We are now responsible for the course of evolution. Or, more accurately, a small number of scientists has the divine power to alter biology, and we will all pay the price for it in some way. The U.S. government is investing enormous sums of money into learning about genetics and the human brain, and ultimately, how to control those systems.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) ramped up an ongoing study that was began eight years ago with the launch of its “BRAIN 2.0” initiative (Brain Research via Advancing Innovative Neurotechnology) last week. The scope and complexity of BRAIN 2.0, which provides $600 million to comprehensively map our 86 billion neurons and their uncounted connections, are comparable to that of the Human Genome Project. The project is anticipated to cost $5 billion in total.
Theoretically, once this accurate brain atlas has been built in silico, digital tools may be used to directly modify neural function. John Ngai, the director of the BRAIN Initiative, demonstrates an unsettling fixation on this approach.
Ngai recently spoke with Stat News and mentioned two specific outcomes of his ongoing neuro-mapping work. The first is a cutting-edge brain-computer interface that was implanted at the University of California, San Francisco last year and enables amazing thought-to-text communication. The other is a significant advance in deep brain stimulation at Baylor University, which involves implanting electrodes to change behaviour and mood in order to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), where “man-computer symbiosis” has long been a paradigm, shares Ngai’s fixation with cyborgs. The defence agency’s participation in the BRAIN Initiative is publicly known and open. However, our greatest military minds also have a strong interest in human enhancement, in addition to the NIH’s stated goal of healing.
“DARPA has been a pioneer in brain-machine interface technology since the 1970s, but we began investing heavily in the early 2000s,” boasted Justin Sanchez, the director of DARPA’s Biological Technologies Office. “We’ve laid the groundwork for a future in which advanced brain interface technologies will transform how people live and work.”
In certain cases, this transformation uses non-invasive technology like wearable neuro-bands or skull caps in addition to brain implants. The DARPA programme manager Phillip Alvelda said, “Imagine what will become possible when we upgrade our tools to really open the channel between the human brain and modern electronics.” The program’s objectives include “Bridging the Bio-Electronic Divide” and developing a “High-Resolution, Implantable Neural Interface.”
If BRAIN 2.0’s atlas is effective, it will be an essential link across this “bio-electronic divide.” The area of the brain will be mapped and available for conquest.
‘The Century of Engineered Biology’
This insane effort to change fundamental biology goes all the way down to the genome. The White House said two weeks ago that $2 billion will be used by the National Biotechnology and Biomanufacturing Initiative to reshape life as we know it. “We need to develop genetic engineering technologies and techniques,” the executive order reads, “to be able to write circuitry for cells and predictably programme biology in the same way in which we write software and programme computers.” The Advanced Research Initiatives Agency for Health (ARPA-H) will receive an additional $1 billion, and a total of $6.5 billion has been proposed for its “high-risk, high-reward” projects.
Renee Wegrzyn, the new agency’s first director, informed her coworkers on Wednesday that people can now change their DNA at will. But because gene-editing technologies like CRISPR have become so accessible and affordable, she said that there is a serious risk to humankind from accidental pathogens or deliberate bioweapons.
“We’re ushering in the century of engineered biology,” Wegrzyn declared with a weird fake-smile, “whether it’s through gene-editing, or it’s through engineering of living medicines that will be in our gut — or in soil to promote fertilization and growth, especially as we face challenges like climate change.”
What more is in store for us in this “century of engineered biology”? Wegrzyn, a former programme manager for DARPA, predicts that this transformation will result in “human-machine convergence” and the development of “Human 2.0.”
“These are things that are somewhere on the horizon,” she told the Long Now Foundation in 2017, “that genome engineering and gene-editing will be a part of. So how do we make sure we can pursue this future in a safe manner?”
Wegrzyn, carrying the transhumanist banner, praised “defensive enhancement,” using mass vaccination as an example to strengthen our immune systems. Additionally, she talked about “offensive enhancement,” which includes changes to people’s “performance” and “cognitive state.”
She sneered, “It’s evolution on steroids, and now it’s in our control.” With a strange chuckle, she assured the audience that “we’re solidly on the defensive side.” If that’s the case, her DARPA projects were outliers at the agency.
It’s simple to see a gloomy future of progressively insane “safe and effective” campaigns when thinking about that culture of radical enhancement (pdf below) combined with the vaccine-obsessed NIH. The founding of ARPA-H seems to be a formal union between the biomedical establishment and the military-industrial complex, with BRAIN 2.0 acting as the stepchild holding the wedding band.
Federally Funded Transhumanism
For good reason, many sceptics, including myself, refer to this officially supported transhumanism. The connection is clear. The original transhumanist Max More declared humanity’s emancipation from our natural inheritance in his 1999 essay “Letter to Mother Nature“:
THROUGH GENETIC ALTERATIONS, CELLULAR MANIPULATIONS, SYNTHETIC ORGANS, AND ANY NECESSARY MEANS, WE WILL ENDOW OURSELVES WITH ENDURING VITALITY AND REMOVE OUR EXPIRATION DATE. … NOT CONTENT WITH THAT, WE WILL SEEK COMPLETE CHOICE OF OUR BODILY FORM AND FUNCTION, REFINING AND AUGMENTING OUR PHYSICAL AND INTELLECTUAL CAPABILITIES BEYOND ANY HUMAN IN HISTORY. … WHILE WE PURSUE MASTERY OF OUR OWN BIOCHEMISTRY, WE WILL INCREASINGLY INTEGRATE OUR ADVANCING TECHNOLOGIES INTO OUR SELVES.
We’ve entered a weird period where modifying human brains and bodies, as well as the underlying DNA, may soon be as commonplace as nose jobs and genetically modified tomatoes are right now. Your tax money are providing the groundwork for the essential decision to transition from healing to enhancement, which is just around the corner.
Selective abortions and smartphone symbiosis are current issues. Designer infants and wearable brain-computer interfaces will be the rage tomorrow. Renee Wegrzyn and John Ngai, to their credit, have both stated that we need public discussions on how far we go with these technologies. Trans children, offensive metaverse ads, and vaccine requirements have been all we’ve seen so far.
It’s crucial that you consider where we are right now and the direction that these efforts to alter DNA and irradiate brains are taking. We must insist on creating our own future plans, to the extent that our voices are heard, since irresponsible technocrats are already working on them, regardless of our opinions.
Article cross-posted from Great Game India.
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.
