War is an “unpleasant business.” That two-word euphemism reflects the divergent experiences of two separate groups: those who profit from violence and those who experience violence firsthand. For anyone in the latter group, war is hell. That’s how Civil War general William Tecumseh Sherman described it, and he was an expert in the subject. He set everything ablaze on his marches through the South. Scorched-earth conquests are meant to break the spirit of opposing soldiers and civilians alike, and Sherman broke everything in his sight.
Sherman’s effectiveness in demoralizing Southerners influenced military minds around the world and shifted military war planning toward tactics that would define the “total wars” to come. Psychological warfare, industrial sabotage, the destruction of civilian infrastructure, and even the targeting of noncombatants became standard practices of war in the twentieth century. The First Great War introduced the terrors of trench warfare, mustard gas, mechanized weaponry, and widespread use of explosives that left many survivors permanently “shell-shocked.” Civilians faced their own horrors as the slaughter of livestock and ruination of farmland spawned famine and disease.
When hostilities officially ended on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month, nations around the world marked the cessation of atrocities with annual observances on November 11, known as Armistice Day or Remembrance Day. For years, people not only took time to remember those who had died during the Great War, but also took time to remember the terrifying carnage. Because the violence and death of WWI were so horrendous, survivors wanted to make sure future generations would never walk down the same terrible path.
The unthinkable could be avoided only if people thought about the horrors of war; the indescribable could be prevented only by describing the evils of war in detail. In the United States, successive presidents issued annual proclamations reminding Americans of everything that had been lost during the Great War, and in May of 1938, Congress made November 11 an official holiday. In the statutory text, lawmakers designated Armistice Day as “a day to be dedicated to the cause of world peace.” World War II was in full swing sixteen months later.
After a second global conflict that mass-produced death on a scale never before seen — including through the firebombing of entire cities and the annihilative power of nuclear weapons — a kind of nihilism ate away at the souls of survivors. In the United States, Armistice Day was eventually replaced with Veterans’ Day — a wonderful occasion to remember the sacrifices of all service members, but an inversion of Armistice Day’s original intent nonetheless. Rather than reminding survivors of the horrors of war and dedicating Americans’ efforts toward “the cause of world peace,” Veterans’ Day proffers a patriotic message that subtly encourages the uninitiated to march off to war, too.
Eighty years after WWII and over a century since the conclusion of a conflict so savage and awful that witnesses simply called it the “Great War” out of an expectation that there could never possibly be another so vile, we sit on the precipice of a third world war that will eclipse the twentieth century’s mass slaughter. Some military historians believe that war has already begun. They have plenty of evidence: the Hamas terror attacks on Israeli civilians, Israel’s defensive response in Gaza and the broader region, Iran’s nuclear brinkmanship and proxy wars throughout the Middle East, the fall of Bashar Assad’s Syria and the ongoing Christian genocide, the Russia-Ukraine War, civil wars raging in parts of Africa and Asia, rebellions brewing in parts of Europe, North Korea’s saber-rattling, China’s advanced preparations for seizing Taiwan, and the hybrid warfare now common between the Chinese Communist Party and the United States.
Some forty countries are today in a state of armed conflict. Many other countries, such as China and the United States, are directly funding or arming sides in those conflicts. With fewer than two hundred sovereign nations in the world, that means somewhere between twenty and twenty-five percent of the planet is already fighting. We are one Franz Ferdinand assassination away — one flick of the infernal lighter — from global conflagration and a level of bloodshed never witnessed by anyone alive today. One military miscalculation, one technical snafu, one errant drone, one stupid provocation, or one unmeasured response could send the world spiraling toward chaos.
We have not sufficiently remembered the last two global wars, and because we have forgotten that war is hell, we are galloping toward the Devil’s gates too fast to heed Dante’s eternal warning atop Inferno’s entrance: “Abandon every hope, who enter here.”
What makes this moment in history particularly dangerous is that so many weak and unserious global “leaders” seem to believe that foreign wars will save them from domestic problems. For nearly a century, Canada and Western Europe have depended upon the United States to provide for their actual defense. During that time, they have declared “war” on all the wrong things: “global warming,” “hate speech,” secure borders, patriotism, dissent, Western civilization. They’ve gotten really good at fighting ideas. They punish citizens who reject man-made “climate change” for the “crime” of “denying Science.” They jail citizens who object to mass immigration for engaging in “illegal speech.” They censor political dissent. The United Kingdom is excellent at imprisoning Christians who silently pray. Western governments love waging “war” on their own peoples, and persecuting unarmed civilians has apparently convinced some of these tyrants that they would excel at the real thing. Or at least they believe that it makes sense to send unhappy citizens off to foreign battlefields before those citizens decide to overthrow oppressive governments at home.
The U.K.’s Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron talk of war with Russia like prep school boys who got beat up at recess and now want to prove their toughness to the world. Germany is openly calling for the return of mass conscription. Glossy magazine covers picturing young Germans wearing combat uniforms implore teenagers to fight for “New Germany.” What is “New Germany”? It’s a “woke” world of “political correctness,” censorship, and Christian persecution, where socially conscious soldiers are expected to take up arms “to defend diversity.” Forget fighting for freedom, free speech, patriotism, or any other antiquated “obsession” of the “fringe far-right.” “Climate change” warriors who despise their own countrymen for being “systemically racist” are now the very model of a modern major-general!
Unserious people start wars, and unserious leaders end nations. Europe is filled with an unhealthy supply of both.
While European politicians inch closer to waging war directly with Russia over Ukraine’s thirty-year-old borders, perhaps it’s worth remembering who Ukraine’s leaders are. A former adviser to holdover-president Volodymyr Zelensky says Ukraine has a secret last-ditch doomsday plan that involves blowing up all of their nuclear power plants in an act of self-destruction that would make the Chernobyl disaster look minuscule by comparison. Calling Zelensky and his senior staff “a group of deranged people,” the whistleblower explains the suicidal rationale as “we all bite the dust, but so will they.” European governments wish to conscript boys and girls and send them off to war to defend Ukrainian madmen who would scorch their own country — and irradiate much of the continent.
If nobody lives, no problem! In an effort to mitigate Ukraine’s demographic death spiral after sacrificing the country’s healthy, young men, business leaders want to relocate more than eight million migrants from Africa and Asia to provide cheap labor for all the post-war rebuilding. That’s nearly twenty percent of Ukraine’s population. As Raheem Kassam warned last year, Ukraine will soon be Europe’s “first African nation.” Now, that’s a model Germany, France, and the U.K. would love to follow!
Western globalists seem to enjoy the “unpleasant business” of war. They won’t find hell so satisfying.
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.