(Mises)—On Sunday night, the CBS show 60 Minutes ran a segment about the series of mysterious medical episodes suffered by United States intelligence officers and government officials that has been given the nickname “Havana Syndrome.” For almost a decade, officials and their families have reported hearing sudden ringing sounds in their ears and experiencing headaches, dizziness, and other symptoms, usually while stationed abroad.
Many journalists, commentators, and government officials—including a number of those claiming to have suffered from Havana Syndrome—argue that Russian spies are deliberately causing these symptoms with some type of nonlethal acoustic or microwave beam.
The 60 Minutes segment ran with this narrative and presented new evidence that a specific unit from Russia’s military intelligence agency (GRU) may have been behind several specific Havana Syndrome cases.
Anyone who has been following this story would find the examples in this new report familiar. An FBI agent at home in Florida experienced a sudden, intense ringing in one of her ears while standing by a window in her laundry room. She then felt pain and pressure in her head and chest. After the episode, the agent experienced memory issues and some occasional vertigo.
The second case featured in the segment was the wife of a Justice Department official stationed at the US embassy in Tbilisi, Georgia. The woman was also in her laundry room when she experienced a piercing ringing sound in her left ear that quickly grew into a headache. She then walked outside to find a man sitting in a car nearby who looked like a suspected member of Unit 29155, the GRU unit that 60 Minutes presented as the likely perpetrator of these attacks.
The journalists from 60 Minutes, The Insider, and Der Spiegel who collaborated on this report identify and track some men who are alleged to be members of the GRU unit in question and suggest that it is possible they were present in cities where US officials experienced Havana Syndrome symptoms. The other big piece of evidence was a document that apparently indicates that a member of Unit 29155 was given a bonus for performing good work on the “potential capabilities of nonlethal acoustic weapons.”
The producers sprinkle in other scraps of evidence along with interview clips with former intelligence officers and other officials to paint the picture of a nefarious group of Russian spies sneaking around the world to direct acoustic weapons or microwave beams into the homes of Americans working against Russia.
This is a textbook example of a conspiracy theory. But it also doesn’t make a lot of sense.
For an acoustic weapon to be behind these symptoms, soundwaves powerful enough to cause seemingly permanent damage to the target’s inner ear would have had to be directed through the laundry room windows, all without damaging the glass or even being heard by others nearby.
And as former Los Alamos scientist Cheryl Rofer explained in a 2021 article, microwave beams are similarly implausible. First, the power supply needed to generate microwaves powerful enough to injure someone’s brain would make a portable weapon impractical. Second, the range of such a weapon would likely be minimal, so it would be hard for the perpetrator to remain hidden from the target throughout the attack. Third, because of how microwaves generate heat, if a microwave beam powerful enough to damage the brain were directed at a target’s head, there would also be visible burns on the skin and flesh where the beam first made contact. There is no way to isolate the effect to one internal part of the body.
That’s not to say it’s impossible that any one of these sudden headaches and inner ear problems are somehow the result of an attack. But any honest observer would have to admit that, so far, the narrative put forward by 60 Minutes can only be considered an implausible conspiracy theory.
It is important for any truth-seeking news consumer to notice the contrast in how narratives that lack concrete evidence are portrayed by the so-called mainstream press.
Take, for instance, the idea that Hunter Biden may have landed his $83,000-a-month board seat for a Ukrainian gas company because it was understood that he could offer access to his father. Or that the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated not in a Wuhan market, but in the nearby virology lab that we know was conducting US-funded gain-of-function research on coronaviruses. Or that FBI informants, who had a heavy presence in the organizations that planned the rally on January 6, may have played a part in leading the crowd to the Capitol.
All three of these theories are way more plausible than the theory that the Russians are diverting some of their most elite intelligence operatives to go take potshots at the homes of US officials with an energy weapon that doesn’t make any physical sense. Yet only the latter gets a full, serious segment on the top Sunday night news program. Why? Because it contributes well to the anti-Russia narrative that the political establishment is trying to push. The others, in contrast, each go completely against the establishment’s preferred account. So, they are either dismissed, demonized, or outright ignored in the establishment-friendly media.
The discourse about Havana Syndrome makes it clear that members of the Washington establishment and their friends in the media are completely fine with farfetched conspiracy theories, as long as they find them useful.
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.