(The Epoch Times)—Are you seeking social connection in these post-lockdown times of fragmentation, disorientation, sadness, economic loss, and ill-health?
You are not alone. It’s a problem all over the world. Three years ago, our social, economic, political, and cultural institutions were shattered by a central decree. The key edict came from the World Health Organization (WHO). The date was Jan. 30, 2020. The WHO was thrilled how China was responding to the virus by shattering the lives of its citizens. It told the entire world of the CCP’s miracle cure!
The WHO, said an official communique, “believes that it is still possible to interrupt virus spread, provided that countries put in place strong measures to detect disease early, isolate and treat cases, trace contacts, and promote social distancing measures commensurate with the risk.”
The entire world, wrote the WHO, should embrace a “spirit of support and appreciation for China, its people, and the actions China has taken on the front lines of this outbreak, with transparency, and, it is to be hoped, with success.” Cheers to China, said the WHO, because it is “setting a new standard.”
And so the CCP welded doors of apartments shut and an entire city was turned into a prison in the name of virus control. Suicides and despair followed, along with population-wide terror. A month later, the government proclaimed that it had beat the virus.
The WHO was thrilled, and so it set up a special junket for health officials from the United States, Europe, and the UK. This took place Feb. 16–24, 2020. The chartered flight to see the glories of the CCP miracle included Anthony Fauci’s deputy assistant. The report came in with nothing but rave reviews.
“At the individual level, the Chinese people have reacted to this outbreak with courage and conviction. They have accepted and adhered to the starkest of containment measures — whether the suspension of public gatherings, the month-long ‘stay at home’ advisories or prohibitions on travel.”
This one report should have been enough to discredit the WHO forever, and prompt its instant abolition. Instead, the report issued on Feb. 24, 2020, became an instruction manual for the entire world, including the United States. Three days later, the New York Times was calling for nationwide lockdowns. Two weeks later, the Trump administration ordered that “public and private venues where people gather should be closed.”
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We know the rest of the tragedy. Businesses, schools, churches, families, and communities were wrecked, and not just for two weeks but for a year or two or more. Looking back the goal was always to buy time to get the entire population pumped with mRNA shots delivered through lipid nanoparticles. Governments around the world used all their power to make it so.
And the effect? I’m sure you have your own stories. The sadness, demoralization, ill-health, mental illness, learning loss, and psychological sense of damage are everywhere in evidence.
Every report reveals this. It proves impossible to exaggerate the carnage. You think kids lost one year of education? Maybe two? It is getting worse. How bad is it overall and when has it been this way? The figures on reading and math show that the U.S. is set back at least two decades in progress on educational outcomes.
It’s impossible to name the worst of it since it is all awful. But loneliness certainly ranks high. Friend groups were wrecked. Not being allowed to meet for many months dissolved them. When they tried to reconstitute, they split over masking. When they tried again, they broke up over vaccines. Top health officials were urging people to exclude family members from gatherings if they were unvaccinated.
Daily I hear from people with deeply tragic stories. I spent yesterday in the beautiful and mysterious town of Tepoztlán, Mexico, meeting with a group of people who found refuge here from lockdowns. Mexico was open in those days. Even this town had its own lockdowns but they were brief. The many thousands of people who moved here include people from all over Europe, the UK, Israel, and the United States. Each has an amazing story of tragedy and triumph, and everyone is working to rebuild a life.
It’s true in your town too, as you well know. Everyone of all ages is trying to find a new path.
It’s with this backdrop that I just learned of a new initiative from the World Health Organization. And this one you simply will not believe. It is seeking new powers, new funding, and a new mandate to cure your loneliness. It’s just not possible to make this stuff up.
The headline is “WHO launches commission to foster social connection.” The commission will “address loneliness as a pressing health threat, promote social connection as a priority and accelerate the scaling up of solutions in countries of all incomes.”
What great experts are on this commission?
- Vivek Murthy (co-chair), Surgeon General, United States
- Chido Mpemba (co-chair), Youth Envoy, African Union Commission
- Ayuko Kato, Minister in charge of measures for Loneliness and Isolation, Japan
- Khalid Ait Taleb, Minister of Health and Social Protection, Morocco
- Jakob Forssmed, Minister for Health and Social Affairs, Sweden
- Ximena Aguilera Sanhueza, Minister of Health, Chile
- Cleopa Mailu, Permanent Representative to the U.N., Kenya
- Ralph Regenvanu, Minister of Climate Change, Vanuatu
- Haben Girma, Deaf Blind Advocate and Activist, United States
- Hina Jilani, Elder and Human Rights Lawyer, Pakistan
- Karen Desalvo, Chief Health Officer, Google, United States
Wait, don’t tell me that you have doubts that Vanuatu’s Minister of Climate Change will be able to assist in mitigating your loneliness? Surely not! Well, whatever limits he may encounter can surely be addressed by the Chief Health Officer of Google. Right?
It is intriguing that only one member of the commission is associated with a privately owned business, and that business happens to be Google. Google has been carrying water for the WHO now for at least four years. Its own YouTube platform has specifically said that it will delete any video that offers health policy commentary which contradicts the WHO. That’s essentially an announcement that the company has fully integrated itself with global government.
It’s so brazen now that they don’t think they need to hide it anymore.
So what will the WHO do about our loneliness? The press release says: “The Commission on Social Connection, supported by a Secretariat based at WHO, will hold its first leadership-level meeting from 6 to 8 December 2023. The first major output will be a flagship report released by the mid-point of the three-year initiative.”
Wonderful! So they will meet in a few weeks. It will surely be a wonderful occasion socially lubricated by chartered flights, champagne, caviar, and plenty of extremely charming small talk. Then in a year and a half, and after many emails and Zoom follow-ups, they will issue their first report.
Their final report is due in 2026 wherein they will make some recommendations.
If you are lonely, rest assured that in three years, the World Health Organization will issue a report. The experts will have spoken! The very people who wrecked the world will be charged with fixing the problem.
The absurdity of this entire cartoon-like scenario is so preposterous that not even the promoters and participants can really take it seriously. They are just trolling us now, underscoring to anyone paying attention that they have no regrets and only intend more of the same. The lockdowns will continue until morale improves.
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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.