(WND)—A new study suggests that senior citizens in key government positions have the risk of dementia as they age, and with that would come a new and worrying national security risk.
The Rand Corp. study states, “Individuals who hold or held a security clearance and handled classified material could become a security threat if they develop dementia and unwittingly share government secrets.
“The exploratory research discussed in this Perspective highlights the factors involved in dementia becoming a risk to global and national security, proposes a framework to assess the risk, and guides further study of this potential threat. The authors also explore how the national security and intelligence communities are especially at risk because they employ large numbers of military veterans, who, as a population, may have a higher risk of developing dementia because of high rates of traumatic brain injury.”
The issue is significant at this point because of Joe Biden’s age as an octogenarian and his many, many mental lapses that are evident on an almost daily basis.
President Donald Trump, who was challenged to take a cognitive test when he was president, and aced it, repeatedly has cited Biden’s mental stumbles and bumbles, which have gotten to the point he’s even misidentified his own grandchildren and called on people who are dead.
A vast majority of Americans, by polling, now also believe Biden is too old to be president.
The federally funded study said, “As people live longer and retire later, challenges associated with cognitive impairment in the workplace will need to be addressed. Our limited research suggests this concern is an emergency security blind spot. considering the potential consequences of an inadvertent security breach stemming from cognitive impairment, we believe that further study of risk, recognition, and mitigation strategies is important.
“Such research should be paired with educating the current and retired security workforce and their families to increase awareness and recognition of dementia symptoms.”
It concluded, “Further understanding of cognitive impairment and cognitive decline within an aging IC and national security workforce cohort could contribute to securing the safety of classified information in the United States.”
It explains, “The U.S. government entrusts classified material to individuals who possess a security clearance (Department of Defense Manual [DoDM] 5200.01, 2013). But how do these trusted individuals remain good custodians of that classified information if they are impaired? Two trends might contribute to a new type of national security threat: (1) People are living longer, and (2) people are working later in life. As a result, the workforce might experience a higher prevalence of dementia than in past generations. Taken together, we believe that an increasing number of cleared personnel—that is, personnel who hold or have held security clearances—have or will have dementia.”
It reported, “The U.S. population of adults ages 65 and older will double between 2000 and 2040 (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Administration for Community Living, 2018). In turn, an increase in the number of individuals with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias is expected to accompany this demographic change.”
The very real threat comes because there is “the potential for an individual to use their authorized access, intentionally or unintentionally, to harm their organization…”
It said, “An individual who holds a Top Secret security clearance who develops dementia and unwittingly shares government secrets is an insider threat.”
A report from Just the News explained the study is “bringing more scrutiny to aging politicians for recent apparent lapses in cognitive abilities.”
The report cited, “Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who has access to more classified information than most other members of Congress due to his leadership position, recently had two brief on-camera ‘freeze-ups,’ where he stopped talking and stared blankly forward for less than a minute.”
Further, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, recently appeared to forget that she had been ill, and absent from the Senate for months, and she needed to be told by aides how to vote.
Biden, 80, is the oldest person to hold the Oval Office in U.S. history, and has prompted widespread concern, even among Democrats, over his “public gaffes and stumbles,” the report said.
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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.
