I hope that this Independence Day was the greatest Independence Day that you and your family have ever experienced. Personally, I had the opportunity to spend some time with family over the past several days, and that helped to rejuvenate me. We should be thankful for times like these, because we will not always have them. In fact, at the rate that America is falling we may not have too many July 4th celebrations left.
Just about every major decision that our leaders make is self-destructive, and if we stay on the road that we are currently on our nation is not going to survive. So let us hope for some sort of a great awakening to happen soon, because the clock is ticking.
In a recent article, Jeff Lukens pointed out that when nations finally die they tend to do so “with surprising speed”…
When nations die, they do so with surprising speed. Ernest Hemingway made a similar observation when a person in his novel was asked how he went bankrupt, and his reply was, “Gradually, then suddenly.”
Nations are built upon classical values — perseverance, self-reliance, and honor. A great nation is one whose values have made it unusually prosperous. In its latter days, the nation becomes hollowed out and burdened with a costly, top-heavy government. The middle class is expected to provide generosity to the masses. Over time, traditional values fade away, and everyone seeks to live off everyone else.
The United States shows aspects of a once great power past its prime. It is socially and politically divided, aware of the necessity for changes, unable or unwilling to make them, and losing the conviction in the shared goals that earlier invigorated it.
Sadly, he is quite right. Our core values have been fading away for decades, and at this point most Americans realize that something has gone horribly wrong.
In fact, a recent Gallup poll discovered that a whopping 87 percent of us rate the overall state of America’s moral values as either “poor” or “only fair”…
A record-high 50% of Americans rate the overall state of moral values in the U.S. as “poor,” and another 37% say it is “only fair.” Just 1% think the state of moral values is “excellent” and 12% “good.”
We know that we are deeply sick, but we don’t have the willpower to turn things around.
In addition to the moral decay that we see all around us, Americans are also losing faith in the things that are supposed to unite all of us as Americans.
Another Gallup survey that was recently conducted found that only 29 percent of Democrats and only 33 percent of Independents are “extremely proud” to be Americans at this point.
- Hand-curated links from conservative and Christian sites — NO legacy media garbage links. Patriots get their news every day at JDRucker.com
Patriotism is in decline, and this is especially true among our young people. As a result, fewer and fewer of them want to serve in our all-volunteer military, and this is starting to cause major problems. Our “all-volunteer force” has been shrinking, and so if a major war were to erupt we would likely see a draft be instituted…
Because of its cost, the AVF is too small to handle a major war or emergency. When faced with two medium-size campaigns, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the AVF was seriously challenged to provide sufficient troops, despite constant mobilization of reservists, the enlistment of local allies, and the deployment of copious contractors. A major conflict would break the AVF—an open secret in defense circles, but something that few in Washington want to discuss. Over the past year of fighting, Russia and Ukraine have both taken casualties equal to at least half the active-duty U.S. Army. (U.S. military doctrine says that a force is destroyed after sustaining 30 percent casualties). Selective Service, subject to even less scrutiny than the AVF, remains on the books because if we ever enter into another major conflict, we will need a draft again.
Could you imagine how our young adults would respond if such a thing actually happened?
There would be riots all over the country.
Right now, so few young people want to enlist that the U.S. Army isn’t even coming close to meeting their recruiting targets…
The result is that 2023 is likely to be the worst year for military recruiting since the AVF began. Most of the services have already said that they will fail to hit their recruiting targets. The Army, short 15,000 recruits last year and facing the same shortfall this year, is shrinking. The Army’s top enlisted leader, Sergeant Major of the Army Michael Grinston, recently warned that trying to do more with less is putting “an enormous strain” on soldiers and their families.
In order for an all-volunteer military to work, a significant portion of the population has got to deeply believe in the core values that the country represents.
But what are America’s core values today?
The guy in the White House and his family have made millions of dollars by doing favors for foreigners, and our deeply corrupt news networks don’t seem to care very much.
The values that Joe Biden says that he represents are diametrically opposed to the values of our founders.
At this point, the White House is literally seething with evil, and so it shouldn’t surprise us that the Secret Service just found cocaine in the White House library…
A game of Internet Clue has broken out on social media as Americans share memes about the cocaine found at the White House over the holiday weekend.
Mystery ensued on Tuesday following reports that a suspicious white powder that turned out to be the narcotic was found at the White House library on Sunday, sparking a hazmat situation and forcing an evacuation.
The discovery came two days after recovering addict Hunter Biden, 52, was last seen at the White House, and internet trolls took joy in speculating on the culprit.
During his lifetime, Hunter Biden has consumed mountains of cocaine, and so there is lots of speculation that he was responsible for bringing it into the White House.
Hopefully that is not true, because it would be really bad news if he was experiencing a relapse.
Of course the White House library is under video surveillance 24 hours a day, and so the Secret Service should be able to easily determine who brought cocaine into that room. But if it was Hunter Biden, I am sure that the story will be hushed up and brushed under the rug.
In Washington, deception and lies have become more common than the truth, and most Americans are entirely convinced that this will never change. But one way or another, change is coming.
No government that hates the truth will stand for long.
And as James Howard Kunstler has aptly observed, truth will ultimately prevail even if America does not…
Hard times will produce strong men and women with a bias toward reality, which naturally tends to comprise things that are truthful. Untruth will be consigned back to its traditional category: Evil. It will be shunned, as it should be. Nations come and go and perhaps America, as a federation of states united as one, will go. Many of the self-evident truths that were born with her will remain to be honored one way or another, in some region of this large land-mass, or another. Events await. Facing our time of dark uncertainty, we have a lot to think about this Fourth of July, a very solemn holiday.
We certainly do have a lot to think about.
Time is running out.
Will America wake up in time?
Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can check out his new Substack newsletter right here.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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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.