Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:

• The Global Fertility Crisis Is Worse Than You Probably Think: Everybody knows about the decline in birthrates. Fewer people understand why—or just how significantly it could transform society in the next few decades. (Derek Thompson)

• The Feed Is Fake: That “viral” song, movie, meme, influencer, and celebrity drama was probably the product of a stealth marketing campaign. Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users. Vulture on the slow realization that the algorithmic feed isn’t curating reality so much as constructing one. A useful frame the next time a “viral moment” looks too clean. (Vulture) see also It Sure Seems Like These Instagram Ads Want You to Do Cocaine: Meta’s ad algorithm apparently decided some Wired writers needed paraphernalia tips. A funny-disturbing reminder of how thin the line is between targeted advertising and being nudged toward narcotics. From designer straws to magnet-sealed leather pouches, the platform is awash in products seemingly built for coke—despite Meta’s policies on drug paraphernalia. (Wired)

• Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence: Both the general public and academic communities have raised concerns about sycophancy, the phenomenon of artificial intelligence (AI) excessively agreeing with or flattering users. Yet, beyond isolated media reports of severe consequences, like reinforcing delusions, little is known about the extent of sycophancy or how it affects people who use AI. Here we show the pervasiveness and harmful impacts of sycophancy when people seek advice from AI. Our findings highlight the necessity of explicitly addressing this incentive structure to mitigate the widespread risks of AI sycophancy. Models tuned to be relentlessly agreeable measurably reduce users’ willingness to take socially helpful action — and increase emotional reliance on the bot. (Arxiv)

• Your Mattress Got Worse on Purpose: The practice has a name. Mattress retailers call it the “name game,” and it exists to deliberately confuse buyers. The manufacturer makes one mattress, then ships it to ten different retailers with a different cover and a different model name on each. The world’s largest mattress maker now owns America’s largest mattress retailer. The FTC tried to stop them and lost. A funny, angry tour through the enshittification of the mattress business — private equity, foam compression, fake reviews, and the bed-in-a-box pivot to “premium.” You will recognize every move from other industries. (Worse On Purpose)

• Megatrends: AI vs the decade’s structural headwinds: Deutsche Bank research note arguing the productivity dividend from AI may not be large enough or arrive fast enough to offset demographic, fiscal, and geopolitical drags: “Our new AI-powered megatrend model shows that the world faces severe headwinds from several overlapping megatrends that, post-WWII, has only been seen during the 1970s oil crises and the onset of the 2008 financial crisis. In this piece, we explain our new megatrend model and how it uses AI analysis to quantify qualitative signals, filters our proprietary human-created data from dbDataInsights, and layers it all beside traditional data series. In all, we take almost 100 data points and track how each of the six global megatrends have waxed and waned quarterly over the last 70 years. In particular, we focus on the impact of these trends on GDP growth, equity markets and other key economic outcomes. We then use our model to estimate how the most important megatrends will develop over the rest of the decade.” Sober and worth your time. (Deutsche Bank Research Institute)

• Report: Chief Justice John Roberts’ Wife Made Over $10 Million As “Legal Consultant” The disclosure-versus-recusal gap at the Court keeps widening: Jane Roberts, the wife of Chief Justice John Roberts, made more than $10 million in commissions over an eight-year stretch where she matched top lawyers with elite law firms—including some that had cases before the Supreme Court—according to documents obtained by Insider, as concerns grow about justices possibly having unreported conflicts of interest. (Forbes)

• The Election Deniers Are Winning: The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system. On the now-mainstreamed 2020 denialism in elected office: Parikh is just one of many election deniers who were long relegated to the fringe and are now—with Trump back in office and still not over his electoral defeat six years ago—embedded inside the government. system. Whether ‘winning’ is the right word depends on the time horizon; the trend is unmistakable. The universe of people pressing debunked theories is so broad that it’s a feature of the system. (The Atlantic) see also MAGA Isn’t Broken. This Is What It Was Built to Do.: A pointed counter to the “victims of propaganda” framing — argues the movement is functioning exactly as designed. The internal left-of-center debate on how to think about MAGA voters keeps getting sharper. The most dangerous thing about MAGA is that they mean it. (The Rational League)

• A Different Kind of Fading President: Joe Biden became quieter, while Donald Trump grows even louder. (The Atlantic)

• Why Have Immigration Agents Detained This American Citizen Three Times? ProPublica on a US citizen detained three times by ICE while the agency keeps insisting it doesn’t do that. Read it for the specifics, not the slogans. Leonardo Garcia Venegas, a U.S. citizen whose prior detentions went viral, was recently detained for a third time — and shackled. “I just want to live in peace,” he says. (ProPublica)

• Rupert Murdoch’s High-Stakes Blitz Against the NFL: Murdoch is making a play for live sports rights to keep Fox relevant in the streaming era. Old media still has a few cards to play. Fox founder lobbies Trump to preserve air rights for broadcasters as powerful streamers encroach on their turf (Wall Street Journal)

Video of the day: The Philosophy of a Hitman: Why We’re Obsessed With Cinematic Assassins

Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Vimal Kapur, CEO and Chairman of DJIA component Honeywell International. The firm is in the midst of dividing into three companies: Honeywell Automation, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. The firm has fully integrated AI as the intelligence layer in all of its automation processes and products.

 

China’s electricity generation increased by almost 500 terawatt-hours (TWh). Thjat’s a Germany-sized electricity grid last year

Source: Our World In Data

 

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The post 10 Sunday Reads appeared first on The Big Picture.

Free Speech Shouldn't Be Just For The Party In The White House

Authored by Charles Sauer via RealClearMarkets,

One of the most important Executive Orders signed by President Trump on his first day in office was Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship. As the title suggests, the order forbids any U.S. Government employee from taking any actions that violate the First Amendment rights of any American citizen. The Executive Order is intended to protect against future encroachments on the right to free speech like those that occurred under the Biden Administration.

During the Biden years, government officials routinely pressured social media companies to silence Americans for questioning the official response to COVID-19. For example, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy said that, unless social media companies "voluntarily" removed posts containing "misinformation," the Administration would apply "appropriate legal and regulatory measures." Other members of the Administration sent messages to social media executives, addressing them as if they were poorly performing White House interns. At least one Biden staffer, Deputy Assistant to the President Rob Flaherty, even dropped an F-bomb in an email to Meta, parent company of Facebook and Instagram, inquiring why a post he "requested" be taken down was still up.

In March of this year, the Justice Department signed a consent decree with Louisiana and Mississippi settling a lawsuit brought by the states on behalf of their citizens whose First Amendment rights were violated by the Biden Administration's censorship. The settlement forbids the Surgeon General, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency from threatening social media companies for refusing to remove or limit the viewership of "content containing protected free speech." Unfortunately, some members of the Trump Administration seem to have not read this Executive Order.

For example, Federal Trade Commission Chair Andrew Ferguson, while a vast improvement over his predecessor Lina Khan, thinks the FTC should use its power to punish woke corporations for engaging in First Amendment-protected activity. The FTC recently settled a case, along with eight states, brought against major advertising companies. The suit alleged that the companies worked with progressive media watchdog groups, such as NewsGuard and the Global Disinformation Index, in order to limit the placement of ads on conservative sites. The ad agencies' defense was to claim that they were protecting brand safety.

Brand safety refers to advertising placement agencies avoiding sites with controversial political opinions or objectionable content. One problem with the FTC's case is that being concerned with brand safety makes valid business sense. A business whose customers largely come from a demographic that tends to support progressive politics will not want to advertise on pro-MAGA websites for fear of alienating its existing customers. Similarly, a brand whose customers are mostly conservative will not want to advertise on AOC 2028. The main problem with the FTC case is that organizing boycotts of a business because of the business's political activities is a First Amendment-protected activity.

Boycotts have a long and distinguished history. They were instrumental in the civil rights, labor, and other progressive movements. Boycotts have been used by conservatives, most notably by social conservatives, to pressure advertisers to stop running ads on programs that offended them. Organizers of these boycotts worked with conservative media watchdogs like the Media Research Center. Now, thanks to the precedent set by Andrew Ferguson, the next Democrat FTC Chair could target the Media Research Center and their allies for conspiring to restrain trade by organizing boycotts.

Chair Ferguson also wrote to (then) Apple CEO Tim Cook warning him that Apple could face a federal investigation for "unfair or deceptive or practices." The deception in question is the claim that Apple's news aggregation site is ideologically neutral, when in fact it promotes stories from left-wing sources while ignoring stories from conservative sources. Even if this were true, Apple has a First Amendment right to choose what news sources to feature in its news aggregator. If consumers are dissatisfied with Apple's selection, they are free to use one of the many conservative news outlets on the internet.

Chair Ferguson and government officials like Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chair Brendon Carr are not just violating the First Amendment - they are violating President Trump's executive order on free speech. Unfortunately, the President's commitment to free speech is also less than consistent. President Trump and his appointees must stop violating the First Amendment - otherwise America will become a country in which free speech only exists for those who won the last election.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 23:20

Gunman Dead, Bystander Wounded After Large Shootout With Secret Service Near White House, Trump Safe

After a very busy day in Washington and at the White House, given the Saturday flurry of diplomatic activity over the announcement of a tentative Iran peace deal, but which is still awaiting word and some details from Tehran, a deadly shooting erupted just outside the White House, resulting in a massive security and response and presence.

President Trump was at the White House when at around 6pm ET the Secret Service responded in a hail of gunfire as 21-year-old Maryland man Nasire Best opened fire at 17th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue NW near the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

via Reuters

The president is safe, and the emergency has been declared over.

Somewhere between approximately 15 to 30 gunshots were fired, according to CBS News, which spoke to local law enforcement. President Trump was at the White House during the incident, "but was not impacted," the Secret Service spokesperson later announced.

A bystander was wounded, and the suspect was hit by by Secret Service officers upon returning fire. The gunman was wounded and taken to the hospital, where he later died. 

I was in the middle of taping on my iPhone for a social video from the White House North Lawn when we heard the shots. It sounded like dozens of gunshots. We were told to sprint to the press briefing room where we are holding now. pic.twitter.com/iqdQwh4soq

— Selina Wang (@selinawangtv) May 23, 2026

CBS reports upon the suspect's name being identified that "According to the source, Best had a previous run-in with Secret Service in July 2025 in which he tried to gain entry to the White House and was arrested and sent to a psychiatric ward for mental health issues."

A complete White House lockdown as since been lifted. According to more emerging details:

The Secret Service confirmed a couple of hours after the shooting that the man had died after exchanging fire with its agents.

The man had approached a White House security checkpoint and pulled a gun from his bag before opening fire, according to the Secret Service. Law enforcement shot back and wounded the man, who was taken to the hospital where he died. 

Fox reporting that an innocent bystander was hit when a gunman and Secret Service exchanged gunfire near the White House. Condition unknown. pic.twitter.com/mFKad4aZWg

— Acyn (@Acyn) May 23, 2026

As for the wounded bystander, the victim's information has not been released, and his condition not immediately known - after being rushed to the hospital.

New footage of the shooting near the White House pic.twitter.com/aTDtFD2onU

— Faytuks Network (@FaytuksNetwork) May 23, 2026

Per CBS, Senate Majority Leader John Thune and House Speaker Mike Johnson both praised the rapid response of the Secret Service as the shooting unfolded

In a post on X, Thune declared he is "grateful for the Secret Service and the agents' decisive actions to protect President Trump and everyone at and around the White House this evening."

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 22:13

Dozens Of Nations Scramble For World Bank Financing Amid Iran War Global Shock

Via The Cradle

Twenty-seven countries have moved to activate emergency World Bank financing mechanisms since the US-Israeli war on Iran began in late February, Reuters reported Friday.

Three nations have already received approval for fast-tracked funding, while the other 24 are in the process of completing administrative procedures. 

Kenya and Iraq have publicly confirmed they are seeking emergency World Bank assistance, with Nairobi facing surging domestic fuel prices and Baghdad grappling with severely diminished oil revenues due to disruptions in maritime exports.

Getty Image

The 27 nations are drawn from a pool of 101 countries with access to pre-arranged contingent financing, including 54 that are enrolled in the World Bank's Rapid Response Option, a mechanism that allows sovereign borrowers to immediately redirect up to 10 percent of their undisbursed project balances.

World Bank President Ajay Banga has outlined a three-tier funding structure. Between $20 billion and $25 billion is available immediately through existing crisis instruments, rising to $60 billion within six months if the bank reorients parts of its broader portfolio, with longer-term structural changes capable of pushing the total to around $100 billion. 

Activity at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), by contrast, has been minimal. 

Despite Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva anticipating that up to a dozen nations would seek between $20 billion and $50 billion in emergency assistance, sources told Reuters that very few formal requests have been filed, with countries in a "wait-and-see mode.”

The IMF previously warned that the US-Israeli war on Iran has significantly worsened the global economic outlook by disrupting energy markets, raising inflation, and weakening growth prospects worldwide.

It said the war had reduced expected global growth from 3.4 percent to 3.1 percent, significantly worsened inflation, and posed major risks of further deterioration in energy supply routes.

From world markets still feeling the sting of the Iran war, to a host of central banks bracing for their next moves, these are the stories to watch in business and finance in the coming week https://t.co/xIhHy1MlEI pic.twitter.com/oqpUcNcUx9

— Reuters (@Reuters) May 22, 2026

The IMF added that prolonged fighting could deepen regional economic damage, potentially push the global economy toward recession-level growth, heighten uncertainty in financial markets, and accelerate broader geopolitical and economic instability.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 22:10

Ferrari Fever Hits Samsung, SK Hynix Workers As AI Memory Boom Mints New Wealth

The global memory boom, with Samsung at the epicenter of the production ecosystem, appears to be generating a sudden wealth effect among some employees, with local media reporting that newly enriched chip workers are now panic-buying luxury sports cars. 

A short clip from MBC News, the news division of Munhwa Broadcasting Corporation and one of South Korea's top national TV and radio broadcasters, featured at least one exotic car dealership reporting a sharp uptick in Samsung Electronics and Hynix employees seeking to buy high-end sports cars.

"We've been getting dozens of phone calls every day for the past month. The customers coming in are mostly employees from Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix. There have been a lot more people coming to look at cars priced over 100 million won (~$73,000 USD)," a MBC reporter could be heard saying in the news segment.

Just in: Employees at high-end and supercar dealerships in Korea say their showrooms are packed with Samsung and SK hynix employees. pic.twitter.com/LuCxWj3cpS

— Jukan (@jukan05) May 22, 2026

Google Search trends confirm a recent spike in internet searches for "Ferrari dealer" as Samsung and SK Hynix have become the world's most important memory companies.

Shares of Samsung and SK Hynix have gone absolutely parabolic ...

... as well as KOSPI.

Meanwhile...

• Korean Bubble Mania: Retail Investors Max Out On Margin Debt, Choose To "Risk Complete Collapse" Than Miss Stock Rally

We suspect the exotic-car buying spree will accelerate once Samsung and its largest union reach a new labor deal. Voting begins Saturday. Coverage here.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 21:35

State-Sponsored Suicide Authored by MN Gordon via dollarcollapse.com

"A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

- Will and Ariel Durant, The Story Of Civilization

Enemy Within

How does a superpower die?

Does it come from the blinding kill shot of a hypersonic missile streaking through the sky? Or, perhaps, a rogue cyberattack that mortally destroys the national power grid?

Will the end of America come with foreign tanks rolling through New York or a massive, coordinated amphibious attack on Los Angeles?

These dramatic scenarios make for captivating conjecture. But they're highly unlikely. If you look at the autopsy reports of the world's greatest empires, the ultimate cause of death is rarely a sudden, overwhelming external blow.

Long before the barbarians breached the gates of Rome, the Roman denarius had been systematically devalued into a glorified copper token to fund a bloated bureaucracy. This was characterized by widespread domestic corruption and endless military expansion.

So, too, long before the British Empire reluctantly packed up its global flags, it realized the staggering cost of multiple wars had left it financially bankrupt, structurally hollowed out, and entirely dependent on American loans.

Great civilizations don't usually get slaughtered by their rivals. They commit slow, sophisticated, economically optimized suicide.

As we move through 2026, the United States is following a well-worn, dangerous path. But it's traversing it at a speed and scale that would leave ancient Rome in the dust.

The reality that no politician will publicly admit is that America's out-of-control federal spending and its monstrous, multi-trillion-dollar financial system are doing far more structural damage to the country's long-term survival than any foreign adversary ever could.

By burying the nation in unpayable debt, Congress is willingly destroying America from the inside. Hence, the greatest threat to our future lies not across the ocean, but directly within our own borders.

Act Of War

Let's talk about the ghastly numbers. They're often ignored by the general population because our brains are hardwired to glaze over when we start talking about trillions. Here we'll break them down for you.

Right now, the official U.S. national debt has blown past $39 trillion. To put that into perspective, if you spent one dollar every single second, it would take you about 32,000 years to spend $1 trillion. America owes 39 of those.

But the real issue isn't just the total balance on Washington's credit card. It's the cost of keeping the account active. The yield on a 30-year Treasury bond recently climbed above 5 percent for the first time in nearly 20 years. Yet today's balance is much larger than it was 20 years ago. When you owe $39 trillion, even a tiny uptick in interest rates transforms your budget into an insurmountable nightmare.

America is currently burning through roughly $3 billion every single day just to pay the interest on its existing debt.

Think about that for a second. Before a single pothole is filled, before a single soldier is paid, before a single school lunch is funded, or a Medicare claim is processed, $3 billion dollars vanishes into thin air every 24 hours. It doesn't buy new equipment, it doesn't rebuild infrastructure, and it doesn't help struggling families. It's purely the cost of treading water.

Instead of investing in the future, we're paying for the profligacy of the past.

If a foreign nation managed to sabotage the U.S. economy so severely that it drained $3 billion a day out of the federal Treasury, it would be viewed as an act of war. We would mobilize the military.

Yet, because this bleeding is caused by our own fiscal policy, we pretend it isn't happening and go back to scrolling on our phones.

Vicious Doom Loop

The entire American lifestyle - and by extension, the global economy - is built on the singular, fragile assumption that the rest of the world will always want to buy American debt. For decades, this was a safe bet. Treasuries were considered risk free in terms of default.

The U.S. dollar, while under threat of the U.S. government's making, remains king of the global financial system - for now. When global chaos hits, investors run to U.S. Treasuries like a safe harbor in a storm. This exorbitant privilege allowed Washington to spend money it didn't have without facing immediate consequences.

But that privilege resulted in a dangerous lack of discipline and created a catastrophic level of arrogance. Politicians on both sides of the aisle began treating the national debt like a meaningless artifact. To Congress, and as elaborated by the late Dick Cheney, "deficits don't matter."

Unfortunately, the mathematics of debt do matter. And right now, the system is locked into a vicious, mechanical doom loop. Here's how it works...

Every month, while you pay your bills, live within your means, and balance your personal finance books, the Treasury issues mountains of new debt just to pay off the old debt that's maturing. All the while, it's borrowing more to cover current overspending. Yet, because the market is getting flooded with U.S. bonds, investors are demanding higher yields.

Higher yields mean refinancing becomes more expensive. More expensive refinancing creates even larger deficits. Larger deficits require issuing even more bonds.

The financial system is, in effect, cannibalizing itself to stay alive. No enemy army could design a more effective trap to paralyze the American financial system.

When an enemy attacks, the damage is obvious. Buildings fall, smoke rises, and the country rallies together. But when financial decay sets in the destruction is deceptive. For many people, the cause is unclear.

Inside Job

Over the decades, American leaders assumed the world had no choice but to use the dollar. Where else were they going to go?

But our adversaries and allies alike have watched this fiscal train wreck unfold and are methodically diversifying their reserves. They realize that a superpower running a $39 trillion deficit is a precarious foundation for the global economy.

Central banks around the world have accelerated their gold purchases to historic levels. Countries like China have been systematically reducing their holdings of long-term U.S. Treasuries.

It's not a sudden boycott of the dollar. Rather, it's a slow calculated diversification. As the rest of the world lightens up on their purchases of U.S. debt, the Federal Reserve becomes the buyer of last resort. That means creating credit out of thin air to buy U.S. Treasuries. This is a formula for runaway inflation. The type that has destroyed countless currencies throughout history.

To be clear, Fed asset purchases have been occurring for much of the 21st century. So, too, have U.S. government policies of dollar debasement. This sophisticated state-sponsored suicide takes place in ongoing Congressional hearings, mundane Treasury auctions, continuous debt ceiling increases, pretend government shutdowns, and carefully scripted statements by the Fed using concocted syntaxes that are designed to keep people from panicking.

As America closes in on its 250-year anniversary it's being drained of its capital. The government continues to borrow tomorrow's prosperity to pay for today's political promises. All the while, the people watch the infrastructure of the nation's cities crumble as $3 billion a day is directed to service interest payments. The currency buys less and less every year, forcing citizens onto an endless economic hamster wheel.

Alas, it hasn't taken an enemy to destroy America. Our politicians have already done the job for them.

Sincerely,

MN Gordon
for Economic Prism

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 21:00

Another Detransitioner Wins A Huge Settlement

A woman who underwent a double mastectomy after identifying as "nonbinary" has reportedly secured a confidential $3.5 million settlement after suing the mental health professionals who approved her for the life-altering procedure. Camille Kiefel, 36, alleged in a malpractice lawsuit that two Oregon therapists signed off on the surgery after only brief telemedicine consultations, despite a documented history of mental health issues. The settlement was reached just days before the case was set to go to trial. 

The case is already fueling renewed scrutiny of how quickly some medical providers have approved irreversible gender procedures for vulnerable patients struggling with serious mental health issues.

The settlement comes after another detransitioner, Fox Varian, won a $2 million judgment back in February against the providers who referred her for a double mastectomy at age 16. Soon after the settlement was announced, the American Society of Plastic Surgeons announced its position on gender transition surgeries for minors, concluding “there is insufficient evidence demonstrating a favorable risk-benefit ratio for the pathway of gender-related endocrine and surgical interventions in children and adolescents.” According to reporter Benjamin Ryan, at least 30 detransitioners have sued healthcare providers in the past four years.

Kiefel’s complaint, filed in 2022, named licensed clinical social worker Amy Ruff and licensed professional counselor Mara Burmeister, along with their respective employers, Brave Space and the Quest Center for Integrative Health. According to the suit, it took only two telemedicine Zoom sessions, each lasting about an hour or less, for Kiefel to get approval for the surgery.

Kiefel's history at the time of those consultations showed obvious signs of mental health issues that should have been taken into account, but clearly were not. She had a documented record of trauma, depression, ADHD, and suicidal ideation. Her path toward identifying as "nonbinary" began even earlier.

She has described a childhood incident in which her best friend was sexually assaulted when both girls were in the fifth grade. "I started dressing more masculine after that," she recalled. "I just wanted to protect myself." In college, a women's studies course introduced her to the concept of being nonbinary, and she came to believe adopting that identity could explain the gender-related distress she had carried since childhood.

Despite the approval of the mental health professionals, the surgery did not resolve her gender dysphoria, and within two years, she detransitioned. 

In the interim, she developed vertigo, tinnitus, and Raynaud's syndrome, a condition that causes extremities to go numb and cold. She eventually began working with a naturopath and exploring the relationship between gut health and mental wellbeing. Once she addressed her physical health through nutrition, she says both her mental and physical condition improved substantially. 

That improvement is what forced the harder question.

"So while I'm addressing all my physical health issues, I start to question whether or not the surgery was helpful for me," she told Fox News Digital. "And then about a year and a half later, I de-transitioned."

 "I didn't want what happened to me to happen to other vulnerable girls and women," she said. 

Her lawsuit alleged professional malpractice, intentional infliction of emotional distress, and fraud, each rooted in the same core allegation: that she was neither properly evaluated nor genuinely informed before she consented to an irreversible procedure. "And I wasn't given true informed consent. And that's something that everyone deserves to have for any medical procedure," she said.

Kiefel says she reached out to gender medicine organizations in hopes of creating dialogue around how vulnerable patients are screened and counseled. Those efforts went nowhere. "So for many, I think for a lot of this is going to be the lawsuits that are actually going to create change," she said. Given that Brave Space, one of the named defendants, has since shut down permanently, the courts may be the only venue left with any real leverage.

Despite detransitioning, her body will never be the same. “And it is difficult because there's like little reminders like, I'll be looking in a mirror after taking a shower and those ugly scars are still there," she said. "Dresses don't fit me the same way ... I'd like to have kids, but I would never be able to nurse them, and I'll never have that connection with them, and then they won't get the benefits of breast milk. So it's been difficult."

Despite the physical and emotional scars caused by her transition, by her own account, Kiefel is now the most mentally stable she has ever been. 

Cases like this are likely to reshape gender medicine for years to come, as doctors, therapists, and hospitals face growing legal and financial pressure over how quickly irreversible procedures were approved for vulnerable patients. The era of rubber-stamping gender interventions after cursory evaluations appears to be coming to an end, with malpractice lawsuits succeeding where internal oversight and medical institutions failed.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 20:25

Building American Cities That Would Make The Founding Fathers Proud

Authored by Charles Ma via RealClearPolicy,

American cities need bold renewal. What we need is a "MadeCity" vision - a vision for intentionally crafting or "making" cities that emphasize the enduring higher order potential within people.

Beginning to plan and build such cities as part of America's upcoming 250th anniversary is a fitting way to extend John Winthrop's vision for America as a "City on a Hill." A MadeCity is a living monument to faith, freedom, and entrepreneurship - the very ideals that turned a collection of colonies into the greatest nation on earth.

Washington, D.C., our nation's capital, is the ideal place to begin. Transforming the District into a true MadeCity would restore Americans' faith in their country and give the world a renewed beacon of hope. It would remind citizens of the Founders' deep faith and worship that sustained them through the Revolution and the creation of a new republic. The arts would play a central role, turning our capital into a place of inspiration and reverence rather than just a sterile bureaucracy. Venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and families would drive the transformation, proving that America is not destined to be a nation of elites and dependents, but of creators and builders with shared vision and purpose.

As Proverbs reminds us, "Where there is no vision, the people cast off restraint." Today, too many Americans feel hopeless, taught to rely on government instead of cultivating motivated citizenship. Proper education can change that. We must teach young people the truth: America is the greatest nation on earth - a superpower of liberty, economic freedom, and human flourishing. Our most valuable currency is not dollars but our youth, talent, and leadership.

The Founders - Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, and George Washington - were men of faith who thought and built on a grand scale. They were entrepreneurs and visionaries as much as statesmen. Franklin revolutionized printing and invention. Washington built a thriving business at Mount Vernon. They and countless others created vibrant cities - New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore - and inspired the rise of Chicago, Los Angeles, and beyond. Their greatest fear was that future generations would fail to keep the republic they sacrificed to establish. Franklin's warning rings loud today: "A republic, if you can keep it."

Yet too often our current leaders and builders operate with short-term, accountant-style thinking - applying band-aids when visionary, long-term transformation is required. Mayors and politicians focus on the next election cycle instead of monuments that will stand for centuries. We went to the Moon with courage and faith. Reaching Mars - and rebuilding our cities - demands the same spirit.

Government has an important constitutional role, but it cannot replace the human drive to create. Our $39 trillion national debt is sustainable only because the world retains confidence in America's future growth and productivity. That confidence must be earned, not assumed. True wealth is not created by trading stocks or relying on today's tech giants alone. It is built by bold minds who invent, manufacture, and construct - the same spirit that produced the iPhone, the assembly line, and the great American cities of the past.

Post-World War II Europe offers a powerful lesson. Nations rebuilt with purpose, drawing on faith and resolve to rise from ruins. America, never defeated, has even greater potential. Washington, D.C., is perfectly positioned to lead a new revolution in urban building - one grounded in faith-based entrepreneurship that honors the "Great Experiment" our Founders began.

We are a nation born in courage, not caution. Our builders must stop fearing failure and start believing again in the possibility of creating the next great American cities. Families need inspiration. Communities need purpose. The next generation needs to see living proof that the American Dream is alive and being built - not managed or regulated into mediocrity.

MadeCities are the answer. They are places where we create the conscious arrangements that make living irresistible and remarkably fruitful, where a quantum currency is realized through specified complexity and manifold beauty. Just as living organisms thrive as the result of the intelligent design and coordination of their many diverse parts, MadeCities promote human flourishing as a consequence of the integrated design of their different essential elements and institutions, whether residential, recreational, commercial, cultural, legal or religious. Indeed, a living and thriving city depends on the intelligent design and planning of its founders inspired by the Way, Truth, and Life of God the Creator.

Here is a bold framework: "How might we create cities that grow in the favor of both God and Man?" A living city where we as citizens are living stones, feeding on living waters, responding to a living God. This is what made America unstoppable and MadeCity's core Movement.

Ryan Higgins, a descendant of one of the founding families in the U.S. said the following about our nation's amazing history: "In 1623, my 13th great grandfather fled a tyrannical government and risked life and limb to come to the New World because he knew the recipe to human flourishing could not be found in a King. As a man of deep faith, Richard Higgins knew the only Hope worth fighting for was a civilization rooted in God, with a heavy emphasis on family and community. Made City is taking that same mindset into 2026 and beyond" and "our current concrete jungles across the US have lost hope, creativity and community. The result is clear to see; isolation, record levels of depression, anxiety and mental health issues." Higgins is correct to point out that what we have been doing for decades is not working.

Washington DC is the place to start. I hope to play a role in continuing America's tradition of faith-driven entrepreneurship and in helping build the next City on a Hill. America cannot remain the land of the free unless it is also the home of the brave, the innovative and the bold.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 19:50

"I Think It Will Reduce Our Jobs": Jamie Dimon Predicts AI-Driven Workforce Shift At JPMorgan

Artificial intelligence is set to significantly alter hiring patterns at JPMorgan Chase & Co., according to CEO Jamie Dimon, who said the bank expects to recruit more AI-focused talent while reducing reliance on some conventional banking roles over time, according to Bloomberg.

During a Bloomberg Television interview at the firm’s China Summit in Shanghai, Dimon acknowledged the long-term impact AI is likely to have on employment across the industry. “I think it will reduce our jobs down the road,” he said. “There will be all different types of jobs, and I think we will be hiring more AI people and fewer bankers in certain categories, and it will make them more productive.”

The shift reflects a broader transformation underway on Wall Street, where major banks are accelerating investments in automation and generative AI to streamline operations and improve efficiency. Executives across the sector have increasingly spoken about the technology’s ability to replace repetitive work while reshaping how financial institutions operate.

Bloomberg writes that unlike some peers who have framed the transition more bluntly, Dimon emphasized that workforce reductions could largely happen gradually through attrition rather than mass layoffs. JPMorgan, which sees roughly 25,000 to 30,000 employees leave annually, has enough turnover to retrain or reposition workers as roles evolve, he said.

He also argued that AI’s impact will not be limited to eliminating jobs. New positions are expected to emerge, particularly in areas tied to client relationships and revenue generation, even as some support and operational functions become more automated.

Dimon’s remarks followed controversial comments from Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters, who recently said the bank was replacing “lower-value human capital” with technology as part of a plan to cut thousands of support positions. Goldman Sachs President John Waldron has likewise described traditional back-office work as a “human assembly line” susceptible to automation, while HSBC CEO Georges Elhedery warned this week that AI would “destroy” certain jobs even as it creates others.

Addressing the backlash surrounding Winters’ comments, Dimon defended the executive while acknowledging the wording had landed poorly. “It was an inartful way to say something,” he said. “I think it will be old jobs. If back-office jobs disappear, we need more front office jobs to cover more clients.”

Research from consulting firms and banks suggests the disruption could be substantial. McKinsey estimates that nearly a third of work hours in finance and insurance may eventually be automated, while Citigroup has projected that more than half of banking jobs face a high likelihood of either replacement or augmentation through AI technologies.

Still, Dimon cautioned against allowing the transition to move too quickly without considering the broader consequences. “I think it’s incumbent upon us, society, to think through if it happens too fast,” he said.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 19:15

What 'Compassion' Isn't

Authored by Laura Hollis via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

One of the most frustrating aspects of contemporary conversations about politics and public policy is how often the deleterious effects of terrible programs - local, state and federal - are brushed aside with distracting and even deceitful claims that the intentions behind the policies were "compassionate." This is an utterly wrongheaded analysis for many reasons. Laws, public policies, and government programs should be evaluated by their results, not by the state of mind of their advocates or sponsors.

Nathan Dumlao/Unsplash.com

The weaponization of compassion has launched a de facto competition of who can be thought to be the most "compassionate" or, at least, not thought to be uncompassionate. The result of this arms race has been chaos, destruction, and depravity.

It's easy to lose sight of just how often this pernicious dynamic takes place, so it's worthwhile to point out a few of the disastrous policies that were promoted, and in some cases continue to be promoted, as being "compassionate" and to call them out for the societally corrosive lies they are.

1. It wasn't "compassionate" to close our mental hospitals. The impulse was understandable; plenty of those facilities were substandard. But the results were catastrophic. Until fairly recently in this country's history, the "homeless" population consisted largely of small numbers of unattached males who drifted from place to place seeking work. But since the 1980s, the homeless population of the United States has exploded. Nearly three-quarters of a million people are homeless, and the number jumped 18 percent from 2023 to 2024. California has 187,000 of the country's homeless; more than 70,000 are in Los Angeles County alone.

2. It isn't "compassionate," nor is it respect for "individual autonomy" or "dignity," to leave the homeless to live as they do. Homeless encampments are hotbeds of filth, including human urine and feces, crime and diseases like leptospirosis, typhus, hepatitis, tuberculosis, and even plague. Across the country, cities are dealing with the economic impact of shuttered stores and declining downtowns attributable to the presence of ever-growing numbers of homeless.

3. It isn't "compassionate" to hand out needles or create places where addicts can use drugs. Leaving aside what should be an obvious argument that we shouldn't be encouraging, much less facilitating, the use of dangerous drugs, two-thirds of America's homeless have a diagnosed mental health illness. A third have a serious substance abuse problem. Approximately half suffer with both. Open-air drug use exacerbates those problems and creates others.

4. It isn't "compassionate," or "equitable," for that matter, to eliminate teaching math, giving grades, standardized tests, advanced academic programs for gifted students or graduation requirements, or to lower entrance qualifications for college and graduate school. It punishes high-achieving students and sends the message to lower-performing students that they aren't capable of meeting basic standards. That, then, undermines public confidence in the graduates of our high schools, colleges, and professional schools.

5. It wasn't "compassionate" to stop enforcing our immigration laws.

6. It isn't "compassionate" to allow violent criminals back on the streets.

7. It isn't "compassionate" to subject children and teenagers with gender dysphoria, and other emotional disorders, to permanent alteration of their bodies with medical and surgical interventions before they are old enough to understand the implications of those decisions.

None of these decisions have had beneficial impacts on their intended populations. Worse still, they are all deeply destructive to other individuals, groups, and society at large. Everyone affected should be able to protest the consequences of these failed policies without getting smeared with the false accusation that they "lack compassion."

Another reason to eliminate "compassion" as a basis for public policy, which we're seeing daily with painful clarity, is that these policies end up being vehicles for massive fraud. Anyone can set up a 501c3 nonprofit, claim to be working for a charitable purpose, and deceive donors into giving money that does little but line the CEOs' pockets. And when government grants are involved, there is little oversight, take Minnesota, for example, and more incentive for grift, bribery, and payback in the form of pouring money into the campaign coffers of politicians who hold the grants' pursestrings. What we end up with is a situation where neither the nonprofits nor the politicians have an incentive to solve the underlying problems, since they're getting rich from their continued existence.

Why has the United States become a nation where "compassion" trumps all other considerations?

Scholars like Helen Andrews argue that the emphasis on "compassion" over logic and methodical analysis is a function of what she calls "the great feminization." Women, Andrews claims, are hardwired to be maternal, and thus more likely to be persuaded by something that tugs at their empathy than by that which appeals to their reason.

I'm not so sure. First, women have functioning brains, and they are certainly intellectually capable of dispassionate analysis. Second, an awful lot of men seem to be just as hornswoggled by appeals to their "compassion" as are misguided women. And third, I don't understand how it is "feminine" or "maternal" to witness the collapse of huge sections of our cities into third-world slums; or to know that drugs are pouring into the country, children are being trafficked for sex, and young women are being raped and murdered because the borders are unenforced; or to see people stabbed to death on public transportation, pushed in front of trains or run down by crazed lunatics at Christmas parades because criminals aren't incarcerated; or to watch as multiple generations of disadvantaged minorities struggle because of schools with weak disciplinary and academic standards; or to want children and emotionally troubled teens to be chemically castrated or surgically sterilized before they're old enough to drive a car, drink a beer, or understand the concepts of sexual satisfaction, fathering, giving birth to or nursing a child, none of which they will experience if they are "transitioned."

None of this is "compassionate." It's objectively irrational. It's wantonly destructive. It is the deliberate disregard of monumental, systemic, catastrophic failure, the evidence of which is irrefutable. There's something seriously wrong with anyone who continues to defend these policies and programs, and I'm not persuaded that it's a matter of chromosomal biology or evolution.

I don't profess to have a complete solution. But a good start would be to demand meaningful metrics when we discuss proposed and existing policies and programs. What matters isn't "compassion"; it's consequences.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 16:20

AI Content Is Swamping The Internet: How It Impacts Critical Thinking

Authored by Autumn Spredemann via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

A never-ending flood of content generated by artificial intelligence is reshaping the internet and the way people engage with information faster than ever.

Illustration by The Epoch Times, Freepik

From news summaries to social media posts to academic research, the sheer volume of machine-assisted materials has been correlated with a spike in "cognitive offloading" - a phenomenon in which people outsource critical thinking and verification to automated systems.

A 2025 analysis of how AI tools affect cognitive offloading showed a "significant negative correlation" between frequent use of AI tools and the ability to think critically in people across age groups and educational backgrounds. The researchers at the SBS Swiss Business School found that younger age groups exhibited a higher amount of dependence on AI models and lower critical thinking scores.

What's more troubling is a Pangram/YouGov study in May that found only 55 percent of participants, all of whom were Gen Zers aged 18 to 28, were able to identify fake or misleading AI-generated material. That number is lower in older age groups, which means half or fewer of adults over the age of 28 were confident in their ability to spot AI content online.

"AI-generated posts and comments can distort public perception, especially when volume is mistaken for credibility," Javi Pérez, an editor of AI-assisted consumer education websites, told The Epoch Times.

"If a user sees dozens of similar posts about a product, trend, political claim, health issue, or financial topic, they may assume there is broad agreement."

'Confident Sameness'

Pérez said consumers need to beware as AI content increases the volume of what he called "confident sameness" online.

"Many articles and posts now repeat similar structures, similar advice, and similar phrasing. For casual readers, this can create the impression that a topic has more consensus or certainty than it really does, because they keep seeing the same ideas repeated across many sources," Pérez said.

"The risk is that people stop knowing which content has been checked. In fields like finance, health, law, education, or news, readers need to know whether claims were reviewed against primary sources, updated recently, and edited by someone accountable."

AI strategy consultant Armand Cucciniello III told The Epoch Times that AI-generated content is changing not only how we consume information, but also how quickly we process and trust it.

"We're moving from deliberate reading toward rapid skimming of polished summaries, commentary, short-form videos, and AI-assisted content designed for speed and engagement," he said.

As someone who has worked in the "U.S. national security landscape," Cucciniello said one of his biggest concerns is that AI systems "can unintentionally amplify large volumes of inaccurate or deliberately manipulated content simply through repetition and scale."

He also believes the high volume of AI-generated content is creating real pressure on public trust.

"When readers encounter nearly identical phrasing or interpretations across multiple sources, it's natural to question whether the information was independently reported or simply repackaged," he said.

Carl Stroud, a public relations expert and chief storyteller at the Smoking Gun Agency, has also witnessed AI content take a toll on the public.

"The fundamental audience need has not changed: People want to trust what they are reading," Stroud told The Epoch Times. "What has changed is how much harder that judgment has become.

"AI-generated content, aggregation, and low-quality slop have made the information environment noisier, flatter, and more confusing, so audiences are now trying to work out whether they are reading original reporting, rehashed content, or something that should never have been published in the first place."

Beyond social media and academia, few industries have been hit as hard with AI-generated misinformation as the news. Stroud, who has spent two decades within UK media circles, editing, and journalism, said he's seeing the AI content churn create fatigue among readers searching for accurate information.

"Fatigue is dangerous because when people feel overwhelmed, they either disengage or become easier to mislead," he said.

Losing Touch

Ashutosh Khulbe, founder of RawPickAI, tests AI tools for a living - about three to four new ones every week.

"What I notice most in my corner of the internet is that everything sounds the same now. Like, eerily the same," he told The Epoch Times. "I'd guess 70 to 80 [percent] of 'best AI tools' articles are AI-generated at this point.

"It creates this weird feedback loop where AI writes reviews based on what other AI already wrote, readers assume there's a consensus, and the actual experience of using these tools gets buried."

He said he tested one writing tool that had hundreds of positive reviews online yet was unusable at the free tier. "You couldn't even finish a paragraph before hitting the limit. But good luck finding that info in a Google search," he said.

Khulbe is especially bothered by the way information distortion is affecting the public.

"AI content skews relentlessly positive because it's trained on marketing pages and affiliate reviews. Nobody's training models on 'I tried this for two weeks, and it sucked.' So the negative signal just disappears from the internet," he said.

The effects of the AI content boom can now be seen in what some are calling "AI psychosis," or a disconnect from reality. While not a clinical diagnosis, the term has become a popular catch-all phrase to describe when AI reinforces an unusual, fixed, or even delusional perception of something in the real world.

People with mental health conditions could be predisposed to developing "AI psychosis," but it's also not limited to that population, according to Dr. Ragy Girgis, professor of clinical psychiatry at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

"The phenomenon of AI psychosis is quantitatively new and could be very dangerous, but qualitatively it's very similar to what's been happening for decades now since the advent of the internet," Girgis said during an interview with the National Academy of Medicine in March.

This photo illustration shows a person holding two mobile phones displaying viral AI-generated videos of students and an elderly woman sharing views on the impeachment of Philippine Vice President Sara Duterte in Hong Kong on June 20, 2025. Days after the Philippine Senate declined to launch the impeachment trial, the two videos arguing for and against the move went viral. Yan Zhao/AFP via Getty Images Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 15:10

Nvidia CEO Urges Super Micro To "Enhance Compliance" Amid AI Chip-Smuggling Probe

In a rare public comment that Nvidia is growing more sensitive to downstream risk, CEO Jensen Huang was quoted by Bloomberg News as saying Super Micro Computer must strengthen internal compliance controls after Taiwanese authorities detained three people accused of smuggling banned AI chips to China.  

"Ultimately, Super Micro has to run its own company," Huang told reporters on Saturday in response to the chip smuggling scheme. "I hope that they will enhance and improve their regulation compliance and avoid that from happening in the future."

The U.S.-based server and data-center hardware company primarily builds high-performance servers, storage systems, networking gear, and complete AI/data-center racks for various customers, but most importantly for those working on edge computing and artificial intelligence workloads.

Huang said Nvidia is "rigorously" explaining the complex regulatory environment to all its partners to avert further downstream diversion risk.

Huang's comments stem from federal prosecutors charging the co-founder of Super Micro and two associates with participating in a scheme to divert roughly $2.5 billion in Nvidia AI accelerators to China.

How the Alleged Scheme Worked:

• The group used a company in Southeast Asia as a front buyer to place huge orders with a California-based U.S. manufacturer.
• Once the servers arrived in Southeast Asia, they were quickly repackaged and secretly shipped to customers in China through a network of brokers.

Related:

• $92 Million In Banned AI Chips Went From Super Micro To Little-Known Chinese Tech Company

Our view is that Huang's comments suggest he is trying to insulate Nvidia from a widening chip-smuggling investigation while preserving access to highly scrutinized international markets.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 13:25

When Unfairness Is Systemic, The Consequences Are Flight, Resistance, Revolt

Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog,

Now that we've drained the aquifers of a stable society, the replacement form of "wealth" is a delusional credit-asset bubble that generates the illusion of "wealth."

Let's weave together two threads that look different: systemic unfairness and civilizational psychosis. As I often note, social species that organize themselves into hierarchies (i.e. primates, including humans) have an innate sensitivity to fairness, as this trait is essential to maintaining social stability, and therefore it has been selected as advantageous.

This sensitivity applies both to individual instances of unfairness / injustice and to systemic unfairness / injustice. If there is no redress when an individual is treated unfairly or abused, the social order is weakened. This is why early civilizations instituted legal codes and systems of redress as they expanded into nations / empires that needed bureaucracies to organize, manage and enforce the rules and responsibilities of every class.

If the mechanisms of redress have become empty shams, then the unfairness is systemic: it isn't just some individuals who have been treated unfairly--everyone is being exploited and treated differently from what the system claims is the operative set of values and rules.

When there's an external source of wealth to be exploited, the leadership has the luxury of becoming extractive and oppressive, because they have a source of wealth that's external to their own populace. Consider the progression from a society of systemic fairness to a society of systemic unfairness.

Consider a fledgling nation that was a society with high levels of social trust and cohesion generated by a dutiful leadership, social mobility and a system in which social pressures meant members of each social class had to respect the same set of social rules.

This structure is the essential foundation of a functional society and economy, for if the resident populace is immiserated by an unfair system, they respond by either fleeing the system (i.e. opting out or leaving), resisting the unfairness / exploitation or revolting against the status quo.

If the nation transitions into an expansionist empire, the leadership can jettison fairness / redress because it can extract wealth via conquest or exploiting new resources. The bureaucracy is co-opted / bought off via the spoils of conquest and corruption, and as the imperium expands, it has sufficient wealth to buy off the citizenry class with bread and circuses or equivalent largesse.

In other words, systemic unfairness--what we now call a rigged casino--is accepted as long as the key social classes feel they're getting ahead. The Roman state / empire is an example of these dynamics, but there are many others.

As long as there's enough external wealth flowing in to enable people to feel they're still getting ahead, social decay is tolerated as "the cost of progress." In other words, who needs fairness if I have a seat in the rigged casino?

But this structure is inherently unstable, both economically and socially. External sources of wealth / resources are eventually depleted, and the largesse diminishes asymmetrically: the wealthiest few at the top continue amassing fortunes, the bureaucrats are squeezed, and the lower classes are now being taxed to cover the decline of external wealth extraction.

The systemic unfairness that was tolerated is no longer tolerable once the majority are no longer getting ahead. This presents the leadership class reaping the lion's share of the wealth extraction with a problem: how to persuade the masses that 1) they're still getting ahead, even as they visibly lose ground, and 2) how to mask the systemic unfairness, i.e. the rigged casino that stripmines the many to benefit the few.

The leadership's "solution" is civilizational psychosis: the founding mythology of the state--so inspirational and lofty--is heavily promoted, even as this mythology (super-abundance, democracy, etc.) no longer maps the real world.

This widening divide generates civilizational psychosis as the masses are corralled into a state of denial that temporarily eases their anxiety at the recognition they're no longer getting ahead and the ladders of upward mobility have all crumbled.

This state of inspirational delusion enables denial to take a superficially plausible inspirational form: Rome is eternal, so we don't have to do anything but await an automatic return to greatness, AI will make us all rich, technological Progress is inevitable and automatically solves all our problems, and so on.

We fervently believe these delusions because the alternative is too painful to bear. The system is rotten to the core, it's all artifice masquerading as authenticity, and not only are we no longer getting ahead, there are no pathways left to get ahead other than gambling, selling our blood or delusional aspirations to become one of the tiny handful of newly minted Tech Bro millionaires.

There is an emotional progression that parallels the progression from a stable society of dynamic equilibrium to civilizational psychosis: denial breaks down into anger, a volatile state with uncertain outcomes, which eventually transitions to bargaining (please let the stock market go back up so I can exit without losses) which leads to depression (it's all lost) which once processed can move to acceptance (oh well, time to start over).

Both denial and civilizational psychosis are inherently unstable as they're self-liquidating. So denial will blossom into anger whether we "like" it or not.

Now that we've drained the aquifers of a stable society, the replacement form of "wealth" is a catastrophically delusional credit-asset bubble that generates the illusion of "wealth." Since the top 10% managerial / entrepreneurial / professional class the leadership needs to run the empire own 90% of the bubbling assets, inflating a credit-asset bubble is a painless way of generating the illusion in this class that they're still getting ahead.

Until the bubble pops, of course, and all bubbles pop, even when we insist they're not bubbles.

Bubbles masquerading as "wealth" is a manifestation of civilizational psychosis, and so these asset bubbles are equally unstable and self-liquidating: they implode not as a result of some external influence but as an inevitable consequence of their internal structure / nature.

Once the system's transition to a rigged casino becomes undeniable, denial cracks wide open and is replaced by anger. The responses to systemic unfairness are flight, resistance and revolt: dropping out, laying flat, let it rot, opting out, booing toadies worshiping the new gods of AI and eventually, manifestations of revolt as political, economic and social redress are suppressed as needless by a delusional leadership class that has embraced civilizational psychosis.

The price of believing their own PR will be higher than anyone thought possible.

*  *  *

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Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 12:50

Ukraine Regained Territory After Cutting Russia's Black Market Starlink Terminals

According to a newly declassified U.S. defense intelligence assessment first reported by Bloomberg, Moscow’s frontline command-and-control structures suffered a catastrophic blackout earlier this year due largely to coordinated crackdown that disabled thousands of black market Russian Starlink terminals.

The Pentagon document highlights just how deeply Russian forces had come to rely on Elon Musk's commercial satellite terminals to patch over their own spotty military communication systems. For months, Russian units bypassed international sanctions via shadow supply networks to source the hardware.

The Friday Bloomberg report claims that a "Ukrainian offensive against Russia earlier this year retook about 400 square kilometers after thousands of portable Starlink internet terminals operated by Russian forces were deactivated," citing analysis from the US Defense Intelligence Agency. 

The document, authored jointly by the DIA and US European Command, states that "Russian military capabilities in Ukraine were temporarily yet significantly degraded following Ukrainian officials’ efforts in February to deactivate thousands of Starlink terminals that were illicitly used by Russian forces to coordinate movements and unmanned aircraft strikes in areas where communications were unreliable or easily jammed."

Ukrainian forces then made their first territorial gains since 2023, after years of steady Russian gains, with Russia military comms now said to be "temporarily yet significantly degraded" due to the loss of the terminals.

The report further describes that Kiev forces working in tandem with SpaceX were able to deploy sweeping geographic restrictions that target-locked and deactivated unauthorized terminals operating inside the combat zone. This resulted in "instant" results.

What also didn't help is the Kremlin's own tightening restrictions on the use of Telegram by Russian forces, and so also the recent lack of this favored encrypted messaging platform among military units left frontline commanders totally isolated.

While US intelligence noted that Russia still maintains an overall structural advantage in raw combat functions, and of course manpower and firepower remains on Moscow's side, the incident demonstrates that communications are still a vital backbone to any modern warfare and command system.

SpaceX has long sought to officially bar Russian consumers from using Starlink, due to long-running sanctions, and to prevent military use against Ukraine.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 12:15