Notes from the edge of civilization: February 29, 2026
Iran's strategic importance; AI models love the nuclear option; and, will these countries survive a nuclear war?
Never underestimate an empire in the throes of death, which often acts like a rabid dog backed into a corner. Like the dog, that empire is going to lash out in a show of supposed strength; but all it’s doing is hastening its demise and undermining its remaining power.
The team here at Collapse Life does not profess to know the complexities, or have access to the knowledge, that underpins what is unfolding in Iran at the moment. But what we know from excellent documentaries like this recent one by Pepe Escobar, is that the world is moving away from America.
Escobar’s documentary, The Golden Corridor, shows how the Iranians (and frankly many others) have innovated instead of shrinking in the face of US sanctions and monetary controls, building new alliances and trade routes that simply bypass American influence and orthodoxy. Iran is VERY important to putting a stake in the heart of the colonial Western concept of “the Middle East,” and instead hastening an eastward power shift toward the emergence of a new, economically powerful region.
Watch the documentary to better understand what’s happening and why rabid dogs eventually meet their demise.
Now that we’re officially at war, recent news of AI war-game simulations is becoming all the more chilling. A researcher at King’s College London dropped three flagship AI models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4, and Gemini 3 Flash — into escalating geopolitical crises such as border disputes, resource scarcity, and regime survival.
In a frightening 95% of the simulations, the AIs unleashed at least one tactical nuke. The New Scientist writes, “They also made mistakes in the fog of war: accidents happened in 86 per cent of the conflicts, with an action escalating higher than the AI intended to, based on its reasoning.”
Artificial intelligence isn’t ideological, it’s just ‘logical’. While humans carry what scholars call the “nuclear taboo” and still remember the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, AI is simply programmed to optimize outcomes. No fear of death or sanctions or mutually assured destruction.
The AI models aren’t bloodthirsty. They’re indifferent. And that’s potentially worse.
As global tensions rise and mainstream headlines renew fears of escalation into World War III, The Daily Express mapped out 10 countries that could be less vulnerable in the event of a large-scale nuclear conflict.
The countries cited include Antarctica, Iceland, New Zealand, Switzerland, Greenland, Argentina, Bhutan, Chile, Fiji, and South Africa. They are all generally characterized by isolation, agricultural capacity, freshwater access, limited strategic military value, or longstanding neutrality.
Of course, this kind of article is speculative and frivolous, and at this moment in time probably pointless. As we’ve been discussing recently on Collapse Life, there really is no place on earth that will be “safe” from the coming technological gulag or whatever else follows. If your main goal is to survive nuclear escalation, you may want to rethink your priorities.
Still — and this is no surprise — an article like this reflects a growing public anxiety about geopolitical instability. If the ‘normies’ are getting worried, you know things are headed in the wrong direction.
Stay vigilant, friends.