“Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder,” according to 20th-century historian Arnold Toynbee. He claimed every great culture collapses internally due to a divergence in values between the ruling class and the common people…🧵

Good morning. The attached, from the Bloomberg article "US-Friendly Nations Slash Treasury Purchases by 60%, Led by Asia," points to a development that I've been writing about: Historically dependable buyers and holders of US government bonds have been pulling back, driven by both local and global factors. As such, the buyer base has been shifting towards more tactical, short-term investors and traders. #economy #markets #bonds #yields

98% of the refugees admitted to the U.S. under Trump have been white South Africans.

90 DAYS WITHOUT POWER, RANKED You are not leaving. The roof is fine. The grid is just gone. No power, no water pressure, no store deliveries, for 90 days. In each category we will go from most important to least important. The categories are ranked too. The roof is covered, so water comes first, then food, then everything that keeps those two usable. 90 days is what you should be prepared for. Most official lists say 3 to 14 days. Those are minimums, not plans. WATER Without it you have days. One gallon per person per day. 90 days is 90 gallons per person. A family of 4 needs 360. Water filter (a gravity filter is the best buy) Food grade barrels or water bricks Unscented bleach to treat stored water Your water heater tank holds 40 to 50 gallons. Know how to drain it. Rain collection (check local rules) FOOD Rice and beans are the backbone. If you cannot afford freeze dried meals, load up on rice and beans. Rice has about 1,650 calories per pound. Dry beans about 1,570. 2,000 calories a day for 90 days is about 110 pounds per person, or four 5 gallon buckets. Cooking oil, salt, sugar, spices Peanut butter Canned meat and vegetables Powdered milk Multivitamins Freeze dried meals if you can afford them Eat the fridge first, then the freezer, then the pantry. COOKING AND FUEL Food you cannot cook is just weight. Camp stove plus fuel for 90 days Extra propane or butane Lighters and matches One pot with a lid Never run a stove or heater indoors without ventilation. HEAT Cold is the quiet killer. Wood stove or a safe indoor rated heater Fuel for it Wool blankets and sleeping bags rated below your coldest night Pick one room, close it off, and live in it Carbon monoxide detector with batteries. Not optional. SANITATION This is what ends up killing people in long outages. 5 gallon bucket with a toilet seat lid Heavy trash bags Kitty litter or sawdust Bleach Soap and hand sanitizer Toilet paper, a lot of it MEDICAL Prescriptions. Ask your doctor about a longer supply. First aid kit Pain and stomach relief Any glasses or contacts, plus a spare pair A printed first aid manual LIGHT AND POWER Headlamps and lanterns Batteries, rotated Solar panel with a power bank A generator is a bonus, not a plan. Fuel goes bad and it is loud. INFORMATION, CASH AND NEIGHBORS Cards stop working when the power does. Battery or crank radio Cash in small bills, silver and gold if you have it Paper copies of IDs and contacts Know your neighbors. Trade skills, not just supplies. MORALE Books, cards, games, something for the kids. Boring beats hungry. Bored beats panicked. THE FIRST 72 HOURS Fill the bathtub and every container you own before the water stops. Fridge and freezer stay shut. A full freezer holds about 48 hours. Charge everything while you still can. Cook and eat what will spoil first. Obviously we could add security and it is important but depending on where you are, what your aloud to have/own I'm not going into great detail on that. What I can say is have a plan, talk it over with your family, everyone has a job. Don't be afraid to talk to your neighbors you know as well to make sure they are doing their part if you plan on working together. Feel free to add anything I may have missed. Anything you may think would be of added value for others to read and share. Book mark this, come back to it, create a check list. To be clear, I am not a survivalist. This is not survival advice. This is only my setup that I am following with my family. If nothing else maybe just a reminder. ISO Ledger 🛡

Greenland has now lost more ice than it has gained for 30 consecutive years, losing around 135 billion tonnes in the year to August 2026. Even with a relatively cool start to summer and less melting than in previous years, the ice sheet continued to shrink. carbonbrief.org/guest-post-g…

OpenAI just announced that its model proved the Standard Model of physics actually exists. That sounds absurd. It's not. For 70 years, physics has had a dirty secret. Quantum field theory is the most accurate theory humanity has ever built. It predicts properties of the electron to more than 10 decimal places. The LHC, the Higgs boson, the chips in your phone all run on it. And yet no mathematician had ever proven it exists. Physicists have been using it like a recipe that works every single time, without anyone being able to prove the dish is a coherent object. We built cathedrals for 70 years on foundations nobody had verified. The problem is so hard that in 2000 the Clay Institute made it one of its 7 Millennium Prize Problems, $1M each. In 26 years, only one has been solved (Poincaré, by Perelman, who refused the money). Here's the timeline OpenAI just published: September 9, 2026: their model produces a proof that Yang–Mills theory exists. September 18: it extends it to QCD, the full theory of the strong force, with quarks. Then to a completion of the Standard Model. October 16: the Yang–Mills proof is formalized in Lean, meaning a machine checked every single logical step. To understand why this is insane, you need to understand the problem. Forget particles as tiny balls. The universe is made of invisible oceans stacked on top of each other: an electron field, a photon field, a gluon field. A particle is just a wave on one of those oceans. But in quantum mechanics, the oceans are never calm. They ripple at every scale. Zoom in, you see smaller ripples. Zoom in again, smaller still. It never stops. So when you do the math, those fluctuations add up to infinity. Physicists found a trick called renormalization: subtract one infinity from another, and what's left matches experiment perfectly. It works. But mathematically it's duct tape. Nothing guaranteed there was a real object underneath. Now the hardest case: Yang–Mills, the theory of gluons. Gluons are the glue holding quarks together inside every atom in your body. And unlike light, they interact with each other. Two light beams pass through each other. Two gluons collide and stick. The field feeds on itself. That's what made it untameable. The key that unlocks it won David Gross the 2004 Nobel Prize: asymptotic freedom. The strong force gets weaker the closer you look. Think of a rubber band between two fingers. Close together, it's slack and the fingers move freely. Pull them apart, the tension explodes. That's why you never see a lone quark. And that's the gift: the infinities come from tiny scales, and tiny scales are exactly where the theory goes calm. You zoom in, the monster falls asleep. The method: turn spacetime into a grid, like pixels. On a grid, everything is finite. Then refine the grid, again and again, and prove the picture converges instead of exploding. A mathematician named Balaban did a huge part of this in the 1980s and never finished. The construction sat open for 40 years. According to OpenAI, the AI closed it. Now look at who's reviewing it. David Gross, the Nobel laureate whose mechanism makes the proof work. Arthur Jaffe, who literally wrote the Millennium Prize problem and co-founded the Clay Institute. Plus Douglas, Klebanov, Nekrasov. The man who wrote the question is now reading a machine's answer. And in the same blog post, almost in passing: the Exponential Time Hypothesis in computer science is false, and the Kakeya conjecture is solved in every dimension. Three bombs in one post. Honest caveats, because they matter: This is not the full Millennium Prize. The Clay problem has two parts: existence and the "mass gap". OpenAI claims existence only. The physics materials aren't public yet. Gross's group chose to write it up themselves first. Lean verifies the logic, but experts still have to confirm the formal statement really captures what physicists mean. And it changes zero predictions. Physicists won't calculate anything differently tomorrow. It proves the ground under the cathedral is real. But the craziest part isn't the theorem. It's the scene. Nobel laureates are now acting as interpreters of what a machine discovered. OpenAI calls its proofs "raw research data" and refuses academic credit. For centuries, science worked one way: humans discover, then humans explain. We may have just entered the era where machines discover, and humans explain.

Trump's affordability message: "You could even come to Mar-a-Lago. You'll be my guest. The problem is that for $5,000 the most you'll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. I'm not even sure you could buy that! No, don't go there. It's not a good place if you're price conscious."

Meta had an internal PR plan to try and discredit Jon Haidt because he was a critic of social media. Meta was going to recruit academics, like Andrew Gelman, to write take down pieces. They were trying to turn academics against one another through a "whisper strategy". This is a very serious problem for open academic debate. If academics who share negative evidence about a platform are targeted by campaigns to smear our credibility, we are in deep, deep trouble. This creates a very serious conflict of interest for anyone who is paid to do this. law360.com/articles/2542517/…

👀 A satellite study led by the University of Reading finds heat loss from the north Atlantic has fallen 18 per cent in 40 years. It's among the strongest signs yet that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, the ocean current system that carries heat north to Europe, is slowing. The study is still in peer review. newscientist.com/article/259…

BREAKING: President Trump says he is banning the terms “Artificial Intelligence” and “AI.”

Chomsky was wrong. Researchers found your brain doesn’t store language the way every textbook since 1957 claims. For decades, the undisputed rule of linguistics, led by Noam Chomsky, was that human language is hierarchical. We were told our brains process language using complex "grammar trees." That we secretly build deep, abstract, mathematical rules in our heads before we speak. This new paper proves that is completely wrong. Researchers at Cornell University analyzed how people actually process and produce language in real time. They found sequences. Linear chunks. When we speak, we aren't calculating deep syntactic rules. We are just predicting the next most logical sequence of words based on the context of the words right before it. We string linear chunks together. If this sounds familiar, it should. This is exactly how Large Language Models like ChatGPT work. For years, critics have dismissed AI as "just a next-token predictor." They said it isn't truly intelligent because it doesn't understand deep grammatical hierarchies like humans do. But this paper suggests humans don't use those hierarchies either. We are just predicting the next chunk. Language isn't a rigid tree of mathematical rules. It's a linear stream of contextual predictions. We thought we were building AI to mimic the complexity of the human brain. It turns out, the human brain was just running a simpler algorithm all along.

My sons are working their way through college, and this is the stat that worries me. The impact is two to three times larger for entry-level workers. The first rung of the ladder is where AI is cutting first.