Present Day, March 2026
I want to be precise about what I am and what I am not, because the word prophet has been used about me in ways that I need to correct.
A prophet is someone who receives information about the future from a source that is not available to ordinary observation. What I do is not that. I have no access to information that is not available to careful, sustained, historically informed observation. The difference between me and a good historian is not that I have access to something they do not. The difference is that I have been doing the observation continuously for five centuries without the interruptions that death and institutional change impose on historians who work within academic careers and lifetimes.
When I say that the geometry of collapse is predictable, I am not saying I know what will happen. I am saying I recognize a configuration of conditions that has, in my direct experience, reliably produced a particular range of outcomes. This is the same thing a physician does when they recognize a set of symptoms as belonging to a known pattern. The physician is not prophesying. The physician is applying accumulated pattern recognition to a new instance of a familiar configuration.
I am a witness. The distinction matters because prophets claim authority. Witnesses only claim the accuracy of what they have seen. The testimony is not a command. It is an account. May 22. The account will be delivered.