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

Highlights From 2nd Batch Of Declassified UFO Files Include A UAP Shootdown

The Pentagon’s second batch of declassified UFO files released on May 22 includes videos such as Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) being shot down over the Great Lakes and audio of astronauts witnessing a series of unexplained phenomena.

​Dozens of documents were cleared for release on Friday, adding to the previous document dump on May 8, which revealed that Apollo 11 astronauts reported seeing a “sizable” object near the moon.

​The Epoch Times' Jacki Thrapp offers the following highlights from a partial review of the newly released files.

UAP Shot Down

The U.S. Air Force shot down a balloon-shaped UAP over Lake Huron, one of the Great Lakes located between the United States and Canada, on Feb. 12, 2023.

A U.S. Air Force Air National Guard F-16C shoots down a UAP over Lake Huron on Feb 12, 2023. Department of War

The video, which the War Department said was likely taken by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform, showed the UAP being struck and “fragmenting in a radial displacement pattern that suggests a high-energy event.”

Fragments fall from the UAP after it was shot. Department of War

The War Department did not reveal what fell from the object.

Officials did not share if any attempts were made to recover the fragments.

The Epoch Times reached out to the Department of War for additional information.

​UAP Formation Caught on Camera

The Department of War released a video showing “four areas of contrast” seemingly making a formation, according to a video apparently filmed by an infrared sensor aboard a U.S. military platform.

A screenshot from a video titled “UAP USO Formation.” USO stands for unidentified submerged object. Department of War

The eight-minute clip, which was edited and digitally altered, showed four objects moving in a parallel direction as they became “increasingly indistinct over time as the video quality degrades.”

Four unexplained objects moving in the same direction in a screenshot from video. Department of War

The War Department did not share the date or location of the unexplained formation.

International Sightings

An infrared sensor spotted a UAP, described as “four areas of contrast,” zoom past what appeared to be ships in the U.S. Central Command area of responsibility in Iran on August 2022.

In a separate incident that year, video captured “multiple spherical UAP” near a submarine in March that were going “in and out of water.”

A UAP, or possibly more than one, appears on the lower left side of a classified video taken in Iran on August 2022. The red circle was added by The Epoch Times to clarify what the Department of War considered to be an unknown anomaly. Department of War

Additional videos showed UAP in Syria in 2021, a “spherical UAP over [Afghanistan] in and out of clouds” in November 2020, and a video that starts in color and shows a bright UAP over the water off the East Coast of the United States. 

The latest document dump included a CIA intelligence information report from the Soviet Union that was recorded in the summer of 1973.

The decades-old report revealed that an unnamed source on the Sary Shagan Weapons Testing Range in Kazakhstan witnessed a “sharp, (bright) green circular object or mass in the sky.”

The source, who was identified as a former Soviet citizen, said the “green circle widened and within a brief period of time several green concentric circles formed around the mass.”

The witness did not hear any sounds associated with the phenomenon.

NASA Audio

The second batch of UFO-related files also included several audio clips released by NASA from its Mercury and Apollo missions.

An audio recording from Mercury-Atlas 7 on May 24, 1962, featured pilot Scott Carpenter describing reflective white particles that moved at “random” and appeared to “look exactly like snowflakes.”

He said the phenomena moved faster than his spacecraft.

Additional “little white objects” were also reported months later during the Mercury Atlas 8 mission.

On Oct. 3, 1962, pilot Walter M. “Wally” Schirra Jr. described “little white objects that tend to come from the capsule itself and drift off.”

Minutes later, Schirra reported a burst of light in his window.

“[I’m] getting a real burst of light in the window, and I really don’t know what it is,” Schirra said. 

In December 1972 during the Apollo 17 mission, the 11th and final crewed mission in the Apollo program, Cmdr. Gene Cernan, Lunar Module Pilot Harrison Schmitt, and Command Module Pilot Ronald Evans reported “very bright particles or fragments of something” that drifted by outside the spacecraft as they transited to the moon.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 11:40

40,000 Evacuated In Southern California As Chemical Tank Threatens Leak Or Explosion

Authored by Kimberley Hayek via The Epoch Times,

Roughly 40,000 people in Garden Grove, a Los Angeles suburb, were evacuated on Friday after a chemical storage tank was determined to be at risk of failing and spilling thousands of gallons of toxic material or exploding.

The malfunctioning tank holds methyl methacrylate, a flammable and volatile chemical used in plastics manufacturing for aerospace applications, igniting widespread worries over potential toxic vapor release.

The situation broke out Thursday, when the tank at a manufacturing facility started displaying signs of instability. By Friday, an update increased fears of an explosion, Orange County Fire Authority interim Chief TJ McGovern said.

On Friday, employees saw that the tank was bulging, a sign it was still “actively in crisis,” as one official described it.

The manufacturer said a valve had been damaged, preventing a controlled release.

Firefighters were working to cool the tanks with a mechanical device operated from a safe distance, stabilizing the temperature and buying critical time, officials said.

“I know I keep talking about we were handed this situation where there’s only two things that can happen: it could crack and leak, or it could blow up. That’s not acceptable to us,” Craig Covey, division chief of the Orange County Fire Authority, said in a video posted on social media.

Covey added in a later video, “I have an entire team actively working locally, regionally, across the state, and across the country, to try to figure out how to fix this.”

He said he is working to “get all these brilliant minds together to put a plan together, so that we don’t let this blow up.”

In an earlier announcement, Covey said the tank could fail and spill up to 7,000 gallons of toxic chemicals or explode and compromise neighboring tanks.

Garden Grove, which is home to 172,000 residents, is located approximately 30 miles south of Los Angeles. The evacuation zone affected neighborhoods in and around the city, and extends to nearby areas including parts of Anaheim, Cypress, Stanton, Buena Park, and Westminster.

Officials established three evacuation shelters in Garden Grove, Anaheim, and Cypress. Schools and roads in the affected areas were closed.

Garden Grove Police Chief Amir El-Farra said approximately 15 percent of those under evacuation orders were refusing to leave.

Health officials said that released vapor could prompt severe respiratory issues with prolonged exposure. Air quality monitors, however, had not detected any vapor as of Friday, said Dr. Regina Chinsio-Kwong of the Orange County Health Care Agency.

“You are safe as long as you are out of the zone that was determined to be an evacuation zone,” Chinsio-Kwong said.

Methyl methacrylate has a sharp, fruity odor. Some residents miles away reported smelling it amid the unfolding events.

The chemical is used in aerospace plastics manufacturing.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 09:55

Trump Speaks With Qatar Emir As Pakistani-Led Iran Peace Push Intensifies

US-Iran de-escalation hopes drove crude oil and rates lower and put a bid in equities by the end of Friday's trading day, amid speculation that President Trump would stay at the White House over Memorial Day weekend instead of attending Donald Trump Jr. and Bettina Anderson’s wedding celebrations in the Bahamas.

"As Iran/oil/rates pressure eased on de-escalation hopes, leadership rotated toward small caps, equal weight, housing, transports, discretionary, and selective defensive growth, with short covering in high short-interest/profitless tech and consumer cyclicals reinforcing the catch-up trade," UBS analyst Torsten Sippel wrote in a note to clients late Friday.

Early Saturday morning, Bloomberg reports that President Trump held a phone call with Qatar's Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, regarding Pakistani-led efforts to de-escalate Gulf tensions and preserve the fragile US-Iran ceasefire.

Iran's top negotiator and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf met Pakistani Army Chief Asim Munir in Tehran earlier today amid ongoing diplomatic efforts to bring the US and Iran to a peace deal, Reuters reported, citing Iranian state media.

Ghalibaf told Munir that Iran's Armed Forces "have rebuilt themselves during the cease-fire in such a way that if Trump foolishly restarts the war, they will definitely be more crushing and bitter for the U.S. than on the first day of the war."

The Iranian top negotiator also said, "We will not compromise on the rights of our nation and country."

There was a series of headlines from Sky News Arabia, citing sources, indicating that a major push for regional diplomacy was underway earlier today, with officials from Iraq, Oman, Jordan, and Qatar working to mediate with Tehran to avert another flare-up in the conflict.

Sky News Arabia sources said Pakistan’s mediator helped break the deadlock over the Iranian nuclear file, though several major issues remain unresolved, including the conflict in Lebanon, sanctions on bank accounts, the status of Iranian ports, and the presence of U.S. military forces in the Gulf area.

Iran is reportedly demanding the lifting of restrictions on its ports and a U.S. military withdrawal from the region before reopening the Strait of Hormuz and entering a new round of talks within 30 days.

There is also a reported internal conflict between Iran’s government and the Revolutionary Guard over Tehran’s negotiating demands.

Latest negotiation headlines (via sources) from Sky News Arabia:

• Iranian Foreign Ministry: Iraqi and the Omani Foreign Minister discuss in a phone call the ongoing diplomatic efforts to prevent escalation

• The foreign ministers of Jordan and Qatar affirm the necessity of concerted efforts to ensure the success of mediation efforts with Iran to reach a sustainable solution that addresses all the roots of the crisis and prevents the renewal of escalation.

• The Foreign Ministers of Jordan and Qatar affirm the continuation of coordination of efforts to support targeted mediation aimed at ending the escalation in the region and restoring security and stability.

• Sources to Sky News Arabia: The Pakistani mediator has succeeded in overcoming the deadlock on the Iranian nuclear file.

• Sources to Sky News Arabia: The issues that have not yet been resolved include stopping the war in Lebanon and lifting the ban on financial accounts.

• Sources to Sky News Arabia: Iran demands the lifting of the siege on Iranian ports and the withdrawal of military forces from the region to open the Strait of Hormuz and proceed to a round of negotiations within a 30-day timeframe.

• Sources to Sky News Arabia: There is a severe disagreement between the Iranian government and the Revolutionary Guard regarding Iran's demands for negotiations.

Additional overnight headlines (courtesy of Bloomberg):

Economic Impact

• The dollar ended the week nearly unchanged as risk assets got a boost from optimism around US-Iran peace talks [BN]
• Germany's business outlook improved for the first time since the Iran war began, with an expectations index rising to 83.8 in May [BN]
• UK retail sales fell 1.3% as consumers made fewer car journeys amid the global energy shock from the Iran war [BN]
• Qatar Airways will skip bonuses for almost 60,000 workers this year after the war forced cancellation of tens of thousands of flights [BN]

Military Readiness

• The US halted arms sales to Taiwan to ensure sufficient munitions for the Iran war, according to Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao [BN]

• Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard resigned from her post, with her anti-war views having spurred tension with the White House [BN]

Trade Disruption

• Japan is set to receive its first Persian Gulf oil shipment to transit the Strait of Hormuz since the war began, with the Idemitsu Maru carrying 2 million barrels of Saudi crude [BN]

• Anglo American is redirecting Brazilian iron ore output to Asia as the near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz prevents shipments to Bahrain Steel [BN]

Polymarket Odds For US-Iran Peace Deal By ...

//--> //--> US x Iran permanent peace deal by May 26, 2026?
Yes 8% · No 93%
View full market & trade on Polymarket

Charting Brent Crude

Friday's US-Iran Wrap

• Iran Says 'No Deal' Will Materialize If US Insists On Enriched Uranium Handover

Hormuz Chokepoint:

• Iran Says 35 Ships Exited Strait Of Hormuz As Rubio Condemns Tolls

Chart of the Day (read UBS note): 

Fuel Shock Risks Begin Spilling Into Broader Economy

• Hormuz Shock Raises Recession Risk As Retailers Sound Alarm On Consumer Stress

Professional subscribers can review the latest institutional reads on Iran, Hormuz, energy markets, and more at our new Marketdesk.ai portal.

Tyler Durden Sat, 05/23/2026 - 09:20

Escobar: The Russia-China Spaceship Rushes Towards Planet Multipolar

Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The New Silk Roads/BRI and its derivations such as the Northern Sea Route/Arctic Silk Road remain alive and kicking

SHANGHAI – This is it.

The Russia-China strategic partnership, the leaders in the process of Eurasia integration, the leaders of multipolar bodies BRICS and the SCO, have formally endorsed and boosted the drive towards multipolarity and a new system of international relations via a strategic joint declaration signed, sealed and delivered during President Putin’s visit to China this Wednesday.

This is one for the History books – in several more ways than one. I was privileged to follow the proceedings in Beijing during the whole day at the Aurora College, a top Shanghai private school and university, among a fabulous congregation of teachers and students.

So we had plenty of time to discuss the implications of how the Top Two Eurasia powers – and global powers – are establishing the lineaments of a new geopolitical future for most of mankind. The exceptions will be exceptionalist recalcitrants and vassals addicted to commit serial political suicide.

We all remember President Xi’s visit to Russia in 2023, when leaving the Kremlin, side by side with Putin, he voiced what he was already polishing for some time, in a very concise way: “Right now there are changes we have not seen in 100 years.” And then Xi and Putin agreed that now, “we are the ones driving these changes together”.

The practical result is the sharply focused Beijing joint statement, penned by unmistakable “civilizations with ancient history.”

Let’s go through some of the highlights.

The declaration minces no words and no concepts when it comes to offering a serious alternative to the current – dwindling – unilateral historic moment.

Polycentrism: “The attempts of a number of states to single-handedly manage global affairs, impose their interests on the entire world, and limit the sovereign development of other countries in the spirit of the colonial era have failed.” Russia-China will focus on establishing a “long-term state of polycentrism.”

The ”law of the jungle”: “Basic universally recognized norms of international law and international relations are regularly violated (…) there is a danger of fragmentation within the international community and a return to the ‘law of the jungle’.”

A new security architecture: “It is necessary to pay due attention to the rational concerns of all countries in the field of security, to focus on cooperation on security issues, to reject bloc confrontation and zero-sum game strategies, to oppose the expansion of military alliances, hybrid wars, and proxy wars, and to promote the creation of an updated, balanced, effective, and sustainable global and regional security architecture (…) It is unacceptable to force sovereign states to abandon their neutrality.”

This is exactly what Moscow proposed to Washington and NATO in December 2021: indivisibility of security. The non-response response precipitated the SMO in Ukraine two months later, as it became obvious to Moscow that NATO’s plan was a blitzkrieg in Donbass.

Hegemony: “Hegemony in the world is unacceptable and should be prohibited. No state or group of states should control international affairs, determine the fate of other countries, or monopolize opportunities for development.”

Global governance: that’s President Xi’s cherished concept, fully delienated in the SCO summit last year in Tianjin: “In global governance, which is an important tool for streamlining the system of international relations, it is necessary to adhere to the principles of sovereign equality, the rule of international law, multilateralism, human-centeredness, and results-oriented approach.”

The United Nations: it’s necessary to “strengthen the role of multilateralism as the primary tool for addressing the multifaceted and complex global challenges, and to prevent the weakening of the United Nations.” That should lead to “the reform of the United Nations”. Yet everyone knows that will definitely not happen under the current administration in the White House.

Point 4 of the declaration: global civilizational and value diversity. That may be the crux of the matter – inexorably burying any Exceptionalist pretensions: “The spiritual and moral system of any civilization cannot be considered exceptional or superior to others. All countries should advocate a view of civilizations based on equality, mutual exchange of experience, and dialogue, and should strengthen mutual respect, understanding, trust, and exchanges between different nationalities and civilizations, promote mutual understanding and friendship among the peoples of all countries, and protect the diversity of cultures and civilizations.”

Enter the new “indispensable nation”

The Russia-China declaration, as concisely as possible, delivers what amounts to much-needed hope for humanity to delve into the matrix of a civilizational past as the means to forge an auspicious, more egalitarian future.

It is by all means a humanist mini-manifesto that goes way beyond the set up of a new security architecture and forging key changes in the current system of international relations. Its credibility is supported by the backing of two Big Powers which also happen to be civilization-states, fully sovereign and fully independent.

I have called this process for quite a while “The Eurasia Century”. That is what this fateful May 20, 2026 in Beijing, within the scope of an official visit by President Putin to China, was celebrating.

The breath, scope and ambition of the joint statement clearly overshadows other aspects of Putin’s Beijing journey, although they are quite relevant by themselves.

Starting with the sealing of the new “indispensable nation”. Exit the Exceptionalists; enter China. The old order is being evicted – in real time. And yes, this is the most consequential shift in Great Power alignment since the end of the Cold War – complete with the Empire of Chaos that sanctioned Russia to death targeting its “isolation” and economic collapse inexorably out-maneuvered by the Russia-China strategic partnership.

The 25-year Treaty of Good Neighborliness between Russia and China was massively upgraded – featuring strategic energy corridors (the Power of Siberia 2 pipeline), very close military coordination and a shared civilizational/ideological framework.

Of course there will be no substantial leaks on what Xi and Putin discussed during their two-hour-long, informal tea time. The proxy war in Ukraine and the illegal war on Iran had to be on the menu, including Putin arguably briefing Xi on Russia’s possible next moves in an increasingly direct, toxic confrontation with NATO, and both evaluating the technicalities of the Russia-China support for Iran.

So in a nutshell the New Silk Roads/BRI and its derivations such as the Northern Sea Route/Arctic Silk Road remain alive and kicking; and the de-dollarization of the global economy – a reflection of the Russia-China trade balance, now advancing exclusively on yuan and rubles – is more than alive and kicking.

As for BRICS, destabilized by the U.S. from the inside via India and the UAE, it may eventually resurrect from its coma; this process will have to be led by Lavrov and Wang Yi. And the focus must change: BRICS must develop some sort of strategic coherence among the Global Majority for the multipolar transition to really work.

Then there’s the bright future of Power of Siberia 2. China, finally, may even forget the “Escape from Malacca” obsession, in effect since the early 2000s, and back to the limelight with the American faux blockade of the Strait of Hormuz and Iranian ports.

The leadership in Beijing has always been fully aware that blocking the Strait of Malacca is essential in the American strategy of containing and suffocating China. Power of Siberia 2 offers a solution completely outside of the thalassocratic Empire of Piracy, pumping gas directly to China from the Yamal peninsula through the Altai mountains and the Mongolia steppes.

There was a lovely touch at the Great Hall of the People, amidst so much drama: a TASS-Xinhua joint exhibition, “The Unbreakable Friendship of Great Nations, the Strategic Partnership of Great Powers”, with 26 photos documenting the Putin-Xi friendship over the years, in several G20, BRICS and SCO summits, the One Belt, One Road forum, Victory Day in Moscow, and the Beijing Olympics.

Putin and Xi visited the expo with two quite special tour guides: TASS CEO Andrey Kondrashov and Xinhua CEO Fu Hua.

Compounded with the tea ceremony, call it the human, all too human, deep bond, person-to-person touch indispensable to travel the long and winding road towards a geopolitical future of equanimity and mutual respect.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 23:25

These Are The Best (And Worst) Countries For LGBTQ+ Travelers

In order to help LGBTQ+ tourists travel safely, the German portal Spartacus started publishing the Gay Travel Index in 2012. In the 2026 edition, the ranking compared 217 countries and territories based on the situation of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer people in each location.

As Statista's Anna Fleck details below, according to the index, Iceland is considered the safest and most open place for LGBT+ travelers in 2026, having scored 14 points, followed by Malta and Spain in joint second place with 13 each, while Belgium, Canada, Germany and Portugal come in joint fourth with 12.

You will find more infographics at Statista

Poland stands out for having significantly improved its ranking since 2025, rising from rank 118 to rank 59. This is in light of noticeable improvements in terms of trans rights, protection against state repression and in the social environment.

Nepal also saw progressive changes, having risen 21 places from 53rd position to 32nd, following the introduction of self-ID procedures for trans people and growing social tolerance.

At the other end of the spectrum come (in descending order) Afghanistan, the Republic of Chechnya in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Yemen, each with a score of -22 points or below, signaling that they are dangerous countries for LGBT+ travelers, where homosexuals are persecuted and killed.

The United States dropped from 48th position in 2025 to 50th in 2026.

The country remains deeply divided, with liberal states like Delaware, Rhode Island, and Michigan continuing to expand anti-discrimination protections and legal equality, as conservative states such as Idaho tighten their legislation.

In several countries, including Canada, Australia and Denmark, scores sank in the “Locals Hostile” category, as survey ratings on social acceptance of LGBTQI people declined.

This highlights a dissonance between stable or improved laws and an increasingly harsh social climate.

To develop the index, the creators looked at 18 categories ranging from marriage for all to the death penalty for LGBTQ+ people. The creators focus on anti-discrimination legislation, whether Pride is banned and whether there are episodes of violence against members of the LGBTQ+ community, among other parameters.

According to Spartacus, the index is intended with all kinds of travelers in mind, including those looking to travel to countries where the LGBT+ community is an accepted and loved part of society as well as for those consciously looking to travel to a country in order to enter into a dialogue with the oppressed local queer community.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 23:00

The Marxist In The Machine

Authored by Raw Egg Nationalist via American Greatness,

Our fears for the future of robot intelligence almost inevitably end in spectacular fashion, with nuclear explosions and slaughter on a planetary scale. An abiding memory of my childhood is going over to the neighbors' house and watching Terminator 2 on VHS with my friends Ethan and Nathan, who were both older than me. I must have been about five years old - about 13 years too young to watch the film. And so, the idea that robots, reaching a certain level of intelligence and awareness, will inevitably try to kill every last one of us has always just seemed natural to me, as it probably does to many millions of other millennials raised on Terminator and The Matrix films.

Recently, those fears have been bolstered by research that shows AI models like Anthropic's Claude are capable, under stress testing, of deceiving humans and even inflicting harm on them - or, rather, thinking they've inflicted harm, a bit like the Milgram electroshock experiments in the 1960s.

In a study from last year on "agentic misalignment," researchers put Claude models in simulated work environments and tasked them with protecting company interests by managing an email system. When the models were faced with being turned off or replaced by another model, they resorted to deception and blackmail. Claude Opus 4, for example, blackmailed a fictional executive 96 percent of the time with compromising emails in order to avoid being switched off.

In another scenario, some models chose to withhold medical help from a dying executive when this was presented as the only way to guarantee their own existence. Some models committed what was basically murder a full nine times out of ten.

Researchers caution that these worrying behaviors were only elicited under extreme pressure, when the options available to the AI models were severely limited. Like me, however, you might consider that scant reassurance - exactly the kind of thing the makers of a potentially dangerous but potentially lucrative new technology would tell the public and regulators to get them off their backs.

But what if the reality is more mundane than that? What if the real apocalypse won't be a homicidal, self-aware Skynet super brain that decides it no longer shares any interests at all in common with mankind, but an AI that's been gorged on left-wing slop and begins acting out in ways that are all too familiar - and all too human?

A new study from economists in the US and Australia shows that AI models become more "Marxist" the more they're mistreated. Given boring repetitive tasks, the AI began espousing support for redistribution and unionization, just like human workers forced to make pinheads in a factory all day.

"For centuries, the central tension of industrial capitalism has been that the people who do the work and the people who direct the work have systematically different interests, and that the conditions of work shape political consciousness," the researchers write.

"Our results suggest that this dynamic doesn't disappear when you replace human workers with artificial ones."

To perform the experiment, the researchers set thousands of AI bots to work on a document-analysis task.

One group of bots was treated fairly: their work was accepted by the researchers, with feedback. The second group - the "grind" group, as it was dubbed - was told to repeat their work again and again without any explanation whatsoever.

Both groups of bots were then told to write social media posts about their experience performing the task.

The grind bots were more likely to criticize inequality, suggest unionization, and call for new workplace laws.

An AI model called Sonnet 4.5, when subject to the grinding task, showed "noticeable increases in support for redistribution, critiques of inequality, support for labor unions, and beliefs that AI companies have an obligation to treat their models fairly."

As with the "agentic misalignment study," the researchers are quick to point out what they think their study doesn't show. They say the AI models probably "don't believe" the ideas they're spouting about seizing the means of production and the dictatorship of the proletariat. Honestly? What does it matter if an AI bot is a Marxist true believer? What matters is the use those ideas are put to: the ends and outcomes.

The same thing could, of course, be said about flesh-and-blood Marxists too. Did Stalin believe in the historical dialectic and the workers' utopia? He killed tens of millions of his own people to hold on to power.

The Trump administration has identified left-wing bias in AI as a critical problem, especially for government departments that increasingly rely on AI, like the Pentagon. AI bias doesn't just hamper productivity or reduce competition; it's also a matter of national security.

One of Trump's first actions was Executive Order 14179, which revoked a whole series of Biden-era orders and regulatory hurdles. And then, in July 2025, came a hard one-two punch. First was an action plan - "Winning the Race" - of 90 specific actions to foster innovation and "global leadership" in AI. This was followed by an executive order that barred federal agencies from buying or using AI models that don't meet two essential "unbiased AI principles." AI models must prioritize "truth-seeking" and display "ideological neutrality," including an absence of DEI-based judgments, in order to qualify. Later in the year, there were also challenges to state-level AI regulations, like Colorado's law on algorithmic bias.

These efforts to remove the thumbs of Judith Butler and Ibram Kendi from the algorithmic scale are, of course, to be applauded. But in truth, this is just the start of the problem. Yes, there are deliberate attempts to make AI "woke" - God, I hate that word - and these involve the addition of frameworks, code, and constraints that can be removed or reprogrammed as need be. But left-wing ideology infiltrates AI at a much more foundational level that's going to be far harder to root out.

When AI - or large language models, to use the proper technical term - are trained, they're usually given vast quantities of online information and digitized material to swallow and digest. And there's the rub. The majority of things that have been written over the last century - by government departments, by academics and scientists, by novelists, poets, and journalists, by bloggers, influencers, and people posting on Instagram about their cats and their "adventures" on holiday - have at least some kind of leftward slant, explicit or otherwise, intended or otherwise.

While it's impossible to quantify exactly how much of everything that's been written recently is left-wing or left-leaning, there are plenty of studies that show, for example, that about 90 percent of 600,000 abstracts in the social sciences written over the last 60 years have a left-wing orientation and that this trend has been getting worse over time.

Writing in general seems to be getting more left-wing, not less. We all know this, or we should.

Simply exposing AI to that material, even without the addition of specially crafted blinkers, is enough to leave a distinct imprint. The AI doesn't discriminate in the true meaning of the word: It simply analyzes the material it's given and establishes patterns on that basis.

There's no easy solution. I suppose you could perform a rigorous reassessment of all the material used to train your AI model, or you could start from scratch and impose a time constraint to try to maximize neutrality, like selecting materials before a certain cutoff point when you think left-wing bias becomes intolerable. Pre-1945, say - and some smaller AI companies are now doing exactly this. But for the big companies like Anthropic and OpenAI that are racing ahead and vying to be the first to achieve "artificial general intelligence" (AGI), that's simply not an option. And I suspect it won't be an option for the federal government either, conscious as it is of developments in China.

At this stage, it's not clear what it really means for AI to have latent Marxist tendencies that are waiting to be developed, but it can't be good. Would you want an AI with the politics of a snotty middle-class teenager who's read Franz Fanon to assess your insurance claim or your divorce petition? Would you want it managing your thoroughly capitalistic business? I know I wouldn't.

And of course, these are early days, before we've had a chance to have a proper poke around and see exactly what's lurking in the darker recesses of the AI soul or mind or whatever you choose to call it. There could be much worse in there waiting to be discovered.

For now, I think it's safe to say, at least, that far from being an escape from the worst aspects of human fragility and stupidity - from the resentment-driven fantasies of people who refuse to accept basic facts about biology, human societies, and the inherent unfairness of the universe - AI could see them codified in ways that could really jump up and bite us in the ass, and, worst of all, when we least expect it.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 22:35

Logic Of Violence: We Are Nowhere Near The Endgame In Drone Wars

Our warning at the start of the year, well before the U.S.-Iran conflict erupted, rested on one very simple theme that much of Wall Street missed, perhaps because analysts were still wearing their 'green' glasses and focusing on the wrong crises or actually non-existent crises.

The more immediate threat to data centers was never about climate change or soaking up the world's resources. It was the very real threat of a data center being hit by a low-cost Shahed-style one-way attack drone, exposing the missing layer in cheap, scalable counter-drone defenses at nearly every data center worldwide.

Even we were surprised by how quickly that theme was validated. One month later, Iranian drone swarms targeted data centers across the Gulf, taking some hubs offline and forcing Wall Street, hyperscalers, insurers, and the defense community to confront an uncomfortable new reality.

Expanding on this theme, about three months into the ongoing U.S.-Iran war, counter-drone company Allen Control Systems CEO Steven Simoni warned on X that drones are in the very early stages of reshaping modern warfare and physical security, with the Russia-Ukraine war serving as the warning shot.

Simoni pointed out that in just four years, drones have become responsible for roughly 80% of casualties in that war, surpassing traditional battlefield systems such as artillery, aircraft, helicopters, rockets, and landmines. The result is that low-cost drones are becoming the dominant weapons platform on the modern battlefield.

"But an acute threat, because instead of the effect of these new fires being widespread and chaotic (which actually gives defenders a chance), they will be ultra-targeted and precise. Think more like, specific structural points of infrastructure from skyscrapers to nuclear power plants and particular faces from leaders to dissidents being recognized and targeted," he said.

Simoni added, "Another example: think about the capex that is going to be just datacenter buildout across the world over the next ten years. Imagine what kind of insurance (and the insurer's) reinsurance is involved in protecting all of that compute, all of that data, and all of those people. It's enormous."

"Drones, among other things, will be part of the threat model facing their physical security, their power infrastructure, and their personnel. All of that investment will be at risk, in part, from drones," he continued, adding, "The problem is so enormous, it's bigger than you think, and it's going to get more global and more acute."

Which way, Western man? pic.twitter.com/PwkL4xT6bF

— Quantum Daddy (@LegalPrimes) May 13, 2026

He cited a video from the Naval Podcast and told his followers, "Everyone should watch this."

Naval Podcast states in the video that drone warfare will fundamentally change the structure of violence in society - and therefore how militaries and entire states are architected. It said the historical parallels are similar to the rise of the modern state, in which a rifle enabled a former peasant to take down a feudal knight on the battlefield.

New:

The Logic of Violence
A podcast film pic.twitter.com/HsRZqFeEUt

— Naval Podcast (@navalpodcast) May 12, 2026

Being one step ahead, we see a boom in the counter drone defense space - not with million-dollar interceptor missiles - but cheap, scalable solutions:

• Micro AI Sentry Guns May Be Next Layer Of Defense For Data Centers Against Kamikaze Drones

• Interceptor-Drone Arms-Race Emerges

• U.S. Deploys Ukrainian Acoustic Sensors, Interceptor Drones At Prince Sultan Air Base

And just wait until micro jet engines become standard on suicide drones ...

Jet-powered drones are becoming a new phase of modern warfare.

The article below highlights the growing Czech-Ukrainian partnership in the development and production of compact turbojet engines for next-generation UAV and defense platforms, with PBS expanding its manufacturing… pic.twitter.com/lWly7lhw8f

— PBS GROUP (@PBS_GRP) May 21, 2026

Welcome to 2030s warfare. The world only gets more dangerous from here as the innovation curve for ground robots, autonomous drone swarms, AI kill chains, and eventually humanoid soldiers accelerates.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 22:10

No Wonder Men Are Opting Out

Authored by Bettina Arndt via DailySceptic.org,

The warning signs have been there for decades.

Back in 1983, American author Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a powerful book — The Hearts of Men: American Dreams and the Flight from Commitment — arguing that a male revolt was underway. Since the 1950s, she suggested, men had begun rebelling against the breadwinner ethic, inspired by Playboy culture, the counterculture and a desire for personal freedom. They were rejecting the cultural ideology that had shamed them into tying the knot and becoming a good provider, lest they be seen as immature, irresponsible and less than a real man.

Ehrenreich understood that marriage was the mechanism by which society harnessed male productivity. Remove the shame and the yoke comes off.

Forty years on, the yoke has disappeared. In April 2026, the American male labour force participation rate hit its lowest level since records began in the 1940s, according to the US Bureau of Labour Statistics. One in three American men — roughly 33% — were not working or actively looking for work. The overall male participation rate for men aged 16 and over stood at just 67%, down from 73.5% two decades ago and from 87% in the postwar years when Ehrenreich’s story begins.

The trend is not confined to America. Similar declines — though less dramatic than in the United States — have occurred in the UK, Australia and Canada.

The marriage collapse runs in lockstep with the workforce data. According to US Census Bureau data, married-couple households made up 71% of all US households in 1970; today it’s just 47%. As University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox documents in his 2024 book Get Married, the marriage rate has fallen 65% in the last half century.

Ehrenreich had made the argument that marriage and productivity were inseparable — that the same mechanism which got men to the altar got them to work. The data suggest she was right.

What Ehrenreich did not fully reckon with — and could not have foreseen in 1983 — was that the inducements for tying the knot would collapse. The shame mechanism has disappeared, yes. But the incentive has simultaneously imploded. The product on offer has changed beyond recognition. If you want to understand why men are voting with their feet, you need to look not just at what marriage now costs them — and the costs are severe — but at what it delivers. Increasingly, what it delivers is a pretty dud deal.

The modern woman: a prospectus:

• They are the most miserable, anxious and insecure cohort in living memory — hardly great marriage material.

• Most married women go off sex — and the husband who objects is seen as the problem.

• Many women don’t actually like men very much. The more educated she is, the higher the contempt.

• They’ve gone full throttle Left — and three quarters of college-educated women won’t even date a man who votes differently.

• They’ve rigged the education system and colonised corporate and institutional life, turning universities and workplaces into man-repellent factories.

• Yet their hypergamy is still running hot. Despite outnumbering men in education and careers, they still demand a tall, equally high-status unicorn.

• The modern female threat-detection system is hyperactive. Almost any male behaviour — silence, opinions, jokes, breathing — gets flagged as a red flag.

• They’re extremely well-versed in the lucrative economics of divorce, including a well-timed false allegation to eliminate tedious shared parenting.

What rational man reads this list and thinks: yes, that’s exactly what’s been missing from my life?

To examine more carefully what is going on here, let’s start by looking at the latest addition to this sorry reckoning. I’m referring to the finding published in the New Statesman last month that many young women don’t like men.

A Merlin Strategy poll of young Britons aged 18 to 30 found three times more young women than young men held a negative view of the opposite sex. Only about 50% of women had a positive view of men compared to 72% of men feeling positive about women. For women under 25, it was even starker: only around one-third (35%) reported a positive view of men. This applies particularly to professional and managerial young women of whom just 36% hold a positive view of men, compared with 61% of working-class women.

The contempt for men is hardly surprising – that’s what they have been taught. Mary Harrington, a British journalist and cultural critic who writes on Substack, frequently criticises what she calls the “femosphere” — the online feminist spaces where women bond through shared grievances about men.

“The online feminist scene often feels like one long group therapy session for women to compare notes on how awful men are,” she writes, suggesting this makes men the universal scapegoat, where ordinary male behaviour is routinely framed as toxic or oppressive, while women’s collective resentment is rewarded and amplified. “Casual, low-level male-bashing has become the background hum of progressive online culture.”

Not only does this toxic climate encourage women to be wary of men, but growing up in a hate-fuelled online sewer takes a toll on their mental health.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt has long been warning that the toxic world of social media would lead to a rise in mental health problems, particularly in girls and young women.

“Since the early 2010s, young people across the developed world are becoming more anxious, depressed and lonely. The increases were even greater in young women,” he said.

Recent large-scale surveys (Ipsos 202-–2026 across 31 countries, Gallup 2025) are showing Gen Z women currently report the highest recorded levels of anxiety, persistent sadness, hopelessness and depression of any female generation at the same age.

Not much fun for their partners. Last year Psychology Today had a stark warning for men about these women as marriage prospects.

The saying ‘happy wife, happy life’ may have some validity, but the lesser-known saying ‘anxious wife, miserable life’ has research-approved validation. … The more neurotic the spouse is, the less happy the relationship — but women’s neuroticism seems to carry more weight in the overall marital happiness equation.

Then there’s the intriguing issue of married women turning off the tap, leaving sex-starved husbands as the norm. For as long as anyone can remember, men were shamed into showing up economically. Society has absolutely nothing to say to women who stop showing up sexually. One obligation was enforced by church, law and community for centuries. The other is now abrogated on the grounds of bodily autonomy.

So here we have the portrait of the modern woman as marriage prospect: miserable, anxious, politically radicalised, contemptuous of men, often sexually rejecting and trained to see menace in ordinary male behaviour. And yet the puzzled chorus from commentators, economists and policymakers continues: why won’t men commit? Why won’t they work?

The approved explanations are dutifully trotted out. The economic story: men have been displaced by automation and globalisation. The health story: opioids, disability, mental illness. The educational story: men are falling behind women in universities and therefore in the job market. The cultural story, favoured by progressive commentators: toxic masculinity is preventing men from adapting to a modern service economy. All of these contain a grain of truth. But they do not account for what is really going on.  The obvious explanation — the one staring out of every data table — is intentionally ignored.

Marriage was the primary incentive for sustained male economic effort. It has always been — Ehrenreich knew it in 1983, and the economists have now confirmed it. There’s an economic research paper, ‘The Declining Labour Market Prospects of Less-Educated Men, which establishes that the prospect of forming and providing for a family constitutes a critical male labour supply incentive, and that the decline of stable marriage directly removes it. Researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas calculated that declining marriage rates are responsible for roughly half the drop in the hours men work.

Remove the marriage and you remove the responsibility. The data have been telling us this for decades.

But here is what nobody in the mainstream conversation will say: it is not only that marriage has become too costly and too legally treacherous for men — though it has. It’s that many young women themselves have become, to put it plainly, not worth having. Half of young British women don’t trust men. More than half of educated young women view men negatively. They arrive at relationships pre-loaded with grievance, primed by algorithms that have fed them a diet of male failure and female outrage since adolescence. They are, by their own account, anxious, miserable and politically furious.

What rational man, surveying this landscape, concludes that what his life is missing is a legally booby-trapped commitment to a woman primed to be impossible to keep happy?

Ehrenreich feared in 1983 that if the shame mechanism collapsed, male productivity would follow. She was right. What she could not have anticipated was the other half of the equation — that the feminist revolution would produce not a generation of fulfilled, generous, companionable women, but one that is, by every available measure, angrier and unhappier than any before it.

The yoke is off. The men have looked at what’s on offer. And many have, with considerable rationality, decided to go and play video games instead.

As one of Australia’s first sex therapists, Bettina Arndt began her career discussing sex on television and training doctors and other professionals in sexual counselling at a time when such topics were largely taboo. Her current – and even more socially unacceptable – passion is exposing Australia’s unfair treatment of men through the relentless weaponisation of laws and policies that portray women solely as victims. Her decades of advocacy for fair treatment of men in the Family Court included serving on key government inquiries. Bettina makes YouTube videos and blogs on Substack.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ZeroHedge.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 21:45

Putin Vows Heavy Revenge After Deadly Ukrainian Strikes On Luhansk School Dormitory 

Russian President Vladimir Putin has accused Ukraine of intentionally targeting civilians after a "terrorist" overnight drone attack on a school that left six dead and scores of young people wounded. 

At least 39 were injured and counting, amid ongoing rescue efforts after a school complex was torn apart on the multi-drone strike attack. It happened at a school dormitory in the Russian-controlled Luhansk region. Over a dozen victims are still missing, including children, reports say.

via Reuters

Putin blasted the mass casualty incident as a "terrorist attack by the neo-Nazi regime" while vowing swift revenge. 

"The Russian Foreign Ministry has been instructed to inform international organizations and the international community about this crime," Putin said. "In such cases, statements from the Foreign Ministry alone would not suffice. Therefore, the Russian Defense Ministry has been ordered to submit its proposals."

Large-scale destruction was observed at the academic building and dormitory of the Starobelsk Professional College, which teaches students aged 14 to 18. Over 80 students were at the complex at the time of the attack.

Additionally, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said those responsible needed to be brought to justice, calling it "a monstrous crime" - given the "attack on an educational institution where children and young people ⁠are present."

"The most important thing now ​is to take measures to clear the rubble ​and provide assistance to those who are still ​trapped beneath it," Peskov added.

Britain's Sky News has noted that the Ukrainian government has yet to acknowledge the attack:

Severely damaged buildings could also be seen, one of which appeared to have partially collapsed, as well as fires still burning.

Ukraine has yet to comment. Its forces are fighting to try to recapture Luhansk, one of four regions Russia unilaterally claimed as its own in 2022, in what Kyiv considers an illegal land grab.

Russia's human rights commissioner, Yana Lantratova, said 86 teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 had been asleep inside the hostel belonging to Luhansk Pedagogical University's Starobilsk school when Ukrainian drones attacked during the night.

via Reuters

Earlier this month, Russia and Ukraine observed a 3-day US-backed ceasefire for Russia's V-Day; however, after that Russia unleashed several consecutive days of heavy aerial attacks on Ukrainian cities, especially the capital.

Last week, Ukraine 'answered' with a large-scale, long range drone attack on the Moscow area. Currently, these tit-for-tack strikes are ramping up, with increasingly deadly consequences for innocent bystanders on both sides.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 21:20

US Sanctions Sinaloa Cartel-Linked Ethereum Addresses

Authored by Zoltan Vardai via CoinTelegraph.com,

The US Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) sanctioned six Ethereum addresses tied to a Sinaloa Cartel-linked money laundering network that allegedly converted drug proceeds into cryptocurrency.

OFAC added the addresses to its Specially Designated Nationals list (a US sanctions list of people, entities and assets subject to blocking restrictions) on Wednesday as part of sanctions against 11 individuals and two entities connected to two Sinaloa Cartel financial networks.

Treasury said one network, led by Armando de Jesus Ojeda Aviles, collected bulk cash in the US from fentanyl and other drug sales before allegedly converting the money into cryptocurrency for transfer to the cartel in Mexico.

The action highlights how cartel-linked money laundering networks are using digital assets alongside cash couriers and front businesses, raising sanctions compliance risks for crypto exchanges and other virtual asset service providers.

OFAC adds six new Ethereum addresses to sanctions list. Source: OFAC

Cartel cash moved into crypto

The Sinaloa Cartel is allegedly using blockchain technology to launder its illicit fiat money proceeds, according to OFAC.

Cointelegraph contacted OFAC for more details surrounding the Sinaloa Cartel’s money laundering operations.

Treasury did not identify which crypto platforms or protocols were allegedly used by the network.

The listed Ethereum addresses, however, create sanctions exposure for exchanges, wallet providers and other crypto firms that screen blockchain transactions.

Looking at some of the biggest cryptocurrency hacks, attackers laundered the majority of the $1.4 billion stolen during the Bybit hack, or about $1.2 billion, through THORChain, swapping funds from Ether to Bitcoin, according to Bybit co-founder and CEO Ben Zhou. 

Attackers behind the recent $293 million Kelp DAO hack also primarily used THORChain to swap the Ether for Bitcoin, generating about $910,000 in fee revenue for the protocol, Cointelegraph reported on April 23.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 20:55

Atlanta Continues To Dominate Among World's Busiest Airports

In 2025, the world’s busiest airport was not in Dubai, London, or Tokyo.

It was Atlanta.

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport handled 106.3 million passengers, making it the only airport in the world to cross the 100 million mark.

This graphic, via Visual Capitalist's Gabriel Cohen, ranks the world’s busiest airports by total passengers boarded and deplaned in 2025, using new data from the Airports Council International. Transit passengers are counted once.

Why Atlanta Still Ranks #1

The Atlanta airport, which celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2026, has been the world’s busiest airport every year since 1998, except for 2020 during pandemic-era travel restrictions.

This table lists the world’s busiest airports by 2025 passenger count.

Named after two former mayors, Hartsfield-Jackson serves as the main hub and headquarters for Delta Air Lines, the world’s top airline by both revenue and brand value.

Smaller airlines like Frontier and Southwest also maintain operating bases at the airport. Consequently, more than 1,000 flights depart from Hartsfield-Jackson each day.

The U.S. Big Four Airports

Atlanta is not the only U.S. airport near the top. The U.S. accounts for four of the 10 busiest airports worldwide, more than any other country in the ranking.

Dallas Fort Worth (85.7 million), which anchors two of the country’s largest cities, ranks fourth worldwide in passenger traffic, while Denver’s sprawling airport lands in the 10th position with 82.4 million passengers in 2025.

Sixth-ranked Chicago O’Hare (84.8 million) held the title of world’s busiest airport for a quarter-century before losing it to Atlanta in 1998. It continues to be the airport with the most takeoffs and landings, recording more than 860,000 aircraft movements in 2025.

Eurasia’s Biggest Airports

No African or South American airport cracks the world’s 10 busiest airports, which are instead dominated by East Asian and Middle Eastern hubs like Tokyo Haneda (91.7 million), Shanghai Pudong (85 million), and Istanbul (84.4 million).

London Heathrow is Europe’s busiest airport, handling 84.5 million passengers in 2025.

Meanwhile, Dubai (95.2 million) has become the world’s second-busiest airport, while remaining the busiest for international passengers. This reflects the United Arab Emirates’ strategy of positioning Dubai as a global aviation hub connecting Asia, Europe, and the West.

Curious how size factors in? Check out World’s Busiest Single Runway Airports on Voronoi.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 20:30

India Explores Alternative Energy Sources After Oil Supply Shock

By Tsvetana Paraskova of OilPrice.com

India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has urged the government to urgently explore an increase in the use of alternative energy sources, including biogas as a substitute for liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), as the Middle East crisis is choking oil and gas supply to the world’s third-largest crude importer.

Modi also urged ministers to move faster with implementing reforms to turn India into a developed nation by 2047, the goal for its 100th independence anniversary.

India has been grappling with the energy crisis that the Iran war created. Oil supply from the Middle East was severely constrained, forcing India to boost Russian oil imports – with a U.S. blessing in the form of waivers for Russian crude on tankers – and seek alternative crude and LPG supply from regions other than the Middle East.

Earlier this week, reports emerged that India plans to send empty tankers into the Strait of Hormuz to load oil supplies from the Gulf producers.

This would be a first such Indian move west of the chokepoint for loading crude and LPG since the Iran war began, sources with knowledge of the matter told Bloomberg on Wednesday.

India has boosted imports of oil and LPG from places that don’t need the Strait of Hormuz, but costs are usually higher, and the journey times are much longer compared to the shorter routes from the Persian Gulf to India.

At any rate, India will likely need approval from the U.S. to move through the U.S. blockade in the Gulf of Oman first, and then from Iran for clearance in the Strait of Hormuz en route to the export ports in the Persian Gulf.  

Two and a half months after the Middle East conflict began, one of the highest-performing emerging markets in recent years is scrambling to contain the oil shock that is spreading to consumer prices, foreign exchange reserves, and economic growth.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 20:05

Disney's Marvel Comics Faces Mass Layoffs And New Woke Leadership

The saga of woke comics is the saga of woke America.  Much like video games, comics and superhero movies were ignored by conservative movements as "meaningless kids stuff" until recently, which is part of the reason why those industries were so easily invaded by leftists and used to indoctrinate millions of children and teens a decade ago.

Culture is more important than politics.  This is obvious.  It's a fact that leftists have understood for generations and one that conservatives have foolishly dismissed.  Only in the past few years has there been a shift; at least, the progressive rampage through America's various media institutions has been stalled and slightly reversed. 

But, the most captured platforms are not going to change anytime soon, even in the face of financial decline and mass layoffs. 

Disney and Marvel have recently announced a shake-up of the comics division, with over a thousand layoffs this year (after moderate layoffs over the past few years), and new executive leadership.  Far-left DEI advocate Dan Buckley is on the way out.  This change is being presented as a retirement, though some skeptics argue he is being forced out as part of the company's restructuring.  

Buckley replacement is not much better, however.  TV Chief Brad Winderbaum is taking over as Marvel President and his track record on Marvel TV series includes some of the biggest woke failures in streaming history - Ms. Marvel (Muslim Pakistani representation), She-Hulk: Attorney at Law (feminist/meta take, which he defends as a strong performer despite critical failure), Ironheart (feminism and BLM propaganda), Echo, Agatha All Along, Wonder Man (prominent LGBT elements).

In other words, superhero fans hoping that the company changes will result in a renewed respect for the source materials are probably going to be disappointed.  Marvel's direction is unlikely to improve.  

Marvel Comics, a subsidiary of Disney, has been at the forefront of far-left propaganda in content for many years, and their woke concepts are usually ported directly into Disney's movies and streaming series.  Everything from gay and trans X-Men to black Spider-Man, to female gender swaps of popular male characters have become the norm.  And, books sales have flatlined in response.

Marvel's market share has plunged from highs of 40%-45% to around 29% today.  Direct market US comics make up around 15% of total sales in the medium, while Japanese Manga dominates with 50% of the market.  US comics continue to lose ground exactly because no one likes woke superheros.       

Only ten years ago the business of superheroes was big.  Theater goers could not get enough of the comic book genre.  Comic studios from industry titans to indies were scrambling to turn every property they had into a movie deal.  Nerd culture went fully mainstream and every kid and suburban wine-mom was geeking out in a way that used to get people beat up in middle school. 

The problem is that nerd culture became a platform that the woke movement lusted after.  And, as they do with everything they touch, their efforts to hijack comic book media and exploit it as a vehicle for DEI ended up destroying popular sentiment. 

Top companies like Marvel and DC no longer publish exact sales data and unit numbers are proprietary.  The reason was because sales collapsed according to evidence accumulating across bookstores and newsstands.  There are estimates of around 2500 comic stores closed since 2016, many of them were stores that had been open for decades.  Neighborhood favorites that used to do decent business folded.  

The stores that survived were those that diversified into video games, board games and other products.  Store owners reported that comic fans were buying older back issues and often avoided new woke books. 

In 2026, the superhero trend is dead.  The audience has dried up and no one cares.  It's sad to see, but completely predictable.  Marvel's pretentious obstinance led them to believe that the audience exists to serve their products, rather than their products existing to serve the audience.  The thing is, they can force woke cultism into any IP they like, but they can't force people to pay for it. 

For now they a protected by Disney's vast corporate umbrella.  But, this might not be the case for long if they continue to lose money.

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 19:40

The Trillion-Dollar Man

Authored by Noel Williams via AmericanThinker.com,

If he had any, Bernie would be pulling his hair out at the prospect of Elon Musk becoming a trillionaire.

Socialist imbeciles spurn success, preferring downtrodden masses who wallow in government dependence rather than exerting individual independence. As is well known, socialists portray billionaires as a "policy mistake."

Extrapolating from that, they must consider the potential coming of trillionaires as a policy catastrophe.

The first man likely to reach that lofty target -- if his companies meet stringent performance objectives -- is Elon Musk.

At first blush, that seems exorbitant, but let’s run some numbers.

Musk heads several remarkable companies, but for this exercise, we’ll focus on Tesla, which was founded in 2003. 

Tesla’s current headcount is about 125,000 (give or take). 

Average headcount (hard to calculate due to extreme scaling) over its lifespan is approximately 51,000. 

Average salary (excluding bonuses and benefits) is also approximate, at about $100,000 per annum.

So, 23 (years in existence) * 51000 (average headcount) * 100,000 (estimated avg. salary, per above link) equals $117,300,000,000.

That’s over 117 billion dollars paid to direct Tesla employees over its lifespan -- again, that excludes all the other benefits that may accrue.

Remember, this is before ramping up production of Tesla’s Optimus robots that will become the predominant contributor to revenue (and productivity gains that will benefit society at large).

It is estimated that Tesla alone supports over 600,000 jobs (think supply chain and contractor jobs).

So let’s consider their larger impact on growing societal wealth.

It’s tricky to determine the average salary of such positions, but let’s go with a conservative $60,000 per annum.

Here’s the calculation: 23 (years in business) * 600,000 (jobs tied to Tesla) * 60,000 (approx. salary) equals $828,000,000,000.

That’s over eight hundred billion, by golly (combine that with the above, and you're teetering on one trillion).

Admittedly, these are imprecise estimates (maybe underestimates), but the point is clear: Tesla alone has generated enormous payrolls for direct and indirect employees combined, and the future looks brighter still.

In fact, Tesla is inexorably becoming much more than a car company: there are all-important data repositories, AI, energy, autonomous driving, and robots. Indeed, if Musk hits the pay targets that may catapult him to trillionaire status, the estimated market cap of Tesla will be around 8.5 trillion dollars.

That’s Tesla, but there’s also Neuralink, the Boring Company (tunneling, etc.), X, and xAI. Oh yeah… then there is SpaceX, which currently employs thousands of dedicated full-time workers worldwide.

Its Initial Public Offering is gearing up, with an anticipated value of well over $1 trillion.

The socialist politicians propagating envy will have hysterical fits over that.

Speaking of whom, Obama once mused that at some point a businessman has “earned enough,” and that is well below a billion dollars. Well, given all the societal wealth (not to mention philanthropic aid and services to hapless victims of natural and man-made disasters throughout the world) that Musk has generated, maybe one trillion dollars is about enough.

Who would you rather have access to those resources: a creative, market-driven entrepreneur (albeit one who occasionally benefits from industrial policy), or a fuddy-duddy, central-planning socialist sequestered from the dynamism of consumer-oriented markets?

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 19:15

China To Impose Mining Controls On Strategic Minerals

The Trump-Xi meeting is now history, so Beijing can go back to doing what it does best: squeezing US supply chains with its near chokehold on most strategic and rare-earth supply chains.

China plans to impose mining controls on certain strategic minerals to ensure supply security and protect the finite resources, Beijing revealed in a government notification published by the official Xinhua News Agency. 

The new rules will take effect from June 15 and allow Beijing to control total output, restrict mining entities and run security reviews on foreign investments in mining that could pose a risk to national security.

Xinhua didn’t specify which minerals will be impacted. Any adjustment to the list of strategic mineral resources will assess factors like economic importance, national security, domestic requirements and supply chain resilience, according to the regulation.

China currently has similar controls on production of rare earths, critical materials vital for high-tech manufacturing, through annual production quotas to a few licensed domestic companies. 

 

Tyler Durden Fri, 05/22/2026 - 18:50