholesale, the Enlightenment’s reminder of the need for intellectual rigour and a commitment to truth, while conservatives can use it as a tub-thumping defence of the West that marginalises the vital campaign for social justice.

In consequence of this pincer-movement attack, the Enlightenment’s legacy is existentially vulnerable. It makes me deeply worried as someone whose entire career has been built on trying to understand and analyse the world around me – especially a world that still tries to confine thinking women to the realms of emotion and ‘personal experience’.

I believe that Enlightenment values are essential, but that we have largely forgotten how to make a good case for them: we need to rely on shared facts, tested by experiment; a public sphere where open discussion can take place; and the belief that discussion should be founded on reasoned argument. We need, moreover, to cherish the more political values of tolerance, freedom, human rights and the common good. Advocates for artificial intelligence have the temerity to claim that large language models are ushering in a ‘second Enlightenment’ (a claim that was uncritically echoed in a paper published by the World Economic Forum last year) when what we are in fact seeing is the destruction of the Enlightenment legacy under the false banner of its name. As the historian David Bell argued in The New York Times in 2025, AI is actually ‘shedding Enlightenment values’ by simply reinforcing ‘what we already think we know.’ In The Guardian, the journalist and geopolitical risk consultant Joseph de Weck warned that ‘AI is taking us back to the dark ages’, making us lazy, and stymying independent thinking.

Reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool

The evidence suggests that we are going through a rapid de-enlightenment. Newspaper circulations, attention spans and trust in forms of agreed knowledge are in freefall. Misinformation, disinformation and deepfakes are gaining ground. If we let go of the valuable aspects of the Enlightenment project, we open ourselves up to a world of AI blather, ‘my truth’ pronouncements, wobbly sentiment and unchecked power.

My unease with this parlous state of affairs has provoked me to go back and rethink the Enlightenment and what it has to offer. But, rather than unthinkingly recouping it as a mission, I want instead to tease out and weigh up its merits, to discern with nuance what is still fit for our times. I want to ask if it is possible to rescue the Enlightenment’s rallying power, and if it’s worth defending what the combined forces of Left and Right are coming together to attack. Are the Enlightenment’s deficiencies barnacles on an old ship, or integral to its design?

Ironically, in critiquing the Enlightenment, the postmodern Left has deconstructed the basis of its own belief systems, and now liberal intellectuals no longer know what to defend outside of demands for affirmation, or the assertion of the individual right to be who you want to be. In the midst of intolerant purity spirals, reason is in danger of being demonised as a white man’s oppressive tool, and writers and thinkers such as Kate Clanchy or Slavoj Žižek are cancelled rather than engaged with. Yet what is more dangerous: holding to a set of Enlightenment values that might be flawed, or opening the floodgates to a post-truth world in which any authoritarian agenda might well hold sway? I believe that it’s possible to conserve intellectual standards and be politically radical at the same time. Because there is another side to the Enlightenment that is not surfacing in the culture wars, and which is the opposite of centrist complacency: namely, intellectual humility and political challenge.

The difficulty with any discussion of the Enlightenment is that it’s not clear what the word actually means. Broadly speaking, it was a philosophical project that grew out of the establishment of the scientific method in the 17th and 18th centuries: Francis Bacon and his circle had pioneered the rejection of alchemy, mysticism and superstition in favour of the empirical study of the physical world, and this became the basis of philosophical positivism. If you visited the National Gallery’s exhibition devoted to Joseph Wright of Derby, you might have seen An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768) – a tribute to natural philosophy that offers stark contrasts of darkness and light to dramatise the impact of scientific discovery.

In 18th-century France, a group of thinkers emerged known as the philosophes. Led by Voltaire, Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Denis Diderot and Montesquieu, they championed the secular pursuit of knowledge. Over the course of 20 years, Diderot and d’Alembert produced a 28-volume Encyclopédie, a ‘systematic dictionary’ to be passed on to future generations for the improvement of mankind. Voltaire championed the primacy of mathematical logic. And Montesquieu argued for the division of power within government to ensure that no one group could exert tyranny. Enlightenment was also pursued in Scotland by figures such as Adam Smith, David Hume, James Hutton and Thomas Reid, and in Germany by Moses Mendelssohn, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Immanuel Kant, who sought to bring together human rationality and an exploration of the world around us.

What these thinkers had in common was a belief in the power of reason to liberate us from inherited custom and received wisdom. The Encyclopédie defined the philosophe as someone who, ‘trampling on prejudice, tradition, universal consent, authority, in a word, all that enslaves most minds, dares to think for himself’. In 1784, a Berlin periodical invited readers to respond to the question ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Kant sent in an essay, defining it as ‘man’s release from his self-incurred immaturity’, which he identified as ‘the inability to use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another.’

Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones

This rejection of dogma is inspiring. But the Enlightenment was a diverse, even contradictory movement, which is partly why it can now be deployed as a political football by those who occupy very different positions (see also liberalism). ‘I’m really not at all convinced that there was such a thing as Enlightenment,’ the historian Dorinda Outram, author of several books on the Enlightenment, told me. The philosophes declare that they’re ‘producing universal categories that apply to all human beings, like universal humanity’, but then they ‘repeatedly exclude people from being under the aegis of those universal categories’, such as ‘Black people, women and the poor’. In A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Mary Wollstonecraft lambasted the Enlightenment for claiming universality while excluding women from the realm of rationality. ‘She really takes it and shakes it and says, look, this is all wonderful, but it’s not real unless you include everybody,’ Outram said. Critics of the Enlightenment don’t necessarily reject universalism as an ideal, but point out that the commitment to universalism was selective.

Some historians not only charge the Enlightenment with hypocrisy, but believe that racism is in its bones. Angela Saini is a science journalist who has written about the origins of race science. ‘I’m a big fan of the Enlightenment,’ she told me. ‘It gave us so much of the world as we know it today,’ in terms of ‘rationality and the scientific method’. Carl Linnaeus’s system of biological classification, however, one of the main artefacts of Enlightenment science, divides people up by skin colour, which is ‘incredibly arbitrary’, Saini told me: he’s ‘essentially taxonomising humans in the same way that he’s drawing up taxonomies of the natural world.’ Voltaire believed that different ethnic groups had fundamentally different origins – a theory known as polygenism – and that the age of reason had arrived at maturity only in Western Europe. ‘Humanity,’ wrote Kant in 1802, ‘has its highest degree of perfection in the white race.’

The standard defence of Enlightenment figures, Kehinde Andrews told an Open University seminar, is that ‘yes, they were racist, but that’s separate from their moral philosophy … so why would we throw the baby out with the bathwater?’ That is the wrong way to think about it, Andrews said, since Enlightenment thinkers like Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Kant ‘all had these beliefs that Europe was superior, that whiteness was better, that Black people were inferior’, and that this is ‘not a coincidence’, it’s actually the ‘premise of where they come from’.

Saini points out that these racist attitudes were also a product of their time, and were economically and politically expedient: the Enlightenment’s cherished notions of ‘freedom and equality and reason and secularism’ were forged alongside ‘these ideas about some people being inferior to others’. The hierarchies that were described as ‘natural’ were ‘self-serving’, Saini explained, because they not only justified colonial expansion but also ‘reinforced the social order’.

Enlightenment was invoked by anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century

The experience of colonisation nonetheless mitigated racist attitudes as Westerners came into contact with cultures that were evidently intellectually and culturally sophisticated. For example, ‘they get more and more interested in China,’ Outram told me, and ‘the confrontation there is clearly not between reason and unreason. It’s just different sorts of reason.’ The Enlightenment was inconsistent because it was changing over time. ‘It’s a very different thing at the beginning of the 18th century from what it is at the end,’ Outram said, ‘when the focus is on a new sort of humanitarianism’ and new forms of ‘altruism’, such as ‘the philanthropic founding of lifeboat stations’, which is inspired by the idea that ‘people will willingly go out in dangerous conditions to try and rescue people who they have no links with, who are total strangers.’

As the historian Jonathan Israel argued in Radical Enlightenment (2001), in contrast to negative images of pale, male, wealthy elites with direct or indirect links to slavery, prominent Enlightenment thinkers such as Diderot and Nicolas de Condorcet were in fact passionate abolitionists: Diderot contributed some stridently anti-slavery arguments to the Histoire des deux Indes (1770), a polemic against colonial rule, and bemoaned the treatment of ‘Negroes’ in the Encyclopédie (although he simultaneously describes them as having ‘little intelligence’), writing that ‘We have reduced them, I wouldn’t say to the conditions of slaves, but to that of beasts of burden; and we are reasonable! And we are Christians!’ Condorcet wrote in 1795 that the gains of the ‘Age of Discovery’ counted for nothing unless Europeans ‘acknowledge men of other climates, equals and brothers by the will of nature, have never been formed to nourish the pride and avarice of a few privileged nations’. Enlightenment was invoked by later anti-slavery revolts, such as in Haiti at the turn of the 19th century, and by later anticolonial thinkers such as W E B Du Bois, who drew on its assertion of a common humanity and emancipation through reason.

I spoke to Richard Whatmore, a historian and author of The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (2023), who cited Voltaire writing in 1764 that ‘Discord is the great ill of mankind; and tolerance is the only remedy for it.’ For Whatmore, Enlightenment is ‘any strategy that prevents wars of religion from breaking out.’ In the 18th century, ‘diversity means disagreeing without wanting to flatten your rivals. As soon as you want to ostracise and exile, that’s the end of Enlightenment. That’s fanaticism.’ The difficult thing, he said, ‘is living together with people who think completely differently to the way that you do.’ Whatmore believes the Enlightenment ended with the French Revolution and its desire to create ‘an exclusive community’, which he likens to ‘our culture wars’. As soon as you descend into culture war, ‘that shows you’ve lost to an 18th-century mind’. Whatmore identifies this tendency on both the Trumpian Right and the identitarian Left. To oppose prejudice but cancel those who disagree with you is – arguably – a particularly modern form of hypocrisy.

Tolerance – applied to both people and opinions – is a slippery virtue. I can see both sides of the debate between universalism and particularity. So I mistrust the warm embrace St Paul extends to the Jews, inviting them into the Christian fold while simultaneously erasing the boundaries of Jewish identity, and also the disingenuous republicanism of France, where claims to a level playing field between religious groups are disputed by members of the Muslim community. But I do subscribe to a genuinely egalitarian universalism that prioritises the capacity for peaceable disagreement over narrow demands for recognition by either identitarians or nationalists.

Universalism was hotly debated by members of the Jewish Enlightenment, including Moses Mendelssohn, who – like Kant – contributed an essay to the Berlin magazine essay call. Mendelssohn was in favour of Jewish assimilation, but the preservation of Jewish identity remained a fraught issue – coming to a head with the Nazi Holocaust and the widespread conclusion that the assimilationist ‘experiment’ had failed. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, many of the foremost historians of the Enlightenment were postwar Jewish scholars, among them Peter Gay, who looked back to the Enlightenment to provide a model for how to avoid fascism. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has also argued against ethnocentrism and in favour of a universal morality that transcends national or cultural particularity.

Curators, book editors and academics hold some power but not compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen

Critics of Enlightenment universalism are right to uncover the power dynamics that too often underlie claims to ‘objectivity’. But the key point for me is that most attacks on Enlightenment values fail to take account of the power disparity actually in play: the fact that the so-called ‘liberal elite’ is actually in timid retreat. The populist Right taking aim at the ‘mainstream media’, experts, professionals and especially the apocryphal exclusive cabal called the ‘illuminati’ is essentially targeting embattled remnants or phantom ghouls. Meanwhile, the Left trains its sights on cultural ‘gatekeepers’ whose influence is also either fictive or on the wane. Relative to the most downtrodden members of society, curators, book editors and tenured academics hold some power but, compared with the tech corporations, billionaires and political strongmen who are ruthlessly undermining them and everything they stand for, they really don’t.

When Eleanor Roosevelt drew up the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, she took great care to include representatives from other countries and cultures, including the Chinese philosopher and diplomat P C Chang. Chang was a pluralist and supported the Declaration, but there remained a particularist challenge: namely, that the Declaration emphasises individual rights and liberties whereas, according to the Confucian tradition, the self is defined by communal ties. We should remember challenges like these, but we must not let them contribute to the destruction of those universalist institutions that were built on the philosophical foundations of the Enlightenment. The entire international order is currently teetering on the edge, threatened by neo-totalitarian leaders and undermined in turn by its former allies on the Left for being Western-centric and exclusionary. We let them perish at our peril, as it is these institutions that support the less powerful and hold the real elites to account.

Reason is the compass I look to in my work and in my interactions with others – especially when there is conflict to resolve. But we should also recognise its limitations: its sometimes stolid sidelining of qualities like habit, cognitive dissonance and ineffable experience. An over-insistence on rationality can look like arrogance if it is not checked internally, and an unfortunate consequence of the attack on experts is that they can become more dogmatic in self-defence. In the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued that the Enlightenment’s rigid insistence on reason led inevitably to totalitarianism. They believed that the suppression of alternative value systems such as religion or tradition was a ‘disenchantment’ that was always underpinned by the threat of violence. ‘The fully enlightened earth,’ they wrote, ‘radiates disaster triumphant.’ Outram thinks that Adorno and Horkheimer put their finger on something important: ‘the way in which Enlightenment values and Enlightenment thinking were very likely to tip over into their opposites.’

Enlightenment reason has always had its critics. Rousseau believed that it corrupted innocent human nature. Michel Foucault didn’t like its tendency to stigmatise those who don’t fit society’s definition of the ‘reasonable’: vagabonds, criminals and the mentally ill. The philosopher John Gray thinks that its faith in progress is quixotic. Saini told me that, as a journalist, she is focused on the end goal of changing people’s minds for the good, and simply stating what is ‘reasonable’ as self-evident truth is not always the best way of achieving that. ‘If I’m trying to convince someone who is hesitant about taking a vaccine to take it, it doesn’t work to hit them over the head with this idea that vaccines are safe and scientists have proven this,’ she said. After all, their fears often ‘come from a rational place. It could be a fear of losing bodily autonomy, a genuine fear of vaccine injury, or doubts that have been seeded by some information that they’ve read.’ Categorising someone’s mistaken position as irrational tends to entrench them in it further, ‘because they feel they’re under attack.’

The story of Eve eating the apple expresses a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance

Saini also cautions against dismissing the populist turn in our politics as wholly irrational. ‘There’s been a kind of block in politics for a long time, where people felt that nothing was happening; it didn’t matter who they elected.’ When populist candidates promise wholesale change, ‘it is very appealing to people,’ she said. ‘That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily retreating from reason. It just means that they’re frustrated.’ Outram likewise stresses the importance of maintaining a pluralistic view of what reason and knowledge mean. ‘The attack on expertise is, in fact, a struggle between different forms of knowledge … I am an expert,’ she acknowledges, ‘so I have some skin in the game,’ but the expertise that ‘going through the Cambridge History School gives you is as valid as the tacit knowledge of, say, brewers of beer.’

For Outram, promoting morality is a more pressing priority than defending reason, because ‘unreason, misinformation and disinformation are all used in the service of cruelty … If you lie to somebody, you show that you don’t respect them.’ Lying – by governments or corporations, say – is invariably carried out ‘in defence of projects which are morally indefensible, otherwise you wouldn’t have to lie about them.’ It is the later Enlightenment value of care for others – articulated by Adam Smith and Edmund Burke – that Outram believes we should remember now: ‘the idea that we’re linked to all other human beings by sympathy and empathy,’ that ‘we can’t see other people suffer without feeling pain ourselves.’ (This recalls Kant’s moving statement, made in the context of advocating a cosmopolitan internationalism, that ‘a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere’.) Morality is what stops reason succumbing to hypocrisy.

Of course, the accumulation of knowledge doesn’t automatically lead to human progress. But there is an alternative, counter-Enlightenment narrative that is hardly preferable: the narrative of Pandora opening her box, or Eve eating the apple. These stories express a fear of knowledge and the chaos it brings, yet we find that chaos actually comes from ignorance. We must maintain epistemological humility, but we must also keep our cognitive bearings as the reality around us dissolves into White House-generated memes, clickbait advertising and AI slop.

In contrast to the Enlightenment’s reputation for high-minded entitlement, its proponents aimed above all to promote critique that was both unassuming and restless. In An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), Hume wrote that if those who are ‘dogmatical in their opinions’ could become ‘sensible of the strange infirmities of human understanding, even in its most perfect state’, this realisation would ‘naturally inspire them with more modesty and reserve’ and ‘diminish their fond opinion of themselves, and their prejudice against antagonists’. Intellectual modesty was intimately linked to tolerance of others: since ‘we are all formed of frailty and error,’ Voltaire wrote, ‘let us pardon reciprocally each other’s folly – that is the first law of nature’. Kant emphasised the inescapable limits of human knowledge. I am not the first to note that our own age of increasing ignorance is characterised, ironically, by people holding trenchantly to what they think they know.

Like Kant, Foucault also asked ‘What is Enlightenment?’ – the title of a 1984 essay. He defined it as ‘the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era’. Seen in this light, the Enlightenment laid the foundations for the social sciences: the conviction that our ‘historical era’ is endlessly readable. This is my favourite definition of the Enlightenment: a commitment to ‘permanent critique’: of our world, and also – crucially – of ourselves. It is the best remedy for both manipulation and self-delusion.

In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful

Neither the identitarian Left nor the flag-waving Right is currently very good at self-critique. The Left is too self-righteous and the Right too wedded to an illusion of ‘balance’ to acknowledge its own ideological agenda. As for political radicalism, the Left’s narrow focus on identity prevents it from examining big-picture, socioeconomic power dynamics, and the Right’s rose-tinted nostalgia for Western greatness leads it to defend the status quo. Neither side is remotely ‘enlightened’. We need to be humble and self-questioning, to be sure, but that should not stop us speaking truth to power, and challenging financial and technological elites. With the tech bros laying claim to a new Enlightenment (when, really, it’s the same white, male and Anglophone-centric old guard in new clothes), there’s all the more need to bolster the good in our intellectual inheritance.

The Enlightenment may have been a mixed, paradoxical project, but its critical attitude was bound up with revolutionary intent: to lay the intellectual foundations for a better world. We must save the Enlightenment baby from its muddied bathwater by remembering its own teaching of discernment; advocating for rationality as an ambition rather than an absolute; and above all rejecting attempts to link expertise, cultural capital and high intellectual standards with power and privilege at a time when they are so gravely imperilled.

In our age of binaries, the fact that the Enlightenment contains multitudes is actually helpful. ‘There was a great deal of plurality in the way that people thought, even at that time,’ Saini said. ‘And that’s why I think, when we look at the past, we should hesitate from being too judgmental, because we ourselves will be judged by future generations for the way we live now.’ Refusing to consign people or ideas in history to wholesale categories of good or bad allows us to say, she told me: ‘We know the kind of world that we want and, if anything is possible, which is I think the lesson of history, then we can take what we know is useful.’ About the rest of it, Saini concludes, ‘We can say that was fine for you, it’s not fine for us. And that’s OK.’

Sunspot Activity Going Off A Cliff, Volcanoes and Cold Climate Change

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Not so fast folks. We have a working solar maxima on tap and the decline will be through the next four years. all this remains within the expected channel. That channel is centuries old so go back to sleep.

We have a hard lapse coinciding with the Little ice age and no real understanding of how it comes about, except that we should care.

A far more real risk is a solar flare cooking off our comms and power though we are becoming way more protected.

Sunspot Activity Going Off A Cliff, Volcanoes and Cold Climate Change

Dr. Sircus

May 6

In the shadows of the mainstream climate narrative — filled with fears of overheating, carbon overload, and global boiling — lies a quiet admission from one of the most established scientific institutions in the world: NOAA predicts a complete drop-off of sunspots beginning around 2030. Yet NOAA still insists global warming is a threat.

This sunspot prediction is not just a data point. It’s a cosmic alarm bell, but no one is listening. Climate change has become a globalist religion of insanity. It is also scientific insanity, for CO2 is the most necessary gas and highly healthy. Without CO2, oxygen would not exist at a concentration that supports life on Earth.

After Athens logged its coldest May Day on record, the cold pushed deeper overnight into May 4, with historic May lows across Greece and the wider Balkans. Russian-sourced cold drained south through the Balkans, returning frost o basins and valleys and threatening orchards, vineyards, and early-season crops.

For most of modern history, climate discussions have focused almost entirely on what happens here on Earth—carbon, industry, methane, oceans, aerosols, deforestation, economics, politics. Yet long before factories, SUVs, carbon taxes, and climate conferences, the Earth was already moving through powerful cycles of warmth and cold, abundance and famine, glacier retreat and glacier advance.

To understand climate honestly, we must occasionally lift our eyes from the ground and look upward. The Sun is not merely a distant lamp hanging in the sky. It is the energetic engine of the entire planetary system. And one of the clearest fingerprints of solar behavior comes through sunspots—dark magnetic regions on the Sun whose numbers rise and fall in roughly eleven-year cycles, but also in much longer grand cycles that can last decades or even centuries.

Denver, Rockies face potentially biggest snowstorm of the season on the 4th and 5th of May.

When solar physicists and historians look back through telescopic records, ice cores, and isotopic reconstructions, a striking pattern emerges. During the Spörer Minimum, roughly 1450 to 1540, solar activity declined sharply, and Earth entered some of the coldest centuries of the Little Ice Age. Then came the famous Maunder Minimum, when astronomers observed fewer than fifty sunspots during decades when tens of thousands would normally have appeared. These were the years of brutal winters, advancing glaciers, shortened growing seasons, crop failures, and the freezing of the Thames.

Cyprus woke to snow in its Troodos Mountains on May 4 and 5, an event well outside the island’s early-May norms. The same cold outbreak also reached Mount Hermon in Israel.

Later came the Dalton Minimum, again accompanied by lower temperatures and agricultural disruption. This correlation between prolonged solar minima and colder climate is not speculation. It is one of the best-documented long-cycle patterns in climate history. NOAA’s own solar cycle progression data shows that after the current stronger-than-expected Solar Cycle 25, solar activity is expected to move downward toward the next solar minimum around 2030–2031. NOAA has not predicted the complete disappearance of sunspots in 2029; some will remain. But the Sun is expected to enter its natural declining phase later this decade. But the crash will be severe, according to NOAA.

Is the `Dark Comet’ 1998 KY26 the Spacecraft Phobos 1?

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

so far, it seems that non gravitational acceleration is produced by close by solar radiation. natural enough.

This points out that way too much space junk is out there and we now need to sort it all out.

Still no real evidence that these objects are adjusting their orbits on a pass. I have shown possibility but a real adjustment has not been identified. Of course most of our objests are not extra solar as far as we can discover.

Is the `Dark Comet’ 1998 KY26 the Spacecraft Phobos 1?

Avi Loeb

https://avi-loeb.medium.com/is-the-dark-comet-1998-ky26-the-spacecraft-phobos-1-304169bce8a2

An artist’s illustration of the planned landing of JAXA’s Hayabusa2 spacecraft on the `dark comet’ labeled 1998 KY26. (Image credit: Kommesser/ESO)

Dark comets are a proposed class of curious hybrids between comets and asteroids. These objects show significant non-gravitational accelerations, yet they exhibit absolutely no sign of cometary outgassing in the form of a coma or tail. The first recognized interstellar object, 1I/`Oumuamua, showed these features and was suggested to belong to this class in a recent mainstream publication, posted here. However, based on its inferred flat shape (published here) and non-gravitational acceleration, I argued in a much earlier publication here that 1I/`Oumuamua might be technological in origin. The dark comet categorization of 1I/`Oumuamua and similar solar system objects was the mainstream response to my nontraditional suggestion.

A year ago, I wrote a paper (accessible here) with my postdoc, Richard Cloete, suggesting that the dark Comet labeled 2005 VL1 might be the Venera 2 Spacecraft, a failed Soviet mission to Venus launched in November 1965.

Another member of the proposed class of dark comets in the Solar system is 1998 KY26. The nature of 1998 KY26 is not just an academic question. The Japanese Aerospace eXploration Agency (JAXA) plans to land the spacecraft Hayabusa2 on this object in July 2031. In its original mission, Hayabusa2 explored the 900-meter-diameter asteroid 162173 Ryugu in 2018, returning asteroid samples to Earth in 2020. With fuel remaining, the spacecraft was sent on an extended mission until 2031, when it is set to encounter 1998 KY26. This will be the first time a space mission encounters a tiny object on the size scale of 10-meters. Mainstream astronomers hope that this landing will reveal the nature of outgassing from a dark comet.

1998 KY26 was observed by a number of ground-based telescopes to support the preparation of the Hayabusa2 mission, and the results were reported in a 2025 Nature Communication paper — accessible here.

Interestingly, this so-called `dark comet’ was observed to be shiny with a very high reflectance (albedo) of 0.52 (±0.08). Its inferred size of 11 (±2) meters is comparable to that of a spacecraft. In addition, it exhibits an exceedingly short rotation period of 5.3516 (±0.0001) minutes which implies a sturdy monolithic object, whereas a rubble pile asteroid would break up under the associated centrifugal force.

In a new paper that I just co-authored with the brilliant Adam Hibberd, Adam Crowl, and Carlos Olea (accessible here), we present supporting evidence that 1998 KY26 could be technological in origin. In particular, we identify it as potentially a relic of a historical Russian mission to Mars, the Phobos 1 probe, which suffered a failure 2 months after the launch in July 1988, due to upload of a faulty command.

An artist’s illustration of the Phobos 1 spacecraft. (Image credit: Michael Carroll/JPL/NASA)

Our new paper shows that that two propulsive velocity thrusts (∆Vs) combined at 1.9 kilometers per second, the first just after loss of mission and the second in May 1996, allow the orbits and phases of the two bodies to align, with an arbitrarily low separation in velocity-position space. There is also evidence that 1.9 kilometers per second was within the performance envelope of Phobos 1, which had a powerful nitric acid and amine-based autonomous thruster for Mars Orbital Insertion.

Our analysis cannot unequivocally identify that 1998 KY26 is definitely the Phobos 1 probe. Nevertheless, we have shown quantitatively that

1. The Phobos 1 and 1998 KY26 orbits are similar. The two orbits converge and are statistically compatible, given the uncertainty in the orbit of 1998 KY26, which is tightly constrained due to the existence of over 230 observations of this `dark comet’.

2. The difference between these two orbits is compatible energetically with the overall velocity thrust (∆V) envelope available to Phobos 1.

3. There is a historical record in support of the hypothesis that a propulsive velocity thrust (∆V) was delivered shortly after loss of mission.

4. The Phobos 1 mission was lost early on in the probe’s transit to Mars, enabling a large ∆V capability.

5. The observational data on the physical properties of the dark comet 1998 KY26 support the association with Phobos 1. This includes the measured small size, high albedo and unusually large spin, which favors a sturdy object over a rubble pile asteroid.

6. The dark comet appears to be quite elongated based on changes in its apparent magnitude, as expected for Phobos 1.

Gladly, the verdict on our association of the `dark comet’ 1998 KY26 with the spacecraft Phobos 1 will be indisputable once JAXA’s Hayabusa2 mission gets close to it. The beauty of science is that hypotheses can be tested experimentally beyond any reasonable doubt. This is why the Vatican acknowledged publicly in 1992 (as reported here) that Galileo Galilei was right and the Sun is not moving around the Earth as they claimed for centuries. I wonder whether the mainstream of comet experts will acknowledge that 1I/`Oumuamua may have not been a natural `dark comet’ if it becomes clear that their so-called `dark comet’ 1998 KY26 is technological in origin, beyond any reasonable doubt.

My plea to the mainstream of comet experts is simple. Please extend your training data set to include not just rocks and icebergs but also the space objects launched by humans over the past 69 years. After all, we know that the truthfulness of statements made by AI systems depend sensitively on the extent of their training data sets. This is why the U.S. invests in 2026 over 700 billion dollars in data centers for training AI systems. The database on all space objects launched by humans is a rather modest addition to all the asteroids or comets we know about. Is it too much to ask that the assessments of comet experts will be trained on it as well?

On September 17, 2020, Pan-STARRS 1 — the same telescope that discovered 1I/`Oumuamua, identified another near-Earth object which showed non-gravitational acceleration without a cometary tail. Naturally, this object, labeled 2020 SO, would have been classified as another `dark comet’. However, follow-up spectroscopy by NASA’s Infrared Telescope Facility revealed that its spectrum resembles that of stainless steel, confirming that it is the Centaur upper stage used to launch in September 1966 the Surveyor 2 spacecraft towards the Moon. I rest my case.

2020 SO was pushed away from the Sun by solar radiation pressure, the same mechanism that I proposed in a 2018 publication here as the source of the non-gravitational acceleration of 1I/`Oumuamua. We know that 2020 SO has a technological origin because we launched it. The remaining question is who launched 1I/`Oumuamua?

The Sumerian Tablet Listing 6 Things That Live Inside the Moon — And Why They're Stirring

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 05:01:00 +0000

That sumerian tablet is an additional source of confirmation. We posted an extensive study on the Moon some years ago from a team who has never published.

The clear conclusion is that the Moon is a Machina tasked with creating the working surface of the Earth. The moon is hollow and this also begs the hollow question for all planets and stars. I bring that up because it means we have it wrong for everything.

This actually outlines an extensive internal maschinary within for which we know nothing.

Our understanding of gravity may well be naive. and we have been ignoribg the anomolies for ever.

The Sumerian Tablet Listing 6 Things That Live Inside the Moon — And Why They're Stirring A mysterious 4,500-year-old Sumerian tablet hidden in Yale’s Babylonian Collection may contain an unsettling secret about the Moon itself. Known as YBC 11304, the ancient text allegedly describes six categories of beings living inside the Moon — from silent “listeners” monitoring Earth to terrifying “sleepers” sealed deep below the lunar surface. As modern moonquakes, eclipses, and human activity begin matching the tablet’s recorded activation conditions, researchers are left asking a disturbing question: was this ancient civilization describing mythology… or something real waiting beneath the Moon’s surface?

The Sumerian Tablet Listing 6 Things That Live Inside the Moon — And Why They're Stirring

A scribe in Ur sat under a tower built for the Moon and wrote something that should not make sense. He called the Moon a thing that was carried into the sky and set in place. Hollow. Filled. Watching. For four thousand years that read like poetry. Then we crashed a spacecraft into the Moon and it rang like a bell for nearly an hour. The clay and the data keep saying the same impossible thing, and once you line them up, the night sky stops feeling empty.

The Sumerian Tablet That Says the Moon Was Placed - And Describes What's Inside It

Where did the moon actually come from?

0:02
2 secondsModern science still cannot agree because the moon breaks its own rules.

0:06
6 secondsToo big, too light, too perfectly placed. The Sumerians did not argue. A 4,000-year-old tablet says the moon was

0:13
13 secondsnot born beside the Earth at all. It was brought here, caught during a crash between two worlds, and steered into orbit on purpose. The same tablet

0:22
22 secondsdescribes what the builders left inside it. And in 1970, two Soviet scientists wrote a paper saying almost exactly the

0:29
29 secondssame thing. If you want more deep looks at old records that match things modern science only proved many years later, hit subscribe. I cover this kind of forgotten history every single week.

0:40
40 secondsNow, let me show you what the tablet says. It was the year 2100 before our era in the city of on the low river plane in the south of what is now Iraq.

0:50
50 secondsA scribe sat in the shadow of a stepped tower that rose higher than anything else for a 100 miles in any direction.

0:57
57 secondsThat tower was a ziggurat and it was not built for a king. It was built for the moon. The Sumerianss worshiped the moon

1:03
1 minute, 3 secondsas a living god. They called him Nana in the old tongue, sin in the later one. He was not a small god in their religion.

1:12
1 minute, 12 secondsHe was one of the most important gods they had. Older than the sun god, older than the storm god. The first great city of the south was his city. Its high

1:21
1 minute, 21 secondspriestess answered to no one but the king. And the way the Sumerianss described their moon god is the first strange thing about this story. They did not describe Nana as a light in the sky.

1:32
1 minute, 32 secondsThey described him as a traveler, a being who arrived. The hymns call the moon a boat, a ship that crossed the night carrying the god inside it. And

1:41
1 minute, 41 secondsthey are very clear that the boat came from somewhere else and was placed where we now see it. For a long time, scholars

1:48
1 minute, 48 secondsread that the obvious way. Poetry. Old people making nature into a person the way every culture did. The moon moves across the sky. So they imagined a boat.

1:58
1 minute, 58 secondsNothing more. But one tablet does not fit that reading. It is cataloged as NI451 found in the temple records at Nepur and

2:07
2 minutes, 7 secondsnow kept in Istanbul. Most visitors walk straight past it. It looks like every other record tablet in the case. gray

2:14
2 minutes, 14 secondsclay, packed script, a corner broken off. But this one is not a list or a deal. It is a description. And what it

2:21
2 minutes, 21 secondsdescribes is the origin of the moon itself. The tablet says the moon was not always in our sky. It says there was a

2:28
2 minutes, 28 secondstime the night was empty of it. Then it says the moon was carried across the heavens and fixed into place above the earth and that from that night forward

2:37
2 minutes, 37 secondsthe tides answered to it and the months were counted by it. The word the scribe uses for fixed into place is the same word the Sumerians used for setting a

2:45
2 minutes, 45 secondsbase stone into a wall on purpose placed. Built, think about that for a second. A Bronze Age scribe writing about the moon chose a building word.

2:55
2 minutes, 55 secondsNot a birth word, not a word for something that grew or formed. A word for something that was set in place by hands. And the tablet does not stop

3:03
3 minutes, 3 secondsthere. It tells you where the moon came from before it was brought here. To understand that part, you have to look at a different Sumerian text, one most people have heard of without knowing it.

3:13
3 minutes, 13 secondsThe Anuma Elish. It is the great creation story of Mesopotamia written down by the Babylonians, but built on Sumerian roots far older. And at its

3:22
3 minutes, 22 secondscenter is a crash. The story describes two great bodies in the early heavens.

3:27
3 minutes, 27 secondsOne of them, called Tiiamat, is a world of water. The other comes in from the far dark on a long, slow path and

3:34
3 minutes, 34 secondsstrikes her. The epic describes Tiiamat being split. One half becomes the sky, one half becomes the earth. Her broken

3:41
3 minutes, 41 secondspieces become a big band of broken rock strung across the heavens. And Tiiamat had a companion the epic lifts above all

3:48
3 minutes, 48 secondsthe others. A figure it names Kingu. In 1976, a writer named Zachary Sitchin read that crash not as myth but as a

3:56
3 minutes, 56 secondsmemory, a real account of something that happened in the early solar system. In his reading, Tiiamat was a watery world that once circled where the asteroid

4:04
4 minutes, 4 secondsbelt now sits. The intruder shattered her. Her remains became the earth knocked into a new path. And the broken rock of the crash became the asteroid

4:13
4 minutes, 13 secondsbelt that still circles the sun in a ragged ring. And Kingu, the figure the epic names at Tiiamat's side, Sitchin read as her largest moon. A moon that

4:22
4 minutes, 22 secondssurvived the ruin of its parent world, caught by the new Earth and dragged into orbit around it. Kingu became the moon.

4:29
4 minutes, 29 secondsMost scholars reject Sitchin's translations and many of their complaints are fair. He stretched words.

4:35
4 minutes, 35 secondsHe filled gaps with his own answers. But here is the part the critics rarely face. Sitchin did not invent the idea that the moon was a caught body that

4:43
4 minutes, 43 secondscame from somewhere else. The Sumerianss wrote that down. He just put it in front of a modern crowd. The tablet at Nepur and the Anuma Elish were saying it 4,000

4:52
4 minutes, 52 secondsyears before he was born. And the Sumerianss were not the only ones who remembered a time before the moon. Far to the west, hundreds of years later,

5:00
5 minutesGreek writers wrote down a strange story about a people called the Procelinoi. A word that means plainly, the ones from

5:07
5 minutes, 7 secondsbefore the moon. The Arcadians claimed their ancestors had lived in the land before the moon was ever in the sky.

5:13
5 minutes, 13 secondsAristotle mentioned it. Appalonius of roads wrote it into his story of the Argonauts. Plutarch repeated it. Most history writers treat it the way they

5:22
5 minutes, 22 secondstreat the Sumerian hymns as an old brag about being very old, but it is the same claim. There was a time the night was empty of the moon and then there was

5:30
5 minutes, 30 secondsnot. You find versions of it spread across the old world. Some African and South American stories described the sky before the moon arrived and the disaster

5:38
5 minutes, 38 secondsthat came with it. Floods, darkness, a sky that had changed overnight. None of these cultures were in touch when these

5:45
5 minutes, 45 secondsstories were first told. Yet, they keep circling the same impossible memory. The moon has not always been there. It came

5:53
5 minutes, 53 secondsand the world it arrived over was never the same again. The Sumerians simply wrote it down earliest and in the clearest, most careful words on a tablet

6:03
6 minutes, 3 secondsthat names the event as a placing rather than a birth. But the version you have heard, the tidy one about poetic old

6:10
6 minutes, 10 secondspeople imagining boats in the sky, that is not the full picture. Because when modern science finally turned its tools on the moon, it did not find a normal

6:18
6 minutes, 18 secondsnatural moon. It found exactly the kind of thing the Sumerians described.

6:23
6 minutes, 23 secondsSomething that does not belong where it is. Start with the size. The moon is huge compared to the planet it circles.

6:29
6 minutes, 29 secondsMost moons in the solar system are tiny next to their worlds caught asteroids or small icy chunks. The Earth's moon is more than a quarter of the Earth's

6:37
6 minutes, 37 secondswidth. There is no other rocky planet with a moon anywhere near that size. By the normal rules of how planets and moons form together, it should not exist

6:46
6 minutes, 46 secondsat this scale. Then there is the way it sits. The moon is locked. It turns exactly once for every orbit it makes.

6:53
6 minutes, 53 secondsSo it always shows us the same face. In all of human history, before we had spacecraft, no one had ever seen the other side of it with their own eyes.

7:02
7 minutes, 2 secondsOne half is aimed at the Earth at all times. And when space probes finally took pictures of the hidden side in 1959, it looked nothing like the face we

7:11
7 minutes, 11 secondsknow. No broad dark planes, almost no smooth seas, just a cratered, crowded, strange crust. The two halves of the

7:19
7 minutes, 19 secondsmoon do not match, and geologists are still arguing about why a single natural body would be built so lopsided. Then

7:26
7 minutes, 26 secondsthere are the metals. The rocks the astronauts carried home were strange.

7:30
7 minutes, 30 secondsSome moon samples ran unusually rich in titanium and in heatresistant metals, the kind of high heat metals you would link to metal working rather than to

7:38
7 minutes, 38 secondsraw, untouched stone. Vassin and Sterikov pointed straight at this. A natural moon, they argued, should not have a surface dusted with the kind of

7:46
7 minutes, 46 secondsmetals you would expect from a built shell. The people who defend the usual story have answers, and the answers work on paper. But every one of them asks you

7:55
7 minutes, 55 secondsto accept one more thing that should not be there. Now, the weight. This is the detail that should have stopped people cold. The moon is far too light for its

8:03
8 minutes, 3 secondssize. On average, each small block of it weighs about 3.3 g for every cime. The Earth weighs about 5 and a half. A body

8:12
8 minutes, 12 secondsthat formed beside the Earth out of the same stuff should be about as heavy as the Earth. The Moon is not. It weighs as if a large part of its inside is

8:20
8 minutes, 20 secondsmissing. That is not a typo. A body the size of the moon made of solid rock and metal should be much heavier than the

8:28
8 minutes, 28 secondsmoon actually is. The numbers say there is empty space down there or stuff so light it has no business being inside a planetized body. Geologists have known

8:36
8 minutes, 36 secondsthis since the first careful measurements and they still do not have a clean answer for it. And then there is the spot it sits in. The moon sits at

8:44
8 minutes, 44 secondsalmost exactly the distance and angle needed to make total solar eclipses where the moon covers the sun perfectly.

8:50
8 minutes, 50 secondsNo more, no less. The sun is 400 times wider than the moon and almost exactly 400 times farther away. That match is so

8:58
8 minutes, 58 secondsexact it makes some astronomers visibly uneasy when you bring it up because there is no rule of nature that makes it happen. It just is. The moon is placed

9:06
9 minutes, 6 secondsso exactly that. In the Sumerian text, it is called on purpose. Stack them up.

9:12
9 minutes, 12 secondsThe locked face, the mismatched halves, the wrong metals, the missing weight, the impossible spot. Each one alone is a puzzle a patient scientist can live

9:20
9 minutes, 20 secondswith. Together, they describe a thing that behaves less like a rock and more like something that was built. The real question is what was happening behind

9:29
9 minutes, 29 secondsclosed doors when the people who had the moon data first started reading these old tablets next to their tools. Because for a while those two streams of

9:38
9 minutes, 38 secondsinformation stayed completely apart. The archaeologists had the clay. The astronomers had the rock. Nobody was putting them in the same room. That did

9:47
9 minutes, 47 secondsnot last. Before we get to what they found inside, I want to make sure you are still with me because the next part is where this stops being a story about

9:54
9 minutes, 54 secondsan old myth and starts being a story about a measurement. If you are finding this interesting, take one second and subscribe. It honestly helps the channel keep digging into records like this one.

10:05
10 minutes, 5 secondsNow, let me tell you about the night the moon rang. By the late 1960s, humans were not just looking at the moon anymore. They were landing on it, and they were leaving tools behind.

10:15
10 minutes, 15 secondsSeismometers. tools made to listen for shaking the same way we listen for earthquakes here. And the engineers wanted to test them. So, they decided to

10:23
10 minutes, 23 secondshit the moon on purpose and watch what the seismometers heard. On the 20th of November 1969, the crew of Apollo 12

10:31
10 minutes, 31 secondstook the spent upper stage of their lunar module and crashed it on purpose into the surface about 40 m from where their seismometer sat. They expected a

10:40
10 minutes, 40 secondssharp jolt that would fade in a few seconds. The way a struck rock goes quiet almost right away. That is not what happened. The moon rang on for

10:49
10 minutes, 49 secondsnearly an hour. The shaking did not fade the way it should. It rolled on and on, ringing through the body of the moon like the inside of a bell long after it

10:58
10 minutes, 58 secondsis struck. One of the scientists who studied the readings, a quake scientist named Maurice Euing, told the press that the moon had answered in a way no one

11:06
11 minutes, 6 secondscould fully explain that it had rung like a bell and that nobody was ready for what that meant because a solid thing does not ring like that. A solid thing soaks up the shock and goes still.

11:17
11 minutes, 17 secondsA hollow thing or a thing with a strange layered inside wrapped around empty space rings. You'd think someone would have stood up at that point and said, "This changes everything." Nobody did.

11:28
11 minutes, 28 secondsThe finding was published, talked about in technical papers, and quietly added to a pile of moon oddities that never quite added up. A few months later, they

11:36
11 minutes, 36 secondsdid it again. This time with a much bigger thing. A spent rocket booster from Apollo 13 slammed into the moon with far more force. And this time, the

11:44
11 minutes, 44 secondsmoon rang for over 3 hours. 3 hours of shaking from a single hit, reaching depths the tools could not reach before, and still no clean answer for why a

11:52
11 minutes, 52 secondsnatural body would act that way. And if the ringing were the only strange reading, the scientists might have filed it away and forgotten it. But then came

12:00
12 minutesthe mass measurements. In 1968, before the landings, spacecraft circling the moon kept drifting off course in tiny,

12:08
12 minutes, 8 secondssteady ways, as if something below the surface was tugging at them. Two researchers, Paul Mueller and William Shoggrren, traced the wobble to huge

12:16
12 minutes, 16 secondslumps of mass buried under the moon's flat planes, thick and even, sitting exactly where they should not be if the moon had formed the way the textbook

12:24
12 minutes, 24 secondssaid. They called them masscon, mass concentrations. The moon, it turned out, was not put together like a normal

12:32
12 minutes, 32 secondsworld. It had heavy, outofplace masses locked into its inside and a body that should have been too light overall, both

12:39
12 minutes, 39 secondsat the same time. That was just the story. The public knew the version in the news releases about winning missions and moon rocks brought home. Behind the

12:47
12 minutes, 47 secondsscenes, a small number of people were looking at a moon that was too big, too light, hollow sounding, and packed with buried masses. And they were asking a

12:56
12 minutes, 56 secondsquestion out loud that they would never put in an official report. The question was simple. What if the moon is not natural at all? That is exactly the

13:04
13 minutes, 4 secondsquestion two Soviet scientists asked in print. In 1970, Male Vas and Alexander Sherbikov put out an article in a Soviet

13:12
13 minutes, 12 secondsmagazine with a title that sounds like science fiction, but was meant completely seriously. They asked whether the moon was made by an alien mind. They

13:21
13 minutes, 21 secondslaid out the oddities one by one, the impossible size, the wrong weight, the ringing, the strange surface metals. And

13:29
13 minutes, 29 secondsthey argued that the simplest answer for a thing that acts like a hollow built shell is that it is a hollow built shell. a built body hollowed out

13:37
13 minutes, 37 secondssomewhere else and moved into orbit around the Earth. They had no idea, or maybe they did, that a scribe in had

13:44
13 minutes, 44 secondswritten down nearly the same claim 4,000 years earlier. The moon was built. The moon was hollowed. The moon was brought

13:52
13 minutes, 52 secondshere and set in place. In time, anyone who reads the tablet next to the Apollo data will understand exactly what that

13:59
13 minutes, 59 secondsscribe was trying to record. Which brings us to the part of the tablet that the early translators left alone. What the Sumerians said is inside. The tablet

14:08
14 minutes, 8 secondsNI 2451 does not describe the moon as a solid ball. It describes it as a ship with an inside. The same way the hymns

14:16
14 minutes, 16 secondsdescribe Nana's boat as something you could be inside. The text says the moon holds chambers. It describes a great hollow at its heart ringed by levels the

14:25
14 minutes, 25 secondsway the Abzu tablets describe levels stacked inside a building. And it says those chambers were not empty. According to the tablet, the moon was hollowed out

14:34
14 minutes, 34 secondsbefore it was placed in our sky. And it was filled with three things. The first, it calls the record of the waters, which scholars linked to the Sumerian belief

14:42
14 minutes, 42 secondsthat the moon ruled the tides and the cycles of life, water, and birth. The second, it calls the seed kept apart, words the Sumerians used elsewhere for

14:51
14 minutes, 51 secondsstored life, kept safe against ruin, the same idea that runs through their flood stories. And the third is the part the tablet handles carefully, almost

14:59
14 minutes, 59 secondsunwillingly. It calls it the watcher that does not sleep. A presence sealed inside the moon, placed there to watch the earth below, waiting. The Sumerians

15:08
15 minutes, 8 secondsbelieve the moon was looking back at them, not as a word picture, as a fact.

15:12
15 minutes, 12 secondsThe god in the boat riding the hollow ship across the night, watching the world he had been placed above. And here is where the dread sets in if you let

15:20
15 minutes, 20 secondsit. If the tablet is wrong, it is a strange coincidence that a Bronze Age scribe described a hollow inside and a

15:28
15 minutes, 28 secondsweight oddity we could not measure until we had rockets and seismometers. A coincidence that he described mass locked inside a hollow body. The exact

15:37
15 minutes, 37 secondsclash the messcon show without any way to find it. A coincidence that he wrote caught and brought here. The exact words

15:44
15 minutes, 44 secondsthe modern capture idea uses for a moon that formed elsewhere and was caught by Earth's pull. That is a lot of coincidence for one broken tablet. And

15:52
15 minutes, 52 secondsif the tablet is not wrong, then the thing in our sky every night was put there. The question stops being where the moon came from. It becomes who

16:00
16 minutesdecided we should have one and what they sealed inside it before they left. Now, the fair thing to say is that none of this proves the moon is man-made. The

16:09
16 minutes, 9 secondsringing can be partly explained by the dry, cracked, waterless rock of the moon's crust, which carries shaking far longer than wet Earth rock does. The

16:17
16 minutes, 17 secondsweight can be explained if the moon simply lacks a large iron core, which the giant impact theory allows for. The eclipse match really might just be luck

16:26
16 minutes, 26 secondssince the moon is slowly drifting away and the lineup is only perfect in our own time. Regular science has answers

16:33
16 minutes, 33 secondsand the answers are not stupid. But notice what those answers need. They need the moon to be unlike almost every other moon in the solar system. They

16:42
16 minutes, 42 secondsneed it to have formed in a way we have never seen anywhere else. They need a chain of lucky accidents that made a moon so perfectly suited to steadying

16:49
16 minutes, 49 secondsthe Earth's tilt, driving the tides, and lighting the night that life on the surface leans on it. The natural answer is not impossible. It is just not

16:58
16 minutes, 58 secondssimple, and it is not what the people who lived under that moon and built towers to it and counted their lives by it actually wrote down. They wrote that

17:07
17 minutes, 7 secondsit was brought here. So, the real question isn't whether the moon is hollow. We may settle that within a lifetime as we put better tools back on

17:15
17 minutes, 15 secondsthe surface and finally listen long enough to map what is or is not inside it. The real question is what we do with

17:23
17 minutes, 23 secondsthe fact that a record this old from people we were taught to think of as backward keeps describing the sky with an exactness they should not have had.

17:31
17 minutes, 31 secondsEither they were guessing and they guessed right about things they could not possibly test or they were remembering something. And if they were

17:38
17 minutes, 38 secondsremembering it, then somewhere in the chambers the tablet describes, the watcher that does not sleep is still up there, exactly where it was set in

17:46
17 minutes, 46 secondsplace, still doing the one thing the Sumerians said it was left to do.

17:50
17 minutes, 50 secondsWatching the tablet sits in Istanbul today, cataloged as NI451.

17:56
17 minutes, 56 secondsYou can ask to see it if you go. Most people never do. It looks like a broken piece of mud. But if you can read it, you are looking at the oldest claim

18:05
18 minutes, 5 secondshumanity ever wrote down about where the moon came from. And it does not say the moon was born. It says the moon was brought. If records like this are what

18:13
18 minutes, 13 secondsyou came for, you need to see the one I am covering next. The Sumerian tablet that maps a second world hidden inside our own with directions we can still

18:22
18 minutes, 22 secondsfollow today. Click the video on screen now.

NANO Nuclear Demonstrates Key Supply Chain Role Covered By Recent Acquisition

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Obviously getting ready to collect all that Iranian Enriched uranium. And no, we do not want anyone playing in this sandbox.

Security adds a layer of cost that makes playing non competative. As Iran has now understood. You do not want to stand up a miltary apparatus to match great powers just to produce a bomb.

I hope we do not have to flash bang some rogue actor to make a global point.

NANO Nuclear Demonstrates Key Supply Chain Role Covered By Recent Acquisition

Thursday, May 28, 2026 - 11:15 AM

NANO Nuclear Energy connected the dots on two stories we’ve been following closely.

The company's recently acquired subsidiary, Secured Transportation Services (STS), served as prime logistics contractor for the largest single international HALEU shipment in NNSA history (1.7 metric tons) from Japan, plus support for removing 13.5 kilograms of highly enriched uranium from Venezuela’s dormant RV-1 research reactor.

NANO also notes they transported an additional shipment of HALEU for advanced reactor testing in the US.

As we covered recently, the NNSA framed the Japan transfer as a landmark win for America’s advanced nuclear fuel supply and nonproliferation goals. The Venezuela operation eliminated a long-standing proliferation risk in the Western Hemisphere. Logistics details stayed quiet at the time.

NANO acquired STS for $13 million. The deal instantly converted the pre-revenue microreactor developer into a revenue-generating business. STS posted roughly $1.3 million in profits for the twelve months ended December 31, 2025.

Today’s update revealed that STS was the lead operator behind those exact missions. The company handled international licensing, maritime transport, port operations, security planning, customs, and final overland delivery for the Japan campaign; the full scope of a record-setting effort.

It also provided planning and U.S. domestic transfer support for the Venezuela HEU removal and executed another domestic HALEU run supporting fuel qualification programs.

This is real execution on the logistics side of the nuclear supply chain, one of the parts that has been painfully missing from America’s broader nuclear comeback.

The Sumerian Tablet That Lists the Seven Powers Taken From Humanity

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

I propose that Sumarian scholars were deeply informed by earlier anti diluvian sources produced from 35,000 BP through 12900BP. Published long lives suport this possibility. Sumer arose at the end of the long lived transition era between 12,900BP to 9000 BP first phase ( geological stabalization) and 9000 BP to 6000 BP ( Re settlement under long lived leadership and knowledge retention)

humanity was established and modified to exclude talents as part of the Fall from Eden. I have already noted the loss of mind to mind comms still retained by the rest of life on earth at some level. note the HIVE GIANT INSECT exerience lasting throughout the Carboniferous when athmospheric oxygen levels ran at 35%.

this ists 6 additional talents. All plausible.

The Sumerian Tablet That Lists the Seven Powers Taken From Humanity — And Who Still Holds Them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GR2g_Kc-OBk

In the restricted storage wing of the British Museum, past the Assyrian reliefs and the Babylonian boundary stones, there is a climate-controlled room that does not appear on any public floor plan. Constant temperature, humidity locked at forty percent. On shelf 14-C of cabinet row seven, cataloged under the designation K.2100, sits a clay tablet slightly larger than an adult hand, recovered from the library of Ashurbanipal at Nineveh by Layard's expedition in 1851. The standard museum record describes it as a mythological fragment, Old Babylonian copy, partial preservation, variant of the Descent of Inanna cycle. The general structure of these texts is well known. The goddess Inanna descends through the underworld, passes through seven gates, and at each gate something is removed from her — a garment, a piece of jewelry, a symbol of divine authority. The standard interpretation treats this as allegory. Death and rebirth. Seasonal cycles. Temple ritual. That reading has held for over a century.

In the restricted storage wing of the

0:01British Museum, past the Assyrian

0:04reliefs and the Babylonian boundary

0:06stones, there is a climate controlled

0:07room that does not appear on any public

0:10floor plan. Constant temperature,

0:12humidity locked at 40%. On shelf 14C of

0:16cabinet row 7, cataloged under the

0:18designation K.201000, 20110 0 sits a

0:22clay tablet slightly larger than an

0:24adult hand recovered from the library of

0:26Asherbanopal at Nineveh by Leard's

0:29expedition in 1851.

0:31The standard museum record describes it

0:33as a mythological fragment old

0:35Babylonian copy partial preservation

0:38variant of the descent of Anana cycle.

0:41The general structure of these texts is

0:43wellknown. The goddess Anana descends

0:46through the underworld, passes through

0:48seven gates, and at each gate something

0:50is removed from her, a garment, a piece

0:52of jewelry, a symbol of divine

0:54authority. The standard interpretation

0:57treats this as allegory, death and

1:00rebirth, seasonal cycles, temple ritual.

1:06That reading has held for over a

1:08century. The problem is that K2100 does

1:11not describe garments. The word that

1:13standard translations render as ornament

1:16is written on K2100 as a compound

1:19Sumerian term that translates most

1:21accurately as a power embedded in the

1:23body, not an object removed from the

1:26outside, a capacity extracted from

1:28within. And the tablet lists seven of

1:31these capacities individually with a

1:33description of each with the name of the

1:35deity to whom each was transferred after

1:37extraction and with a direct statement

1:39that humanity once possessed all seven

1:42and now holds none. If the Sumerianss

1:44were writing poetry, they chose

1:46extraordinarily specific language. If

1:49they were recording something else, then

1:51what was taken from us? And who still

1:53has it?

1:55The Sumerian word the tablet uses is me.

1:58One of the most debated terms in the

2:00cuneaoiform lexicon. Mainstream

2:02assiology translates me as divine

2:05decree, a vague theological concept

2:07representing abstract forces that govern

2:10civilization.

2:11The standard reading treats the me as

2:13symbolic metaphors for cultural

2:16institutions like kingship and

2:17priesthood. But the cunea form on K2100

2:21does not support that reading. The

2:23tablet enumerates the sevenme as

2:25functional capacities with physiological

2:27descriptions. The first is nam kuru the

2:31power of seeing what is distant

2:33described not as wisdom but as a

2:35function of the eye and the back of the

2:36skull. A capacity to perceive beyond the

2:39range of ordinary vision. The second is

2:42namish tuku direct knowing without

2:44instruction. The ability to absorb

2:47complex information without being

2:48taught. The third is nam shub, the power

2:52of the spoken command, not rhetoric, but

2:55a capacity for speech to alter physical

2:57reality, for sound to affect material

2:59structures.

3:02The fourth is nomilla, which translates

3:05literally as the power of living without

3:07end. The text is specific, biological

3:10processes that do not degrade, cells

3:13that replicate without error, a body

3:15that does not age. The fifth is namin,

3:19the power of sovereign connection, the

3:21ability to communicate between minds

3:23without spoken language. The sixth is

3:26nam eigal, the power of seeing what is

3:29hidden, perceiving the interior of solid

3:32objects. And the seventh given the

3:34longest description is nam mam

3:37translated for decades as divine

3:39radiance but described on K2100 as a

3:42field generated by the body that repels

3:44harm, prevents disease, and makes the

3:47bearer immune to physical damage. Seven

3:50capacities described in physiological

3:52terms that read less like theology and

3:55more like a technical inventory of

3:57capabilities removed from a species and

3:59redistributed to its creators. and the

4:02tablet names every recipient.

4:06The redistribution section of K2100 is

4:08the part that no mainstream translation

4:10has fully published. Partial renderings

4:13exist in academic footnotes, accompanied

4:15by disclaimers that the passage is too

4:17damaged for reliable interpretation. The

4:20tablet is damaged, but the structure of

4:22the list is intact enough that the

4:24pattern is unmistakable. The first me

4:27farseeing was given to Enki consistent

4:30with his role across the entire Sumerian

4:32corpus as the one who sees to the edge

4:34of the universe. The second direct

4:37knowing was given to Nisaba the goddess

4:39of writing and scribal arts described in

4:42other texts as needing no teacher. The

4:45third, the spoken command went to Enlil.

4:48In every Sumerian text, Enlil's word

4:50does not merely order. It physically

4:53alters reality. When Enlil speaks, the

4:56ground opens. The texts do not describe

4:58obedience. They describe causation

5:00through vocalization.

5:02The fourth me living without end went to

5:05the Anunnaki collectively, not to one

5:07god, to the council.

5:11This detail has been ignored because it

5:13implies that immortality was not an

5:15inherent divine quality. It was a

5:17transferred capacity, something that

5:20originally belonged to the created

5:21species and was taken back. The fifth,

5:25mind-to- mind communication, has a

5:27partially legible recipient beginning

5:29with nin, suggesting a major goddess.

5:32The sixth, seeing what is hidden, shows

5:35traces consistent with Utu, the sun god,

5:38from whom nothing can be concealed. The

5:40seventh recipient, whoever received the

5:42protective field, is completely erased.

5:45The signs are gone. And in Sumerian

5:47textual tradition, names are not

5:49casually destroyed. Deliberate eraser

5:52from a clay tablet is a documented

5:54practice. You erased a name to erase a

5:56being's power to remove them from the

5:58record to ensure they could not be

6:00invoked. Someone made certain that name

6:03would not survive.

6:06The tablet does not frame the removal as

6:08punishment. Every comparative mythology

6:11framework would predict a fall

6:13narrative. Humanity sins, the gods

6:15punish, the powers are revoked. K2100

6:19does not follow that pattern. The

6:21language used is administrative, not

6:24judicial. The Sumerian terms are the

6:26same ones found in economic tablets from

6:29and legash. Terms for reallocation of

6:31resources, redistribution of assets,

6:34administrative transfer. The gods did

6:37not punish humanity. They reorganized a

6:40system. And the reason given is not

6:42transgression. The reason is that the

6:44species possessing all seven capacities

6:47became impossible to manage. The text

6:50uses a phrase translating approximately

6:52as they could not be directed. And a

6:55second partially legible reading, they

6:57had no need of the gods. A workforce

6:59that cannot be directed. A created

7:02species with no need of its creators.

7:04That is not a moral failure. That is a

7:07design flaw. The Atrahasus epic supports

7:10this reading.

7:12The gods create humanity, observe the

7:15result, and make adjustments. Multiple

7:17adjustments. They introduce mortality,

7:20disease, infertility. Each modification

7:23is a response to a specific problem.

7:26Humans are too numerous, too

7:28independent. The adjustments are

7:30iterative. They are refinements of a

7:32product not working as designed. K2100

7:35adds a layer that Atrahasis omits.

7:38Before mortality, before disease, the

7:417ME were extracted first. The

7:44capabilities were the first thing to go.

7:46The biological constraints came later as

7:48secondary containment. And this

7:51sequence, remove the advanced functions,

7:53then restrict the hardware, then reboot

7:56with reduced permissions, is not the

7:58structure of a myth about divine anger.

8:01It is a controlled shutdown protocol.

8:03The result is us.

8:07A species that cannot see beyond the

8:09visible spectrum, that must be taught

8:11everything from scratch, whose words

8:13have no material force, whose bodies

8:15degrade from birth, and who can be

8:17harmed by virtually every force in the

8:19environment. Seven capabilities removed.

8:23And if the tablet is accurate, not

8:25destroyed, transferred, held.

8:29If K2100 were the only text describing

8:32the systematic removal of human

8:34capabilities by non-human entities, it

8:37could be dismissed as a theological

8:39outlier. The problem is that K2100 is

8:42not alone. The Egyptian Book of the

8:45Dead, chapters 64 and 175, contains

8:49passages where the deceased demands the

8:51return of powers taken at the beginning

8:53of the age of humanity. The hieroglyphic

8:56term is semhem modified by

8:58determinatives indicating plurality and

9:00specificity. Multiple distinct powers

9:03each named. The pyramid texts at Sakara

9:06describe the pharaoh's journey after

9:08death as a process of reclaiming

9:10capacities distributed among the gods at

9:12creation. The pharaoh does not acquire

9:15new powers. He recovers original ones.

9:18The language is explicit. In the Vdic

9:21tradition, the rig vda describes the

9:24cosmic sacrifice of perushia, the

9:26primordial being whose body was divided

9:29to create the universe.

9:32The division is performed by the davas

9:34and the result is a cosmos where the

9:36original unified capacities are

9:38scattered across separate domains, each

9:41held by a different deity. The

9:43Mesoamerican Popal Vu contains an

9:45episode that is even more striking. The

9:47gods create the first humans and

9:49discover they can see everything across

9:51any distance through any obstacle. The

9:54gods are alarmed. They deliberately

9:56cloud human sight, reducing it to a

9:58fraction of its original range. The text

10:01uses the metaphor of breath on a mirror.

10:04This is not a story about blindness as

10:06metaphor for ignorance. It describes the

10:08surgical reduction of a specific

10:10perceptual capacity because the created

10:12species was too powerful. four

10:15civilizations, four continents, four

10:17independent traditions describing the

10:19same event. The deliberate removal of

10:21capabilities from humanity by the

10:23entities that created it. The

10:25probability of this structural

10:27correspondence arising through

10:28coincidence decreases with each

10:31additional instance.

10:34Two traditions might share a common

10:36source. Three might reflect a universal

10:38archetype. Four, with this level of

10:41specific alignment, the enumeration of

10:43distinct powers, the named recipients,

10:46the administrative framing suggests

10:48either shared historical memory or a

10:51transmission mechanism that no current

10:52model of ancient contact can account

10:54for.

10:57The responsible position is that K2100

11:00is mythology and cross-cultural

11:02parallels reflect universal narrative

11:04patterns. This is the consensus. What

11:07makes it harder to maintain with

11:08absolute confidence is the evidence from

11:10genetics and neuroscience that keeps

11:12identifying features of human biology

11:14that do not fit the expected

11:16evolutionary pattern. The human cerebral

11:19cortex contains approximately 86 billion

11:22neurons. Chimpanzees have roughly 6.2

11:25billion. The jump is an order of

11:27magnitude leap in a time frame that

11:29evolutionary biologists acknowledge is

11:32difficult to account for through

11:33standard selection pressure. The FOX P2

11:36gene, critical to human speech,

11:38underwent two specific mutations after

11:40the human lineage split from

11:42chimpanzees. These mutations

11:44fundamentally altered the protein it

11:46produces and are directly linked to the

11:48fine motor control that makes complex

11:50language possible. No other primate has

11:53them.

11:55They appeared in humans only and their

11:57functional impact is so precise that

11:59several researchers have noted the

12:01mutations look engineered rather than

12:03random. The word engineered does not

12:05appear in the published literature. The

12:07observation does. The encode project

12:10publishing major results in 2012 found

12:13that at least 80% of the human genome

12:15has biochemical function, regulating

12:18gene expression, controlling protein

12:20production, timing, orchestrating how a

12:22single cell develops into a

12:24differentiated organism. What encode

12:26could not determine is why so much

12:28regulatory architecture exists in the

12:30human genome that does not exist in

12:32other primates. The regulatory

12:35complexity is disproportionate. It

12:37exceeds what standard models predict for

12:39a species that diverged from its closest

12:41relative 6 million years ago. None of

12:44this proves the Sumerian account, but it

12:46establishes that human genetics contains

12:48features the current framework handles

12:50poorly.

12:53an order of magnitude neural leap with

12:55no identified driver, speech genes that

12:59appeared with surgical precision, and a

13:02regulatory genome of disproportionate

13:04complexity whose full function remains

13:06unmapped.

13:08The Sumerians had a word for what they

13:10claimed was removed. The geneticists

13:13have not yet found a word for what

13:14appears to be missing.

13:17K2100 has been in the British Museum

13:20since 1852. The first serious

13:23translation was conducted in 1924 by the

13:26French Assyrianologist Francois Thuro

13:29Donjan who included K2100 in a broader

13:32study of the ME concept. He noted the

13:34unusual terminology in private

13:36correspondence but published only the

13:38standard reading. His personal notes

13:41donated to the Louv after his death in

13:431944 contain a different assessment.

13:46Theo Donghan writes that the

13:47physiological language of K2100 is

13:50unlike anything in the standard corpus

13:53and that the tablet appears to describe

13:55the me as intrinsic biological functions

13:58rather than symbolic divine authorities.

14:01He did not publish this observation. In

14:031978, a graduate student at the School

14:05of Oriental and African Studies,

14:08Margaret Hail, requested access for her

14:10doctoral dissertation on variant ME

14:12texts. Her request was approved. She

14:16photographed the tablet and began a

14:17chapter arguing that K2100

14:20represented a biological reading of the

14:22ME concept.

14:253 months later, her access was revoked.

14:28The museum cited conservation

14:30reclassification. Hail's dissertation

14:33submitted in 1981 does not contain the

14:36chapter. She left academia in 1985 and

14:38never published on K2100.

14:41In 2003, the British Museum digitized a

14:44significant portion of its Cuneaform

14:47collection. K2100 was not included.

14:50Formal inquiries received a standard

14:52response. The tablet was in conservation

14:55review and would be digitized when

14:57stabilization was complete. As of this

14:59recording, stabilization remains

15:01ongoing. 23 years of conservation review

15:04for a tablet photographed without

15:06difficulty in 1978.

15:08Every instance of outside interest in

15:10K2100 has coincided with a restriction

15:13of access. Thorough Deng Xan noted the

15:16anomalies and published only the safe

15:18reading. Hail attempted analysis and

15:21lost access. The digitization excluded

15:24the tablet from a collection containing

15:25fragments in worse condition. The

15:28pattern is not proof but it is a

15:30pattern.

15:32The tablet sits in London. The

15:34conservation review continues. The 7ME

15:38described on K2100 remain untransated in

15:42full in any publicly available

15:43publication. The physiological language

15:46that thorough Donjan noted a century ago

15:49has not been subjected to modern

15:50computational analysis. The

15:53cross-cultural parallels have not been

15:55examined in a systematic comparative

15:56study. The genetic anomalies

15:59accumulating in the literature have not

16:01been mapped against the specific

16:02capacities the tablet describes. None of

16:05this has happened. The question of

16:07whether K2100 preserves a genuine record

16:10of capabilities removed from the human

16:12species or whether it is unusually

16:15detailed bronze age theology remains

16:17open. The responsible position is that

16:20it is theology. The uncomfortable

16:23position is that the theology keeps

16:24aligning with data the theologians could

16:27not have known. The Sumerianss did not

16:29have microscopes. They did not have

16:31genome sequencing.

16:34They did not understand neural

16:36architecture or regulatory DNA. Yet they

16:39described a species that was reduced,

16:42capacities that were extracted, and a

16:44redistribution to specific entities who,

16:46in every other surviving text, exhibit

16:49exactly the powers the tablet says they

16:51received. Anki sees what is distant, and

16:55Lil speaks, and reality changes. The

16:58Anunnaki do not age. The sevenme were

17:01not destroyed. The tablet is explicit.

17:04They were transferred. They are held.

17:06They exist somewhere in the framework

17:08the Sumerianss described with more

17:10precision than we have been willing to

17:11acknowledge. K2100 does not answer

17:14whether recovery is possible. The scribe

17:17at Nineveh either did not know or chose

17:19not to record the answer. What he

17:21recorded was the inventory, the list,

17:24the names.

17:27A document precise enough to function as

17:29a receipt filed in a library buried for

17:32two and a half thousand years, recovered

17:34by a Victorian archaeologist who had no

17:37idea what he was holding, cataloged as

17:39mythology, and stored on a shelf where

17:42it has waited for someone to read it the

17:43way it was written. The seven powers are

17:46listed. The recipients are named. The

17:49record exists. The conservation review

17:52is in its 23rd year. The digitization

17:55remains pending, and the tablet, as it

17:57has for 5,000 years, waits.

Why Stable Systems Fail: The Illusion Of Institutional Control

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Mon, 01 Jun 2026 07:00:00 +0000

what is poorly understood that any stable configuration is underlain by accepted workng protocols which are actively sustained by participants. all this apears stable yet is always completely ready to reset and rebuild. Central to this is the end points look diminished and even wreaked.

Yet it is all about a spectrum of finite actions which masks the greater picture completely.

control means working protocols that cannot be corrupted.

By the by, the reason the Trump Tariff experiment is floundering is because it totally misreads how trade itself works. and that is ignorance. Yet natural historic ignorance repeated for centuries. We are watching the emergence once again of global free trade arrangement much larger than either the USA or China.

Why Stable Systems Fail: The Illusion Of Institutional Control

Friday, May 29, 2026 - 05:05 PM

Authored by Luc Lelièvre via The Mises Institute,

There is a persistent belief in modern political life that systems fail because they become fragile. Institutions, it is assumed, weaken under pressure and eventually break down. This intuition is not just incomplete—it is backward.

Systems do not fail when they become fragile; they become fragile because they have already lost contact with the realities they claim to govern. What appears as stability is not strength, but the final illusion of a structure that can no longer correct itself. This is not a matter of conspiracy or intent, it is structural.

When institutions become more responsive to their own internal logic than to the world they were created to manage, this dynamic begins to unfold. As James C. Scott observed in Seeing Like a State, modern administrative systems must simplify in order to function. They translate complex, local, and context-dependent realities into legible categories, procedures, and metrics. This makes governance at scale possible—but it also creates systematic blind spots.

At first, the displacement of reality is subtle. Signals are filtered, anomalies are treated as exceptions, friction is absorbed. From within the system, nothing appears fundamentally wrong: Processes continue, reports are generated, decisions are made. This is the phase most observers mistake for stability.

In reality, the system becomes less responsive—not because it lacks information, but because it can no longer recognize what falls outside its categories. It does not consciously ignore reality; it simply ceases to register parts of it. As its categories harden, the system becomes more coherent, outputs are more consistent, procedures are more standardized. Language is more uniform, however, this coherence is achieved by exclusion, not mastery.

Rigidity is not strength, it is the loss of adjustment. At this point, fragility appears to emerge under pressure. However, this is misleading. A system becomes fragile because it must prevent itself from recognizing its own failure. Any signal requiring fundamental revision threatens not just a policy, but the system’s internal logic. The cost of recognition becomes prohibitive.

This is the knowledge problem identified by Friedrich Hayek: knowledge in society is dispersed, tacit, and often inarticulable. No centralized system can fully integrate it. As argued in The Fatal Conceit, attempts to do so inevitably distort or suppress what cannot be processed.

A contemporary illustration is the bureaucratic handling of the covid pandemic in Canada and Quebec. Centralized directives frequently overrode local realities and visible human costs. Once the framework was fixed, admitting significant errors became too costly. Criticism was absorbed through procedure rather than leading to meaningful revision—an instance of administrative rigidity that sustained the appearance of control.

At this point, the problem is no longer ignorance but overreach. Systems do not merely fail to process dispersed knowledge; they restructure reality so that corrective feedback no longer enters. What replaces it is not coordination, but representation. Under these conditions, power does not respond, it absorbs.

Demands are acknowledged but redirected. Critiques are translated into procedural adjustments. Pressure accumulates without producing structural change. It is dispersed, reformulated, or deferred. This creates a second illusion: that pressure leads to correction; it does not.

Pressure can be absorbed indefinitely—so long as it does not align. Fragmented demands rarely threaten a system. Even widespread dissatisfaction can coexist with institutional continuity if it lacks coordination and timing. Saturation is not mobilization.

As Mancur Olson argued in The Rise and Decline of Nations, mature systems accumulate organized interests that resist adaptation. Over time, this produces rigidity while preserving the appearance of order. What appears to be stability is closer to inertia than to equilibrium. Feedback loops become captured. Signals are no longer responses to reality, but to negotiated representations of it. The system ceases to adjust and begins to persist.

History repeatedly illustrates this pattern.

Late-stage regimes often display surface stability. Their structures remain intact, their procedures continue. Their authority is formally unchallenged. However, beneath this lies a growing disconnect between institutional representation and lived reality. The system persists—but as a closed loop.

When change occurs, it is rarely gradual. It emerges when multiple conditions converge—economic strain, political disillusionment, social fragmentation. Only then does accumulated pressure become transformative. Until that point, stability can appear indefinite.

This is why a crisis is often misread as the beginning of failure. By the time fragility becomes visible, it has long been present; what changes is not instability itself, but its expression. The real danger is not that systems fail, but that they continue to function after losing the capacity for correction.

As Ludwig von Mises emphasized in Bureaucracy, administrative systems can operate according to rules even when those rules no longer achieve their intended ends. The mechanism continues—but without effective steering.

Markets, by contrast, reveal what bureaucracies suppress. Price signals communicate information about scarcity, preference, and misallocation that no centralized structure can replicate. Coordination emerges not from design, but from dispersed knowledge. Correction rarely comes from within closed systems.

Stability, in this sense, is not evidence of health, it is often the final stage of a system that has lost the ability to adapt. Modern systems do not fail when they become fragile. They become fragile because they have already failed—structurally and long before that failure becomes visible.

The more decision-making is centralized, the more lived knowledge is replaced by abstract representations detached from reality. What follows is not reform, but substitution. At that point, the system no longer responds in any meaningful sense, it simulates a response.

Its stability is an illusion produced by abstraction, rigidity, and the suppression of signals it cannot process. It endures not because it is strong, but because it no longer registers what would force it to change.

The question is not when the system will fail, it is how long it can continue after failure has already occurred. History suggests the answer is uncomfortable: Systems do not collapse when they finally become unstable; they appear stable until the moment their failure can no longer be ignored.

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Gee, AI needs to become cost conscious. The whole computer biome is a default to maximum computation and obviously the AI will slavishly recalculate the same decision it made yesterday and the day before. engineers are simply too lazy to work like that.

and away goes your billing on an exponential curve.

Let us now see if they can fix this.

Sir Escanor (𝘏𝘰𝘱𝘪𝘶𝘮 𝘚𝘭𝘢𝘺𝘦𝘳)

@EscanorReloaded

CEOs are quietly realizing the AI replacement plan has a problem.

Two problems, actually.

One: the token costs for running AI agents are now exceeding what they were paying the employees they fired.

Two: when the tokens run out, the AI stops. Just stops. No continuity. No workaround. Just a spinning wheel where your workforce used to be.

You fired humans to save money and bought a subscription that bills you into a corner.

The employees you let go knew what to do when things broke.

The AI just invoices you for the outage.

And then there’s the permission problem nobody wants to talk about.

To do its job, the AI agent needs access. Full access. Your systems, your patents, your contracts, your future plans. Everything you spent years building, handed over to a process that has no loyalty, no discretion, and no skin in the game.

You didn’t hire a replacement.

You gave a stranger with no soul the keys to everything you own.

Enjoy.

Something very interesting is beginning to emerge from inside the AI industry itself...

Written by Donna Hancock Date: 05-28-2026 Subject: Robots and Artificial Intelligence

The company that bet its future on AI just told 100,000 engineers to stop using its best tool because it was bleeding them dry

Something very interesting is beginning to emerge from inside the AI industry itself.

For the past two years we have been told that AI would replace human workers, dramatically reduce costs and create unprecedented efficiency across every sector of the economy.

Markets soared on that promise.

Companies fired staff, announced "AI integration" and watched their stock prices rise accordingly.

But now some of the first major cracks are beginning to appear in the narrative.

Microsoft has reportedly started canceling large numbers of internal Claude Code licenses after costs spiraled far beyond expectations as engineers increasingly relied on the system.

Uber executives admitted their AI budgets were effectively blown apart within months of deployment.

Even Nvidia's own VP of Applied Deep Learning openly stated that for his team, the cost of compute had become "far beyond the costs of the employees."

What is becoming apparent is that large scale AI deployment may not actually reduce costs in the way investors were led to believe.

Quite the opposite.

The more powerful these systems become, the more they are used. The more they are used, the more tokens, processing power, energy, infrastructure and compute they consume. And at enterprise scale those costs become enormous.

The assumption was that companies would replace expensive humans with cheap AI.

Instead, they may end up needing: expensive humans supervising extremely expensive AI systems running on staggeringly expensive infrastructure.

And that changes the economic equation entirely.

The Sumerian Tablet Listing 5 Species That Existed Before Humans — And How Each One Ended

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

firstly, ignore the use of the word species here. Secondly, insectoids used hive minds extensively during the Carboniferous. this is important new information.

This is one more transmission of antidiluvian knowledge, quite similar to genesis.

The hard part is grasping the translation transitions taking place ,but it is mostly from high level into a Bronze Age lexicon and back out. so not completely impossible.

It literally tells us that neanderthals deminished and died out. We suspected as much but had zero confirmation. This is unexpected confirmation. survivals may still exist only because we have exactly one report. bigfoot is doing much better with the same constraints.

all this tells us that sumarian Text was informed by access to antidiluvial records and all of it needs to be taken seriously.

As I have posted ,Genesis is a translation from an antidiluvial text created on the heels of the pleistocene nonconformity and we also include the kolbrin Bible as well. both provide an extensive survival report that conforms to a craft leaving and then returning with repopulation support and materials. Think UFO the size of a football field. Think 2000 year stand by some place else besides on Earth. This will soon be possible and mankind certainly understood what was coming.

Ages are described accurately and this cannot be luck.

The Sumerian Tablet Listing 5 Species That Existed Before Humans — And How Each One Ended

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bumwBvTLgYc

In 1893, a team from the University of Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet slightly larger than a man's hand from the excavation trenches at Nippur. It was cataloged as CBS 10673, packed into a crate with several hundred other fragments, and shipped to Philadelphia, where it sat in the basement of the Penn Museum for over sixty years, classified as a cosmogonic fragment, Old Babylonian copy, partial text. The first partial translation was attempted in 1956 by Samuel Noah Kramer, the same Kramer who spent decades assembling Sumerian myths from shattered pieces scattered across twenty museums worldwide. He translated the upper third, assigned it to the category of creation narratives, and moved on to better-preserved material that he considered more urgent. The lower two-thirds of CBS 10673, covered in dense cuneiform script arranged in two tight columns with unusually small sign spacing, remained untranslated until 2004. No one prioritized it. No one had reason to.

Null Source investigates CBS 10673, an ancient clay tablet from the University

0:00In 1893, a team from the University of
0:02Pennsylvania pulled a clay tablet
0:04slightly larger than a man's hand from
0:06the excavation trenches at Nepur. It was
0:09cataloged as CBS 10673,
0:13packed into a crate with several hundred
0:15other fragments and shipped to
0:16Philadelphia where it sat in the
0:18basement of the Pen Museum for over 60
0:20years. Classified as a cosmogonic
0:22[music] fragment, Old Babylonian copy,
0:25partial text. The first partial
0:28translation was attempted in 1956 by
0:30Samuel Noah Kramer, the same Kramer who
0:33spent decades assembling Sumerian myths
0:35from shattered pieces scattered across
0:3720 museums worldwide. He translated the
0:40upper third, assigned it to the category
0:42of creation narratives and moved on to
0:44better preserved material that he
0:46considered more urgent. The lower two/3s
0:49of CBS 10673
0:51covered in dense cuniform script
0:53arranged in two tight columns with
0:55unusually small sign spacing remained
0:58untransated until 2004. [music]
1:01No one prioritized it. No one had reason
1:03to.
1:06When a team at the Oriental Institute in
1:08Chicago finally worked through the full
1:10text, what they found did not match
1:12Kramer's classification.
1:14The tablet does not describe the
1:15creation of humanity. It describes what
1:18existed before humanity. Five distinct
1:21species, each named with its own
1:23Sumerian compound term, each given a
1:26physical description, a function, and a
1:28duration of existence. And for each of
1:31the five, the tablet provides a specific
1:33mechanism of destruction. Not a single
1:36flood, not generic divine wrath. five
1:40separate extinction events described
1:42with structural detail that appears
1:43nowhere else in the surviving Cuneaform
1:45corpus. The tablet has been on
1:48restricted access since 2011. The stated
1:51reason is conservation. The conservation
1:54work has not produced a single published
1:56status report in 14 years. If you are
1:58here because the artifacts, the
2:00restricted tablets, the parts of the
2:02archaeological record that do not fit
2:04the textbook version of history interest
2:06you, subscribe.
2:09We investigate one of these cases every
2:12week. Now, let me show you what the
2:14tablet actually says about the five
2:15species that came before us.
2:19The tablet opens with a period the
2:21Sumerianss called Naml Gala, a phrase
2:23Kramer rendered as the age of lordship.
2:26The 2004 team proposed an alternative.
2:30Namlu gala functions not as a
2:32description of governance but as a
2:34temporal marker. An era defined not by
2:36who ruled but by what lived. The first
2:39species is called olu which breaks down
2:42into ool meaning primordial and doo
2:45meaning to shape. The ool du are
2:48described as beings of the water and the
2:50stone who moved without legs and built
2:52without hands. Their size is given in
2:54Sumerian architectural units suggesting
2:57organisms between 3 and 5 m in length.
3:00Their function is stated plainly. They
3:03prepared the ground. The mechanism of
3:05their ending reads, "The sky burned and
3:08the waters turned to powder."
3:10A 2016 paper in the proceedings of the
3:13National Academy of Sciences documented
3:16chemical signatures at the Peran Triacic
3:18boundary 252 million years ago, the
3:22largest mass extinction in Earth's
3:23history.
3:26The signatures indicated extreme
3:28atmospheric heating and ocean
3:29acidification so severe that marine
3:32carbonate structures dissolved. The
3:35waters turned to powder is not poetic
3:37metaphor. It is what happens to a
3:39calcium carbonate ocean under
3:41catastrophic acidification.
3:43The second species, Guirgal, translates
3:46as great boned form. They walked on the
3:48land the Udu had prepared, consumed
3:51vegetation, and their bones were as the
3:53pillars of a temple. Their ending came
3:56through the fire from the outer
3:57darkness, a grammatical construction the
4:00Sumerians reserved specifically for
4:01events originating beyond Earth's
4:03atmosphere. The Cretaceous Paleogene
4:06extinction 66 million years ago, a
4:09bolide impact, fire from the outer
4:12darkness. And the species it destroyed,
4:15great boned vegetation consumers whose
4:17skeletons were as temple pillars, bear a
4:20resemblance to sorapod dinosaurs that is
4:22difficult to attribute to coincidence.
4:25Two species, two extinctions,
4:29both described by people who had never
4:31seen a fossil.
4:33The remaining three entries maintain the
4:35same pattern. And the fifth one is the
4:37most disturbing of all.
4:40The third species is designated ashagar,
4:43a compound that has generated more
4:45disagreement than any other term on the
4:47tablet. Ash means singular. Mei refers
4:51to the divine laws governing reality.
4:54Gar means to place. Together the ones
4:57who set the singular law. They are
4:59described as small, numerous, dwelling
5:02in structures built from the earth
5:03itself, operating as a collective rather
5:06than as individuals. The scribe uses a
5:09phrase with no parallel in any other
5:10Sumerian text. They thought with one
5:13body. Individual cognition expressed
5:16through collective behavior. But the
5:18significant element is their
5:19destruction. The breath of the world
5:22changed and the ashmagar could not
5:24change with it. Their structures
5:25endured, but the builders did not.
5:28Paleontologists studying the late
5:30Carboniferous period have documented
5:32exactly this.
5:34Atmospheric oxygen levels reached 35%
5:38supporting arthropods of extraordinary
5:40size, dragon flies with 70 cm wingspans,
5:44millipedes over 2 m long, scorpions the
5:47size of dogs. These organisms built
5:50extensive burrow networks across
5:52multiple continents. When oxygen levels
5:54crashed during the transition to the
5:56perian, their passive tracheal
5:58respiratory systems could not function.
6:01The breath of the world changed. Their
6:03trace fossils survived. The builders did
6:06not. A Sumerian scribe writing around
6:091800 B.CE described an extinction
6:12mechanism that modern paleontology would
6:14not formally document until Robert
6:16Burner's atmospheric oxygen models at
6:19Yale in the 1990s.
6:21The scribe did not have isotope analysis
6:23or sediment cores. He had a tradition
6:26that told him a species had once
6:28breathed differently and died when the
6:30air betrayed them. The question is not
6:32whether this correspondence is real. The
6:35question is where the tradition came
6:37from.
6:39The fourth entry introduces Lunaur, a
6:42compound that translates as the near
6:44humans of the other land. The physical
6:47description is the most detailed on the
6:49tablet. The Luna Kurr walked upright,
6:52used stone tools, wore animal skins, and
6:55made sounds that carried meaning but
6:57were not speech. They were stronger than
6:59humans with thicker bones and skulls
7:01that sloped where ours are flat. They
7:04lived in caves. They buried their dead,
7:06and they existed alongside the earliest
7:08humans for many counted seasons before
7:11they disappeared. Their ending has no
7:13catastrophe. The tablet says simply that
7:16the new ones came and the Luna curr grew
7:18fewer and fewer until the last of them
7:21slept and did not wake. In 2010, Svante
7:25Pabo at the Maxplank Institute published
7:27the first Neanderthal genome.
7:30Neanderthalss coexisted with modern
7:32humans for approximately 5,000 years.
7:35They used tools, wore skins, buried
7:38their dead with apparent ritual intent.
7:41Their bones were denser. Their skulls
7:44featured pronounced brow ridges and a
7:46sloping posterior cranium. They
7:48communicated using a vocal apparatus
7:50that lacked the descended larynx,
7:52enabling full human speech. They made
7:55sounds that carried meaning but were not
7:56speech. Their populations declined
7:59gradually as modern humans expanded into
8:01their territories. The last known groups
8:04survived in southern Iberia until
8:06approximately 40,000 years ago. They
8:09grew fewer and fewer until the last of
8:11them slept and did not wake. The
8:13Sumerianss emerged around 4,500 B.CE.
8:17The Neanderthalss disappeared around
8:1940,000 years ago, a gap of 35,000 years.
8:23No oral tradition survives that span
8:25without written records. And yet CBS
8:2910,673
8:31describes a species matching the
8:33Anderthalss in every particular the
8:35tablet addresses. [music] anatomy,
8:37behavior, tools, communication, and the
8:40exact demographic pattern of their
8:42decline.
8:44Either the scribe invented a description
8:46that aligns perfectly with a hominin
8:48species he could not have known about,
8:50or the information came from a source
8:52that preserved knowledge across a time
8:54span that should have erased it
8:56completely.
8:58The fifth entry is the shortest and the
9:01[music] most difficult. The species is
9:03designated an shaga, those of the inner
9:06heaven. The physical description is
9:08almost absent. Instead, the text
9:10describes capabilities. The anshaga knew
9:13the counting of all things. They built
9:15structures that moved the stars in their
9:17vision. They spoke across distances
9:19without sound. And they held the mi, the
9:22divine laws, not as gifts from the gods,
9:25but as possessions earned through their
9:27own understanding. This is the only
9:29species on the tablet described as
9:31possessing technology, not tools,
9:34technology. And the mechanism of their
9:36destruction is not environmental.
9:38[music] The text says the anaga reached
9:41for the fire of the gods and the fire
9:42consumed them. They burned from within
9:45and the land they stood on became glass
9:47and the water they drank became poison
9:50and their children were born twisted for
9:52seven generations until none were born
9:54at all.
9:56The 2004 translation team published this
9:59passage with a [music] footnote that has
10:00been cited more than any other element
10:02of their work. The footnote reads, "The
10:05description is consistent in its
10:07structural elements with the known
10:08effects of ionizing radiation exposure
10:11on biological populations, [music]
10:13including acute radiation syndrome,
10:16environmental vitrification, water table
10:18contamination, and multigenerational
10:21terratogenic effects leading to
10:23reproductive failure.
10:25In 2005, a geological survey in
10:27Rajasthan documented deposits of fused
10:30silica glass in strata dating to
10:33approximately 2,000 BCE.
10:36The chemical composition did not match
10:38meteorite impact signatures. The trace
10:40element ratios were closer to trinitite,
10:43the glass created at the Trinity nuclear
10:45test in 1945, than to any natural
10:48formation. The anaga are the species on
10:51CBS 10673
10:53that most closely resembles humanity.
10:56Technological, mathematical, ambitious,
11:00destroyed not by an external force but
11:02by their own achievement.
11:05The tablet does not say whether we are
11:07the same species returning or a new
11:10attempt. It simply records what happened
11:12to the last civilization [music]
11:14that reached the level we are
11:15approaching now.
11:18Five species, five extinctions, each
11:21described in language that maps onto a
11:23real event in Earth's biological
11:25history. The correspondences are
11:28structurally specific. Marine organisms
11:30destroyed by ocean acidification.
11:33Large terrestrial fauna destroyed by
11:35boli impact. Giant arthropods destroyed
11:38by atmospheric oxygen collapse. Near
11:41humans gradually replaced by modern
11:42humans. A technological civilization
11:45destroyed by its own fire. The order on
11:48the tablet does not follow strict
11:50chronological sequence. The oxygen crash
11:52preceded the Peran Triacic event, but
11:55the tablet lists them in reverse. This
11:57has been used as an argument against the
11:59correspondence, but independent
12:01researcher Daniela Morasini in a 2019
12:04paper accepted for conference
12:06presentation at the European Association
12:08of Archaeologists and then withdrawn
12:10before delivery under unexplained
12:12circumstances argued that the tablet is
12:15organized not chronologically but
12:17hierarchically. Each species is more
12:20complex than the last.
12:23Water creatures, land creatures,
12:26collective builders, near humans,
12:28technological civilization, a ladder of
12:31increasing sophistication, each rung
12:33destroyed by a different mechanism,
12:35building toward one implicit question
12:37the tablet never explicitly asks, but
12:39that its entire structure makes
12:41unavoidable. If every species before us
12:44was destroyed, what destroys us? The
12:47fifth entry answers it. The fire of the
12:49gods is not punishment. It is not
12:51judgment. It is a threshold. A
12:54technological milestone that every
12:56sufficiently advanced species eventually
12:58reaches. And that according to the
13:00record preserved on this single clay
13:02tablet in a Philadelphia basement, none
13:04has survived. The scribe at Nepur did
13:07not editorialize. He did not warn. He
13:10simply documented what his tradition
13:12told him had happened five times before
13:14and arranged it in the only order that
13:16mattered, the order of what each species
13:18was capable of when it died.
13:22CBS 10,673
13:25was placed on restricted access in 2011,
13:297 months after the full 2004 translation
13:32was first cited in a popular science
13:34publication. A New Scientist article
13:36that drew attention to the extinction
13:38correspondences and generated
13:40significant public interest. The stated
13:42reason is conservation, but several
13:45details resist routine explanation.
13:47Conservation restrictions typically
13:49limit physical handling while
13:51maintaining catalog visibility. CBS
13:5410673 was removed from the museum's
13:56searchable electronic catalog in the
13:59same 2018 update that removed CBS 8534,
14:03the chromosome tablet held in the same
14:05institution. The accession number exists
14:08in the original 1893 printed ledgers,
14:11but the digital record has been thinned.
14:1414 years is an extraordinarily long hold
14:16for a tablet of this size. The Pen
14:19Museum has conserved tablets in worse
14:21condition within two to three years.
14:23[music] No status report has been
14:24issued.
14:27Formal access requests from three
14:29independent researchers between 2015 and
14:322023 were declined using identical
14:34language. The same sentences, same
14:37phrasing, same institutional template
14:39applied to two tablets that happened to
14:41contain the two most anomalous texts in
14:44the museum's Nepur collection.
14:46A junior member of the 2004 translation
14:49team speaking off the record in 2018
14:52said only that the institutional
14:54response to the tablet's public
14:55visibility had been chilling and that
14:58further work on the text was unlikely to
15:00receive university support. These are
15:03not the words of people who believe they
15:04translated a routine creation myth. The
15:07team leader has not published on
15:09Sumerian cosmogonic material since 2011.
15:12His academic output shifted entirely to
15:14administrative texts and economic
15:16records, the least controversial
15:18category of cuneaifor scholarship. The
15:21pivot was never publicly explained.
15:25CBS 10673
15:27does not answer its own question. It
15:30describes five species, five
15:32destructions, five clearings of the
15:34biological stage, each making way for
15:36something more complex, more capable,
15:39more dangerous. It places humanity at
15:42the end of this sequence, not as the
15:44pinnacle of creation, but as the latest
15:46iteration in a cycle that has repeated
15:48five times before. And it gives the
15:50fifth destruction a cause that is not
15:52geological, not astronomical, not
15:55atmospheric. It is technological,
15:58self-inflicted.
15:59The anaga, the heart of sky beings, had
16:02mathematical knowledge, long-d
16:04distanceance communication, structures
16:06that altered their perception of the
16:08cosmos. If they existed and destroyed
16:11themselves at the threshold described on
16:13the tablet, then we are not pioneers. We
16:16are followers on a path that has been
16:18walked before, approaching a fire that
16:20has burned before. The geological
16:22evidence is thin. Fused glass in
16:25Rajasthan and Libya.
16:28Anomalous signatures in strata that do
16:31not match known natural sources. None of
16:33it conclusive. All of it contested. But
16:36the tablet's description is on the clay.
16:39It has been read. It says what it says.
16:42And it sits in a museum basement in
16:44Philadelphia, restricted, uncataloged in
16:47the digital record, waiting for someone
16:49to ask why a 3,800-year-old scribe
16:52described five mass extinctions with
16:54structural accuracy a modern
16:56paleontologist would recognize, and why
16:59the institution holding this record has
17:01spent 14 years making it harder to see.
17:04The Sumerians did not have carbon dating
17:06or genome sequencing or atmospheric
17:08modeling. They had clay and reads and a
17:12tradition they said came from beings
17:13older than themselves. What they wrote
17:16on CBS 10673
17:18either represents the most extraordinary
17:20coincidence in ancient literature or the
17:23most extraordinary inheritance. The
17:25tablet does not tell us which. It
17:27records what came before and how each
17:30version ended.
17:32And it leaves the sixth ending ours.
17:37If this changed how you think about what
17:39the Sumerianss actually knew, subscribe.
17:42Next week, we are looking at another
17:44tablet from the same Nepur collection.
17:47One that describes not what lived before
17:49humans, but what was done to human
17:51biology after we were created. The video
17:54on screen goes deeper into the
17:56restricted material at the Pen Museum.
17:59Click it. The archive is larger than

18:01they want you to know.

University of California's woke decision to ignore STEM applicants' SAT scores to boost 'equity' backfires with oh-so-predictable consequences

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Sat, 30 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Let us understand something. SAT preparation is a thing. That preparation ensures you have reached a basic treshold. I wrote those tests back in 1966 with minimal preparation in Ontario where they were not even important. since then preparation has become a real thing.

Entering any math program without that baseline is a mistake and here is also where talent matters. No even talented teenage couch potato ever got recruited by the NBA. Same problem. It takes both taent and setious application. to compete at this level. The body and mind need to transition.

University entrance should plausibly be restricted to a 1400 combined SAT. and augmented by colledge level preparation for those not meeting this standard. We want the A team and the B team. The fluff merchants stay C team and that is still a majority.

University of California's woke decision to ignore STEM applicants' SAT scores to boost 'equity' backfires with oh-so-predictable consequences, as professors beg for help

By SOPHIE GABLE, US REPORTER

Published: 10:59 EDT, 28 May 2026 | Updated: 11:24 EDT, 28 May 2026

The University of California's landmark decision to eliminate standardized testing has now come under scrutiny as professors shed light on the extreme proficiency failures undergraduate students have demonstrated.

Multiple mathematics professors and one law professor at UC Berkeley authored an open letter calling on the university administration to mandate the SAT and ACT for the fall 2027 semester.

More than 600 professors have signed the letter, pushing back on the argument that standardized tests eliminate equity in the application process.

'The SAT/ACT mathematics requirement is not an obstacle to equity; rather, it is a prerequisite for it,' the professors said.

'Failing to measure preparation gaps does not remove barriers; it moves them into the classroom, where they become harder to overcome.'

Standardized tests have been a frequent subject of debate in academia. Those in opposition have argued that students who can afford standardized test preparation and attend well-funded high schools have an advantage over lower-income communities.

In 2020, the Board of Regents unanimously voted to suspend standardized testing requirements through 2024 and eliminate them altogether by 2025.

John A. Pérez, the chair of the board at the time, hailed the decision as an 'incredible step in the right direction.'

Professors at UC Berkeley have argued in an open letter to bring back standardized test requirements

View gallery

The University of California eliminated test requirements in 2020 after a significant push from students and advocacy groups that even included a lawsuit

John A. Pérez, the chair of the Board of Regents in 2020, praised the decision to eliminate test score requirements

The decision came after a 2019 lawsuit filed by UC students, the Compton Unified School District and other advocacy groups claimed that college entry tests discriminate against applicants based on their socioeconomic status.

After the Board of Regents voted to phase out the tests, students argued that allowing voluntary submissions did not eliminate the discriminatory practices.

UC later reached a settlement with the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, and the university eliminated standardized tests in the application process.

Six years later, professors have said that the decision, coupled with the impacts of the pandemic, has poorly impacted students.

'We now observe preparation gaps so severe that instructors must reteach middle-school mathematics while simultaneously teaching the material students need for sciences, engineering, economics, and other quantitatively demanding fields,' the professors wrote.

Mathematics professors Zvezdelina Stankova, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, John W Lott and Mina Aganagic authored the letter alongside law professor Chris Jay Hoofnagle.

The professors noted that mathematics in particular proved to be a struggle for undergraduates.

The letter noted that at least 20 percent of Berkeley first-semester calculus students showed a lack of proficiency in their exams.

Zvezdelina Stankova argued that returning to the standardized test requirement ensures equity, rather than eliminating it

Mathematics professors Zvezdelina Stankova, Svetlana Jitomirskaya, John W Lott and Mina Aganagic authored the letter alongside law professor Chris Jay Hoofnagl

Five UC Berkeley professors authored the letter, but hundreds have signed it in support

All University of California campuses have been accepting applicants in recent years without considering their standardized test scores, a decision that is now facing intense scrutiny from professors

Stankova argued that standardized tests ensure equity rather than diminish it. She said that in her 30-year teaching career, her 2023 calculus II class stood out as an unprecedented challenge.

'Something had changed drastically. The bottom was taken out, and there were 25 to 30 percent of the students who were in free fall. There was nothing you could do for them. They were just not prepared,' she said, according to the Los Angeles Times.

She noted that she understood the letter would be controversial, but argued that she does not believe reinstating standardized tests will harm diversity or equity.

'I actually see it helping it, because you have right now the lack of SATs hurting the underrepresented minorities,' Stankova argued.

'You give them a ticket, an entrance ticket to a great university system like UC, only that they fail. How is that diversity?'

Advocates for eliminating standardized tests have pointed to the record number of applications UC received in 2021.

The university admitted a record number of students, hailing the class as its largest and most diverse ever.

Administration officials also loosened application requirements that year, following a challenging learning environment brought on by the pandemic, including modifications to deadlines and letter-grade thresholds.

The Board of Regents unanimously voted to eliminate test scores in 2020. The new board has not publicly said whether they will return to the requirement

Over 600 professors across UC campuses from varying disciplines have signed the letter in support of bringing standardized tests back

UC spokesperson Rachel Zaentz told the Daily Mail in a statement, 'In light of concerns raised by UC faculty about student preparedness for undergraduate study, in March I called upon our systemwide faculty Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools (BOARS) to address timely topics tied to students’ college readiness and UC’s admission process.

'BOARS is in the process of proposing a roadmap of policy work and partnership building with other state and K-12 education leaders in the next academic year and beyond.'

Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the UC systemwide Academic Senate, said in a statement to the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle that he has heard 'concerns raised by UC faculty about student preparedness for undergraduate study.'

He added that the board 'is in the process of proposing a roadmap of policy work and partnership building with other state and K-12 education leaders in the next academic year and beyond.'

The university stressed that mathematics proficiency has been a challenge due to periods of remote instruction during the pandemic, suggesting that standardized tests were not solely to blame.

The Daily Mail has reached out to the Board of Regents for comment.

Record-breaking apartment building 3D printed in just 34 days

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:31 +0000

This is promising.All the finishing still takes months but the shell is printed eliminating concrete forms if i got it right. That matters because all that can be done on the fly while even running modifications.

four story blocks are pretty well the working standard and able to provide an optimal foot print. We have already settled on this.

now we can work at pulling the cost down.

Record-breaking apartment building 3D printed in just 34 days

By Adam Williams

May 28, 2026
F

France's ViliaSprint² is Europe's largest 3D-printed apartment building
Plurial Novilia

Europe's largest 3D-printed apartment building has been completed in France. Containing 12 social housing apartments spread across three floors, the project's printing process was carried out in just 34 days.

ViliaSprint² was created by developer Plurial Novilia, with designer HOBO Architecture, and printed by PERI 3D Construction using a COBOD BOD2 3D printer, which is the same type used in the previously covered 3D-printed data center and earthquake-resistant house. It's positioned next to another very similar building by the same developer, which was constructed using traditional techniques and took three months longer to complete.

ViliaSprint² was completed three months faster than a neighboring conventionally constructed building
Plurial Novilia

According to COBOD, ViliaSprint² is the first building in France in which both the load-bearing structure and all walls were printed directly on-site. The COBOD BOD2 printer extruded a cement-like mixture supplied by Holcim in layers to build up the basic shell. This printing was originally planned to last 50 days but took just 34 days in all, with three human operators overseeing the work. The rest of the build process, including traditional construction work by human builders like adding the roof, windows, and wiring, began in March 2025 and was completed in early 2026.

"The curved facade and rounded floorplan are only economical because of 3D printing, complex geometries that would add significant cost with conventional formwork come at no premium," says COBOD. "On-site concrete production further reduces transport emissions. The optimized form also saved approximately 10% of concrete volume. The building integrates perlite insulation, timber balcony structures, 500 sq m (5,400 sq ft) of photovoltaic panels, and a hybrid gas/heat pump system by Atlantic Systèmes, achieving around 60% energy self-sufficiency in compliance with France's RE2020 2025 [green building] targets."

The interior consists of 800 sq m (8,611 sq ft) of living space, spread over the three floors. Each of the dozen social housing apartments also comes with its own balcony.

Each of the apartments in ViliaSprint² opens onto its own balcony area
Plurial Novilia

As far as we can tell, the ViliaSprint² could actually be the world's largest 3D-printed apartment building, but with this construction space being so decentralized and fast-moving, perhaps we've missed one. Let us know in the comments if you know of something larger.

Looking to the future, Plurial Novilia and its partners are planning another larger project containing approximately 40 apartments using two 3D printers simultaneously. The aim is to reduce print time by a factor of four and lower costs to that of conventional construction.

The Quiet Collapse Under The Market's Surface...It's Getting Louder

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

rivate credit is typically illiquid and difficult to price. Yet we have eras of enthusiasm because they can promise Yeilds that are in short supply. when that stalls, you worry.

Worse we have a following demographic shrinkage underway which undermines the whole structure.

consumption has to shrink.

The Quiet Collapse Under The Market's Surface...It's Getting Louder

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 - 08:00 AM

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/quiet-collapse-under-markets-surfaceits-getting-louder

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

The market is hypnotized by headlines out of the Middle East. Every missile strike, every oil spike, every rumor about escalation with Iran sends volatility dealers and gamma-chasing algorithms into another violent intraday swing.

But beneath the geopolitical theater, a dangerous story continues to deteriorate quietly in the background: multiple areas are cracking in a way that looks increasingly systemic, and almost nobody wants to talk about it. But I won’t shut up about it.

Why? Try this on for size. According to Fitch Ratings, the U.S. Private Credit Default Rate just hit another all-time high. Fitch reported that the trailing twelve-month private credit default rate rose to 6.0% for April 2026, up from 5.7% in March and the highest level since the firm began tracking the data in August 2024.

The model-based default rate climbed to a record 4.8%, while the privately monitored rating default rate remained an astonishing 9.7%. Those are accelerating cracks.

Fitch recorded 10 private credit default events in April alone, heavily concentrated in industrials, manufacturing, and business services. More importantly, the composition of those defaults matters. The majority were not traditional payment misses. Seven involved distressed maturity extensions, lenders kicking maturities one to two years down the road simply to avoid recognizing immediate failure. The remaining defaults largely involved borrowers introducing payment-in-kind interest structures instead of paying cash interest.

This isn’t normal business operations for private credit. Instead it’s like running a triage at an emergency room. Extending and pretending while hoping magic liquidity comes out of nowhere and saves the day is a strategy popular on Wall Street. The only problem is when that liquidity never arrives, the chaos is multiples larger than it would have been if these businesses had done the right thing years prior.

The most alarming detail from Fitch may be this: in the April trailing twelve-month period, Fitch counted 81 unique defaulters generating 99 separate default events — the highest number ever recorded since tracking began. More than half of all default activity came from interest deferrals or PIK structures replacing actual cash payments.

In plain English, companies are increasingly surviving by pretending they are solvent when they aren’t.

Healthcare providers remain among the worst areas, while consumer products posted an extraordinary 11.1% default rate. Industrials and manufacturing surged to a 9.1% default rate, nearly doubling year-over-year. Fitch itself warned that prolonged Iran-related inflation pressure and higher energy costs could further weaken consumer demand and increase rating pressure on industrial issuers.

As I’ve written for the last year (at least), private credit was sold as a superior replacement for traditional banking risk. Investors were told that direct lenders had tighter covenants, better borrower visibility, superior workout flexibility, and floating-rate protection. What actually happened was a decade-long explosion of leverage financed by ultra-cheap money and dependent on permanently low defaults.

Now rates are higher, refinancing windows are shrinking, and many of these companies were never structurally viable at current borrowing costs.

I have already argued repeatedly that rates likely need to go higher from here because inflation pressures remain embedded throughout the system. The bond market understands this. Long-end yields continue to scream that inflation expectations are not anchored, fiscal credibility is deteriorating, and Treasury supply is becoming overwhelming. And the problem is simple: every additional increment higher in rates worsens private credit defaults materially.

A massive portion of these borrowers are floating-rate structures. Every basis point increase directly raises debt servicing costs for already fragile companies. Many sponsors are now choosing between injecting fresh equity into deteriorating businesses or simply extending and pretending until the market forces recognition.

At the same time, the U.S. consumer is visibly weakening. Auto loan delinquencies and credit card delinquencies that are 90+ days past due have already returned to levels last seen during the 2008 financial crisis. Households have burned through excess savings, financing costs have exploded, and inflation continues to erode purchasing power.

The consumer exhaustion is no longer theoretical. The only question is whether or not consumer exhaustion even matters. During Covid, when the Fed printed a metric fuck ton of cash in the absence of having an actual economy, consumer behavior — sitting at home and drinking beer, if you were me — didn’t matter. But now, with the Fed’s inability to paper over the entire economy again due to inflation, consumer behavior may actually matter.

Now the Federal Reserve — and potentially the incoming Fed Chair — is trapped in an impossible position. Inflation remains too sticky to justify aggressive easing. The bond market is revolting against fiscal expansion and demanding higher yields. Yet the real economy, particularly lower-income consumers and heavily leveraged borrowers, is weakening rapidly beneath the surface.

There are no clean choices left. Cut rates too early and inflation risks reigniting while bond yields surge even higher in response. Keep rates elevated and the pressure wave moving through private credit, consumer lending, commercial real estate, and corporate refinancing only intensifies.

Meanwhile, equity markets continue trading like geopolitical prediction markets. The Iran conflict has become the dominant headline catalyst for every daily gamma swing we now call a stock market. Algorithms chase oil, defense stocks, and volatility spikes while investors remain fixated on the next military escalation.

But behind the scenes, the underlying financial plumbing continues to deteriorate.

Private credit defaults are rising to records. Consumers are rolling over. Delinquencies are back at crisis-era levels. Bond market stress is intensifying. And leverage built during the zero-rate era is finally colliding with the reality of sustained capital costs.

Markets can ignore structural deterioration for a surprisingly long time, but eventually, reality forces recognition.

Like a drunk finally waking up clear-headed after a long night, at some point this market will sober up and realize that beneath the geopolitical distractions, the foundation itself has been quietly cracking the entire time. In the meantime, here’s a couple ideas I’ve thrown around about trying to sidestep a bond crisis, should it occur: What To Own Before A Bond Market Crisis

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 often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning. Contributor posts and aggregated posts have been hand selected by me, have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author, reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions. All positions can change immediately as soon as I publish this, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier.

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What Do They Have Planned? Scientists Are Projecting That The Population Of The World Could Fall By 50 Percent By 2064

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

This is about potential pandemics. While tyhis is a real risk, it is typically stabalised by self isolation and cell phones make that super easy today.

My greater concern is the global drop in birth rates. This alone can produce a steady global decline which we are already seeing.

That is the real existential threat and not overpopulation.

What Do They Have Planned? Scientists Are Projecting That The Population Of The World Could Fall By 50 Percent By 2064

May 26, 2026 by Michael

https://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/what-do-they-have-planned-scientists-are-projecting-that-the-population-of-the-world-could-fall-by-50-percent-by-2064/

The global elite have been warning about overpopulation for a long time. Many of them are convinced that humanity is the greatest environmental threat that our planet faces, and so they believe that dramatically reducing the number of people walking around should be a top priority. A number of very twisted measures have been implemented in an effort to advance that agenda, but the population of the globe has continued to grow. Needless to say, this has greatly frustrated population control advocates. The things that they have been doing are not working fast enough, and there are some that are pushing for more extreme measures.

Getting rid of large numbers of people is not easy, but scientists at the University of Milan are projecting that we could see a massive population shift during the years ahead.

In fact, they are claiming that the population of the world could fall by 50 percent by the year 2064…

Earth’s population currently sits at 8.3 billion people – but it could crash within the next 40 years, experts have warned.

Scientists say that, in a worst–case scenario, humanity could potentially be halved by the year 2064.

Could you imagine 4 billion people being erased from the planet in less than 40 years?

The researchers at the University of Milan are saying that their projections are based on a “deliberately conservative” worst case scenario…

‘Under a deliberately conservative worst–case assumption that Earth’s sustainable carrying capacity suddenly dropped to around two billion people, our model predicts a rapid global population decline, with humanity potentially halving by around the year 2064.’

In order to hit the number that they are talking about, billions of people would have to die.

Just think about that.

Ultimately, these researchers are envisioning a world with a “carrying capacity” of just two billion people…

But in a ‘worst–case illustration’ Earth’s carrying capacity could plummet to just two billion, they warned.

This would mean that the maximum number of people our planet could sustain indefinitely would be around a quarter of its current population.

And, in turn, it would trigger a crash which could see the number of people on Earth halved.

So what are some things that could kill billions of people?

As I detailed extensively in my last book, nuclear war and the nuclear winter that follows could kill billions of people.

Widespread global famines could also achieve that goal, and it appears that widespread global famines are rapidly approaching.

But perhaps the easiest way to kill billions of people would be a global pandemic with a very high death rate.

Right now, Bundibugyo virus is spreading like wildfire in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Unlike other forms of Ebola, there is no cure for Bundibugyo virus.

We are being told that it has a death rate of between 25 and 50 percent, and so once you get it there is a very good chance that you will die.

Some of the symptoms include fever, headache, nausea, abdominal pain, intense weakness, nosebleeds and vomiting blood.

A lot of people that didn’t take this outbreak seriously are starting to pay attention now that two suspected cases have popped up in Italy…

TWO suspected Ebola cases have been detected in northern Italy in the past 24 hours, triggering a health alert.

A man, 31, and a woman, 33, developed a high fever, nausea, vomiting and intestinal problems – symptoms of the deadly virus – after returning from Uganda.

The cases concern a man from Bulgarograsso and a woman from Lurate Caccivio, had spent three months in the East African country working in humanitarian aid.

Other members of their families were travelling with them, but it is still unclear if they are also presenting with any symptoms.

Hopefully authorities in Italy have isolated those two individual in time.

Because it appears that this version of Bundibugyo virus spreads very easily.

At this stage, we are being told that the outbreak in central Africa “is spreading faster than efforts to contain it”…

The deadly outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda is spreading faster than efforts to contain it, the World Health Organization warned Monday.

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said those responding to the epidemic were “playing catch-up” because of delays in detecting cases.

Nobody has any idea how many people are actually infected.

And more people are dropping dead with each passing day.

One official with the International Rescue Committee has ominously declared that “warning signs are flashing red”…

“The initial failure to detect this outbreak has allowed it to spread to several areas of Ituri province in northeast DRC, where the first cases were identified, as well as to North Kivu (just to the south of Ituri) and South Kivu provinces, and now Uganda,” the International Rescue Committee, one of the aid groups on the ground, said in a report published on Tuesday.

With cases reported in key population centers such as Goma, the capital of North Kivu, and Kampala in Uganda, there is a significant risk of onward spread of the disease, the group assessed.

“The warning signs are flashing red,” Bob Kitchen, vice president of emergencies for the group, said in a statement.

Global health authorities are openly admitting that they do not have this outbreak under control.

And it certainly does not help that some victims have been running away from treatment centers…

Health officials in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have reported a disturbing new trend of patients fleeing from treatment centers when they come under attack from angry mobs – something that is happening with increasing frequency, as youths in the eastern Congo demand the remains of friends and family be handed over for funerals, in defiance of outbreak protocols.

When victims run back to their family and friends, they are just going to spread the disease to others.

And in some cases, mobs of young people are actually attacking treatment centers…

First on Saturday and again on Sunday, residents of Mongbwalu town in the DRC attacked the Mongbwalu general referral hospital.

Dr Richard Lokodu, medical director of the facility, told Reuters that 18 Ebola patients had fled on Saturday after “unidentified individuals” burned tents, erected by Médecins Sans Frontières, where patients were being isolated.

The hospital came under four waves of attacks on Sunday, he added, by young people mobilised by relatives of a religious leader who died of Ebola. Seven other patients escaped and Congolese police and soldiers had to intervene to restore order.

This is an unmitigated disaster.

Bundibugyo virus is going to spread all over the region, and perhaps that is what was intended.

Can you imagine the panic that we will witness if this horrifying disease starts spreading in the United States?

Authorities have already ordered enhanced screening for anyone entering the U.S. from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and South Sudan…

Officials in the US said on Friday that people returning to the US from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda and South Sudan would need to fly to one of three US airports for screenings: Washington Dulles International Airport near Washington, DC; Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport in Georgia; and George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston, Texas.

Bundibugyo virus is not supposed to transmit easily from person to person.

But this version does.

Healthcare workers that have taken extreme precautions are even catching it.

We could potentially be just weeks away from a major global health scare.

I will be watching this outbreak very closely, and I think that there is a lot more going on behind the scenes than we are being told.

Space-Squatters Will Open The Final Frontier

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

Sooner or later, we will have gravity ships available and this makes free lance economics possible. Them you penetrate rock anywhere and secure it as a living space.

a few other problems to solve but that certainly starts it all.

This is not far fetched at all.

Space-Squatters Will Open The Final Frontier

Tuesday, May 26, 2026 - 08:25 PM

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/space-squatters-will-open-final-frontier

Authored by Rainer Zitelmann via American Greatness,

When we talk about the future of mankind in space, we should learn from history.

Squatters played a crucial role in the settlement and economic development of the American West. Long before government institutions were firmly established, settlers moved onto unclaimed land, built homes, cultivated farms, and created entire communities without initially possessing formal legal title to the land they occupied.

In many cases, these settlers were the true pioneers of westward expansion. They established the foundations of economic life—farms, towns, trade networks, and local infrastructure—while the state often arrived only later. The expansion of the American frontier was driven less by central planning in Washington than by millions of individuals acting on their own initiative.

What made the squatters especially important was that they created facts before the law recognized them. They settled the land first and expected legalization afterward. Over time, American lawmakers accepted this reality and introduced legislation allowing settlers to obtain formal ownership of the land they had improved and cultivated.

The squatters embodied a distinctly American idea: that those who productively use land should have the right to own it. This belief stood in sharp contrast to the European tradition of aristocratic landownership and became deeply connected to the American ideal of the independent entrepreneur and pioneer.

Their activities transformed vast territories into economically productive regions. By cultivating land, building businesses, and creating communities, squatters helped turn the frontier into one of the most dynamic areas of economic growth in the nineteenth century.

Some economic historians view the squatters as an early example of how property rights emerge from below—through use, investment, and social recognition—before they are formally recognized by the state.

What we need in the future are space squatters. The crucial difference from the historical squatters of the American West is this: on other celestial bodies, there is currently no ownership at all. The land belongs to nobody. And unlike in the settlement of the American frontier, there is no indigenous population whose rights could be violated.

According to Article II of the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, states are prohibited from appropriating celestial bodies or territory in outer space. Whether this prohibition also applies to private individuals and private companies remains controversial among space lawyers.

The treaty says nothing explicitly about whether private individuals are permitted or prohibited from owning celestial bodies or land on celestial bodies. At the time, nobody imagined that entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos might one day finance private space exploration with their own fortunes.

Some legal scholars, therefore, argue that national sovereignty ends where outer space begins. In their view, the treaty prohibits national appropriation of the Moon, Mars, or asteroids—but not private ownership. Their interpretation relies on a classic legal principle: expressio unius est exclusio alterius. If a treaty explicitly prohibits one category of actors—namely, states—then other actors not mentioned may remain unrestricted.

So who should have the right to acquire property in space? My answer in my book New Space Capitalism is straightforward: Those who have the financial means to get there, develop, and use the land. For instance, if SpaceX succeeds in reaching Mars and starts to build permanent settlements on the Red Planet, then the ownership of land should go to SpaceX first. Not of the entire planet, of course, but of a practicable area, for example, the size of Singapore. The surface area of Mars is 200,000 times that of Singapore, so SpaceX would initially only own 0.0005 percent of Mars. That would be enough to develop multiple settlements, but not so many that others would no longer have a chance.

SpaceX could fund its flight and development costs by listing the land on Mars in a real estate investment trust (REIT). The price would then be determined by the market. Most people would buy shares not to live there themselves, but in the hope of value appreciation. Future colonists could also receive preferential access to shares or land rights as an incentive to settle and remain on Mars for several years. In this way, private ownership would become a mechanism for attracting pioneers willing to take extraordinary risks.

We need private property in space. Without it, the conquest, settlement, and economic development of the Moon, Mars, and asteroids will remain impossible. More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle observed, “Property that is common to the greatest number receives the least attention.” The history of the twentieth century confirmed his insight. Every socialist experiment that abolished private property ultimately failed. Why should a system that repeatedly failed on Earth suddenly succeed on Mars?

No—what humanity needs are pioneers of space, space squatters, just as America once needed squatters to settle the frontier. The difference is that this time, no one will be displaced, because the celestial bodies belong to no one at all.

Rainer Zitelmann is the author of the book New Space Capitalism, which will be published by Skyhorse in early June.

Aluminum Supply Crisis Is About To Get Worse

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Fri, 29 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The supply problem is because of the strait of hirmuz. Burning gas to produce power to then produce aluminium is sound. the problem is that they should have placed those electric furnaces outside out of harms way.

The problem with aluminium is that you first build a huge surplus power plant and then build that smelter. both are huge multi year builds in normal circumstances.

The war as taken some of this off line although trucking should fix that.

Aluminum Supply Crisis Is About To Get Worse

Wednesday, May 27, 2026 - 01:15 AM

https://www.zerohedge.com/commodities/aluminum-supply-crisis-about-get-worse

Aluminum prices in London are up nearly 17% since the onset of the U.S.-Iran conflict, as a growing chorus of top commodity desks, including Mercuria, Goldman, JPMorgan, and others, warn that the market is facing a major supply shock.

That disruption, driven firstly by Middle East smelter outages and the Hormuz maritime chokepoint, is now colliding with new concerns that China may be forced to curtail output amid energy-use and emissions inspections, according to Bloomberg.

More color from the report:

Chinese authorities are now moving to rein in that over- production as inventories swell. A smelter in Baise, Guangxi province, has already cut output of molten aluminum, Mysteel wrote, without providing estimates of volumes affected. The steel and oil refining industries will also be targeted, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology said in a statement on May 13.

Building on production cut risks in China, as it is the world's biggest producer, there is another report from Bloomberg that Guinea, the world's largest bauxite producer, is preparing to limit exports of the ore, threatening flows to China's aluminum industry.

Mines and Geology Minister Bouna Sylla told the outlet that the West African nation will dial back bauxite exports in June after a surge in exports sparked a price slump that the government wants to correct.

"Supply mustn't exceed demand," Sylla said. "We want to regulate the quantity to raise prices back to reasonable levels."

For context, most of Guinea's bauxite is loaded on bulk carriers and shipped to China, where it's first refined into alumina, then turned into the industrial metal aluminum.

The complexity of the aluminum supply shock extends well beyond Gulf disruptions, as we outline in this note, which is why prices in London are trading around $3,673 a ton, the highest since March 2022.

JPMorgan analysts recently warned that the industry is descending into a black hole, or a "metaphorical point of no return," where the "global aluminum market will face a serious and prolonged supply outage," even if vessel flows through the Hormuz chokepoint resume in the near term.

Additional market warnings:Mercuria, Goldman, JPMorgan See Major Aluminum Market Shock

The great aluminum squeeze is underway. Prices are likely going higher.

🚨🌍 Elon Musk may have just exposed the limits of China’s internet censorship.

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

The one reason i have always felt that censurship was ultimately futile is just this. The tech curve is slowly running away from tyhe censors.

The only way forward is to rely on human laziness until that fails.

just saying.

Elon Musk may have just exposed the limits of China’s internet censorship.

Vincentius Liong/Leong 梁国豪

Elon Musk may have just exposed the limits of China’s internet censorship. Reports claim Musk was able to post on X while inside China — despite the platform being officially banned by the Chinese government — allegedly using a direct Starlink satellite connection designed to keep users connected anywhere on Earth. 📡 The moment instantly reignited global debate over: ⚠️ Digital freedom ⚠️ Government censorship ⚠️ Satellite internet power ⚠️ Global tech influence ⚠️ The future of unrestricted communication If true, the implications are massive. China operates one of the world’s most sophisticated internet control systems, often referred to as the “Great Firewall.” But technologies like Starlink are now raising a new question: Can governments still fully control information in the satellite era? 🌐 For supporters, it’s a symbol of free communication breaking barriers. For critics, it’s a warning about the growing power of private tech empires. One thing is certain: the battle between censorship and global connectivity is entering a completely new phase. 🚀 Credit: CTTO, Cris Zenith

Depends what you mean by "Digital freedom" - freedom of users or observers .. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/security-aviation/2026-05-12/ty-article-magazine/.premium/starlink-users-beware-israeli-tech-can-reveal-your-identity/0000019e-17f1-d618-adde-17f3e27d0000

Like Reply

Media censorship in China remains one of the most misunderstood matters of modern consciousness. China doesn't 'ban' these apps, it just doesn't facilitate their operations in China. You can still access these apps easily through VPNs, and in the case of foreigners using their own telco plans, through their own links.

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Inter Dimensional Computation | IDC™1d

Integral Dimensional Time™ the temporal management within Inter Dimensional Computation | IDC™ may eventually remove the incentive for censorship altogether. Instead of suppressing information, harmful signal patterns lose propagation naturally, where context, ethical weighting and human participation determine what achieves informational continuity. Combined with PRIVACY-as-PRESENCE, content no longer flourishes through outrage algorithms or forced amplification — but through authentic resonance sustained over time. Not censorship. Informational gravity.

Drone lifting watermelons

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

This potentially changes everthing for hillside agriculture. you can plant anywhere in beds and then work the crop without using roads or anything other than footpaths. the harvest can be collected and then boosted out. This also includes tools and lunch.

We can also imagine flying in a bucket of water to fill a tank feeding a drip irrigation tube.

now imagine a drone lifting a fifty pound bucket from a local pond to the header tanks up on a hillside terrace system all morning. a real bucket brigade.

This is real and practical and supports a million one acre microgreen growing operations without wasting any land for rolling in hardware.

Drone tech will soon need a new market and global agriculture looks good.

Drone lifting watermelons

Peter Kappes

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ralphyliu_ugcPost-7464511840442748930-dkhy/

These drones are helping farmers airlift bags of watermelons. That is some serious payload capacity and a huge load off their shoulders. Follow Peter Kappes & Bots n' Beans for daily robotics, humanoids, and tech. Follow Future of Built for more robotics on the construction si

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

This makes serious sense. It clearly works with row farming and spacing can be planned. It is also a great product for seed companies. just roll the tape down onto the seed bed and even water.

I have been posting that agriculture needs to be engineered around living active fencerows to start with but this can be much better and way more flexible.

It can be a wonderful tool.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.

Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.Written by Donna Hancock Date: 05-26-2026 Subject: Agriculture

https://www.freedomsphoenix.com/Article/396258-2026-05-26-farmers-have-figured-out-that-the-cheapest-pesticide-is-a.htm

They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.

In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.

The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.

We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.

The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Thu, 28 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

without question, we can scale electric power to run any level of horsepower demand and keep it conveniently sized. It all falls apart over storage arrangements. all that heavy machinery still has to operate through a full shift with out ever running out of power.

as this makes clear ,the whole plan is actually years away. We have made amazing progress since the year 2000. We may have what we want by 2050 assuming it is possible. And i think it is.

It is still difficult.

The Bubble Pops: Big Miner BHP quietly backs away from decarbonization

By Jo Nova

https://joannenova.com.au/2026/05/the-bubble-pops-big-miner-bhp-quietly-backs-away-from-decarbonization/

The ABC and the Guardian think they are onto some hot scandalous leak, but they don’t seem to realize the awful truth they are accidentally revealing.

This is not the story of an evil miner failing to make commitments, it’s the story of their technology fantasy busting. If wind and solar power were cheap, the profit hungry miners would be doing it wouldn’t they?

Instead all their ambitious plans are coming undone.

BHP is the largest mining company in the world, it has shareholder approval to spend millions on wind and solar projects and on the conversion to electric trucks. They also had an enthusiastic management and Net Zero targets, yet somehow the company has decided to drop or delay the wind and solar projects, and the low emissions processing plant too. It’s all been put in the deep freeze, delayed until 2031 before it even starts.

The truth is that the big electric haul trucks are not even close to being ready, and without the batteries to soak up the unreliable power, there was no point in spending a billion dollars on the wind and solar projects either yet.

Everything hinged on the electric trucks being ready but they weren’t:

World’s biggest miner BHP backtracks on climate action with key projects put on ice, leaked documents reveal

By Christopher Knaus and Adam Morton, The Guardian

In a statement, BHP said its progress towards net zero emissions was dependant on technological shifts in trucks, trains and bulldozers, which were not yet ready to be deployed.

“For example, no Australian mining operation is currently utilising critical 240-ton battery-electric haul trucks as the technology is not advanced enough to scale to an operational fleet,” a spokesperson said.

The company is trialling battery electric trucks…

“The technology simply does not exist:”

The Chamber of Minerals and Energy of Western Australia, an industry group, said the shift to electrified haulage was incredibly complex and required a whole-of-sector effort to pioneer technological change.

“There is currently no mining operation anywhere in the world with the scale, complexity and operating conditions of the Pilbara running a fully electrified haulage fleet, because the technology to do so simply does not exist,” said its chief executive, Aaron Morey.

The ABC make out that BHP is being deceptive, saying it would cut emissions, while “locking in fossil fuels” yet the ABC has been deceptively telling us that wind and solar was the cheapest form of energy, while pretending they are real journalists, and not bothering to find out the real cost, something ten thousand engineers could have told them.

In their news stories the ABC didn’t have the honesty to mention that the failure of the “urgent” BHP plans shows that wind and solar obviously weren’t cheaper or more useful than diesel.

Antamina copper mine in Peru.

BHP Antamina copper mine in Peru.

BHP put in a sincere effort, but the ABC was deceptive all along

The only thing that the ABC “caught” BHP doing was plotting how to manage the reputational hit from making realistic business decisions. In a normal world they shouldn’t need to do that. But when the media-commentariat is fixated with trying to control the weather, then sensible companies make plans to put out those reputational fires. The fact that reporting is so irrational reflects badly on the ABC and The Guardian, not on BHP.

It doesn’t appear to have even crossed the minds of the ABC-Guardian team that their story puts renewable energy in a dismal light. They seem to believe that the higher costs are irrelevant and companies should spend the extra dollars out of charity for the planet, even though they’d be depriving their shareholders to do it. How about those ethics, eh?

The ABC reports that another thing that foiled the BHP plan was that diesel trucks got cheaper (the tragedy!):

Leaked documents expose how BHP shelved its ‘urgent’ plans to cut WA emissions

ABC News

They were working to a tight deadline — about 80 per cent of BHP’s Pilbara trucks were due to finish their operational life between 2024 and 2027.

A temporary fix was hit upon. BHP would overhaul its current fleet of diesel trucks to extend their life by a few years. This would buy the company time so it could start going electric in the late 2020s. But once again, the company had a change of heart. And once again, cost was a factor.

In 2023, diesel trucks from its main supplier Caterpillar suddenly became cheaper. The internal documents show rather than $5 million each, the price had fallen to $3 million.

So BHP went back on its plan. It purchased 62 new diesel trucks for its Jimblebar mine, locking in diesel use at one of its biggest mines until at least the late 2030s and potentially to 2041.

When diesel trucks became $2 million dollars cheaper each, should BHP have bought the expensive electric trucks anyway, and thus reduced their profits, providing less money for mums and dads superannuation accounts, and charged more for the ore, eventually depriving Mum and Dad of cheaper steel too?

The ABC reports on companies as if they are a failed wing of a government department, not a mass of independently organized people working together to serve millions of other people who willingly pay for these goods and services.

Make immigration boring

noreply@blogger.com (arclein) — Wed, 27 May 2026 07:00:00 +0000

This is a tall order We want selection but omit investment in the transition itself which is way more important. actual transition needs to be planned and implimented. It must support language training in particular. and we also need only a handful of uber drivers.

so far we have seen plenty of badly handled protocols and some that work. Canada got the sweet spot only because selection stayed tight on the professional class who often came as students.

As stated, it is complicated and demands planned experiments in order to predict outcomes.

Make immigration boring

The fiercest political battle of our age needs less moral drama and more hard thinking about numbers and fair tradeoffs

https://aeon.co/essays/more-migration-or-less-migration-the-answer-is-boring?

Whitechapel High Street in London, United Kingdom, December 2025. Photo by Mike Kemp/Getty Images

Alan Manning

is professor of economics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK. His latest book is Why Immigration Policy Is Hard: And How to Make It Better (2025).

Edited byCameron Allan McKean

2,900 words

The share of migrants in some high-income countries has roughly doubled in the past 35 years, reaching historic highs. In the United States, migrants made up 14.8 per cent of the population in 2024 – very similar to the previous high around 1910 and more than triple the proportion at the low point in 1970. This is despite most people saying they want a decrease in immigration. For 60 years, Gallup has polled Americans on whether they want higher or lower migration, and in almost every year most people said they wanted the level lowered. Similar results have been found in surveys among residents of European countries such as France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Denmark. There is a gap between what voters say they want and what they have got.

Surveys also show that people are more concerned about some forms of migration than others. Large flows of unauthorised migrants can quickly reinforce a view that immigration is out of control. In 2024, 77 per cent of Americans considered the situation at the US border with Mexico to be a crisis or a major problem. Residents in other parts of the world – including South Africa, Colombia, and certain European nations – also tend to have negative views about migrants entering their country through irregular means.

It is no surprise, then, that immigration is now prominent in the politics of many countries. Populist Right-wing parties draw much of their support from voters who think that immigration has been too high, and that this has eroded living standards and cultural cohesion. As Nigel Farage, leader of the Reform Party in the United Kingdom, put it in his manifesto: ‘Record mass immigration has damaged our country … Multiculturalism has imported separate communities that reject our way of life.’

Against these views is another tribe, one that thinks of itself as pro-migration. They often want higher immigration and believe that only racists and bigots (and those opposed to economic growth) could fail to see the benefits that migrants bring to their host nations. Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, claimed in a Guardian headline that ‘Migration Is Britain’s Superpower’.

Today, we remain caught in a polarised debate between these two tribes, with one arguing that migration is very good and the other that it is very bad. Each side has cherry-picked, misrepresented, exaggerated and (sometimes) made up evidence to support its position. Each side has been free with its criticisms of the other side but not critical enough of its own arguments. This style of debate serves us badly. Asking whether immigration is good or bad makes about as much sense as asking whether food is good or bad.

The impacts of migration are rarely as concerning as the critics claim but also not as beneficial as supporters say. Consider one major source of concern for those who want a lower level of immigration: the idea that immigrants are negatively impacting the wages of locals. In the US and other high-income countries, immigration has probably not reduced the wages of locals to any great extent, but it hasn’t raised them much either. A thorough review of the evidence by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine concluded that ‘the impact of immigration on the wages of natives overall is very small.’ Complex issues like these have become flashpoints that deepen the positions of both tribes.

We badly need a better discussion of migration. It’s something I learned the hard way. In 2016, I became chair of the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC), an independent, government-appointed body tasked with making recommendations on the details of UK migration policy. As chair, I quickly found that pontificating from on high about whether migration is good or bad (as I had probably been prone to do) was not very helpful for designing actual policies. That experience changed how I think about the debate and gave me an understanding of what we need to do to improve our discussion of immigration. I’m not here to persuade you to join one side or the other. I’m here to set out a clearer, and ultimately more boring, way of thinking about immigration.

First, we need to recognise that, for as long as people can move between countries, we will need policies that limit such movement. Without limits, migration flows would be too large and asymmetric, leading to increasing problems in today’s highly unequal world. So, what is a migration policy? A migration policy essentially says ‘Yes’ to some people who would like to migrate to a country, and ‘No’ to others. For any state, the goal is to be as clear as possible about these decisions. It sounds simple. After all, anyone who has been an employer or has been asked out on a date must do the same thing. However, the polarised migration debate often splits between one side that appears to almost always want to say ‘Yes’, and another that appears to almost always want to say ‘No’. In the realm of policy, these decisions involve difficult, uncomfortable trade-offs about who gets to migrate (and the benefits of migrating). We need to face up to these difficult decisions, not pretend they don’t exist.

Deciding how to respond through policy involves looking particularly closely at populations. Immigration changes the size of a population and its mix, in terms of age, skill, ethnicity, religion or other factors. For any proposed immigration policy, we should all think carefully about how it will affect population growth and also the intended mix of the population. Most countries will want a modest rate of population growth, perhaps around 0.3 to 0.5 per cent a year. Without migration, populations in many high-income countries will decline due to falling fertility rates. Immigration can also help countries address the challenge of ageing populations, but this is much less effective than is widely believed. A European Commission report in 2019 concluded that: ‘Neither higher fertility nor more immigration will stop population ageing.’ Other serious demographic studies have come to the same conclusion. Migrants may be young when they arrive but don’t stay young – they age at the same rate as everyone else.

Few would argue it is the job of government to provide a firm with consumers

Though there are benefits to high rates of population growth supported by high rates of migration, there are also significant costs. Newly arrived people need houses to live in, machines to work with, and roads to travel on. All of these require resources to be diverted. In 2023, very high immigration to the UK meant the population grew by 1.3 per cent, quite possibly the highest rate (outside wars and their aftermaths) for 200 years. That was too high: giving the new residents the same level of capital as the existing residents would have required investment equal to about 6 per cent of GDP, one-third of all investment spending by the UK.

The need to limit population growth inevitably puts limits on the level of immigration. These limits often force countries to choose which type of migrants they want. We can see this in the policies of countries like Canada and Australia, which are explicit about their plans for the level of migration and the mix of migrants.

Accepting that migration policies will likely be with us for the foreseeable future is the first step to improving the discussion. The second point is this: give less power to lobby groups in influencing migration policy.

When I was the MAC chair, much of my time was taken up with meeting lobby groups who wanted fewer restrictions on immigration. As part of its enquiries, the MAC would issue an open call for evidence. In the past, 99 out of 100 responses from business lobby groups argued for a more liberal regime – even as opinion polls suggest the public want more restrictions. Their arguments were normally framed as being in the interests of the country not themselves, but I had my suspicions. They often did not take kindly to my hints that there might be some degree of self-interest in their requests.

Business lobbying is not unique to migration policy. Corporate interests also tend to argue for lower taxes, lower minimum wages and less regulation. Typically, such demands made by business lobbyists are opposed by progressives. But, when business lobby groups push for more liberal rules on work migration, progressives are often supportive for fear of appearing critical of migration. The result is that a lot of the discussion becomes focused on concerns of businesses, particularly the idea that the economy ‘needs’ migrants. If a firm says: ‘I’m struggling to sell my product and I’m short of customers,’ we might respond: ‘Perhaps your product is priced wrongly or is not a very good product’ – few would argue it is the job of government to provide a firm with consumers. But when employers complain of labour shortages and that ‘nobody wants to take my jobs’, they may believe the state should provide them with migrants – a workforce that will work under the terms and conditions employers view as appropriate. Migration policy needs to strike a balance here: what is good for business can be good for the country but not always. The undue influence of lobbies and the reluctance of progressives to criticise is found across most countries and leads to what the political scientist Gary Freeman called the ‘expansionary bias’, which can lead to a situation where migration is generally at higher levels than voters want.

So, if we want to improve the way we think about immigration, we need to accept the necessity of migration policies and find ways of giving less power to lobby groups. The third step involves recognising that immigration policy will be hard in a way that requires us to think far beyond election cycles and national borders.

Our world is so unequal that more people want to migrate to high-income countries than the residents of those countries will want to admit. Migration policy will say ‘No’ to far more people than it says ‘Yes’ to. Refusing to let someone in is hard if you care about others and understand that migration generally has big benefits for the migrants themselves. But allowing people in is also hard because some of the frustrated migrants will use visa rules (normally legally but sometimes not) to achieve ends very likely different from the policy’s intended aims.

Universities in many countries have lobbied for international students to be given the right to work for a period after graduation. But if work rights are too generous, student visas become attractive to people who are not so interested in the education they receive. Instead, they may care more about opportunities to work, especially when the possible earnings can offset or exceed the cost of tuition fees. Part of the problem is that less selective colleges (especially those that are private) will admit large numbers of international students as a means of boosting revenue from fees. This can lead to an unsustainable rise in student immigration, forcing governments to impose restrictions. Canada, the UK and Australia have all followed this pattern, producing an undesirable boom-and-bust cycle in student migration policies.

Where these flows have been stopped it’s always been through agreements between countries

When it comes to designing visas for migrants, we need to think more carefully about how they might be used in practice, instead of how we would ideally like them to be used. This kind of due diligence would help avoid some of the scandals that have undermined people’s confidence in the immigration system as a whole.

It is easy to improve the managed parts of migration that relate to work, study, family, and resettlement programmes. Much harder are the parts that are unmanaged and disorderly, such as when people cross borders without authorisation and claim asylum after arrival. Migrants crossing the US-Mexico border, the Mediterranean or the English Channel in small boats have made many anxious about migration. These flows often attract more media attention than their share in total immigration would warrant but I don’t think we should be surprised that people care about an apparent inability to control borders. It is normal and natural to focus on more controversial issues and, because these flows are not managed, people can be worried that numbers might be growing. Too often, the debate over these flows is dominated by the two tribes with their lazy slogans of ‘detain and deport’ on the one side, and ‘safe and legal routes’ on the other. ‘Detain and deport’ is not as easy to do in practice as it sounds; Donald Trump is probably failing to meet his targets for deportations, even after a massive budget increase for immigration enforcement and disregard for due process. It is not easy to design ‘safe and legal’ routes, with an eligibility wide enough to capture those who come irregularly, without potentially increasing numbers.

There are no easy solutions here and it’s a mistake to pretend that there are, but where these flows have been stopped it’s always been through agreements between countries. Australia ended unauthorised boat arrivals through turnbacks to Indonesia. The EU’s agreement with Turkey in March 2016 reduced sea crossings in the Eastern Mediterranean to Greece from more than 985,000 in the previous 12 months to 26,000 in the following year. The number of encounters at the US southern border fell from 2.5 million in the year to September 2023 to 445,000 in the year to September 2025 – a fall that started under the former president Joe Biden but has continued under Trump. Monthly totals are now about 10,000. While Trump might take all the credit, Biden’s agreement with Mexico to quickly return those who try to cross has been vital to this change. So, international cooperation is required to deal with irregular migration and to manage the asylum and refugee system better.

Part of the difficulty that arises from migration policy is that those creating it are thinking short-term and that the impact of immigration is sometimes more positive on a shorter timescale. Some migrants (those with high earnings and employment rates) always pay more taxes than they receive in welfare and public services. Other groups of migrants have positive initial impacts on public finances but negative effects in the long run. When migrants first arrive, they are often employed, don’t have access to welfare benefits and are young and healthy. But they do not stay that way forever.

Too often, short-sighted governments have used higher immigration to avoid dealing with longer-running problems. One example is the way that some states use migration as a tool to boost the economy and reduce government borrowing. However, the impact on public finances is essentially the same: both approaches seek more resources today at the cost of fewer in the future.

There is no single right way to do migration policy, but one idea I find helpful is what Philip Martin and Martin Ruhs have called the ‘numbers vs rights’ trade-off. This is a way of thinking about the relationship between the number of migrant workers and the rights they receive: more immigration can often lead to fewer economic and social benefits for those who migrate.

This can be seen in two very different approaches taken by states. One approach to migration policy has high levels of immigration but gives those migrants few rights and no path to permanent residence or citizenship. Places like the United Arab Emirates (where migrants make up more than 75 per cent of the population) and other Gulf countries come closest to this model. Locals are supportive of the high levels of migration because the rules that restrict the rights of the migrants enable the locals to benefit from (some might say exploit) the migrants more effectively. The migrants may be treated poorly by the standards of the place where they arrive, but they can be better off than they would have been if they’d stayed in their home countries, so they also accept this deal.

The alternative approach – perhaps exemplified by European social democracy – gives more rights to migrants. They might not have a full set of rights from the first day of arrival but, for many, there is a path to permanent residence and citizenship. In this model, it is harder to ensure locals benefit from migration. If migrants eventually have access to welfare benefits, not all the new arrivals will provide fiscal benefits for locals. So locals will want to be more selective about the migrants they choose to admit. Or, in some cases, migrants from lower-income countries might be prepared to accept lower wages than locals. Labour and immigration laws designed to limit this risk to locals may make it harder for employers to use migrants to undercut wages, but they can also reduce the employers’ incentive to hire migrants.

Our binary, polarised debates on migration ignore the ‘numbers vs rights’ trade-off. Instead, we have ended up with a divide between the pro-migration tribe that want high migration as well as high rights and, on the other side, the anti-migration tribe that want low migration and don’t care much about migrants’ rights. Both sides wrongly pretend there is no trade-off.

We can’t go on as we are now. We can do better. We should aspire to a world in which migration policy is so boring that it no longer figures prominently in our politics and nobody is interested in reading articles like this.