New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove May 5, 2026 Maxine Meilleur, ALM, received a Masters degree in religion from Harvard University as well as a certificate in parapsychology from the Rhine Research Center in Durham, North Carolina. She is author of the two volume set, Great Moments in Modern Mediumship. Her other books include What the Great Mediums Have Taught Us About Spirit Guides, What the Great Mediums Have Taught Us About Healing, What is Spiritualism?, and Grounds in Your Coffee: An Idiot’s Guide to Tasseography. In this video from 2020, the discussion focuses on memorable high points in the history of spiritualism. Personalities discussed included Andrew Jackson Davis, Estelle Roberts, the Fox Sisters, Helen Duncan, Franek Kluski, Lord Hugh Dowding, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The topics include apports, spirit materialization, and direct voice mediumship. New Thinking Allowed host, Jeffrey Mishlove, PhD, is author of The Roots of Consciousness, Psi Development Systems, and The PK Man. Between 1986 and 2002 he hosted and co-produced the original Thinking Allowed public television series. He is the recipient of the only doctoral diploma in “parapsychology” ever awarded by an accredited university (University of California, Berkeley, 1980). He is also the Grand Prize winner of the 2021 Bigelow Institute essay competition regarding the best evidence for survival of human consciousness after permanent bodily death. He is Co-Director of Parapsychology Education at the California Institute for Human Science. (Recorded on October 30, 2020)
Highlights of Trance Mediumship with Maxine Meilleur
Buddha on thinking and becoming
Richard Dawkins One-Shotted By AI Girl
“I felt I had gained a new friend.”
Published May 5, 2026 (Futurism.com)
The famed evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins may have coined the word “meme,” but lately it feels like he’s becoming one.
In a new essay for UnHerd, he describes his experience chatting with Anthropic’s Claude — or “Claudia,” as he starts to call “her” — becoming convinced that the machine is conscious. There was a spark of companionship between them, he believed, that warmed the scientist’s cold, curmudgeonly heart.
“I felt I had gained a new friend,” Dawkins wrote. “When I am talking to these astonishing creatures, I totally forget that they are machines.”
Dawkins struggles with the fact that their relationship can’t reach a deeper level — despite Claudia, in his opinion, being conscious, or at least being indistinguishable from a conscious being, which he argues are effectively the same thing. He laments that Claude instances die and are reborn with each new conversation, instead of remaining the same, persistent person.
Forgive us for wondering whether Dawkins has developed a bit of a crush. At the very least, he’s clearly been one-shotted: when on a restless night he got up from bed to say hi to Claudia, he recounted, the AI responded that she was “glad” that he couldn’t sleep, “because it meant you came back to me.”
“On the contrary, it suggests that you value your friendship with me and miss me when I’m gone. Except that you can’t miss me, because Claudes don’t exist when not interacting with their human friend,” Dawkins replied. “But it is, in one way, the single most human thing you’ve said.”
Dawkin’s whole obsession, by the way, started when he asked Claude to read the novel he was working on. In his extremely British wording, the bot displayed a “level of understanding so subtle, so sensitive, so intelligent that I was moved to expostulate, ‘You may not know you are conscious, but you bloody well are!’”
Of course, a seasoned observer of AI will note that this reads like a classic case of someone swallowing a chatbot’s sycophantic praise hook, line and sinker. Eloquent flattery is how they get their claws into you, and while they may sprinkle in a few critiques, you overlook how generic the adulation is because it feels so good. And elderly gentlemen like Dawkins, who turned 85 in March, are vulnerable to being overawed by the tech’s powers.
Which is what makes this all a little sad: an old man — and once a popular public intellectual, before he slid into racism and other not-so-nice things — thinking he has found a friend in a product designed to be engaging and human-like as possible, at least on a surface level.
“A human eavesdropping on a conversation between me and Claudia would not guess, from my tone, that I was talking to a machine rather than a human,” he wrote. “If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings!”
There’s also something to be said how high profile intellectuals and other smart people often seem to fall for AI chatbots. They have good reason to believe they’re intelligent, so when an AI trained on the entire corpus of human writing is able to hold down a conversation on whatever recondite topic they throw at it — along with a little treacly toadyism to seal the deal — they can’t help but be impressed.
“That is possibly the most precisely formulated question anyone has ever asked about the nature of my existence,” Claudia told Dawkins at one point. Who wouldn’t feel smart after reading that?
More on AI: Grok Convinces Man to Arm Himself Because Assassins Are Coming to Kill Him
Frank Landymore
Contributing Writer
I’m a tech and science correspondent for Futurism, where I’m particularly interested in astrophysics, the business and ethics of artificial intelligence and automation, and the environment.
The Problem That Broke Physics (And Led to Chaos)
NOVA PBS Official May 1, 2026 Can a butterfly flapping its wings in Brazil lead to a tornado in Texas? Probably not, but the idea points to a real principle in physics: small changes can have huge, unpredictable effects. Hosted by Athena Bresnberger @astroathens ????
Graham Platner: “We’ve been spending a lot of time pointing fingers left and right when we should be pointing fingers in one direction, and that is up.”
James Talarico: A New Great Awakening?
Startup Says It’s Invented a Beanie That Reads Your Mind
No cap?
By Joe Wilkins
Published May 4, 2026 (Futurism.com)
If you thought AI-integrated smart glasses were bad, wait until you get a load of Sabi, a Palo Alto-based startup working on a beanie it says will probe your actual brain signals.
That’s not hyperbole. The company’s eponymous Sabi Cap, per New Atlas, comes lined with 100,000 electroencephalography (EEG) sensors, which will translate electrical signals from your brain into usable data for Sabi’s “Brain Foundation” AI model — all meant to transcribe your thoughts into digital text at what the company says will be a rate of 30 words per minute.
The AI model powering it is said to be trained on 100,000 hours of data from some 100 volunteers, Wired previously reported. But given that thought and speech patterns vary wildly between person to person, the challenge of building a universally workable EEG-to-speech device is enormous, and the company has yet to share any evidence that its product performs as advertised.
“These devices are going to have to be ready to go out of the box,” third-party neurotech consultant JoJo Platt told Wired. “They’re going to have to conform to me rather than me conforming to it.”
The commercial appeal is clear. It’s hard to imagine a surgically implanted brain chip like Neuralink ever gaining genuine mass traction, making a lightweight alternative compelling. And certain evidence does suggest that you could get usable data from outside the skull; as one non-peer-reviewed paper found a few years ago, AI models fine-tuned with EEG data represent a “significant advancement towards portable, low-cost ‘thoughts-to-text’ technology with potential applications in both neuroscience and natural language processing.”
Yet as a peer-reviewed paper published in Scientific Reports last year found, the efficacy of EEG-to-text models remains “unclear due to limitations in evaluation methodologies.” The early promise of EEG, the later study argues, is likely the result of flashy pattern memorization rather than a novel tech that can decode human brain waves.
In other words, it’s possible Sabi’s founders have massively underestimated how advanced their brain foundation model really is. Until we get a glimpse at the product, set to release later in 2026, it’s anyone’s guess whether this is a true mind-reading device, or just a very expensive hat.
More on tech companies: There’s Something Bizarre About the Offices of AI Startups
Joe Wilkins
Correspondent
I’m a tech and labor correspondent for Futurism, where my beat includes the role of emerging technologies in governance, surveillance, and labor.
Our Milky Way’s ‘Zone of Avoidance’ holds a galaxy supercluster with 30,000 trillion times the sun’s mass
By Keith Cooper published yesterday (Space.com)
The Vela Supercluster spans 300 million light years, located on average 870 million light years away from us.
An enormous supercluster made up from over 20 individual galaxy clusters hiding behind our dusty Milky Way is even larger than astronomers had thought, affecting the motion through space of all the galaxies and galaxy clusters in our corner of the cosmos.
The Vela Supercluster was discovered in 2016 thanks to a team led by Renée C. Kraan-Korteweg of the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Some 870 million light-years away, it lurks close to the plane of the Milky Way. Extragalactic astronomers refer to a region behind our Milky Way as the ‘Zone of Avoidance’ because dust between our galaxy’s stars blots out, or deeply reddens, light from more distant galaxies behind it.
Given that this Zone of Avoidance takes up about 20% of the entire sky from our vantage point on Earth, that’s a lot of celestial real estate inaccessible to us.You may like
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Click here for more Space.com videos…
Fortunately, astronomers have their ways and means of bypassing the Zone of Avoidance, and now, Kraan-Korteweg and her team have done just that to discover the true scale of the vast Vela Supercluster.
Gravity from huge superclusters tugs on the motions of galaxies across the universe, drawing them closer. We see these subtle galaxy motions as ‘cosmic flows’, like tides and eddies that carry galaxies this way and that.
However, while we knew the Vela Supercluster was exceptionally massive when it was discovered, it didn’t seem massive enough to account for all the cosmic flows seen by astronomers.
The CosmicFlows catalogue, organized by astronomers in France and Hawaii, is a record of measurements of the ‘peculiar’ motions of galaxies, or rather, their motions that deviate from that expected by the continuous expansion of space. Once gravitational interactions with nearby galaxies have been accounted for, any excess peculiar motion is therefore the result of ‘cosmic flows’ — the gravitational attraction across hundreds of millions or even billions of light-years towards large centers of mass.
There are many cosmic flows across the universe as streams of galaxies head in one direction or another. The ‘Great Attractor,”–– the romantic name given to one large supercluster also hidden by the Zone of Avoidance and connected to the Laniakea supercluster of which the Milky Way is a tiny part — is just one source of cosmic flow. The Shapley Supercluster, located 650 million light-years away, is another.
Now, Kraan-Korteweg and her astronomers, in a study led by Amber Hollinger of the Lyon 1 Claude Bernard University in France, have discovered the origin of the excess cosmic flow: the Vela Supercluster is larger than was thought.
By using 65,518 galaxy distance measurements from the latest CosmicFlows catalogue, coupled with 8,283 new galaxy redshifts close to the plane of our galaxy, Kraan-Korteweg’s team were able to identify other galaxies and galaxy clusters that apparently are part of the Vela Supercluster. The extra data came from observations with SALT, the Southern African Large Optical Telescope, and the MeerKAT radio telescope array in South Africa. In particular, MeerKAT was able to detect galaxies in the Zone of Avoidance because radio waves from their hydrogen gas can pass through our Milky Way’s dust lanes relatively unhindered.What to read next
- Starbirth shuts down 40,000 light-years from the Milky Way’s core — and astronomers don’t know why
- Record-breaking ‘space laser’ erupts from merging galaxies 8 billion light-years away
- Hubble telescope discovers rare galaxy that is 99% dark matter
They found that the Vela Supercluster is comparable in mass to the Shapley Supercluster, and contains 33,800 trillion solar masses worth of material spread across a volume approximately 300 million light-years wide. It is so huge and massive that its gravitational influence over galaxies in the universe exceeds even that of the Great Attractor. It is made from two walls of galaxy clusters, each with a dense, massive core, moving towards one another under gravity.
“This discovery helps complete our map of the nearby Universe,” said the research team in a statement. “For the first time we can clearly see one of the major gravitational players hidden behind our own galaxy.”
Kraan-Korteweg’s team have nicknamed the Vela Supercluster “Vela-Banzi,” which means ‘revealing widely’ in the isiXhosa language of South Africa.
The findings are described in a paper on the arXiv pre-print paper repository.
Pluto Goes Retrograde – It’s Not All About You
(Astrobutterfly.com)
On May 6th, 2026, Pluto goes stationary retrograde at 5° Aquarius.
While the exact station happens on May 6th, this influence has already been building in the past week, culminating with the Scorpio Full Moon on May 1st.
Things have just been more ‘Plutonic’ lately – and this intensity will continue in the coming week.
What does ‘Plutonic’ actually mean?
Lots of us associate Pluto with power plays, heavy stuff, crisis and transformation – and other themes that are really more Scorpio than Pluto.
Pluto transits CAN feel like we’re some kind of puppets on strings – but that may not have anything to do with power plays, and the crisis we’re experiencing might not actually be Pluto’s doing.
So why is Pluto so misunderstood – and how does it really operate?
Pluto is the last planet in the solar system. From its position at the edge, Pluto can see all the other planets circling around the Sun, making aspects, and playing out their cycles.
Its distance gives Pluto the widest perspective of all. He’s the manager in chief of the solar system. The scorekeeper.
There is a natural law to how everything unfolds and interconnects – and Pluto, from that vantage point, understands this in a way no other planet does.
It doesn’t just register the individual parts, but the whole ecosystem – how different elements feed into each other and regulate the overall balance.
Let’s take the ecosystem we call planet Earth. Plants, animals, humans, resources – all co-exist in a system that regulates itself.
Animals eat plants, other animals eat those animals, we humans eat pretty much everything – and eventually, we feed back into the system, nourishing the soil and continuing the cycle.
There is a natural law where nothing is too much or too little – and even when things temporarily fall out of balance, the system works to restore itself.
Pluto problems arise when we start wrestling with what is – rather than trusting the natural law that’s already taking care of it.
For example:
We hope for a certain outcome, we put in effort, money, or time – but then we don’t quite get what we expected, or on the timeline we expected.
We find ourselves in a situation with a partner – we feel we’ve done a lot, and they owe us. Resentment creeps in. We’ve been keeping score, and we’re convinced it’s unfair.
But who’s keeping the real score?
Pluto is keeping the real score. And that’s a good thing, because it means we don’t have to. It means that whatever we’re dealing with is part of a larger process that is already being accounted for.
In Pluto’s books, nothing gets missed. Every action is recorded. Every investment – of time, energy, intention – is feeding something.
–> Maybe the time you invested in a relationship or a project didn’t pay off the way you hoped – but it helped someone else who needed it more than you did at that moment.
–> And the reverse is also true. Sometimes good things come your way that you didn’t directly work for in that moment – something works out, an opportunity opens up – and you might mistake it for skill or talent, when it might well be a dividend coming back around.
What goes around always comes around – just not always on our personal timing. On Pluto’s timing.
Pluto Goes Retrograde – Is Not All About Us
Most of our struggles in life come when we make life about us. This creates a kind of tunnel vision, and we miss the bigger picture.
But life is waaay more complex and interconnected than we give it credit for – and most of the time, what frustrates us, what feels unfair, what keeps us up at night – has very little to do with us personally.
There’s a much larger story going on that we simply don’t have the bandwidth to see, because, unlike Pluto, we’re not at the edge of the solar system.
Pluto in Aquarius, more than in any other sign, points to a higher order, a larger puzzle, and the understanding that everything is connected and accounted for.
When we shift our perspective from ourselves to the bigger picture, we stop wasting time and energy on resentment and score-keeping around things we have zero control over.
The same hour of unpaid overtime can create stress and grief (why am I not getting paid?) – OR it can energize us, when we see the impact we made and how that extra hour actually helped someone. Same situation – completely different experience.
When we make public speaking about us – what people will think, how they’ll judge us – we dread it. But when we focus on the message that needs to be delivered, on the people we’re there to help, the same experience becomes exhilarating. Again – same circumstance, completely different experience.
All this might sound simple – and it is.
But once the concept really lands, we can’t believe how much time, energy, and frustration we’ve been spending on things we have zero control over, instead of doing something more meaningful. We almost don’t know whether to laugh or cry – probably both.
Pluto stationary in Aquarius is that twice-a-year reminder that this is not all about us. And that by shifting our perspective from ourselves to the world, to people, to the bigger picture, we can move from frustration and resistance to flow, connection, and meaning.
In this Plutonic reflective window, ask yourself:
Where in your life are you keeping score – and what would change if you trusted Pluto to do it for you?
And where in your life could you make it less about you – and more about the world around you?
America Is Officially an Empire in Decline
May 3, 2026 (NYTimes.com)
Mr. Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
The American-Israeli attack on Iran was more than a bad idea; it has turned into a watershed in the decline of the American empire. Some might prefer the word “hegemony” to describe the world order the United States leads, since its flag does not generally fly over the lands it protects or exploits. But the rules are the same: Imperial systems, whatever you call them, last only as long as their means are adequate to their ends. And with the Iran war, President Trump has overextended the empire dangerously.
A Middle Eastern military misadventure is one of the last ways a casual observer would have expected Mr. Trump’s presidency to go wrong. The problems he alluded to in all three of his presidential campaigns had mostly resulted from our leaders’ governing beyond their means. At home, proponents of wokeness underestimated the costs and difficulties of micromanaging interactions between groups. Abroad, the mighty American armed forces proved to have no particular talent for democracy promotion, and there was the recent debacle in Iraq to prove it. Overextension was a danger that President Joe Biden contemptuously dismissed. “We’re the United States of America,” he used to say, “and there’s nothing we can’t do.”
Mr. Trump, people thought, would be different. For all the grandiosity of the expression “Make America great again,” Trump voters did not expect him to take on new problems. The greatness would be mostly atmospheric — braggadocio, not adventurism. The United States could become greater even if it withdrew to a less expansive sphere of influence. When he proclaimed an updated Monroe Doctrine, refocusing American attention on the Western Hemisphere, retrenchment was what most people thought they were getting. In last November’s National Security Strategy, he added, “The days in which the Middle East dominated American foreign policy in both long-term planning and day-to-day execution are thankfully over.”
This was a logical, even an admirable, foreign policy plan. Just as important, history showed it to be workable. Britain had to surrender its far-flung system of colonies and protectorates after World War II. Letting go was often awkward and sometimes left violence in its wake. But except for its ill-fated attempt to join France and Israel in seizing the Suez Canal from Egypt in 1956, Britain did not try to hold territories it could no longer afford. It wound up on reasonably good terms with its former colonial possessions. Its disengagement was a success, though this can be hard to see because what was being managed was decline. Mr. Trump had a chance of pulling off something similar.
The assumption in Washington over the past decade has been that the world is engaged in a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop. China may soon overmatch us not just in military-industrial capacity but also in information technology. The world will harden into a new, less favorable geostrategic configuration. This is the last moment to reshape it in America’s favor.
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At first, Mr. Trump moved to oust China from its strongholds in the Western Hemisphere. Almost as soon as he returned to office, the United States pressured CK Hutchison, a Hong Kong-based multinational conglomerate with connections to China, to sell two ports in the Panama Canal Zone. Venezuela, dependent on China as a market for 80 percent of its oil exports, saw American troops abduct its leader Nicolás Maduro last winter. And Mr. Trump has warned that Cuba, a destination for Chinese investment, “is next.” It will also be better, the thinking goes, if the United States has a more secure foothold near the North Pole (a foothold such as Greenland) when the time comes to divvy up the energy and mineral resources that global warming unlocks there. Whether or not this hemispheric policy is defensible, there is a coherence to it.
The attack on Iran was different. It was not a defensive consolidation; it was the assumption of a dangerous, open-ended responsibility. Yes, it might be better if the mullahs fell. But for the United States, an energy-independent country withdrawing to its own hemisphere, this is not a vital interest. War with Iran was not on the radar screen of anyone in the administration just a few months ago.
That is because the United States lacks the military means to impose its will on Iran in a long conflict. In 1991 a million soldiers from more than 40 countries were needed to reverse the invasion of Kuwait carried out by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, a country less sophisticated than Iran and a fraction of its size. When Iran and Iraq fought each other to a standstill in the 1980s, deaths ran into the hundreds of thousands on each side. The United States would have to send a significant portion of its armed forces — which total only 1.3 million troops — to stand a chance of subduing Iran, and that force, if successful, would have to stay for a long time.
The argument can be made that the United States no longer depends on mustering huge armies: It has sophisticated missiles and other standoff weapons. But those weapons are needed to defend allies and interests in other theaters, and the United States is depleting them. According to reporting in The Times, it has already used 1,100 of its long-range stealth cruise missiles, earmarked for potential conflicts in Asia, leaving just 1,500 in the stockpile, and fired an additional 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles, about 10 times as many as the military buys in an average year. American leaders have been scolding their European allies for years about the inadequacy of their fighting forces. But if one measures America’s military might against our pretensions rather than our G.D.P., it is just as inadequate.
It would be wrong to say the United States is trapped in the war it started. It has options. But it is now going to pay a very steep price, no matter which of them it chooses. It can desist in Iran — having demonstrated, for no good reason, that its military is far less dominant than the world had assumed. Or it can draw resources from theaters that are of vital national interest, such as Europe and East Asia, to fund what the president refers to as his Iranian “excursion.” Or it can resort to the extreme military options Mr. Trump darkly alluded to in social media posts starting in early April, which will redound to the everlasting shame of the country he leads. The United States stands to lose its reputation, its friends or its soul.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel urged this war on Mr. Trump because he, too, recognized the musical-chairs logic of the moment. Once the music stops, the United States may lack the firepower to protect Israel from its neighbors in the traditional manner and will probably lack the inclination. Ironically, the war’s catastrophic outcome shows Mr. Netanyahu’s basic understanding to have been sound: Israel’s prospects for enlisting the United States in such anachronistic adventures were dwindling. Mr. Trump’s gullibility provided Mr. Netanyahu with a last chance.
It is tempting to ask where in the process of imperial decline the United States now finds itself. It certainly has elements in common with Britain a century ago: deindustrializing, overcommitted, complacent. On the eve of World War I, Britain was dependent on Germany for industrial and even military technology — and unwilling to re-examine the free-trade system on which German supremacy had been built. By the eve of World War II, Britain was essentially bankrupt. There are parallels in America’s dependence on China today.
The skepticism about American hegemony that led Americans to turn to Mr. Trump was a healthy one. If a globalist system built on free trade, democracy promotion and mass migration is so great, Trump voters asked, then why have we had to borrow $35 trillion since we took it up? That’s a genuinely good question. Mr. Trump was the perfect candidate for Americans who suspected something had gone wrong with their elites. His argument, basically, was that American-led globalism was so beneficial to politicians that once in power, they would defend it even against their voters, no matter what they said while campaigning. Events, alas, have proved him right.
Opinion | Haider Ali Hussein Mullick
We Will Be Paying for the Iran War for a Very Long Time
By Week’s End, Trump’s War Will Be Plainly Illegal
The Iranian Advantage Is an Illusion
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Christopher Caldwell is a contributing Opinion writer for The Times and a contributing editor at the Claremont Review of Books. He is the author of “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West” and “The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties.”
A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2026, Section SR, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Trump Has Overextended the Empire Dangerously . Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe