Jeremiah Babe, 8/17/26
"This Can Get Bad Real Fast -
Japan's $620 Billion Selloff Of US Equities Would Be Catastrophic"
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So, we rise from the rubble...
StatCounter
Monday, August 17, 2026
"Alert! This Will Get Ugly Fast! Stockpile as Much Food as You Can Now!"
Full screen recommended.
Canadian Prepper, 8/17/26
"Alert! This Will Get Ugly Fast!
Stockpile as Much Food as You Can Now!"
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Musical Interlude: Yanni & Samvel Yervinyan, "Until The Last Moment"
Full screen recommended.
Yanni & Samvel Yervinyan, "Until The Last Moment"
"From Stardust to Sapiens: A Stunning Serenade to Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation"
Our Cosmic Origins and Our Ongoing Self-Creation"
By Maria Popova
"We were never promised any of it - this world of cottonwoods and clouds - when the Big Bang set the possible in motion. And yet here we are, atoms with consciousness, each of us a living improbability forged of chaos and dead stars. Children of chance, we have made ourselves into what we are - creatures who can see a universe of beauty in the feather of a bird and can turn a blind eye to each other’s suffering, creatures capable of the Benedictus and the bomb. Creatures who hope.
A generation after Maya Angelou held up a cosmic mirror to humanity with “A Brave and Startling Truth,” Pattiann Rogers - who writes with uncommon virtuosity about the intersection of the cosmic and the human, and whose poems have therefore been a frequent presence in "The Universe in Verse" - offers a poignant cosmogony of our self-creation in the stunning final poem of her book "Flickering" (public library).
Full screen recommended.
"Homo Sapiens: Creating Themselves"
by Pattiann Rogers, Read by Maria Popova
I.
"Formed in the black-light center of a star-circling
galaxy; formed in whirlpool images of froth
and flume and fulcrum; in the center image of herring
circling like pieces of silver swirling fast, a shoaling
circle of deception; in the whirlpool perfume of sex
in the deepest curve of a lily’s soft corolla. Created
within the images of the creator’s creation.
Born with the same grimacing wrench of a tree-covered
cliff split wide suddenly by lightning and opened
to thundering clouds of hail and rain.
Cured in the summer sun as if in a potter’s oven,
polished like a stone rolled by a river, emboldened
by the image of the expanse beyond earth’s horizon,
inside and outside a circumference in the image
of freedom.
Given the image of starlight clusters steadily silent
above a hillside-silence of fallen snow… let there be sleep.
II.
Inheriting from the earth’s scrambling minions,
images of thorn and bur, fang and claw, stealth,
deceit, poison, camouflage, blade, and blood…
let there be suffering, let there be survival.
Shaped by the image of the onset and unstoppable
devouring eclipse of the sun, the tempestuous, ecliptic
eating of the moon, the volcanic explosions of burning
rocks and fiery hail of ashes to death… let there be
terror and tears. Let there be pity.
Created in the image of fear inside a crawfish
skittering backward through a freshwater stream
with all eight appendages in perfect coordination,
both pincers held high, backing into safety beneath
a fallen leaf refuge… let there be home.
III.
Made in the image of the moon, where else
would the name of ivory rock craters shine
except in our eyes… let there be language.
Displayed in the image of the rotting seed
on the same stem with the swelling blossom…
let there be hope.
Homo sapiens creating themselves after the manner
and image of the creator’s ongoing creation — slowly,
eventual, alert and imagined, composing, dissembling,
until the right chord sounds from one brave strum
of the right strings reverberating, fading away
like evening… let there be pathos, let there be
compassion, forbearance, forgiveness. Let there be
weightless beauty.
Of earth and sky, Homo sapiens creating themselves,
following the mode and model of the creator’s creation,
particle by particle, quest by quest, witness by witness,
even though the unknown far away and the unknown
nearby be seen and not seen… let there be goodwill
and accounting, let there be praise resounding."
Complement with astronomer-poet Rebecca Elson’s ode to dark matter and the mystery of being, “Let There Always Be Light,” non-speaking autistic poet Hannah Emerson’s astonishing “Center of the Universe,” and Jane Hirshfield’s “To Be a Person,” then revisit Pattiann Rogers’s harmonic of the human and cosmic perspectives, read by David Byrne and illustrated by Maira Kalman."
"A Look to the Heavens"
"Slide your telescope just east of the Lagoon Nebula to find this alluring field of view in the rich starfields of the constellation Sagittarius toward the central Milky Way. Of course the Lagoon nebula is also known as M8, the eighth object listed in Charles Messier's famous catalog of bright nebulae and star clusters.
Click image for larger size.
Close on the sky but slightly fainter than M8, this complex of nebulae was left out of Messier's list though. It contains obscuring dust, striking red emission and blue reflection nebulae of star-forming region NGC 6559 at right. Like M8, NGC 6559 is located about 5,000 light-years away along the edge of a large molecular cloud. At that distance, this telescopic frame nearly 3 full moons wide would span about 130 light-years."
"Still Walking Beside You"
Full screen recommended.
"Still Walking Beside You"
"There's something nobody tells you about a long love. It doesn't live in the moments you planned for. Not the anniversaries, not the milestones. It lives in the walk you took without thinking about it. The hand reached for in the dark. The silence on a long drive that needed no words at all. A whole life together can look quiet from the outside. That's usually when it's everything. I hope this finds you on a day when you can still reach over. And I hope you do."
"Your Shadow Knows the Truth "
Full screen recommended.
Delta King's Blues,
"Your Shadow Knows the Truth "
"A reputation is what people think about you. Character is what follows you home. "Your Shadow Knows the Truth" is an original Delta blues song about integrity, quiet character, and the simple truth that no amount of praise can silence your own conscience. Led by warm resonator guitar, soulful harmonica, and the seasoned voice of Delta Blues Brother, this song reminds us that the hardest person to deceive is ourselves. This is the blues of character. "You can fool the whole wide world... not the man you meet each day."
"How to Stop Collecting Regrets Before It Is Too Late"
Full screen recommended.
Native Elder,
"How to Stop Collecting Regrets Before It Is Too Late"
The Daily "Near You?"
Kuala Lumpur, Wilayah Persekutuan Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
Thanks for stopping by!
"The World Is Running A Huge Oil Deficit, The SPR Hits A 4 Decade Low, And Diesel Shortages Are Looming"
by Michael Snyder
"The world is barreling toward a historic energy crunch that will be unlike anything that we have ever seen before. When fighting with Iran erupted earlier this year, the global economy was absolutely swimming in oil. We literally had far more oil than we needed, but now commercial inventories have gotten extremely tight and national reserves are alarmingly low. If the Strait of Hormuz does not get reopened soon, we will quickly enter an immensely painful chapter of the global energy crisis. Energy prices will shoot way up and shortages will start to become a major issue. In fact, a global scramble for supplies of diesel fuel has already begun.
Right now the world is consuming far more oil than it is producing. We have been running an enormous oil deficit for months, and the amount of oil that is coming out of the Persian Gulf is running at about half of pre-war levels… Wall Street analysts – who use ship tracking services like Kpler and Windward Intelligence, among many other data points, to provide estimates about oil flows – have said oil tankers have been getting roughly 4 million barrels of oil out of the Persian Gulf each day.
In addition to the roughly 7 million barrels per day that Middle Eastern countries have rerouted around the strait through pipelines and other methods, about 11 or 12 million barrels have been flowing out, according to the tracking services. That’s significantly lower than the 20 million barrels per day that the region had exported before the Iran war started.
We have been able to operate normally all this time because there was a tremendous amount of excess oil sitting around. But now somewhere between 1.5 and 1.9 billion barrels of excess oil have disappeared…Global inventories are between 1.5 billion and 1.9 billion barrels lower now than they were at the start of the war, depending on who’s estimating. Massive crude stockpiles before the war helped prevent catastrophe when supply dried up.
Commercial oil inventories are exceedingly tight at this stage. The good news is that there is still some extra oil remaining in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The bad news is that the amount of oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve is now so low that we risk doing permanent damage if we continue to drain the salt caverns where the oil is stored…
The caverns that hold the U.S. strategic oil reserve could get damaged by the rapid release of stockpiles in response to the Iran war, experts warned this week as inventories hit a four-decade low. Damage to the caverns would make it more difficult to respond to future energy emergencies, the experts said. The oil in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, or SPR, is stored at 60 salt caverns thousands of feet underground at four major sites along the Gulf Coast in Louisiana and Texas.
300 million barrels is considered to be a danger point by many industry insiders. We have now gone beyond that level…The SPR has tumbled below 300 million barrels for the first time since it was filled in the early 1980s, according to Department of Energy data released Monday. Inventories are depleting as the U.S. releases 172 million barrels in response to the supply disruption caused by the Iran war. The SPR will sit at around 243 million barrels after the drawdown is finished.
To extract oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, operators pump water into the bottom of the underground caverns. This pushes the crude oil to the surface and into the pipelines. However, the caverns must always maintain a strict minimum of 70 million barrels. This cushion keeps the extraction pipes safely submerged in oil instead of drawing up water.
Officials in Washington are insisting that we can safely keep removing oil out of the SPR until we reach the 70 million barrel mark. But one expert is warning that such a claim is “nonsense”…“Don’t believe the people out of the government that are saying the SPR can go to 70 million barrels. It’s nonsense,” Hochstein told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Thursday. At that level, the reserve would be depleted to “the point of never resurrecting it,” he said.
Depleting the reserve below 300 million barrels risks damage to the caverns, the former Biden administration official warned in June. “I don’t know anyone who believes we can go below 300,” Hochstein told CNBC’s Brian Sullivan at an Atlantic Council event. “I know plenty of people who think we can’t get near 300 because physically you will damage the caverns where the oil is stored.”
We have now gone under the 300 million barrel mark. And I think that we will continue to draw down the SPR because there is no much pressure to do so. But the clock is ticking. Eventually we won’t be able to get any more oil out of the SPR. What will we do then?
Will we start seeing lines at gasoline stations? That is precisely what we are witnessing in Russia right now. In fact, another wave of fuel shortages has just hit that nation…Fuel shortages have returned to some regions of Russia in August, prompting local authorities in at least 10 regions to again tighten controls on sales of motor fuel at petrol stations, according to authorities and regional media. Reuters witnesses reported on Monday that gasoline was once again unavailable at some fuel stations in the Moscow region, although diesel fuel was available at almost all stations. The fuel crisis, which began gaining momentum in May and by July had spread to almost all regions of Russia, follows the shutdown of several refineries hit in drone attacks and a seasonal rise in demand.
Russia is normally the second largest exporter of diesel fuel in the world. But now they are being forced to hoard what they have. So this is starting to make things very difficult in Europe and Asia. In fact, European countries are now scrambling to find sufficient supplies of diesel fuel…Diesel cargoes are costing more than jet fuel in Europe for the first time in more than a year, LSEG data showed, as the continent replaces lower Middle East air fuel shipments with other sources of supply, but struggles to secure more diesel for industry and agriculture.
Europe has been able to pull in jet cargoes from the U.S. and other countries like Nigeria as prices surged after the start of the Iran war, which disrupted crude and fuel supply. Global diesel supply tightened even further when Russia banned exports amid Ukrainian attacks on its refineries. “We see a higher risk of persistent scarcity pricing in diesel than in crude heading into winter,” analysts at Goldman Sachs said in a note.
We were warned that this would happen, and now it is happening. Here in the United States, diesel prices are really starting to spike… In the United States, the report said, diesel futures booked their sharpest rise since July on Monday, adding 7.4% to $4.19 per gallon. The average retail price for a gallon of diesel was $5.32 on Tuesday, according to AAA data. That was up from $4.88 per gallon a month ago and $3.71 per gallon a year ago. To put it mildly, this is problematic.
Diesel is often referred to as the workhorse of any economy. Indeed, economies run on diesel, which is used for everything from freight transportation to farming, to heating during the winter. If diesel prices are consistently higher for an extended period of time, they will inevitably be passed on to consumers, fueling a more generalized inflation trend. We produce more diesel than anyone, and so for the moment we are okay. But higher diesel prices will directly affect the cost of living for every single one of us. And if the Strait of Hormuz does not get reopened, things will get a lot worse.
For now, the Iranians are insisting that the Strait of Hormuz will remain closed until President Trump agrees to every single one of their outrageous demands. President Trump can never do that, because giving in to every single one of their outrageous demands would make him look like an all-time loser. So it appears that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, and the global energy crisis is poised to greatly accelerate in the months ahead."
"Bank Of America & Walmart Issue Major Warnings"
Full screen recommended.
Snyder Reports, 8/17/26
"Bank Of America & Walmart Issue Major Warnings"
"Walmart, Bank of America, and TransUnion just raised the SAME red flag in the same week - and it's a warning most American households are about to feel. Walmart's CEO identified fuel prices as the single biggest "stress point" for consumers. Customers are now filling up with fewer than 10 gallons per visit, buying only a couple days' worth of groceries, and turning to Buy Now Pay Later just to cover food. Bank of America's own customer data confirms it: lower - and middle-income households are pulling back on discretionary spending, and their wage gains are barely covering the jump in gas prices. TransUnion sees the same strain from a third angle - consumer credit profiles. People have drained their savings, maxed their credit, and already tapped retirement accounts. There's no backup left."
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"The Looming Debt Crisis: Is America Following the Path of Collapsed Empires?"
"The Looming Debt Crisis: Is America
Following the Path of Collapsed Empires?"
by Nick Giambruno
"Debt can topple even the most powerful empires. Whether it’s Rome, Spain, France, Britain, or the Soviet Union, excessive debt has played a critical role in their decline. The typical pattern in these examples of collapsing empires is:
Stage #1: Empires achieve success and become overconfident.
Stage #2: Overconfidence leads to extravagant spending on luxuries and wars.
Stage #3: Empires finance this lavish spending by going into debt.
Stage #4: The debt grows to an unsustainable level and creates a crushing burden.
Stage #5: Empires finance the debt through taxation and currency debasement.
Stage #6: The populace bears the brunt of debt repayment as empires raise taxes and debase the currency - to the maximum extent - until it causes internal instability.
Stage #7: Empires cannot finance their militaries because of their debt burden. This is usually the tipping point.
Stage #8: Underfunded militaries plus internal instability make empires vulnerable to foreign invasion, domestic revolution, civil war, and other existential dangers.
Stage #9: The empire collapses.
Now, it’s the US Empire’s turn. The US federal government has the biggest debt in the history of the world. And it’s continuing to grow at a rapid, unstoppable pace. Annualized interest on the federal debt exceeded $1.2 trillion recently and is shooting higher at an exponential rate.
The federal debt’s annualized interest cost is already higher than the defense budget. It’s on track to exceed Social Security and become the BIGGEST item in the federal budget.
Historian Niall Ferguson summed it up nicely: "Any great power that spends more on debt service (interest payments on the national debt) than on defense will not stay great for very long. True of Habsburg Spain, true of ancien régime France, true of the Ottoman Empire, true of the British Empire, this law is about to be put to the test by the US beginning this very year."
Bonds, T-bills, and dividend stocks may still pay on schedule. But in today’s environment, the bigger question is whether that income is enough to preserve purchasing power.
Consider this:
1. The American populace is nearing its breaking point as taxation and inflation rise.
2. Interest on the federal debt exceeds defense spending and is set to become the BIGGEST expenditure, and it will keep growing from there.
As a result, the US Empire is somewhere between Stage #6 and #7 in the empire collapse pattern I described above. It is nearing the point where its crushing debt burden will make it difficult to finance existing military spending.
As we saw in the historical examples, a tipping point is reached once an empire’s debt burden becomes so great that it struggles to pay for its military. It’s like someone waving a big red flag. The US government will soon have to choose to:
1. Cut defense spending amid the most chaotic geopolitical period since WW2.
2. Default on its promises regarding Social Security, Medicare, Veterans’ Benefits, and welfare generally.
Though it may try, the US government cannot continue to pay for entitlements and defense even if their current levels stay flat into the future. But they won’t stay flat. Both are set to grow significantly in the years ahead. Tens of millions of Baby Boomers - about 20% of the population - will enter retirement in the coming years. Cutting Social Security and Medicare is a sure way to lose an election.
With the most precarious geopolitical situation since World War 2, defense spending is unlikely to be cut. Instead, defense spending is all but certain to increase. Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates recently said: "Barely staying even with inflation or worse is wholly inadequate. Significant additional resources for defense are necessary and urgent."
The most likely outcome is that the US will try to have its cake and eat it too by paying for both growing defense and domestic obligations via currency debasement. However, it will likely end up just like other powerful collapsed empires that preceded it - with an underfunded military and domestic instability.
The truth is that Trump cannot make America great again any more than Gorbachev could save the Soviet Union. Once an empire struggles to pay for its military, the decline is impossible to reverse.
Consider this. The Denarius - the Roman silver coin - lost nearly all its silver content between 180 and 280 AD. The US dollar has lost over 98% of its value against gold since 1971.
Just as the Roman citizens realized their government was defaulting on its promises to them through currency debasement, I am confident that Social Security and Medicare recipients and others who have been promised something from the US federal government will notice they are being paid in debased currency. They won’t be happy. Just as Roman soldiers realized they were being paid in debased currency, I am confident American soldiers will realize the same thing, and they won’t be happy either. In short, the US will soon reach the tipping point that has caused the collapse of other powerful empires.
Its crushing debt burden is nearing the point where it will cause the military to be underfunded and internal instability as average citizens bear the brunt of debt repayment through increased taxation, inflation, and broken promises on Social Security and other programs.
Remember, the interest expense is set to exceed Social Security and become the biggest item in the budget. It will only get bigger from there as the debt continues to grow at an unstoppable and exponential rate. Therefore, I don’t think it will be long before the exploding interest expense crowds out funding for defense, Social Security, and other domestic commitments. As that happens, I expect the US is headed for a disaster of historical proportions.
I am confident that the collapse of the US Empire, which has been in place since the end of WW2 - otherwise known as the US-led world order - could happen a lot sooner than most realize. The global geopolitical situation was already trending towards a multipolar world order. The US debt crisis is compounding its geopolitical problems and will accelerate this established trend. That means we’re likely to see the end of the US-led world order and the emergence of a multipolar world order in the not-so-distant future.
Many people will be unprepared for the collapse of the US Empire. However, when you look at the Big Picture, that is where I think we’re headed. And just like the collapse of previous empires, debt will play a significant role. When private businesses go bankrupt, shareholders get wiped out. When governments go bankrupt, those who hold its fiat currency get wiped out.
Given the historical examples, one thing I think we can be sure of is that the US government will try to service its debt costs with currency debasement, just like many empires that collapsed before it. That’s terrible news for the US dollar. The consequences of this debt crisis will extend far beyond geopolitics.
As the US government resorts to increasingly aggressive currency debasement to fund its obligations, the value of the dollar will continue to erode - and capital will seek refuge in scarce assets. Gold will likely be one of the primary beneficiaries. But silver could offer even greater speculative upside. Silver is a tiny market. During periods of monetary stress, even a modest influx of investment demand can overwhelm available supply and send prices sharply higher."
"Life Is Inconvenient..."
"One of life's best coping mechanisms is to know the difference between an inconvenience and a problem. If you break your neck, if you have nothing to eat, if your house is on fire – then you’ve got a problem. Everything else is an inconvenience. Life is inconvenient. Life is lumpy. A lump in the oatmeal, a lump in the throat and a lump in the breast are not the same kind of lump. One needs to learn the difference."
- Robert Fulghum
"We All Know This Civilization Is Doomed, But They Keep Telling Us Everything's Normal"
"We All Know This Civilization Is Doomed,
But They Keep Telling Us Everything's Normal"
by Caitlin Johnstone
"Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions.
We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future.
We can all see the summers heating up. We can all see that there are fewer insects and less wildlife around than when we were young. We can all see that the western empire is on borrowed time. We can all see that younger generations are having much more difficulty affording housing and life expenses than their parents and grandparents. We can all see that technology has stagnated as capitalism’s innovation-for-profit model hits the limit of how far it can carry us as a species.
We can all see the apps, search engines, social media platforms and tech services getting shittier and shittier year by year. We can all see AI making everything worse and turning everyone into cognitive infants who can’t do anything for themselves while consistently failing to deliver what its proponents say it will deliver.
We can all see the people around us getting dumber, crazier and more miserable as we are pushed into dystopian conditions where everyone gets more and more alienated and must pay a monthly fee for the experience of connection.
We can all see that state authoritarianism is escalating in proportion to public discontent with the status quo. We all know we’re in a completely unsustainable situation. We all know we are riding a bus with disintegrating wheels. But it doesn’t get acknowledged by anyone at the top. The news reports are still about the latest celebrity gossip and whether the economy arrow is pointing up or down. The movies and shows are still about wacky and witty characters for whom capitalism is working perfectly fine. The politicians are still talking about culture war issues and the Evil Dictator of the Day.
It is taken as a given that our grandchildren will be living in more or less the same kind of world we are living in, when we all know there’s no way this is true. The wheels on the bus are coming off, boys and girls. The ride is near its end.
I’m not saying we’re all going to die, I’m just saying this civilization as it presently exists cannot possibly be sustained. Immensely drastic changes are coming up around the bend whether we like it or not, either by a deliberate transformation or by some cataclysmic event occurring against our will.
Life in the 2020s feels so spiritually dissonant because we all know this is the case, but all the sources we’ve been trained to look to for information and context are acting like everything’s perfectly fine. They’re painting a cheery picture over reality while every normal person is staring at the giant black cracks that keep appearing in the paint job.
Which tells you all you need to know about the competency of the people who are steering the bus. The people in charge are just going to keep driving this thing into the ground until there’s nothing left to save. If there’s going to be a world-saving revolution, it’s going to come from we ordinary people who are willing to acknowledge reality, not from the oligarchs and empire managers presently steering things who have been blinded by the pursuit of profit and power.
We either find some way to get their hands off the steering wheel and take control, or we find ourselves confronting the future horrors they’ve been discouraging us from thinking about while they drive us to our doom."
Dan, I Allegedly, "No More Beef!"
Full screen recommended.
Dan, I Allegedly, 8/17/26
"No More Beef!"
"Tyson Foods is closing major meat-processing facilities, thousands of workers are facing job losses, and the American beef industry is under enormous pressure. In this video, Dan breaks down the growing beef crisis, the rising cost of raising cattle, disappearing American farms, and why some experts say beef producers cannot charge enough to make the business profitable. Beef prices have already climbed dramatically, and the closure of processing plants could put even more pressure on consumers, farmers, ranchers, restaurants, and grocery stores. Filmed at the Santa Ana Elks annual car show and fundraiser, Dan looks beyond Tyson Foods at the bigger economic picture: the decline of American farms, rising food prices, small businesses struggling to survive, restaurant closures, and consumers cutting back on everything from groceries to dining out. The beef supply chain takes years to rebuild, so the consequences of today's decisions may continue to affect food prices for years to come. Is America facing a long-term beef shortage, higher grocery prices, and the continued decline of the American farm? Watch the video and let me know what you think."
Comments here:
Adventures With Danno, "Massive Price Increases At Walmart!"
Full screen recommended.
Adventures With Danno, 8/17/26
"Massive Price Increases At Walmart!"
Comments here:
Jim Kunstler, "Realignments"
"Realignments"
by Jim Kunstler
“A sane society cannot debate its way out of psychosis.
It must diagnose the patient with lethal precision and
restore the ancient boundary between the mad and the free.”
- LHGrey on "X"
"Back in the days of sailing ships, a certain subtropical zone of the ocean became known as the “horse latitudes.” There, an eerie windless calm prevailed, sometimes for weeks, stalling the progress of ships in mid-crossing. In desperation to save water on-board, captains ordered the horses being transported to America to be cast overboard, and the animals’ bloated carcasses drifted in an ominous cortège of warning to other mariners entering the zone of stillness and death.
This stretch of weeks in late summer has become the horse latitudes of human affairs for American politics. The primaries are mostly over, at least the ones that mattered. Congress has departed the Potomac swamp for the lakes, seashores, and the county fairs out where the corn grows high. The heat in the Arabian Sea must turn the deck of an American aircraft carrier into a giant hot-plate sailors fear to tread. Even the country’s multitude of lawyers turn off their cell-phones and contemplate the blank, watery horizon with heads full of iced brown liquor.
We civilians are stuck between that old rock and a hard place... two political parties whirling around the drain of extinction in a nation seeming to drift toward the edge of the known world. In the background, a massive realignment grinds away. The old parties of labor and of property have forgotten their reasons for existence. Labor vamoosed to Mexico, China, and obscure faraway lands decades ago. Property is still here, but it’s all been collateralized into grift and fraud.
In the absence of working people to defend, the Democrats became a party of racketeering race-and-gender hobgoblins, now marshaling into an insectile host of predatory Marxists, and altogether their antics present as a spectrum of mental illness. Voters who somehow managed to preserve some sense of mental decorum increasingly abandon that lunatic coalition - but where to go? This is exactly what is happening in the state of Michigan with the rise of Abdul el-Sayed, who adds a caboose of jihad to his choo-choo train of Bolshevik nuttery. Long-time Dems like Democratic attorney Julian Epstein are publicly jumping ship to support el-Sayed’s opponent, Mike Rogers.
The clueless old gorks in charge of the Democratic Party - the likes of Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, Mark Warner, Liz Warren, Chris Murphy, Sheldon Whitehouse - are suddenly nowhere to be seen (or heard). They don’t dare denounce this latest onrush to new-and-improved insanities because, apparently, insanity is all the party has left - stealing other peoples’ property... pretending to change sexes... organizing giant frauds... demanding payoffs for hallucinated affronts... and feeding the vicious Leviathan they want government to be.
And don’t be too sure that coalescing around the figure of one AOC in 2028 is going to save this outfit. Sandy is trying to pretend she’s somewhere in the middle, between the feckless old official leadership and the outright commies, but she’s still a member of the odious “Squad” composed of Somali fraudster Ilhan Omar, jihadist Rashida Tlaib, and race-hustler Ayanna Pressley - meaning, its just the same brand of crazy the party has been cultivating for more than a decade. What remains for America to discover about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is that she’s a mere opportunist with nothing inside except some skill at middle-school girl games. . . Eva Peron without the savvy.
On the other end of the political transect stand the Republican phantoms of Congress busy getting nothing done for the past year and a half despite holding the majority in both houses. They’re personified perfectly by Senator Mitch McConnell, quite possibly dead for all that anyone really knows. In John Thune you have something like an anti-leader, doing everything possible to evade his duties, squashing election reform under arcane procedural bullshit, obstructing the confirmation of important agency nominees and federal judges, and “gaveling-in” ghost sessions of his chamber to prevent the president from making recess appointments. And why? Probably for no better reason than he just wants to dissociate himself and many of his fellows from the president because he’s seen as too gauche for their club.
Speaking of whom, you see Mr. Trump and his faction stand apart, but not alone, in this big game. He’s going through a rough patch in these horse latitudes of summer. Mr. Trump is also working hard to realign American interests at home into an economy based on making things of value instead of just taking profits on financial shell-games. It’s a gigantic task and one that will take time to get working because factories can’t be built overnight and the demoralized working class can’t be instantly realigned to opportunities that are months from materializing. In the meantime, have a little faith if you can, even though these have been notably faithless decades for our sore-beset nation, and we are too accustomed to bad faith.
Just power through these listless, torpid dog days of August and gird your loins for action in the fall because it’s coming. And that includes a long-awaited accounting for the many crimes against the people of this land by some of our own people. A new permission structure is building out there in the foggy gloaming: you will be set free to stop pretending about a lot of stuff that matters."
Bill Bonner, "No More Mr. Nice Guy"
Tavern Brawl, 17th century Baroque Style.
"No More Mr. Nice Guy"
by Bill Bonner
Poitou, France - "The weekend brought a little relief from last week’s End Times-ish heat. But the scorching temperatures got us thinking. Peter Turchin, a Russian entomologist, who left off tracking beetles to track empires, wrote a book called ‘End Times.’ He saw the demise of an empire as an inside job. Elites rule. Rich, ambitious people want to join them. When there is no longer room for them at the top, they throw a brick through the window.
Does that sound familiar? Maybe. But that is the job of historians, philosophers and madmen - to study and label humans as though we were bugs. Then, we can enjoy the illusion that we understand what is going on. But we’re not really cockroaches.
And yet, there are patterns. There are precedents. There are things we can learn from the past so that the future seems like an encore, not a whole new show. At the core of Turchin’s oeuvre is the idea that empires are self-limiting. They produce elites. And then, they over-produce elites. The society becomes top heavy - too many lawyers, too many hedge fund managers...too many knowledge workers! Then, with so many unproductive citizens, economic growth slows and the elites have nowhere to go. They make trouble. They become corrupt. Carlyn Beccia:
A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions - cartels, lobbies, insiders - the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.
Polybius, a Greek taken to Rome as a hostage, described the process, which he called ‘anacyclosis.’ Beccia: "Kingship rots into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, democracy into mob rule - and the wheel turns, predictably, forever." Most people go through life believing that these things happen - at the top - without involving much input from hoi polloi at the bottom. But recall that 90% of government authority comes from fraud, not force. And fraud only works as long as the fraudee goes along with it.
Madoff’s victims, for example, must have suspected that he was up to something. Returns that regular...and that high...weren’t normal. But as long as the money kept coming their way, they were happy to be a part of it. If the pattern of history holds up, people will go along with almost any public fraud as long as the system appears to be working. But then, when the system runs out of money, more muscle is needed to hold it together. So, if the US empire really is approaching its ‘End Times,’ we can expect even greater flimflam...and more blood. It will be ‘normalized,’ as they say today. Beccia again:
When ordinary living standards stagnate, and too many people fight over too few seats at the top, societies enter what [Turchin] calls an “age of discord.” His model, built on historical data, flagged the United States years in advance: discord arriving around 2020.
As we highlighted in our book, ‘Win-Win...or Lose,’ game theorists tell us that the winning formula is usually to cooperate...respecting the rules with other cooperators. Cooperative commerce produces real wealth. Win-win. But then, when you run into a non-cooperator, you should cut the SOB off immediately. Following the rules only pays off when others follow them. When breaking the rules becomes ‘normalized,’ the rule follower is no longer a customer or a supplier; he’s a mark.
Yes, dear reader, it’s a wicked world. That is what brings on the End Times. People play nice with one another because playing nice pays off. Then, perhaps because there is no more room at the top...or perhaps because the burden of debt becomes overwhelming...or perhaps because playing nice for so long has produced a whole nation of fat, vulnerable targets...
Nobody really understands what makes the world go ‘round, but turn it does. The nice players survive, for a time, by ‘clustering’ - living and working with each other. They form tribes whose members trust each other, unified by place, culture, race, ideology...or whatever. But then as the rule breakers multiply and prosper it becomes less rewarding to play nice. Not that people become generally nasty or corrupt, but they come to accept it in others. That is the rot that really dooms a society...not the crime, but the shrug.
In this, as in so many other ways, the Trump Team is in the lead. His followers - some 30 million strong - have joined a tribal group with a strong sense of identity...and a strong leader at its head. Policy positions can change easily. What really matters is loyalty to the Big Man and a willingness to let him break the rules. ‘No more Mr. Nice Guy,’ says POTUS."
Chris Hedges, "The Dead"
The tombstone for my grandparents, Ethel and Philip Prince,
and my uncle, Maurice Prince.
"The Dead"
by Chris Hedges
Mechanic Falls, Maine — "I am standing in Maple Grove Cemetery in Mechanic Falls, Maine. In front of me, within a radius of a few feet, are three rectangular granite headstones that read “HEDGES,” “BLAIR” and “PRINCE.” Before me lie the remains of my parents, grandparents, two uncles and my aunt. The grass is parched and yellowed. There are small American flags placed in round metal holders, slightly askew, next to each gravestone.
All of the men were World War II veterans. My father was an Army sergeant in North Africa and the Middle East. Uncle Ellsworth was in the Merchant Marine and went back and forth in the North Atlantic convoys. Uncle Morris fought on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands and Luzon in the Philippines, where he was wounded. My grandfather, Philip Prince, an Army master sergeant, trained troops in Texas.
Besides being identified as veterans, there is little information available from these plots, although my father is named as the Rev. Thomas Hedges. The women, including my mother, who was an English professor, have almost nothing to identify them. Their names. Their dates of birth and death. Patriarchy rules, even in death.
Service to the war machine of the state confers the ultimate status, especially in small, rural towns, although my father and Uncle Morris loathed war and the military. Uncle Morris returned from the South Pacific and drank himself to death as he struggled with physical and emotional wounds. My father, unlike my other relatives, refused to have a gun in the house. He became a pacifist after the war and an anti-war activist during the war on Vietnam. He told me as a boy that if the Vietnam War was still being fought when I was 18, and if I was drafted, he would go to prison with me. I carry that image, my father and I, in a cell.
I feel grief and loss. But I also feel something else. These individuals loom large in my consciousness. They visit me in dreams. They carry the gargantuan imprint our immediate family make on us, for good or ill. I can summon up their faces and voices.
Small, insignificant moments in our lives, like old-time movie reels, play in my head. Fishing in trout streams with my grandfather. Duck hunting in icy waters on the Maine coast with Uncle Ellsworth. Sitting in a hard wooden pew during my father’s sermons. Arguing with my mother - which I did frequently - about William Faulkner, who I loved and who she did not. My slight and wickedly funny grandmother in her apron, cooking French toast on the white porcelain stove. Uncle Morris, disheveled and seated at my grandparents’ small kitchen table, his breath smelling of alcohol, which no one else in our family drank. Aunt Miriam, who we called Auntie Mim, who had no children and who doted on my sister, brother and me.
I always wanted to be a writer. My mother, even before I could read, would type up my stories and staple them together in little pamphlets. When I arrived at my grandparents’ house, which burned down shortly after my grandmother died, I would climb upstairs to find yellow legal pads and neat rows of sharpened pencils laid out on a birdseye maple sewing table.
Lunch in rural communities is the big meal. Not dinner. My grandmother, when it was time to eat, would shout up the narrow stairs, “Christafa,” in the thick Maine accent that colored the speech of my relatives.
The red wooden barn, where swings hung from the thick beams for us as children and where I hand-tied fishing flies with my grandfather, is a pile of broken timber.
My grandfather, who smoked a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes a day and died at 86, unsurprisingly, of emphysema, would mix batches of Prince’s Insect Repellent in the barn. He poured it into small amber-colored glass bottles to sell to gun and tackle shops. One afternoon, he took me out to the barn and made me put my hand on a Bible. “Swear you will never tell this formula to anyone,” he intoned. I promised. He then made me doubly swear not to divulge it to my mother, his daughter. They had a fraught relationship, given his domineering personality and my mother’s formidable resistance.
Love is imperfect.
I am alone in the Maple Grove Cemetery. There is nothing to stop me from speaking to the empty space. I tell them I love them. I tell them I miss them. I carry memories of a few dramatic intervals in our lives. Mostly, I carry mundane interactions of daily existence, which death makes sacred.
Thornton Wilder’s play "Our Town" is set in the fictional town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire between 1901 and 1913. In the play Emily Gibbs dies at 26 giving birth to her second child. She joins the dead in the town cemetery. She defies the advice of the departed townspeople around her and returns to earth to relive one happy day.
She goes back to the day of her 12th birthday. It is dawn. No one from her past can see or hear her as she speaks to them. “I can’t bear it,” Emily says as she watches her birthday celebration. “They’re so young and beautiful. Why did they ever have to get old?”
“Oh, Mama,” she implores, “just look at me one minute as though you really saw me. Mama, fourteen years have gone by. I’m dead. You’re a grandmother, Mama. I married George Gibbs, Mama. Wally’s dead, too. Mama, his appendix burst on a camping trip to North Conway. We felt just terrible about it - don’t you remember? But, just for a moment now we’re all together. Mama, just for a moment we’re happy. Let’s look at one another.”
“I can’t,” she goes on. “I can’t go on. It goes so fast. We don’t have time to look at one another.” Emily breaks down sobbing. "Take me back - up the hill - to my grave,” Emily says. “But first: Wait! One more look.” She looks left, out past the audience and then to the right.
“Good-by, Good-by, world,” she says. “Good-by, Grover’s Corners...Mama and Papa. Good-by to clocks ticking…and Mama’s sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths…and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”
Emily and the other spirits watch the stars come out over Grover’s Corners. She admits she should have listened to them. It was a mistake to return. “Yes, now you know,” Simon Stimson, the bitter, alcoholic choirmaster, tells Emily. “Now you know! That’s what it was to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know - that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.”
“Simon Stimson,” Emily’s mother-in-law Mrs. Gibbs says, “that ain’t the whole truth and you know it.” Emily’s husband George comes to the cemetery. He throws himself on her grave. He does not speak. “They don’t understand, do they?” Emily says. “No dear,” Mrs. Gibbs says. “They don’t understand.”
It is dusk in Maple Grove Cemetery. It is time for to leave. My generation will follow the generation before me. This is the ancient rhythm of existence.
Death comes faster than we imagine. It robs us of all that is most precious. I carry these dead with me. I will carry them until I, too, depart. They remind me of my obligation to the living. They remind me, as the poets and sages tell us, that life is sacred, that love must always be honored, that our existence is brief, that human beings are fragile, that one day the memories we carry will vanish, that we are made from dust, and to dust we will return.
Live, the dead whisper, while you can."
Sunday, August 16, 2026
"Seventy-Two Hours from Desolation: When the Shelves Bleed Empty and the Aquifers Run Dry While America Sleeps and the Government Has Already Abandoned You to the Famine That Comes Like Thief in Night"
"Seventy-Two Hours from Desolation: When the Shelves Bleed Empty
and the Aquifers Run Dry While America Sleeps and the Government
Has Already Abandoned You to the Famine That Comes Like Thief in Night"
by Madge Waggy
Editor’s Note: The following investigation arrives at a moment when complacency regarding American alimentation security has reached perilous magnitude. What follows amalgamates verified agrarian data, supply chain assessments, and eyewitness documentation from individuals positioned to observe systemic degradation. The paragraph immediately below was authored by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has spent decades examining agricultural policy and nourishment system vulnerabilities, and who granted permission to reproduce his assessment verbatim:
“We are witnessing the deliberate dismantlement of America’s alimentary independence. Within eighteen months, perhaps sooner, the confluence of collapsing aquifers, fertilizer scarcity, and transportation breakdown will create conditions for widespread hunger in a nation that has not experienced such deprivation since the 1930s. The warning signs are not merely visible; they are flashing scarlet. Those who do not prepare will find themselves dependent upon a government that has systematically destroyed the infrastructure of local nourishment production and has already demonstrated—through its pandemic response—its willingness to let populations suffer while protecting institutional interests.”
The editorial staff has verified through independent sources the specific vulnerabilities cited in Kennedy’s assessment. What follows represents our own investigation into how rapidly these theoretical failures could translate into empty shelves and hungry bellies. The timeline is shorter than comfortable analysis suggests. The preparation window is closing. The reader is advised that dismissal of these findings constitutes a gamble with stakes measured in children’s lives and civilizational continuity.
The Mirage of Perpetual Plenty: How Just-in-Time Distribution Created a Seventy-Two Hour House of Cards: Perambulate through any American supermercantile establishment. Fluorescent illumination hums overhead. Shelves stretch aisle after aisle, packed with colorful containers, fresh produce pyramids, meat cases gleaming with cellophane-wrapped abundance. To the casual observer, this resembles the most successful nourishment distribution apparatus ever constructed. And indeed, for a season, it functioned magnificently.
Beneath this veneer of perpetual plenty, something has gone terribly amiss. Not yet visible to shoppers who assume tomorrow will bring more of the same. But visible to the truckers who know diesel reserves are thin. To the agrarians watching aquifers evaporate. To the warehouse managers seeing order fulfillment times stretch from hours to weeks. To the agricultural economists who track grain reserves and comprehend that America—supposedly the breadbasket of the world—maintains approximately seventy-two hours of nourishment security at any given moment.
Seventy-two hours. Three days. That buffer stands between normalcy and nationwide hunger when just-in-time delivery systems encounter disruption. Not weeks. Not months. Days. And the disruptions are already beginning, already accumulating, already testing the tensile strength of a system that has eliminated every margin for error in pursuit of quarterly profit maximization.
American grocery establishments operate upon principles that would have seemed insane to previous generations. Inventory turns over every three to five days. Warehouses hold minimal stock. Regional distribution centers maintain perhaps two weeks of certain staples, less of perishables. The entire edifice depends upon continuous resupply—trucks arriving daily, sometimes multiple times daily, to restock what consumers purchased hours before.
This apparatus, celebrated by supply chain experts as “efficient,” represents a radical departure from historical nourishment security. As recently as the 1950s, most American communities maintained grain elevators, local nourishment processing, and household pantries that could sustain families through seasons of scarcity. Previous generations canned vegetables from gardens, kept root cellars, maintained relationships with local butchers and bakers who sourced from nearby farms. Nourishment traveled perhaps fifty miles from production to consumption.
Contemporary nourishment travels an average of 1,500 miles. Processing occurs in massive centralized facilities—sometimes single points of failure for entire product categories. A conflagration at one JBS meatpacking plant in 2021 disrupted twenty percent of American beef production for weeks. A ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline stopped fuel distribution to the Southeast, and within days grocery shelves emptied as trucks could not operate. The apparatus has no redundancy because redundancy costs capital, and quarterly earnings reports punish inefficiency.
The average American metropolis contains approximately three days of nourishment at any moment. Not three days in warehouses—three days total, counting what sits upon shelves, what moves in transit, and what remains in households combined. Beyond that, starvation begins. Not discomfort. Not inconvenience. Actual starvation, with its attendant civil unrest, violence, and societal disintegration.
The Diesel Hemorrhage Nobody’s Tracking: When Transportation Becomes Optional, Nourishment Becomes Scarce: Marcus Chen (name altered, Iowa-based long-haul driver, twenty-three years traversing American highways) describes what he observes: “Previously, one would pull into any trucking station, replenish fuel, continue rolling. Presently? Stations run dry by noon. Rationing appears at the pump. Colleagues abandon loads because they cannot secure fuel to complete the haul.”
Diesel reserves have plummeted to levels unseen since 2008. But 2008 possessed functioning refineries. 2024 possesses refinery capacity that has declined twenty percent since 2019. Environmental regulations—however well-intentioned—have rendered new construction uneconomical. Existing facilities operate at maximum, with no surge capacity. When one malfunctions, as occurred in Louisiana in March, prices spike regionally within hours.
Strategic Petroleum Reserve releases? Gasoline and crude. Not diesel. The refined product that actually moves nourishment from farm to table has been systematically neglected because it fails to generate headlines like $5 gasoline does. (When diesel reaches $7, $8, $10 per gallon, nourishment transport becomes optional. Optional transport signifies rotting grain in silos while supermercantile shelves empty.)
Chen continues: “Acquaintances have parked their rigs. Cannot afford operation. The load pays $3,000, the diesel costs $2,800. For two days of driving, sleeping in the cab, consuming station sustenance. They have finished. And when sufficient numbers finish, your nourishment does not move. Period.”
The American Trucking Association estimates a shortage of 80,000 drivers currently. By 2025, that reaches 160,000. Autonomous trucks? A decade distant at minimum. The men and women who move America’s nourishment are aging out, burning out, and shutting down. No one replaces them.
Aquifer Extinction Beneath the Breadbasket: When Ancient Water Runs Dry: Beneath Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas lies the Ogallala Aquifer. Largest underground freshwater reserve in the Western Hemisphere. It contains water that fell as precipitation during the last Ice Age. It required 15,000 years to accumulate. It has been depleted by forty percent in sixty years of industrial agriculture.
Dave Miller (pseudonym, third-generation Kansas wheat agrarian) stands beside a well that now pumps at 380 feet depth. “My grandfather drilled to 80 feet. My father to 200. I am at 380 and the flow diminishes. When I reach 500, I am finished. The energy cost to pump that deep exceeds the value of the crop.”
Miller’s narrative repeats across the Great Plains. Satellite gravimetry—NASA’s GRACE satellites—confirms what agrarians know: the aquifer disappears. Portions in Texas will be economically exhausted by 2028. Kansas follows by 2030. When those portions fail, American wheat production drops by thirty percent. Minimum. (Thirty percent less wheat signifies bread prices that working families cannot afford. It signifies export markets that vanish. It signifies geopolitical leverage that evaporates.)
Alternatives? None exist. Surface water in the Colorado River is over-allocated; the river no longer reaches the ocean. Desalination is energy-prohibitive and geographically distant. Cloud seeding remains wishful thinking. The Ogallala represents irreplaceable capital being liquidated to maintain current production that cannot be sustained.
Climate projections—verified by tree ring data showing medieval megadroughts lasting centuries—suggest the Southwest and Plains are entering drought conditions unprecedented in recorded experience. The “Dust Bowl” of the 1930s lasted a decade. The coming drought may last a century.
American agriculture was built upon assumptions of water availability that are proving false. When the water runs out, the nourishment runs out. The timeline is years, not decades. Possibly months, depending upon weather patterns.
The Fertilizer Chokepoint: When Input Scarcity Meets Output Collapse: Synthetic nitrogen fertilizer requires natural gas. The Haber-Bosch process feeds half the global population but consumes enormous energy. When gas prices spike, fertilizer production stops.
European fertilizer plants shut down in 2022 when Russian gas supplies were sanctioned. They have not restarted. American plants in Louisiana and Texas—accounting for sixty percent of domestic fertilizer production—experienced outages in 2023-2024 due to hurricane damage and cost-driven maintenance deferrals.
Agrarians entering 2024 planting season faced prices double those of 2020. Many applied half rates. Some applied none, gambling on soil reserves. The yields are arriving now, and they are down. Corn production—down. Wheat production—down. Soybeans—down.
China, previously a major fertilizer exporter, restricted exports in 2021 to ensure domestic nourishment security. They have not resumed. Russia and Belarus face sanctions. The remaining global supply flows to highest bidders. American agrarians are being priced out of the inputs required to maintain yields. (Without fertilizer, American agriculture reverts to 1920s productivity levels. Those levels cannot feed 340 million people. Those levels cannot feed 200 million people.)
Phosphate and potash face similar constraints. Morocco controls seventy percent of global phosphate. Saskatchewan has most potash. Transportation disruptions, export restrictions, or geopolitical conflict affecting either region eliminates American access within weeks. The “Green Revolution” that multiplied global nourishment production was built upon synthetic inputs. Those inputs are becoming scarce and expensive. The revolution is ending.
Processing Concentration and Single Points of Failure: American meatpacking is concentrated. Four companies control eighty-five percent of beef processing. When JBS—Brazilian-owned, operating facilities across America—suffered a ransomware attack in 2021, twenty percent of American beef production stopped for a week. Prices spiked forty percent.
When a conflagration destroyed a Tyson chicken processing plant in 2022, regional poultry shortages lasted months. When COVID outbreaks forced temporary closures at Smithfield and Cargill facilities in 2020, agrarians euthanized millions of animals that could not be processed while grocery stores limited meat purchases.
The apparatus has no redundancy. None. A single point of failure—cyberattack, fire, pandemic, labor strike—can eliminate national capacity for specific proteins. The “efficiency” of concentration creates catastrophic fragility.
Labor in these facilities is increasingly scarce. Immigration restrictions have reduced the workforce that historically staffed slaughterhouses. Wages have risen, but not enough to attract American workers to jobs that involve killing and butchering animals ten hours daily. Automation exists for portions of the process, but not for skilled cutting and trimming.
When the next disruption hits—and it will—the animals will back up on farms, unable to be processed, while supermercantile cases empty. The disconnect between production and consumption is not bridged by goodwill. It requires functioning infrastructure that is being systematically degraded.
Import Dependency and the Southern Border Nourishment Chokepoint: Despite agricultural exports, America has become dependent upon imported nourishment for categories that cannot be domestically produced economically. Fresh produce in winter—tomatoes, peppers, berries, leafy greens—comes from Mexico and Central America. Eighty percent of seafood is imported. Coffee, chocolate, spices—essentially 100% imported.
The southern border crisis is not merely a migration issue. It is a nourishment security issue. When border crossings close, when customs inspection slows, when trucks wait days to cross, produce spoils. Avocado prices spike. Berry shelves empty. The “fresh” nourishment that Americans expect year-round depends upon frictionless cross-border movement that is being deliberately impeded by policy choices. (When you cannot buy a tomato in January, you notice. When you cannot buy any fresh produce for weeks, you panic.)
Mexico is experiencing its own water crisis. The Colorado River no longer reaches the delta. Mexican agriculture that supplies American supermarkets is contracting. The supply that Americans assume will always be there is shrinking from the source.
China controls American nourishment processing in ways that are not widely understood. Smithfield Foods—America’s largest pork producer—is Chinese-owned. ChemChina owns Syngenta, major agricultural chemical supplier. The supply chains that appear domestic are controlled by entities that answer to Beijing, not Washington.
When geopolitical tensions escalate—and they are escalating—nourishment becomes a weapon. The exports that America depends upon can be restricted. The processing that America requires can be disrupted. The “nourishment independence” that policymakers assume exists is a mirage.
The Seed Monopoly and Genetic Vulnerability: American agriculture depends upon seeds produced by three corporations: Bayer (German), Corteva (American), and ChemChina (Chinese). These entities control the genetics of corn, soybeans, cotton, and vegetables. The seeds are engineered for specific conditions: high fertilizer input, abundant water, pesticide application. They are not adapted for drought, for poor soil, for organic cultivation. When inputs fail, these seeds fail. They are also patented, meaning agrarians cannot save and replant. They must purchase annually from the monopoly.
The genetic diversity of American agriculture has collapsed. Where a century ago hundreds of corn varieties existed, now a handful of genetically identical hybrids dominate. A single pest or pathogen adapted to these specific genetics could eliminate national corn production in a season. (The Irish Potato Famine occurred because one variety—the Lumper—dominated. When blight evolved to attack it, millions starved. American agriculture has replicated this vulnerability at industrial scale.)
Seed vaults exist—Svalbard, various government facilities—but the knowledge of how to grow, save, and breed seeds has been lost. The agrarians who knew how to maintain open-pollinated varieties are dead. Their children and grandchildren purchase from catalogs, dependent upon supply chains that are failing.
Government Incompetence and the Illusion of Emergency Preparedness: The USDA maintains emergency nourishment reserves. Theoretically. In practice, the “Strategic Grain Reserve” holds approximately 30 million bushels of wheat. America consumes roughly 2 billion bushels annually. The reserve covers less than a week of consumption. What is held is old, often spoiled, poorly stored. The facilities are crumbling. The logistics to distribute in emergency do not exist. The reserve is theater—designed to reassure, not to feed.
During COVID, the USDA demonstrated its priorities. Agrarians destroyed crops because restaurant demand collapsed while nourishment banks faced shortages. The apparatus could not pivot. Milk was dumped while children went hungry. This is the apparatus that is supposed to manage the next crisis.
The “farm bill”—the legislative mechanism that supposedly supports American agriculture—is a welfare program for agribusiness giants, not a nourishment security measure. It subsidizes corn and soy for ethanol and animal feed, not vegetables for human consumption. It pays landowners to leave fields fallow while prices spike. It is designed by lobbyists, not nutritionists or security planners.
When crisis hits, the federal government will not save you. It cannot. The infrastructure has been dismantled. The local nourishment systems have been destroyed. The knowledge has been lost. You will be on your own.
The Timeline: From Complacency to Hunger:
DayEventConsequence:
1 Hurricane hits Gulf Coast refineries. Diesel spikes to $8/gallon. Trucking companies cancel unprofitable routes. Regional shortages begin.
2 Panic buying empties urban supermarkets. Social media shows empty shelves. Those paying attention buy what they can. Others assume restocking.
3 National Guard called to protect deliveries to cities. Rural areas receive nothing. Urban-rural divide becomes explicit, hostile.
4 Refrigeration failures in summer heat cause massive spoilage. What was in transit rots. What was in stores is gone. Home reserves consumed rapidly.
5 Looting begins. Not criminal opportunism—survival behavior. Police cannot control it. National Guard cannot be everywhere.
6 Hospitals report malnutrition admissions. Diabetics without nourishment face insulin crises. Elderly, infants, immunocompromised begin dying.
7 Martial law declared in major cities. Curfews. Travel restrictions. Constitution suspended “temporarily.”
This is not speculative fiction. This is the timeline from multiple emergency management simulations. The “seventy-two hour” estimate assumes government response, National Guard deployment, emergency distribution. When those systems fail or are overwhelmed, the timeline compresses. (If you do not have thirty days of nourishment in your home right now, you are gambling that the above scenario will not occur in your lifetime. The odds are worse than you think.)
The Preparation Gap and Who Will Survive FEMA recommends three days of emergency nourishment and water. Three days. The same seventy-two hour window that represents total system vulnerability. Their recommendation assumes that government will restore function within that window. The experience of Hurricane Katrina, of Puerto Rico after Maria, of Texas during the 2021 freeze, demonstrates that government does not restore function within three days. Government often makes things worse.
The Americans who will survive the coming scarcity are those who have already prepared. The Mormons, with their church-mandated year of nourishment storage. The preppers, mocked by mainstream culture, who have gardens and pantries and community. The rural families who never stopped canning, hunting, maintaining local nourishment networks.
Everyone else—urban, dependent, just-in-time consumers—will face choices that no American has faced in three generations. The choice between hunger and violence. Between starvation and theft. Between death and degradation. The supermarkets will not restock. The government will not rescue. The cavalry is not coming. You are on your own, and the time to recognize that is before the shelves empty, not after.
The Reckoning: Kennedy’s Timeline and the Accelerating Crisis: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s eighteen-month timeline may be optimistic. The confluence of aquifer depletion, fertilizer scarcity, diesel shortage, and processing concentration suggests that multiple failure points could activate simultaneously, accelerating the timeline to months rather than years.
The 2024 harvest is coming in below projections. The 2025 planting season faces input costs that will drive acreage reductions. The 2026 harvest—if current trajectories continue—will be a disaster that makes the 1930s Dust Bowl appear minor by comparison.
America has not experienced widespread hunger since the Great Depression. The social fabric has not been tested by scarcity. The assumption that nourishment will always be available, that the apparatus will always function, is about to be destroyed.
The warning signs are not hidden. They are visible to anyone who looks: emptying aquifers, idling trucks, rising fertilizer prices, contracting processing capacity, border disruptions, seed monopolies, government incompetence. The pattern is clear. The trajectory is set. The only question is timing, and timing is running out.
Seventy-two hours. That is what stands between you and hunger. Not years. Not months. Days. And those days are counting down, whether you acknowledge them or not. The famine is not coming. It is already here for those who cannot afford $8 eggs and $12 milk. It is spreading up the economic ladder as inflation destroys purchasing power. It will become universal when the apparatus breaks, and the apparatus is breaking now."
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