(End of the American Dream)—Have you noticed that the mainstream media is suddenly full of very alarming stories about H5N1? When hundreds of millions of birds were dying because of the bird flu, the mainstream media didn’t seem to care very much, and so most people in the general population didn’t seem to care very much. Then the bird flu started infecting lots of mammals all over the globe, and the mainstream media still didn’t seem to care very much. But now here we are in the middle of 2024, and the mainstream media has suddenly decided to ramp up the fear level.
Even though there has only been one confirmed human case in the U.S. so far this year, the mainstream media is pumping out article after article about the threat that H5N1 could potentially pose to humanity. Do they know something that the rest of us do not?
It is quite true that if a version of H5N1 comes along that can spread easily from human to human, the death toll could be catastrophic.
Are we on the verge of seeing that happen?
The New York Times is reporting that H5N1 “has acquired dozens of new mutations”, and apparently some of them “may make it more adept at spreading between species”…
The bird flu virus sweeping across dairy farms in multiple states has acquired dozens of new mutations, including some that may make it more adept at spreading between species and less susceptible to antiviral drugs, according to a new study.
I don’t like the sound of that at all.
Researchers are telling us that the bird flu “acquired mutations in late 2023 that allowed it to jump from wild birds to cattle in the Texas Panhandle”…
In the new study, the researchers collected samples containing virus from 26 dairy farms in eight states. Cows are not typically susceptible to this type of influenza, but H5N1 appears to have acquired mutations in late 2023 that allowed it to jump from wild birds to cattle in the Texas Panhandle, the researchers said.
The virus then appears to have spread on dairy farms from Texas to Kansas, Michigan and New Mexico. In at least a dozen instances since then, H5N1 has also spilled from cows back into wild birds, and into poultry, domestic cats and a raccoon.
This is a very chilling development.
In the past, the bird flu would appear for a while and then go away.
But for the past couple of years it has been wiping out millions upon millions of birds all over the planet with no end in sight.
From this point forward, will H5N1 also be a permanent threat to our cattle population?
Needless to say, that could represent a very serious threat to our food supply.
Even more alarming is the fact that the strain of H5N1 that a dairy worker in Texas caught reportedly had “a mutation that allowed it to infect people more efficiently”…
The only person to have been diagnosed with bird flu during the current outbreak carried a virus with a mutation that allowed it to infect people more efficiently. One cow in the study also carried H5N1 with that mutation. More than 200 others were infected with versions of the virus bearing a different mutation that offers the same advantage.
Why are we only learning about this now?
And what is going to happen if this mutation which enables H5N1 to “infect people more efficiently” starts spreading among wild animals all over the nation?
The New York Times is making it sound like we really could be on the brink of a major outbreak among humans.
Thankfully, the dairy worker in Texas that caught this version of the bird flu did not die, but he did experience “bleeding in his eyeballs”…
The first image of a Texas farm worker infected with bird flu from a cow shows he suffered bleeding in his eyeballs.
It is thought to be the first known case of mammal-to-human transmission and comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) warned bird flu (H5N1) viruses “pose pandemic potential.”
The dairy worker attended a hospital in March after experiencing painful red, weeping eyes with burst blood vessels.
Even more disturbing, some of the cats that consumed raw milk from infected dairy cows in Texas experienced “brain hemorrhaging” and “blindness”.
Is this new version of H5N1 also able to cause “brain hemorrhaging” and “blindness” in humans? Hopefully authorities will have some answers for us soon.
What we do know is that viral fragments are getting into our milk supply.
In fact, the FDA discovered that viral fragments were in approximately one out of every five samples of grocery store milk that they tested…
Tests by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of retail milk samples might give some indication of how widespread the virus is. The agency found viral fragments in one in five samples of commercial milk, although this virus had been deactivated by pasteurization so was not infectious.
The good news is that it appears that the pasteurization process appears to kill the bird flu.
But authorities are warning that raw milk could contain the virus…
At the moment, scientists are focusing on raw milk as a risk factor for transmission to humans. While H5N1 infections in poultry usually result in respiratory illnesses, in cattle the virus seems to mainly target mammary glands, which might explain the high amount of virus found in raw milk from infected cows.
Until we know more, I think that it would be very wise to avoid drinking any raw milk for the foreseeable future.
You do not want to get this disease.
According to the WHO, since 2003 there have been 888 confirmed human cases.
Of those, 463 have died.
But as long as humans are only catching this virus from other mammals, we probably will not see a major global outbreak.
However, if a strain comes along that can spread easily from human to human, we are going to have a massive problem on our hands and the level of fear that we will witness will be off the charts.
I do not know how this particular story will end, but I am entirely convinced that we have entered an era when great pestilences will be very common.
So let us hope for the best, but let us also get prepared for the worst.
The past several years have demonstrated what fear of a disease can do, and H5N1 has the potential to absolutely dwarf anything that we have experienced up to this point.
Michael’s new book entitled “Chaos” is 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.