(End of the American Dream)—It is hard to believe that 2025 is almost done. This year has flown by, and it has been absolutely packed with historic events. Unfortunately, I fully expect 2026 to be even more chaotic. We are facing all sorts of economic challenges, terror attacks are becoming more frequent, and nations all over the globe are preparing for war. Meanwhile, the ground underneath our feet continues to shake with alarming regularity. In fact, the state of California was just hit by a significant earthquake swarm for the fourth day in a row…
California has been rattled by multiple earthquake swarms over the past four days, with the latest hitting on Tuesday.
The US Geological Survey (USGS) reported a 3.1-magnitude quake at 5.53am PT (8.53am ET) near San Ramon, the epicenter of the recent seismic activity.
This tremor followed a dozen smaller quakes ranging from 1.1 to 1.6 magnitude.
Just yesterday I was telling Sam Rohrer about the earthquake swarms that have been hammering California day after day, and now another one has struck today.
Interestingly, this latest series of earthquake swarms began just three days after California Governor Gavin Newsom made a very controversial statement about “trans kids”…
Newsom, 58, made his comments on “The Ezra Klein Show” in the Dec. 10 episode. The California governor told the host that, although he has suggested it’s unfair for transgender athletes to compete in women’s sports, he is still a supporter of the trans community.
“I want to see trans kids,” he said. “I have a trans godson. There’s no governor that signed more pro-trans legislation than I have, and no one’s been a stronger advocate for the LGBTQ [community].”
Newsom is currently considered to be the overwhelming favorite for the Democratic nomination in 2028.
So it was a really big deal for him to say something like this.
The entire California coastline sits directly along the Pacific Ring of Fire, and we have seen so much seismic activity along the Pacific Ring of Fire in recent months.
Is all of this activity leading up to something really big?
A USGS research geophysicist named Annemarie Baltay is warning that there is “a 72 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake occurring anywhere in the Bay Area between now and 2043″…
USGS research geophysicist Annemarie Baltay said she is not unusually concerned that the recent earthquakes signal anything larger on the horizon for San Ramon.
‘These small events, as all small events are, are not indicative of an impending large earthquake,’ Baltay told Patch.
‘However, we live in earthquake country, so we should always be prepared for a large event,’ she said. ‘There is a 72 percent chance of a magnitude 6.7 or larger earthquake occurring anywhere in the Bay Area between now and 2043. So we should all be aware and be prepared.’
It was certainly newsworthy for such a prominent geophysicist to make a statement like that.
Needless to say, I am far less optimistic than she is.
As our world continues to be shaken by an unusual level of seismic activity, comet 3I/Atlas is preparing to make its closest approach to our planet on Friday…
A stray comet from another star swings past Earth this week in one last hurrah before racing back toward interstellar space.
Discovered over the summer, the comet known as 3I/Atlas will pass within 167 million miles (269 million kilometers) of our planet on Friday, the closest it gets on its grand tour of the solar system.
NASA continues to aim its space telescopes at the visiting ice ball, estimated to be between 1,444 feet (440 meters) and 3.5 miles (5.6 kilometers) in size. But it’s fading as it exits, so now’s the time for backyard astronomers to catch it in the night sky with their telescopes.
If you can believe it, the deadline for the government to release the Epstein files is also on Friday…
The deadline for the Justice Department to release records in its investigation into notorious convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is just days away.
By Friday, Attorney General Pam Bondi must make the files publicly available “in a searchable and downloadable format,” per the Epstein Transparency Act signed into law by President Donald Trump last month.
Is the fact that these two things are occurring on the exact same day just some sort of really bizarre coincidence?
Hopefully all of the Epstein files really will be released in a “searchable and downloadable format” by the end of this week, because the American people deserve the truth.
There is one other thing about comet 3I/Atlas that is getting a lot of attention.
A comet typically has a “tail”, but comet 3I/Atlas also has an “anti-tail”…
Ever since NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope first gazed upon the object on July 21, scientists noticed a strange protrusion jutting out of the object, a second tail that counterintuitively points directly at the Sun, not away from it like the characteristic tails of familiar solar system comets.
This “anti-tail” could be the result of “enhanced mass loss in the Sun-facing side,” as Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb told Futurism earlier this year, which causes larger fragments to be broken off. These larger fragments are less susceptible to being affected by the Sun’s radiation pressure, causing them to move more slowly and accumulate on the Sun-facing side.
Over a month after its perihelion, or closest pass of the Sun, observations still clearly show 3I/ATLAS’ anti-tail, as Loeb noted in a new update on his blog. A December 13 image taken by the Teerasak Thaluang telescope in Rayong, Thailand “shows a prominent anti-tail, uncommon for comets, pointing in the direction of the Sun,” he wrote.
I have never heard of a comet having an “anti-tail” before.
And I think that it is kind of weird that this comet with an “anti-tail” will be closest to Earth just 6 days before Christmas.
On another note, on Monday a replica of the Statue of Liberty that was a total of 115 feet tall toppled over in front of a large retail store in Brazil…
A powerful storm toppled a 115-foot replica of the Statue of Liberty outside a Havan megastore in southern Brazil on Monday, December 15.
As the storm raged through the area, wind gusts reached 50 to 56 miles per hour, according to local authorities.
A lot of people are really freaking out about this.
And this happened just two days before President Trump is scheduled to deliver a major address to the nation from the White House…
President Donald Trump will give an address to the nation live from the White House on Wednesday night, he announced on Tuesday.
Trump teased the address in a statement on social media, saying the speech will take place at 9 p.m. ET on Wednesday. He has not clarified a topic for the address.
“My Fellow Americans: I will be giving an ADDRESS TO THE NATION tomorrow night, LIVE FROM THE WHITE HOUSE, at 9 P.M. EST. I look forward to ‘seeing’ you then. It has been a great year for our Country, and THE BEST IS YET TO COME!” Trump wrote.
If the president is going to interrupt prime time television, that usually means that something really big is going to be announced.
Is President Trump going to tell us that we are going to war with Venezuela?
If so, that will certainly be a very ominous sign.
Of course it is entirely possible that President Trump wants to talk to us about something else.
Wednesday night will be here before we know it, and then we will find out what is on his mind.
Global events are moving at a breathtaking pace, and I have a feeling that the weeks ahead are going to be quite momentous.
Michael’s new book entitled “10 Prophetic Events That Are Coming Next” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com, and you can subscribe to his Substack newsletter at michaeltsnyder.substack.com.
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.