Notes from the edge of civilization: May 3, 2026
BoJo says birth rate decline is a blessing; AI-first fighting force; markets go parabolic while Grandich goes viral; Gen Z heads to church.
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.