In the rolling hills of San Luis Obispo County, where justice once meant finality for the worst offenses, a 75-year-old man who raped and strangled a woman in 1974 is preparing to re-enter society. Gov. Gavin Newsom had the authority to stop it. He chose not to. San Luis Obispo County District Attorney Dan Dow, who fought the release at every turn, has rightly condemned the decision as emblematic of a broken system that prioritizes compassion for killers over protection for the innocent.
This is not an isolated failure of bureaucracy. It is the predictable outcome of years of progressive criminal justice “reforms” that have systematically eroded the state’s ability to keep dangerous predators behind bars. Alberto Tamez Jr. pleaded no contest to the brutal murder of Genevieve Adaline Moreno, a 56-year-old woman working at a Nipomo bar. He dragged her from the premises, beat her as she begged for mercy, raped her, and left her body in a eucalyptus grove.
Now, after more than five decades, he walks free because Sacramento’s elite decided that age and “good behavior” outweigh the heinousness of his crime.
Dow pulled no punches in his assessment. “When you rape, strangle, brutalize and murder a woman — in my perspective and point of view — that should be the death penalty or life without parole,” he stated. His office sent a deputy to oppose the parole board’s decision in December 2025, yet Newsom’s administration remained silent, allowing the release to proceed.
Newsom’s office offered no public explanation for its inaction. This silence speaks volumes in a state where the governor has long championed policies that treat incarceration as the greater evil than the crimes themselves. The Elderly Parole Program, which Newsom backed, opens the door for inmates 50 and older who have served 20 years to seek freedom. On paper, it sounds merciful. In practice, it has become a revolving door for those who forfeited any claim to mercy through their actions.
A Pattern of Prioritizing Criminals Over Victims
Tamez’s release follows a disturbing series of cases exposing the same flawed philosophy. Child molesters with centuries-long sentences have received parole hearings. Prosecutors in multiple counties have scrambled to file new charges or rally opposition just to keep predators off the streets. Each time, the refrain from Sacramento remains the same: the system demands compassion, and victims’ families must simply accept the new normal.
Dow’s frustration resonates far beyond one county. “When California reforms the system, policymakers focus on making it more compassionate for criminals while forgetting about the impact on victims,” he noted. Californians, he believes, have reached their limit. The state’s experiment in decarceration has produced measurable increases in crime and a growing sense that public officials view repeat offenders as the true victims of an outdated system.
This approach inverts the very purpose of government. Scripture reminds us that rulers bear the sword not in vain but as ministers of God’s wrath against evildoers. The Book of Romans declares, “For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil” (Romans 13:4). When leaders lay down that sword in the name of “reform,” they do not demonstrate superior morality. They abandon their God-given duty to protect the innocent and restrain the wicked.
The tragedy in Nipomo from over half a century ago still echoes. Moreno had no surviving family to advocate for her at the parole hearing. Her killer, once deemed deserving of life behind bars under the standards of his sentencing era, now benefits from a political climate that has rewritten those standards to favor release. Dow rightly points out that no one in 1974 imagined such an outcome for this kind of savagery.
California’s voters have watched as sanctuary policies, reduced sentences, and parole expansions have reshaped their state. The question is no longer whether these policies endanger lives. The evidence mounts with every released rapist and every grieving community. The real debate is whether Sacramento will acknowledge the failure before more innocents pay the price.
Dan Dow and prosecutors like him continue the fight, reframing the conversation around victims rather than perpetrators. Their stand deserves support. In a culture that increasingly excuses evil under the guise of equity, remembering the blood of Abel still cries out from the ground remains a moral imperative.
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.
