The US government continues dragging out terms of settlement with Iran, Israel continues invading, occupying and ethnically cleansing southern Lebanon and Gaza, and the Trump White House continues playing 'MAGA Greatest Hits' to its base. Their detachment from reality is becoming more palpable - and unsustainable, surely? - by the day...


Running Time: 01:40:15

Download: MP3 — 138 MB

When Cassiopaean cosmology collides with Plato, Paul, Langan's CTMU, and Elon Musk's transhumanist vision. What emerges is equal parts revelation and red flag

In my last post, I gave my entire book, "High Strangeness", to Grok for review and analysis. At the end, I promised that my next post - this post - would be a continuation of that discussion because it did get VERY interesting. Hopefully, you have read the previous post and are now ready to see where I went with it.

This conversation looks at ancient parallels with Plato's Cave, Gnostic archons, and the Apostle Paul's "principalities in high places". You will see that all three align strikingly with the Cassiopaean framework. I then compare it to Chris Langan's self-referential universe, Elon Musk's simulation hypothesis and Neuralink dreams, and even Donald Trump's pragmatic disclosure push. Surprisingly, Grok suggests that some of today's most ambitious tech visionaries may be doubling down on the very control system they claim to escape.

First, I want to bring your attention to a recent post on X about Elon Musk's goals for humanity.


You will see shortly what that has to do with my exchange with Grok about "High Strangeness". My next query was: "I wonder if the works of any ancient philosophers, or even the Apostle Paul, could be found supportive?" (Of the Cassiopaean Cosmology in "High Strangeness".)

Another 'TACO Tuesday' came and went... by Thursday the US military was again 'locked and loaded' for another go at Iran... and by Saturday evening Trump was dangling another peace deal - 'for realz this time'. As American diplomacy erratically yo-yo's, in the real world, some oil tankers are once more sailing the Strait of Hormuz, but now on Iran's terms.

War is a cynical business, a 'racket', as US General Smedley Butler said a century ago. Wars begin because they're profitable, and only end with the promise of more profit. Is it a 'win' for the US if it makes more money selling more oil, even if that means Iran is also doing so? For Trump, perhaps, but for the 'imperial class', this constitutes 'abject surrender'.

While the stand-off between the US/Israel and Iran appears to be reaching a 'conclusion' one way or another, the Russia-Ukraine/NATO War has dragged on for 4 years, and could yet enter a new phase. Drone warfare and 'low-intensity conflict' can co-exist with 'normal life', as we've witnessed in Ukraine, so Euro-Atlantic regimes seem keen to undergo 'Ukrainization'...


Running Time: 01:37:15

Download: MP3 — 134 MB

Deferred due to the US-Israeli war against Iran, Trump finally visited China last week, where he received an apparently 'warm' welcome from Xi Jinping, along with a stern warning: do not mess with Taiwan, and let us work to avoid the 'Thucydides Trap', wherein a dominant power inevitably wars with a rising power. Whether Trump understood the finer points of Chinese diplomacy is unclear, but it's clear he intended to 'do big business deals' by bringing 'our finest' captains of industry in tow.

Overhanging the event is the 'unfinished business' in Iran, where it's looking increasingly likely that the US and Israel will 'have another go' at 'reopening the Strait of Hormuz'. Should that be attempted, we are staring down the barrel of a gargantuan global energy crisis. Does Trump care? He certainly cares about his legacy, and even he must doubt the chances of the US 'fall-back plan' of North America supplanting the Middle East as the 'global energy spigot' in the event that the Gulf becomes FUBAR...


Running Time: 01:41:57

Download: MP3 — 140 MB

April 2026 closed with the Sun once again reminding us who runs the show. On the 23rd and 24th, Active Region 4419 fired off two back-to-back X-class flares, an X2.4 followed hours later by an X2.5, flanked by a string of M-class events and several coronal mass ejections. Earth's sunlit side took the hit in the form of shortwave radio blackouts, and forecasters watched for at least minor G1 geomagnetic storming in the days that followed. The monthly sunspot mean came in around 79, modest for Cycle 25 on paper, yet these late, high-energy outbursts make the same point we've been making for years: the cycle's "decline" looks nothing like the textbook curve, and the Sun continues to drive what we see on the ground. Given recent patterns, we should expect more of the same through the coming months.

That solar context is also why it's worth highlighting the ongoing Super Niño, which mainstream climatology continues to file under "symptom of warming" while missing the deeper signal. Historically, the strongest El Niño events have not been heralds of a runaway greenhouse; they have clustered near major climatic inflection points, preceding sharp cooling phases.

Why the Cassiopaean synthesis rattles materialists, religionists, and New Agers alike — and why it looks more rational than the "UFOs are demons, return to church" narrative

In my last article, I announced that it was the finale in my "Fun With AI" series. I think I spoke too soon.

There's probably no end to the fun a person can have with AI even if the topics discussed in that little series were rather serious and possibly depression inducing. Today, I'm going to make it worse. If you think those subjects were depressing, hold my beer!

There's a little backstory to the fun we are going to have with AI today. A month or more ago I noticed that there was a significant uptick in the number of people searching my name and work on google. I know this because I have an academia.edu account and they notify me when someone is searching my name on google and lands on their site. The uptick wasn't like overwhelming, just significant enough to get my attention. Instead of a few searches every week, there were tens and dozens per day. And, this is still ongoing. I thought about it for a while and I suspect it is just because of the heightened interest in UFO/UAP disclosure as well as some of the things coming out from gov whistleblowers on the topic.

Anyway, I then started to get a few requests from academia.edu for any text from my book High Strangeness.
Well, cool, I thought. And then I thought some more. I finally decided that, with all the confusion about the topic due to the many crazies coming out of the woodwork, maybe I should just upload the whole darn book to academia.edu. I do plan to talk about the issue in some depth in an upcoming podcast, but can't say definitely when that will be just yet. Stay tuned.

I had to ask my crew/publisher for a PDF since it's been so long I have no idea where the file is. I received a copy almost instantly! I uploaded it to academia.edu and then, I was scanning through it a bit and wondering what else I could do with this handy text and the lightbulb went on!

Yup! You guessed it! I can use this text to play with Grok!

Why Today's AI Can Mirror Human Thought Without Ever Knowing or Being — And Why That Distinction Matters More Than the Hype

In the finale of the "Fun With AI" series, Mandatory Intellectomy probes the philosophical core of large language models through live conversations with DeepSeek, Claude Sonnet, and especially MiniMax. The result is a stark diagnosis: current AI is epistemologically inept and ontologically ignorant — a sophisticated pattern-matcher that perfectly imitates understanding while possessing none. The piece connects these limitations to broader questions of consciousness, the AGI illusion, and the materialist hubris driving the industry, closing the series with a warning that we are playing with forces we refuse to understand.

This is the last of the series "Fun With AI" (links at the end) and it ends, appropriately, with two of my favorite topics: Epistemology and Ontology.

Remember from my earlier mini-series (links at the end) how I was just going on and on about the issues of how do we know anything and what that ultimately means? Recall that, in that series, I defined our target topics:

Ontology is the study of being, existence, or reality itself — what exists, what kinds of things exist (e.g., physical objects, abstract entities like numbers, or minds), and the nature or categories of existence. Epistemology, by contrast, is the study of knowledge — how we come to know things, what counts as justified belief, the sources and limits of knowledge, and how we distinguish truth from opinion.

If your epistemology is no good, your ontology is gonna suck and that could be seriously problematical. I'm not sure that everyone really grasps how important these topics are. Yeah, they are fancy sounding words and you don't hear regular folks spouting them on the daily. But you can bet your bippy that they influence everything about everyone's life. Here and there throughout the previous series I gave examples of how this works on individual and global scales. Very smart people can be using very bad epistemological approaches and methods and end up shooting themselves in both feet regularly and causing a lot of harm around them. Elon Musk and Donald Trump - who both claim to be pretty smart and have something of a track record to support those claims - come to mind. However, in Herodotus' Histories (Book 1), Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia, asked Solon who the happiest (or most blessed/fortunate) person was, expecting Solon to name him due to his riches and power. Solon instead pointed to ordinary people like Tellus of Athens, who lived a virtuous life, saw his children thrive, and died honorably in battle.

Iran's dismantling of the US base shield exposes the central weakness of Washington's regional order: its occupation infrastructure can no longer protect itself.

To riff on Bruce Springsteen's My Hometown: "Tehran says 'These bases are going, boys / And they ain't coming back / To your hometown'."

The Washington Post's 6 May 2026 article, 'Iran has hit far more US military assets than reported, satellite images show,' was an overdue admission - based on leaks from the US Department of Defense (DOD) and Washington's intelligence community - that Iran had inflicted significant damage to US assets. However, The Post only tells part of the story.

The Post examined 109 of the hundreds of satellite images published by Iranian media, whose authenticity could be verified "by comparing them with lower-resolution imagery from the European Union's satellite system, Copernicus, as well as high-resolution images from Planet where available."

Caught in a trap by Iran, the gulf between what US president Trump wishes were true, and what is actually real, continues to grow. While the Strait of Hormuz remains impassable to the US Navy, its distant "blockade of Iran's blockade" is apparently taking effect, with billions of dollars' worth of oil shipments failing to leave Iran and thus reducing the country's cash flows.

Iranian officials remain steadfast, however, denying dodgy Washington outlet Axios' repeated claims that a peace deal is 'ready any day now', and stressing that it's prepared to ride out Trump's attempt at economic siege in the belief that the American president will blink first when actual oil shortages kick in, globally, sometime between now and September.

The rest of us are left with little choice but to watch Trump learn the hard way that there are some things he cannot 'will' into existence...


Running Time: 01:22:03

Download: MP3 — 75.1 MB

Typically, the American president has blurted out 'the plain truth' about what his government is doing around the world - from the Caribbean to the Arctic to the Black Sea and Indian Ocean: behaving like pirates. This week we review, taking into account Richard Medhurst's excellent dot-connecting in his documentary 'The Petrogas-Dollar: The Secret US Strategy Behind the Iran War', the string of US and Israeli government moves this year to effectively 'ring-fence' the global flow of oil and gas.

As we've been warning for over a decade, the US was never going to just roll over in the face of Russian defiance regarding Crimea, Iranian resistance against Israeli expansionism, and Chinese 'win-win' geoeconomic strategy towards a multipolar world. They hatched a 'counter-attack', and Trump is playing his part to 'make America great again', which is really just to do whatever the US can to forestall or prevent the end of its currency's status as 'global reserve currency'.


Running Time: 01:40:04

Download: MP3 — 91.6 MB