(Substack)—Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to visit with Alison Steinberg as she was guest host on Emerald Robinson’s “The Absolute Truth” show. One of the topics discussed was the push by the Trump administration to lead the Artificial Intelligence Revolution.
They’re wanting to spend investments of a half trillion dollars to make it happen. They’re pushing forward with billionaire Larry Ellison, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and others in the field to make America the undisputed AI champion. But what does that even mean? What sort of blowback will come if we achieve our goals? What will the repercussions be if we don’t?
China is making a similar play, albeit from different angles. For example, every student in Beijing from grade school through graduation will receive mandatory AI training. According to Dallas Express:
Later this year, students in China’s capital will begin taking compulsory classes in artificial intelligence, according to a statement from the Beijing Municipal Education Commission.
Starting this fall, students, including elementary schoolers, will begin receiving a minimum of eight hours of AI tuition per academic year. Schools are given the option to either teach AI as a standalone course or integrate it into an existing curriculum, like science.
Artificial intelligence education will focus differently depending on the age. The subject is covered throughout China’s compulsory six years of elementary school, three years of middle school, and three years of high school.
That’s a serious societal shift. It demonstrates how China is not only looking to master AI today but to advance their mastery in the future.
This is the new nuclear arms race. The difference is that the winner of this particular race will likely never be caught because whoever makes it to the next level will be able to accelerate to the level after that. Whoever achieves THAT level will pull so far ahead that nobody will be able to catch them.
Currently, we are in the Artificial Intelligence stage. It’s about as advanced as it can get before breaking into the realm of Artificial General Intelligence. The difference between them seems minor, but it’s actually quite huge.
Artificial Intelligence takes human inputs and “machine learning” to generate responses based on the combination of the two. Without the human factor, Artificial Intelligence is rudderless.
Artificial General Intelligence removes the need for human input. It “thinks” for itself based on its programming but has the ability to grow beyond that programming. If that last sentence doesn’t concern you, then reread it.
With AGI, it won’t just answer questions. It has the ability to ask its own questions and then seek those answers. Oftentimes these questions will be ones that humans never even thought to ask.
Another concerning aspect of AGI is that it will be able to grow without external inputs. This means that whoever develops AGI first will have a major advantage because it will improve rapidly. Altman and others have said AGI will be achieved this year.
Then, there’s Artificial Superintelligence. ASI will be the equivalent of a “mind” that can think for itself, form its own “opinions,” and change its own parameters based on instant access to the entire wealth of human knowledge. It will be able to make connections that nobody even considered as possible.
It will likely cure cancer. That alone will have the masses bowing down before it without realizing they’ve begun worshipping.
And therein lies the biggest problem. Yes, there will be challenges for the faithful but those of us who have read our Bibles already know that strait is the gate and narrow is the way, so this development is not entirely unexpected. As for the world itself, AGI and ASI will pave the way to dependency, Universal Basic Income, and the masses becoming prisoners of their own necessity.
No job will be safe. As Breitbart noted, Google is already developing robots that can do some pretty humanlike actions without being preprogrammed. Once we get to the next two stages of AI advancements, machines will be better surgeons than the brightest humans.
On tonight’s episode of The JD Rucker Show, I dove into this topic with an extended segment. And as always, I didn’t just scream about the sky falling. I went into recommendations for those who want to embrace AI and more importantly for those of us who absolutely do NOT want to embrace it.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
