The Goal Leads to CACTUS

It’s almost over.

All that remains is for UK, France, Germany, and Japan to send in their troops to open the strait.

Out buying supplies. The willpower it takes to walk past tuna on sale for $1.00 a can because I think I have enough is superhuman.

When will Taiwan have energy shortages caused by the Hormuz closure?

Based on current reports from March 2026, Taiwan has secured enough energy supplies to avoid immediate shortages through April 2026, but it faces a high risk of power shortages starting in May or June 2026 if the Strait of Hormuz remains closed.

While Taiwan maintains substantial oil reserves, its natural gas (LNG) supply is much more precarious due to limited storage capacity and high reliance on Middle Eastern imports.

Key Factors Driving Potential Shortages

The “April Buffer”: The Ministry of Economic Affairs has confirmed that 91% of April’s LNG arrivals are already secured. However, only about half of the needed supply for May has been contracted as of mid-March.

Limited Storage: Taiwan’s LNG reserve of roughly 11 days is the lowest among major East Asian importers (compared to Japan’s 21 days and South Korea’s 52 days). This leaves almost no margin for shipping delays caused by rerouting around the Cape of Good Hope.

Summer Demand Surge: Electricity demand in Taiwan typically spikes in late May and June. Because LNG fuels over 50% of Taiwan’s power grid, any gap in arrivals during this peak period could force immediate power rationing.

Semiconductor Impact: Industries like TSMC, which consumes approximately 9% of Taiwan’s electricity, are particularly vulnerable. A sustained disruption could lead to prioritizing “high-margin” chips (like AI components) over others if power must be diverted.

Mitigation Measures

To prevent a total blackout, the government is currently:

Coal Backup: Keeping 13 GW of coal-fired capacity on standby to replace gas-fired generation.

Alternative Sourcing: Negotiating with the United States and Australia for additional shipments to arrive in June.

Demand Management: Potential measures include raising air-conditioning temperatures in government buildings and implementing industrial power caps.

xraymike79 today…

https://collapseofindustrialcivilization.com/2026/03/19/the-war-that-turns-the-lights-off/

There is a difference between threatening a chokepoint and bombing the cables that hold the bridge up. Over the past week, the Iran war has crossed that line. What began as another grisly, “manageable” conflict on the edges of the global economy is turning into something else: an open season on the energy infrastructure that keeps the lights on, the food moving, and the financial system papered over.

One of the most revealing things about this latest phase is not just what happened, but how leaders talk about it.

Iran’s foreign minister now promises “zero restraint” if more of its infrastructure is struck, implying that the previous wave of attacks on Gulf energy sites used only a fraction of Iran’s capabilities. In Washington, Donald Trump insists the United States “knew nothing” of Israel’s South Pars strike, even as reporting and regional analysis suggest U.S. officials were informed in advance. Almost in the same breath, he threatens that if Iran hits Qatar’s LNG infrastructure again, the U.S. will “massively blow up” the entirety of South Pars “at an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen.”

What is being said out loud here is extraordinary. Allies casually drag each other into attacks on each other’s critical infrastructure while denying foreknowledge. A sitting U.S. president promises, on social media and then in briefings, to annihilate a core piece of the world’s gas system as punishment for attacks on a third country’s energy hubs. Iran lists major facilities in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar as “direct and legitimate targets” and begins hitting them.

This is the rules‑based order in our current, perverse reality: great powers claiming legal and moral cover to destroy assets that keep billions of people clothed, fed, and warm, then backfilling the justification later.

Nothing on this scale has happened before. Past oil shocks burned Kuwaiti wells, closed canals, or harassed tankers, but left the core of multiple producers’ upstream systems intact and repairable in months rather than years. Today’s campaign goes straight for the main nodes of the global gas and oil machine, disabling a large slice of Qatar’s LNG capacity for years and threatening to keep a historic share of Gulf crude and gas effectively offline. It is not just another scare at a chokepoint. It is the first time the suspension cables of the energy system themselves are being systematically cut.

At home, governments will respond by expanding emergency powers that had once been reserved for rare, discrete crises. Rationing regimes, mandatory demand reductions, intensified surveillance of “critical infrastructure,” and the deployment of troops to guard refineries and ports will be rolled out as temporary measures and then linger as permanent architecture. In wealthy states, this will be wrapped in the language of “resilience” and “homeland security.” In poorer ones, it will be defended as the price of avoiding outright famine and state failure.

From a distance, this is exactly the kind of convergence the old limits‑to‑growth and collapse theorists tried to warn about. They argued that complex, high‑energy societies push into overshoot by piling ever more infrastructure and interdependence onto finite resource flows, until shocks hit the load‑bearing parts of the system and complexity starts to run in reverse. On their charts, it looked like smooth curves for industrial output, food, and population bending gently down after a peak. In our world, it looks like something cruder: missiles punching holes in gas fields and cable corridors, insurance markets refusing to cover whole regions, and governments discovering that “demand destruction” is just a polite phrase for forced reductions in consumption. You still get less energy burned, fewer flights taken, fewer goods shipped—but through blackouts and mandatory rationing, not through planned transition. The question is no longer whether modern civilization will shrink its material footprint. It is whether that contraction will be distributed, negotiated, and humane, or imposed from above and outside by a tightening ring of chokepoints and a thinning cushion of surplus.

Nicole Foss believes the US attack on Iran was a deliberate plan to reduce demand for oil and introduce social controls (aka Covid 2.0), however, because US leaders do not understand CACTUS, things will spin out of control.

I don’t agree with the Covid 2.0 bit, but I do agree with the CACTUS bit.

https://www.foss.blog/2026/03/20/the-next-gfc-is-beginning-and-it-will-be-much-worse-than-the-last-one/

The shit is about to hit the fan spectacularly, as energy and finance are extremely co-dependent, and finance has been over-extended for years to decades. The coming massive energy shock will reveal all the systemic fraud, and crush finance back to a grim reality. What’s happening is a liquidation event, deliberately caused with foreknowledge of what at least the inital effects would be, but insufficient understanding that events like this can get out of hand very quickly. What starts as attempt at controlled demand destruction meant to lead the world’s population into a digital control grid (ie an involuntary rationing system for resources about to become very scarce) can escalate unbelievably quickly into a wave of unprecedented physical destruction. Control is an illusion. The global system cannot be centrally controlled. Attempts to do so will fail, but at horrendous cost. The analysis posted above discusses this in detail.

We’re about to see an almighty bidding war for oil resources outside of the Straits of Hormuz. As that oil is still priced in dollars, that means a dollar liquidity squeeze. Assets will be sold to raise dollars, and good assets are much easier to sell than dodgy ones. This could turn into a bloodbath of asset sales at lower and lower prices, with margin calls aggravating the process considerably. This can unfold very quickly. Watch the film Margin Call if you need to understand how this takes on a life of its own. Finance is virtual, so the time in which it can change is very short. It then becomes a powerful driver for impacts all across the physical world. This is exactly what I’ve been predicting the endgame would look like for the last twenty years.

Maybe not quite as wise or aware as I remember her in her younger years…

The best energy investments now would be in modular thorium reactors, which are passively safe, meaning that they neither explode like Chernobyl, nor melt down like Fukushima. Being relatively small, they can be constructed much more quickly than large uranium reactors, but time is of the essence due to how quickly the crisis is unfolding.

Despite WWIII sucking up all the oxygen, a few people are still fighting to improve public health, but it’s very difficult to make any progress.

A few days ago a judge decided he knows more about children’s health than Robert Kennedy Jr. and every member of the ACIP committee… And everyone at HHS, the CDC, and other.. This is a judge with no medical degree, no pediatric expertise, and a lifetime appointment… and with one ruling, he erased the most meaningful attempt to protect American children this government has ever made.

Reuters called it “upending Kennedy’s overhaul of childhood vaccine policies.” Here’s what actually happened.

RFK Jr. looked at peer nations (like Denmark and Germany) with healthy kids and functioning societies, and said let’s see if there’s a smarter schedule. What he found was that we give 54 shots of 72 vaccine doses. Denmark gives roughly half that. And Denmark has not seen measles come back, or polio come back, or smallpox come back. 

None of the fear porn the American Academy of Pediatrics has been selling you has actually happened.

Meanwhile we went from 12% of American children with chronic disease in the 1980s to nearly 50% today. In 48 years, we have seen the greatest collapse of children’s health in the history of this country, happening in perfect parallel with a vaccine schedule that grew from 12 vaccines to 54 shots.

You cannot look at the health of American children and call that program a success. You simply cannot.

So what did the judge do? He said RFK Jr. didn’t run it by ACIP, the advisory committee that by everyone’s understanding has always been advisory only. No binding authority, just an opinion, not a mandate. At least that’s what they always told us when the committee was captured… And then when Kennedy moved to satisfy that requirement, the judge said he didn’t recognize the current ACIP either.

There is no committee he recognizes. According to him there are no changes allowed in either direction, no new vaccines can be added, there can be no modifications for any reason, including a bioweapon attack. One judge has put the entire country in limbo to protect a rubber-stamp committee that has never once had a genuine skeptic in the room.

A committee where members like Paul Offit voted to add rotavirus vaccines to the childhood schedule while personally developing a rotavirus vaccine and didn’t recuse himself. That’s the balance they’re defending.

The American Academy of Pediatrics, a trade organization funded by the pharmaceutical industry, went to court to make sure your doctor has no say in your child’s vaccine schedule. They don’t want pediatricians in the conversation. They want the government to decide.

This is what happens when you try to clean the swamp. The swamp has judges.

This case is not over. It’s an injunction, not a final ruling. The Trump administration will appeal. And we will keep fighting.

Because the children of this country deserve better than what 40 years of this program has given them.

Imagine you are an Iranian commander reading this moron’s message…

Oops, didn’t think Iran would retaliate, even though they told me they would, better pretend US had nothing to do with it.

I’m serious. Really, I’m really serious.

Nicole Foss found a pretty good Australian rant about the insanity.

https://www.foss.blog/2026/03/19/major-excalation-in-the-gulf-war/

Donald Trump didn’t play 5D chess. He didn’t even play checkers. He walked into the room, knocked the board off the table, shit on the floor, and declared victory. And now 8 billion people who never got a vote are going to pay for it at the petrol pump, at the supermarket, in their heating bills, and in their fucking retirement savings.

The wheels of disaster grind slowly. The bombs make the news but the economics make the history books. $200 oil doesn’t kill you in a fireball. It kills you at the checkout.

Buckle. The fuck. Up.