(Alt-Market)—There are two classic propaganda narratives used by governments when it comes to keeping the public invested in any war campaign that does nothing to advance their national interests:
First, there’s the “commitment” lie, which says that once you step in to support a war effort you then must stay exponentially committed, even if that war effort is exposed as pointless. Anytime the public pulls back from that war in a bid to reconsider what purpose it serves they are ridiculed for potentially “risking lives” and setting the stage for defeat. In other words, you must support the effort blindly. You’re not allowed to examine the conflict rationally, because who wants to be blamed for losing a war?
Second, there’s the “domino effect” lie, which says that if you allow a particular “enemy” to win in one conflict, they will automatically be emboldened to invade other countries until they own the entire planet. It’s the same claim used to trick the American populace into supporting the war in Vietnam and it rarely turns out to be true. In fact, nations that engage in regional wars tend to be so weakened by the fighting that they don’t have the means to move on to another country even if they wanted to.
In the US we heard both of these narratives heading into the recent congressional vote for billions more in monetary and logistical aid to Ukraine. Neocons and Democrats worked together to force the bill through with a percentage of true conservatives fighting to stop it. Those conservatives were attacked relentlessly by the media for “helping the Russians”, but the reality that no one in the mainstream wants to talk about is that Ukraine has already lost the war.
No amount of additional funding or arms shipments are going to help them, and it has nothing to do with conservatives questioning the validity of war spending. Anyone who has a basic understanding of military strategy knows that the key to winning is ALWAYS manpower first, logistics second. Not superior technology or armaments, not superior cash and certainly not popular support from foreign interests.
This is especially true in a war of attrition, and attrition is in fact the method being used by Russia to systematically whittle down Ukraine’s forces. However, the western media refuses to discuss what’s really happening and has been acting as a hype machine for Ukraine instead.
In September of 2022 I noted that the Russian pullback to the Donbas was not the “retreat” the western media made it out to be. Many establishment talking heads claimed that this was the beginning of the end for Vladimir Putin and that Ukrainian forces would be taking Crimea in the near future.
I argued that Russia was likely trying to consolidate its position as western artillery and tanks flooded into Ukraine. I also suggested that Russia wanted to avoid urban combat in major cities while tens-of-thousands of seasoned mercenaries were rushing to the front from the US and Europe. I predicted that the Russian pullback was in preparation for surgical strikes on western Ukraine’s resources and grid infrastructure.
With Ukraine’s grid heavily damaged, a large portion of the population would leave the cities and head for Europe until the war played out. Putin has specifically avoided major fighting within larger urban centers for a reason. Driving civilians out of metropolitan areas would make it easier for Russia to strike Ukraine in a secondary offensive without risking extensive collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties. This is exactly what has happened.
Almost 7 million Ukrainians left the country outright in the past 2 years, with another 6 million displaced (mostly from larger cities). Currently, Russia is moving to push civilians out of Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second biggest city, and they will probably be successful given their momentum and the destruction of water and power resources. With civilians out of the way a more aggressive attack can then be initiated.
Russia has been using an “artillery bubble” as a tool to protect ground forces as they push an advance. Meaning, troops will only attack as far as the artillery can reach. Artillery is vital to a large scale offensive. Coincidentally, Russia doubled its importation of explosive materials commonly used for artillery in the past several months. They are now reportedly producing triple the amount of artillery that NATO is providing to Ukraine.
Mainstream analysts claim the push towards Kharkiv move might be a feint, allowing Russia to increase the size of its buffer zone. They continue to assert that Russia doesn’t have the forces necessary for a major offensive. I would say it depends on how weak Ukraine’s defensive lines actually are. Russia has been consistently using large scale Pincer movements to envelop defensive positions and destroy them.
In the past two weeks alone Russia has gained considerable ground. Russian troops recently made confirmed advances northwest of Svatove (Luhansk Oblast), near Avdiivka (Donetsk Oblast), in Robotyne (Zaporizhzhya Oblast), and in east (left) bank Kherson Oblast, U.S.-based think tank Institute for the Study of War reported on May 6th. The reason for this is relatively simple – Ukraine lacks the manpower to effectively establish defense in-depth. All the reports coming from the front support this theory.
That is to say, Ukraine’s defensive lines are a facade with no secondary positions or trenches to stall Russian breakthroughs. Once the Russians cut the main line there’s nothing much stopping them from gaining large stretches of ground. Some analysts have blamed this development on a lack of Ukrainian foresight or strategic preparedness, but I would argue that they just don’t have enough people to defend more than a single forward line.
My position is backed by numerous reports of the government’s desperate struggles with conscription. For the past six months the average age of Ukraine recruits is 43 years old. Meaning, youth recruitment is waning, either because younger people don’t want to fight and are avoiding the draft by leaving the country, or too many have died.
The conscription problem has been hidden by the western media for many months now, but even corporate news platforms are starting to admit that there is a severe lack of new recruits. Front line fighters have been complaining for months that they need to be cycled away from the trenches and given rest.
Another bad sign is the fact that Ukraine has been using Special Forces soldiers for trench duty. These units are trained specifically for asymmetric hit-and-run warfare, not sitting in mud holes waiting for artillery strikes to rain down on their fixed and exposed positions. It seems like pure stupidity, but it makes sense if Ukraine is actually running out of people to hold their only defensive line.
The cover-up of massive casualties is something I mentioned in past articles on the war and I think it bears repeating: Western warhawks continue to claim that it will be “cheaper” to use Ukrainian soldiers to fight Russia than to fight a larger war down the road with American and European lives.
The sociopathy behind this rationale is disturbing. The lack of manpower in Ukraine cannot be solved. It is a product of endless death paid for with our tax dollars. NATO has prolonged the fighting with funding and arms, but not to win, only to sacrifice more people in a bloody conflict Ukraine is destined to lose.
Their argument also assumes that Americans and Europeans are going to jump blindly into military service in a war against Russia. I don’t know about Europeans, but I do know for a fact that most Americans are not going to buy in and will refuse a draft. The majority of the US public doesn’t even want to send further aid to Ukraine; they certainly aren’t going to go die for Ukraine. The arrogance of the warhawks is mind boggling.
The bottom line is this: Ukraine is about to be overrun. They didn’t have the manpower to effectively launch a counteroffensive. They don’t have the manpower to establish defense in-depth. And, they are using their most seasoned soldiers as cannon fodder in the trenches.
This dynamic demands that diplomatic solutions be entertained, but no one seems to be talking about that. Why?
As I theorized in my article ‘World War III Is Now Inevitable – Here’s Why It Can’t Be Avoided’, the underlying plan may very well be to try to force Americans and Europeans to accept an expanding war with Russia. The western public has been bombarded with lies about Ukraine’s ability to win; when they lose people will be shocked and incensed by the outcome.
Maybe the elites hope that the populace will be so angry about the loss that they will rally around a larger war effort by NATO? The French government has already asserted that they are willing to send troops to Ukraine in direct confrontation with Russia, while Lithuania and Poland have said they will not rule out the possibility.
Now is the time for peace negotiations, BEFORE Ukraine is overrun. Will this happen? Probably not. But when diplomacy is removed from the table completely the only conclusion we can come to is that a greater war is desired. And when greater war is desired, we also have to conclude that our leadership has something substantial to gain by putting the world at risk.
You might be on the side of Ukraine, you might be on the side of Russia, you might not care about either side, but there’s no denying that this war is being escalated by special interests and we need to ask why?
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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.
