Editor’s Commentary: The vast majority of the time, I post Michael Snyder’s work without skipping a beat. He’s an extremely talented writer and thinker, traits that are surprisingly uncommon in tandem. Great thinkers often write in ways that make them sound like they want the world to know they’re great thinkers. Michael’s commentary is down-to-earth while betraying the brilliance in his analytical skills.
Today’s post needs a bit of minor, nitpicky criticism. What he calls “political correctness” can and should be called by the way it’s manifesting today: wokeness. Political correctness is an old scourge that once ran rampant in our culture, but it has been replaced by its far-more perverted and destructive big brother. Widespread wokeness has infected our armed forces under the Biden regime in ways that go far beyond standard political correctness.
Otherwise, Michael is spot-on as usual. Here’s his article…
Should we be surprised that so few young adults want to serve in the U.S. military? When I was growing up, serving in the U.S. military was considered to be a noble profession. My own father was in the U.S. Navy throughout all my years in school, and I never once thought that he should leave to get a different job until he finally decided that it was time to retire.
But now Joe Biden and his politically correct minions at the Pentagon have transformed our military into a laughingstock, and that should deeply grieve all of us. The U.S. military is one of our most important national institutions, but it continues to get weaker and weaker.
According to NBC News, every single branch of our military is having difficulty with recruiting in 2022…
Every branch of the U.S. military is struggling to meet its fiscal year 2022 recruiting goals, say multiple U.S. military and defense officials, and numbers obtained by NBC News show both a record low percentage of young Americans eligible to serve and an even tinier fraction willing to consider it.
The officials said the Pentagon’s top leaders are now scrambling for ways to find new recruits to fill out the ranks of the all-volunteer force. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks consider the shortfall a serious issue, said the officials, and have been meeting on it frequently with other leaders.
The Army is having the biggest problem with recruiting.
At this point, the Army has only reached 40 percent of its goal for this fiscal year.
That is terrible, because the fiscal year ends on September 30th.
Officials are primarily blaming a couple of factors for the shortfall. The pool of young people that are actually eligible for the military is shrinking, and the percentage of those that are eligible that actually intend to serve is also shrinking…
The pool of those eligible to join the military continues to shrink, with more young men and women than ever disqualified for obesity, drug use or criminal records. Last month, Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville testified before Congress that only 23% of Americans ages 17-24 are qualified to serve without a waiver to join, down from 29% in recent years.
An internal Defense Department survey obtained by NBC News found that only 9% of those young Americans eligible to serve in the military had any inclination to do so, the lowest number since 2007.
I think that it says a lot about our society that 77 percent of our young people are not even qualified to serve in the military.
That is absolutely pathetic.
And it is really alarming that such a low percentage of those that are actually eligible have any desire to do so.
How can we explain this?
Well, here are 3 reasons why a lot of young people out there are shunning the military these days…
#1 Political Correctness
Traditionally, a high percentage of military recruits come from homes that are both conservative and patriotic.
But thanks to the Biden administration, the U.S. military has now become a politically correct madhouse…
Start with President Joe Biden’s Inauguration Day executive order prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. The order specifically opened doors for transgender men who want “access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports” reserved for women.
Under a DoD Instruction, all military personnel must embrace the notion that gender is “assigned at birth,” even though human DNA and chromosomes in every cell determine biological sex long before birth. Doctors, nurses, and chaplains must provide or support controversial treatments for gender dysphoria, including life-long hormones or irreversible surgeries, regardless of their own medical ethics or religious convictions.
And of course each June the political correctness in the military tends to reach a crescendo, and this year is certainly no exception…
President Biden’s obsequious Proclamation on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI+) Pride Month sparked numerous displays of LGBT activism, including a high-level Pride Month event at the Pentagon.
Marine Corps headquarters tweeted an image of a helmet sporting six rainbow-colored “bullets.” Air Force Recruiting posted a picture of trainees running with a rainbow striped banner, not the Stars and Stripes, and in Germany, Ramstein Air Force Base sponsored their second “Drag Queen Story Time” for children.
If General Patton could see what our military has become, he would be rolling over in his grave.
But even though our military leaders are being relentlessly ridiculed, they keep producing more cringe-inducing videos for social media like this one…
What is a self-respecting young conservative that is thinking about joining the military supposed to think when he sees something like that?
#2 Vaccine Mandates
I warned that good people would be driven away from the military by the vaccine mandates that Joe Biden implemented, and that is precisely what has happened.
Needless to say, the majority of those that are opposed to vaccine mandates are conservative, and as I have already noted conservatives traditionally make up the largest pool of military recruits.
And not only is the military losing recruits, but it is also losing countless good people that are already serving in the ranks.
For example, it is being reported that tens of thousands of National Guard soldiers are “no longer allowed to participate in their military duties” because they have refused to be vaccinated…
Some 40,000 National Guard and 22,000 Reserve soldiers who refused to be vaccinated against COVID-19 are no longer allowed to participate in their military duties, also effectively cutting them off from some of their military benefits, Army officials announced Friday.
“Soldiers who refuse the vaccination order without an approved or pending exemption request are subject to adverse administrative actions, including flags, bars to service, and official reprimands,” an Army spokesperson said in a statement.
There is a significant chunk of the population that will not even consider military service for the foreseeable future because of the absurd vaccination policies of the Biden administration.
That is extremely unfortunate, because large numbers of really good people are being rejected for no good reason at all.
#3 War With Russia
The war in Ukraine has fundamentally changed how many view service in the U.S. military.
In the past, serving in the military could mean dying in action, but that was mostly for personnel serving on the front lines in places such as Iraq or Afghanistan.
But if our proxy war with Russia in Ukraine becomes an actual shooting war between our two nations, it could rapidly become a nuclear conflict.
And if there is a nuclear war between the United States and Russia, all of our military bases will be prime targets.
You can find a list of all of our military bases on Wikipedia right here. If you are working on a military base and the Russians launch a surprise first strike, you will almost certainly be among the 20 percent of the U.S. population that will instantly be wiped out during such an attack.
I know that there are a lot of young people out that there have no intention of needlessly dying in a pointless war with Russia, and I can’t blame them for seeing things that way.
As the quantity and the quality of recruits continues to go down, we can see the impact that this is having on our military in countless ways.
For example, we just learned that a 65 million dollar Super Hornet was simply blown off one of our aircraft carriers in the Mediterranean Sea by bad weather…
On July 8, 2022, an F/A-18 Super Hornet assigned to Carrier Air Wing (CVW) 1, embarked aboard USS Harry S. Truman (CVN 75), blew overboard due to unexpected heavy weather in the Mediterranean Sea. The carrier was conducting a replenishment-at-sea, which was safely terminated through established procedures.
And at this point the Navy hasn’t even decided whether to go back and get the aircraft or not…
The Navy has not yet made a determination if the service will recover a F/A-18 Super Hornet that blew off the deck of USS Harry S. Truman (CVN-75).
The service announced Sunday that the Super Hornet was blown overboard on Friday due to heavy weather in the Mediterranean Sea. There was no personnel in the aircraft at the time, U.S. Naval Forces Europe-Africa spokesperson Cmdr. Richlyn Ivey said in a statement to USNI News on Monday.
U.S. 6th Fleet is still reviewing how to recover the aircraft, Ivey said.
Are you kidding me?
The incompetence that we are witnessing on a regular basis in the military now is absolutely mind blowing.
Of course the same thing could be said about the incompetence that we are witnessing on a regular basis from our federal government.
We better hope that a major war doesn’t erupt any time soon, because we are definitely not ready for one.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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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.
