How could we have allowed things to deteriorate this badly? For a moment, I want you to imagine that you have just arrived in a major city in a foreign country. Unfortunately, instead of the shiny new buildings and beautiful homes that you expect to see, there is trash, filth and the sound of police sirens everywhere that you go. After walking a few blocks, you stumble upon one of the dozens of open air drug markets that are freely operating in that particular city. Many addicts are lying on the ground wherever they suddenly passed out, others with visible gaping wounds are staggering around like zombies, and you even spot one enterprising addict that has decided to take a dump right in the middle of the street.
Of course there are used needles scattered everywhere, and you try not to step on them. You decide that it is time to leave, but it is already too late, because protesters behind you and in front of you have started to clash with the police. Moments later a police car is set on fire, and you can smell tear gas in the air. Thankfully, you are able to scramble to safety, and eventually you find your way back to your hotel room and lock the door. When you turn on the news to see what they are saying about the chaos in the streets, you are amazed to discover that it is being reported that the protests were “mostly peaceful” and that everything is just fine.
Sadly, what I have just detailed is not a description of a major city in a foreign land.
Rather, it is a description of what daily life is now like in many of the largest cities here in the United States.
For example, just consider what conditions are currently like in the center of Philadelphia. An extremely potent drug known on the street as “tranq” is causing hordes of addicts to literally wander around like zombies…
Doctors in Philadelphia have been given new guidance to help them deal with an influx of patients addicted to animal tranquilizer xylazine – known on the street as ‘tranq’.
An outreach charity is warning that the drug – a muscle relaxant intended for large animals like horses – is leaving users ‘unable to walk’ and with ‘gaping wounds’.
Philadelphia has become the epicenter for xylazine, which has rapidly made its way into the city’s drug supply as a cheap and very potent cutting agent.
One neighborhood in Philly in particular has become world famous for the open air drug market that operates there, and for some reason authorities refuse to shut it down.
And so addicts “are shooting up in broad daylight” right now, and many of them literally have “raw, gaping wounds in desperate need of medical attention”…
The Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia – known as ‘ground zero’ for the city’s drug epidemic – is in crisis due to widespread abuse of an animal tranquilizer called xylazine.
Addicts are shooting up in broad daylight, hunched over in a stupor or passed out on the streets. Many have raw, gaping wounds in desperate need of medical attention. And there are needles, syringes and garbage littered across the sidewalks.
‘I’ve never seen human beings remain in these kinds of conditions,’ said Sarah Laurel, who runs outreach organization Savage Sisters.
Yes, this is really happening in the city of Benjamin Franklin.
What would he think about all of this if he could see us today?
At this point, a whopping 90 percent of the heroin in Philly contains “tranq”, and one study has found that the drug has already spread “to 36 states and D.C.”…
Now more than 90 percent of the heroin now found in Philadelphia contains xylazine. A June study found the drug has spread to 36 states and D.C.
The drug, also known as ‘tranq’, causes a blackout stupor. It also leads to skin damage so severe it resembles chemical burns, plus deep festering wounds that frequently result in amputations.
Some cities have decided that one way to deal with the drug crisis is to start legalizing some of the less potent drugs.
But what the politicians didn’t anticipate is that the illegal trade would continue to operate alongside the legal trade.
In fact, at this point the number of “unlicensed” marijuana stores in New York City far exceeds the number of “licensed” stores…
It’s hard to miss the marijuana shops on almost every block in New York City.
According to the NYPD, more than 1,300 illegal marijuana stores are selling pot without a license.
“I admit, I don’t think we ever talked about this scenario happening,” St. Senator Liz Krueger said.
As drugs, crime, violence and chaos take over in our largest cities, some big corporations are deciding that now is the time to move out.
For instance, we just learned that the city of Seattle has just lost “its downtown Nike flagship store and multiplex movie theater”…
Crime-ridden Seattle has lost its downtown Nike flagship store and multiplex movie theater as crime runs rampant and the number of homeless people dying soars.
The Rain City’s downtown area suffered its latest blow on Friday when the popular Nike store, located at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Pike Street, shut its doors for good.
Nike’s exit came right after Regal Cinemas announced it would reject the lease of the Meridian 16 multiplex located on Seventh Avenue and Pike Street.
Many years ago, my wife and I visited downtown Seattle during the middle of the day.
It was a little sketchy, but we watched our backs and stayed out of trouble.
Sadly, I would not make a similar trip today.
And if you go into the heart of many of our major cities at night, you are literally taking your life into your hands.
Over the weekend, extremely violent clashes in Atlanta between police and Antifa activists made headlines all over the nation…
On Saturday night, Antifa members took to the streets of Atlanta to throw rocks at and light fires outside of the Atlanta Police Foundation after the now-suspended Atlanta Forest Twitter account called for a “night of rage” following the fatal shooting of one of their members, 26-year-old Manuel Esteban Paez Teran.
The Post Millennial Editor-at-Large Andy Ngo tweeted, “Breaking: Far-left extremists & #Antifa gathering for revenge against law enforcement in #Atlanta over the killing of their gunman at their autonomous zone smashed up businesses & set an @Atlanta_Police vehicle on fire.”
This sort of thing has become increasingly common, but we keep being told that all of this is perfectly normal.
And even though we were literally watching footage of the police vehicle that Antifa had just set on fire, the mainstream media just kept insisting that what we were witnessing in Atlanta were “mostly peaceful” protests.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1617168065908834305
"Largely peaceful protest"
Ignore the cop car on fire in the background pic.twitter.com/mcRl0musaX
— AntifaWatch (@AntifaWatch2) January 22, 2023
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1616994446352187394
Yes, it was all so very peaceful.
So there is absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
In fact, if you live in Atlanta you may want to try one of the downtown restaurants for a late dinner tonight.
To me, the kicker was that some of the rioters that were arrested actually had explosives on them…
A protest in downtown Atlanta over a police shooting turned into a riot on Saturday night, as hooligans attacked the office tower home to the Atlanta Police Foundation, damaged other structures, and torched a police vehicle. Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens told reporters police arrested six people — and some of the ones arrested had explosives.
Since they are leftist protesters, they have likely already been released on bail, and the charges against them will probably be quietly dropped in a few weeks when nobody will notice.
But the even bigger story is how rapidly our society is degenerating now.
We have been warned for years that our major cities were degenerating into crime-ridden, drug-infested hellholes, and at this point no rational person can deny what is happening.
The United States was once a beacon of light for the rest of the world, but now we have become a cautionary tale.
We are showing everyone precisely what not to do, and conditions in our streets just continue to get even worse with each passing day.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “End Times” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written six other books that are available on Amazon.com including “7 Year Apocalypse”, “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending copies as gifts to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
I have published thousands of articles on The Economic Collapse Blog, End Of The American Dream and The Most Important News, and the articles that I publish on those sites are republished on dozens of other prominent websites all over the globe. I always freely and happily allow others to republish my articles on their own websites, but I also ask that they include this “About the Author” section with each article. The material contained in this article is for general information purposes only, and readers should consult licensed professionals before making any legal, business, financial or health decisions.
I encourage you to follow me on social media on Facebook and Twitter, and any way that you can share these articles with others is definitely a great help. These are such troubled times, and people need hope. John 3:16 tells us about the hope that God has given us through Jesus Christ: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” If you have not already done so, I strongly urge you to invite Jesus Christ to be your Lord and Savior today.
Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
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.