(End of the American Dream)—If you think that what we are witnessing is “normal”, I honestly don’t know what to say. Over the past few years, the United States has been getting pummeled by one major natural disaster after another. The number of billion dollar natural disasters in 2023 established a new all-time record high for a single year, and 2024 is certainly off to a roaring start. It seems like each new week brings multiple new disasters, and right now we are watching a couple of whoppers. The blizzard that has started to hammer the state of California is so immense that it is difficult to believe that it is actually real, and the Stonehouse Creek Fire in the panhandle of Texas has officially become the largest fire in the entire history of that state…
The Smokehouse Creek Fire is officially the largest and most devastating fire in Texas’ history – with the killer inferno burning through over 1.1 million acres of land.
As of Thursday, the record-breaking wildfire has scorched through 1,075,000 acres and is three percent contained, with thousands of people evacuating their homes.
Ghastly winds coupled with the raging flames have charred huge swathes of the Panhandle – and the wildfire is now the equivalent size of the whole of Rhode Island.
This fire has already burned more than a million acres, but it still only 3 percent contained.
How is that even possible?
According to CBS News, throughout the region “lampposts are now melted, power line posts are split in half and homes and properties have been reduced to charred remains”. It is already the second largest fire in the entire history of our country, and even if the fire was put out now the recovery would take many years because there has been so much devastation.
The Turkey Track Ranch is one of the oldest and most historic ranches in the state of Texas, and it has been almost completely obliterated…
The fire also destroyed most of the historic $180 million Turkey Track Ranch, which was home to “one of the largest and bloodiest battles of the Great Plains” near the end of the Civil War, and the site of the Red River War that started in 1874. The property, one of the oldest ranches in the state that covers roughly 80,000 acres, has seen an estimated 80% of its pastures, plains and creek bottom burned in the fire, CBS affiliate KHOU-TV reports.
“The loss of livestock, crops and wildlife, as well as ranch fencing and other infrastructure throughout our property as well as other ranches and homes across the region is, we believe, unparalleled in our history,” the owners said in a statement. “…We are all completely devastated and personally heartbroken by the magnitude of this horrific event.”
I cannot even comprehend what the owners are going through right now.
Just try to imagine what it must be like to have your life’s work burned to the ground in a single day.
And this fire is going to have a huge impact on all the rest of us too.
85 percent of the cattle in the state of Texas are in the panhandle. Video footage of cattle that have been burned to death is being shared all over social media, and Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller is estimating that “tens of thousands” have already been killed…
Reuters spoke with state Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who warned the wildfire has likely killed tens of thousands of livestock and destroyed grain in storage bins.
“It’s almost like gasoline when it goes up,” Miller said, adding, “We have now lost over a million acres.
Beef prices have already risen to absolutely insane levels all over the country.
So what is going to happen now?
Miller is also warning that for the cattle that survive there won’t be anything left to eat…
“Feed supplies are scarce for surviving cattle because the fire destroyed grazing lands and bins holding crops like wheat and corn,” he said.
Miller continued: “There’s absolutely zero vegetation. The cattle that do survive, they have absolutely nothing to eat.”
If you love beef, stock up now, because prices are about to go a lot higher.
Meanwhile, the state of California is being hit by yet another historic storm.
A “crippling blizzard” has already begun, and by the time the weekend is over some areas will literally be buried under 10 feet of snow…
A crippling blizzard is expected to pummel the mountains in California and Nevada late this week and into the weekend, dumping the biggest snow of the season so far. By the time it’s all over, the highest elevations could be buried under 10-plus feet of snow.
The worst of the storm will be felt across the Sierra Nevada mountain range. The event is now getting underway Thursday but will hit its peak starting Friday and last through the weekend. With a major winter storm like this, wind gusts over the Sierra ridges will easily exceed 100 mph, creating intense blizzard conditions that could last for days.
“It’s just all weekend,” FOX Weather Meteorologist Britta Merwin said. “That’s all you need to know. It is literally all weekend.”
It is being reported that a wind gust of 120 mph was recorded on Ward Mountain on Thursday, and extremely powerful winds will continue throughout the weekend as snow falls at a staggering pace.
If you can believe it, it is being projected that “snowfall rates of up to 5 inches an hour are possible”…
Extremely heavy snowfall rates of up to 5 inches an hour are possible, said Brittany Whitlam, a forecaster with the weather service’s Reno office. Snowfall accumulations across three days will generally range from 50 to 100 inches across the Sierra, with locally higher amounts at higher elevations, UCLA climate scientist Daniel Swain said in a forecast discussion on YouTube on Thursday
“This will be another snowstorm probably for the record books in some places,” Swain said.
I can’t even imagine what a storm of that magnitude would be like, because I have never experienced anything like it.
Local residents are being told that some communities may be isolated for an extended period of time, and snowfall totals in the worst hit locations could actually reach “15 feet or 180 inches”…
AccuWeather is projecting that 6-10 feet of snow will fall at Donner Pass or up to 120 inches, spanning several days. Similar snowfall is likely at many of the ski resorts in the Sierra Nevada, with an AccuWeather Local StormMax™ snowfall of 15 feet or 180 inches. Drifts from the storm will reach as high as several stories.
Now that is a storm!
For years, I have been warning in my books that we would see natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity.
And actually what we are experiencing right now is just the beginning.
Much more is on the horizon, and most people in the general population have no idea…
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
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.
