Notes from the edge of civilization: May 10, 2026
Project Freedom... Plus!; no child support, no passport; apocalypse early warning system; who's "Cliff from Las Vegas?"; Hantavirus dancing nurses in 3-2-1; church AND casino; we got him!
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!
el gato malo shared the best take on the Hantavirus we’ve seen so far. Nothing more needs to be said.
“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.