Op-Eds & Commentary
This page contains my published op-eds and commentary. Unlike my academic work, these pieces are not peer-reviewed. They go through editorial review and are accepted or rejected at the outlet’s discretion. I am not a staff writer or contributor to any outlet. Every piece here was independently written and submitted, the same way a paper is submitted to a journal. The purpose of an op-ed is to make a clear argument without six months of peer review and dozens of citations. They are not meant to be perfect. My work is grounded in logic and scientific data, and each argument is written to stand on its own.
I have no political affiliation and do not write from an ideological position. I do not support conspiracies or speculation. I do not support violence in any form. My work is grounded in logic and science. I do not believe in name-calling to make arguments. Editorial rooms can add / remove sections from my pieces without my approval.
Cosmological Expansion Isn't a Fact. It's an Assumption
RealClearScience - April 2026
Prior to late 2025, no framework in published literature had demonstrated that the CMB blackbody spectrum could be reproduced without metric expansion. That changed in October 2025 when a preprint, later published in the Journal of Modern Physics in January 2026, proved exactly that using collisionless Liouville transport and a frequency-independent redshift kernel. The CMB, long treated as the strongest evidence for expansion, was shown to be consistent with expansion but not uniquely dependent on it. Since then, the same program has extended that result to time dilation, surface brightness, luminosity distance, and JWST timing constraints. The case for expansion has not been disproven. But its claim to necessity has not survived.
This piece argues that cosmological expansion, while consistent with available observations, is not uniquely required by them. The Hubble tension, JWST anomalies, and the incompatibility between quantum theory and expanding spacetime are not isolated problems but a pattern of accumulating strain on a framework that has been treated as settled rather than tested.
The contribution is methodological. Published work in peer-reviewed journals has shown that the cosmic microwave background blackbody spectrum, redshift, time dilation, and surface brightness data can all be reproduced without invoking metric expansion. When multiple frameworks reproduce the same observations, the dominant one is not proof. It is a choice.
You Cannot Bomb an Ideology Out of Existence
Foreign Policy In Focus— March 2026
The Wire (India) - March 2026: https://thewire.in/world/you-cannot-bomb-an-ideology-out-of-existence
International: https://www.geopolitika.news/vijesti/fpif-bombama-nije-moguce-unistiti-ideologiju-koja-odrzava-teokratski-iran/
This is not a pro-war or anti-war piece. I do not advocate for or support violence in any form. My work focuses on structural logic and decision making.
This conflict looks simple at first. The United States and Israel have hit Iran hard, destroying infrastructure, degrading its military, and killing senior leadership. In most cases, that kind of pressure forces a government to change course because survival comes first. Iran does not work that way. The system is built around resistance to outside pressure, and that resistance is part of how it holds itself together. When it is attacked, it does not just weaken, it uses that pressure to reinforce its own narrative. The leadership can frame losses as proof the country is under threat, which strengthens internal cohesion instead of breaking it.
That is where the problem sits. Military force can destroy equipment and delay programs, but it cannot remove the idea that holds the system together. Even major losses can be absorbed and turned into something that strengthens the regime rather than weakens it. At the same time, stopping the pressure does not solve anything either, because the system remains intact and has time to recover. That leaves no clean outcome. Force can reduce capability, but it cannot change a system that is built to survive and adapt under pressure, which is why this conflict is unlikely to end through bombing alone.
Corporate AI as the Military’s Weakest Link
Small Wars Journal - March 2026
The military is normalizing generative AI as routine infrastructure rather than treating it as a fragile and high-risk intervention. The Department of Defense is already tracking more than one million unique users on its enterprise platform within months of launch. Data control, operational language, and internal reasoning patterns are not abstract assets. They are the connective tissue of military power, and once externalized through probabilistic systems, they cannot simply be pulled back inside by policy assurances or procedural checklists.
The risk does not arise from what large language models might decide to do on their own. It arises from how humans use them when they become convenient. When tools are framed as assistants and productivity aids, they are pulled into everyday workflows, and everyday workflows are where discipline erodes. Procedural compliance is not the same as custodianship. The absence of immediate failure is not safety.
Mensa at 80 - The club that measures everything except intelligence
Spiked — April 2026
The piece argues that Mensa's entry requirement, a score at or above the 98th percentile on a standardised IQ test, selects for timed pattern recognition rather than the cognitive traits that actually produce original work. Drawing on the cases of Richard Feynman, William Shockley, and Luis Alvarez, all Nobel laureates who would not have qualified, the piece examines how Mensa repurposed a diagnostic screening tool as the entrance exam for an elite intellectual society.
When thought becomes a gate rather than a generator, when the point of measuring intelligence is to decide who gets in rather than what gets built, logic dies and legacy masquerades as truth. Mensa stopped generating anything decades ago. It has been coasting on the cultural prestige of a number.
The published version reflects editorial decisions made by Spiked's editorial team. The original draft did not include language directed at individuals. I do not believe in personal attacks or name-calling as tools of argument and did not use them in the submitted version.
Communism is not evil. It is obsolete
Quillette - April 2026 - My OG title. Staff changed it.
I have no ideological position, my position is structural. Either it works or it doesn't. The problem with communism is that Marx treated humanity like a machine, predictable and controllable, when human nature is neither.
Every communist state in history has either collapsed, reformed into something unrecognisable, or survived only through external subsidy and internal repression. The standard explanation blames ideology, bad leadership, or Western interference. This piece argues the problem is structural, not moral.
Any system that suppresses internal variation, eliminates meaningful feedback, and removes selection pressure will accumulate errors faster than it can correct them. Communism does not fail because corrupt people run it. It fails because it was built to suppress the only mechanisms capable of keeping it alive.