Miss Universe Canada asked contestants to wear costumes celebrating the country’s culture and heritage. Two of them obliged by wearing Indigenous-inspired outfits. One featured a feathered headdress and the other wore a fur dress, fur boots, and braids.

Boy, it didn’t take long for them to discover they had chosen the wrong culture to celebrate.

"It's 2026, we should know better," said former winner Ashley Callingbull, a Plains Cree woman from the Enoch Cree Nation. "Anything traditional or sacred should not be allowed. I was very, very upset."

The contestants apologized, the pageant apologized, and organizers promised a “comprehensive costume guide” to prevent future outbreaks of unauthorized Canadiana.

Next year, everyone should just wear a sari and carry a Tim Hortons cup. At least then they’ll look authentically Canadian.

The federal government has finally found a productive use for all those hours kids spent staring at screens: helping to keep airplanes from colliding.

The FAA has recruited more than 2,000 gamers to train as air traffic controllers, arguing that gaming develops the quick thinking, sustained focus, and ability to manage multiple streams of information the job requires. The campaign has helped the agency reach 94% of its hiring target.

So there you have it: being a nerd in your mother’s basement finally pays off.

There is, however, one fairly important difference. In a video game, if you crash the plane, kill everyone aboard, or die yourself, you simply press reset and try again. In an air traffic control tower, there are no extra lives. And your Mom (probably) won’t bring you Spaghetti-Os.

For decades, Americans have been told they had too much body fat. Now, thanks to Ozempic, there’s apparently not enough.

So, plastic surgeons are turning to dead bodies for spare parts. They’re injecting sterilized fat harvested from cadavers into patients who want fuller faces, boobs, and butts. That’s because GLP-1 users no longer have enough of their own fat to relocate.

The product, nicknamed “zombie filler,” can cost tens of thousands of dollars and is FDA-compliant rather than specifically FDA-approved. Just in case you were concerned.

No word on whether the FDA is going to extradite and imprison anyone for zombie fat production, like they did with this past weekend’s interview guest, Mark Grenon (), and his novel Miracle Mineral Solution.

Harvesting dead people for vanity — what have we come to? Dead fat walking!

This week’s Signal Map runs from a national debt closing in on $40 trillion to disappearing pennies, stopping along the way to visit ads for chatbots and the return of Hunter Biden. Civilization is still doggedly committed to keeping all four quadrants full. (Click to enlarge if you find the text too small.)

Most preparedness plans begin with what to store. But what if the more important question is where to live?

Join us this coming Wednesday for an interactive livestream with , founder of Overcome Babylon and author of a new book called Great Tribulation Survival Guide. We’ll examine strategic relocation from a scriptural perspective: the risks ahead, where safer places might be found, and how to decide whether moving is necessary.

The Case for Strategic Relocation: Where to Live in Uncertain Times
Wednesday, August 19 at 8:00 PM Eastern / 6:00 PM Mountain

Watch on YouTube or Substack. Log in to join the live discussion.

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At Collapse Life, we aim to separate signal from noise. Today we’re introducing a new tool to help with that. We call it The Signal Map.

It's our attempt to plot out a handful of stories each week along two simple axes: signal → noise (the horizontal axis) and early → accelerating (the vertical axis). Doing so lets us think beyond the headlines and ask: what does this story really tell us?

The upper right quadrant holds stories to pay attention to now, while the lower right are emerging signals that could become bigger over time. Top left you’ll find accelerating noise: stories that seem to dominate the headlines without materially changing the long-term picture. Finally, the lower left is for interesting curiosities and distractions that may be worth knowing about but are not likely to matter much in future.

We probably won’t always get the placement right, but that’s part of the exercise. And frankly, it’s your chance to weigh in with comments on what you think should be on the map and what you’d move. We’d love to hear from you on this new feature, and help with its evolution into the future.

The Signal Map isn’t meant to be definitive or predictive. It’s a bit of fun, and a reminder to take a step back from the firehose of information and think about which stories actually deserve our attention, versus the ones that only appear to.

Here are some other stories we’ve been watching:

As if Boston Dynamics’ robot dog wasn’t unsettling enough, a California startup has unveiled “Threehalves,” a seven-foot-tall, goat-headed, four-legged robot designed to carry chainsaws, haul equipment, and operate in wildfire zones too dangerous for humans. The company says the remote controlled beast is really meant to protect people by sending a robot into hazardous conditions instead. They say the black goat head is just a safety feature that prevents the robot from fitting through standard doorways and can act as a physical stop in confined spaces.

Sure looks like Baphomet to us.

The Financial Times estimates that Venezuela has generated more than $13 billion in oil revenue since the US captured Nicolás Maduro in January and took control of the country’s oil exports. But Washington has said remarkably little about where Venezuela’s money has gone.

President Trump told Fox News this week that Venezuela is a very “happy” country again — except for the recent “earthquake, I guess you’d call it.” And the billions in oil revenue nobody can properly account for. And the angry protesters taking to the streets to challenge daily power cuts that last four to five hours in Caracas.

But apart from the devastating earthquake, shattered infrastructure, missing money, and intermittent electricity, Venezuela is a country filled with shiny, happy people!

Ah, happiness — coming soon to America, too.

Despite all the talk of ceasefires and deals, the Pentagon insists the US is ready for a long confrontation with Iran. Families of the sailors aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln seem less sure.

Reports from the carrier describe shrinking meal portions, shortages of basic supplies, failing sanitation, and collapsing morale after months of repeated deployment extensions. Family members confronted Navy leadership this week, talking not only of exhaustion and uncertainty, but of sailors struggling to get enough to eat.

For months, military analysts have been warning that the US doesn’t have enough missile stockpiles and industrial capacity for a prolonged conflict. Now another shortage has entered the conversation: food.

Ultimately, this story isn't really about food, or sanitary napkins, or crew morale. It's the convergence of all these reports, emerging from the same ship, validated by families back home, that sends the signal worthy of attention. Systems under strain rarely fail all at once, but instead show themselves through small failures that compound… this is what becomes harder to explain away or, frankly, ignore.

COMING UP…

Save the date: On Wednesday, August 19, Collapse Life and Overcome Babylon will host a joint livestream on strategic relocation based on his new book.

and will discuss what to look for in a safer, more resilient place to live — and how to think seriously about relocating before circumstances make the decision for you. Come join the discussion and bring your questions and comments! Link to livestream coming soon.

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This week, Google announced a new integration inside Google Earth that would allow users to transform real satellite and 3D imagery into historical reconstructions, architectural concepts, educational scenes, and more. It didn’t take more than a few hours for people to start stress-testing the tool, realizing they could create convincing fake satellite imagery over real locations, including refugees near the Mexican border, a non-existent nuclear plant in Iran, and a fatal crash on an Amsterdam street.

Less than 24 hours later, Google rolled the feature back to, “work on implementing stronger guardrails.”

The timing of this is spectacularly stupid. Releasing a tool for fabricating satellite-style evidence would have been reckless at any moment, but doing it in the middle of expanding wars — when verifying competing claims about bomb damage, nuclear sites, and civilian casualties increasingly depends on satellite imagery — borders on societal sabotage.

The most charitable reading is that the product team had been working on this for a while and was excited to go live with their ‘cool new tool.’ Perhaps nobody with sufficient authority was asked what might happen when users type «show missile damage at an Iranian nuclear site» into the prompt field?

The darker reading is that Google knew misuse was possible but considered the product launch more important than preserving the evidentiary integrity of satellite-style imagery. It may be conspiratorial to suggest the feature was intentionally released to contaminate the information environment during wartime, making genuine evidence easier to dispute, but perhaps intent is actually beside the point.

Once fake satellite evidence becomes easily manufactured, the main political benefit is not just that you can’t believe false pictures, but that real pictures can now be denied. Every authentic image of a bombed hospital, damaged airbase, or burning oil terminal can now be dismissed as “probably AI.” So while Google may not have intended to fog the battlefield, they may have just handed all sides a massive fog machine.

Remember, we were always at war with Eastasia… and now we may have the photo evidence to prove it.

When and if humans finally create colonies in outer space, one thing is for sure: they’ll feel right at home when they see the litter spreading across the neighborhood.

This week a discarded SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage, launched during a lunar mission in 2025, is expected to slam into the moon at roughly 5,400 mph. The collision will carve out a crater about 90 feet wide, but scientists are rushing to gloss over the story, saying it poses no danger and will provide valuable data for future lunar exploration.

So, in short, humanity’s first instinct upon reaching a new frontier — long before building a permanent settlement — is to use it, abandon it, and call the mess a research opportunity.

As we noted in a story earlier this week, when people move they bring their old habits with them.

No word yet on whether Mr. Musk will be on the hook for the littering fee.

Malaysia has ordered the closure of the Network School, an experimental community founded by tech founder Balaji Srinivasan with the aim of laying the groundwork for a future “network state.”

Srinivasan has dreamed of a digitally organized society that exists alongside, and perhaps one day beyond, traditional nation states for many years, writing about it in his 2022 book The Network State.

In an August 2024 blog post, he wrote: “We’re starting a new school near Singapore for the dark talent of the world.” (We plan on exploring that idea more in an upcoming story.) By “near Singapore,” what he meant was an island in Malaysia known as the Singapore-Johor Special Economic Zone.

Malaysia was none too pleased when they heard reports that Israeli participants had joined the project, since it is a country that does not recognize Israel and restricts entry by Israeli citizens. Malaysian authorities later said they found no immigration violations among those inspected, but ultimately revoked the school’s license over regulatory issues.

Within a day, Srinivasan announced the project would relocate to Kazakhstan.

There’s so much to explore in this story — permits, zoning, nationhood, citizenship, talent, and opportunity… to say nothing of the term “dark talent.” But for Notes, we’ll just focus on one small slice: the fact that governments are becoming less willing to tolerate systems that separate legal nationality from physical access. Whether through investment passports, digital communities or globally mobile elites with multiple citizenships, the spaces between jurisdictions are narrowing.

Just weeks ago, we wrote about how the European Union demanded that several Caribbean nations dismantle their “golden passport” programs, arguing that citizenship sold by one country effectively grants access to the entire Schengen Area.

Now Malaysia has moved against a private community that, intentionally or not, appeared capable of creating another pathway around national restrictions. For decades, globalization rewarded those who could navigate the gaps between countries. Now, governments are increasingly trying to close them — while they still can.

We just couldn’t resist weighing in on the on-again-off-again “deals” that seem to be flying a mile-a-minute out of Washington DC’s inner circle. Probably not for the reason you’d expect.

Nevertheless, one minute, deals are being begged for by one side, another minute, expletive-filled rants against “scumbags” and “lunatics” abound. The art of the deal may have met its match, given the kinds of realtime hallucinations we’re witnessing.

But truly, we say, the real victim in all this? Justice.

The rants and hallucinations, deals and expletives are simply running cover for the sordid Jeffery Epstein saga.

Where’s the justice for the abuse? Where’s the headlines putting pressure on this administration to bring to account the perpetrators and real “scumbags?” Why can’t we root out and punish pedophiles and sex fiends that appear to be running this nation’s politics, business, academia, and intelligence? When are we going to stop sacrificing our children to Moloch?

That’s the point of this little vignette. Don’t forget. Don’t partake in the hallucination. Don’t take your eyes off what’s really happening. The future of our children depends on it.

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The award for best Long Read of The Week goes to the inimitable Ron Unz for his 8,500-word opus, “The Iran War and the Manipulation of Oil Markets.” There’s no way to summarize it and do it justice — you’ll need to take the time to read it yourself, or click the audio button and let Ron read it to you. It’s quite worth your investment.

If you’ve been wondering why the price of a barrel of oil has hovered around the same level it was before the war began, only hitting $100 this week for the first time since May as the conflict spilled into the Red Sea, this article will begin to shed some light on the subject.

Read it alongside this excellent analysis from from his new venture, SNAFU Investing, and let us know your thoughts on the picture that begins to emerge.

SNAFU Investing with Lau Vegys

Who Canceled the Oil Apocalypse?

Remember the oil shock…

Read more

22 days ago · 62 likes · 16 comments · Lau Vegys

As we explored in this week’s podcast with of The Daily Doom, the gap between official economic statistics and the economy people actually experience seems to be widening. Here’s another great indicator to demonstrate that: more Americans are treating themselves to the five-finger discount.

A new survey from LendingTree reveals that 30% of Americans say they’ve shoplifted, up significantly from 23% in 2024. Food and nonalcoholic drinks remain the most commonly stolen items, with most respondents citing financial strain as their motivation for shoplifting. Younger people were more likely to say they’ve shoplifted at least once, and respondents say they are more likely to steal from a chain store like Walmart or Family Dollar than from a local store.

This tracks with the sentiment recently revealed in a now-infamous New York Times podcast, in which three millennial influencers discussed their views on stealing from box stores as not “right” but not necessarily wrong either.

Watch this space… the shoplifting index may be the new benchmark for the real economy and public sentiment all rolled into one: when more people are stealing food and feeling morally OK about it, the economy — and society — may not be as healthy as the spreadsheets suggest.

A man and his wife went into a Kohl’s in suburban Minnesota to drop off some Amazon returns. Sounds like a pretty familiar scenario, right?

Well, imagine their surprise when they got back to the parking lot and were swarmed by four armed squad cars.

…four cop cars came flying out of nowhere and boxed us in. The officers jumped out and started shouting. It’s a situation that can quickly and frequently turn bad, so as unprepared as I was, I followed their orders, got out with my hands up, and tried to figure out what the hell was happening.

What was happening, as it turns out, is that the police had incorrectly identified the vehicle’s license plates as stolen. The driver was Joel Feder, an automotive journalist and director of content and product for The Drive. He was test driving a $155,000 Land Rover with manufacturer’s plates that had been entered incompletely into a federal database used by Flock’s system to surveil traffic around the country.

Police received a clear image showing the mismatch but failed to verify it before tracking Feder in the vehicle for days and finally confronting him and his wife as suspected felons.

The now-viral tale has an ersatz happy ending, ultimately coming down to a matter of human error. But Feder says the mix-up is a warning that the integration between Flock and police departments into a nationwide surveillance grid is far from perfect. One trigger-happy cop could have set this course of events spiraling in a different and decidedly dangerous situation.

“They need better guardrails,” Feder told “NewsNation Prime” on Saturday.

Resistance to this Flocked Up digital prison is growing, which is welcome news. But don’t be surprised if it goes away temporarily, only to return in a form that’s harder to destroy and impossible to avoid.

Let’s make resistance fertile.

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Roubini went on Bloomberg TV this weekend and casually explained that AI and robots would make large chunks of the population permanently unemployable, blowing a hole in the payroll tax system that supports Social Security and eventually making universal basic income or partial government ownership of Big Tech an inevitability.

The Bloomberg hosts, Scarlet Fu and Tom Keene, barely blinked and only briefly noted that Roubini’s future sounded like everyone losing their jobs. But then they cheerfully returned to reminiscing about Davos. Civilization may be approaching the end of productive work, but remember that time at the bar in the Alps?? Those were good times…

Roubini, for his part, tried to paint an optimistic picture: machines do the work, growth explodes, governments tax the winners, and everyone gets a check. The less charming and more realistic version is that humans become unnecessary as workers but remain useful only in their role as consumers. The state sends a monthly allowance to keep the shopping carts moving and the pitchforks in storage.

Welcome to the post-work future: fewer jobs, more surveillance, and just enough “money” to keep Amazon delivering.

Roubini’s post-work future depends on taxing the winners and redistributing the proceeds. Canada may want to check whether the winners are planning to stick around.

A new report from the Fraser Institute says the top 20 percent of families now pay 65 percent of personal income taxes and 58 percent of all taxes (sales, payroll, property, and other taxes), despite earning just under half of total family income.

The report comes as Canada expands benefits, raises expectations, and watches high earners, doctors, and other skilled workers head south. A November 2025 report found that 20 percent of immigrants leave Canada within 25 years of landing, with onward migration peaking in the first five years. Immigrants with doctorates are nearly twice as likely to leave Canada within five years as those with bachelor’s degrees, and highly-skilled immigrants are more than twice as likely as lower-skilled immigrants to leave Canada within five years.

Progressive taxation is supposed to make the wealthy carry more of the load. The problem begins when the entire system depends on a small, mobile group unwilling to be the national ATM. How’s that working out, Canada?

So, when the national ATM decides enough is enough, there’s always a Caribbean island willing to sell an escape route. At least, there was…

The European Union is now threatening to strip visa-free travel from Antigua, St. Kitts, Dominica, St. Lucia, and Grenada unless they shut down programs that sell citizenship to foreign investors — programs the small island nations say have become critical sources of revenue for them.

A critical source of revenue for one government is an annoyance to another government. People who want to unburden themselves from the pilfering that comes from high-tax countries will alway seek new places — it’s the free marketplace of sovereignty.

Until it isn’t.

Western nations have argued that the citizenship programs offer a backdoor for applicants from other countries to gain visa-free access to their countries with little due diligence. OK… a fair concern; citizenship should require a little more checking than a Costco membership.

Still, the ultimatum is rich coming from a bloc built around the concept of free movement of capital and people. Europe spent decades teaching the world that citizenship was an economic asset, but now it’s alarmed when small Caribbean nations are charging market rates for it.

Apparently passports may be bought, sold and leveraged — just not by countries too small to write the rules.

We take these kinds of grumblings as a shot across the bow; your ability to move freely and find places to protect the spoils of your own hard work is being eroded with each passing month. Continue to position yourself wisely in this increasingly hostile environment.

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Their grandparents had the Summer of Love. In 2026, young people disillusioned with the digital world answered with the ‘Summer of Ludd.’

Two weeks ago, New York City’s East Village became a gathering place for a new generation of Luddites. Events included self-defense workshops, tea parties, journaling with scraps and found materials, and our personal favorite: Google in Real Life, where people gathered to ask and answer each other’s questions. Another hands-on session introduced participants to shortwave radios, FM transmitters and walkie-talkies.

Participants also revisited the original Luddites, the skilled textile workers who rebelled in early 19th-century England against factory owners using new machines to deskill their work, drive down wages, and concentrate their economic power.

Two centuries later, their argument feels familiar. Earlier this year, Gallup found that roughly one-third of young people said AI made them angry, while 42 percent said it made them anxious. Excitement about AI had fallen to just 22 percent.

Young people have certainly not rejected technology outright — about half still use generative AI at least weekly. But many are increasingly angry about what technology has become: intrusive, compulsory, addictive, and designed to displace human judgment.

Gen X had the iconic printer beatdown scene in Office Space: three frustrated workers dragging a piece of office equipment into a field and smashing it to pieces.

Maybe the ‘Summer of Ludd’ is Gen Z’s response. A bit more constructive than smashing machines… but maybe, just maybe, while late 60s feminists burned bras, this generation will act on the impulse to burn their phones.

When Venezuela’s government stopped publishing credible economic statistics in 2016, Bloomberg began tracking the price of a café con leche at a bakery in eastern Caracas. The result is a decade’s worth of data that shows what monetary collapse looks like in real time.

Today, the price of a simple cup of coffee has gone parabolic. The years immediately following 2016 appear almost flat, but not because things were economically stable. It’s because the latest price increases are so extreme they visually crush everything that came before them. After a sharp rise in 2025, the line went nearly vertical in 2026.

This month, the tracked price climbed above 2,000 bolívars, up from around 300 a year earlier — an increase of roughly 563 percent in just 12 months.

The blunt simplicity of Bloomberg’s index is why it’s so striking. Governments frequently revise their methodologies, suppress statistics, lop six zeroes off currencies, and declare fresh beginnings. All the while, the people buying breakfast still know their money is dying.

America is nowhere near Venezuela’s monetary collapse — at least not yet. But the growing suspicion that official inflation figures bear little resemblance to real life is becoming palpable.

Questions remain, though. What does the breaking point look like? Is the same hockey stick fate waiting silently in the wings for the right moment to pounce in America? If the Pandora’s box that was opened in Hormuz doesn’t get straightened out quickly, that breaking point may come sooner rather than later. Hello Zimbabwe!

Poor Dr. Evil. All he wanted was sharks with frickin’ laser beams attached to their heads. Instead, because of all the bureaucratic red tape, he got ill-tempered sea bass. We bet he’d be pretty excited about what the technology industry is cooking up now.

The CEO of a company called Axon, Rick Smith, says his team is actively researching drones capable of physically stopping suspects using tasers. We already have drones that can provide real-time surveillance. The next obvious step in is to let them “put an effect on somebody” — corporate language for remotely incapacitating a human being. For ‘public safety’, of course.

The dystopian future just got one step closer.

Axon insists… cough, cough… it will never build intentionally lethal drones. Its stated mission is to replace situations that might otherwise end in death with less-lethal alternatives. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? But we’re less interested in whether a taser is preferable to a bullet and more interested in what happens when force becomes this cheap, scalable, and psychologically detached from the person who deploys it.

A police officer standing several feet from a suspect must make a visible decision and accept at least some immediate risk. A drone operator could eventually stun someone from a command center miles away — a gamer’s wet dream. Or maybe the ‘operator’ is AI… in which case, there is zero emotion, zero ethics, zero morals and zero accountability.

Maybe Axon genuinely intends to keep humans firmly in control and lethal force out of the equation. But history suggests that once institutions possess the ability to remotely immobilize people, the argument will quickly shift from whether it should be used to how often.

The future, apparently, is a flying robot watching you from above and congratulating itself for not killing you.

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Students at Quebec’s École nationale d’horlogerie may be among the few who are not anxious about their jobs being stolen by a humanoid robot soon after they graduate.

That’s because they’re learning something artificial intelligence definitely cannot do: how to sit in a quiet room for long hours, hold your breath, and reassemble parts so tiny a small breeze can ruin a day’s work.

This week the CBC profiled Canada’s only watchmaking school, and we highly encourage you to read the entire article or, better yet, listen to the audio documentary. It’s a superb example of radio journalism — the kind for which CBC became famous. And while Notes is normally full of snark and bite, this time we’ll just say this is a story worth reading.

It describes how the school in Trois-Rivières, on the banks of the St. Lawrence River northeast of Montreal, was founded after World War II to help veterans re-enter civilian life through a skill that required patience, discipline, precision, and calm. Eighty years later, it is still teaching how to repair machines most people don’t use, in a culture where most people throw things away.

One of the most poignant moments comes from Louis-Philippe Grondin, a 47-year-old student who used to work as an interior designer. He left the industry after becoming frustrated with creating spaces out of materials good enough to last for a lifetime, but which would all go into the trash in five to seven years because it was out of fashion. “I wasn’t at ease with that,” he said.

“It’s more meaningful,” Grondin says, “to maintain something.” Amen to that!

Cynics might argue that the students at a watchmaking school are wasting their time and effort. Who needs a watch to tell time anymore? Your phone does that, along with your oven, your car, and countless other digital gadgets.

A phone can tell you what time it is, but it can’t remind you what that time is worth. Leave that to a website called foodnevercomes.com. It does exactly what it says.

It looks just like a regular delivery app, where you can scroll menus, customize an order, enter an address, choose a payment method, and track a fake courier across a fake map.

But nothing is cooked, nothing is paid for, and no food will ever arrive.

The app belongs to a growing category of something called ‘dopamine sites’: digital spaces that recreate the thrill of buying without the inconvenience of actually receiving, using, digesting, cleaning up, or living with anything. It is consumption stripped down to its purest form: anticipation without consequence.

So, in contrast to the watchmaking school in Quebec, where students are learning to bring back to life something that is very real, we have a viral app from South Korea that caters to people who order food when they’re not hungry, only because they’re so under-stimulated, restless, and bored out of their skulls that pretending to order a hamburger from a restaurant that doesn’t exist can feel like some sort of relief.

Welcome to the dopamine economy, where people learn to desire without receiving, choose without committing, consume without consuming, and simulate satisfaction just long enough to survive another evening inside the matrix. This pure conditioning for life inside the digital corral. As we always try to remind: stay human, friends.

Since it’s a holiday weekend in America, we’ll keep this week’s Notes short, and end on some seemingly good news. In his July 4th speech, President Trump made mention of interplanetary travel:

“We’re going to be going to Mars very soon. And I think that's something that we do have in mind. And we're going to do the moon and we're going to go from there. We're going to go to Mars, and we're going to continue to be way ahead.”

Does that mean Don and Elon are back together again? We’re not going to Mars without Elon, right? Add this to the wedding of the year, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce in Madison Square Garden with about a thousand of their closest celebrity friends, and we’re feeling the love here in America this weekend.

(It wouldn’t be Notes from the Edge of Civilization without a little snark, right?)

Join us at 12:30 ET for Book Chat. This week we’re actually going to be talking about movies that predicted the future — what they got right and what still hasn’t come to pass. It’ll be fun and light after weeks of talking collapse. Be there!

A new report from The Guardian describes factory workers in India being asked to wear head-mounted cameras while they sew garments, fold towels, build, sort, and perform other physical tasks. At first, some workers found the setup funny; that is until they realized they were producing training data, known as ‘egocentric data’, for the robots who would eventually replace them.

Large language models like Chat GPT and Grok were trained on huge volumes of text scraped from across the internet. But humanoid robots like the ones Elon Musk is developing need data that teaches them how to move through the real world. And increasingly that data is coming from human laborers doing repetitive, precise, underpaid work. A few weeks ago, we told you about a company called Shift that offers free apartment cleaning to New Yorkers who allow human cleaners to wear cameras while they work. The pitch: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data.”

But just like with everything else, there’s a way to cut costs by offshoring the work. So instead of workers in New York gathering data in exchange for free housecleaning, increasingly the data is coming from garment factories, construction sites, warehouses, and informal labor markets in India, where workers already earn just a few dollars a day. Now their movements are becoming a valuable digital asset for companies racing to automate industrial work, and they get nothing in return except maybe a soft drink once in a while.

This is the next stage of the AI economy: not just stealing words, images, music, and creative work, but extracting human movement. And then eventually, humanity itself.

At any rate, the worker sells their labor once, then the recording of that labor gets cleaned, annotated, packaged, licensed, resold, and used to build systems that may eventually make the worker unnecessary. It’s the cycle of life, right?

The quote that says it all comes from Lalita, one of the garment workers profiled in The Guardian story: “We are not even getting our full worth for the work we do now. Who is going to pay us when we are replaced by robots?”

Bingo!

Here’s a good question an X user recently asked: Can’t the UK stop being an insufferable c*nt for 5 seconds?

You may think this post is perhaps too profane, but we dare you to hold to that claim after you’ve read about the situation that prompted the expletive in the first place.

Paul Powlesland, a British barrister and environmental campaigner, helped organize a volunteer cleanup of Aldersbrook, a tributary of the River Roding, which runs through Essex and the suburbs of Greater London.

He and his crew reportedly removed around 200 bags of rubbish, branches, weeds and silt over 10 days from a waterway already plagued by illegal dumping and sewage discharges.

Then came the bureaucrats: the Environment Agency investigated whether the cleanup itself was illegal because Powlesland had done it without the proper permit.

To be fair, river work is not always simple. Dredging, flood risk, waste left on floodplains, and disturbance of habitats can create real problems. Not every well-meaning person with a shovel is automatically a hero. But that’s also not the whole story.

The absurdity is the asymmetry. Major pollution, sewage discharges, and illegal dumping can carry on with seeming impunity, but a group of volunteers with bags and boots are a sudden reminder to the state that it has rules that must be obeyed. It’s a lot easier for the system to go after citizens who act, than institutions that don’t.

This story resonated with enough people that, after it came to the public’s attention the agency dropped the charges. The machine certainly can move quickly when it has egg on its face, can’t it?

Powlesland is now asking for a meeting with the chief executive of the Environment Agency to request them to redirect their energy away from punishing river volunteers and toward two constructive goals: forcing Thames Water to produce a serious, near-term plan to stop illegal sewage discharges, and turning the River Roding case into a model for how regulators can work with grassroots river guardians instead of treating them as the problem.

Bravo, Mr. Powlesland!

In December, Australia introduced new regulations requiring age-restricted platforms to take “reasonable steps” to stop Australians under age 16 from creating or keeping accounts.

Awkwardly, the ban doesn’t appear to be working very well. While the government reports that more than 5 million under-16 accounts have been deactivated or restricted, a recent study found that 85% of Australians aged 12 to 15 were still using social media months after the ban began, often by self-declaring an older age or passing weak selfie checks.

Importantly, children and parents are not penalized; the legal burden sits with platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, TikTok, Twitch, X, YouTube, Kick and Reddit.

This weekend, the government said it will double the maximum penalty for breaches to A$99 million (about US$68 million), while giving the eSafety Commissioner stronger powers to force platforms to provide evidence of what they are actually doing to comply. The government says investigations are already underway into alleged non-compliance by Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube.

Opposition to the social media ban has always centered around the fact that child safety is the perfect Trojan horse for policing everyone else. And now that real-life evidence is proving that self-declaration, selfies, and parental permission are useless, there’s only one thing left: identity verification at scale.

That’s precisely where this story stops being about teenagers and starts being about the architecture of online life. Today it is under-16s on TikTok, but tomorrow it’s “misinformation,” “harmful content,” “extremism,” “public health,” “financial scams,” or whatever fresh emergency requires adults to show their papers before speaking, reading, watching, posting, or dissenting.

Big Tech created the addiction machine. Government now offers to fix it by building the permission machine.

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Join us today at 12:30 ET/9:30 PT for a very special Book Chat, featuring Professor Jem Bendell, to discuss his book ‘Breaking Together.’ Join the live discussion on either Substack or YouTube.

If you read one piece this week, make it this analysis from Patrick Wood. It helps explain why so many people may be missing the main thrust of what’s been happening in Iran.

Patrick Wood's Technocracy News

Iran: The Goal Was Always Economic Reintegration, Not Containment

Note: In the plainest terms, economic reintegration is the process of bringing a country that has been cut off from the global economy back into it — restoring its access to trade, capital, banking, investment, and the financial systems that let money and goods cross its borders. This is Iran in 2026…

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2 months ago · 230 likes · 69 comments · Patrick Wood

Wood argues that the Iran settlement deal was never really about military victory. He frames it instead as economic reintegration: Iran being wired back into the global economy through trade, capital, banking, transport corridors, and a reported $300 billion private investment vehicle. If it doesn’t feel like Iran has been “defeated,” that may be because the point was to onboard, not conquer. Or, conquer in a different way, as it were.

The key detail is hiding in plain sight. The people who shaped the deal are not traditional diplomats. Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner are real estate and finance men fluent in development deals, Gulf capital, and infrastructure logic. The result, Wood argues, reads less like a peace treaty and more like a blueprint for regional redevelopment.

That’s the unnerving part. The public was told to look for victory on the battlefield. But the real prize may have been the map: Hormuz, energy routes, the International North-South Transport Corridor, the Abraham Accords, and the broader project of turning adversaries into counterparties.

So think again when you hear talking heads tell you Iran has been contained. It may have been converted from a hostile gap in the global grid into an investable node. It’s a classic example of how technocracy moves: through corridors, capital, dependency, and control.

If Wood’s theory is correct, we expect to see other ‘pariah’ states move into the crosshairs for integration and ‘investment.’ (We’re looking at you, North Korea!)

Australian commentator and observer, Michael Ginsburg, who joined us a few months ago to talk about predictive programming, says episode 3 of Years and Years is now being acted out in real life.

He may be onto something — though not necessarily in the literal, scene-by-scene sense.

In the mini-series, Britain is buckling under institutional failure, economic stress, political exhaustion, and public rage. Into that vacuum steps Vivienne Rook, a media-savvy outsider who turns taboo-breaking into political power. She rises to leadership because the system has lost legitimacy and the voting public craves change.

That’s the most useful comparison. Right now, Britain looks politically combustible. Keir Starmer appears unable to survive the week as Prime Minister. Andy Burnham is being talked up as Labour’s rescue figure. Reform is trying to hold together a populist-right coalition. Rupert Lowe and Restore are pressuring Reform from further out on the nationalist right. The center is collapsing because too many people have stopped believing it represents them.

Ginsburg’s specific prediction is bold: Farage steps aside, Lowe returns, Reform absorbs Restore-style policies, and Britain ends up with a nationalist Reform government that looks eerily like the “Four Star Party” arc in Years and Years.

Perhaps. What’s most disturbing however, is that the conditions no longer feel fictional. You don’t need Hollywood scriptwriters to notice the pattern: collapsing trust, managed decline, migration panic, economic insecurity, elite contempt, media hysteria, and a public increasingly willing to reward anyone who sounds like they are finally saying something true.

That may be the real warning of Years and Years. Dystopian fiction isn’t writing the future… it’s just noticing where society is heading before most people are ready to admit it.

Today is not only the summer solstice — marking the start of summer and the longest day of the year — but it’s also Father’s Day. To all you fathers and father figures out there, thanks for everything you do.

No matter how tight the economic times are, apparently even the most squeezed consumers can still find change under the cushions for Dad.

The National Retail Federation expects Father’s Day spending to hit a record $27.9 billion this year, up about 16% from last year. The average person is expected to spend $227, with outings, clothing, and greeting cards leading the way.

Around the country, businesses are piling on discounts to keep the ritual moving: free sandwiches, cheap ribs, discounted bagels, app-only tacos, half-price drinks, and enough promo codes to make fatherhood feel like a frequent flyer program perk.

In a year when everything feels more expensive, and in the context of more money being spent by folks unable to afford it, a cynic might point out this day is working just as its creators planned. Only this year, the discount codes are working overtime.

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In South Boston this week, two kids — aged 12 and 11 — set up a lemonade stand.

It’s an American tradition that used to function as training wheels for basic entrepreneurship: cardboard sign, plastic cups, a lockbox, maybe a few indulgent neighbors pretending it was the best lemonade they’ve ever had. It’s classically American.

Or at least it was, because it’s 2026, so there’s a twist. Two other boys allegedly came by wearing masks, flashed a handgun, grabbed about $80, and ran.

It’s the ultimate sign this country has moved from Norman Rockwell to something more akin to Thunderdome — a low-trust society where might makes right.

Brandishing a handgun is one thing, but the fact the suspects were also kids makes the whole thing extra sordid. We are asking (as we’re sure you are): What kind of a country are we living in where the response to seeing success and earnings at a lemonade stand parlays into daylight robbery?

There’s something deeply broken in the zeitgeist of this nation when a makeshift lemonade stand needs the defense of door camera footage and police intervention. Childhood is being pulled into the same ambient instability as everything else. Adults may still want to pretend things are OK, but the example that’s been set by them and those leading our towns, our cities, our states, and our country is trickling down to give kids everywhere a rather harsh wake-up call.

Hey, at least the kids will have an interesting anecdote for the business school entrance essay!

Businesses are replacing employees with AI and learning a tough lesson. Bots can’t have the authority of an employee when they save money, but the legal responsibility of a toaster when they screw up.

Case in point: a BMW dealership in Toronto.

The CBC reports that when Zack Giacomelli’s 2021 BMW needed major repairs, he contacted BMW Toronto about selling it back. He got a sympathetic text message from someone named Quinn, who made him a firm buyback offer of $27,162.79 CAD — just enough to cover what Zack still owed on the car. Quinn made an appointment with Zack to lock in the deal.

That all came as great news to Zack, until he found out that Quinn was not a helpful employee but an AI chatbot gone rogue. Moments later, a human salesperson called Zack to say the offer was invalid and the real buyback number was closer to $20,000, leaving Zack out of pocket nearly $7,000.

That seems to be the trick companies are trying to pull. They’re using bots to cut labor costs, but then claiming the bot doesn’t actually count, making it more like an autonomous bait-and-switch tool.

Canadian law has already had a little chat with this fantasy. In 2024, Air Canada was forced to honor bad information given by its AI after the company tried arguing the bot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own actions.

After CBC contacted BMW Toronto, the dealership reinstated the original offer. Funny how “that’s not our problem” becomes “we want to do right by the customer” once the threat of bad press shows up. It’s probably the most money the Canadian broadcaster has saved a Canadian taxpayer in quite some time.

Fact is, companies everywhere want tireless digital employees to help lower the bottom line and boost profits. However, they’re quickly learning that requires human time and energy to manage it. So then the question becomes: Are companies really much further ahead in the end?

To state the obvious, this a must-watch space, because going up the AI chain of command, some companies supplying AI products are about to openly revolt. Just this week, Wired reported that a livestreamed Meta meeting descended into chaos with one employee even claiming, “it's literally the gulag.”

This is a far cry from a dealership in Toronto, but things are about to get spicy for all of us as the entire post-World War Two system many of us know disappears and is replaced with something we cannot even fathom. Fourth turning indeed!

In Albania, a proposed luxury resort linked to Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump has helped send tens of thousands of protesters into the streets. The immediate flashpoint is the threat to one of the Mediterranean’s largest flamingo habitats.

While the birds may have given this movement its mascot, the deeper grievance is institutional rot. People are not just angry because flamingos might be displaced, they are tired of seeing the same pattern everywhere: public goods privatized, laws bent, politicians bought, oversight mocked, and citizens informed after the important decisions have already been made.

(It’s like the datacenter playbook has metastasized into the everything playbook!)

That’s why this has grown beyond an environmental protest and become a referendum on whether Albania’s government exists to protect the country, or package it.

And it matters beyond Albania because the model has gone global. Find a beautiful place, call it underdeveloped, promise jobs, dismiss the locals and local wildlife, and act surprised when they don’t want their homeland turned into a luxury escape pod for billionaires.

The birds may survive. The question is whether the government will.

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A sea of red is the only way to describe the markets this past Friday. Approximately $1.75 trillion was wiped out from the US stock market, alongside roughly $130 billion from the cryptocurrency market.

If those numbers confuse you, alarm you, or make you wonder about your investment strategy, you won’t want to miss our upcoming exclusive session with Wall Street veteran Peter Grandich, happening this Wednesday, June 10, at 7pm ET.

We want to be clear: Peter is doing this without compensation or remuneration. He likes what we’re doing at Collapse Life and wants to support our efforts and for that, we are eternally grateful. Who benefits? You.

This will be the first of three intimate and interactive discussions with Peter, and it’s exclusive to paid subscribers only — that way, there’s a chance for you to interact and get your questions answered. So upgrade today to reserve your spot, then look for the link in your email over the next day or two and we’ll see you on Wednesday!

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Have you heard about the “Freedom Ship”? It’s making headlines recently: a proposed mile-long floating city that would carry up to 80,000 people, including 50,000 permanent residents, 20,000 crew, and thousands of visitors. The concept includes homes, schools, banks, shops, hotels, a stadium, museums, parks, a water park, helipads, and a “state-of-the-art hospital.” It would be too large to dock, so it would remain offshore in international waters and ferry people to and from land.

The pitch is part cruise ship, part sovereign startup city, part techno-utopian escape pod. Its backers say it could be nuclear-powered, environmentally friendly, economically self-sustaining, and even capable of cleaning the oceans as it travels.

But the paragraph that matters is the one about medical research.

“We also want a state-of-the-art hospital. We’ve been approached by medical research facilities because we would be outside the reach of regulatory bodies, so the Freedom Ship would be an ideal venue for that,” CEO Roger Gooch told The Telegraph.

And now the picture starts to come into focus. This is not just another absurdly large cruise concept. It points toward a familiar fantasy: build a private jurisdiction beyond ordinary public accountability, then call it ‘innovation.’ Cruise ships already struggle with deadly outbreaks (Hantavirus anyone?) and evacuations. Scaling that up to the population of a small city while advertising ‘freedom’ from regulatory oversight does not exactly inspire confidence.

The floating city becomes a place where finance, biotech, gambling, residency, education, security, and governance can be bundled into one corporate-controlled environment that is offshore, mobile, and deliberately hard to regulate.

The unspoken promise is about exit — from national rules, public scrutiny, and democratic constraint. The risk is that the people most excited by that model may not be the ones you want designing your future.

A few weeks ago, The Economist profiled “passport bros” — Western men who move abroad in search of women they describe as more traditional, feminine, and accommodating than the apparently terrifying species known as ‘The American Woman.’

The most interesting part is not that some men are finding love overseas. People have always married across borders. What’s revealing, and left unsaid in the utterly sloppy reporting of The Economist, is that several of the men profiled are not just participants in the trend. They are monetizing it.

One couple, Mike and Pafan, admit to making their living as social media influencers. Another man, Austin Abeyta, combines remote data analytics work with content creation and coaching. In other words, these are not neutral case studies of men looking for women. These are business relationships, under the guise of personal relationships. Whether love is actually found is masked by the fact that this is a for-profit enterprise, selling men hope of love via a lifestyle commodity.

That changes the story dramatically.

When Mike posts a video captioned “Point of view: you have a Thai girlfriend”, with Pafan kneeling on the floor clipping his fingernails, that’s not just a snapshot of a specific relationship dynamic in action. It’s content aimed at an audience of men who feel rejected, resentful, lonely, economically squeezed, or simply tired of competing in the American dating market.

That means The Economist should have asked harder questions, like:

• Who benefits when American men believe Western women are ruined?

• Who monetizes the idea that moving abroad will solve loneliness, status anxiety, sexual frustration, and economic precarity?

• How much of this “traditional femininity” is real, and how much is staged content for men scrolling alone in a Cleveland, Ohio basement at 1 am?

• What happens when a private relationship becomes a recurring content format?

• And most importantly: are these men finding wives, or building funnels?

Passport bro culture is not just about the politics of sex, love, marriage, or even misogyny. It is also an influencer economy built on grievance. The product being sold is restored male status at a discount. And it’s downright predatory.

(Note: If you’re familiar with the 1980s British rock band, The Smiths, you’ll know the subhead at the top of this edition of Notes comes from the 1986 single, Panic. Whether there’s panic in Dundee and Humberside, we cannot actually say. We do not condone hanging DJs.)

The Telegraph reports rising UK interest in panic rooms and private bunkers, with some builders claiming inquiries have jumped since COVID and the wars in Ukraine and Iran. “A wave of new buyers is paying six-figure sums to prepare for an uncertain world,” they write.

As wars rage on Europe’s borders and geopolitical tensions rise, more Britons are exploring a question that once seemed the preserve of Cold War survivalists: if the worst happens, where can you go?

But let’s not confuse six-figure underground shelters with a national awakening. A handful of wealthy homeowners installing air filtration systems, blast doors, and backup power is not a new outlook on preparedness.

This weekend on the Collapse Life podcast, we spoke with Amy Edelman and Chris Begley, the co-authors of a new preparedness book who made the opposite point: it is exceedingly difficult to get most people to take even basic, modest steps like stocking up a few weeks’ supply of food, water, and first aid.

While the wealthy are building themselves boltholes, most people are putting their heads down and hoping the grid, the grocery store, the government, and the just-in-time economy will all still show up on schedule. Broad preparedness continues to be culturally embarrassing, psychologically uncomfortable, easy to postpone, and even easier to mock.

Towards the end of the article, The Telegraph mentions that sheltered spaces are “no longer necessarily a perk for the rich.” And maybe that’s partly true. A £32,000 home reinforcement project on a £250,000 property or a working couple outside London adding an overground shelter is not exactly Bond-villain territory, but it is still a very particular kind of “ordinary.”

The most interesting signal coming out of all of this is that the desire to bunker down may no longer be confined to the ultra-wealthy, but it also hasn’t translated into a wider public awakening. Instead, it is being privatized by the few who can afford to act individually.

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Silicon Valley’s pitch used to be that AI would free us from boring, repetitive work, giving us more time to spend on creative and productive endeavors. The reality, of course, was always something else.

But there’s a new pitch in town!

Please perform boring, intimate, domestic, physical, emotional, and creative tasks so we can record them, learn from them, automate them, meter them, and sell them back to you on a monthly subscription basis.

Turns out we’re not completely useless eaters after all. They’ve found a use for us… at least for now.

At BlackRock’s 2026 Infrastructure Summit in March of this year, Sam Altman described a future where intelligence is sold like electricity or water, metered by usage, with compute capacity determining access and price.

That’s the top of the pyramid: intelligence as infrastructure. But underneath, the raw material still has to come from people — their homes, bodies, habits, preferences, gestures, labor, and awkward little private rituals. It’s the digital equivalent of Soylent Green — AI, it’s made out of people!

To understand what we mean, have a look at the following examples:

• A company called Joi AI is reportedly hiring ten “masturbation consultants” who will get paid $2,000 a month to test AI-guided sexual wellness sessions and report the effects on their stress, sleep, mood, and confidence.

• A company called Shift is offering free apartment cleaning to New Yorkers who allow human cleaners to wear cameras while they work, generating footage to train household robots. The company’s own site says the deal plainly: “You get a spotless apartment. We get training data.”

• A company called SPAN is letting you host a mini-data center inside your house in exchange for subsidized electricity, internet, and backup power.

You get convenience, cash, or lower bills; they get data, behavioral mapping, embodied instruction, and another chunk of human life converted into machine-readable form.

The first step to being replaced, apparently, is being paid to document yourself into obsolescence. Do not comply.

Washington State just unwittingly gave us a peek into how the control grid expands. The state passed House Bill 1596, also known as the BEAM Act, which will come into effect on January 1, 2029.

Under the new law, repeat reckless speeders will be required to install GPS-based “intelligent speed assistance” devices before they can regain limited driving privileges. The law was passed in response to a devastating 2024 crash that killed a woman and three children — the kind of tragedy no civilized person would easily shrug off.

But as usual, the question is not whether we should do something about reckless drivers. That answer is obvious. The question is what kind of infrastructure do we need to build in the name of stopping them?

The BEAM act demonstrates how this rolls out: a horrific tragedy creates a moral opening; a seemingly reasonable fix follows; the machinery is installed, in this case GPS monitoring, monthly override limits, state-approved installers, monthly fees, tampering penalties, and a vehicle that now decides whether you are allowed to exceed a programmed threshold.

It all seems to make sense and all appears reasonable, right? We must do something about dangerous repeat speeders.

Once the infrastructure is there, however, who says it won’t be applied to address unpaid parking fines, or carbon overuse, or people with high credit card debt… or whatever new ‘social emergency’ requires just a little bit more control.

The slippery-slope concern is, to be fair, an inference and not something the law explicitly states. But so was the idea of getting a jab not too long ago — it was a simple enough instruction, until those who wanted to exercise bodily autonomy didn’t comply. Then the claws came out — vax passports, quarantine camps… you remember.

For now, the idea of GPS-based vehicle restriction tied to legal permission to drive is very much real. More of it is to come.

Of all the wild things to come out of what might be the wildest White House in history, Thursday’s X post takes the gold medal.

It’s click bait at its finest, enticing the viewer with the promise of revelations about extraterrestrials and bringing them directly into something… quite different. Official government communication has now apparently wrapped immigration enforcement, meme warfare, UFO cosplay, and gay disco anthems into a radioactive little propaganda burrito. Watch (above) to see what we mean — it’s only 11 seconds long, but packs a spicy punch.

Here’s the gist: “YMCA” plays beside what appears to be the US side of the border wall (inferred) while a UFO abducts a hoodie-wearing figure and deposits him on the other side. Click to Aliens.gov and you’ll see an “Alien Arrest Map,” and an ICE tip line for reporting “suspicious aliens.” Apparently the government spent decades denying UFOs only to reveal the real extraterrestrial threat was your landscaper.

The weird part isn’t the administration’s hardline immigration enforcement; that’s totally on-brand. The weird part is how they’re communicating like an intern with a Canva subscription and a Village People obsession.

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Last week, we brought you Waymos swarming an Atlanta suburb like a futuristic merry-go-round. This week, we see Elon Musk — the man who promises Mars colonies are just around the corner — confronting reality: the driverless future still struggles with fences, chains, construction barricades, and basic spatial awareness.

Newly unredacted crash reports submitted to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reveal that Tesla Robotaxis have crashed at least twice while being remotely piloted by human teleoperators, with a human safety monitor sitting in the front seat. In one case, the remote operator drove the vehicle into a fence. In another, it scraped a construction barricade at 9 mph. Which raises an uncomfortable question: if even the backup human can’t reliably operate the thing at golf-cart speeds, what exactly is the revolutionary breakthrough we’re being sold here?

The incidents are small enough to sound almost comical. Tesla robotaxis clipped mirrors, tangled with parking lot chains, and failed to avoid a dog darting into the street. The dog escaped unharmed, but sadly our faith in ‘frictionless’ AI perfection did not.

To be fair, every autonomous vehicle company has incidents. Tesla is hardly alone. But the mythology around AI increasingly depends on the belief that human beings are the weak link and that software can smoothly manage the chaos of the real world. Yet reality keeps intervening. Who knew that things like uneven streets, confusing construction zones, random dogs, or bad weather would provide humanity’s defense against the singularity?

“Stop Hiring Humans” is the kind of deliberately provocative marketing messaging that sounds edgy and solicits enthusiastic nods in a Silicon Valley pitch deck.

But when billboards started showing up on the streets of New York and San Francisco, and more recently in the skies over the Bay Area, it landed a bit differently than in the tech bro echo chamber, particularly at a time when millions of people are already anxious about layoffs, stagnant wages, and automation creeping into knowledge work.

The human backlash to AI has been on full display this commencement season, with graduates repeatedly booing speakers who praise AI. At a ceremony at an Arizona community college last week, the wrong names were read and in some cases the graduates' names were not read at all. "We're using a new AI system as our reader," the college president said, leading to loud boos from the audience. (That’s some clever use of AI there, institution of higher learning!)

Graduates in Tennessee were told by their commencement speaker that, “the things you learned in your first year here may already be obsolete.” In his speech at Middle Tennessee State University, record executive Scott Borchetta said the quiet part out loud, telling graduates, “AI is rewriting production, as we sit here.” When they booed him, he said: “Hey, then do something about it. It’s a tool. Make it work for you. You can hear me now, or you can pay me later.”

That particular part of Borchetta’s speech at once condemns higher learning as the useless institution it has become, as well as illustrates that the “great bifurcation” — as yesterday’s podcast guest, Mark Jeftovic, calls it — is underway at full speed. Pretty much everyone is going to be steamrolled because of how fast it’s all moving and how long it will take most people to adapt… cognitively and otherwise.

At the University of Arizona on May 15, when former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduates not to fear AI and instead to reclaim their agency and figure out how to help shape it, he was repeatedly met with jeers and boos from the audience.

The same thing happened to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield during her remarks to graduates at the University of Central Florida on May 8. She was caught off guard by the reaction when she said, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.”

The reaction is significant, because college graduates are normally the demographic most culturally aligned with technological progress. They are supposed to be the optimistic adopters already inhabiting the future. If even they are beginning to recoil, it suggests something deeper is shifting psychologically.

The older generation of commencement speakers, comfortable in their own success, largely view AI as a tool for increased efficiency and creative breakthroughs. To them, replacing a dozen workers with one AI-assisted operator is a gain. But to the students saddled with debt and hoping to break into their first employment, it evidently sounds like the people holding the reins have no intention of bringing them along.

Just when when you thought that great national nightmare was finally memory-holed, Texas steps up with a reminder. It’s true that everything is bigger in Texas, including the delusion.

to the rescue.

She says some institutions are defying Texas state law and still mandating COVID vaccinations. This includes some medical schools and training institutes. Dr. Bowden recently posted this, for anyone who may need the support:

And if you’re in Utah, there’s this:

A shout-out to both doctors for their courage and bravery in supporting individual choice and bodily autonomy.

Now gird your loins for Ebola and/or Hantavirus. Incoming in 3… 2… 1…

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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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3 months 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’?