(Natural News)—Close calls involving commercial flights have been happening with greater frequency recently, and many of them are being attributed to human error. From air traffic controller mistakes to pilot errors, the number of close calls has reached a level so concerning that the New York Times launched an investigation into it this summer. As the incidents continue to pile up, many people are asking what is behind the phenomenon, and one big part of the answer is Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) hires.
Journalist Ashley St. Clair shared some disturbing information about an incident that took place on July 29 in which a United Airlines plane suffered from a hard landing and was nearly totaled.
The info she obtained indicated that the copilot of the plane was a former flight attendant who had been fired from their post and then rehired as part of United Airlines’ DEI program, even though their name appeared on a list of employees who could not return to the company. Moreover, the individual reportedly failed numerous trainings, including the crucial simulator training that pilots must undergo.
St. Clair implied that it’s not the first time something like this had happened and that United has a history of covering up disasters involving DEI hires.
She asked: “Was the #2 at the Denver hiring center also onboarded through DEI? Did she or did she not change fail grades for DEI hires because “it makes the numbers look bad”? Did the instructor who failed this co-pilot ask corporate why they passed him?”
In November, an incident took place in which two private planes collided on a Houston airport runway. Although no one involved was seriously injured, investigators pointed to air traffic controllers as being the responsible parties. This was yet another example of what the New York Times deemed “an alarming pattern of safety lapses and near misses in the skies and on the runways in the USA.”
As part of its investigation, the paper found that runway incursions had nearly doubled during the period they studied despite major advancements in technology that should have helped reduce the numbers.
DEI hiring is putting lives in jeopardy
Revolver News spoke to several FAA employees and air traffic controllers, many of which asked for anonymity and were only willing to speak off the record. Although the publication found that worsening aviation safety is a complicated matter, there are two main factors that are playing a role. First, they say, is the way that COVID policies affected staffing levels in air traffic control rooms. The second is the way that “aggressive affirmative action policies” that were put in place by the Obama administration have caused a major deterioration in the quality of air traffic controllers, with diversity policies causing a decline in quality that is putting the aviation industry in danger.
They warned: “The aggressive substitution of merit in favor of diversity has led to a so-called competency crisis, jeopardizing not only our ability to generate innovative technology but, in a more dire sense, our ability to simply maintain the proper functioning of various complex systems vital to our existence as a first-world civilization.”
In November, the nonprofit group America First Legal filed a series of complaints with the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission seeking a probe into the DEI initiatives used by Southwest, United and American Airlines. They accused Southwest and United of using illegal quota systems to advance their DEI goals and said that hiring practices were a violation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 given that they are “based on the race or color of the individuals involved.”
Most rational American passengers will tell you that they would like to see the most qualified individual possible flying their plane. Pilots, air traffic controllers and everyone else involved in aviation have the lives of hundreds or even thousands of people in their hands every day, and hiring for these roles should be based on merit and nothing else.
Sources for this article include:
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.
