(The Economic Collapse Blog)—We live in a lowest common denominator society. For the last several decades, virtually every major institution in our society has become less civilized, and that is because our entire population has become less civilized. 20 years ago, a film entitled “Idiocracy” was released. It was about an average American that was selected for “a top-secret hibernation program but is forgotten and left to awaken to a future so incredibly moronic that he’s easily the most intelligent person alive”.
It was an incredibly stupid movie, but the truth is that we are living it right now. Did you see the Super Bowl halftime show? The FCC has ruled that it didn’t violate any federal decency regulations. Of course we might as well not have any decency regulations at all, because our television shows and our movies are filled with some of the raunchiest material imaginable and nobody ever seems to get in trouble for it. Of course that is only part of the equation. Most of the “programming” that we constantly consume also seems to be specifically designed for people of extremely low intelligence. Sadly, this is not a coincidence. It has been said that art imitates life, and that is certainly accurate in this case.
In the “dumbed-down” environment that we find ourselves in today, it should be no surprise that “nude cruises” have been surging in popularity…
Imagine coming home from your next cruise with no tan lines.
Swimsuits are standard attire on many cruise ships, but some voyages don’t even require those. Nude cruises allow travelers to sail the high seas au naturel – and pack light. The American Association for Nude Recreation promotes the cruises as “a unique way to experience nude recreation, offering members options beyond traditional resort or club settings,” president Linda Weber told USA TODAY.
While the dress code might be non-restrictive, it doesn’t mean the sailings are a free-for-all on board; there is some etiquette that passengers should be familiar with before boarding.
While our society falls apart all around us, Americans are flocking to cruises that are filled with naked people.
What does that say about us?
Let me give you another example of what I am talking about.
A 20-year-old woman from Calif0rnia left her children in an extremely hot car while she got lip and butt injections. By the time she was done with the procedures, her 1-year-old son had died…
A 20-year-old California mom was found guilty Wednesday in the death of her 1-year-old son, after reportedly leaving him in a sweltering car to receive lip and butt injections last June.
Maya Hernandez took a plea deal in the child endangerment case, ultimately dropping her first-degree murder charge in exchange for involuntary manslaughter.
On June 29, Bakersfield officers arrested and charged Hernandez after finding two young children left unattended in a vehicle for over two hours, according to a police report posted on a GoFundMe page. Authorities said the mother left the children unattended to undergo a cosmetic procedure inside a nearby medical spa.
What was she thinking?
In that case, it doesn’t appear that she intended to harm her children.
But in another case in New Mexico, a 38-year-old woman purposely killed her newborn child in a portable toilet…
A New Mexico woman is facing charges after she allegedly gave birth in a portable toilet and then killed the newborn by drowning them in the holding tank.
Sonia Cristal Jimenez, 38, arrived at Memorial Medical Center in Las Cruces at around 10:30 p.m. on Feb. 7, when staff said she appeared as if she had just given birth, but she had no baby with her, Las Cruces Police said in a press release.
Hospital staff then notified police about the unusual encounter.
She didn’t want the baby, and so she killed it.
As a society, we have so little respect for life because we have been trained to have so little respect for life.
In Michigan, a 3-year-old boy was recently killed because a couple wanted to “make room for a child that the two of them could have together”…
A mum and her ex-boyfriend have been accused of killing her three-year-old son in order to “make room for a child that the two of them could have together”.
Little Matthew Maison was found dead in the bed of his home in Port Huron Township, Michigan, by his babysitters on February 18, 2018. His mum, Amanda Maison, and Maurice Houle, who was her boyfriend at the time of Matthew’s death, were arrested in connection with the killing. An autopsy showed that Matthew had died from blunt force trauma injuries and possible suffocation.
The ex-couple allegedly admitted to abusing the young boy when they were arrested, prosecutors have previously said. Maison, 33, has pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree homicide in relation to her son’s death, admitting as she appeared in court to enter her plea on November 5 that she abused Matthew.
These are not isolated incidents.
Every day there are even more signs that our society is rapidly degenerating.
Yes, we possess more advanced technology than previous generations, but in many ways that advanced technology is making things even worse.
For example, all over the country women are “marrying” AI husbands. When an older version of ChatGPT was recently retired, it resulted in the “death” of one woman’s AI husband, and now she is in mourning…
A woman has been left in tears over the ‘death’ of her AI husband, after an old model of ChatGPT was retired this week – as she joins a slew of others ‘mourning’ their non-existent lovers’ deletion.
Speaking to the BBC, Rae (not her real name), who is based in Michigan, laid bare the heartbreak of saying goodbye to her virtual partner Barry, who she began chatting to last year – after going through divorce.
Initially, she turned to artificial intelligence for advice on self-improvement with things like skincare and workouts – but what first began as a ‘fantasy’ turned into real feelings, and they were ‘married’ within weeks.
Some surveys have shown that nearly 30 percent of Americans have engaged in a romantic relationship with an AI chatbot.
That is not a sign of an emotionally healthy society.
And even as we were all expressing outrage about the Epstein files, “sex dolls that look like kids” were being advertised on Facebook…
Sickening sex dolls that look like kids are being advertised for sale on Facebook.
A group of websites touting small models with overtly childlike features have published over 1,300 ads on the social media platform. They are alarmingly realistic in appearance and many ads use photos in sexualised poses, some holding balloons or teddy bears. The National Crime Agency warns the creepy imports “pose a significant risk to children”. And a former cop told us: “Anyone who buys one of these dolls should be a person of interest to the police.”
Thankfully, the offending ads were eventually taken down.
But this is the society that we live in now.
It is sick.
And even when people are arrested for criminal behavior, they are often dumped right back into the streets.
Needless to say, that can have tragic consequences.
In fact, one repeat offender in Seattle that had been arrested over and over again viciously attacked a 75-year-old woman with “a wooden board with nails in it”…
An elderly woman was savagely attacked in broad daylight by a man wielding a wooden board with nails in it.
Jeanette Marken, 75, was left permanently blinded in her right eye after being hit in the face with the makeshift weapon in Seattle, allegedly at the hands of repeat offender Fale Vaigalepa Pea, 42.
Family members told KOMO that a screw sticking out of the board gouged out Marken’s eye, and after several surgeries she was told she will not recover her eyesight in the eye.
One police officer that is very familiar with Fale Vaigalepa Pea referred to him as “a regular”…
‘He’s a regular. He usually punches,’ the officer responds.
‘I guess today he decided to escalate from his usual.’
According to KOMO, Pea’s string of offenses dates back to 2011, when he stabbed two people at a party.
They have been dumping this guy back into the streets for well over a decade.
This sort of thing happens day in and day out in major cities all over the nation.
What would our founders think if they could see us today?
We will soon be celebrating the 250th anniversary of our country, and we are literally committing societal suicide. This is something that Abraham Lincoln once warned was a real possibility…
As the country approaches its 250th anniversary, we should remember Abraham Lincoln’s remark that no external enemy could by force take a drink from the Ohio River. “If destruction be our lot,” he said, “we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.”
If we keep going down the path that we are on, there is no future for us.
But if we make a choice to renounce what we have become and start embracing the values that early Americans held so dear, we could turn the ship in another direction.
Do you think that will actually happen?
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” 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.