Crime rates are soaring all over the nation, and this is especially true in heavily populated urban areas. The complete and utter lawlessness that we are witnessing has caused many pundits to describe our largest cities as “war zones”, and unfortunately that is not an exaggeration at all. In fact, there are some zip codes in Chicago where young adult males are more likely to be shot and killed than U.S. soldiers were during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq…
For some residents, Chicago is more dangerous than Afghanistan was for U.S. troops during the Iraq war, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medicine Association.
The study found that young men are more likely to be shot and killed in ZIP codes with the most violence than American soldiers were in Afghanistan or Iraq.
Yes, things really have gotten that bad.
We have reached a point where it is literally safer to go to war than it is to go to the most dangerous parts of Chicago.
And for the worst zip codes in Chicago, the numbers are not even close…
Specifically, in Chicago’s 60624 ZIP code, the homicide rate for young men is more than 1,200 for every 100,000, and it’s not the only ZIP code with numbers like this.
The average annual deaths per 100,000 for American soldiers who were heavily engaged in combat numbered at 395 in Afghanistan and 330 in Iraq.
Sadly, the violence in Chicago just continues to intensify.
Crime was up 61 percent during the first four weeks of this year, and many Chicago residents are completely fed up with Mayor Lori Lightfoot…
It caused one Twitter user to say: ‘Since [Lightfoot]’s term began, Chicago has suffered 2,278 homicides and over 9,000 shot. Since January 1, the city has endured 41 homicides and 194 shot. Yet here Lightfoot is blissfully dancing and asking voters to return her to office. Lightfoot is detached from reality.’
In addition to rising crime – overall crime is up a shocking 61 percent in the first four weeks of 2023 from the same period last year – Lightfoot has overseen vacancy rates of nearly 30 percent after flagship stores on the Magnificent Mile bailed.
So is Chicago the worst major U.S. city for crime?
No, actually it is being reported that overall crime per capita is now even higher in Denver…
Crime statistics for Denver, Colorado’s capital city, are astounding. They now put the Mile High City at the very bottom of the safest cities ranking at Neighborhood Scout. Crime in Denver is now worse than that in New York City or Chicago.
Some statistics from the Denver Police Department: Aggravated assaults, robberies, and homicides, through mid-December 2022, numbered 6,810. Three years ago, that number was 4,924. Property crimes in 2019 were 26,133. In 2022, through mid-December: 42,100.
In Denver, the murder and assault rates are twice the national rates, and three times the national rate for rapes and robberies.
Denver was once such a nice place to live.
So what happened?
Unfortunately, it appears that illegal immigration is fueling much of the crime that is happening in the Mile High City, and every year it just gets even worse.
Earlier this week, an official from U.S. Customs and Border Protection admitted to Congress that he has “tremendous concern” about the vast numbers of “gotaways” that are constantly pouring into our communities…
A U.S. Customs and Border Protection chief patrol agent told lawmakers during a Tuesday Congressional hearing that he has “tremendous concern” that felons and terrorists are among the millions of “gotaways” crossing the southern border into the United States, the New York Post reported.
Tucson Sector Chief Patrol Agent John Modlin, who has been with the Border Patrol since 1995, explained that the law enforcement agency needs more resources to improve border security and handle the influx of migrants attempting to enter the country.
If people come into this country legally, they are likely to obey our laws once they are here.
But if people come into our country illegally, they are not likely to magically transform into law-abiding residents later on.
Of course illegal immigration is only part of the equation. Violent crime rates are exploding all over the nation, and this includes cities that are very far from the southern border.
In Seattle, the number of homicides in 2022 was 24 percent higher than it was in 2021…
Seattle’s violent crime rate rose to its highest point in 15 years in 2022, with reported homicides surging by about 24% compared to 2021, according to the Seattle Police Department’s (SPD) Year-End Crime Report, more than a year after the city cut its police budget.
Property crime rates are also escalating dramatically. For example, cargo theft has become an absolutely massive problem in the state of California…
California led the way with 417 reported cargo thefts in 2022, a 41% year-over-year increase, followed by Texas with 223 and Florida with 153.
CargoNet’s 2022 data showed the average value of cargo stolen in a theft was $214,104, a 20% increase compared to 2021.
Cargo theft hot spots are typically areas around major ports, as well as intermodal facilities, distribution centers and truck stops.
Needless to say, none of this should surprise any of us.
Moral decay has been eating away at the foundations of our society for decades, and that was inevitably going to lead to rampant social decay.
If we want to turn things around, one place to start would be our ridiculously pathetic system of public education.
Many young people are turning to crime these days because the public schools have simply not equipped them with the tools that they need to be successful in life.
According to test results that were just released, only 7 percent of all eighth graders in Baltimore City are proficient in math…
The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.
Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7 percent of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93 percent could not do math at grade level.
What in the world are they teaching these kids?
And it turns out that not one single student was proficient in math at 23 of the schools…
Project Baltimore found, in 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math. Not a single student.
What kind of future do you think that most of those kids will have?
We have failed an entire generation of children, and most Americans don’t seem to care.
For years I have been writing about the relentless decline of our culture, but most people didn’t think that our cultural decline was a big deal.
Unfortunately, now our major cities are crime-ridden, drug-infested hellholes, and it is getting worse with each passing year.
Our society has become a giant mess because of the choices that we have made.
Wake up America, because time is running out.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, 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 copies as gifts 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.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
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.