The largest cities in the United States are becoming cesspools of crime, drugs, violence and homelessness, and no matter what “solutions” our politicians come up with the problems just continue to get even worse. Sadly, this is even happening in the wealthiest cities in the whole country. New York City is the financial capital of the entire globe, and over the past two decades San Francisco has been swimming in giant mountains of tech industry money.
But today the streets of both cities look like something out of a post-apocalyptic horror movie. If things are this bad while economic conditions are still relatively stable, what will those streets look like two years from now when economic conditions are far worse?
New York City has seen some pretty rough times in the past, but the Big Apple has never had as many homeless people sleeping in shelters than it does right now…
New York City’s homeless problem does not appear to be getting any better.
According to the Coalition for the Homeless, the numbers have actually hit an all-time high. They claim the average number of people sleeping in a shelter every night climbed to nearly 66,000 in October.
It is far more preferable to sleep in a shelter than it is to sleep in the streets, because violence in NYC has escalated to very frightening levels…
Fatal stabbings and slashings are up an alarming 37% in the Big Apple this year.
The NYPD has logged 96 blade-involved killings so far in 2022, compared with 70 for the same period in 2021, according to department stats obtained by The Post.
Stabbings and slashings overall are up 10% in 2022, with 4,344 compared to 3,954 last year, the stats show.
Meanwhile, the downward spiral that we are witnessing in San Francisco is incredibly alarming.
I recently watched footage of what downtown San Francisco currently looks like, and afterwards I was truly at a loss for words.
This is what the kids in San Francisco are forced to walk past everyday.
Hard drug use, drug deals, feces, needles, adults slumped over with exposed wounds and addicts suffering from mental illness screaming in the streets.
The streets are truly scary to walk down. pic.twitter.com/F9xSNJod4m
— Savanah Hernandez (@sav_says_) December 15, 2022
Have things really gotten this bad?
Part of the problem is that the office buildings downtown are much less occupied these days thanks to the “work at home revolution” that began during the early stages of the pandemic…
Today San Francisco has what is perhaps the most deserted major downtown in America. On any given week, office buildings are at about 40 percent of their prepandemic occupancy, while the vacancy rate has jumped to 24 percent from 5 percent since 2019.
Another major factor is drug addiction. Right now we are witnessing the worst drug crisis in the history of the United States, and it just keeps intensifying every year.
In fact, the number of drug overdose deaths among our teens actually “doubled from 2019 to 2021”…
Drug overdose deaths among US teens doubled from 2019 to 2021 – even as use of illicit substances declined – as fentanyl fueled a nationwide crisis.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported today that teenage overdoses increased 109 percent over the two years. Deaths caused by fentanyl alone increased 182 percent.
Once upon a time, the United States was such a lovely place to be.
But now our communities are degenerating into rapidly decaying hellholes and our streets are filled with violent predators.
Have you heard about a new trend called “jugging”?
From coast to coast, predators are patiently watching potential victims and they strike as “they juggle smartphones and car keys in parking lots or at home”…
A new crime trend is targeting the distracted and the elderly, with police warning about it from Alabama to California.
The big picture: Jugging involves thieves staking out unsuspecting victims at banks or retail stores before following and robbing them while they juggle smartphones and car keys in parking lots or at home.
But of course not all predators will be satisfied with just robbing you.
When a 20-year-old pregnant woman was taken in by a 36-year-old man after being kicked out of her home, she was initially relieved to have a place to stay.
But that sense of relief didn’t last long…
A 20-year-old pregnant woman was kicked out of her house around Thanksgiving. Her luck appeared to be make a holiday rebound when a stranger offered her a warm meal and a place to stay. However, this was anything but charity.
Michael Barajas, 36, is accused of subjecting the young woman to unimaginable depravities over the course of three weeks.
It turns out that this particular predator actually had his teeth filed down into sharp points.
He literally looks like he is insane, and Genesee County Sheriff Chris Swanson is describing him as “a monster”…
According to the Tri-County Times, Barajas has been charged with human trafficking, kidnapping, first-degree criminal sexual conduct, possession of methamphetamine, assault with a dangerous weapon, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, and felony possession of a firearm.
“This guy is a monster,” said Swanson. “If you look at the teeth that are filed down and the threats of ripping out a throat, I will say no more.”
Anyone with any sense never would have gone with him.
But other predators can look completely innocent.
For example, one 33-year-old man recently thought that he was pulling over to help a woman that was in trouble on the side of the road.
But once he got out of his vehicle, two men jumped out from their hiding spots and viciously attacked him…
Shortly before 11 p.m. on Wednesday, an unnamed 33-year-old man was driving along near the intersection of Hutchinson Road and South George Washington Boulevard, a rather rural area just outside Yuba City, about 40 miles north of Sacramento, when he spotted a woman standing near a black SUV on the side of the road. She flagged the man down, indicating that she was in some kind of distress.
The man pulled over and exited his vehicle to see how he could help. However, once he left his vehicle, two seemingly armed men jumped out of the woman’s SUV. One appeared to have a gun, the other had a knife. Under threat of violence, they zip-tied the driver’s legs together and stole his wallet and car keys. The three con artists then poured gasoline all over the victim and lit him on fire before they left, driving away in their own SUV and taking the victim’s car too.
This is what our country has become.
We are rapidly evolving into a “Mad Max society”, and that is because we have rejected the values that this nation was founded upon.
And if we stay on the path that we are currently on, things are only going to get worse.
Ignoring what is happening is not going to make it go away.
Social decay is systematically eating away at the foundations of our civilization, and at this point America’s decline is really starting to accelerate.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
