(End of the American Dream)—Have you noticed that stories about measles have been popping up in the news a lot lately? At first I didn’t pay much attention, but then I decided to look into what is going on, and I was quite alarmed by what I found. At one time measles was a disease that was on the verge of being totally defeated, but now it is back with a vengeance. According to the World Health Organization, the number of measles cases in Europe in 2023 was 45 times higher than it was in 2022…
There was an “alarming” nearly 45-fold increase in measles cases in Europe last year, the World Health Organization (WHO) says.
Health chiefs are warning that cases are still rising and “urgent measures” are needed to prevent further spread.
Some 42,200 people were infected in 2023, compared to 941 during the whole of 2022.
What could possibly account for an increase of this magnitude?
I don’t know, because this isn’t supposed to be able to happen.
We are being told that Russia and Kazakhstan each reported approximately 10,000 cases during the first ten months of last year…
Russia and Kazakhstan fared the worst, with about 10,000 cases each from January to October last year. In Western Europe, Britain had the most cases with 183.
The WHO said there were nearly 21,000 hospitalizations and five measles-related deaths in the January-October period in the 51 countries in its European region.
Why is Russia being hit so hard?
Could this have anything to do with the war in Ukraine?
I don’t know.
Of course cases of measles have been spiking in many other parts of the globe as well. Here in the United States, there have been outbreaks in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia during the past couple of months…
Nearly a dozen cases of measles have been reported in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Georgia in recent weeks, according to local health departments. International travel, coupled with declining global vaccination rates, is probably behind this spate of cases, experts say.
The Philadelphia Department of Public Health has confirmed at least nine cases of measles over the past month after a person contracted the highly contagious virus outside the United States and exposed a parent and child at a children’s hospital, according to health department spokesperson James Garrow. That exposure then led to a Philadelphia day care outbreak that includes at least five children.
Once measles appears in a community, it can spread very rapidly, and that is because it is extremely contagious…
But unlike other common viruses, measles is so contagious that up to 90 percent of people who are close to an infected person will become infected if they are not immune to the virus, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“It doesn’t have to be cough right in your face,” Stinchfield says. Tiny virus particles can survive in the air for two hours, where they “circulate around and bounce over to this person and that person, and before you know it, you’ve exposed a lot of people,” she says.
What’s more, a person infected with measles can spread the virus four days before the most obvious symptom — a telltale rash — appears.
Hopefully this measles scare will turn out to be nothing.
But I will be keeping a very close eye on any future developments.
Meanwhile, the H5N1 bird flu continues to kill vast numbers of birds and animals all over the planet.
In Argentina, it has been spreading rapidly among seals, and almost all of the seal pups that get infected end up dead…
Almost 96 percent of Southern elephant seal pups across Argentina born in 2023 have met a tragic end as a highly contagious strain of avian influenza continues to wreak havoc on wildlife.
The scale of mortality sparks concerns that the H5N1 strain is now capable of mammal-to-mammal infection.
“The sight of elephant seals found dead or dying along the breeding beaches can only be described as apocalyptic,” says Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) health director Chris Walzer.
Once there is sustained mammal to mammal transmission of H5N1, scientists tell us that it is probably only a matter of time before there is an outbreak among humans.
And that is really bad news, because H5N1 can have “a greater than 50% death rate” among humans according to the CDC.
So we will watch for more reports that H5N1 is spreading among mammals.
Earlier today, I found a story about a polar bear in Alaska that just died from the disease…
A polar bear has been killed by bird flu as the highly contagious H5N1 virus spreads into the most remote parts of the planet.
The death was confirmed in December by the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation. “This is the first polar bear case reported, for anywhere,” Dr Bob Gerlach, Alaska’s state veterinarian, told the Alaska Beacon.
It was found near Utqiagvik, one of the northernmost communities in Alaska, two years after this latest strain was detected in North America.
Needless to say, that is not a good sign.
There is one more thing that I wanted to mention before I wrap up this article.
Employees at a hospital in Denver have been given a live Ebola vaccine “for preventative measures”…
A few medical employees at Denver Health made history Monday as some of the first people to receive the live Ebola vaccine for preventative measures, the hospital said.
Ebola is a rare but deadly disease. In 2014, a major outbreak in West Africa led to some cases in the United States. While there are no known outbreaks in the world right now, members of Denver Health’s High Risk Infection Team said they are some of the first to receive the live vaccine as a way to be prepared in the event of a future outbreak.
If Ebola is not a threat in North America, why do this?
I don’t understand.
Over the past few years, there have been some tremendous public health scares, but I believe that what we have seen so far is nothing compared to what is coming.
The diseases that are already circulating around the globe will continue to mutate, and it is inevitable that new outbreaks will erupt.
In secret labs all over the planet, researchers are experimenting with some of the deadliest diseases ever known to humanity, and in many of those cases they are actually trying to make those diseases even deadlier.
It is way too easy for an accident to happen, and once a bug gets loose it can spread all over the world in the blink of an eye.
Our ability to create great “pestilences” has far surpassed our ability to control them, and that represents a very serious existential threat to all of humanity.
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.
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.