(End of the American Dream)—Did you see that we just bombed the Houthis? Each new day in 2024 seems to bring some sort of a new escalation, and for now most Americans can ignore all of the fighting because it is all happening on the other side of the globe. But how are they going to feel when the U.S. is actively engaged in multiple wars simultaneously and those wars are directly affecting daily life inside the United States? The time to speak out against the foolish policies of our leaders is before the entire world is engulfed in flames. Once thousands of missiles start flying, it will be too late.
Most Americans don’t realize this, but this weekend Taiwan will hold an election which may determine whether the U.S. and China go to war.
In fact, China has literally framed this election as “a choice between war and peace”…
Across the Pacific, Taiwan will this weekend hold one of the most closely watched polls globally and its outcome could impact rocky U.S.-China ties and dictate geopolitical trends in 2024. China has called it a choice between war and peace.
On January 13, 19.54 million people—83 percent of Taiwan’s population—will be eligible to vote, including 1.03 million possible first-timers, according to the Central Election Commission in Taipei. At stake are the promise of myriad social reforms, the future of Taiwan’s economic and energy policies, and, as always, its relationship with neighboring China, balanced against its decades-long closeness with America.
We shall see what happens, but the candidate that has been leading in the polls is the candidate that China hates the most…
Taiwan presidential front-runner Lai Ching-te’s lead over his main opposition rival has narrowed significantly, setting the stage for a close race in the final weeks before the pivotal vote.
Lai’s ticket, representing the ruling party, leads with 37.3% of support followed by Hou Yu-ih’s of opposition Kuomintang (KMT) with 33.4%, according to a survey conducted between Dec. 19 and Dec. 21 by pollster My Formosa. Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party trails with 17.7%.
If Lai Ching-te wins, a Chinese invasion becomes very likely.
And the moment that China invades Taiwan, the U.S. and China will be at war.
Meanwhile, the war in the Middle East just got even more “interesting”. It is being reported that a “U.S.-led coalition” just struck more than a dozen targets in Yemen…
A U.S.-led coalition has attacked sites in Yemen associated with Iranian-backed Houthi rebels who have been firing dozens of drones and missiles into Red Sea shipping lanes.
The U.S. strikes, a significant escalation of the U.S. involvement in Middle East fighting amid Israel’s war in Gaza, followed the 27th Houthi attack since late November earlier Thursday. The attacks deepen U.S. involvement in the region. In recent weeks, the Pentagon has attacked Iranian-backed militants in Iraq and Syria who have targeted U.S. troops there with rocket attacks.
“Today, at my direction, U.S. military forces — together with the United Kingdom and with support from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, and the Netherlands — successfully conducted strikes against a number of targets in Yemen used by Houthi rebels to endanger freedom of navigation in one of the world’s most vital waterways,” President Joe Biden said late Thursday.
In addition to being at war with Iranian-backed militias in Iraq and Syria, now we are essentially at war with the Houthis.
We are being told that the targets included “radar systems, drone storage and launch sites, ballistic missile storage and launch sites, and cruise missile storage and launch sites”…
The strikes were from fighter jets and Tomahawk missiles. More than a dozen Houthi targets were fired upon by missiles fired from air, surface, and sub platforms and were chosen for their ability to degrade the Houthis’ continued attacks on vessels in the Red Sea, a US official told CNN.
They included radar systems, drone storage and launch sites, ballistic missile storage and launch sites, and cruise missile storage and launch sites.
The strikes are a sign of the growing international alarm over the threat to one of the world’s most critical waterways. For weeks, the US had sought to avoid direct strikes on Yemen because of the risk of escalation in a region already simmering with tension, but the ongoing Houthi attacks on international shipping compelled the coalition to act.
Needless to say, this war in the Middle East is still only in the very early stages.
It is going to get so much worse.
The war in Ukraine is going to get a lot worse too, and in recent weeks Russian forces have been steadily gaining ground.
I feel so bad for those that have been forcibly conscripted to fight on the front lines. The Russians are constantly pummeling the front lines with all sorts of weaponry, and that includes massive glide bombs that possess enormous destructive power…
Ukrainian Army frontline personnel speaking to the New York Times have widely reported devastating damage from a new wave of Russian air strikes using glide bombs. Personnel told the American paper that while long having suffered from near constant artillery attacks, since the spring they had endured “the additional devastating power” of these glide bombs. They stressed that these bombs were obliterating their underground bunkers and carried up to 500kg of explosives each. One serviceman compared the impact of Russian glide bomb strikes to “hell’s gates,” stressing that the Russian Air Force “would send them two by two by two, eight in an hour… It sounds like a jet coming down on you.” The Russian Defence Ministry has reported the integration of gliding and correction modules onto FAB-500 500kg bombs against Ukrainian positions, with these having a range of approximately 70km depending on the altitude from which they are released. Such guided bombs can lay down fire at a small fraction of the cost of cruise or ballistic missiles, but still cost significantly more than unguided bombs.
Can you imagine sitting in a muddy trench hour after hour as tremendous explosions go off all around you?
The next round probably won’t have your number on it, but it might. Hundreds of thousands have already died, and many of them never even receive a proper burial.
As the Ukrainians lose ground, they will become increasingly desperate.
Some Ukrainian leaders have suggested using U.S.-supplied weapons to strike missile launch sites inside Russia, and Dmitry Medvedev is warning that such a move could provoke a nuclear response…
A senior ally of President Vladimir Putin warned on Thursday that any Ukrainian attacks on missile launch sites inside Russia with arms supplied by the United States and its allies would risk a nuclear response from Moscow.
Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chairman of Russia’s Security Council, said that some Ukrainian military commanders were considering hitting missile launch sites inside Russia with Western-supplied long-range missiles.
This war should have been ended a long time ago.
At some point someone is going to push things too far, and then there will be no going back.
In my new book I have a chapter entitled “The 3 Wars Of The Apocalypse”, and two of them have already begun.
A lot of people out there still have faith that our leaders know exactly what they are doing and that they will be able to keep World War III from erupting.
Unfortunately, the truth is that World War III is already here, and soon global events will spiral completely out of control.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is now 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.
Any war where you cannot bomb your enemy is a war that you will surely lose. Ukraine’s help is sadly being slow walked while their infantry troops are being decimated another sure way to lose a war. Russia is a bully and if it is not stood up to it will never change its ways. Joe never should have been on the ballot nor elected.