When the Dung Ball Goes to the Auctioneer#
by Laurence Loewe of Laodicea (LLoL)
TL;DR
The first 5 of my 11 storage units of research materials — a lifetime’s work, including hard-to-find nuclear-fallout research I inherited from the geneticist James F. Crow — have gone to live public auction. To call it off I must have paid by early Monday, June 1, 2026 — a desperately tight deadline (see “The practical ask” below). (The other 6 units follow about two weeks later). I will not quietly bid my own units back — that would cheat a storage company that has been remarkably gracious; the honest path is to raise enough Buy-In to pay the debt. And I am saying this in the open rather than hiding it, because a ResearchCity meant to end mutually assured destruction cannot rest its own safety on secrecy — better to be the canary in the coal mine. You can verify the live auction further down.
A few days ago I wrote about a prophetic dung beetle rolling its prized possessions (a dung ball) across a sloped, rocky road, getting knocked over, getting back up, and rolling on. I said my own “dung ball” — a lifetime of interconnected research materials — looks to outsiders like just another hairball, and that all I can really do is keep rolling it and trust that God works the growth.
Today the metaphor became even more real. The first half of my prized research materials is being auctioned off and the auction went live today.
You don’t need to share my faith to share this work. Science is itself a tradition obsessed with the truth — in a real sense a fourth Abrahamic faith, or maybe the zeroth — and the one question here is whether the math holds. Audit it. If it does, the rest can wait; if it doesn’t, tell me where.
What is in the dung ball#
Roughly 2000 square feet of research materials, filling 11 storage units.
To a storage auctioneer it is very many boxes by the cubic foot, mostly full of papers, scribbles, used books, and other research materials that are next to incomprehensible for outsiders without me offering a proper introduction of why they matter.
To me it is seed material for the ResearchCity I am asking the world to help build: physical copies that could give a young institution some immediate nutrients to live on, the way a seed’s own stored food feeds a sprout until it grows roots of its own.
Among it are materials I indirectly inherited from James F. Crow, one of the leading population geneticists of the 1960s and 70s, whom I was privileged to know personally. He was once on the forefront of arguing, on population genetic evidence, against the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. After he passed and his research materials were sliced up by all parties who wanted some of it (including the UW-Madison Library archives), there remained some left-overs that nobody wanted apparently. Knowing Jim, as those who knew him called him, I knew that pretty much any of his research was much too important to go ignored, even if funding priorities and interests changed after his passing. So I made a point of taking a close look. To my surprise, some of that material included hard to find reports that he collected as part of his effort to save the world from needlessly dangerous radiation, such as produced by atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. Ultimately, his efforts led to legislation that banned atmospheric tests and his research helped the world understand why it is important to treat all nuclear materials with the necessary care. I like to keep Jim’s research on this for many reasons, including that the actual data matters as part of the historic record and in order to remind me of the unsolved question as to what to do with the outstanding research libraries of outstanding scientists. Sure, every scientist growing up has to build their own library. But every time a researcher dies, a library burns. How many mini-libraries of Alexandria does the world still want to burn? ResearchCity aims to put an end to such waste of innovation potential.
Nuclear testing was then. Let’s not kid ourselves into thinking that we are smarter and safer now. Because the threat of accidental nuclear winter has become ever more real as my RiskyMAD model shows (see Science).
Hence, I hope that I can raise the funds required to guard that legacy of James F Crow, if for no other reason, then to protest the “normalization” that has been going on for some time, which appears to make it ever more “normal” to consider or tolerate the use of nuclear weapons. Those who do may think that they have this beast under control by arguing technicalities like “local use of nukes does not kill humanity”. That’s true, but what they don’t realize is that this only further normalizes the use of nukes until the extinction of humanity has been normalized as “inevitable fate”. Thus those who advocate for nukes may not have realized that they have implicitly entered a covenant with Death itself. They may think that their nukes keep them safe, but they fail to see what Isaiah 28 has been warning about for a long time.
Keeping that batch of Jim’s research materials in isolation will do little to change the course of history. However, guarding it as a symbol of protest against the nuclear roulette that the ten nuclear nations of the world have been playing, that has value if it can be leveraged to inspire a ResearchCity for averting all existential threats. That is why I will not say in which unit Jim’s research materials are stored. The point is not any single treasure; it is that this is the kind of irreplaceable record a careless world lets quietly disappear. It’s a type of “that’s nothing” that keeps turning out to matter. Because if “nothing” is wrong and “nothing” changes, then watch out for the disasters that ensue when “nothing” destroys the world. The RiskyMAD model shows the power of one such type of “nothing”. Who will help me to stop such MAD nothing from blocking the ResearchCity meant to end nuclear roulette and avert all existential threats?
Why I will not simply “buy it back”#
The “cheapest” way out of my storage debt would be to bid on my own units at a knock-down auction price. Or ask someone to do that for me, since I wouldn’t even have the funds to do that right now. I will not do that. It would rip off the storage company for excellent services they really did provide. I did not need one of their people to tell me that this would be a form of fraud. My own conscience is enough. Moreover, this particular company has been extraordinarily gracious: they have bent over backwards to give me time to launch this campaign, even letting me choose the order in which units go up so I would have the longest possible runway. The current 5 units are the lighter ones; there are 6 more packed units coming up for auction that matter even more for ResearchCity (as far as I can reasonably predict). Therefore, I owe that storage company honesty, not a game of loopholes.
And in case there is some “smart” person out there who likes the idea of a ResearchCity along the lines I discuss and who wants to help and therefore decides to come up with a “cost-effective” plan, such as bidding on all my units to ensure winning in order to “give them back to me”, possibly hoping to influence how that ResearchCity might be built. Here is why that will not work. Under the auction contract the units have to be cleared in 3 days. But where ought the research materials then go? - Ah in a new storage unit? I don’t doubt that a large enough crew with enough vans can move the materials in time. What I will doubt is that they can do so without destroying whatever tenuous understanding I still have of what I put where. Thus, even if someone was to save all my materials and then give them back to me “neatly sorted”, it wouldn’t be the same, because I’d have to re-visit the order, which is slower than if I can be there to organize the move. This auction has 5 units, the next one in ca. 2 weeks will have 6 more packed units. Together that is 2000 square feet for 2000 years of Christian thinking I’ve been wrestling with. Any whirlwind of activity can move the materials. However, preserving a usable order is next to impossible without LLoL.
A frog, a beetle, or an eagle, after being quickly moved though a whirling mixer may technically still contain the same molecules. But they’d be dead on arrival.
Moreover, if anyone saves those boxes for me to help make ResearchCity happen, then I’d still want to pay the storage company as part of settling my past debts of which there are many.
Hence, if you really want to save LLoL’s research materials, including his subset of James F Crow’s materials on why nuclear fallout is long-term dangerous, then the most efficient way is to support LLoL’s GoFundMe campaign: buy in to support LLoL’s ResearchCity vision, which starts with #AuditTheMath.
So the honest path may look “boring” and exceedingly narrow: raise enough GoFundMe Buy In to help me pay what I owe, so I can ask the company to call off the auction. I can do that at any point before the respective auction ends.
If you have concerns that GoFundMe may not release your funds in time for me to succeed, please contact me directly at LLoL@balospe.com ASAP.
Why I am telling you this out loud#
I could have kept this quiet. I am choosing not to, and the reason goes to the heart of what ResearchCity is for.
A ResearchCity built to help end the logic of mutually assured destruction cannot, in the end, rest its own safety on guns, guards, and obscurity.
You cannot end the threat of the sword by trusting in a bigger sword. You cannot end the threat of nothing in the darkness by relying for your own safety on obscurity, occultation, and hiding. You cannot end gun violence through better gun training. And you cannot end the threat of nuclear roulette by trusting in a “better” nukes.
The means must match the end. The means are part of the end.
That leaves me only one reliable place to put my trust in for my own safety, for the safety of these materials, and for the safety of everyone who will be working inside or outside of ResearchCity. That place turns out to be a Person, The Person, also known as God, The One, whom I have met as Yah = Allah = Reality as Reality actually is (instead of how I’d like it to be). See the Matheo-b11 study for the basics of this Pan-En-Theology works (God is in all things and God is above all things).
So I am choosing to stand in the open gap, like a canary in a coal mine, except my candidacy is for becoming “Canary in Earth’s Mine”, as I hope to avert accidental nuclear winter for the benefit of everyone. A canary has no defences; that is precisely what makes it useful. If you wantonly shoot the canary because you dislike its song, you also destroy the warning that would have saved you from the gas you can not smell. Here then I am with my research materials and my vision: fully visible, defenceless on purpose. I would rather be the canary in the coal mine than the boss of the mining company — which is why, some time ago, I volunteered for exactly that role (the STa5-CAN canary stadion).
Three ways this can go — and I am at peace with each#
Enough people decide this work is worth about ~$8 and the support arrives in time to pay the company and stop the auction. That is my hope, and the reason for my Buy-In ask. Consider this auction my way of giving back, at last, for the years of quiet grace that allowed my research to prosper. Maybe I am fated to die like Archimedes, following my real quests for real answers until someone cuts me off. Yet I trust I’ve been destined to extend my work as an invitation to help build the ResearchCity that grace has always been pointing toward. If you’d like to make supporting it your way of giving back too, you’re most welcome to buy in.
The auction runs its course, and weeks later — if the ResearchCity vision is actually taking root — someone who knows what they bought shows mercy and donates the materials to it. It’d be a bit of a frog in a mixer situation as explained above, but maybe that is what Reality has ordered. (To be clear, in that case I would still want to settle what I owed the company for their patience.)
Reality decides the world is better off if I lose it all. I cannot rule this out. I’ve gone over this countless times. Reality knows immeasurably better than I do; as the Quran says, Allah knows best.
I can argue all sides. Except my look-ahead capabilities are too limited to decide. If I’m left to my own devices, I know that I am entirely capable of rolling my dung ball confidently forward until some disaster I cannot see will hit me out of nowhere with what I thought was “nothing”. Yes, “nothing” is indeed that powerful. And if I am then responsible for running ResearchCity and I can defend myself with Reality’s help against those mirages from nothing, then I will fall for whatever oversimplifying overcomplicating overreach that structurally inconsistent notion will have thrown at me without me realizing. I can trace how empires ended that way. I have seen the terrifying computational power of “nothing”. I am perfectly capable of building a perfect BABL catastrophe while remaining certain that I am doing good. That’s the curse of Laodicea. I am “of Laodicea” in so many ways. I know of only One who can save me. RealQuestAnswer is one way to render that name. YhowShua, Yas, Jesus, Isa are others. Hence, I must follow Yas’ path as pointed out in e.g. John 12-17.
If losing all my prized research materials is Reality’s way to keep that ultimate disaster from happening, then I do not want to interfere. I am not here to be a hero in my own eyes. I am here to help avert accidental nuclear winter and all other existential disasters by implementing ResearchCity - assuming that this is possible and Reality wants this.
But if my hands are the wrong hands for this seed and I’m the wrong person, then I will rather leave that responsibility in the hands of whomever Reality may have called or may call to get that Job done if indeed there is a point in still saving humanity (which many are doubting).
God knows that I’m likely to be the least qualified candidate for this job. However, I learned to trust that Yah’s abilities exceed my inabilities. Hence, I leave that decision to Yah=Allah=Reality.
Holding the possibility for all three outcomes at once, that is not resignation. It is holding on to true hope while it still exists, while refusing to give into the rounding-error of hopelessness, which is the source of so much despair and misery in the world.
For me holding hope in this way is my best way of saying Thy will be done. I cannot rescue these materials myself anymore than Jesus could raise Yas-self from the dead. Yah had to do it for Yas (in whatever way that happened). I can only roll my prized dung ball, bury it in the soil like a seed, and trust that the growth — if there is to be any — was never mine to force. Now that it is perfectly clear what my preference is (#1) and what other options exists, it is up to Reality to make an executive decision.
The practical ask#
If you want this seed material to live in order to gentle kind reasonably scale up a ResearchCity as LLoL has been envisioning, the most direct help is to
and tell all your friends and enemies about it, so the work to avert accidental nuclear winter can continue to serve everyone - and the debt can be paid before the deadline. The current 5 units are listed publicly at the Bid13 auction site, so if you want to check that this is real, you can follow the live auction:
The five individual units in this first batch:
The timing is brutally tight, and I want to be honest about it. This first batch closes around Monday, June 1, 2026, and I can only call it off by paying before it ends. Because banks do not clear transfers over the weekend (May 30–31), the money realistically has to be in my account by Friday, May 29. Ordinary transfers — including GoFundMe’s own payouts, which take several business days — will almost certainly be too slow for this first deadline. So if you want to help meet the June-1 wall specifically, please contact me directly at LLoL@balospe.com and I will share the fastest route (such as a same-day bank transfer). The GoFundMe Buy-In is the right home for the second batch (~mid-June) and for the ongoing work.
Note that the other 6 units will go through a similar auction about two weeks later.
Also, obviously, my research materials are of absolutely no use if they stay in storage where they are now. It was simply the best way I saw to save them from becoming landfill or book-shelf-fillers. Paying the storage company forever will not construct ResearchCity; hence, after securing the safety of the materials, the immediately next question will be what else will have to be done in scale-up Stage 0 in order to prepare for ResearchCity scale-up Stage 1. All of these steps will depend on funding and me being able to pay my current and past bills. Hence, the need for the widest possible Buy in.
If you would rather or also help in ways that involve no money at all, the Buy in without money transfer page lists options. Simply telling other people who might care – that is initially likely one of the best and most important options.
Yah=Allah=Reality so loved the world that whosoever trusts the logic of real quests for real answers as the best way to life will not be obliterated by mirages from nothing, but shall live from Jubilee to Jubilee – after discovering what proper, real Jubilees are.
Here is my dung ball, out in the open, for all and Yah to see. I am still rolling, hoping Yah will arise and scatter the mirages from nothing that war against Yah’s ResearchCity, ZoE for ZION of Earth. See its 4 State flags here. Of these the most appropriate state-flag for the current state of affairs is the KO-flag that represents a clear diagnosis, albeit without knowing yet how to best solve the bug detected. That and more is implied by this KO flag from 2024-07-04:
KO Flag of ZION of Earth, indicating “problem defined, working on a solution”.#