I’ve been pretty much housebound in our little cottage during the summer heat wave here in super-humid Memphis, so I’ve begun playing a computer game called Civilization as a diversion from my various book-writing projects.
It’s the fifth generation of this game, which first launched in 1991. I’ve never played the prior versions, but this one is like the old board game Risk but infinitely more complex and enthralling. And, in God’s unpredictable sense of humor, it is the perfect complement to my recent studies on history and geopolitics. After just a few hours of playing, my understanding of the mindset of the upper elites had been greatly increased and refined. My abstract and academic perspectives on the global realignment taking place relative to the declining Anglo-America NATO powers and the ascending BRICS alliance came to life as I built my own empire and strove for global dominance.
The game puts you in the seat of power to make decisions require long-term planning involving the fate of nations and the timing and trajectory of technology and social policy. Such things as the will of the people far below you are merely considerations to be weighed against other factors they can’t see or appreciate, including the will of competing powers that may be malicious or benign, and the demands of constituent powers and special interests within your empire (think Pfizer and the LGBTs) who may or may not care about people within their sphere of influence or control.
Playing Civilization 5 has been like watching a curtain being drawn back to expose all the major players on the world stage: one gigantic “Game of Thrones” – which consequence (the revelation of this truth, I mean) is so obvious to me now that I think both that game and the film series may actually be social engineering tools in their own right, designed by the elites to heighten appreciation for their challenges and thus lessen hostility to them: to “walk a mile in their shoes,” so to speak.
Heck, playing Civ 5 might very well be mandatory training for the World Economic Forum’s “Young Global Leaders” or perhaps even a secret aptitude assessment tool being monitored by elite recruiters (which concept has been a plot element of at least three science-fiction films/series I can think of.) “Game of Thrones” instills a sense of foreboding (predictive programming) about a rising threat to all of civilization from the frozen north (think Russia).
But here in the real world among the common people, self-determination is not a social privilege granted by benign or pragmatic elites, but a gift of God built into the order of Creation. And the many religions of the world that influence the will of the people are not, as in Civ 5, totally interchangeable tools for population control. When the powers of the world align to impose new levels of control through contrived “climate crises” and “disease epidemics” (things not technically in the game but equivalent to things that are) the people of the real world do not just adjust and get over it (or maybe they do – but they shouldn’t.)
It does help, however, to have insights into how the elites think and see the world, especially regarding the much longer-term planning they do than the common people realize. For example, the Anglo-American elites knew at the end of World War II that the Russian Empire would grow as a threat to their already centuries-long global hegemon, which arose under the British Monarchy (when “the sun never set on the British Empire”). After WWII, the American side of the partnership rose to (real or apparent) dominance.
The planning goes even deeper than that as evidenced by Woodrow Wilson’s role in creating the League of Nations. His globalist influence continues through the work of the Wilson Center offering in 2011 this summary of the American elites’ perspective that persists today:
“Sir Halford Mackinder, the father of geopolitics, argued that the power that controls Eurasia controls the world. How can the West ensure that the struggle for this fundamental theater in world politics is resolved in favor of Western democratic governance – without the autocratic domination of Eurasia?”
That’s why Gen. MacArthur wanted to keep the Allied war machine of WWII rolling to Moscow. But Truman fired him to take that option off the board, and NATO was formed as an alternative, with a strategy of slow encirclement that has taken us incrementally to the Ukrainian/Russian border, which is, of course, the ultimate, existential red line for the Russians whose only choice was submission or war.
The Eurasian “world island” is dominated today by Russia and China who have their own vision for breaking the Anglo-American hegemon by challenging it with a new multi-national economic alliance called BRICS. It’s all about ending exclusive U.S. control of the world “reserve currency,” the dollar. Theoretically, if the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) create their own workable system for international trade without using the dollar, the U.S. will lose the ability to print unlimited sums to cover its massive debts, and our economy will experience an unsurvivable crash. Our loans suddenly will come due with no way to pay them off.
Does that explain the non-stop hard-sell of an economic “Great Reset” that nobody wants? Do the elites know dollar dominance is likely in a death spiral?
Is the self-destructive insanity of the OBiden administration all just cultural sabotage by China (using bribery and extortion of U.S. pols) to weaken American resistance to BRICS and turn us against our own government? (If “our democracy” means sexual anarchy and the grooming and mutilation of children, hatred of “whiteness” and unstoppable election fraud, who would fight to preserve a hegemonic system based on “democracy” instead of embracing the BRICS idea of a new multi-polar order?)
Is fear of BRICS the real reason for the fear of Donald Trump and the “America First” movement? (Doesn’t “America First” implicitly reject the very globalist strategy driving NATO and its necessary system of endless wars and international bullying?)
The Western media are downplaying the fact that BRICS added six new members last week: Iran, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, Egypt and Ethiopia. The potential negative impact of this for the United States is huge. Here’s a high-quality analysis from the pro-BRICS side.
One surprising result of playing Civ 5 is a renewed love and loyalty for the America I grew up in and a greater hesitancy to view the BRICS alliance favorably. Because whatever short-term benefits the world might reap from a defeat of today’s deeply perverse and corrupt Anglo-American hegemony, the replacement system would soon be just as bad for other reasons – because alliances of strongmen only last as long as it serves their individual interests, and the only interest the BRICS nations really have is ending U.S. bullying. After that it would be a very bloody free-for-all, except in the real world, and not in the safety of a computer game.
Content created by the WND News Center is available for re-publication without charge to any eligible news publisher that can provide a large audience. For licensing opportunities of our original content, please contact [email protected].
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.