International Man: The “15-minute city” is an urban planning concept rapidly spreading in North America and Europe. They aim to make everything—where people work, shop, get their education, healthcare, and leisure activities—just 15 minutes away.
The idea is for bureaucrats to restrict—and eventually prohibit—car use because everything is within walking or biking distance. Phasing out hydrocarbons, in general, and cars with internal combustion engines, in particular, is a primary goal of the carbon hysterics.
Critics also argue that 15-minute cities will eventually allow for total surveillance and control of people’s lives, as governments will inevitably pair them with an ESG social credit system and central bank digital currencies.
What is your take on the 15-minute city concept?
Doug Casey: It’s social engineering taken to a new level—trying to reform the way humans act and live. In fact, it’s social engineering that’s expressed in the form of civil engineering, putting people in the kind of houses, environments, and locales that the elites—strike that, I mean parasites—prefer.
It’s as if the whole human race is taking a role in the Jim Carrey movie The Truman Show. But that’s way too benign. The way they’re trying to reform the cities and force people to stay in place in certain areas, it’s more like the panopticon, which was a type of prison where all people could be observed easily by the guards at all times.
Of course, keeping everybody within a 15-minute radius of their home sounds convenient, homey, and small town-like. But it just makes things much more convenient for artificial intelligence to monitor where everybody is. Not just in their vehicles, either, because the next step along this path will be to make it desirable for everybody to have a chip implanted so individual bodies can be monitored. The 15-minute city concept is just a step on the way to something much more dystopian.
International Man: 15-minute cities received a big boost from the Covid hysteria as many city councils and mayors sought to redesign city spaces amid the lockdowns.
The concept has spread to many areas in North America and Europe, with plans to transform parts of the biggest cities into numerous 15-minute city zones. We have already seen this happen in Ottawa, Oxford, and other large cities.
What is really going on here?
Doug Casey: It’s all about control, but it won’t be sold as a military “you must do this” type of control. It will be a soft, “do it for your own good” type of control. And, of course, it’s part of the general climate insanity for the supposed good of Mother Earth. The idea is to get people to stay out of their cars and, for that matter, stay off of planes and even public transportation.
It’ll be sold as a great way to get to know your neighbors, walk, and maybe bicycle. They’re trying to return the world to medieval times where nobody went more than 15 minutes from their house. Because not only weren’t they supposed to but there might be dragons over the next hill.
International Man: The global elite don’t want the plebs to be as mobile as they used to be.
In recent years, we’ve seen more and more travel restrictions. The Covid hysteria set a precedent for using lockdowns as official policy and introduced many confusing travel restrictions. The carbon hysteria also serves as a pretext for all sorts of proposals to limit and restrict travel. The trend now in motion is gaining momentum.
How do you see 15-minute cities within the context of this trend?
Doug Casey: People are far easier to control if you know where they are at all times. And the elite—again, they’re parasites that don’t produce anything or serve a useful purpose—want the plebs to stay in place, not just physically, but psychologically, economically, and politically.
They’d prefer to live in a world where places like St. Mark’s Square in Venice, Machu Picchu, and the Grand Canyon aren’t overwhelmed with the hoi polloi because they’re back observing their 15-minute travel zones and adhering to requirements that allow them to expend only so many pounds of carbon.
It’ll be much more convenient for the parasites from a personal living point of view, in addition to affording them vastly more control.
International Man: The World Economic Forum (WEF) has promoted 15-minute cities.
Why are they interested in this topic?
Doug Casey: In the past, the United Nations provided the premier forum for governments to get together and palaver about how to restructure the world. But the UN—fortunately—is fading into obscurity. It’s now really no more than an expensive club for mid-level government officials to vacation in New York while playing big shot and connecting with other ambitious bureaucrats.
The World Economic Forum is for the real power people.
The WEF, however, needs a reason for existing. These people are into power and money. They naturally like to socialize with each other, scratching each other’s backs and seeing themselves as masters of the universe. Now that they’ve gotten to know each other at the WEF and have clearly taken the reigns over at least the Western world, they’re no longer there just to socialize. They have lots of big plans for the plebs.
The concept of the 15-minute city is one of the many prongs of attack that they’ve launched to essentially take over the world, as outrageous as that sounds.
International Man: Given everything we have discussed, what can the average person do to safeguard his sovereignty in general and his freedom to travel in particular?
Doug Casey: First of all, try to relocate to a rural area where you’re much more in control of your own life, and you’re not surrounded by thousands of people who might rat you out as a non-conformist and could easily turn hysterical.
The second thing is to get as rich as you can because having assets helps insulate you from both the parasitic elites and the capite censi.
And third thing you can do is to resist any way you can. Speaking out and letting other people know that they aren’t alone in thinking what’s going on is actually evil. But recognize the risks of doing so.
We can’t change the trends of history. The atmosphere in today’s world is like that of the early days of the US Civil War or the early days of World War I or World War II. The boobs become stupidly hysterical, enthusiastic to ” join up” to fight some real or imagined foe, and marching together in lockstep. A giant mind virus is well on its way to capturing most people.
We live in really dangerous times.
Editor’s Note: The months and years ahead will be politically, economically, and socially volatile. What you do to prepare could mean the difference between suffering crippling losses and coming out ahead.
That’s precisely why, legendary investor and NY Times best-selling author Doug Casey just released this urgent report on how to survive and thrive.
Article cross-posted from International Man.
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.
Mr. Casey is way to polite. The only way to stop this, is to put holes in the scumbags trying to force us to live like cattle. I am too old and do not have anything to worry about in what time I have left, but people need to wake up. You cannot not reason or compromise with leftists. You have to destroy them or else they come back and continue with their idiotic ideals.