(End of the American Dream)—It is being reported that an unknown disease that causes people to “cough up blood” has spread to multiple cities in Russia. When I first heard reports that this was happening, I wasn’t sure what to make of it. But now more media outlets are reporting on this mystery disease, and the new reports that I am seeing are extremely alarming.
Of course it is entirely possible that this is a naturally occurring illness, but since Russia is involved in a very bitter war with Ukraine we cannot ignore the possibility that some sort of a biological agent has been released inside Russia. Since the U.S. has been very heavily involved in running the war in Ukraine from the very beginning, will the U.S. be blamed if the Russians ultimately determine that a biological weapon of some sort has been used?
According to the Daily Mail, in addition to “leaving patients coughing up blood”, this mystery illness also produces an extremely high fever…
A mystery outbreak that is leaving patients coughing up blood and with a severe fever has been reported in Russia.
Local media and social media posts say the illness begins with Covid-like symptoms such as weakness or muscle aches.
But within five days, these progress to a fever of up to 102.2F (39C) and a persistent, bloody cough.
We are being told that victims are testing negative “for Covid and the flu”, and cases are popping up in numerous Russian cities…
Posts on Telegram, the Russian messaging service, say cases have been reported in multiple cities, but officials have not confirmed how many cases or hospitalizations have been recorded.
The posts also claim that patients have tested negative for Covid and the flu, with doctors said to be writing down a diagnosis of ‘acute upper respiratory tract infection of unspecified origin.’
This story has created so much buzz that the Russians were forced to address it.
At this stage, the Russians are claiming that nothing unusual is going on…
Russian authorities have dismissed growing speculation over reports of an unidentified virus that causes patients to cough up blood and suffer from prolonged high fever, saying no new pathogens have been detected.
The rumors, which originated on the Telegram channel SHOT and were amplified by local media, centered on patients exhibiting severe respiratory symptoms but testing negative for influenza and COVID-19.
Maybe the Russians are being straight with us.
Or perhaps the Russians are just trying to keep their population calm.
JD’s manually curated links for God-fearing MAGA patriots
I don’t know.
But it does appear that there are a lot of Russians that are very sick right now.
Hopefully we will get a more complete explanation soon.
Meanwhile, we have learned that one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s limos “exploded and caught fire”…
ONE of Vladimir Putin’s limousines exploded and caught fire in Moscow as the tyrant orders sewers to be searched and the pat down of his own guards.
An Aurus limousine from Putin’s “official car fleet” blew up in a huge blast on a street just north of Moscow’s FSB secret service headquarters in Lubyanka.
Normally, vehicles don’t “explode” all by themselves.
So was this some sort of an attack?
Was someone trying to take Vladimir Putin out?
If Vladimir Putin gets killed, the Russians will inevitably blame the Ukrainians.
And since we have been so heavily involved in the major decisions that Ukraine makes, we would likely be blamed too and the peace process would almost certainly be dead.
The New York Times has just published a piece that reveals that the U.S. has been much more deeply involved in the war in Ukraine than most people realize. According to that report, U.S. officials have been coordinating things from a command center in Wiesbaden, Germany since the very early days of the conflict…
Side by side in Wiesbaden’s mission command center, American and Ukrainian officers planned Kyiv’s counteroffensives. A vast American intelligence-collection effort both guided big-picture battle strategy and funneled precise targeting information down to Ukrainian soldiers in the field.
One European intelligence chief recalled being taken aback to learn how deeply enmeshed his N.A.T.O. counterparts had become in Ukrainian operations. “They are part of the kill chain now,” he said.
The Russians are going to be absolutely furious when they read this.
During the Biden administration, U.S. officials and Ukrainian officials would gather together every morning and “survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets”…
Every morning, officers recalled, the Ukrainians and Americans gathered to survey Russian weapons systems and ground forces and determine the ripest, highest-value targets. The priority lists were then handed over to the intelligence fusion center, where officers analyzed streams of data to pinpoint the targets’ locations.
We have not just been supplying Ukraine with what they need to fight.
We have been active participants in the conflict.
Now we have a very small window of opportunity to find a peaceful way out of this mess, and that very small window of opportunity rests in the hands of President Trump.
Up until just recently, Trump has been very diplomatic with the Russians, but now he says that he is “very angry” with Putin…
President Donald Trump said he was “very angry” and “pissed off” when Russian President Vladimir Putin criticized the credibility of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s leadership, adding that the comments were “not going in the right location.”
Agence France-Presse reported that Putin on Friday called for a transitional government to be put in place in Ukraine, which could effectively push out Zelenskyy.
“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault — which it might not be — but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said in an early-morning phone call with NBC News on Sunday.
Honestly, I don’t think that the Russians want to end the war quite yet.
They still have quite a few objectives that they would like to achieve, and their forces continue to steadily move forward…
Russian forces have continued rolling up villages in the east and south of Ukraine on Saturday and Sunday. A full battlefield press has continued even amid President Trump’s efforts to get all sides at the negotiating table.
First, on Saturday Russia’s defense ministry announced the capture of the two villages of Shchebraki in the southern Zaporizhzhia region and Panteleimonivka in the eastern Donetsk region.
The more territory the Russians take, the more leverage they will have, and they fully understand this.
And it is also a very troubling sign that the Russians have just decided to conscript additional troops…
Russia has ordered the largest increase in conscription since the Ukraine war began as a further 160,000 servicemen are called up to the frontline.
The planned draft size has increased from 150,000 in 2024 and 134,500 in 2022, when Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine.
It comes as Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered Russia to boost the size of its army to 1.5 million active servicemen – an increase of some 180,000 troops over three years.
If the Russians were anticipating that peace was imminent, there would not be a need to conscript more soldiers.
It appears that the fighting will continue at least for now, and that means that the Ukrainians will become increasingly desperate.
And when a desperate animal is backed into a corner, really bad things can happen.
Unfortunately, it appears that really bad things are already starting to happen.
If we remain on the path that we are currently on, it is probably just a matter of time before U.S. forces and Russian forces start fighting one another directly.
Needless to say, that would put us right on the verge of the unthinkable.
So we better hope that peace negotiations succeed, because the alternative would be absolutely horrifying.
Michael’s new book entitled “Why” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.