Can you be counted on? That is the question we quietly ask others. It is the question good people ask themselves. And I suspect that it is a question the Almighty will pose when we stand before Him to be judged.
It is a question that has nothing to do with intelligence or talent. It is a question that has nothing to do with one’s ancestry or station in life. Yet it is the most important question when danger comes, time is short, and everything is on the line. When you say, “I will hold this position,” can others put their lives in your hands? When you give someone your word, do you treat it as a solemn duty? When you make God a promise, can He count on you?
That’s the test for integrity, and it is a test that most people fail. That’s because being a person of integrity requires choosing tough and sometimes lonely roads. It requires the honesty and discipline to admit when you have done wrong. It requires moral resolve. And all these traits are in short supply today.
There are a thousand different ways in life to seek honors, and there is no shortage of honors out there waiting to be won. There is only one way to live a life with honor — by being a person of character, strength, and commitment. Doing so requires walking a thin line while almost everyone else veers far from principle’s path. Seeking to behave virtuously in a world that mocks virtue is not easy. Living honorably is its own precious reward.
Why do I bring this up? Because 2024 is not only going to be a tumultuous year but also a year when the wheat is separated from the chaff. Each of us will be tested, and each of us will be given the opportunity to prove our mettle.
With two regional wars already raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, China’s Xi promising an invasion of Taiwan, and a not-so-secret globalist plot to resettle millions of military-aged illegal aliens into the United States, the geopolitical cauldron is boiling over. With the U.S. government’s deficit spending, money-printing, and “green energy”-induced inflation spiking the cost of necessities at home while America’s foreign adversaries rapidly decouple from the dollar, we are one match strike away from the whole financial tinderbox going up in smoke. With Democrats moving from mail-in-ballot fraud to outright removing Trump from ballots (as well as imprisoning his voters), the justice system’s self-immolation could incinerate what’s left of due process and the rule of law. 2024’s fortune cookie might as well read, “Only those who seek shelter and hide will see ’25.”
How we respond to these chaotic events will define both our lives and the life of our country. When disaster strikes, can you keep a calm head? Will you do everything you can to safeguard your family, friends, and community? Will you dig down deep with steely nerve? Can you be counted on when it matters most?
It has never been more important for people of integrity to lead, and in the trying times that lie ahead, there will be a public desperation for such leaders. How do I know? Because, with a few notable exceptions who are already being mercilessly persecuted today, America’s entire leadership class lacks honor.
After years of shamelessly defending the wealthy and powerful from what it routinely denigrated as “baseless conspiracy theories,” the mainstream media have finally been forced to admit that two separate sex scandals (one involving Jeffrey Epstein’s child sex trafficking operation and another involving a Beltway prostitution ring — both probably honeypot goldmines for foreign intelligence services) substantiate long-running claims that America’s “ruling class” has a predilection for pedophilia.
After failing to defend Jewish students from on-campus attacks following Hamas’s October 7 slaughter of Israeli innocents and failing to truthfully defend her academic record as one befitting for the president of the country’s oldest university, Harvard’s Claudine Gay still refuses to take responsibility for her own actions and instead blames her ouster on “racial animus.” After spending the last three years discharging servicemembers for refusing experimental “vaccines,” promoting men in skirts, stigmatizing conservative troops as “extremists,” and insisting that “white supremacy” and “climate change” are existential threats, the Pentagon has proven itself so full of horse manure that nobody wants to get near its stench.
While the whole world knows Joe Biden is suffering from dementia, the U.S. press corps never says a word. While roughly half the country believes his 2020 election “victory” depended on electoral fraud, and with evidence of that fraud piling up for three years, the press corps refuses to ask hard questions. When hundreds of thousands of unarmed, patriotic Americans show up to exercise their First Amendment rights to protest for free and fair elections on January 6, 2021, however, the press corps can’t stop talking about an imaginary “insurrection.” Today’s journalist class is filled with liars and frauds who have no time to speak truth to power because they are too busy manipulating the public and protecting the powerful.
America’s current “leaders” are power-hungry pedophiles, plagiarists, propagandists, and pro-Hamas partisans. They chase cushy academic positions, meaningless journalism awards, and the superficial trappings of professional prestige. They are not, however, people with honor. If they were, most would have resigned long ago or begun fighting the corruption from within the Marxist globalist beast. Instead, they use their resources to undermine those who have the audacity to exhibit character and moral strength. The people who cannot lead and cannot be trusted have chased all the real leaders away.
What we have is a leadership vacuum. For too many years, the worst among us have risen to the top, while the best take cover to avoid being seen. American exceptionalism has withered because America’s most exceptional people have quietly disappeared. In “going Galt,” they have left the keys to the kingdom with the ransackers and thieves.
Too many of the clergy — those who promised God, “Thy will be done, On earth as it is in heaven” — have proven through their own sex scandals and willingness to be silent in the face of government-directed evil that they cannot be counted on. Too many academics have proven that they prefer their sinecures to their intellectual obligation to think critically. Too many natural-born warriors have proven that they would rather avoid rocking the boat than protect the country and Constitution they swore oaths to defend.
If and when tragedy strikes, though, these Americans who have been far too quiet for far too long will have a second chance. They should take it. Reclaiming their honor by admitting their past wrongs is the way those who have been silent can rejoin the fight for America’s survival. Victory, after all, is never easy. It is defined as success in a struggle or endeavor against great odds. It is a difficult ordeal that ends in triumph. In other words, there can be no victory, unless we first acknowledge that the work before us is immense and the challenges daunting.
There certainly can be no victory for American freedom, unless those with honor join the fight. Integrity shines most during uncertain times. And as those lacking honor “lead” our country to its destruction, more and more Americans will turn to each other with a single question on their minds: can you be counted on?
Image via PickPik.
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.
