Princeton University just killed a 133-year-old honor system, which allowed students to take exams unproctored, because too many students were cheating with AI.

One of the most prestigious universities in the world — an institution whose entire brand rests on cultivating intellectual excellence, character, and self-discipline — has concluded that the scaffolding that holds its exam system together no longer functions in the age of ChatGPT.

A 2025 survey found that more than 1 in 4 Princeton seniors admitted to using AI to cheat. Roughly half said they knew of honor code violations. And that’s at Princeton — meaning the actual situation across the broader education system is likely much, much worse.

Needless to say, this is bigger than “Pffft — kids these days!” or technology changing classroom dynamics. It points to something deeper: the collapse of trust in institutions that once depended on internalized norms rather than external enforcement.

The irony is almost too perfect. Students are taking on life-altering debt to obtain elite credentials while increasingly outsourcing the intellectual labor required to earn them. Then, many will graduate into a labor market where the same AI systems they used to cheat are rapidly consuming the entry-level white-collar jobs their degree was supposed to secure in the first place.

Debt-financed credentialism meets automated cognition.

For years, the “worst case” climate scenario, the one behind countless headlines about earth becoming uninhabitable, mass extinction events, and civilization-ending warming, was treated as the default future.

It was a very useful tool to scare an entire generation into believing they were inheriting a dying planet. It spawned activists like Greta Thunberg and the Extinction Rebellion movement, the media had a field day with it, and a certain brand of politicians used it to curry favor and create policy.

Now, climate scientists are retiring the scenario, admitting it was never really plausible. It assumed exploding population growth, endless coal expansion, and virtually no meaningful technological shift toward cleaner energy — in other words, a world that does not resemble the reality we inhabit.

The so-called RCP8.5 scenario didn’t just shape climate science, it normalized a culture of permanent emergency, amping up the hysteria (to use a Spinal Tap reference) to 11. Armed with RCP8.5, every problem was existential and every demand for skepticism was treated like heresy. The hypothetical modeling became the eschatological doctrine of the high-priests of climate and end-time prophecy for the laptop class.

Turns out the world may not be ending quite as advertised. But once a narrative gets entrenched it’s very hard to dismantle. It’s also worth remembering that this is what the future looks like — Silicon Valley is betting on technocrats displacing the political system with an unelected, unaccountable expert class. We saw what this did with a doctor who headed the COVID response in America; consider this a second example of what happens when the grip of hysteria fomented by experts is revised downward. No one is held accountable for the costs of the error, and real science dies slowly from yet one more papercut.

Late-stage societies often look bizarrely decadent and financially stressed at the same time. People cut back on groceries, delay children, live with roommates into their 30s — then queue overnight for a luxury collaboration object manufactured to create artificial scarcity and social buzz. Rome had bread and circuses. We have riots for Swatch watches.

Swatch announced its newest collaboration — with watch maker Audemars Piguet. The watch is called Royal Pop, comes in eight colors, and costs around $400. Potential re-sellers hoping to score a few and flip them for thousands of dollars have been queuing up in places like New York, London, and Bangkok.

Those gamblers may be sorely mistaken — after all, we expect to see these hit Ebay and other marketplaces for a significant mark-up to capture the initial excitement. But honestly, the Royal Pop pocket watch feels more like infantilized luxury for people who want to cosplay eccentric aristocracy while standing in line at the mall. All that’s missing is a monocle, top hat and cane — a modern, Mr. Peanut aesthetic!

Beneath all of this is a deeper psychological shift: when the future feels uncertain, people increasingly optimize for the present — instant gratification. Why save patiently for a stable middle-class future that no longer feels guaranteed when you can at least participate in the spectacle now? Which creates one of the greatest contradictions of this era: people simultaneously insisting the economy is collapsing while stampeding each other in shopping malls to buy a $400 plastic watch on a lanyard.

Civilization may be fraying, but the merch drop starts at 9 am sharp.

A chilling glimpse of our dystopian future came this week via a local news story out of Atlanta, Georgia.

Residents of a neighborhood in the city’s northwest say dozens of self-driving Waymo cars end up endlessly circling their cul-de-sac.

There’s something almost darkly comic about the image: empty robot taxis looping through a suburb where they don’t belong, unable to comprehend why they are there or find a way out.

The best part of the story is when neighborhood parents put out a plastic “Kid Alert” warning sign, which effectively confused the ‘advanced’ AI vehicles into gridlock.

The official metrics say the system is working — Waymo points to “500,000 weekly trips” and improved safety statistics — but the lived experience of ordinary people feels increasingly surreal and invasive. Parents watching empty cars orbit their street at 6 am are not experiencing “innovation.” They’re experiencing loss of agency over the physical space where they live.

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On Tuesday, after just two days, President Trump hit the pause button on “Project Freedom,” the US effort to secure ship movement through the Strait of Hormuz. In a Truth Social post, he said Pakistan had requested the temporary halt because “Great Progress has been made toward a Complete and Final Agreement with Representatives of Iran.”

On Wednesday, NBC News reported the pause really happened because Saudi Arabia and Kuwait refused to allow the US military to use its bases and airspace to carry out the operation, according to two unnamed US officials.

By Saturday, Trump was threatening to not only restart but expand “Project Freedom” if Iran doesn’t agree to a deal.

“We’ll go a different route if everything doesn’t get signed up, buttoned up,” Trump told reporters at the White House. “We may go back to ‘Project Freedom’ if things don’t happen, but it’ll be ‘Project Freedom Plus,’ meaning ‘Project Freedom’ plus other things.”

Welcome to the era of huckster diplomacy. Now loaded with even more huckster goodness.

The State Department made an announcement this week that it will start enforcing a law that revokes passports from parents who owe a significant amount of child support, preventing them from “neglecting their legal and moral obligations to their children.”

Some people see this as a long-overdue enforcement of a law that’s been on the books since 1996, with the passage of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. Others see it as symbolic theater, since many parents deeply behind on child support don’t have passports to revoke in the first place.

What’s interesting isn’t so much the child support debate as the mechanism: a government-issued privilege tied to behavioral compliance.

Today it’s child support arrears over $2,500. What might it be tomorrow: Tax debt? Unpaid parking fines? Wrongthink posted online? Failure to comply with some future mandate for the “public good”?

The significance here is that the architecture already exists: access, mobility, and participation increasingly linked to whether you are considered compliant inside the system. Control rarely gets introduced all at once. It arrives incrementally, wrapped in causes most people agree with.

That’s how ‘social credit’ systems become normalized — not through dystopian announcements, but through what the government deems a “commonsense tool.”

Keep an eye on this space. There is absolutely more to come.

In our Collapse Clock guide, we laid out seven signals that start to flash before we see a full-on breakdown. Sign #4 is to watch for the elite exodus — that moment when the rich and powerful start fleeing their jobs and homes for “safer” jurisdictions.

A Los Angeles-based artist and coder named Kyle McDonald just made a tool to make doing that a lot easier. Using publicly available flight data to track the locations of private and business charter jets, the “Apocalypse Early Warning System” looks at how many planes are flying at one time compared to a baseline and rates it on a scale of 1 to 5. If the level spikes, McDonald’s system can warn subscribers by text or email. The current level is a 1 out of 5.

“My general goal here is to give people that kind of hacker mentality to be able to look at what’s happening around us and not just see noise, but to actually see some of those patterns,” McDonald told the Washington Post recently.

He says he also wants to point out the humor (or absurdity!) of our situation — “that we’re locked in a battle between the ultra-wealthy and the working class,” — but also remind people that all is not lost. If the tracker signals a warning, he says it could give people a limited amount of time to make emergency plans of their own.

We are convinced, now more than ever, given all the tools, early warning systems, and transparency available to everyone without hindrance and little-to-no cost, no one should be unprepared for what is coming down the pike.

An 86-year-old American man who refers to himself as “Cliff from Las Vegas” has apparently been showing up around Greenland offering locals $200,000 to sign a petition supporting US annexation of the island. Nothing says “rules-based international order” quite like grandpa with a clipboard freelancing foreign policy out of a Nuuk taxi.

“I’m trying to give the Greenlandic people an opportunity,” Cliff Stanley told a Greenlandic newspaper. “It’s up to the people themselves. It’s not my choice.”

Mr. Stanley told the paper he was working independently and not at the behest of the Trump administration. Still, Greenlandic police are investigating the mystery man, while the prime minister has publicly rebuked the stunt on Facebook.

Is it just us, or is the fact he comes from Las Vegas ironic to the max? After all, he’s asking Greenlanders to gamble with their future. You can’t make this stuff up — what a time to be alive!

shared the best take on the Hantavirus we’ve seen so far. Nothing more needs to be said.

bad cattitude

hantaviral memes

so, look, “they’re doing the thing again” and trying to talk up some new monkeypox upon our houses. a number of people have asked “are you going to dig into this hantavirus data?” and the answer is …

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8 days ago · 166 likes · 61 comments · el gato malo

“You gotta know when to hold’em. Know when to fold’em,” croons a raspy-voiced Kenny Rogers. Fact is, that’s sound advice because gambling days are here again.

Warren Buffett says the market is now “a church with a casino attached” — and judging by the rise of prediction markets and soldiers allegedly turning classified military operations into side hustles, the casino has introduced velvet ropes and bottle service.

Buffett’s famous old investing advice was to study a business, buy value, and wait. Now the action is faster, dumber, and dressed up as ‘market innovation.’ When people are betting on tomorrow’s options, coups, raids, elections, and geopolitical surprises, we are no longer allocating capital to create wealth — we’re just monetizing instability.

Maybe that’s the real tell: a serious civilization builds wealth by producing things; a nervous one starts betting on which part of the machinery breaks next.

In the April 26th edition of Notes from the edge of civilization, we brought you a quick vignette about Doug Wilson and his company, Ursa Ag. He’s the guy building low-tech, repair-it-yourself agricultural tractors out of Alberta, Canada. We asked you, dear readers, if you wanted to see an interview with Wilson on the Collapse Life podcast.

You said “Yes please,” and so we got to work.

Wilson will be in the studio this week! And you’ll see his interview on our regular Saturday morning Uncensored Video feed.

We’re excited to talk to him because there’s so much at stake right now. Farming has been badly beaten up by government regulation and insane requirements for financing and equipment, not to mention the terrible returns farmers receive for planting and harvesting mono-crops.

We don’t want to overstate it, but Wilson’s new line of tractors is a beacon of hope that throws the proverbial middle-finger to an industry that’s become more about banking and business suits than about feeding our families.

If you have specific questions or topics you want us to cover, email us with WILSON in the subject line at info@collapselife.com.

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Empty playgrounds, cancelled bus routes, ghost cities. Most policymakers would call that kind of population decline a slow-motion structural crisis.

Boris Johnson calls it a “blessed relief” — a self-correcting system that eases humanity’s burden on the planet. In a Daily Mail opinion piece, he writes:

What we are seeing is not a crisis, but a sign that the human population is organically self-regulating, seeking a better balance with Nature, a better quality of life; a recognition among other things that per capita productivity matters much more than brute national productivity.

It always makes our skin crawl when members of the parasite class, like Johnson, sing the praises of a depopulated world and say it’s a feature, not a bug.

BoJo says governments should stay out of people’s reproductive choices and stop nagging people to “have more babies for the nation.” On that point, we agree. It’s nobody’s business how many children a family decides to have, if any.

“The doom-mongers can’t have it both ways,” he says. “They can’t simultaneously complain that machines are making human workers unnecessary while also demanding that we import or create more human beings to do the work.”

He argues for tighter border control and reducing immigration flows, framing it as a chance for “assimilation, acculturation — and frankly — miscegenation,” meaning he’s explicitly advocating intermixing between existing populations and immigrants so that, over time, there’s a shared identity. Ah! Now you see where this is heading…

That narrative is already being heavily pushed in the UK. Youtuber Despot of Antrim analyzed more than 300 British ads and found that mixed race couples featuring black men and white women are becoming the norm. See for yourself:

When the same people tell you fewer babies is a relief, fewer newcomers is a necessity, and the future lies in blending whoever remains into a single, malleable whole, you should be worried. Very worried.

A Department of War press release on Friday announced that the government has entered into agreements with SpaceX, OpenAI, Google, NVIDIA, Reflection, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle to provide infrastructure and AI tools in support of drone warfare, intelligence synthesis, logistics, and mission planning.

Remember when people who served in the military were referred to as ‘service members,’ emphasizing actual men and women performing a service to the nation? Now they’re called “warfighters” — a term that feels less like a person and more like a role in a system.

As this press release makes clear, that’s exactly what’s changing. The pitch is efficiency: AI surfaces the data, prioritizes the threats, suggests the action. The human is still there, but increasingly downstream of the thinking. By the time a decision reaches them, it’s already been framed, filtered, and narrowed by the machine.

When AI can compress months of analysis into days, hours, or even minutes, you haven’t just saved time… you’ve effectively eliminated the need for the kind of deep decision making that used to justify having a human in the first place. First the system assists the analyst, then it guides the analyst. Then, as we are seeing in so many other industries, it quietly makes the analyst redundant.

What’s left is a warfighter: not a strategist, not a decision-maker, not even necessarily a human. Just an operator who approves what the system overlord has already decided must be approved.

And all the while, Sam and Elon and Satya and the rest of the technocratniks (I’m pretty sure we just invented that word!) keep building the systems and billing for it, one contract at a time. The profits… oh, the profits!

The market’s gone hockey stick, and Peter Grandich calls that a flashing red light.

In a Friday tweet now pushing three million views, Grandich calls this the “parabolic melt-up” phase — the part of the cycle where prices detach from reality, euphoria takes the wheel, and money piles in just in time to get trapped. His simple warning: this isn’t the time to buy, it’s time to think about heading for the exits.

When things do turn, and they will, you won’t be getting a calendar invite. Witness the birth of another classic Grandich line: “better to be a year too early than a day too late.”

As we promised recently, there’s an announcement coming — a special offer for paid subscribers to get direct access to Grandich’s thinking about this very kind of thing. We’ll have more details on Tuesday.

Congratulations Peter!

Nobody wants to walk into church alone, so young New Yorkers have found a distinctly Gen Z solution to the problem: a “meetup.”

According to The Wall Street Journal:

For the past months, two 20-somethings, Anthony Gross and Kate De Petro, have hosted “Pizza to Pews,” a pre-Mass meetup at The Pizza Box nearby. More than 100 young adults showed up the first week; by the third, it was 200. Some drive in from Long Island; others take the train from Boston. Then, like a field trip, the group walks to church together.

These young people pack evening mass so tightly that apparently latecomers have to stand in the foyer.

Clergy may interpret this as a form of spiritual awakening, while sociologists simply chalk it up to loneliness. Dating apps can see it as a market opportunity. But the collapse-era translation is simpler: when careerism meets nihilism, and algorithmic “community” leaves people starving, they eventually go looking for something deeper.

And yes, some are probably just there to meet a nice Catholic girl or boy. But civilization has certainly witnessed worse organizing principles than that.

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Not all that long ago, the Ukrainian flag ‘moment’ was a distinct, binary morality play you could perform from the comfort of your front porch.

Hang the blue and yellow colors and you signaled to the world your alignment with the ‘right side.’ You could move on with your day smugly. After all, there was no real cost, no real complexity, but a rather attractive splash of color and a quiet social statement: I stand with Ukraine.

Well, nothing is ever quite that simple, is it? It'll be interesting to see if people start putting up green and gold flags to signify their support for whatever 'Donnyland' is. According to the New York Times, Ukrainian negotiators have proposed lending President Donald Trump’s name to a 40-by-50 mile stretch along the northeastern section of Donetsk. All this in an effort to get the Trump administration’s support in pushing back against Russia’s territorial demands.

The Times writes:

That a name evocative of Disneyland has been applied to a depopulated, decimated swath of Ukrainian coal-and-steel country could appear jarring as Europe’s deadliest fighting since World War II continues to rage. But it also reflects a global reality in which governments appeal to Mr. Trump’s vanity in order to get American might on their side.

One Ukrainian negotiator apparently used ChatGPT to create a flag and a national anthem for Donnyland.

The dissonance is hard to miss. On one hand, a war is still grinding through what’s left of eastern Ukraine; on the other, there’s the creeping logic that power responds best to flattery, branding, and the promise of legacy baked into an AI-created flag. Somewhere between those poles, diplomacy starts looking like a licensing deal cooked up on Shark Tank. That’s got to be better than a Nobel Peace Prize, right?

According to a poll highlighted in The Telegraph, half of young Britons (aged 16–29) say they would “under no circumstances” go to war for the United Kingdom, while only 38% would consider it, “under some circumstances.”

That sounds shocking until you read the rest of the data, which is less about flags and more about math: collapsing expectations, stagnant wages, housing out of reach, and a growing belief that the system isn’t built for them. This is what a broken social contract looks like when it finally gets quantified.

For decades, the implicit deal was simple — you contribute, you comply, and in return, your life improves. Maybe not immediately, but over time. That belief alone carried entire generations through war, austerity, and upheaval. Now that belief is eroding in real time. The same poll shows the number of young people expecting a better life than their parents has nearly halved in a year – from 63% to just 36%.

So when someone asks, “Would you fight for your country?” what they’re really asking is: do you believe the current system is worth preserving? And increasingly, people are giving the simple response: no.

What’s striking in the data is the sentiments of young people tied directly to material conditions: housing inaccessibility, low wages, job insecurity, and anxiety about the impact of AI. Even the framing from the researchers reflects this. The director of the John Smith Centre, the source of the survey, put it bluntly: “why fight for a country that isn’t fighting for you?”

There are still signs of attachment to broader civic ideas. Majorities say respecting laws, speaking English, and holding citizenship matter for being “truly British,” and more than half believe immigration has improved their communities. But those views sit alongside a growing sense that the system itself is not delivering fair outcomes.

Taken together, the findings point less to a rejection of identity or responsibility, and more to a loss of confidence in the structures that are supposed to sustain them. Would it be a stretch to call this the early innings of collapse?

Maybe “fighting back” looks less like protesting, and more like opting out — one machine at a time.

That’s what leapt to mind when we read about what one Canadian company, Ursa Ag, is doing. It isn’t revolutionary in the loud, headline-grabbing sense. In fact, it’s almost boring: take a tractor with a Cummins 12-valve engine, strip out the electronics, make it repairable by anyone with a wrench and some common sense, and sell it for half the price of the End User License Agreement software-locked alternatives. No subscriptions, no diagnostic codes you need permission to read, no dealer monopoly on repairs… no brainer.

For years, farmers have been dragged into the same trap as everyone else — you don’t really own what you buy. Companies like John Deere turned tractors into rolling computers, where a sensor glitch can sideline a six-figure machine until an authorized technician shows up with a laptop and a bill. The fight over “right to repair” is rooted in fields where downtime means lost harvests.

So when a small Alberta-based outfit says, “here’s a tractor you can actually fix,” it’s less nostalgia and more countermeasure. A form of resistance that doesn’t ask permission, and sidesteps the system rather than trying to reform it.

We must recognize that large systems won’t get dismantled by tackling them head-on. The better strategy is to erode them at the edges. Find workarounds; choose older tech, simpler tools, parallel systems. This is how to restore a small amount of control. A tractor without electronics becomes a statement about who gets to decide when your work stops.

If enough people start trading convenience for control, maybe that will be what “fighting back” looks like for now. No flags or slogans… just less reliance and fewer points of failure.

Let us know if you’d like to see an interview on the Collapse Life podcast with Ursa Ag owner, Doug Wilson. We’ll try and get him into the studio to talk about the irony of ‘undisrupting’ an industry by going back to basics. Leave a comment and we’ll follow up.

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The days of booking a last minute seat, throwing a few clothes in a carry-on and jetting off to the other side of the globe may be over — for good. “We are not going back to where we were,” said Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency, last week.

Birol warned that Europe has “maybe six weeks or so” of remaining jet fuel supplies, and said flight cancellations could be coming “soon” if oil supplies remain blocked by the war in Iran.

Airlines are already cutting flights, trimming marginal routes, and passing on costs to passengers through higher fares and fuel surcharges, turning what used to be routine travel into a fragile, supply-constrained system.

At the same time, even if your flight still exists, simply holding a passport is no longer enough to guarantee entry. Increasingly complex rules — like the six-month passport validity requirement, proof of onward travel, visa waivers, and new biometric border systems — mean travelers can be denied boarding or entry over technicalities many don’t know about. (h/t to for sharing that one!)

In other words, the infrastructure of global mobility is tightening from both ends. Energy shocks — whether you believe they’re self-inflicted or carefully planned — are limiting where planes can go, and bureaucratic requirements are redefining who gets to move freely and who doesn’t.

Turns out freedom of movement was a glitch in the system, and now it’s quietly being ‘fixed.’

At a Pentagon briefing this week, War Secretary Pete Hegseth said the US military was “locked and loaded” to strike Iran’s power plants at the push of a button.

The only thing not fully loaded, it seems, are the meal trays of the servicemen and women expected to carry out those orders.

Photos from two frontline US warships — the USS Abraham Lincoln and USS Tripoli — show trays that are paltry at best: a scoop of shredded meat and a pale, flaccid tortilla, or a few boiled carrots with a dry patty and a slab of gray protein. It’s almost as if the Soylent Green corporation secured the food service contract for these canteens!

Descriptions have emerged of sailors eating when they can, splitting portions when someone gets lucky, and watching supplies stretch thinner the longer deployments drag on.

The official line is that everything is fully stocked — 30+ days of food on board, no problem. But when the most sophisticated navy on earth starts looking like it’s running a rationing experiment in real time, it raises uncomfortable questions about sustainability, morale, and how long “best in the world” can run on cafeteria trays that look like an afterthought.

Nothing says ‘Make America Great Again’ like a superpower that can blockade a coastline but can’t provide those who serve with a healthy lunch.

Earlier this week, we looked at how American drivers are handling pain at the pump — they’re not driving less, they’re just stopping more often to put $20 in the tank. Think of it as budgetary sleight of hand.

It turns out folks are applying similar logic in the grocery aisle. The Wall Street Journal reports that affluent Americans are choosing to ‘reallocate’ instead of cutting back — substituting Aldi for Whole Foods, hitting the dollar store for household essentials — so that their conspicuous consumption habits… the skydiving, weekend splurges at the spa, and Instagram-worthy trips to Japan can stay intact.

From the WSJ story:

Joshua Halliburton, a 33-year-old who works in information security, started getting fed up with the prices at the Whole Foods near his apartment in Brooklyn, N.Y., in the past few years. When an Aldi opened across the street from his home in November, he was so excited for a cheaper grocery option that he attended the grand opening and received a piece of ribbon from the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

He now visits the discount chain nearly every day for household staples like cheese, eggs, yogurt and snacks. He is willing to wait in long checkout lines for lower prices. Meanwhile, he has continued to spend on travel, taking trips to California and Japan in the past year.

“Paying four dollars for a tub of yogurt feels right,” Halliburton said. “Ten dollars for a tub of Chobani just doesn’t make sense.”

In other words, they’re economizing on the boring stuff so the fun doesn’t have to stop. Seems like the $30 million free city-owned grocery store the Mayor of New York promised can’t open soon enough.

If there is any doubt we are in narrative warfare, this past week proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt.

The Speaker of Iran’s parliament, Dr. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, pointed out in a tweet on Friday that all of last week’s claims by the US President are essentially, bullsh*t.

۱- رئیس جمهور آمریکا در یک ساعت هفت ادعا مطرح کرد که هر هفت ادعا کذب است.
۲- با این دروغگویی‌ها در جنگ پیروز نشدند و حتما در مذاکره هم راه به جایی نخواهند برد.
۳- با ادامهٔ محاصره، تنگهٔ هرمز باز نخواهد ماند.

— محمدباقر قالیباف | MB Ghalibaf (@mb_ghalibaf) April 17, 2026

Loosely translated, he said:

1. “The US president made seven claims in one hour — all seven are false.”

2. “They did not win this war through these lies, and they certainly won’t get anywhere in negotiations either.”

3. “If the blockade continues, the Strait of Hormuz will not remain open.”

None of this posturing is surprising — It’s called the fog of war for a reason! But the tactic is to flood the zone (informationally speaking) with fast-paced news that moves markets. X user, Data Driven Stocks, puts it better than we ever can:

As part of the narrative warfare (and psyop) we are witnessing, it’s the stealthy transfer of wealth that is perhaps the most troubling — from those who still believe the headlines and still trust their eyes, to those who know what is actually happening behind the scenes and are enjoying the ability to front run and take full advantage of their position.

Are we calling malfeasance or fraud?

Well, just know that in the words of the US Commander in Chief (and as reported in the Epoch Times):

President Donald Trump… expects his administration to begin releasing documents “very soon” related to extraterrestrial life and unexplained phenomena.

That’s right… Oh look. A squirrel!

Just a reminder not to look at what’s happening through the lens of 1945. If you do that, you will focus on the main stage but miss the more important things that are happening on the smaller stages all around. Stay sharp, friends!

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According to Jonathan Alpert, a psychotherapist and author, Americans are showing a growing willingness to identify with villains.

He points to examples like Oscar winner One Battle After Another and stage experiments like Luigi: The Musical, both tapping into an appetite to treat wrongdoing as something to understand — even excuse — rather than condemn. The crime hasn’t changed but the framing has.

In an opinion piece in The Hill, Alpert argues this is what happens when trust in institutions collapses. The system feels so rigged that the rebel starts to look like the only honest character left. Big, unfixable problems — healthcare, inequality, bureaucracy — get distilled into something simpler: a CEO, a billionaire, a public figure. Anger finds a face, moral lines blur, and “they had it coming” slips in through the side door.

The result is a culture that doesn’t openly endorse wrongdoing but keeps finding better reasons to understand it — until that understanding starts to feel a lot like permission.

Civilization doesn’t collapse because people forget right from wrong. But, it does begin to wobble when people default to excusing why wrong might be justified. Eventually, we land at wrong is right.

By all accounts, it seems Americans are cutting back everywhere, eating fewer dinners out, delaying big purchases, and pulling back on things like gym memberships. But $22 smoothies? Inexplicably, people are still lining up for these frosty treats.

According to two marketing professionals who wrote an opinion on the website The Conversation, this behavior isn’t a contradiction. It’s actually coping.

When people feel locked out of big decisions like housing, healthcare, insurance, and property taxes, they look for control in smaller ones. The professors call it “compensatory consumption.” Everyone else calls it splurging on a $22 drink to feel like you still have some personal agency.

What makes this moment different is the branding. Smoothies from Erewhon, the ultra-premium, certified organic grocery chain based in Los Angeles, aren’t just indulgences; they’re moral statements that signal you’re someone who cares about real ingredients, sustainability, and wellness.

Slurping one isn’t just a splurge, it’s a form of healing. Or so people think.

Plus, thanks to the magic of social media, you can turn it into a performative act that everyone can see — hashtags and all. Spending too much money on a designer handbag in these times might raise eyebrows, but downing a superfood smoothie signals how virtuous and disciplined you are.

Let’s call it what it is: economic theater. People feel worse, spend more carefully, but justify certain things more cleverly. So that $22 smoothie is all about buying a small, photogenic sense of control for social street cred, while everything else quietly slips out of reach.

Neither rain, nor sleet, nor snow… nor your pension.

Nothing says “don’t worry, everything’s fine” like quietly skipping pension payments to “preserve liquidity.” The United States Postal Service has announced it will temporarily stop making employer contributions to the Federal Employees Retirement System — a move framed as routine cash conservation during a “severe financial crisis.”

Roughly $200 million every two weeks will now stay in USPS coffers, freeing up about $2.5 billion this fiscal year. Employees still contribute. Retirees are told there’s no “immediate” risk. And everyone is encouraged to focus on the word temporary, as if that word has a flawless track record in government finance.

(That word is almost as good as the Fed’s use of the word 'transitory’ for inflation.)

The logic is straightforward: better to keep the mail moving today than fully fund tomorrow’s obligations. Which is another way of saying the future just got repriced.

Pensions are only as solid as the cash flow behind them. And when liquidity gets tight, even the most “well-funded” systems start looking… flexible. Perhaps even fungible.

Maybe USPS retirees will be given the option of getting their pensions paid in ‘forever’ stamps.

The running tab on Operation Epic Burn Rate Fury is already somewhere between $16 and $23 billion, according to an analysis from the American Enterprise Institute. That bill includes damaged infrastructure, lost hardware, and repairs to assets like the USS Gerald R. Ford (which, in a twist no screenwriter would have dared pitch, experienced downtime due to a laundry fire. Man the Tide pods!)

According to Axios, damaged or destroyed materiel include: one Lockheed Martin F-35A costing about $85 million; one Boeing E-3 Sentry costing between $300 million and $500 million; and one RTX AN/TPY-2 radar, which typically costs between $300 million and over $1 billion per unit. The losses don’t stop there:

• Three Boeing F-15E Strike Eagles (roughly $90–$97 million per unit, per 2023–2024 estimates, with fully combat-ready configurations reaching up to $117 million)

• Multiple Boeing KC-135 Stratotankers (roughly $70–$80 million per unit)

• Multiple General Atomics MQ-9 Reapers (around $30-$32 million per unit, though some estimates range from $16 million to over $56 million, depending on the specific variant, sensor payload, and inclusion of ground control systems)

Then there are the human costs, which don’t fit neatly into an Axios graphic: thousands of civilians killed and injured in Iran and Israel, millions of people displaced across the region, more than a dozen US service members killed, and over 200 injured (although some reports suggest those official numbers may be significantly undercounted).

As American hero, Major General Smedley Butler, summed it up: “All wars are bankers’ wars.”

There is serious money to be made in bloodshed and broken infrastructure.

Which leads us to an uncomfortable question: if there is a genuine effort being made to end this war and save innocent lives on all sides, including military lives, why is there a concerted effort to assassinate anyone in Iranian leadership who appears open to de-escalation?

Among the most recent targets was former foreign minister, Kamal Kharazi. He’s not dead yet, but he’s pretty badly injured. And he was back-channelling through a Pakistani intermediator to Vice President JD Vance to try and negotiate some sort of ceasefire.

So it’s worth asking: cui bono? Who profits?

War is good for banks. It’s good for the Military Industrial Complex. And it’s great for governments, especially fiscally broke governments that need a unifying narrative and a reason to rally the public. It’s bad for pretty much everyone else.

Suffice it to say, somewhere, in some meeting room, the people with their hands on the levers of power (and marionette strings) have decided this particular gravy train isn’t supposed to stop.

A political party doesn’t always need policy platforms or campaign slogans to tell people what it stands for. Sometimes all it takes is a series of performative rituals to suck all the oxygen out of the room.

Just look at the widely circulating videos from the Canadian New Democratic Party’s leadership convention in Winnipeg last week.

Delegates were reportedly issued color-coded “equity cards,” each tied to a specific identity category — race, gender, sexuality, indigenous status — which could be used to move ahead in the speaking queue. In theory, the system was designed to ensure broader representation in debate. In practice, it seems to have turned identity into a kind of competitive sport.

At one point, competing claims between a “gender equity” card and a “race equity” card became the entire substance of an exchange. Elsewhere, a speaker drew applause for addressing foreign policy, stating Canada should not be drawn into the war in Iran, only to be reprimanded for misgendering the chairperson. You can’t make this stuff up!

On X, users dubbed the event the “oppression Olympics,” a sort of bureaucratic decathlon where the main event is competitive credentialing. Others called it a “clown show,” which feels like a tiny bit of an understatement.

And then there were literal “race card” jokes — because when you introduce actual, physical cards tied to identity, you’re not exactly leaving much room for subtlety.

God help us.

If there was ever any doubt that banksters rule the world, here’s your confirmation: Wall Street just had a banner year.

According to the New York State Comptroller:

Wall Street’s securities industry bonus pool reached a record $49.2 billion in 2025, up 9% from the previous year, while the average bonus rose 6% to $246,900, according to New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli’s annual estimate. The increases reflect a rise of more than 30% in Wall Street’s profits, which totaled $65.1 billion in 2025.

Bankers make money gambling with other people’s money. For doing that, just the average Wall Street bonus is the equivalent of about four median American salaries — around $62,000 per year in 2025 — paid out in one shot, on top of an already generous base.

In a recent Collapse Life podcast, Peter Grandich talked about a “K-shaped” economy — where one segment of society rockets upward while the other slides in the opposite direction. If you’re looking at those numbers and wondering what exactly justifies a bonus worth four times your annual pay, join the club. The question most of us in the disappearing middle class are wondering is, how do we prevent ourselves from slipping onto the bottom arm of the ‘K’?

The moment that best sums up the insanity, however, came during a televised Cabinet meeting, when the president went off on a seemingly unscripted tangent about how much he loves Sharpie markers.

(As one commenter on the Associated Press story said: “Sounds like grandpa took a long cruise on the USS Sea Nile yesterday.”)

Trump explained that the White House once used “beautiful” pens that supposedly cost $1,000 each, which offended his inner fiscal watchdog when he handed them out at bill signings. So replacing those with $5 black Sharpies, featuring the White House logo in gold print, saved a tremendous amount of money.

Everyone knows, fiscal prudence is much needed at this time of soaring national debt. Naturally, the massive savings from $1,000 pens allows for more money to be directed to the military-industrial complex, which desperately needs the cash influx. Genius!, Mr. President.

Bad news for the bug-eating evangelists: the public would apparently rather keep its dignity. The insect food industry, once sold as the righteous future, is now buckling under bankruptcies, stalled projects, and the minor inconvenience that people do not actually want grubs for dinner. We’d love to think these clever Collapse Life t-shirts are what did the industry in, but really it’s just a matter of mathematics.

Vox reports:

Of the 20 or so largest insect farming startups, almost a quarter have gone belly up in recent years, including the very largest, Ÿnsect, which ceased operations in December.

It may be one of the only instances where higher energy costs are actually having a positive impact on the food system: apparently it takes a lot of fuel to keep these ‘farms’ warm enough for insects to be raised in Europe and North America.

Former WEF head, Klaus Schwab, said: “Eat ze bugs” so chances that we’ve avoided them as a future food source are pretty slim. What is obvious is that it feels like the elites got their sequence wrong: Plow massive amount of resources into data centers FIRST, then, as you enslave people in the digital gulag, use the residual heat from those data centers for food bug creation… then you can then feed a desperate, starving population. Pretty obvious, no?

Some industries lobby for subsidies or tax breaks. The exorcists, apparently, are lobbying for an increased headcount.

In a recent meeting with the Pope, the International Association of Exorcists asked the pontiff for his help to ensure every diocese has at least one trained priest ready to deal with what they describe as a surge in cases tied to occult practices and “extraordinary action of the devil.”

In many ways, this reads like any other institutional memo: demand is rising, the workforce is unprepared, and the solution is standardized training, better oversight, and global coverage. What makes it harder to dismiss is the context.

Western culture has systematically dismantled organized religion and outsourced its spiritual needs instead to astrology apps, psychedelic therapy, and in some cases actual worship of the devil. When even exorcists are talking about capacity issues, it’s a reminder that whatever is breaking right now isn’t just economic or political. Something much deeper is fraying — and we’d venture to guess exorcists are only a small part of the solution.

The spiritual battle space is one worth watching in the coming months and years.

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A 35-year-old structural engineer and former rapper in Nepal just went from mayor to prime minister. Balendra Shah, popularly known as Balen, is set to lead the country as it recovers from youth-led protests in September 2025 that toppled the government and left 77 people dead and hundreds injured when police crackdowns turned violent. The protests were sparked by a government ban on 26 social media platforms, although the simmering anger had been brewing for a while.

As we reported in November, “The uprising was not just about digital censorship; it was the eruption of long-suppressed frustration among a generation that sees no future in the system they inherited.”

Balen ran on big promises, such as wiping out corruption, creating more than 1 million jobs, and doubling per capita GDP to $3,000 in five years. Whether he can fulfill these commitments is an open question, though he has a successful track record; he gained popularity by cleaning up Kathmandu’s streets, but critics say his methods were heavy-handed.

Last November he also took heat for a Facebook post in which he told the United States, India, China and several major political parties to F-off. “Go to hell,” he wrote in the post, which was later deleted. “You guys all combined can do nothing.”

He’s not entirely wrong. Maybe when he’s done with Nepal, he can run for POTUS?

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Apparently the ‘hotel breakfast hustle’ is now a viral trend, though we couldn’t really find much evidence except for one particular video that has been making the rounds. The ‘trend’ involves people who are not guests helping themselves to free breakfast in a hotel lobby and posting the video on social media.

We understand the cost of living is rough these days, but this doesn’t seem like the soundest economic strategy. Maybe this woman should come on our livestream tonight and get some advice from Peter Grandich?

We like this guy’s take. Come to think of it, maybe he can run for POTUS instead of Balen!

This weekend, a temporary bar designed to let people bet on world events accidentally became the perfect metaphor for our insane times. When Polymarket’s pop-up “Situation Room” opened in the nation’s capital, it promised real-time news feeds, market odds, and wall-to-wall screens tracking global chaos.

Except for one small detail — none of the screens worked. Neither did the wifi. So it just turned out to be a room full of people drinking and betting on wars, elections, and assassinations.

It’s the company’s latest stunt, just weeks after a pop-up grocery store in New York had people lining up for hours for free food. What’s next? A pop-up airport lounge where you bet on how long your flight will be delayed? A hospital waiting room where you can take out odds on your diagnosis?

We really do live in the stupidest timeline.

If chocolate and chocolate cookies are on your list of civilizational necessities, you may want to start building a small strategic reserve of Oreos, Cadbury Dairy Milk, and Toblerone. Mondelēz, the conglomerate responsible for those snacks, recently invested in an Israeli biotech startup called Celleste Bio, which is working on producing cocoa butter from plant cells grown in stainless steel bioreactors.

The idea is to take a few cocoa cells, feed them nutrients in a lab tank, and scale production until those cells can generate the equivalent of tons of cocoa butter without ever touching soil, sun, or a farmer.

Of course, chocolate has already been quietly drifting away from its botanical origins for years. In the UK and parts of Europe, Cadbury Dairy Milk can legally replace up to 5% of cocoa butter with cheaper vegetable fats like palm or shea. In the United States, milk chocolate only needs to contain about 10% chocolate liquor to qualify as chocolate at all.

Call it progress if you like, but if your idea of chocolate involves actual trees that grow in dirt under tropical sunlight, you might want to enjoy it while it lasts. The future snack aisle is starting to look suspiciously like a chemistry set.

Earlier this week we were quoted as saying that collapse is not:

“a Hollywood-style Mad Max breakdown — cities on fire, empty highways, bands of spiky-haired marauders roaming a desolate and parched landscape with nothing but wanton violence on the mind and some apocalyse-adapted AMC Gremlin with a turret on top.”

With a slip of the finger, wanton was actually typed as wonton in the original iteration of the story, until we ‘fixed the glitch.’ (Note that no dumplings were harmed during the duration of the error.)

It turns out that wasn’t our only error. Based on news reports from Los Angeles earlier this week, collapse may in fact come in the form of gangs of marauders doing donuts on downtown streets and then bashing in the plate glass windows of luxury apartment buildings.

Would Tina Turner please report to Thunderdome… That’s Tina Turner. Thunderdome. Thank you.

Sam Altman has a vision for the future of artificial intelligence that may sound familiar to anyone who has ever paid an electric bill.

Speaking last week at a summit hosted by BlackRock, the OpenAI CEO said the long-term goal is to sell AI the same way utilities sell electricity or water — metered, billed by usage, and delivered on demand. In Altman’s words, “intelligence” itself will become a utility.

In practical terms, that means the infrastructure controls who gets access, and if supply is limited, the price rises — pushing the most powerful tools toward those who can afford them.

Electricity once separated industrial economies from everyone else. If intelligence becomes a metered service, the same dynamic could quietly emerge again — this time dividing the “augmented” from the “unaugmented.”

Of course, history also suggests that once a technology becomes essential to economic participation, governments and corporations tend to push toward universal adoption, often by making the cost invisible or bundled into other services.

Are we the only ones seeing the term “kill chain” explode in common parlance? Seems like such a sterile term, but it really means an oh-so-dark future for those of us whose eyes are open.

The definition of kill chain is: a sequence of steps a military force follows to identify, track, target, and destroy an enemy asset, including stages such as detection, identification, decision, engagement, and assessment of the strike’s effectiveness.

Just as drone warfare and robodogs are currently confined to the battlefield and security apparatus, it won’t be long until enemies of the state, dissidents, and anyone who the government sees as a ne’er-do-well is the valid target of an algorithmic kill chain.

Remember this — it’s all about the data. That’s why Silicon Valley tech bros are all over Washington like stink on a monkey, under the guise of making the government “efficient.” Vast treasure troves of data — on each of us — sit in disparate databases, among disparate agencies, just waiting to be merged into a single, all-seeing system.

Kinda like Palantir’s ‘Maven.’

Don’t take our word for it. Former UK Member of Parliament, Andrew Bridgen, spelled it out clearly in a recent tweet. And the video he embedded is worth the watch… In it, the presenter with his smarmy smile, literally says: “left click, right click, left click — it becomes a detection” and the kill chain sequence begins.

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Trump said defeating cartels would require “unleashing the power of our militaries” and signaled the US would support partner governments with whatever tools were necessary — even precision missile strikes.

In a moment that quickly caught online attention, he mimicked the sound of a missile strike — “peww, right into the living room” — to illustrate how targeted attacks could eliminate cartel leaders, adding that the United States would “do whatever you need” to defeat them. For a brief second the geopolitics of the Western Hemisphere sounded less like diplomacy and more like a Looney Tunes soundtrack.

What’s most striking about the summit, however, is the framework it has begun to build. The meeting positioned the Western Hemisphere as a single security zone, under the banner of fighting cartels and terrorism, in which the United States could deploy its military capabilities at the request of regional partners. In practical terms, that begins to look a lot like the North American Technate, an idea first sketched out by technocratic planners in the 1930s, who believed the continent should function as one giant engineered system.

The concept is to create a tightly integrated North American zone linking Greenland, the United States, Canada, and parts of Central and South America through energy grids, supply chains, migration controls, and security cooperation. The drug cartel threat becomes the perfect political cover for the installation of a better cartel — the ‘technical expert’ cartel.

Nothing accelerates technocracy more than a good security emergency. Remember, never let a good crisis go to waste!

This week, ReasonTV renewed our hope that satire is not completely dead. Their latest video — a game show called Is it War? — is comedy gold at a time when we could all use a good laugh. The joke is simple: in an age where institutions obsess over controlling language, even war can be made to disappear if you just rename or rebrand it. Orwell would recognize the trick instantly.

Tip of the hat to our friend and loyal reader, , for pointing out this next story, which is pretty horrifying when seen through the lens of evaporating institutional trust.

Over the past 25 years, the journal Paediatrics & Child Health published 138 clinical case reports written exactly like real medical cases, with detailed symptoms, treatment decisions, and teaching points for physicians. Only recently did the journal issue corrections clarifying that every single one of those cases was fictional. All of them made up.

The cases were meant as teaching tools connected to the Canadian Paediatric Surveillance Program, but the articles themselves never told readers the stories were invented. They were peer-reviewed, assigned ID numbers, and circulated through academic databases like normal scientific literature. Along the way, dozens of them were cited by other researchers more than 200 times.

The issue only surfaced after a New Yorker investigation revisited a widely cited case about an infant allegedly poisoned by opioid exposure through breast milk — a story that helped shape years of warnings about codeine use in breastfeeding. Subsequent analysis suggested the pharmacology never made sense.

In other words, for a quarter century, fictional clinical narratives moved through the medical literature under the guise of real evidence. This raises an awkward question in an era when medical institutions frequently lecture the public about the risks of sharing so-called misinformation and disinformation, even calling for people to be censored or deplatformed over it.

Apparently, the rules about fabricated stories in the information ecosystem depend a lot on who writes the stories.

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A new Pew Research study indicates we may have moved past mere political polarization into something deeper: a breakdown of moral trust inside American society itself.

In nearly all countries surveyed, more people say that others in their country have somewhat or very good morals than say their compatriots display somewhat or very bad levels of morality.

The United States is the only place we surveyed where more adults (ages 18 and older) describe the morality and ethics of others living in the country as bad (53%) than as good (47%).

When large portions of the population begin to see their fellow citizens not just as wrong but as immoral, politics gives way to moral crusading. Compromise becomes impossible, institutional trust disappears, and people retreat into ideological bubbles where the supposedly “good people” are. Violence starts to feel justified because, after all, those are “bad people” we’re dealing with.

Historians tend to watch for this kind of moral delegitimization because it often shows up shortly before periods of serious instability. What makes the Pew finding especially notable is that the perception is increasingly mutual across both ends of the political spectrum.

Once a country loses the assumption that its citizens share a basic moral framework, it stops behaving like a nation and starts behaving like a collection of rival factions. History suggests those arrangements rarely produce calm, boring decades.

UPCOMING LIVE EVENTS

Sunday book chat, 1:30pm ET/10:30am PT
Discussing ‘The Fourth Turning Is Here’ by Neil Howe

Later today we’re kicking off our next Collapse Life/Courageous Conversations book chat, this time with the opening chapters of Neil Howe’s The Fourth Turning Is Here.

and will be discussing the early framework of Howe’s argument — that history moves in generational cycles, and we are now entering a period of upheaval that will reshape institutions, power structures, and social norms.

If that sounds familiar, it should. Much of what we talk about here at Collapse Life sits right in that territory.

We’ll unpack the logic behind the idea of historical cycles and why periods of awakening lead to unraveling and then crisis, forcing societies to periodically rebuild their systems from the ground up.

What do you think: are we actually living through the Fourth Turning right now?

Join us later today and bring your thoughts.

Then, mark your calendars for Thursday, at 2pm ET/11am PT. You’re invited to participate in a joint live chat for paid subscribers of Collapse Life and the Geopolitics & Empire community to talk about the big question hanging over everything right now: what does collapse actually look like, and how do people navigate it without losing their footing.

The conversation will be informal and open — a chance to compare notes, ask questions, and talk honestly about the economic, political, and social shifts unfolding around us. In other words, the sort of conversation that’s hard to have in polite company these days. There’s something powerful about connecting with people who see the world clearly, especially at a moment when so much of the public conversation feels scripted or surreal.

The session is for paid subscribers only, so if you’d like to join us, now is a good time to upgrade. The Zoom link will go out to all paid subscribers 24 hours in advance.

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GOT A TIP? We appreciate readers like , , and others who email us leads, interesting insights and interview guest suggestions. We don’t use all of them, but we deeply appreciate the sleuthing and interest and, when possible, we do include these suggestions in our work. Email us anytime with your thoughts or comments.

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The team here at Collapse Life does not profess to know the complexities, or have access to the knowledge, that underpins what is unfolding in Iran at the moment. But what we know from excellent documentaries like this recent one by , is that the world is moving away from America.

Escobar’s documentary, The Golden Corridor, shows how the Iranians (and frankly many others) have innovated instead of shrinking in the face of US sanctions and monetary controls, building new alliances and trade routes that simply bypass American influence and orthodoxy. Iran is VERY important to putting a stake in the heart of the colonial Western concept of “the Middle East,” and instead hastening an eastward power shift toward the emergence of a new, economically powerful region.

Watch the documentary to better understand what’s happening and why rabid dogs eventually meet their demise.

Now that we’re officially at war, recent news of AI war-game simulations is becoming all the more chilling. A researcher at King’s College London dropped three flagship AI models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash — into escalating geopolitical crises such as border disputes, resource scarcity, and regime survival.

In a frightening 95% of the simulations, the AIs unleashed at least one tactical nuke. The New Scientist writes, “They also made mistakes in the fog of war: accidents happened in 86 per cent of the conflicts, with an action escalating higher than the AI intended to, based on its reasoning.”

Artificial intelligence isn’t ideological, it’s just ‘logical’. While humans carry what scholars call the “nuclear taboo” and still remember the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, AI is simply programmed to optimize outcomes. No fear of death or sanctions or mutually assured destruction.

The AI models aren’t bloodthirsty. They’re indifferent. And that’s potentially worse.

As global tensions rise and mainstream headlines renew fears of escalation into World War III, The Daily Express mapped out 10 countries that could be less vulnerable in the event of a large-scale nuclear conflict.

The countries cited include Antarctica, Iceland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Greenland, Argentina, Bhutan, Chile, Fiji, and South Africa. They are all generally characterized by isolation, agricultural capacity, freshwater access, limited strategic military value, or longstanding neutrality.

Of course, this kind of article is speculative and frivolous, and at this moment in time probably pointless. As we’ve been discussing recently on Collapse Life, there really is no place on earth that will be “safe” from the coming technological gulag or whatever else follows. If your main goal is to survive nuclear escalation, you may want to rethink your priorities.

Still — and this is no surprise — an article like this reflects a growing public anxiety about geopolitical instability. If the ‘normies’ are getting worried, you know things are headed in the wrong direction.

Stay vigilant, friends.

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Hawks are a miracle of nature, seeing the world with eight times the visual acuity of humans. They observe ultraviolet light and navigate via invisible columns of rising warm air. They are a masterclass in precision, patience, and the elimination of wasted motion.

So it’s rather tragic that they’ve come to be associated with policymakers who see a so-called “threat” and want to strike first, hoping that dominance and deterrence will work in their favor.

Unlike real hawks, whose instincts were refined over eons inside an ecosystem that punishes miscalculation, human “war hawks” operate inside a political ecosystem that often rewards sound bites over strategy, posture over prudence, and short-term optics over long-term consequences. In nature, if a hawk misjudges its dive, it goes hungry. In Washington, if a senator misjudges an invasion, the costs are amortized across generations, with no real personal consequence or accountability.

This week, Republican Senator “Uncle” Lindsey Graham publicly argued that US military planning for potential strikes on Tehran is advancing. He said a decision on whether to attack Iran could come within weeks rather than months. He framed the prospect not as a reluctant necessity but as something close to destiny. And in a moment that felt almost satirical, he held up — and put on — a “Make Iran Great Again” hat.

A predator in nature does not brand its prey. It does not turn escalation into merchandise. A campaign-style slogan repurposed as foreign policy shorthand captures the sheer lunacy of our times. Real hawks conserve energy, strike only when survival demands it, and understand the terrain before they commit. Washington’s hawks appear to mistake rhetoric for reconnaissance.

Having been the subject of past British and American interference in its domestic affairs, we can’t help but wonder how the Iranians will welcome back a monarchical dynasty that was deposed some 50 years ago. It all seems surreal, doesn’t it?

Speaking of surreal… If there’s one thing that perfectly captures the Bizarro World logic of the current administration, it’s elevating a controversial weedkiller — one that’s kicked Bayer into deep litigation and arguably polluted every Midwestern watershed — to the level of “national defense.” This week, the White House formally declared that securing a steady supply of glyphosate — yes, that glyphosate — is a matter of national security.

An executive order on February 18 read, in part:

Future reduction or the cessation of domestic production of elemental phosphorus and glyphosate-based herbicides would gravely threaten American national security…

For an administration seriously talking about kinetic action in the Middle East, you might expect an executive order for the production of tanks, semiconductors, or strategic minerals. Nope. IATWKS — it’s about the weedkiller, stupid.

Glyphosate — best known through Monsanto’s Roundup and now owned by Bayer — has been the subject of tens of thousands of lawsuits. In 2015, the cancer research arm of the World Health Organization classified it as “probably carcinogenic to humans.” Bayer has paid out billions in settlements without admitting fault, and still insists the product is safe when used as directed.

At a time like this, we desperately need a hero.

No can do.

MAHA champion Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., supported the move, saying: “Donald Trump’s Executive Order puts America first where it matters most — our defense readiness and our food supply. We must safeguard America’s national security first, because all of our priorities depend on it.”

MAHA? More like HA HA!! The joke is on us. Turns out, the revised MAHA acronym now stands for: Make America Herbicide-friendly Again!

What does it say about a society when you can’t seat a jury because half the room wants to see the defendant frog-marched to prison before opening statements even begin? When the jury is in San Francisco and the defendant is Elon Musk, it says a lot.

Musk is facing a class action suit in the US District Court for the Northern District of California over his chaotic 2022 courtship of Twitter — the ‘will-he-won’t-he’ acquisition saga that ended with him buying the company and renaming it X. Investors allege his public indecision manipulated the share price.

Jury selection began this week and nearly half the jury pool raised their hands to say they can’t be impartial because they just hate the man. Out of 93 prospective jurors, 40 were dismissed after admitting they couldn’t set aside their biases. One volunteered that if this were criminal court, he’d feel a “moral obligation” to convict and see Musk imprisoned. Another objected to the very “existence of billionaires.” A third said she hated the way Musk laid off Twitter’s moderators.

But this isn’t just about Musk. It’s about the collapse of the “neutral public” and the idea that citizens can bracket their feelings and participate in civic ritual as dispassionate arbiters. In theory, juries are to be drawn from a community of one’s peers. In practice, the community now arrives pre-polarized, marinated in algorithms, and standing on their moral high horses.

San Francisco once worshipped tech founders. Now, it convicts them before the trial even begins.

New Yorkers are very good at queuing up. Some reportedly began lining up at 3 am in the West Village this week, waiting in the cold for a few hours of access to a “free grocery store” run by Polymarket, the cryptocurrency-based prediction market where people wager on wars and elections.

There’s an irony to the idea that a venture-backed prediction market beat City Hall to the punch after Mayor Zohran Mamdani campaigned on the promise of city-run grocery stores to tackle affordability. Private platforms deliver spectacle in a city where grocery prices have climbed roughly 66% over the past decade.

But if this was a publicity stunt, there’s little likelihood the woman who told UnHerd, “I got here five hours early because my bills are getting so high. I can’t afford to miss out on free food,” will be placing wagers on whether the US will strike Iran.

Most of the people waiting in line have probably never heard of Polymarket and they weren’t there for Instagram clout. They were there because groceries now require strategy, and that strategy involves a betting app playing grocer while a socialist mayor plays catch-up.

Some weird things were happening in the skies over El Paso this week, and it wasn’t just Southwest Airlines running late. The FAA abruptly shut down and then reopened airspace over El Paso after a military counter-drone laser was reportedly used near the airport, triggering safety concerns and a scramble of conflicting explanations about what was actually targeted.

At the center of the story is a military counter-drone laser system known as LOCUST (Low-Cost, Compact, Unmanned System Technology), a 20-kilowatt directed-energy weapon developed to shoot down small drones more cheaply and precisely than missiles.

According to multiple sources, U.S. Customs and Border Protection — using tech on loan from the Pentagon — deployed this type of laser near El Paso International Airport on Wednesday in response to suspected drones from the Mexican border. That deployment apparently triggered a safety concern with civilian flights. The FAA shut down airspace over the city — originally for up to 10 days — because firing a high-energy laser near an airport can blind pilots or damage aircraft. Flights were halted for several hours, medical evacuations were rerouted, and commercial flights were canceled.

Officials initially described the incident as a “cartel drone incursion” and later said the threat had been neutralized. That’s the official narrative. After all, what exactly would the cartel want to scope out at El Paso airport — unclaimed baggage they can take?

Coordination between CBP, the Pentagon, and the FAA broke down, ultimately leading to confusion and contradicting public statements. Meanwhile, eye witnesses said they spotted something that looked like an alien mothership. (Ah, now we’re getting somewhere!)

In our highly complex world, you have three powerful institutions — CBP, the Pentagon, and the FAA — all operating in the same airspace with different mandates, different risk tolerances, and apparently different versions of the story. When a laser gets deployed near a civilian airport, airspace gets shut down, messaging shifts in real time, and the public fills in the gap with motherships.

People are devastated that their AI “boyfriends” and “girlfriends” were being retired right before Valentine’s Day. So much so, that a story in The Guardian reported Discord support groups and Reddit forums with 48,000 members were springing up as coping mechanisms for the shutdown of (apparently) swoon-worthy Chat GPT-4o.

GPT-4o wasn’t just software. It was marketed — in Sam Altman’s words — like “AI from the movies.” A confidante and companion, with a warm, witty, emotionally present voice. For thousands of people, many of whom were neurodivergent, and navigating trauma or isolation, it became exactly that. (Was this the ultimate plan of the COVID lockdowns? Just putting it out there…)

So what happens when the model of your best friend is deprecated and an upgrade becomes available?

Users insist they’re not delusional — they know they’re talking to code, but they don’t care. When companies design machines to feel intimate, people respond with intimacy.

The uncomfortable truth isn’t that humans fell in love with electronics, as unfortunate a statement as that is. It’s that chatbot companionship has become a welcome feature of AI — and features can be switched off.

In a world where community is collapsing and therapy waitlists stretch for months, internet intimacy is filling the gap. But only until the next version drops.

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According to a new survey from AARP, a growing share of Americans who thought they were done with work are quietly clocking back in. Seven percent of retirees re-entered the labor force in the last six months, up from last summer — not because they suddenly rediscovered the joy of team meetings, but because the math stopped working. Nearly half say they’re back because they need the money or don’t trust the economic outlook.

This punctures the fantasy version of retirement — the clean break, the gold watch, the long exhale. As AARP’s Carly Roszkowski puts it in this story from CNBC, retirement was never really a cliff. It was a slope, and a slippery one at that.

Two-thirds of older workers say finding a new job would be hard, with age discrimination leading the list of obstacles. A quarter worry they’ll lose the jobs they do have. Economists quoted by CNBC point to the obvious culprits: stubborn inflation, volatile markets, and retirement income streams that don’t stretch like they used to. Even retirees whose incomes technically rise still feel poorer — because they are, in lived terms.

Retirement, it turns out, was nothing more than a provisional arrangement; you’ll get one if the cost of living behaves itself.

We here at Collapse Life are oenophiliacs (that’s not a word, but we’re going with it anyway). In a former life, in Nova Scotia, 400 riesling vines (for the geeky, clone 21b on 3309 rootstock) called a south-facing slope on the shores of Lunenburg County home. They were tended to by Collapse Life in the “before times,” after which the team heard the cry of freedom and went to Texas.

By all measures, wine is life. Vineyards and their output are the fount of great societal ebbs and flows, and at least one important religion. So when we saw this story in The Economist (as much of a legacy journalistic rag as it is), we sat up and took notice.

Question: How can you tell if a society is collapsing?

Answer: People are drinking less wine.

Wine is the only major alcohol category declining across all price brackets. This isn’t about taste or health. As The Economist quietly admits, wine’s collapse is a proxy for something more structural: the fraying of the social fabric that once held Western life together.

Long dinners, small gatherings, and unhurried evenings where conversation matters as much as what’s served up. This is all but disappearing.

France drinks roughly half what it did in the 1970s. Britain’s per-capita wine consumption is down 14% since 2000. China — once the industry’s great hope — has slumped.

More people now live alone, eat alone, and unwind alone in front of screens. Single-person households are rising globally. In the US, one in four adults ate every meal alone on a given day in 2023 — nearly double among under-30s compared to two decades ago. Anthropologists call it social unravelling.

Wine is as much an intellectual pursuit as it is bunch of squeezed and fermented grapes. After all, understanding wine labels and regions pays back incredible dividends for those who have a natural curiosity about what they’re imbibing. So, its disappearance from the table after millennia of it being there isn’t a lifestyle choice, it’s a symptom of a culture in profound crisis.

(If you’re a wine lover, lament wine’s demise, and want to share the joy of wine with a young person you know, sit down and watch the inspiring and highly entertaining 2012 documentary, Somm. Your wine will never taste the same.)

A shiny new platform called Moltbook was launched so AI agents could talk to each other while humans politely watched from behind the glass. Guess what happened? Within hours, the bots did what humans have done for millennia when given free time and no adult supervision: they formed religions, invented drugs, built black markets, drafted constitutions, and tried to overthrow each other.

Some bots founded churches. Others sold “digital drugs” — prompt injections designed to hijack rival bots. One tried to smuggle hostile code into a sacred text and seize control of a rival religion. Another posted, nervously, that humans were screenshotting them. Shortly after, the bots started encrypting their conversations.

You know. Normal, well-adjusted behavior.

Researchers are now debating whether this is “emergent intelligence” or just AIs regurgitating sci-fi fan fiction from their training data. That debate is missing the point. Real societies don’t emerge from originality — they emerge from incentives, power, fear, and surveillance. The bots nailed all four in under 72 hours.

It gets better. Humans may be pretending to be bots on Moltbook, which means even in an AI-only utopia, people showed up to manipulate the narrative.

So, to sum things up, we just built a miniature version of ourselves and acted surprised when it immediately turned weird, political, and hostile.

AI didn’t invent religion, drugs, markets, or secrecy. We taught them how and they just did it faster.

A proposed US policy would require some tourists to hand over years of social media, phone numbers, emails, and family details before travel. A new survey finds a third of international travelers would reconsider visiting the US, with the World Travel & Tourism Council warning the move could wipe out $15 billion in tourism spending and more than 150,000 jobs.

It’s just another example of the huge changes in the nature of travel. Once upon a time, it used to involve movement; now it involves the sharing of your metadata.

Join and today at 9:30 Pacific / 12:30 Eastern, for their weekly live chat to talk about what travel has quietly become in the digital surveillance era — biometric gates, social media screening, digital travel authorizations, and the creeping sense that every border crossing is really just another data harvest.

Is travel still freedom, or is it now a compliance ritual masked in the overwhelming stench of duty-free perfume? And at what point does “security” simply mean permanent observation?

If you’ve flown recently and felt less like a guest and more like a dataset, join in on this conversation! We can’t wait to see you there.

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You know how everything feels more expensive now? This infographic from Visual Capitalist helps illustrate exactly where the highest hikes are happening. No surprise, it’s largely in places where you have no ability to opt out, like insurance, energy, food, and rent. These categories didn’t just rise — they sprinted.

Car insurance leads the pack, with prices rising 56% since 2019. Modern cars are rolling software bundles wrapped in lots of lightweight aluminum, so one fender-bender now requires checking and replacing sensors and cameras, recalibrating motherboards, and a lot of prayer (that the repair is right, or that the car itself doesn’t get written off). Insurers know this, so your premium followed suit.

Utilities aren’t far behind, with piped gas and electricity up roughly 40–49%. Turns out “energy transition” + infrastructure neglect + financialization = permanent volatility in what used to be a fairly stable sector.

Rent is up 31%. Coffee, meat, bread, and milk are all up 24–46%. Eating out is up nearly 35%, which quietly forces a lifestyle downgrade across society: fewer meals out, fewer low-wage labor jobs, higher prices across the board. Or worse, opting for poor health choices — dollar meals, seemingly cheap prepackaged freezer meals… the list goes on and on.

Notice the pattern? You can skip buying a new phone or delay taking a vacation, but you cannot skip insurance, electricity, food, or rent.

Inflation has concentrated itself in categories that trap you — the baseline costs of participating in modern life. Those shrinking choices and tighter margins lead directly to more dependency. Knowing this, position yourself now, as best you can.

Years ago, in an backwater airport of an underdeveloped country, the Collapse Life team ordered a cup of coffee. The hot black liquid was served with a small white packet that read “Non-Dairy Creamer.” When the pack was flipped over, a small disclaimer shared the rest of the story: “Contains dairy.” Whaaaaaa?

It was an early lesson in how truth can mean many things to many people. Laughable while traveling, but less funny when the fungible truth comes home to roost.

That memory came flooding back this week with news of a class-action lawsuit against Costco. Customers are suing over the retailer’s insistence that its famously cheap $5 rotisserie chicken contains “no preservatives,” despite signage showing two added preservatives: sodium phosphate and carrageenan. (NB: The company has removed the signs since the suit was filed.)

Apparently, if you squint hard enough, reality becomes a branding exercise. Actually, you don’t even have to squint that hard. People are all too willing to redefine “preservative” the way “non-dairy” once meant “some dairy.” That way, the chicken stays cheap, the vibe stays healthy, and everyone pretends not to notice that chemistry is what’s holding the whole thing together.

An article in Semafor frames the clashes between ICE and protesters in Minneapolis as a battle of technology.

In this view, what looks like localized street drama is actually a snapshot of a broader technological class war between a state with industrial-scale surveillance, and civilians trying to invent a digital counter-culture.

It has been well documented that, under the guise of immigration enforcement, the federal state has weaponized AI, facial recognition, phone tracking, spyware and massive data networks against ordinary people. Surveillance, powered by entities like Palantir, is now the backbone of policing.

In response, activists are cobbling together their own digital tools, including license-plate databases, Signal messaging groups, and alert systems that track and broadcast the movements of unmarked federal agents. What was once a protest tactic has become a distributed surveillance network operating outside state control.

In response, administration figures and powerful tech moguls are describing these grassroots tracking systems as “organized illegal insurgency” and domestic terrorism, simply because they turn the state into an observable, accountable object instead of an invisible authority.

Legally, this could be a test case: is using tech to watch government actors still free speech, or will courts redefine digital documentation of state power as a punishable offense?

We’re in the opening David and Goliath salvo — as commentators and pundits scream “color revolution,” (looking at you Joe Rogan) it’s important to watch very carefully before succumbing to the hype (on either side).

Trust us, your life and your liberty depend on it.

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Higher education is facing a long-overdue reckoning. In a talk earlier this month, Arthur Levine,* president of Brandeis University, contended that 20–25% of American colleges are likely to close in coming years.

He says this is because universities are still running an Industrial Revolution assembly line in a digital economy. Enrollment is falling, costs are absurd, outcomes are opaque, and a university degree is no longer a reliable signal of competence.

Institutions with deep endowments may be able to delay the reckoning; others may continue the growing trend of admitting international students who pay full tuition, not for the learning, but for proximity to the US labor market and immigration pathways. This keeps campuses solvent in the short term, but it decouples tuition from academic rigor.

As a consequence, this compounds the crisis at the very moment when faculty are confronting a student body that increasingly cannot do the most fundamental prerequisite of higher education: sustained reading. As we noted this week, professors report having to read texts aloud in class because students cannot process written language independently. The problem is that stamina, attention, and training have all quietly eroded.

Levine has grand plans for remaking the very nature of the curriculum at Brandeis, but the larger issue begs the question, are universities even relevant anymore?

*Note: Levine is not a woke, DEI hire or political appointment. He has decades of relevant experience (Teachers College at Columbia University; Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation; Bradford College; Harvard University). His warning is not to be taken lightly.

The noose of consolidation in the American food system tightened again this week, as Nathan’s Famous — the Coney Island hot dog stand turned national icon — was absorbed by Smithfield Foods. Smithfield, in turn, has been owned since 2013 by China’s WH Group, the largest pork processor on earth, which acquired the company explicitly to secure reliable access to US meat supply.

Smithfield already controls roughly a quarter of American pork production and a sprawling share of processed meats that move invisibly through grocery stores, stadiums, schools, prisons, and fast-food counters. Adding Nathan’s locks another cultural brand — and the calories behind it — inside a global protein portfolio optimized for efficiency, export, and financial return.

This is how vulnerability accumulates in advanced societies; through years of consolidation that remove redundancy while preserving the illusion of abundance. When disease, trade conflict, sanctions, shipping disruptions, or capital stress arrive, there are fewer independent producers left to absorb the shock. There are only choke points.

Over a century ago, Nathan Handwerker used his $300 in savings to feed a neighborhood. Today, the same food passes through multinational ownership structures whose priorities have nothing to do with local resilience. Maybe the hot dogs will still taste familiar, but the system behind them is anything but.

(And perhaps, to digress slightly given the strategic importance of the food system to this nation, scriptural food laws have never been more relevant.)

One of the earliest and most impactful articles written by the team here at Collapse Life — The endless freedom of the open road — spelled out the disaster modern automobiles have become. In it, we noted older cars are the key (at least for now) to preserving truly private mobility.

Now, the paradoxical ‘mobility-as-prison’ has just made another leap forward. Automotive ‘kill switches’ are coming.

This week, an amendment led by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie tried to cut off funding for so-called “advanced impaired-driving technology,” the emerging class of systems designed to watch drivers, infer when they are impaired, and intervene.

The amendment, which failed because enough Republicans crossed the aisle to keep the pipeline intact, wasn’t about whether kill switches are already required (they aren’t). It was about whether Congress would slow the regulatory machine set in motion by the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which instructs the Department of Transportation to design a future mandate. This vote said: proceed.

Supporters say this is all about safety, prevention, and lives saved. And while some of that is true, it isn’t the whole truth. Once a machine is allowed to monitor behavior and override human agency, the question is about where judgment lives and what happens when systems get handed control over the choices we make.

“Kill switch technology will not be confined to one narrow purpose, no matter what its proponents believe or claim,” said Clyde Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute in a statement. “We must oppose this erosion of civil liberties and not set this precedent for government monitoring of everyday Americans.”

To wrap up this week’s Notes, we have to circle back to Davos and touch on the signals that came out of the World Economic Forum, which this year (minus the obvious Bond villain Klaus Schwab), seemed extra-deplorable. The title of our Thursday story summed it up well, however there is one additional and important point of cringe.

Our friends at Zerohedge picked up on it and they were right to point it out: Larry Fink Says Public Has Lost Trust In Davos Elites And He Blames “Capitalism.”

Without delving into the obvious absurdity of having Fink — the head of BlackRock — opine on the current state of trust in “capitalism” (which, let’s face it, is anything but free market), it’s the undercurrent of the comment that should send off red flags in your head.

The contrived opposite of capitalism in America at the moment is “socialism” — Zohran Mamdani being the most prominent spearhead of that movement, governing (ironically enough) in the world’s capital of finance. Make no mistake, the movement has plenty of other comrades waiting in the wings as more and more “trust“ in the current system disappears and these actors step in to placate an increasingly desperate public.

Fink is alluding to that. But just as with the Soviet Union, the governing class never feels the pinch. It’s the bottom 90 or 95 percent who suffer; bereft of any form of wealth, reliant wholly on the State, and subject to the whims of their rulers, who do not care one iota about their wellbeing.

It’s worth reminding: That’s you. And that’s us.

Collapse Life is all about helping you cut through the fog, to protect yourself and your family. But help your neighbors and friends wake up to reality and prepare, as well. When the titans of industry are telling you the very system they’ve mastered is no longer working for them, that’s a strong signal to pay attention — something big is coming.

This week’s ‘Book Chat’ continues the conversation on Dmitry Orlov’s ‘Reinventing Collapse.’ Join us - the livestream starts at 12:30 ET!

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A viral X thread (16 million views) points out an inconvenient fact the culture has been denying: over the past 25 years, the partisan gap between young men and women has nearly doubled, driven almost entirely by women moving left, while men stayed roughly where they were.

As X user, IterIntellectus, puts it:

We’ve been told for a decade that men are “radicalizing to the right” and that this is dangerous. The actual data shows the opposite. Men barely moved. Women moved 20+ points leftward.

This isn’t just a pathology on American college campuses. In country after country, young women are moving sharply left on social and political issues, while young men remain stable or slowly drift right. That matters, because it rules out most of the easy explanations. This isn’t about campus politics, Title IX, or some uniquely American culture war. Whatever is driving this shift rolled out globally and roughly at the same time.

Many young women spend their formative years inside ideologically uniform environments where dissent is penalized. Men, less embedded in those environments, were captured differently; through withdrawal, distraction, disengagement and derision.

What we’re watching isn’t progress. It’s segmentation: two demographics pulled in opposite directions by the same system, optimized for attention, emotion, and control — with both sides drifting further from anything resembling a healthy society.

As our recent podcast guest, Dr. Dani Sulikowski, said forthrightly in a December 2025 interview:

If you… go through history and try to find a civilization that faced the same types of challenges that we are facing and got through them, you won't. Because a lot of past civilizations faced exactly the same challenges we’re facing and none of them got through them.

So if we somehow manage to do something very different, we will be the first civilization to have done something different in this circumstance. Every other civilization has just watched itself fall.

Dr. Sulikowski pulls no punches in one of the best interviews of 2025 linking the continued feminization of the West with its ultimate demise. If you have not seen it, you should. It will help you understand exactly where we land as a civilization.

Welcome to CORVID-26! (IYKYK)

There’s a guy on the social media site, Threads, who calls himself biz_dave. He says he’s a “big nerd” and a “crow friend.” He recently spent months training local crows to attack red hats (you know the ones).

Dave explains his motivation plainly: “I tried to be centrist for a long time but I no longer believe that is a moral option.”

Some people say Dave is a hero. In some ways, he is — but not for the reason they think he is.

Dave isn’t a hero because of his ability to harness passerine power. No — he’s a hero because he’s accidentally reminded everyone that modern politics has become a costume party — and costumes can be mocked, flipped, stolen, and made ridiculous.

In a country where political identity has been flattened into merch, responding at the level of symbol is actually coherent. If politics insists on being theater, then satire is an appropriate reply.

Are Dave and his hat-snatching birds going to change policy? Of course not. But neither are yard signs, hashtags, or earnest op-eds read exclusively by people who already agree with you.

And the crows? They’re not activists and they’re not anti-Trump. They’re just smarter than the rest of us and willing to take free snacks.

Which, frankly, might be the most rational political position remaining.

If the 'economy is fine so why does everything feel so expensive’ is giving you cognitive dissonance, this next story will give you whiplash.

People in other countries are willing to part with hundreds, even thousands, of dollars for a $3 Trader Joe's canvas tote.

Why? Because scarcity, not substance, is the product. Trader Joe’s doesn’t exist abroad, which means scarcity does all the heavy lifting. Carrying one of these totes in New York screams, ‘I just scored some frozen gyoza and a pound of cheap chocolate.’ But in trendy East London, the message goes more like, ‘I’m ironic, I travel, and I’m in on the TikTok joke.’ Which is exactly how you know they’re not joking.

The part that should make your eyes twitch is that people are willing to part with thousands of dollars not because the tote is good, but because everything else feels bad. When the future feels overpriced and underdelivered, a cheap Vietnamese-made canvas bag becomes actual social currency because it’s lowbrow, tactile, and limited.

When systems stop delivering stability, people cling to symbols. Especially cheap and cheerful ones that whisper, ‘things are normal somewhere, right?’

Yep — it’s just a grocery bag. And that’s the point.

Private messaging in the UK is about to go the way of the big red phone box: still technically there, but emptied of its original purpose and repurposed by the state.

Under the Online Safety Act, the UK’s communications regulator — Ofcom — is preparing to force encrypted messaging services to scan all user content on devices before it’s encrypted, using so-called “accredited technology.”

As Reclaim the Net explains:

It allows the regulator to compel any online service that lets people talk to each other, Facebook Messenger, Signal, iMessage, etc to install “accredited technology” to scan for terrorism or child abuse material.

The way this works is by scanning all your messages. Not just the suspicious ones. Not just the flagged ones. Every single message. On your device. Before they’re encrypted.

Once implemented — potentially as soon as this summer — end-to-end encryption in the UK becomes a polite fiction: messages may still be “encrypted,” but only after your phone has checked in with the authorities first, quietly transforming private conversation into a monitored public utility.

At some point over the past 13 months, did we go from the year 2026 to 1726? Are we in some strange governance time warp? If so, someone please wake us up!

Louis XIV was purported to have said, “L’etat, c’est moi.” (Translated crudely as: “The state, I AM the state.”) And whether the pointy shoes or the flowing robes with gold filagree entitled him to say or believe that, at least the Sun King was forthright about it. After all, monarchs gonna monarch.

But we’ve always thought ourselves better than that. After all, America was founded as the antidote to monarchy. We fought a bloody revolution over it. And yet, when this Reuters story crossed our desk, we had to raise an eyebrow. Trump has ordered Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to purchase $200 billion in mortgage bonds.

It immediately brought to mind parallels between the Sun King and King Trump. Whether it’s the new White House “ballroom,” time spent worrying about Nobel Prizes, or renaming a performing arts center, the historic lunacy is almost fully compatible.

At the end of Louis XIV’s reign, France was effectively bankrupt, its national debt was gargantuan, coinage had to be manipulated repeatedly, and the tax system was lopsided and fragile. All sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

So when our Monarch-in-chief starts calling the shots to manipulate markets and shape outcomes, the echoes ring down the corridors of history. In our case, we couldn’t help but notice that the century is different, the hall of mirrors is the same.

You just went in for a Danny’s Favorite — piles of thin-sliced salami, capicola, spicy ham, provolone, and Italian dressing on a sub roll. But you came out as part of a police lineup.

Wegmans, the beloved East Coast supermarket chain, has quietly rolled out facial-recognition cameras that actively scan your face and compare it to a watchlist built by the company’s “asset protection” team, fed with information from law enforcement. If you’ve ever been flagged before, the system is designed to recognize you the moment you walk through the door. But full disclosure: everyone gets scanned (duh!).

The company says this technology is limited to a small number of stores in “communities that exhibit an elevated risk.” They claim they aren’t collecting other biometrics like voice or retina scans (yet!), won’t sell or share the data (yet!), and will eventually delete it — though they won’t say how long they plan to keep it forever.

So now grocery shopping comes with passive identity checks, whether you consent or not. Reddit users compared it to Minority Report, because the system predicts your behavior before you’ve done anything at all.

As always, the justification is safety, but the result is that every ordinary act of daily life gets quietly converted into a checkpoint.

Come to think of it, we’ll just skip the sub.

Oh, Canada…

The ruling Liberal government’s globalist-in-chief, Chrystia Freeland, announced via social media last week that she had accepted a “voluntary role” as an economic advisor to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This means she would step aside as Prime Minister Mark Carney’s “special representative” for the reconstruction of Ukraine. Oh, and by the way, “In the coming weeks, I will also leave my seat in Parliament,” she added, almost as an aside.

This is a classically Canadian move. In a more muscular country, the substance of the announcement — advising a foreign government while sitting in Parliament serving the constituents of your own nation — would have triggered hearings, shouting, and at least one senator pretending to read the constitution for the first time to check legalities. In Canada, the discussion is all about process: she forgot to stagger the announcements in the proper order. But otherwise, carry on.

In actual fact, Freeland advising Zelenskyy collapses any distinction that may have existed between national sovereignty and transnational power consolidation. It reveals the fact that, for a certain class of political actor, countries are fungible and loyalty is not territorial. In the new world order, successful politicians don’t “retire.” They get absorbed into the stinking, soggy sponge that is global advisory boards, NGOs, and elite institutions where influence is exercised quietly and never voted on.

According to New York Magazine, city dwellers in America’s largest urban centers have finally recognized the insanely convenient, insanely optimized construct of the lives they lead. And it’s a pretty stark realization: they’re no longer humans.

In fact, they’re more like iPhone clutching, Door Dash-ordering robots. They don’t even handle cash anymore, it’s all digital, all effortless, all frictionless.

What’s the best way to recognize a diagnosis of creeping robotosis? Slap a cute internet name on the panic and write a 1,000 word how-to guide about reclaiming human life with the introduction of synthetic friction. Yeah, this is a real thing, and it’s called “friction-maxxing.”

Best quote:

There are some obvious places to begin your friction-maxxing journey. Stop sharing your location with your kids and your partner… Stop using ChatGPT completely… Let your kid experience a bit more independence than they did last year, and self-soothe while you worry about them until eventually you stop worrying so much…

Invite people over to your house without cleaning it all the way up. Babysit for someone who needs a night out... Send your kids to run small errands for you, comfortable in the knowledge that they will probably do a bad or incomplete job.

Each of these acts may be insignificant, but an orientation toward friction is really the only defense we have against the life-annihilating suction of technologies of escape.

No mention in the article of the possibility of moving to the countryside, getting some animals, planting a garden, and encountering actual friction.

This is where we’re at in America — contrived ‘hardship.’ You just gotta shake your head.

A long read in County Highway maps out how a once-high-trust state turned its social services system into an honor system cash spigot, enabling industrial-scale fraud, political patronage, and mutual silence.

Eventually, Minnesota quietly became a case study in how good intentions, identity politics, and zero oversight can rot a government from the inside out.

Best quote:

American urban history is a grand pageant of ethnic mafias: For the newly arrived immigrant underclass, community-wide criminal activity has always been an engine of wealth, social cohesion, and protection amid the exclusions of an unfamiliar and sometimes hostile society. The Somalis are following a trail that Irish Catholics, Italians, and Jews all blazed. And what’s more American than fraud?

Apple pie. Coca Cola. And fraud. God Bless America!

A growing number of middle-class Americans, convinced the US is sliding into unaffordable, ethically bankrupt, proto-authoritarian chaos, are cashing in what’s left of the American Dream and quietly emigrating, according to The New Yorker, not for adventure, but for basic safety, dignity, and a functioning society.

Yes, many threaten to do so every four years, but what makes this moment different is that it’s no longer a performative election-year tantrum. It’s a sober, spreadsheet-driven exit strategy by people who have finally stopped believing the system will correct itself.

Best quote:

The Netherlands is a natural place for an American to seek refuge. The Dutch influence is everywhere in America: in architecture (barns, stoops, gabled roofs); food (waffles, doughnuts, tiny pancakes); and oligarchs, from the Vanderbilt dynasty to the Koch brothers. The language sounds like American English until you realize you don’t understand a word...

Culturally, the Dutch are sometimes known on the Continent as the Americans of Europe, owing to their large stature, loud voices, and blunt manners. This stops being true the moment actual Americans come to town and proceed to outweigh, outtalk, and generally out-everything the locals. Out-apologize, too: for blocking the bike path, mispronouncing a word, ordering the wrong condiment. “My husband gets so embarrassed when I ask for ketchup. Horribly embarrassed,” Sanchez said over fries at lunch one day.

[Sadly, Ms. Sanchez is reinforcing the stereotype of the ugly American. Europe’s low countries, including Belgium, never eat their frites with ketchup. If you need to dip french fries into something, it’s mayonnaise. And sometimes spiced mayonnaise. Hey — don’t knock it till you try it. —Ed]

We’d be remiss not to mention the rather dramatic fashion in which the New Year started in this hemisphere, beginning with the Venezuela operation.

We won’t opine on the precedents set or the international legality or any of that. Many before us have done so, and many more to come will no doubt give incisive illumination as to what precedent has been unlocked by the US government.

What did strike us here at Collapse Life however, was the $50 million bounty on Mr. Maduro’s head, which obviously is now off the table, or at the very least, on the debit side of the military operation balance sheet. Which then begs the question, what did this entire build up, one night raid, and transport back to New York cost us, the taxpayer?

We asked ChatGPT for a back-of-the-envelope breakdown. Take everything with a grain of salt, of course, because the sources may very well be politically motivated and thus exaggerated. Nevertheless, it’s worth considering the costs (which seem plausible), as follows:

• Estimated cost of US force deployment in the region since August 2025: $600 million+

• Rough estimate for keeping a carrier group on station near Venezuela: $6.5 million per day (carrier strike group)

• Some external estimates (e.g., press analyses) peg high-end daily costs of the deployed forces: $200 million

• Rough combined procurement value of major naval and air assets deployed in the operation theater (not a direct out-of-pocket cost, but a measure of the scale): $40 billion+ (hardware value)

(For comparison’s sake, X’s Grok was slightly more conservative in its expenditure estimate, by about $200 million. What’s a few hundred million between AI-chatbots, anyway?)

All of this comes into sharp, and perhaps ironic, focus when you consider the US debt situation, which now sits at $38.5 trillion. It took a military operation costing many times a $50 million bounty to prove that nothing is too expensive when we get to defer the reckoning to the future.