Two weeks ago, we wrote about the muppet media machine — the seemingly broad network of unverifiable online personas who churn out widely circulated and highly monetized alternative media ‘content’… also known as pap.

This week, we’re looking at another possibility: sheep dipping. Could some of the loudest anti-establishment voices — you know them, because it’s quite likely you watch and/or listen to them — actually be three-letter agency operatives masquerading as alt media heroes? If so, what clues might give them away?

First, let’s talk about the term ‘sheep dipping’.

During the Cold War, the CIA came up with a unique solution to a very particular problem. It needed highly trained military pilots to conduct reconnaissance missions over places like the Soviet Union and Southeast Asia. But if an active-duty American serviceman was shot down, the consequences could be enormous. A covert intelligence operation could quickly become an international crisis or even be treated as an act of war.

So, the CIA’s solution was to temporarily strip certain servicemen of their official military status. On paper, they had resigned, retired, or otherwise left the military. In reality, they continued to carry out missions directed and financed by Washington, often with their rank, benefits, and eventual return to military service quietly protected.

The practice became known as sheep dipping, borrowing its name from a farming practice of immersing sheep in a chemical bath to rid them of parasites. In intelligence terms, the operative was similarly ‘washed’ of his visible military affiliation before being placed in a covert role.

If you follow on Substack or X, you may already be familiar with the concept.

Polly argues that sheep dipping didn’t disappear with the Cold War. It simply moved into a new arena — the rapidly expanding world of alternative media.

It’s impossible to know exactly how often this happens or who specifically may be involved. But the underlying question is this: if intelligence agencies were willing to disguise the status of military personnel to manage a foreign crisis, isn’t it reasonable to ask if they might use similar methods now to monitor, redirect, or contain domestic dissent?

Quite frankly, starting a podcast, YouTube channel, or Substack has never been easier. It’s much harder to build a large and influential audience. That’s why it’s worth a second look when a highly polished “anti-establishment” personality suddenly appears — particularly when they come directly from the military, intelligence, or federal contracting worlds.

We’re not here to point fingers or name names. There’s no point in trying to compile a list of suspected operatives. Anyway, you probably already have your own list of people who make you go “hmmm…?”

We just want to point out what is now becoming a familiar pattern. A former intelligence contractor or special operations veteran leaves government service and almost immediately emerges as a major media personality. There’s no awkward phase of broadcasting from their basement with a cheap microphone and bad lighting. They’re not persecuted or pursued like Edward Snowden.

Instead, they instantly have a professional studio setup with full branding, slick production value, and a steady stream of high-profile guests and prominent whistleblowers. While other independent creators struggle to overcome hostile algorithms, or get blown off by guests they’ve invited, these newcomers somehow easily get top name interviewees and reach millions of people with each new piece of content they put out.

None of that proves anything, to be fair. Sometimes people get lucky. Other times they might have money, connections, talent, or exceptionally good timing. So anyone with an impressive studio and viral content shouldn’t immediately be written off as an intelligence asset. But they also shouldn’t just be taken at face value.

The simplest test is to not just listen to what they say but also to start watching the larger pattern around them.

• Does it look like their operation is well-funded? If so, is there a way to know where the money comes from?

• How can their access to exclusive information and high-profile guests be explained?

• What institutions are they willing to criticize, and which ones seem beyond reproach?

• Does their work help an audience become more capable and independent or does it just make them scared, angry, and hooked on watching the next broadcast with sexy or alarmist headlines.

These questions will not conclusively determine if someone is a sheep-dipped intelligence asset, but they can help you decide if that person has earned the authority you are bestowing on them. Often, even the question: “Did they come out of left field” is enough to put you on the track to digging deeper.

By shedding light on these tactics and highlighting the fact that there is a reason to be skeptical, the intention isn’t to instill feelings of hopelessness or anger. Instead, the goal to help make it harder for anyone — operative, opportunist, or sincere but misguided personality — to capture your trust without earning it. It’s more important than you might think.

How to reclaim your judgment

Walking away from mainstream media doesn’t mean you have left manipulation behind. Of course there are still loads of courageous reporters, honest analysts, and ordinary people doing serious work with limited resources in alternative media. But truly understanding the space means recognizing that grifters, ideologues, and paid operatives abound, and people whose affiliations may not be what they appear ply their trade openly and freely.

Just because someone carries the “independent” label, doesn’t mean you’re guaranteed the truth. And it certainly doesn’t mean they’re actually independent.

A person’s résumé, production value, follower count, or willingness to say things that would never be heard on cable television may all be relevant signals, but none of them should substitute for your critical thinking and judgment.

Look at what evidence they offer. Look at what subjects they avoid. Look at the money, access, and incentives they have. And more importantly, look at whether you’re being directed to feel comfortable and welcomed inside a corral, where it’s tempting to let your guard down.

Below the paywall, we further explore five patterns we think are worth watching: the suspiciously seamless career change, the money behind the operation, the truths that are acknowledged vs the subjects that remain off-limits, the use of public conflict to establish credibility, and the effect the content ultimately has on its audience.

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There’s a remote part of the West Texas desert that most Americans have probably never heard of and many will never see with their own eyes. If you ever watched Wile E. Coyote chase the Road Runner in Saturday morning cartoons, you can pretty much imagine what it looks like.

It’s wild, rugged, beautiful, and still largely untouched. In fact, the Collapse Life team looked to move to this area for many years, house hunting unsuccessfully and always falling short of finding just the right place.

It was attractive because few year-round residents live in the remote communities dotted across the region, which includes hundreds of miles of border between the US and Mexico. As the New York Times wrote recently, this section of the border is so remote and so rugged that people rarely try to cross it, “even at the peak of unauthorized migration.”

Fewer than six migrants a day have been encountered crossing from Mexico in recent months in the entire Big Bend patrol sector, which includes the park and hundreds of miles of border, federal statistics show.

With the harsh terrain and poisonous snakes, spiders, and other predators naturally keeping all but the most intrepid at bay, tourism was almost non-existent until Big Bend National Park was established about 80 years ago. Even then, it took several decades before annual attendance to the park crossed 100,000 visitors. For most of its history, the park hovered between 300,000 and 400,000 annual guests. A rapid surge in popularity beginning in the late 2010s pushed annual visitation to around 500,000, which is where it hovers currently.

The national park sprawls over more than 1,200 square miles and is directly adjacent to Big Bend Ranch State Park, which covers about another 485 square miles. Together, the two parks encompass over 1.1 million acres of protected, pristine land, making the contiguous public landscape larger than the state of Rhode Island. This area is one of the only places in America where you can still see the Milky Way clearly with the naked eye, so pristine is the night sky.

It’s not difficult, therefore, to understand why many residents were opposed to the Trump administration’s proposal to build a 30-foot wall through Big Bend National Park. Opposition came from Texans on both sides of the political divide, and for a while it appeared as though the outcry was somewhat successful, with the plans being significantly rolled back.

Nevertheless, the bulldozers showed up anyway.

Officials now say there will be no wall — only a patrol road running along much of the park’s 118-mile border, plus surveillance equipment and several miles of vehicle barriers.

For the people watching workers tear through vegetation near Santa Elena Canyon, the distinction doesn’t matter all that much.

One interesting part of the response is coming from the community itself. Local restaurants and lodging operators are refusing to serve the contractors hired to do the work — even during the slowest part of the tourism year.

There is something uncomfortable about punishing workers for a decision made in Washington. Inherently, the businesses understand that a massive federal project depends on local meals, beds, fuel, and cooperation. Some have decided they don’t have to make the job easy.

Here’s a sign posted by Venga Cafe, a coffee bar opened in 2023 in the historic ghost town of Terlingua.

The government argues that Big Bend needs more surveillance, not necessarily because there’s an opening in the border that is being exploited now, but because cartels might exploit it in the future.

Let’s face it, once contracts have been awarded, money has been committed, and equipment and manpower have been moved into place, bureaucratic momentum tends to run on a logic all its own. The 30-foot wall may have disappeared from the plans for now; the bulldozers, excavators, and trenching machines haven’t.

On August 17th, Customs and Border Protection Commissioner, Rodney Scott, announced that all construction inside Big Bend National Park would be paused while he visits the area and conducts what he called an “on-the-ground evaluation.” He says he plans to meet with local leaders, residents, and other stakeholders over the next several days. (No word on whether Venga Cafe is willing to make him a coffee.)

This is not the same as canceling the project. The contracts remain in place, and there has been no commitment to abandon the roads, lights, fiber-optic cables, or vehicle barriers. But it is a rare concession from an administration racing to expand border infrastructure and surveillance — and evidence that the demonstrations, lawsuits, political pressure, and refusal of local businesses to cooperate may have made an impact.

Big Bend has bought itself some time. What happens after the officials leave remains to be seen.

The other, less obvious yet more devious part that sets off alarms, is this: It’s easy to assume that border walls are built to keep people out. However, history shows us that roads, cameras, sensors, and barriers work just as well in the other direction. The Berlin Wall, for example, was not just there to prevent people from entering East Germany. It was there to prevent East Germans from leaving.

There’s no direct evidence to suggest that is the impetus behind what’s happening in Big Bend today. But permanent systems of control have a way of outliving the temporary fears that were used to justify them.

So isn’t it worth asking whether this infrastructure could one day be used to keep us in? And if the answer is even remotely affirmative, isn’t it a good idea to think about how you might prepare while there’s still time?

Leave a comment

Share with us in the comments what Plan Bs you might have if our nation goes from land of the free to dystopian gulag.

*****

Before we hit ‘publish’ this morning, AI humanoid robots decided to enter the chat.

The Zerohedge headline that caught our attention was this: Humanoid War Robots Could Soon Patrol US Southern Border To Combat Weaponized Migrant Flows.

If we dig deep into our socio-cultural anthropology studies from university last century, the macro story appears a rather strange mashup of theories from Michel Foucault and Slavoj Žižek. A wall is an obvious expression of state power: you can see it, scale it, photograph it, protest it, and point to exactly where authority has been imposed.

But Foucault understood that modern power becomes more effective as it moves away from visible structures and into systems of surveillance and control (think, panopticon), while Žižek argued that the most consequential forms of violence can disappear into the ordinary machinery of society. In that light, “suspending” the border wall while developing drones, sensors, AI, and autonomous machines may not actually be a retreat of state power at all. Instead, it may mean the border is moving from physical architecture to embedded infrastructure — becoming less visible, more pervasive, and much harder to point at.

On the surface, the land would be able to remain largely pristine, but it would have been successfully subsumed into the surveillance state… more imposing — and potentially more violent — than a 30-foot border wall ever could be.

Don’t miss these upcoming live events:

• Wednesday, August 19, 8pm ET: The Case for Strategic Relocation with Abraham Ojeda (connect via YouTube or Substack)

• Wednesday, September 16, 6pm ET: An exclusive paid-subscriber Q&A with Peter Grandich and Michael Gentile (link will be available closer to the date)

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.

Subscribe now

Mark Grenon spent decades as a missionary before helping establish the Genesis II Church of Health and Healing, an international movement built around the use of chlorine dioxide, also known as Miracle Mineral Solution (MMS). Grenon and his followers regarded it as a religious sacrament and made its distribution central to the church’s mission. Federal regulators saw something very different: an unapproved drug being marketed as a treatment for serious diseases.

That conflict might have remained one more dispute at the margins of alternative medicine, but instead, it escalated into an international criminal case.

When the FDA ordered the Grenons to stop distributing MMS in 2020, the family refused to comply. Mark and his son Joseph were arrested in Colombia, where they had been living for several years, and extradited to the United States. Two other sons, Jordan and Jonathan, were arrested in Florida. All four were eventually convicted, with sentences ranging from five years to more than 12.

In this conversation, Grenon tells the story as he understands it — from his early missionary work and introduction to chlorine dioxide, to the creation of Genesis II, the government raids, his imprisonment, the unexpected blessings that arose from the experience, and the continuing incarceration of two of his sons.

His account is intensely personal, deeply religious and, at times, controversial. It also raises questions considerably larger than chlorine dioxide: Can declaring a substance a religious sacrament remove it from government oversight, or protect its use under the constitution? What responsibility does the government have, if any, when adults knowingly choose unconventional treatments for themselves? And when someone believes a court has no legitimate authority over him, is refusal an act of conscience or a costly legal miscalculation?

This interview does not settle those questions. What it does is give Grenon the chance to explain why he made the choices he did and what those choices ultimately cost his family.

The medical claims expressed by Mark Grenon are his own. Chlorine dioxide is not approved by the FDA to prevent or treat disease. This interview is presented for documentary and journalistic purposes and does not constitute medical advice.

Relevant links:

• Mark Grenon’s website: God’s Universal Antidote

• FDA account of the Grenon case and sentencing

• Collapse Life interview with Dr. Pierre Kory | The War over Chlorine Dioxide

Yesterday morning we stared (as we seem to do every morning lately) at a pile of boxes and furniture we moved out of storage and into our garage a few months ago.

At least a dozen of those boxes, maybe more, are labeled: “BOOKS.” We also have four or five antique barrister bookcases, draped in blankets, waiting to provide a home for those books.

As we work towards becoming a lot lighter and more nimble in anticipation of moving again, books are the exact opposite of light and nimble. They’re heavy and expensive to move, and you can argue that much of what’s in them can be summoned on a screen within seconds. By every practical measure, the boxes and the antiques should all go.

Years ago, while watching the dystopian film V for Vendetta, one particular scene lodged itself firmly in our minds. In an authoritarian future, where Britain has been stripped of its cultural memory, a masked rogue named V creates a hidden underground refuge filled with books, paintings, records, and films that he rescued from government eradication depots before they could be destroyed. That scene is etched into our memories. Given how fast we’re hurtling toward this type of dystopia, is it not incumbent on us to save these relics of physical culture before society reaches a point where there’s nothing left to save?

If we’re being honest, the mentality of holding on to something “just in case” is why we had a storage unit in the first place. Like many people, we kept thinking we might need these things someday. Now, we’re feeling a very strong pull from — the Holy Spirit, the universe, the great magnet… whatever you’d like to call it — telling us that someday may never come and it’s time to let go.

Despite this, the books are turning into a bigger dilemma than we expected.

Somewhere in those dozen or more boxes is a copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers I was carrying when I first met Stephen. There’s a copy of On the Line that chef Eric Ripert signed for us as we celebrated our anniversary at his restaurant, Le Bernardin. There’s a two-volume set of Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking that once belonged to my mother and still bears the crayon marks I scratched on the cover when I was a child.

The words in them are totally replaceable — they can be downloaded in seconds, found in a used bookstore, or read on someone else’s shelf. But the replacements would never contain what these particular copies do: memories.

To make matters worse, we learned recently that AI companies are buying up large quantities of books, cutting off their spines to make them easier to scan, ingesting them into their LLMs, and then discarding them.

Which means we’re back to wanting to keep all our books, as well as the bookcases that could store them, simply as a defiant middle finger to AI and the soulless future we face. But that makes us neither light nor nimble.

So, you see our dilemma?

AI companies — in an attempt to create the perfect synthetic human — want old books precisely because they predate the algorithm-driven synthetic slop that now dominates the internet. Old books are valuable because they are authentically human. AI needs to know how humans think and how they communicate those thoughts. Books do a great job of that, but once their humanity has been sufficiently extracted, they can be abandoned, not unlike old mines.

Last year, we wrote an essay about the paradox of having possessions that make you feel more prepared for an uncertain future and, at the same time, being possessed physically and mentally by those very same objects. We were essentially living out of suitcases at the time, and we wrote about the liberation that came with living small:

“Every item earns its place, which makes you reconsider what’s truly necessary.”

So is Julia Child’s recipe for salted goose truly necessary? Do I really need the copy of D.H. Lawrence’s book that I probably never finished reading because I was too busy falling in love? No. I don’t even need them as physical reminders of memories — of the moment my life changed forever, or the feeling of being a child on the floor of my mother’s kitchen. Those memories are with me whether the books exist or not.

That is precisely how possessions can come to control us.

But replacing physical possessions with digitized versions may essentially replace one form of control with another.

A physical book can be read, shared, loaned, sold, annotated, inherited, or hidden away. No one needs to enter a username and password, pay for a subscription, buy a token, or connect to the internet to explore its contents. Nobody can remotely revise it, withdraw it, edit it, or record which page you opened, how long you stayed on it, and whether or not you finished reading it.

That still doesn’t mean we need to hold on to boxes of books, or that every book inside those boxes deserves to be preserved simply because it was printed on paper. Keeping books sealed up in storage is not the same as “saving” them. A book only lives up to its potential when it sits in someone’s hands and their eyes fall on its words. It isn’t being saved by being entombed in a cardboard box because its owner can’t bear to make a decision.

So, most of ours will probably have to go, preferably to people who will open them, read them, learn from them, or at the very least, smile at what they read. The antique bookcases will likely go too. We are not V, living in an underground lair beneath the rubble of a once-great city… at least, not yet. Wherever we end up is unlikely to have room for a private library, anyway.

Some books have earned their place and will be worth the cost of moving them. Not because their contents are unavailable elsewhere, although that may be true in some cases. And not because future civilizations depend on us to preserve them. It’s only because these particular copies carry something no digital replacement ever will.

Whether Lawrence, Ripert, or Child make the cut is yet to be determined. We’ll keep you posted, if you care to know.

Ultimately, as we move into the next phase of our lives, the goal isn’t to become entirely weightless, though that would be ideal. We are beginning to understand that it would be impossible to shed everything. The goal is to curate what’s worth carrying into the future — and to trust that what we leave behind is not necessarily lost, but also moving on to its new life.

The backlash against data centers is growing with each passing day.

A new analysis finds that more than 500 towns and counties across the country have blocked, banned, or paused new data center developments, and lawmakers in at least 15 states are actively considering restrictions or moratoriums.

New Jersey is one of the states pushing back. More than 25 towns across the state have banned data centers, and at least a dozen more are considering it. Two towns are even facing lawsuits for withdrawing zoning permission.

Citizens are concerned that data centers consume so much power they could collapse the electrical grid, drive up residential utility rates, or both. Their fears are coming to fruition.

In New Jersey, electricity costs have increased more than 18% this year. The average bill was about $300 a month in July, the highest in the country according to the climate news site Heatmap.

The state’s governor, Mikie Sherrill, ran on getting those costs under control. On her first day in office, she declared a state of emergency over the state’s energy situation. Last month, she signed legislation that would hold “utility companies and large data centers accountable through stronger oversight and smarter incentives that will drive down costs and strengthen our grid.”

That’s some slick, politician talk, making it sound like a win for residents: data centers have to pay their own way. However, that’s only a surface level understanding. What New Jersey has done is something far more complicated and, frankly, a bit more devilish.

In a nutshell, the state is making Big Tech pay households to consume less electricity, so that Big Tech can consume more electricity. It’s a ponzi scheme for the grid.

The new law is called the Data Center Fair Share Act. Households will be able to replace their energy-hogging appliances with heat pumps, solar panels, or home backup batteries and the data centers will pay for the swap. As these upgraded households drop the burden on the electrical grid, the utility gives the data center priority positioning in the “interconnection queue.” Essentially, that means the data center gets permission to plug in and use that newly freed-up capacity immediately.

So, while more and more people are saying they don’t want data centers in their communities, and municipalities are steadily pushing back, states like New Jersey are using the moment to accomplish two competing political goals:

They’re trying to tell voters they’re being protected from Big Tech while telling Big Tech: ‘Don’t worry. You can have all the electricity you need.’

There’s something else going on here, summed up perfectly in a quote from Ari Matusiak, co-founder of a nonprofit called Rewiring America and a member of Governor Sherrill’s transition team. Matusiak recently told the climate news site Canary Media that New Jersey’s new law sets a national precedent.

​“[It’s] a blueprint for how policymakers can start to think about households as energy infrastructure,” he said.

And there it is: the incentive isn’t just a nice giveaway to the hardworking little guy. The little guy’s house now produces, stores, and feeds electricity in ways that are ultimately useful to the grid.

Once the technocrats have subsidized the battery, connected the charger, installed the smart thermostat, and aggregated them to be controlled remotely, they’ve also changed the nature of the household. It’s not just the little guy’s castle anymore… it’s a node in an energy infrastructure network.

Collapse Life wrote about this underhanded effort back in late 2023 — the push to get people into electric vehicles was more about decentralizing the power grid than any attempt at saving Gaia:

Model 3s have been stealthily equipped with vehicle-to-grid technology for several years now, even though the grid infrastructure is not quite in place yet. But if that technology is being underhandedly added unbeknownst to all but the geekiest Musk-eteers, what else is being put into place and planned for the transition to electric vehicles? And if it’s such a good thing, why aren’t we all discussing it openly and transparently?

When policymakers and corporations start treating individual assets as cheaper alternatives to building out a conventional grid, it creates an enormous financial incentive to connect and coordinate millions more household devices. Think of it as nouveau collectivization for the digital age, something the Soviets could only dream of.

But wait, there’s more. Turns out nouveau collectivization has a cool, Silicon Valley-esque name: the Virtual Power Plant (VPP).

Under a separate but closely related plan to build a statewide VPP, New Jersey’s Board of Public Utilities (BPU) has proposed that incentives for freebies like smart thermostats, electric vehicle chargers, and home battery systems come with enrollment in the VPP as a condition of receiving the ‘incentive.’

The simple definition of a VPP is this: groups of thousands of individually owned devices — like batteries, electric vehicles, thermostats, water heaters, and solar systems — are linked together and operated as one large grid resource. The homeowner still owns the equipment, but once they’re enrolled in the program the equipment is connected, measurable, and capable of responding to remote instructions from the grid, allowing utilities to dial back power or use the stored energy in its VPP when the grid becomes unstable. In other words, you own the hardware, but the energy… that’s all theirs. The upfront cost for some of that ‘incentivized’ hardware? A minimum VPP enrollment period of seven years… at least, that’s what’s being discussed.

“Every New Jersey family deserves an electric grid that works smarter and costs less,” said Ben Hertz-Shargel, President of NJBPU at a recent meeting. “Virtual power plants give us an opportunity to take technology already sitting in our driveways, homes, and businesses and to leverage them as low-cost resources.”

New Jersey has already required recipients of certain electric vehicle incentives to install networked, Wi-Fi-enabled chargers capable of managed charging and data collection. BPU says the data gathered through those programs can now serve as a “ready resource” for creating virtual power plants.

So the progression looks something like this:

Subsidize the device. Connect the device. Enroll the device. Aggregate the device. Control the device.

None of this means the state can simply walk into your house and seize your thermostat. Participation remains “voluntary,” but when the subsidy for a $10,000 or $15,000 piece of equipment is conditional on agreeing to connect it to the system, it feels subtly coercive. Customers enrolled in a VPP can reportedly opt out on a case-by-case basis, but doing that too frequently could reduce their incentive.

Oh! There’s one more thing. Pretty wicked, if you ask us.

New Jersey is building out this permanent architecture under a state of emergency. The governor’s executive order on her first day in office explicitly identified skyrocketing demand from data centers as a major cause of the energy emergency. Then, invoking New Jersey’s Civilian Defense and Disaster Control Act, she ordered the BPU to begin developing a VPP within 180 days.

There is no sunset date explicit in the executive order.

What emerged from that emergency directive last month wasn’t a temporary program designed to disappear when electricity prices settle down. BPU’s proposal includes an interim VPP beginning in 2027, followed by what it calls a long-term VPP framework, beginning in 2029.

Think about that sequence for a moment.

Data centers are projecting extraordinary electricity demand over the next decade → the state declares an emergency → the emergency gives agencies a mandate to move faster and begin building a system that coordinates privately-owned equipment inside people’s homes → that system is explicitly intended to remain in place indefinitely. In other words, eventually you will own nothing and be happy.

That brings us back to where this story started.

Across the country, towns are actively fighting data centers. But at the state level, the response is not whether this extraordinary new demand is right or wrong. It’s ‘let’s figure out how to accommodate it without making voters feel like they’re the ones paying the price.’

And in case you think this is only happening in New Jersey, think again. The Clean Energy States Alliance reports that the number of VPPs in the US has grown from a handful of pilots a decade ago to dozens of programs with thousands of participating ratepayers.

Approximately half the states now give battery owners the opportunity to enroll in a VPP. Georgia’s program would involve a 10-year contract tied to the premises, so it would convey to future customers in the same location even if the home is sold.

Slice it any way you like, but the outcome is the same: ordinary people, trying to make life a little easier, a little more affordable, are induced to trade autonomy for convenience. On the surface, the bargain looks harmless… who doesn’t like newer, cheaper, smarter, faster, cleaner, more connected?

The realization of what’s on the other side is where things start to get dark (pardon the pun). Deeper dependence on a system in which corporate and government power are becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish means the little guy thinks he’s building a better life. In reality, he’s building the cage of his own captivity. New Jersey appears to be leading the charge.

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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That question led him into a much bigger story about consolidation, stewardship, and what happens when reputation becomes something to buy and sell instead of something to earn.

Sapp’s research project, Worse on Purpose, traces the ownership histories behind hundreds of familiar brands, revealing how acquisitions, private equity, and corporate consolidation can fundamentally change the products we thought we knew.

But the conversation goes well beyond consumer complaints to discuss why quality matters in an era of fragile supply chains, why repairing rather than replacing may become a survival skill, and how our relationship with the objects we own has quietly changed over the past generation.

Collapse Life is about understanding what happens as systems become more brittle and complex — and this episode examines one of the most tangible ways that brittleness and complexity is already showing up — in the backpack on your shoulder, the appliance in your kitchen, and the tools in your garage.

Relevant links:

• Worse on Purpose

• The Brand Ledger

• Post: The Mechanisms of Enshittification

• Keyana Sapp on X

Before you go…

Coming up on Wednesday, August 19: Collapse Life is joining forces with Overcome Babylon for a special livestream on strategic relocation.

and will discuss Abraham’s new book, Great Tribulation Survival Guide, focusing on how to evaluate where you live, looking at what makes a location genuinely resilient, and taking practical and spiritual questions from viewers.

In January 2024, a geriatric named “Madge Waggy” sat in front of her computer and registered a profile on Blogger.com. When asked to introduce herself, she wrote: "I am an elderly woman who wants to share her own ideas with everyone!”

Madge’s first post was titled: “The National Security Strategy of the United States And Counter Terrorism Training And The Economy.” That same day, she published a short piece about the best states in which to live off grid, followed by a 5,000-word analysis of global food supplies, climate disruptions, geopolitical instability, and financial speculation and how they are converging to make food shortages and sharp price spikes an increasingly likely feature of the years ahead. That piece urged readers to prepare by building household food resilience rather than relying on just-in-time supply chains.

Since then, she’s written about global martial law, banking dynasties, and intercepted deep-state communications. All in a days’ work for an old lady just wanting to share her ideas with everyone.

If you’re starting to think something might be amiss about good ol’ Madge, welcome to Collapse Life, it’s great to have you with us.

A look past Madge’s folksy profile and you start to wonder if this is actually a legitimate blog or maybe a node in a coordinated, semi-automated alternative media network that works to monetize skepticism and amp up fear?

In a similar vein, look at Milan Adams, the supposed author behind Preppgroup. This time, the online persona is crafted to look like an elite, technical insider — someone who claims to spend months “buried in central bank GitHub repositories and infrastructure procurement documents.” That simple sentence gives this writer’s doom narratives an intellectual veneer that appeals to a completely different type of questioning reader.

Madge appears to target the emotional, community-minded skeptic who responds to a “grandmother’s warning,” while Milan targets the analytical, tech-minded cynic who wants to read about geopolitics and macroeconomics.

They couldn't appear more different. Yet, despite the contrasting personas, their publishing patterns overlap in intriguing ways. Both put out an extraordinary amount of authoritative-sounding content and operate behind thin or unverifiable online identities. And both seem to have come from nowhere, quickly landing coveted places in many of the same alternative media outlets.

Figuring out how an obscure Blogspot post reaches hundreds of thousands of readers means looking beyond the article itself and toward the publishing environment that surrounds it. Madge Waggy and Milan Adams begin on little-known blogs with modest direct audiences. But many of their articles soon appear on a familiar circuit of larger sites, like LewRockwell, The Burning Platform, The Silver Bear Cafe, or ZeroHedge.

These are big name publications. To the reader, the articles start to feel like part of an organic grassroots movement… legitimate commentators prognosticating about impending armageddon.

Exactly how those articles move through the system isn't publicly documented. RSS feeds, editorial monitoring, direct submissions, or other forms of syndication could all play a role. Whatever the mechanism, the end result is the same: writers with virtually no established public reputations can rapidly acquire the apparent credibility that comes from being republished by multiple recognizable outlets without further substantiation or verification.

A grand paradox of the modern “skeptical” mind, particularly in the post-COVID era, is that in a desperate bid to escape being manipulated by mainstream media, readers walk straight into a much tighter and more automated trap. (That’s classic ‘Camp Two.’ See David Hughes’ Three Camps of Awareness for more information and to make sure you’re not an inadvertent victim.)

The muppet media ecosystem exploits a simple psychological pattern that explicitly instructs audiences to never trust legacy institutions. Madge, Milan, and their ilk frame any external debunking, fact-checking, or platform restriction as the ultimate proof that whatever conspiracy they are spinning up is, in fact, real. Otherwise “they” wouldn’t be trying to suppress it.

Once a reader begins engaging with this type of content, the surrounding information environment does the rest. Recommendation algorithms, search engines, social media platforms, and interconnected alternative media sites reinforce similar themes, making each new article feel like independent confirmation of the last. Over time, readers may find themselves encountering the same narratives from multiple directions, and may not realize how much of their information environment has become self-reinforcing.

If, by now, you’re asking why this happens, as always, just follow the money. The cash register sits just beyond the headlines.

Controversial alternative media sites often have less access to premium corporate advertising networks. Or they may find that direct-response advertising aimed at highly motivated niche audiences pays better. The result is a commercial universe built around subscriptions, donations, native advertising, affiliate links, and products that promise freedom and protection from financial, medical, or institutional failure.

Here’s how geopolitical anxiety can easily be converted into consumer demand:

• Step one: The market trigger. An article authored by a persona like Milan Adams offers a dense analysis predicting the collapse of fiat currency, shortages of essential goods, or a structural deficit in precious metals markets.

• Step two: The consumer response. The reader begins to sense their own financial or social vulnerability, and products that offer immediate protection start to seem more relevant and urgent.

• Step three: The commercial placement. Advertisements, affiliate offers, and sponsored articles promote relevant products: gold and silver, retirement products, backup power generation, emergency food, supplements, medical kits, and paid newsletters.

The exact advertisements displayed may be selected through contextual targeting, a reader’s browsing history, or direct arrangements with the publisher. That’s the classic marketing funnel. But the broader economic alignment is hard to miss: content focused on institutional failure creates a highly receptive market for products promising security and independence from those same institutions.

The model doesn’t stop with display ads for gold or freeze-dried food, either. Some companies have established direct commercial relationships with alternative media publishers. The clearest example is The Wellness Company, founded during the pandemic by Canadian entrepreneur Foster Coulson, whose earlier business career was largely associated with the family business, Coulson Group, and its aviation, manufacturing, and aerial-firefighting operations.

The Wellness Company presents itself as an alternative healthcare provider, selling tele-health memberships, supplements, prescription services, and emergency medical kits while working with prominent physicians including Dr. Peter McCullough. Its marketing speaks directly to audiences who have lost confidence in the conventional medical establishment.

ZeroHedge regularly publishes articles clearly labelled “Sponsored Content By The Wellness Company.” The Burning Platform announced its own partnership with the company in November 2025.

Under this model, the sponsor becomes part of the editorial stream itself. An anonymous article warning of say, water contamination, food shortages, or institutional failure may appear alongside sponsored material offering a private means of protection. That does not prove that the author, publisher, and sponsor are coordinating their messages, but it does show how neatly the subjects complement one another. And, how important your eyeballs are to this entire process.

The anxious reader is first told that existing systems cannot be trusted and then presented with products designed to help them opt out of those very systems. In sponsored content for The Wellness Company, Dr. Peter McCullough urges readers to “stop trusting the system to protect you.” Whether intended or not, the editorial narratives and commercial messaging reinforce one another so institutional distrust is not merely reported on — it’s commodified.

By providing a turnkey alternative to public infrastructure, TWC closes the psychological loop, allowing the anxious reader to feel like they are actively opting out of a failing society, while their skepticism turns into a ready revenue stream. It’s actually pretty clever.

Ultimately, this isn’t about whether every individual article on these alt-media platforms is true or false. Many raise legitimate questions or draw attention to important developments that deserve wider discussion.

The more important skill we all need to hone is discerning what is and isn’t part of the muppet media machinery. That’s a critical part of understanding whether you’re being manipulated. Anonymous personas, automated syndication, algorithmic reinforcement, and commercial incentives push readers in the same direction and can fly under the radar when they are mixed in and amongst legitimate stories, which is why heightened sensibilities are critical.

Once you understand the structure, you go beyond asking whether a story is true or false and start asking why this particular story was placed in front of you, who benefits from your fear, and what they’re trying to sell you next.

Armed with that skill, Madge and Milan don’t stand a chance, no matter how salacious their claims may be.

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In this weekend’s Notes, we wrote about Balaji Srinivasan’s Network School losing its license to operate in Malaysia. The Network School is, by Srinivasan’s own definition, a way to “empower the dark talent of the world,” by which he means the hidden, highly capable individuals who live in disadvantaged regions or do not fit in with traditional legacy institutions. On the surface, what’s to argue — sounds amazing.

But the phrase “dark talent” got us thinking. There’s something dissonant and off-putting about the moniker. For starters, the word “dark” suggests something hidden, obscured, or unknown… which is combined with “talent,” a word rooted in ancient physical weights and currency.

In ancient Greece, a talanton was a unit of weight and, by extension, money. The Romans borrowed the term as talentum. Its later meaning as an “ability” or “gift” developed through interpretation of the Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25:14–30.

In the biblical parable, a wealthy master gives his servants varying amounts of currency (talents) before leaving on a journey. Two of the servants take what is given them and invest it while the master is away, doubling its value. A third servant, afraid of his master's harshness and what might happen if he loses it all, buries his single talent in the ground. When the master returns, he rewards the two who used their talents wisely while condemning the third as "wicked and lazy," stripping him of his talent and casting him into the "outer darkness."

One common reading of the parable is that it concerns stewardship: the servants are judged according to what they do with what has been entrusted to them. Whatever one thinks its theological meaning may be, the servant is judged according to what he does with the gifts he is given.

Srinivasan’s metaphor subtly changes the equation from ‘How will this person use their gifts?’ to ‘How can the network find them and make the most of their gifts?’

The phrase “dark talent” ironically flips the parable on its head: the talent is hidden in the dark not because the individual buried it, but because the system has failed to dig it up. In creating the Network School, Srinivasan aims to replace physical legacy structures with decentralized networks able to mobilize ability that would otherwise be overlooked and make it more visible outside of traditional institutions.

It might be that the problem with “dark talent” is not just the word “dark,” but the combination. “Dark” suggests that someone important has not yet seen the person, while “talent” suggests why the person is worth seeing in the first place.

Together, the phrase transforms a human being — already embedded and visible in a family, profession, culture, and country — into latent value awaiting wider discovery for a larger agenda. The metaphor encourages us to see talent as an underused economic asset until it can be identified, connected, and mobilized through a global network. Or to use more apt Silicon Valley language, this is an as-yet undiscovered disrupter, just waiting for the opportunity to disrupt.

Participating in the Network School still requires talent to become visible on the network’s terms: participants are selected, measured, trained, and aligned around its preferred disciplines. The servant is no longer hiding their talent in the dirt out of fear of a biblical master. Instead, they are laying their talent at the altar of an algorithmic master.

“Dark matter is the undiscovered matter that tools like the Hubble Telescope let us see,” Srinivasan says. “By analogy, dark talent is the undiscovered talent that we need the ‘mobile telescope’ to let us see.” But a telescope doesn’t just reveal an object. It determines where we look, what we count, and what we decide is worth finding.

An engineer in India may be unknown to an American venture capitalist while being perfectly visible to local employers, colleagues, universities, and professional networks. An entrepreneur in Nigeria may lack access to Western capital without being unknown in Nigeria.

The people Srinivasan is labeling as dark talent were never dark — they might have just been outside his network’s field of vision. Discovering this talent, and putting it to work for the technocrats in the service of a new world only they want, might actually be why we’re just a little irked by the use of dark.

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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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Recently released diary entries, emails, and internal scientific communications are reopening questions about what Anthony Fauci and the scientists behind the influential Proximal Origin paper believed privately — and what the public was told with apparent certainty.

Investigative journalist Paul D. Thacker returns to the Collapse Life podcast to help us work through the latest documents.

Thacker argues that the new material does not so much overturn the existing record as make it increasingly difficult to dismiss. Scientists who publicly rejected a possible lab origin continued to discuss it privately. Fauci’s personal writings appear, in some instances, to reflect a more complicated understanding than his public messaging suggested. And many of the news organizations that amplified the official account have responded with what Thacker calls the “hard ignore.”

This conversation also covers:

• The newly released Fauci diary

• The private discussions behind Proximal Origin

• Senator Rand Paul’s continuing investigation

• Why the hearing process functions partly as political theater

• Whether accountability is still possible

• How the pandemic permanently changed the relationship between the public, the media and scientific institutions

This interview was recorded on July 27, two days before Fauci’s Senate appearance, in which he took the fifth. In spite of the hearing’s outcomes, the deeper question remains: when the private record contradicts the public story, who is responsible for correcting it?

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New mid-2025 population figures from England and Wales reveal an interesting phenomenon. From the middle of 2024 until the middle of 2025, the combined population of England and Wales grew to 62 million. London, however, was the only region to experience a drop in population.

Even though London had more births than deaths and international inward migration, this was more than offset by the 420,492 people who moved from the capital to other regions. This population decrease is the first since 1988, with the exception of the unprecedented events of the COVID pandemic.

As the London Evening Standard notes, “More and more Londoners are deciding to quit the city to move to its commuter belt or further afield in search of a better quality of life.”

There’s an odd paradox at play here. Our grandparents and great-grandparents, especially those of us descended from immigrants, moved outward because cities represented crowding, pollution, insecurity, and limited space. We, their descendants, later moved back in, securing desk jobs and recognizing that urban culture could be had with the convenience, safety, comfort, and domestic stability once associated with suburbia. Today, housing costs, family needs, remote work, and declining confidence in urban life are pushing many of us out again — often farther than our grandparents ever went.

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For generations, security has been synonymous with being rooted: buying a house, acquiring land, building durable systems, and establishing yourself in a community. Modern preparedness culture largely still accepts this as the working model — the ideal is the homestead, the small farm, the rural retreat or, in its most exaggerated form, the fortified bunker.

But that model assumes wherever you choose to be is — and will remain — affordable, safe, governable, and suited to your needs. More and more, people who believed they were permanently settled are discovering that those conditions can’t be taken for granted anymore.

The deeper story is not just that people are leaving London, but that established people everywhere are starting to treat location as conditional rather than absolute. Nomadic and itinerant populations were historically regarded as suspicious, rootless, and unwelcome, but now even globally important cities are beginning to lose their hold over people who once expected to remain static, urban, and entrenched.

Making a life in one of these urban centers was once a sign you had made it. Today, many urban families are discovering that simulated village life in cities all over the world is probably too expensive, too socially fragmented, and too fragile in the face of growing homelessness, mass immigration, and associated levels of crime to remain permanent.

Will families begin to move outward again — as if to signal a swing of the pendulum when, urban decay of the 1970s saw “white flight” out of city centers?

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Disagreement in a city is often avoided because of the sheer diversity and number of people with whom you interact on a daily basis. At the end of the day, who cares who votes for who, or what part of the political spectrum someone is on? Most everyone is anonymous, just trying to get through the day, avoiding the dog poop (or worse, these days) on the sidewalk, shoo-ing away annoying pigeons, and steering clear of the scourge of annoying-but-necessary tourists, as they crack on to get through another day.

The rhythm of rural life is a distinct contrast. In a village, the same people you encounter and with whom you may or may not get along could sit on the council, run the shops, organize local events, and determine whether a newcomer is accepted or shunned.

Our friend and Book Chat co-host, , recently posted on Substack about what happened when she and her husband revived a local cinema club in their rural British village. Her experience suggests that geography alone cannot deliver shared understanding.

At a local pub, they screened The Agenda — a documentary dealing with claims about global governance, surveillance, digital identification, central bank digital currencies, and the centralization of food and health systems. Depending on where you are in your own personal awareness journey, the film’s arguments might be considered controversial. But that’s the point — ideas in the film are certainly worthy of consideration, discussion, and contemplation.

At least, that was the thought.

At the interval, one man stood up and announced to the room that he would not continue watching what he called “rubbish.” Around half the audience left with him. They then remained outside talking among themselves for more than 20 minutes. When approached and asked: “What exactly triggered you about the film?” (presumably so that a dissection and discussion could occur), the man who initiated the walkout declined to explain what, specifically, had upset him.

The other half of the audience stayed and, afterwards, continued discussing the film at length. Some were overwhelmed or visibly shaken, while others said they felt validated by hearing concerns they had previously carried only privately.

The episode exposed a fault line that runs through many contemporary communities. The division was not just between people who reached different conclusions after weighing the same evidence. They appeared to disagree about what could safely or legitimately be considered in the first place.

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As we noted in a comment back to Susan, the people who walked out didn’t just disengage. They took the time to create their own discussion outside, just as those who remained gathered around a different interpretation inside. Both groups turned toward people who shared their reaction, but not in equivalent ways. Those who remained continued examining and discussing the film’s claims. Those who left appeared to seek reassurance about what had unsettled them.

We argue this is a perfect example of tribal self-selection. It’s built into our DNA, and it’s been one of the very clever ways in which social media has used our own ancient biology against us, in order to revive the possibility that we all end up in a caste system… easy to control, easy to manipulate, and easy to propagandize.

This is one of the weaknesses in the familiar advice to “find your community” in order to deal with the coming collapse. A community is not necessarily a body of people who understand events in the same way. It may simply be a collection of people who occupy the same place while living within incompatible realities.

Yes, moving from the city to the country may measurably improve life on certain physical metrics, but it doesn’t necessarily eliminate fear, status competition, conformity, or tribalism. In fact, it may amplify them.

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One of our recent podcast guests, Kemble Hildreth of , explained this challenge well when he told us about the demographic changes in the county near Chattanooga, Tennessee, where he owns a cabin. He said that more than 10,000 Californians had moved to the area in five years and that roughly three-quarters had voted Republican.

“There are people clearly moving from California for political reasons,” he said, “and the irony is they’re being mislabeled by the people in Chattanooga that have got some issue with it.”

All this makes us wonder whether the search for the right place is becoming another form of magical thinking. Is there even such a thing as a “right place?”

Many of us pine for the perfect postal code — social Shangri-La, as it were — where safety, affordability, social trust, competent local government, and neighbors who see the world the same way we do abound. In reality, when people move, they often carry their fears, loyalties, and divisions with them. A community that looks cohesive from the outside may just as readily contain fault lines that become visible only when something genuinely contentious enters the room.

Kemble’s own story adds another dimension to this problem. Sometimes what we think we want doesn’t turn out to be what’s good for us.

He once believed, as many people in preparedness circles do, that resilience required land — preferably a lot of it. He bought seven acres for his young family and spent years imagining that they would eventually build a large farmhouse, keep animals, and create a largely self-sufficient life.

Then, reality caught up to the dream.

After volunteering on farms, working with livestock, and even helping out on Joel Salatin’s Polyface Farm, he learned that the life he imagined wasn’t what he really wanted.

“The truth is, I never wanted the big farmhouse,” he said. Nor, he eventually admitted, did he want to spend his days maintaining seven acres and caring for cows and pigs.

He still values the people who do that work and wants to support them by purchasing what they produce. But he no longer believes that resilience requires duplicating every part of that life himself.

His advice is simple: before committing yourself to a new life, “rent the lifestyle.”

That doesn’t just mean renting a house in the country. It means working on a farm, caring for animals, spending a winter somewhere remote and learning how it feels to be far from a hospital, a mechanic, and a grocery store. Learn what happens when the well pump fails, the road washes out, or you need help that can’t come through the click of an app. Maybe you’ll thrive. Or maybe you’ll recalibrate what you think you can manage.

Kemble has now sold his seven acres and, while he has a small cabin, his main home is in an urban historic centre on three-tenths of an acre. The future he describes with the greatest enthusiasm involves not a farmhouse or a fortified retreat, but a small car, a camper, and a few simple systems that can move with him.

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The point here is that the way to live well in the coming years is not one-size-fits-all. Not everyone should sell their house and live in a vehicle. Not everyone should move from the city to a small rural village. There are a million ways to “prepare.”

Kemble’s change of mind reveals something important about resilience. Property may make us resilient, or it may be the very thing that prevents us from adapting.

Land requires labor, buildings require maintenance, and animals restrict movement. Property taxes and insurance could very well dictate whether or not you can afford your life. A deeply rooted person may possess considerable physical resources while having almost no room to respond when the surrounding conditions change.

Real resilience may lie in the distinction between the people who maintain optionality in their lives and the people who do not.

The old model of preparedness emphasized accumulation: more acreage, more equipment, more infrastructure, more spare parts, and more stored supplies. The emerging model may place greater value on portability: practical skills, manageable expenses, adaptable systems, and relationships that extend beyond one property or community. To take the tribalism thought a bit further, perhaps being prepared to hunt-and-gather in places where abundance exists from year to year is an ancient form of preparation most of have ignored.

Such an approach requires a different mentality. It asks us not only what we should acquire, but what we are prepared to release. Letting go of a house, a city, a profession, or a political tribe that has become part of our identity can feel less like adaptation than failure, but holding on is not the same as remaining strong.

Perhaps we’re all destined to become nomads, not because we are programmed to wander endlessly, but because permanence can no longer be assumed.

We may still seek to put down roots, but we need to find a way to avoid allowing those roots to become an unwieldy anchor.

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More than 300,000 people in France and Spain have been evacuated in recent days as "erratic and unmanageable" wildfires continue to scorch thousands of hectares of land. Hundreds of wildfires are burning across Canada as well, from British Columbia to Nova Scotia. Several major wildfires also continue to burn across Colorado and Utah, triggering evacuations, road closures, and large firefighting operations; fire crews in Britain are tackling what they say are some of the worst wildfires ever seen in England, Scotland, and Wales.

At the same time, suspicious fires have destroyed churches across America, from Maine to Buffalo to Astoria to Chino, California, and that’s just in the last few weeks.

Fire is in the air and, as it turns out, in your face, in so many strange ways.

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At the World Cup final halftime show, Shakira performed the competition’s official anthem, “Dai Dai,” wearing a costume that strongly mimicked flickering flames.

Dimitri Oswald, who runs the Reality Revolt channel on YouTube has a chilling 1:30 video on the Masonic symbolism of Shakira’s videos, including her World Cup performance.

Meanwhile, Katy Perry’s newest single, released on June 25, 2026, is entitled “Watch It Burn.”

In the music video, Perry breaks out of a hospital burn unit, grows a scorpion tail, and goes on a fiery rampage, torching a newsstand stocked with fake magazines titled Gaslight Magazine, Alpha, and Slop Times. She walks past a sign reading, “Read Between the Head-Lies,” while screens in the background flash a breaking alert: “Don’t Believe Everything You Hear.”

The entire episode ends with Perry crashing into a church, where she sheds her scorpion tail and is thrown into a baptismal pool.

In the ‘behind-the-scenes’ video posted above, Perry can be seen talking to someone off camera and saying, sarcastically, “You’re used to sinners coming back… I’m back. I’m here to get saved. My mom’s been praying for it for a long time.”

Back in 2014, when Perry made a music video depicting the ancient gods of Egypt, she told Rolling Stone, “Listen, if the Illuminati exist, I would like to be invited!”

*****

If you accept that pop culture is used to prime the public for certain future realities, then you can start to see why this article is drawing parallels between wildfires, arson attacks on churches, and songs about burning down the established order.

Tracks like Perry’s “Watch It Burn” can be described on a personal level as being about her need to renew herself after leaving a toxic relationship. Societally, the same narrative represents a culture that has moved past the desire to “fix” outdated and broken institutions. The message is clear: some structures, frameworks, and systems are too corrupted to reform. The only way forward is a total structural reset — burning down everything so that, from the smoldering ashes, the phoenix can rise.

The “burn it down to rebuild” sentiment echoing through pop culture is not happening in a vacuum. We’ve talked about this previously as it relates to implementing technocracy, most recently, with . This is the powerful philosophical shift we're living through, as Silicon Valley, with its endless access to data and money, is now blatantly and openly shaping public policy with a doctrine known as accelerationism.

While pop music expresses this feeling through emotional anthems of purification by fire, technocrats and policymakers are translating it into literal strategies to dismantle, bypass, or fast-track institutional collapse. Destruction as a necessary cleansing step before rebirth is basically the foundational concept of Effective Accelerationism (e/acc), a concept advanced by tech founders like Marc Andreessen, Garry Tan, and Martin Shkreli.

A 2023 New York Times article described it as follows:

Effective Accelerationism (often shortened to “e/acc,” pronounced “e-ack”) is a loosely organized movement devoted to the no-holds-barred pursuit of technological progress. The group believes that artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies should be allowed to move as fast as possible, with no guardrails or gatekeepers standing in the way of innovation.

Rather than trying to reform legacy systems like banking, public transit, or healthcare, the goal of e/acc is to let technology render them obsolete overnight. Proponents believe the friction of collapse is a necessary price to pay to force society into its next evolutionary stage.

*****

Pop culture serves as the psychological engine that makes this destructive transition palatable by glorifying disruption, framing systemic failure as a beautiful act of “purification,” and normalizing a high-tech future as completely inevitable. The public is conditioned to cheer for the rule-breaking “disruptor,” a narrative archetype that tech leaders gladly inhabit to bypass democratic oversight and public policy. And those of us honest enough to admit it, bear witness to this hubris virtually every day, whether Musk, Thiel, Karp, Zuckerberg, or any of the other self-appointed disrupters happily burning down what we all once took for granted.

Shakira’s “Dai Dai” anthem emphasizes a different kind of flame — an internal, personal fire that global systems cannot take away. In public policy and Silicon Valley, this translates directly to the aggressive push for hyper-decentralization, which holds that if centralized legacy institutions (central banks, federal governments, legacy media) are corrupt or failing, technology must provide the tools to bypass them entirely. This is driven by decentralized protocols, sovereign computing, and crypto-economic networks.

These ideas have moved from fringe internet theories into mainstream public policy. El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiments were early indicators, but the current trend includes local governments exploring decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN) for power grids and internet access. It is the policy equivalent of the pop anthem: pulling power away from a failing collective entity and placing it into a distributed, unquenchable network of individuals.

The hardest part of accelerationist ideology to sell to the public is the inevitable friction, pain, and chaos of letting legacy systems collapse. Pop culture solves this by reframing destruction not as a tragedy, but as a beautiful, necessary cleansing. When Katy Perry sings about lighting a match and watching the past turn to ash, or when Shakira channels raw, destructive energy, they are tapping into a collective desire for a clean slate.

By dancing to anthems about burning things down, audiences subconsciously reframe the terrifying prospect of institutional failure as a form of personal and collective therapy. It shifts the public mindset from “We must protect our institutions” to “Let’s see what happens if they fall apart.” Pop culture primes the public to cheer for the individual who breaks the rules, which perfectly clears a path for tech companies to bypass public policy under the guise of "innovation.”

*****

The Katy Perry story has an even more… interesting chapter, let’s say: the highly publicized relationship with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, which came to the public’s notice during the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos.

You cannot script a more perfect example of the “pop culture to technocracy pipeline.”

Trudeau, the perfect feminist male woke globalist, leaned into the track’s branding directly. He appeared in viral social media videos dancing and hopping along to “Watch It Burn” to help hype her new single. No indication he was wearing blackface, however.

Perry has explicitly framed “Watch It Burn” as a tool for moving past her multi-year relationship and called-off engagement with Orlando Bloom. If Bloom represented the old, traditional Hollywood fairy tale, Trudeau represents a step into a hyper-connected, political-celebrity paradigm.

By using fire as a symbol of purification to torch the emotional remnants of her past, she isn’t just singing about structural destruction — she’s actively living it by immediately pivoting to a relationship with a prominent political figure. And so, while technocrats and modern political figures may want to style themselves as rockstar “disruptors” to gain public favor, the Perry-Trudeau romance actually represents the inverse: the literal merging of pop celebrity and institutional power.

*****

In reporting on this subject, there was a purposeful effort not to stray into the very obvious cross-pollination with biblical prophecy, in particular some of the important females that feature in Revelation. Those females who lead the pop culture charge to burn things down — not just Katy Perry, not just Shakira, but Madonna, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga — look, feel, and act much like what the apostle John described in that important eschatological writing. Nevertheless, it might be worth delving into in a future article.

The unprecedented wildfires and church arsons we’ve been seeing recently are physical manifestations of an accelerated reset. They act as tangible symptoms of a society being systematically burned to the ground. Mirrored by pop culture and social norms, these events represent a deliberate demolition of existing institutions at multiple layers as a means to clear the path for a very different, very disturbing technocratic future.

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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…

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a month 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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So why do so many people feel like they are actually falling behind?

In our latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast, financial writer , of the Daily Doom substack, argues that the apparent normality may be sustained by something far less reassuring: credit cards, government borrowing, depleted reserves, and a willingness to keep pushing today’s costs onto tomorrow.

We look at how war and higher energy prices could intensify inflation, why student-loan defaults may be an early warning of wider household distress, and what happens when Social Security promises collide with a shrinking workforce and a rapidly rising national debt.

We also examine the enormous AI data centers being sold to rural communities as engines of economic growth. They require extraordinary amounts of electricity, water and public support, yet may create only a handful of permanent jobs — and could become obsolete before their costs have been recovered.

Then the conversation takes a turn toward something even more fundamental: the growing complexity of ordinary life. Why does my toaster need my email address? Why does parking require an app, an account, a credit card, and a photograph of your license plate? At what point does convenience become dependence — and dependence become a digital prison?

This episode is ultimately about the distance between what an economy appears to be and what it can actually sustain.

Watch the full conversation and decide how much of today’s prosperity is real — and how much has simply been borrowed from the future.

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Data centers have become a visible example of a major divide in America right now; on the one hand, all the “prosperity” and “healthy economy” politicians keep banging on about. On the other, the actual economy in which regular Joes and Janes participate.

So, what do data centers have to do with it?

The projects are sold to constituents as economic development, innovation, and investment. After state and local governments offer billions in tax breaks and other incentives to attract the facilities, they promise the investment will pay off in jobs and money flowing into the local economy.

“Data Centers are tremendous WINS for the States and Communities that are lucky enough to get them,” President Trump wrote in an oddly capitalized Truth Social post last week castigating New York governor Kathy Hochul for her recent decision to put a moratorium on data center construction.

“They are big, strong, bold, and Money Machines for the State in which they are built,” the President continued. “Both the Taxes and the Jobs amount to LIQUID GOLD!”

The people in the communities where hundreds of acres are being occupied by data centers are increasingly seeing through this façade and arriving at a different conclusion: we’re on the losing end of this bargain.

Across the country, people are objecting to possible increases in their utility costs, industrial noise and pollution, light pollution, maximum penitentiary-like security, and relatively few permanent jobs that remain after the infrastructure has been built.

A 2,250-acre Meta data center in Louisiana required more than 5,000 workers during construction but is expected to end up creating just 500 permanent jobs when it opens. In Abilene, Texas, a data center the size of Central Park required a peak construction crew of 4,000 workers, but the developer is contractually obligated to maintain a staff of only 57 people once construction is complete, though the actual workforce may swell to around 100 people.

Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry says 500 jobs is better than no jobs. “I’ll take it,” he told CNBC last year. “I don’t know where the people are who complain about 500 jobs, but I’ll take them in Louisiana. We will take every job we can get.“

One would think the localities chosen to host these data centers would welcome the economic development, but new research shows that the communities fighting back are more often than not working class and lower-income places where people are questioning why their electricity, water, land, and public finances should be promised to some of the richest companies in the world.

Data scientist recently examined data on more than 1,400 operating and proposed data centers and matched their locations with census-tract information on household income, education and homeownership.

His most striking finding was that data centers in the lowest-income quarter of the communities studied encountered organized opposition 19 percent of the time, while in the wealthiest quarter, the rate was just 3.8 percent.

“The highest rate of resistance comes from neighborhoods with a median income of between $8,000 and $72,000,” Holtzman noted to , author of Blood in the Machine on Substack. “The lowest rate of resistance is in neighborhoods where the average household makes between $133k and $250k per year.”

In other words, lower-income neighborhoods resisted data center development at nearly five times the rate of wealthier ones. NIMBY — not in my backyard — is alive and well in these places.

That finding complicates the familiar claim that opposition to new development is primarily driven by affluent homeowners protecting their property values.

Even more interesting, resistance appears to be having an effect.

Among recently proposed data centers, Holtzman found that 28.2 percent of projects encountering community pushback were cancelled or suspended. Only 5.2 percent of projects without documented resistance met the same fate.

Holtzman calculated that the odds of cancellation were approximately six times higher when communities fought the project. Higher cancellation rates in lower-income areas could be statistically explained by the greater frequency of resistance there, rather than by income itself.

While the analysis demonstrates correlation but cannot prove that opposition alone caused each project to fail, its central conclusion is supported by a much broader change in public opinion.

A Heatmap survey in May 2026 found that 71 percent of respondents would oppose a data center near their home, including 55 percent who would strongly oppose it. Opposition reached 80 percent among adults under age 35 and extended across political parties and geographical regions.

A separate Gallup poll reached almost the same overall result. Respondents most frequently cited excessive water and electricity use, pollution, higher utility bills, and other effects on local quality of life. Gallup found no significant difference in overall opposition by income, suggesting that lower-income communities may not necessarily dislike data centers more than wealthier ones, they just may organize more frequently when projects are actually placed near them.

The easy conclusion here is that people don’t like artificial intelligence. But the more nuanced reasoning is that the conflict is centered around who receives the benefits of economic development and who absorbs its costs.

The AI industry wants communities to believe that data centers are essential infrastructure: the mills, factories, and railroads of a new industrial age. But factories historically employed a majority of the local community and produced tangible goods. Modern data centers can consume the electricity of a small city while employing only a handful of people after they are built. In other words, as opposed to a reciprocal relationship, data centers are parasitic.

The emerging revolt shows that communities are beginning to recognize this calculus. The fact that so many communities are finding their voice at the same time, and using it to show that the machinery of borrowed prosperity can still be stopped by the people expected to pay for it, is a rare silver lining in these otherwise bleak times. Perhaps it may lead more people to recognize that the future being built for us, by people who see us as ‘data livestock’, doesn’t have to be inevitable.

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Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, has spent the last two months away from public view. Amid reports of declining health, the 80-year-old has made only sporadic appearances in 2026, including one in April where he described US President Donald Trump as “mentally deranged.”

His return on Sunday, July 19, at a rally commemorating the 47th anniversary of the Sandinista revolution was notable, therefore, not only because he appeared publicly, but because of the message he delivered.

“There won’t be any more elections here for [opponents supported by the USA] to try to seize the government and seize power,” Ortega declared. “The days when parties backed by the Yankees and the Somocistas would return to power are over — never again.”

This wasn’t exactly a ‘mic drop’ moment — Nicaragua didn’t have a particularly healthy electoral system to begin with. The last elections were held in 2021 and were widely disputed, after opponents and business leaders were detained and dissent was criminalized.

In 2025, Ortega — who has ruled continuously since returning to power in 2007—further consolidated his position through constitutional reforms that named his wife, Rosario Murillo, “co-president.” He also extended presidential terms to six years and placed the judiciary and legislature under even greater executive control. Together, the couple now controls virtually every part of the state, including the armed forces and the courts.

What stands out from Ortega’s speech on Sunday is how he is apparently abandoning the need to preserve any fiction or fantasy around the role of elections in the outcome of a nation. He hasn’t gone into any details on how elections could be called off indefinitely, but ultimately the mechanism doesn’t matter much. What matters is the message the government sends to its people when it decides even the performance of public consent is unnecessary.

But the Nicaraguan people weren’t the only intended audience for Ortega’s speech. It appears he was also speaking directly to Washington, delivering the unmistakable message that Nicaragua’s political future would no longer be negotiated through institutions recognized or influenced by the United States.

The timing of that message is significant. In recent years, Nicaragua has been rapidly expanding its relationship with China. Ortega broke diplomatic relations with Taiwan and restored ties with Beijing in December 2021, giving China another foothold in a part of the world traditionally regarded as Washington’s sphere of influence. Two years later, Xi Jinping and Ortega elevated the relationship to a “strategic partnership,” while a bilateral free-trade agreement took effect on January 1, 2024.

The relationship has since become more than symbolic. According to an investigation published by El País just last week, the Ortega government has granted 84 mining concessions to 22 Chinese-owned companies, concessions that now cover approximately 10 percent of Nicaragua’s territory. The deals include land claimed by Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities and have reportedly been issued without any meaningful community consultation.

With China as an alternate source of investment, trade, infrastructure, and international legitimacy, Ortega has the confidence that previous leaders may not have had, giving him an ally to turn to when Washington applies pressure.

That certainly doesn’t mean Nicaragua no longer needs America. The US is still Nicaragua’s main trading partner and primary source of remittances, with bilateral goods trade totaling an estimated $7.4 billion in 2025. The International Monetary Fund has warned that changes in US tariffs and migration policy could materially affect Nicaragua’s economy.

So, Ortega isn’t exactly declaring independence from the US.

In light of the fact that America has spent years imposing sanctions, condemning Nicaragua’s repression, and demanding the restoration of democratic rule, Ortega appears to believe those demands can be ignored — and that China gives him enough economic and diplomatic leverage to absorb the consequences.

The fact that Ortega no longer believes Washington is willing, or strategically able, to use enough of its power to threaten his rule may be a small but conspicuous marker of the changing world order. A government in America’s former sphere of influence has closed the electoral path, rejected Washington’s authority, and placed bets on a future in which the United States is no longer the only power that matters. Given what we are watching unfold in the Persian Gulf, that’s definitely a signal worth noting.

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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Then the sun came back out. When nothing dramatic happened immediately, most people stopped paying attention.

of Overcome Babylon says that may have been a serious mistake.

In the latest episode of the Collapse Life podcast, Ojeda connects the 2017, 2023, and 2024 eclipses to an ancient biblical symbol, earlier periods of upheaval, and two of the most dangerous fault zones in North America. He also links the eclipse paths to Iran, the shifting balance between East and West, and the increasingly fragile systems on which modern life depends.

His central argument is not that an eclipse causes an earthquake, a war, or the collapse of an empire. It is that signs arrive in the heavens before events take place on earth.

The larger question is what anyone should do with such a warning.

Abraham rejects both complacency and panic. He does not advise sitting still and assuming that God, FEMA, or the existing system will take care of things. Nor does he advocate living in a state of permanent fear, frantically buying supplies, or waiting for catastrophe to strike. Instead, he recommends strategic relocation, resilient living, and a deliberate reduction in dependence on fragile systems.

This conversation is perhaps not what many have come to expect from Collapse Life — but it is perhaps one of the most consequential discussions we’ll ever have.

Watch and decide for yourself.

NOTE: The slides shown during this episode are a small part of a more complete analysis presented in Abraham’s second book, Bible Prophecy Secrets II. The complete presentation is available below, for paid subscribers only. We want to acknowledge and thank Abraham for generously sharing his insights with our subscribers.

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