All posts by Mike Zonta
Featured Books from New Thinking Allowed
Dr. Laurie has devoted her academic career to the study of suffering. When it comes to teaching how to rise after being knocked down, and how not merely to survive life’s most difficult blows but ultimately to thrive, there is no substitute for a teacher who has learned through personal experience.
In The Biodynamic Heart, somatic psychologist Michael J. Shea explores how trauma, compassion, and cardiovascular health are deeply intertwined, offering practical biodynamic approaches to restore balance and vitality to the heart. Blending lived experience, contemplative insight, and hands on therapeutic practices, the book invites a reawakening of empathy and care as essential dimensions of both healing and human health.
Written by foremost experts, this short book gives a clear description of the physics of quantum black holes. The reader will learn about quantum black holes in four and higher dimensions, primordial black holes, the production of black holes in high energy particle collisions, Hawking radiation, black holes in models of low scale quantum gravity and quantum gravitational aspects of black holes.
A black hole ‘feeding frenzy’ could help explain a cosmic mystery uncovered by the James Webb Space Telescope
By Robert Lea published 2 days ago
“It is exciting to think that Little Red Dots may represent the first direct observational evidence of the birth of the most massive black holes in the universe.”
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An illustration of black hole seeds greedily feasting on gas and dust in the early universe (Image credit: Regan/ Mehta/ et al (2026))Share
Scientists may have solved a cosmic mystery that has been troubling them since the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) began observations back in 2022.
When astronomers started looking back into the early days of the universe with the cutting-edge observatory, they discovered supermassive black holes that appear to have formed prior to the universe being 1 billion years old, something our current models of the cosmos can’t explain But a new study has found that a black hole “feeding frenzy” may explain how these cosmic monsters were born so early in the universe’s history.
“We found that the chaotic conditions that existed in the early universe triggered early, smaller black holes to grow into the super-massive black holes we see later, following a feeding frenzy which devoured material all around them,” research leader Daxal Mehta of Maynooth University said in a statement. “We revealed, using state-of-the-art computer simulations, that the first generation of black holes – those born just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang grew incredibly fast, into tens of thousands of times the size of our sun.”You may like
- James Webb Space Telescope spots rapidly feeding supermassive black hole in the infant universe: ‘This discovery is truly remarkable.’
- James Webb Space Telescope’s mysterious ‘little red dots’ may be black holes in disguise
- James Webb Space telescope spots ‘big red dot’ in the ancient universe: A ravenous supermassive black hole named ‘BiRD’
Click here for more Space.com videos…
Performing complex computer simulations, this team of researchers found that the turbulent and dense-gas-rich conditions in the first galaxies may have allowed black holes to enter into brief phases of mega-gluttony, exceeding a barrier known as the “Eddington limit.” This limit determines how much material can fall to a body like a star or black hole before the radiation generated by that accretion pushes further matter away, emptying the central object’s larder of gas and dust, thus cutting off its food supply.
Periods of super-consumption that defy this limit are known as “super-Eddington accretion” and serve as the missing link between black holes that form when massive stars die in supernova explosions and monstrous supermassive black holes.
Supermassive black holes are like six-foot toddlers
Supermassive black holes with masses millions or even billions of times that of the sun sit at the heart of all large galaxies in the modern 13.8 billion-year-old universe, which isn’t troubling to explain at all, as they have had plenty of time to grow.
The issue is the discovery of supermassive black holes as early as 500 million years after the Big Bang, a population that the JWST has routinely been uncovering for the last three and a half years. That is because the merger and feeding processes that are thought to allow black holes to achieve supermassive status are thought to take at least 1 billion years.
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“It’s like seeing a family walking down the street, and they have two six-foot teenagers, but they also have with them a six-foot-tall toddler,” research team member and Maynooth University scientist John Regan previously told Space.com. “That’s a bit of a problem. How did the toddler get so tall? And it’s the same for supermassive black holes in the universe. How did they get so massive so quickly?”
The team’s simulations suggest that a super-Eddington feeding frenzy could have allowed the first generation of black holes to gorge on the dense gas of the early cosmos to reach masses of tens of thousands of times that of the sun. While that doesn’t get us to supermassive black holes, it provides a significant head start on the merger process that would see black holes of increasing size collide and fuse together to birth an even more massive black hole.
“These tiny black holes were previously thought to be too small to grow into the behemoth black holes observed at the center of early galaxies,” Mehta said. “What we have shown here is that these early black holes, while small, are capable of growing spectacularly fast, given the right conditions.”You may like
- James Webb Space Telescope spots rapidly feeding supermassive black hole in the infant universe: ‘This discovery is truly remarkable.’
- James Webb Space Telescope’s mysterious ‘little red dots’ may be black holes in disguise
- James Webb Space telescope spots ‘big red dot’ in the ancient universe: A ravenous supermassive black hole named ‘BiRD’
The team’s research could help scientists determine whether early supermassive black holes started out as “light seeds,” with ten to a few hundred times the mass of our sun, or as “heavy seeds,” with as much as 100,000 times the mass of the sun. Previously, it had been theorized that only heavy seeds would be massive enough to facilitate the rapid growth of supermassive black holes.
“Now we’re not so sure,” Regan said. “Heavy seeds are somewhat more exotic and may need rare conditions to form. Our simulations show that your ‘garden variety’ stellar mass black holes can grow at extreme rates in the early universe.”
The team’s research doesn’t just suggest a new avenue for supermassive black hole growth, but it also shows how important high-resolution simulations are in our investigation of the early cosmos.
“The early universe is much more chaotic and turbulent than we expected, with a much larger population of massive black holes than we anticipated, too,” Regan said.
As for collecting evidence of this theory, that may be a job not for the JWST or any other traditional astronomical device, but for instruments designed to detect the tiny ripples in space known as gravitational waves that mergers such as this radiate. Of particular importance could be the first space-based gravitational wave detector, the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a joint European Space Agency/ NASA mission set to launch in 2035.
“Future gravitational wave observations from that mission may be able to detect the mergers of these tiny, early, rapidly growing baby black holes,” Regan concluded.
The team’s research was published on Wednesday (Jan. 21) in the journal Nature Astronomy.
Senior Writer
Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.
What losing everything taught me about resilience
The Universe of Collective Consciousness with Martyu Rosenblatt
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jan 21, 2026 Marty Rosenblatt, MS, is a computational physicist who spent his career working in the military and industrial sectors. He is the director of the Applied Precognition Project. There are now 1,200 participants. His website is https://www.appliedprecog.com/ Here he provides an update on the use of Associative Remote Viewing (ARV), and other methods, for forecasting and speculating on athletic events and financial markets. He elaborates on his theme that “consciousness is FUNdamental”. He points out that the overall hit rate on remote viewing targets has declined somewhat, it is still well above chance expectation. He suggests that the drop in scoring may be due to the influx of new members; and he discusses his strategy moving forward. 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 July 2, 2020)
How Malleable is Reality with Cynthia Sue Larson
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jan 22, 2026 Cynthia Sue Larson, MBA, hosts Living the Quantum Dream on the DreamVisions7 radio network. She is author of Reality Shifts: When Consciousness Changes the Physical World, also Quantum Jumps and The Aura Advantage. Here she describes unusual case histories she has been collecting for the past twenty years involving disruptions of normal reality. This includes objects suddenly appearing out of nowhere, objects disappearing and then returning, people traveling long distances in an impossibly short amount of time, and instances when masses of people remember events that did not occur in this timeline. This latter phenomenon is known as the Mandela Effect. She believes that these events cannot simply be attributed to faulty memory. 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 July 7, 2020)
Trauma and the Subconscious Mind with Marilyn Murray
New Thinking Allowed with Jeffrey Mishlove Jan 23, 2026 Psychology and Psychotherapy This video is a special release from the original Thinking Allowed series that ran on public television from 1986 until 2002. It was recorded in about 1990. It will remain public for only one week. Marilyn Murray is an internationally recognized trauma treatment pioneer. For seven years, she designed and led a specialized graduate program at Ottawa University in Phoenix, Arizona titled “The Treatment of Trauma, Abuse and Deprivation.” Her teaching has extended to international universities in Hawaii, Ukraine, and the Netherlands, reaching students from over 40 countries. She is author of Prisoner of Another War and The Murray Method® – Creating Wholeness Beyond Trauma, Abuse, Neglect, and Addiction.
World Sound Healing Day February 14
Special Bonus Featured Event
11:30 am – 12:30 pm Eastern Time
Global Unified Heart Activation
Join the world’s largest focused intentional Sound Meditation
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Click Here to Create a World Sound Healing Day Event
Join us on February 14, 2026 for the 24th Annual World Sound Healing Day. On this day, many thousands of people through our planet will be creating Healing Sounds encoded with the intention of Love & Compassion to send a sonic valentine to the Gaia Matrix, our beloved Mother Earth, with the intention of raising the consciousness of all sentient beings.
Thank you for your participation and support! Please feel free to join one of the many sonic events that are occurring on the World Sound Healing Day Events Portal. If you feel inspired–please create one of your own! Participate in these events in any way that feels appropriate. Together we will be contributing to a co-created evolutionary vibrational field of Global Harmonization, planetary peace, and healing for our planet. Together, we can make a difference. Remember—we heal the planet, we heal ourselves. We heal ourselves and we heal the planet.
In addition to the scheduled online events, sounding anytime, anywhere, during February 14, 2026 will help create positive shift and change for our planet on World Sound Healing Day!
The purpose of World Sound Healing Day is to:
1). Heal Our Planet
2). Heal Our Waters
3). Raise Our Consciousness
Thank You to our Partners & Supporters!
(Contributed by John Atwater, H.W.)
What’s with all the Broicism?
Jan 21, 2026 (reddit.com)
Scroll through any social media platform these days and you will eventually encounter the bearded visage of Marcus Aurelius. He is usually rendered in high-contrast black and white, perhaps superimposed with a quote about enduring pain or ignoring the opinions of sheep. The Roman Emperor has become the unlikely patron saint of a very specific digital subculture, but the ‘philosophy’ being peddled under his name bears only a ghostly resemblance to the complex ethics of the Stoa—it has essentially been strip-mined as a mental gym membership for the aspiring alpha. We are living in the age of ‘Broicism’, a hollowed-out version of Stoic philosophy that serves as the theological backbone for performative masculinity and right-leaning individualism (with a good dash of the hustle culture of Silicon Valley).
To understand how a school of Hellenistic philosophy centred on virtue and cosmopolitanism became the operating system for the manosphere, one must look to what has been discarded. The original Stoics, from Zeno to Epictetus, were deeply concerned with physics and logic, viewing the world as a coherent, divinely ordered web of cause and effect. Their ethics were inextricably bound to a sense of civic duty. To be a Stoic was to recognise one’s role in the cosmopolis, the universal city of gods and men. It was a philosophy of radical interdependence. The modern iteration strips away the physics and the civic obligation, leaving behind only the psychological mechanism of emotional suppression. In this reduced form, Stoicism becomes a toolkit for resilience in the service of capitalism, asking ‘how can I ignore the critics while I build my empire?’ rather than ‘how can I live virtuously among my neighbours?’
This utility makes it uniquely attractive to the tech elite and the self-optimisation crowd. If you view your brain as software, Stoicism is represented as a firewall, a philosophy that, if followed, promises an impermeable emotional fortress. But this focus on individual endurance aligns neatly with a particular strain of right-wing political thought. If the locus of control is entirely internal—if, as the distorted maxim goes, you cannot control the world, only your reaction to it—then structural critique becomes obsolete. Inequality and systemic injustice are rebranded as external circumstances to be endured with stiff-lipped dignity, and the onus for change shifts from the state to the individual’s mindset.
It is here that the philosophy merges with the aesthetics of the modern far-right and the ‘trad’ masculine revival. Online communities fixated on returning to a mythical past of patriarchal order have adopted the marble statues of antiquity as their avatars. They see in Stoicism a validation of emotional repression, mistaking the Stoic ideal of apatheia (freedom from disturbing passions) for the modern toxicity of simply not feeling anything. This reading validates a hard-edged, dominance-based masculinity. The ‘Stoic’ man of the Instagram reel is solitary, uncomplaining, and fiercely competitive, conquering his emotions so he can conquer his environment.
Nowhere is this distortion more acute than in the treatment of Marcus Aurelius himself. To the modern acolyte of Broicism, the Emperor is cast as the ultimate patriarch, a conquering general who ruled the world with an iron fist and a frozen heart. His Meditations are read as a tactical manual for alpha dominance, a sort of Art of War for the soul. But this caricature, for anyone who actually engages with the text, is a fantasy. The Meditations were never intended for publication. They were private notes, originally titled To Himself, written by an exhausted man trying to talk himself down from the ledge of despair. When the ‘stoic’ influencers quote him, they often select lines that sound like aggressive affirmations. They often seize upon the famous maxim: ‘The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.’ In the hands of the tech-bro, this becomes a slogan for aggressive disruption, a command to smash through obstacles in pursuit of a Series B funding round or a personal best deadlift.
But Aurelius was not suggesting that one should bulldoze reality to satisfy personal ambition—he was arguing for a radical acceptance of defeat. The ‘way’ he speaks of is not the path to external success, but the path of virtue. If you are blocked from doing your job, you exercise patience; if you are sick, you exercise endurance. The obstacle does not help you get what you want, the obstacle replaces what you want with a new opportunity to be good. It is a philosophy of resignation, not conquest.
The contemporary fetishisation of Aurelius ignores his palpable hatred of the violence he was forced to oversee. He spent much of his reign on the Danube frontier, fighting the Marcomanni, but his journals are filled with reminders of the transience of military glory. He compared the procession of armies to ‘puppy dogs snapping at each other’. While the YouTube montages set his statues against backdrops of Spartans and Navy SEALs, the man himself was writing about the pointlessness of posthumous fame and the tedious monotony of war.
Perhaps the most damaging misinterpretation concerns his emotional life. The contemporary revival sells a Marcus Aurelius who is unfeeling, but the text itself reveals a man deeply sensitive to pain and grief, constantly struggling to regain his composure. He writes repeatedly about how difficult it is to get out of bed, how annoying he finds the people at court, and how terrified he is of losing his children. He does not suppress these feelings, but examines them and attempts to reintegrate them into a cosmic perspective. By erasing his struggle, the modern movement erases his humanity. They replace a complex, suffering philosopher with a two-dimensional action figure. This fictional Aurelius validates a rigid, impermeable masculinity that the real man spent a lifetime trying to dismantle within himself.
The political utility of this distortion is significant. By convincing a generation of young men that their unhappiness is a result of a weak mindset rather than a fractured society, this brand of Stoicism atomises political grievances. If you are struggling to pay rent or find community, the Broic answer is not to organise or demand policy change, but to retreat into the ‘inner citadel’ and harden your mind. It transforms citizens into islands, heavily fortified and utterly alone—it’s a to hell with everyone else but me and my own mantra.
But real Stoicism is hard. It requires a constant interrogation of one’s own impressions and a commitment to the common good that borders on the saintly. What is being sold today by the Broics—the fantasy that if you just ignore the needs of wider society while also repressing your own anxieties, you too can be an emperor—is much easier to get on board with.
- Google AI Overview
Broicism is a modern, often critical term used to describe a “watered-down” or distorted version of Stoic philosophy that has gained popularity in the “manosphere,” “hustle culture,” and Silicon Valley.
Coined by philosopher Massimo Pigliucci in 2019, it characterizes an interpretation of Stoicism that strips away its ethical and community-focused foundations in favor of personal gain and emotional suppression.
Key Characteristics of Broicism
- Emotional Suppression: Unlike traditional Stoicism, which teaches the management of emotions through reason, Broicism often advocates for “bottling up” feelings to appear “tough” or “unaffected”.
- Focus on Material Success: It frequently reframes Stoic principles as “life hacks” or “productivity systems” to achieve external wealth, status, or romantic conquest.
- Hyper-Masculinity: It is often associated with “alpha male” or “sigma” mindsets, emphasizing individual dominance and physical strength while ignoring the original Stoic belief in the equality of all rational beings.
Contrast with Traditional Stoicism
| Feature | Traditional Stoicism | Broicism |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | Developing virtue (wisdom, justice, courage, temperance) | Achieving wealth, status, or “toughness” |
| View on Emotions | Understanding and transforming emotions through reason | Suppressing emotions to avoid looking weak |
| Social Focus | Service to the common good and human family | Self-centered success and personal dominance |
| Material Wealth | A “preferred indifferent”—nice to have but irrelevant to virtue | A primary metric of success and a goal of the philosophy |
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