(End of the American Dream)—If the Chinese decide to pull the trigger on an invasion of Taiwan, it will instantly become the biggest news story in the entire world. Because the moment that an invasion of Taiwan begins, the United States and China will be at war and nothing will ever be the same again. Of course the Chinese would not consider an attack on Taiwan to be an invasion of a foreign country. The Chinese consider Taiwan to be part of their territory just like we consider Florida or Texas to be part of our territory.
For a long time, the communist Chinese government had hoped to “reunify” with Taiwan peacefully, but now it has become clear that is never going to happen. The Taiwanese government continues to boldly declare that Taiwan is not part of China, and the Biden administration recently approved a 500 million dollar arms sale that is intended to help them prepare for a potential invasion. Needless to say, this arms sale greatly infuriated China, and it appears that the Chinese are gearing up for a big move.
In fact, Fox News is reporting that the Chinese are “continuously massing forces at its coastal military bases facing Taiwan”…
China is continuously massing forces at its coastal military bases facing Taiwan, the self-governing island warned Tuesday.
Taiwan said it is bolstering its own defenses in response. The island’s Defense Ministry issued a report on the expansion of Chinese airfields and military activity on Taiwan’s doorstep, saying China has begun probing Taiwan’s territory on a near-daily basis.
“This year, the Chinese Communist Party has aggressively expanded its armaments and continued to build various types of fighter jets and drones,” Maj. Gen. Huang Wen-Chi said of the report. “The information we have received is that all important military bases along the coast … are being continuously updated.”
This doesn’t mean that the Chinese will invade right away.
But they are obviously preparing for something huge.
And the Chinese have also been regularly probing Taiwan’s defenses.
On Thursday, China sent 10 naval vessels and 68 military aircraft toward the island…
Dozens of Chinese warplanes and 10 navy ships were detected around Taiwan, the Ministry of National Defense said yesterday, after warning that Beijing was conducting air and sea drills in the western Pacific.
Ten Chinese naval vessels and 68 aircraft were detected near the nation between 6am on Wednesday and 6am yesterday, the ministry said in a statement.
Forty of the aircraft had crossed the median line of the Taiwan Strait and entered the southwest or southeast air defense identification zone (ADIZ), it said.
If my assessment of the situation is correct, I don’t believe that the Chinese will invade Taiwan right now.
But I do believe that an invasion is coming.
And U.S. military officials have been warning us over and over again about the possibility of such a conflict.
On Monday, Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall had some very ominous things to say about China…
Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall on Monday warned that China was building up its military to prepare for a potential war with the U.S., and he said America must optimize its forces to counter the rising threat.
Speaking at the Air and Space Forces Association Warfighter Symposium at National Harbor, Md., Kendall said the U.S. must be ready for a “kind of war we have no modern experience with,” though he stressed “war is not inevitable.”
“Our job is to deter that war and to be ready to win if it occurs,” Kendall said. “We’re all talking about the fact that the Air and Space Forces must change, or we could fail to prevent and might even lose a war.”
A decade ago, a war with China was unthinkable.
But now a war with China is a very serious threat, and U.S. Air Force officials want a lot more funding so that they can build air bases all over the Pacific…
The U.S. Air Force is finding ways to increase the number of airfields it can take off from in the Pacific—and wants more money to build out airfields and rebuild overgrown WWII airfields.
Adding bases is key to the service’s Agile Combat Employment concept, or ACE, which aims to keep combat aircraft flying despite enemy attacks, Gen. Kenneth Wilsbach, Pacific Air Forces Commander, told reporters Monday at the Air & Space Forces Association’s annual Air, Space & Cyber conference.
The Air Force is currently clearing out a jungle on Tinian, a small island near Guam that was home to the largest B-29 bomber base during World War II and more recently has hosted ACE exercises.
Meanwhile, the war in Ukraine just continues to escalate.
This week, the Ukrainians used British-made cruise missiles to attack Russian warships that were sitting at the port of Sevastopol…
Ukraine unleashed a barrage of ten cruise missiles along with kamikaze drones in a massive assault on Russia’s powerful Black Sea Fleet.
Vladimir Putin’s forces were rocked as a submarine and an assault ship were blasted during the onslaught on the Crimean port of Sevastopol.
British-made Storm Shadow missiles and explosive-packed drone boats are believed to have been used in the biggest attack of its kind on the fleet – marking the first time such weapons have been used in Crimea.
Shocking footage showed huge plumes of smoke and flames seen for miles around rising from the blitzed base. It is the latest blow to embattled Putin’s war effort – and was a major embarrassment for Vlad as he sat down with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un some 5,500 miles away.
When the Ukrainians use western-made weapons to strike targets deep inside Russian territory, the Russians consider us to be responsible for those attacks too. We may not have fired those weapons, but we certainly gave them to the Ukrainians with the intention that they would be used in such a manner.
Giving the Ukrainians weapons that could potentially cause the hot phase of World War III to erupt is a very dangerous thing to do, because the Ukrainians are not exactly rational.
UKRAINE NIGHTLY NEWS * pic.twitter.com/lLhKP0OATM
— The_Real_Fly (@The_Real_Fly) September 13, 2023
We should be trying to find a way to end the conflict in Ukraine, because if we do get into a direct shooting war with Russia that will be a nightmare scenario.
Unfortunately, leaders all over the world have come down with a really bad case of war fever.
The Russians are constantly provoking us, and we are constantly provoking the Russians.
In fact, it is being reported that the “biggest military exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War” will be conducted very close to the Russian border in early 2024…
The upcoming Steadfast Defender NATO war drills, set for early 2024, are expected to be the biggest military exercises in Europe since the end of the Cold War, the Financial Times is reporting Monday.
At a moment the war in Ukraine grows more and more unpredictable, given neither Russia nor the West have shown any signs of backing down, the FT writes that “Nato is preparing its biggest live joint command exercise since the cold war next year, assembling more than 40,000 troops to practice how the alliance would attempt to repel Russian aggression against one of its members.”
Holding those exercises so close to Russia is not a good idea at all.
But it is going to happen anyway.
Earlier today, I came across a very odd story about some very foolish tourists that decided to sprint toward a mother bear and her two cubs…
A shocking video of tourists sprinting towards a bear at Yellowstone National Park has gone viral and prompted backlash on social media.
The clip shows a mother black bear and her two cubs sniffing around in the grass, alongside a road full of queuing cars.
Suddenly, a group of tourists jump out of their vehicles, point, and then begin to sprint towards the bears.
There are four men running, one of whom appears to be carrying a toddler in his arms, while a woman comes into shot approaching the animals with a camera.
What an incredibly stupid thing to do.
If a mother bear feels like her cubs are being threatened, she will do anything she feels is necessary to defend them.
Those tourists are very fortunate that they were not killed.
Unfortunately, we are doing a similar thing with the Russian Bear.
Instead of interacting with Russia shrewdly, we are sprinting toward conflict.
Joe Biden and his minions may truly believe that being “tough” with Russia is the right thing to do, but if they miscalculate and a nuclear war erupts it could result in the deaths of literally billions of people.
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.
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.