(Zero Hedge)—They are far less active across the US in 2026, but not truly gone. Is it exasperating, or, is it entertaining? It depends on how you look at it. Yes, the Black Lives Matter movement is back, and big surprise, they’re angry over the police shooting of another violent minority criminal. But, is he black?
Not according to his extensive offender detail record, in which his race is listed as “White” and his ethnicity is listed as “Latino”. Yet another in a long line of imprisoned minority perpetrators falsely identified as white on their rap sheet in order to artificially reduce official crime stats. That said, it’s nice to know that BLM is finally admitting that all lives matter.
Corey Durrell Ruiz, 38, recently released from prison, was approached by police while riding a bicycle after allegedly attempting to enter (break into) random vehicles in Madison, Wisconsin. He was also suspected of a previous bike theft.
When officers attempted to detain Ruiz, he ran. He was tackled off the bike, but produced a fixed blade knife and stabbed one of the officers. The wounded officer fired three shots, killing the suspect.
Generally speaking, pulling any weapon during an arrest and trying to use it against an LEO is legal justification for the use of deadly force in return. It is unlikely that the officers involved will face charges in court. Not to be overlooked, Corey Ruiz has a long criminal history of up to 40 separate misdemeanors and felonies dating back to 2007.
This includes an extensive history of attacking police officers, and yes, this does matter because it shows a consistent pattern of violence. A world without Corey Ruiz is, objectively, a better world.
The Black Lives Matter movement and the mainstream media have immediately seized on the shooting in an effort to exploit it for political purposes. The local Democrat run government is already bending the knee to protesters as they hijack press briefings with inane fatiguery. BLM mobs are stalking Madison looking for chances to create chaos. Wisconsin’s leftist governor is calling for “accountability” in the shooting.
It’s fascinating that the family of Corey Ruiz has appeared on camera to demand transparency, given that Ruiz was listed as homeless at the time of the encounter with police. Multiple reports indicate mental health and substance abuse issues, and apparently no one from Ruiz’s family was willing to give him a place to stay. They are, though, readily available to soak up the media spotlight and feed the activist fervor in the wake of his death.
News outlets are circulating photos of Ruiz from 2014; a common tactic used by the media to make the suspect look younger and elicit greater empathy from gullible portions of the public.
Concert attendees in Madison got a taste of the old BLM mob mentality when protesters stormed the venue and demanded a platform for their grievances. As much as they would like this to become a “George Floyd moment”, however, times have changed and BLM has exhausted much of the public support they had in 2020.
The shooting is a clear case of officer self defense based on eye witness accounts and the available video footage. Police body cams are liable to give more detailed insight into the incident, but the evidence against Ruiz is already damning.
Leftist groups and Democrats seem to be angling for more Kenosha-style riots, perhaps as a means to create disruption during an election year. But the American populace is tired of the theatrics. If the protests don’t fade due to lack of interest and riots do take place, few people are going to shed a tear if the National Guard drops the hammer on them.
Ultimately, Ruiz is one of many repeat offenders who had no chance of reform; a member of the 1% of people who cause the vast majority of societal grief for the other 99%. He should have stayed locked up for the safety of the community at large, and if he had been he would still be alive today. Maybe, though, that’s not what the Democrats and BLM really want.
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.
