SINGLE POINTS OF FAILURE
Eighty days in, the Strait of Hormuz still closed.
The slot machine is rigged to the generator. This is not a metaphor.
Our world is really like my old 1970s Vegas machine I acquired under circumstances I will not detail here, and a diesel generator that has become the most important appliance I own. When the generator runs, the machine runs. When the machine runs, I feel that civilization is, on some level, still functional. This is irrational, so is the stock market.
Eighty days since the Strait of Hormuz closed — or “experienced navigational restrictions,” if you work in a building with good lighting and a catered lunch. Twenty percent of the world’s hydrocarbon supply, simply removed from the equation. The market, powered by the same sycophantic AI architecture that spent three years telling us supply chains were fine and inflation was transitory, is doing what markets do when reality becomes uncomfortable. It is looking away.
I do not have this luxury, but before we start: if you want the full system rather than the three-point summary, the courses are at the bottom. The rest of this is worth reading anyway.
We covered this in the watchman’s torch premium edition. We covered it because a war game simulation flagged this exact scenario more than two decades ago, and that document existed, and people read it, and then apparently set it down and went to lunch. History has a filing system. It is just not organized in any useful way.
The effects are not theoretical at this point. Southeast Asia is staring at a fertilizer shortage that threatens to intersect badly with crop season. Europe, which had already absorbed the Russian gas severance like a man who insists the knife wound is not that deep, is now watching energy prices move past even the peaks of the Ukraine war years. The continent has the expression of someone who has missed two connecting flights and is reconsidering their relationship with air travel entirely.
We have seen what happens next. In 2020, people who had never considered themselves capable of aggression discovered strong opinions about paper towels. The psychology of scarcity is fast and it is not selective. It finds everyone.
It does not have to find you.
Steven Harris changed how I think about this. Not in a survivalist-compound way. In the way that good security thinking changes how you see systems, you start noticing the dependencies, the single points of failure, the places where redundancy would cost almost nothing and its absence could cost everything.
Three things. Right now. None of them require a bunker.
YOUR CAR IS A FUEL RESERVE. Most modern vehicles hold enough range for 300 to 600 miles. You have been sitting on a strategic petroleum asset and calling it a commute. My rule, normal conditions: refuel at half a tank. During periods like this one: one third. You stay ahead of the moment when the gas station stops being a gas station and starts being something else. The lines form fast. The mood inside them forms faster.
YOUR PANTRY IS YOUR BUFFER. One week is the bare minimum. Not ten years of freeze-dried meals in a room that makes your family uncomfortable. One week, rotated, used, replenished. Harris is specific about this: buy food your household will actually eat. The pantry is a live system, not a museum. Water matters more than people remember until it doesn’t. Large jugs for dispensers. Some toilet paper, but don’t forget you can always take a shower and not use it (ask anyone who has been to Japan).
CASH STILL WORKS. I know what this audience thinks about fiat currency. I have read the takes. But for a two-week regional disruption (power fluctuations, payment processors offline, network degraded) cash is the most antifragile transaction protocol available. It requires no signal, no counterparty uptime, no infrastructure. It is not a long-term thesis. It is a practical observation about how the next fourteen days might go.
There is more to say. Phone battery strategy alone is a full issue. The window between “this is interesting” and “I wish I had done this earlier” is shorter than it looks right now.
Harris runs his own operation. These are not our courses to discount at will, which means we almost never do this. Use HORMUZ at checkout for 15% off. I would not mention it if it were not genuine and I would not expect it to last.
There are two layers to this.
The first is tactical. Steven Harris spent time advising the US Army on deployment in combat zones. The insight that changed how I think: your city already is one, it just hasn’t declared itself yet. The course covers operational security for the environment you actually live in: fuel, power, communication, movement. Short time horizon. High immediate value.
The second is strategic. Long-term food storage done correctly is not a pantry, it is infrastructure. Built once, maintained passively, invisible until it becomes the most important thing you own.
Most people who buy one eventually buy both. The tactical layer tells you what to do in the next thirty days. The food plan layer means you never have to think about it again.