(The Economic Collapse Blog)—In a civilized society, authorities are able to maintain at least a basic level of law and order in the streets most of the time. Unfortunately, at this point it is up for debate whether the United States is still a “civilized society” or not. The chaos in our streets never seems to end, and those that are in charge of running things don’t seem to be able to regain control. The theft, violence and mayhem that we are witnessing in our major cities is being fueled by the worst homelessness crisis in our entire history, the worst drug crisis in our entire history, and the worst migration crisis in our entire history. If authorities cannot control our streets now, what is going to happen once our societal collapse reaches a much more advanced stage?
Robin Bach and her husband were absolutely thrilled when they were able to purchase their dream home in Concord, New Hampshire several years ago.
But now her children won’t even play in the backyard because it has been taken over by a homeless encampment…
A New Hampshire family is being terrorized by a homeless encampment that sprouted up behind their historic home, leading to violent encounters with the vagrants, according to a report.
Robin Bach and her husband spent years restoring their 19th-century dream home in Concord to raise their two children, ages 8 and 11 — but have been plagued by the campers living in the woods behind the palatial abode.
They’ve received death threats and have heard gunshots and screams from beyond the tree line. A swingset in their backyard, bought in 2020 during the pandemic, sits untouched by her terrified children, who will only play in the front yard.
Thousands upon thousands of homeless encampments are popping up in communities all across this country.
Bach and her family have been endlessly terrorized by those that are camping out just behind her property, and it is being reported that she has called the police 37 times…
Since purchasing the house in 2018 with grand plans to renovate and raise a family, Bach has called police 37 times, according to police records reviewed by the newspaper. Six calls were for an area check, another six for disturbances as well as domestic violence and criminal trespassing incidents.
I suppose that they could sell the house at a loss and move some place where the homeless have not taken over yet.
But the problem is that the homeless encampments keep on spreading to new areas.
Meanwhile, the violence in our major cities just continues to escalate.
Over the 4th of July holiday weekend, a total of 109 people were shot in the city of Chicago…
One hundred and nine people have been shot, 19 fatally, in gun violence across Chicago since Wednesday during the extended Fourth of July holiday weekend, police said.
Superintendent Larry Snelling and Mayor Brandon Johnson both called for accountability for those responsible for the shootings.
Johnson was pressed to address what adjustments need to be made to keep the community safe, his response was simply getting more support.
In a civilized society, when you are attacked you call the police and they come and help you.
But in Chicago, about half the time there isn’t even a police officer available when someone calls in to report a violent crime…
In Chicago in 2023, more than 1,800 calls were made to 911 of a person being shot. Only about 800 – fewer than half – were responded to immediately by police officers. The other 1,000 callers were victims of 911 backlogs, where no police were available at the time of the call. Those victims had to wait half an hour, an hour, or even several hours for the 911 call backlog to end and for police to finally arrive.
It was the same for the 32,000 911 calls of an assault in progress, where police were only immediately available for 50% of those calls. And it was the same for 54% of the city’s 911 calls of 35,000 batteries in progress.
All over this country, the police are completely and utterly overwhelmed by the tsunami of lawlessness that we are witnessing all around us.
They are massively outnumbered by the lawbreakers, and the lawbreakers are becoming increasingly bold.
In some of our major cities, things have gotten so bad that lawbreakers brazenly take over entire streets on a regular basis.
In Los Angeles, one of these “street takeovers” recently ended with a blazing inferno…
More than 50 cars were involved in a street takeover in downtown Los Angeles early Saturday as some went up in flames, according to the Los Angeles Police Department.
Video shows a car completely engulfed by a fire, sitting in the middle of an intersection as a thick black cloud of smoke rises from the vehicle. Other cars can be seen as they try to drive around the inferno.
LAPD said several vehicles were impounded after authorities responded to the area near East 18th Street and Main Street, where participants intentionally set two of the cars on fire.
Unfortunately, this is the most law and order that we are going to get.
From this point forward, our society will only become even more chaotic.
Those that have been following my work for a long time know that I have warned that someday we would see armed guards on food trucks.
Well, now it is starting to happen…
Things have gotten so utopian in the state of California, delivery drivers are being accompanied by armed guards due to “crime concerns” while out making deliveries.
One company, Core Mart, has started hiring the guards to escort its drivers. Which means that somewhere, in a board room, it likely made more financial sense to pay for all new security staff than it did to continue to allow drivers to get robbed (and inventory lost) as was happening prior.
These trucks are not transporting objects of immense value.
As you can see in this footage, they are simply making deliveries to convenience stores…
This is our country now.
Authorities are not able to maintain a sufficient level of control in the streets, and so companies are starting to take matters into their own hands.
Needless to say, this is just the beginning.
We will see things happen during the months and years to come that most people never would have imagined in their wildest dreams.
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.
People need to call police for trespassing vagrants, they also need to put up a fence around their back yards, it is not rocket science to call a fence contractor. Truckers need to carry guns for protection or anyone driving at night like shift workers. Husband did for years , now retired. Our senior housing complex manager told us to call police if vagrants go in the wooded areas and camp. They were run off several years ago. Some tried to sleep on benches. Other housing areas had issues. Keep protection handy Incase of home invasions. Some illegals are going into upscale housing areas and bypass security systems. Well trained illegals org, crime gangs. Blue states or blue cities have increase in crimes incl. murder, rape, etc.
Get armed. Stay armed. Know how to use your weapon. I will never, ever tolerate anyone targeting my Family.