The relative peace and tranquility that we had been enjoying for several months has been shattered. All of a sudden, chaos is erupting all over the globe. Rioters are setting fires in cities all over France, the IDF just conducted the largest military operation in the West Bank since 2002, and the Russians and the Ukrainians are both accusing one another of wanting to attack the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant.
If that facility is bombed, it could potentially cause a nuclear disaster far worse than the one that we witnessed at Chernobyl in 1986. Unfortunately, I believe that global instability will be the norm throughout the remainder of 2023 and beyond. Much more civil unrest and war are ahead, and that has very serious implications for every man, woman and child on the entire planet.
Personally, I have been absolutely stunned by the tremendous violence that has been taking place in France. It is being reported that 5,662 vehicles have been set on fire during the rioting so far…
Ministry of the Interior figures taking account of damage to people and property during the now six nights of riots triggered by the shooting death by a police officer of an Algerian heritage teenager in a Paris suburb at a traffic stop reveals there have been 5,662 vehicle fires so far, reports Le Parisien.
The widespread destruction of vehicles, which as images recorded in the areas of unrest in France attest, include not just private cars but also trucks and buses. Trams have also been targeted by vandals. In one widely-reported case, a large truck was stolen by looters to ram down the doors of a mall to gain access to the merchandise inside. There were 1,919 vehicle fires on Thursday night alone.
France has seen a lot of riots in recent years, but nothing quite like this.
At least 1,000 buildings have been torched during these riots, and that includes 254 police stations…
Damage has not by any means been limited to burnt-out cars and buses, however. As the government figures attest, at least 1,000 buildings have been damaged in the riots. This includes attacks on 254 police stations, as well as dozens of town halls, schools, post offices, and private commercial properties targeted for burning or looting.
The rioters have already caused a billion dollars in damage, and this crisis still isn’t over.
But this isn’t the biggest global story right now.
Over the past few days, the Israeli military has been conducting the most extensive military operation that we have witnessed in the West Bank since 2002…
Over 1,000 IDF troops were involved in the campaign, which appeared to be the largest in the West Bank in some 20 years.
Speaking alongside Netanyahu, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said Jenin “in the past two years had become a factory for terror. In the past two days, this ended.”
“We cut off the weapons manufacturing process, captured thousands of bombs, destroyed dozens of production sites, workshops and explosives labs,” he said.
The IDF is beginning to wrap up this campaign, but Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is warning that this was “not a one-time thing”…
“At this moment we are completing the mission, and I can say our widescale action in Jenin is not a one-time thing,” Netanyahu said during a visit to the Salem checkpoint, some 10 kilometers (6.2 miles) from Jenin.
“We will continue [to operate] as necessary to root out terrorism. We will not allow Jenin to go back to being a hotbed of terror,” he added.
Tensions in the region have reached a boiling point, and it is just a matter of time before a major war erupts in the Middle East.
But this conflict in the West Bank is not the biggest global story right now either.
To me, the most important global story at the moment is what is going on in Ukraine.
The Russians and the Ukrainians are both warning that an attack on the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is imminent…
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has claimed that Russia is plotting a potentially dangerous attack on Europe’s largest nuclear power plant, which Russian forces have occupied for more than a year. Russia has accused Ukraine, meanwhile, of plotting to attack the same sprawling Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in Enerhodar, southern Ukraine, in the next two days.
It was a nerve-racking night for people across Ukraine amid the crossfire of accusations, but especially in the towns and cities near the Zaporizhzhia plant, including the city of Zaporizhzhia just a few miles away, which Russia never managed to capture.
I hope that there is no truth to any of this.
But where there is smoke, there is often fire.
I think that someone has been plotting something, and if an attack is carried out it could potentially create a disaster that is “not even comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki”…
An explosion at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant ‘is not even comparable to Hiroshima or Nagasaki’, a Ukrainian opposition leader has told MailOnline.
Such a blast would be ‘a much more terrifying and massive nuclear accident that, in the conditions of such a war, can lead to unpredictable consequences,’ he said.
The good news is that the entire world is now watching the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant very closely due to all of the accusations that are going back and forth.
So it will be much harder for either side to pull something off. Let us hope that an attack does not happen, because that could set off a chain of events that nobody would be able to control.
For example, if the Russians believed that the Ukrainians attacked the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, they may respond by using tactical nuclear weapons against Ukrainian military targets.
If that happens, the U.S. would likely respond by using tactical nuclear weapons against Russians military targets. And then it would be just a matter of time before we get to a full-blown nuclear war.
Already, one prominent Russian leader is warning that the U.S. and the EU “will be responsible for the consequences” if the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is destroyed…
“The goal is monstrous: to use a nuclear terrorist attack to accuse Russia and force the collective West to get directly involved in the Ukrainian conflict,” Leonid Slutsky, chairman of the Russian State Duma’s International Affairs Committee, wrote on his Telegram channel.
Slutsky said tensions are growing around the Zaporizhzhia plant, as they are also “in European capitals.” And in a thinly veiled warning, added, “Brussels and Washington have every chance of being among the sponsors of nuclear terrorists and will be responsible for the consequences of blowing up” the plant.
This is incredibly serious.
But most Americans have absolutely no idea that any of this is going on.
Speaking of the United States, there have been 10 mass shootings in our nation over the past two days…
So far, there have been at least 10 mass shootings on July 4 and 5, according to GVA. Much of the information about each shooting is preliminary, and the details – about the number or nature of the injuries, for example – could change as police investigate.
Mass shootings have become so common that each one barely makes a blip in the news before the next one happens. And it is just a matter of time before the rioting that we are witnessing in France erupts here too.
We are a nation that is in a very advanced state of decline, and most Americans are completely and utterly unprepared for what is coming.
The chaos that is currently being unleashed all over the world is just a small preview of the great storm that is ahead. So I would encourage you to get things in order while you still can, because the pace of global change has accelerated to a speed that is absolutely breathtaking.
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from The Economic Collapse Blog.
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.