I feel really bad for the Taiwanese people. Thanks to the recklessness of Nancy Pelosi, China has decided to become much more aggressive. Until Sunday, a series of extremely alarming “live-fire drills” in the waters surrounding Taiwan will essentially cut off much of the normal maritime and air traffic that reaches the island. And it is being reported that during these “exercises” China actually plans to fire missiles over Taiwan for the very first time. Needless to say, much of the Taiwanese population will become greatly alarmed when they see missiles flying overhead. Taiwan is heavily dependent on imported food, and China is demonstrating very clearly that they can completely cut off the island from all resources if they are crossed again.
In the western world, news sources are using the term “blockade” over and over again to describe what China is doing right now. Here is just one example…
China is to begin a series of unprecedented live-fire drills that would effectively blockade the island of Taiwan, just hours after the departure of US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, whose controversial visit this week has sparked fears of a crisis in the Taiwan strait.
Taiwan has characterised the drills, which will last until Sunday afternoon – and will include missile tests and other “military operations” as close as nine miles to Taiwan’s coastline – as a violation of international law.
Let us hope that these measures are just temporary, because a blockade is technically an act of war.
China’s “military exercises” near Taiwan have already begun, but the really big ones that everyone is talking about will start on Thursday…
Six days of military exercises kicked off Tuesday night with live-fire drills in and around the Taiwan strait that will last through today, as authoritarian China attempts to intimidate its democratic neighbour and pressure the US into dropping support.
Four more days of drills will then commence on Thursday and last until Sunday, taking place in six locations around Taiwan – three of which cross into the island’s territorial waters in what Taipei called a serious breach of international norms.
You can see a map of the six zones where the Chinese will be conducting their drills right here.
As you can see, those six zones essentially form a perimeter which completely surrounds the Island.
And during this time China is warning all airlines “to avoid flying close to Taiwan”…
Beijing followed the condemnation with a slew of punitive measures against Taiwan, including live-drills in six areas around the island’s coastline that will run between noon on Thursday and the same time on Sunday.
Airlines operating in Asia were warned to avoid flying close to Taiwan during the exercise with ships being told to stay away from the “danger zones”.
Until next week, very little maritime and air traffic will be reaching the island.
That won’t hurt too much as long as China ends the blockade early next week.
And as I mentioned earlier, during the exercises China also plans to fire missiles directly over Taiwan for the very first time…
China signaled on Wednesday it plans to dramatically escalate military provocations aimed at Taiwan to include flying missiles over it for the first time, a clear sign that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s departure from visiting the island nation marks not the end of a burgeoning standoff with the U.S. but rather the beginning of one.
The English-language Global Times news outlet, which is aligned with the Chinese Communist Party, included in a post early Wednesday “that conventional missiles are expected to fly over the island of Taiwan for the first time” in response to the California Democrat’s daylong stopover to meet with local officials, which Beijing considers a clear break from standing policy governing the island over which it claims dominion.
This is a very obvious attempt at intimidation.
Of course the Taiwanese people have been living under the threat of a potential Chinese invasion for a long time, but this definitely takes things to a new level.
My hope is that when next week rolls around the Chinese will decide that they have sent a strong enough message and will pack up and go home.
But I wouldn’t count on it.
We continue to get more reports of Chinese forces preparing for military action…
Emerging footage from China appears to show tanks and missiles massing on a public beach as tensions over the situation with the US and Taiwan rise.
The concerning video shows the military equipment along with soldiers from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) heading towards Pingtan Island as China flexes its military muscles.
Are such movements just for show?
That is what some of the “experts” are telling us.
Many “experts” in the western world also assured us that Russia would not invade Ukraine.
And then it happened.
Could it be possible that we are on the verge of making a similar mistake with China? The following comes from an excellent opinion piece by Ted Galen Carpenter…
President Xi Jinping’s warning on the eve of Pelosi’s visit that the United States must not “play with fire,” regarding Taiwan and that those who persist in doing so “will perish by it,” should jar the U.S. foreign policy elite from its complacency. The PRC’s increasingly confrontational stance is reminiscent of Russia’s hardening attitude and demand for Western security assurances regarding Ukraine in late 2021 and early 2022. So, too, is Beijing’s growing deployment of air and naval forces near Taiwan. China probably does not want a war with the United States, but just as Russia was willing to fight to repel a threat to its vital interests in Ukraine, China likely will choose that course as a last resort concerning Taiwan.
Biden’s tone-deaf foreign policy team must realize that Beijing is not bluffing. The administration thoroughly mismanaged the last foreign policy crisis. It cannot afford to mismanage this one.
If the U.S. and China end up in a shooting war over Taiwan, the consequences will be absolutely disastrous even if the war doesn’t go nuclear.
Our stores are currently filled with cheap goods that are made in China, and once war starts the flow of goods across the Pacific would completely stop.
And it turns out that a great deal of our pharmaceutical drugs are also made in China.
The truth is that we simply cannot afford a military conflict with China because we have become dependent on China in thousands of different ways.
So why do we keep provoking them?
Nancy Pelosi knew that visiting Taiwan at this very sensitive time would provoke China, but she did it anyway.
Those that go around starting unnecessary fights always end up regretting it. That is a principle that we should be teaching to our kids, and it is something that our political leaders desperately need to learn as well.
Because if we keep pushing everyone else around, we could easily find ourselves involved in a truly cataclysmic global war.
In the old days, we had true statesmen that knew how to project strength but also avoid war at the same time.
Today, Joe Biden is surrounded by an all-star team of warmongers that seem to have no idea how the world actually works. Their arrogance is only exceeded by their incompetence, and they are making colossal mistakes that threaten to plunge our society into a nightmare from which it may never recover.
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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.
America and Taiwan, here’s your chance to BLOW China out of the water. Test your new equipment and what not.
China has too many missiles, all with plenty of real estate from which to launch them, unlike the US Pacific Fleet and its tiny little boats, and unlike itty bitty Taiwan. Missiles will decide any war in the Strait. The only real deterrent to invasion till now has been China’s realization that it is far too incompetent, yet, to control the world semiconductor industry. Basically, a free Taiwan makes China a LOT more money than a slave Taiwan. A secondary deterrent is that the US would cut off trade with China (unless Xi and Puppeteer Obama have been cooking up something) which would bankrupt the Chi-Coms and set off a revolution. A third and likely barely heeded deterrent would be a US nuclear strike. But as China has more short range cruise missiles than all other nations combined, it also has more anti-missile missiles than all other nations combined. If any nation could thwart a nuclear attack, it’s China. It certainly isn’t ill-prepared for one like the soft, open-borders USA!
Their gear is shit. All they ever have is numbers. We have rods of God, you don’t know about and
Communist Occupied China is a fourth world nation and extremely uncultured, they are trapped 3000 years ago. If they didn’t steal technology they still be using rickshaws. China’s Xi is a third rate punk and is drive China into the ground. If they didn’t bribe so many foreign politicians they’d already be gone. Xi is a fool and China will be totally destroyed if the start a war. Russia is more sophisticated than China, Japan runs circle around China as do both Koreas. Xi is a loser and an embarrassment to China. The Republic of China (Taiwan) is the real and true China all of western China is currently under Communist occupation by terrorist punk communists.
Biden and his administration are idiots.
Seize all American land owned by China.
Biden expects our military (and people outside America) to respect military leaders with testicles; wearing dresses. It’s not happening.
I see Pelosi as a metaphor for the Great White Fleet, but with saggy tits and more wrinkles.
I see Pelosi as a metaphor for the Great White Fleet, but with saggy tits and more wrinkles.
with the current ‘leadership’, I do not see us getting out of this one easily. Es war schoen, euch zu kennen…
Time to start sinking chinese container ships.
Or just deny them berth at UP ports. Sorry about the merchants whose purchased loads of chinese junk are stuck offshore. Maybe Canada?
We flew shipments into Berlin when the Wall went up. We can do the same now.
Well, it’s time for the USS Ronald Reagan carrier group to test their blockade. And anytime that their aircraft or ships get within prescribed distances of the carrier, it’s not going to be pretty for the Chicoms.
It has been known forever that the use of alcohol not only impairs judgment, it enhances all sorts of entitled behaviors normally kept under control by common sense. And, as any minister of deliverance will testify, intoxication increases the influence of unseen, less evolved, trouble causing entities nourished by bad behavior of those made vulnerable by such use. Substance use disorder is more than just a personal problem when alcoholic recklessness affects the fates of nations. Why is there no official intervention here? Surely this is a textbook case of what can happen with this fairly common type of corruption. Of course the arms manufacturers are cheering on this poor demonized woman, why wouldn’t they? Just tragic.
JD, I like most of what you write and interviews you conduct. This article smacks of cowtow towards the ccp.
J.D., this is not Pukey Lousy’s fault. If anything, the Chi-coms sent her there to create an excuse to notch up their intimidation drills. But even if not, then the Chi-coms would find another excuse because this escalation was not reactionary, it was planned. Still, unless the Obama Shadow Government has offered some sort of economic assurances, China could not survive economically the aftermath of conquering Taiwan. Tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of slaves would revolt when faced with starvation. And one could argue, US influence (bourgeois toys and whatnot) have only increased the People’s dissatisfaction with Communist Paternalism. But that assumes BiteMe wouldn’t just roll over like Trump did with Hong Kong, and say merely, “well that wasn’t very nice!…Oh well, back to bathing in the cheap crap you send us by the boatload!”
Sorry for misauthoring, Michael.The article’s tone seemed very JD-esque.
I hear China has 2 Aircraft carriers, and has deployed them near Taiwan…
Be a shame if both of China’s aircraft carriers suddenly disappeared from the surface of the ocean, not unlike a certain Mullah who’s 4 top generals were suddenly killed overnight after threatening the USA, and claiming there’s nothing the USA could do about it…
Just a shame… /s
Well Poopy-pants, it’s your move.
Of course they are.. They know America is ran by idiots right now and will use that to their advantage any time they can..
F commie China and their friends in the democrat/rino party..!!
All apart of the plan… Pelosi goes over on China’s request to make it look like she’s stirring up the pot. Now China has their excuse to go into Taiwan in the name of their own protection. Wonder how much Nancy and Joe made on this deal?
Communist Occupied China is a fourth world nation and extremely uncultured, they are trapped 3000 years in the past. If they didn’t steal technology they still be using rickshaws. China’s Xi is a third rate punk and is driving China into the ground. If they didn’t bribe so many foreign politicians they’d already be gone. Xi is a fool and China will be totally destroyed if they start a war. Russia is more sophisticated than China, Japan runs circle around China as do both Koreas. Xi is a loser and an embarrassment to China, he brings same upon the Chinese people. The Republic of China (Taiwan) is the real and true China all of western China is currently under Communist occupation by terrorist punk communists.