(End of the American Dream)—Our world is witnessing apocalyptic events so frequently that many of us are starting to become numb to it all. Major wars are raging all over the globe, children in Africa are literally dropping dead from starvation as hunger spreads like wildfire, and “billion dollar disasters” are hitting us more frequently than we have ever seen before. But as long as these tragedies are not affecting us directly, most people don’t really care too much.
As the level of worldwide suffering rises, it seems as though hearts are getting colder at the same time. The traumatic events of the past several years have left deep scars, and there are many that prefer to ignore the apocalyptic things that are happening in the world because it is just too much for them to handle emotionally.
According to a brand new study, the number of armed conflicts in 2023 was the most that we have seen in a single year since the end of World War II…
More armed conflicts took place worldwide in 2023 than any other year since the end of the Second World War, according to a Norwegian study published Monday.
Last year saw 59 conflicts of which 28 were in Africa, the the Peace Research Institute of Oslo (PRIO) showed.
We really are living in a time of “wars and rumors of wars”.
But since it isn’t our sons and daughters that are being gunned down on the killing fields of eastern Ukraine, most of us in the western world aren’t really moved by all of the bloodshed.
Every single day, more young lives are being wasted.
But if you think that things are bad now, just wait until Israel and Hezbollah start lobbing thousands of missiles back and forth, China invades Taiwan, and the Russians and NATO begin directly pummeling one another.
Meanwhile, global hunger just continues to grow.
In fact, it is being reported that the number of people facing acute food insecurity last year was the highest ever recorded…
The number of people threatened by hunger in the world has never been so high. In 2023, 281 million people in 59 countries were facing acute food insecurity, according to the 2024 Global Report on Food Crises, published on Wednesday, April 24, by several international organizations (including UN agencies, the European Union, the US Agency for International Development). This figure is up on 2022 (257 million) in its fifth year running.
“This Global Report on Food Crises is a roll call of human failings,” warned UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, prefacing the analysis.
A decade ago, world leaders dreamed of a day when hunger would be eradicated.
Today, that dream is completely dead.
Right now, hunger is exploding in areas all over the continent of Africa.
In Sudan, people are literally eating dirt and leaves just so that they can fill their stomachs with something…
Time is running out to prevent starvation in Sudan, warns the World Food Program.
Twenty-five million people in Sudan need humanitarian assistance, 18 million are facing acute food insecurity and 5 million people are at emergency levels approaching famine as the country’s civil war passes the one-year mark.
Amid so many other crises, the world’s largest hunger crisis is drawing little global attention. In the Al Lait refugee camp, for example, people are eating dirt and boiling leaves, just to have something in their bellies, reports Reuters. Others are eating grass and peanut shells, according to the World Food Program.
Since it isn’t happening to us, most of us don’t really care.
But hunger is growing here too.
According to one recent survey, over one-fourth of the entire U.S. population is now skipping meals due to crazy high food prices…
More than a quarter of Americans have resorted to skipping meals to avoid paying inflated grocery store prices, according to a new survey.
According to a study by Qualtrics on behalf of Intuit Credit Karma, 80% of Americans say they have felt a “notable increase” in grocery costs in recent years. More than a quarter of respondents said the increased cost has led them to occasionally skip meals, while about one-third said they spend more than 60% of their monthly income on mandatory expenses such as food, utilities and rent.
“Food insecurity is a major issue in this country as millions of Americans don’t have enough food to eat or don’t have access to healthy food,” Courtney Alev, a consumer financial advocate at Credit Karma, said in a statement.
I keep warning my readers that this is just the beginning, and I hope that they are taking me seriously.
We are also living at a time when major natural disasters are becoming more frequent.
Last year, our world was hit by more “billion dollar disasters” than ever before…
The planet was besieged by a record 63 billion-dollar weather disasters in 2023, surpassing the previous record of 57 set in 2020, said insurance broker Gallagher Re in its annual report issued January 17.
Unfortunately, we may top that number this year.
So far in 2024, there have already been 11 “billion dollar disasters” in the United States alone…
A deadly outbreak of tornadoes last month caused $4.7 billion in damages across the Southern, Southeastern and Central U.S., making it one of the costliest weather events of the year so far, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Monday.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said there had been 11 confirmed weather and climate disaster events so far this year with losses exceeding $1 billion, with the total price tag topping $25 billion. There were more than 165 tornadoes during the May 6-9 outbreak, impacting Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida, officials said.
We have already experienced so many historic disasters, and hurricane season and the heart of wildfire season are still ahead of us.
Almost every day, we are seeing things happen that we have never seen before.
For example, storm chasers in the middle of the country just recovered a piece of hail that was “about the size of a pineapple”…
Val and Amy Castor, veteran storm chasers with Oklahoma City television station KWTV, discovered a piece of hail more than 7 inches (17.78 centimeters) long Sunday along the side of the road near Vigo Park while they were chasing a major thunderstorm system.
Val Castor said the stone was about the size of a pineapple.
“That’s the biggest hail I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been chasing storms for more than 30 years,” Castor said.
We aren’t supposed to have hail of that size.
But this is the “new normal” where the old rules simply don’t apply.
In California, there has been an alarming series of earthquakes during the past couple of weeks…
First, a magnitude 3.6 earthquake in the Ojai Valley sent weak shaking from Santa Barbara to Los Angeles on May 31. Then came two small quakes under the eastern L.A. neighborhood of El Sereno, the most powerful a 3.4. Finally, a trio of tremors hit the Costa Mesa-Newport Beach border, topping out at a magnitude 3.6 Thursday.
Having half a dozen earthquakes with a magnitude over 2.5 in a week, hitting three distinct parts of Southern California, all in highly populated areas, is not a common occurrence.
The “Big One” is coming eventually, but I don’t think it is coming quite yet.
Hopefully I am not wrong about that.
Other nations are getting pounded by natural disaster after natural disaster as well.
Brazil has been getting hit particularly hard. Nightmarish flooding was making headlines down there for a while, but now wildfires are taking center stage…
After historic floods recently claimed 172 lives in coastal Brazil, the country now faces a new crisis as fires rage through the Pantanal wetlands. These fires have surged nearly tenfold compared to the same period last year, setting the stage for a potential catastrophe worse than the devastating fires of 2020. With severe to extreme drought conditions expected, the situation is becoming increasingly dire.
Data from the Brazilian space research agency, National Institute for Space Research (INPE) reveals a staggering 980% jump in fires across the Pantanal wetlands this year through June 5, compared to the same timeframe in 2023.
Speaking of Brazil, it is in the midst of the worst pandemic of dengue fever that has ever been recorded in that nation…
Brazil recorded the highest number of dengue cases globally in 2024 according to new data from the World Health Organization (WHO). There are nearly 6.3 million probable, and 3 million confirmed cases in the country.
The South American country counts 82% of the 7.6 million probable cases of dengue recorded in the entire world by the WHO this year. Sadly, it also accounts for 77% of the 3,680 deaths globally from the virus and 82% of the 16,242 cases of severe dengue reported.
Thus far, 2024 has seen the most serious dengue outbreak ever recorded in Brazil. According to the Ministry of Health, by the end of May, the number of probable cases was 328% higher than that recorded in the same period last year, which had already seen a record number of dengue diagnoses.
So many pestilences are causing major problems all over the globe right now. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the number of Mpox cases has surged to an all-time record high, and it is the form of the disease that has a particularly high death rate…
The ongoing outbreak of clade I mpox in the DRC has already claimed many victims: The DRC reports “multiple provincial outbreaks” occurring between the beginning of 2023 and April 14, 2024, with an estimated total of 19,919 cases and 975 deaths — meaning that about 1 in every 20 patients have died.
This outbreak is also perhaps the most widespread: “During 2023 and 2024, clade I mpox cases were reported from 25 of 26 provinces and, for the first time, from the capital city of Kinshasa,” the CDC team noted.
Children are especially vulnerable: According to the report, “two thirds (67%) of suspected cases and more than three quarters (78%) of suspected deaths have occurred in persons aged 15 years [or younger].”
If you ever catch this form of Mpox, you will remember it for the rest of your life even if you survive, because it will be the worst pain that you have ever experienced.
On top of everything else, it is being reported that scientists have discovered “giant viruses” in the enormous sheets of ice that cover Greenland…
The idea of a giant virus lurking on a vast ice sheet might sound like the plot to the latest science fiction blockbuster.
But it’s become a reality, after researchers discovered giant viruses while exploring the Greenland ice sheet.
Hopefully none of those “giant viruses” poses a major threat to humanity.
But without a doubt, there will be more global pandemics in our future.
In fact, all of the trends that I have discussed in this article are going to continue to intensify.
Our apocalyptic “new normal” is here.
We live in a world that is going completely and utterly mad, and you can try to ignore that if you wish, but it is the truth.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.
