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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   27528 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 13, 2024

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A helicopter carrying Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi suffered a “hard landing” on Sunday, Iranian state television reported, without immediately elaborating.

Raisi was traveling in Iran’s East Azerbaijan province. State TV said the incident happened near Jolfa, a city on the border with with the nation of Azerbaijan, some 600 kilometers (375 miles) northwest of the Iranian capital, Tehran.

Rescuers were attempting to reach the site, state TV said, but had been hampered by poor weather condition in the area. There had been heavy rain reported with some wind.

Edit 6:14 GMT: Reports that three members of the Red Crescent search team have gone missing in the search area.

Edit 6:17 GMT: Iranian government claims it has made contact with two passengers at the crash site.

Edit 3:25 GMT: Iranian sources have confirmed that the President and all other people on board died in the crash.

Helicopters in rough terrain and bad weather is uncomfortably close to rolling dice with your life on the line.

Unconfirmed reports israel thinks he’s dead.

Oil to the moon

Link?

It was a prediction (slightly joking). If there is any instability or use of the instability to expand the Israeli conflict, then oil will go up.

Is it instability if Israel just wins? Do any Iranian officials really want to spearhead a new anti-Israel campaign? Sounds like a death wish.

  1. Don’t know the internal politics within Iran.

  2. Interregnum periods are often chaotic.

  3. We don’t know if the crash was an accident or a foreign op. If latter, Iran may escalate or internal faction may claim foreign op to effectuate its own goal.

  4. Doesn’t need to be with Israel but could expand for example support of Yemen in proxy war with Saudi Arabia.

Betcha it trades down on Monday. Punters betting on Middle East chaos have always lost, this time won't be different. The galaxy brain move is to short oil here. It's worked every other time.

(Note: I also subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the oil price is manipulated by Western government actors).

Edit: Oil opened down but is now up 0.19% as of 11:00pm eastern. Middle East news is either neutral or negative for oil prices.

Edit 2: Oil now sharply down after some Fed guy pontificated.

Personally, I subscribe to the conspiracy theory that the oil price is manipulated by middle eastern government actors.

They try, but they're just so bad at it. Part of it is unavoidable. The U.S. is the world's top oil producer now.

But also, these governments are clown-level incompetent, and are always backstabbing each other to avoid their quotas. In other news, apparently one of the helicopters sent to aid the rescue of the Iranian President has crashed with multiple casualties.

But also, these governments are clown-level incompetent, and are always backstabbing each other to avoid their quotas.

To be fair, I'm pretty sure Western governments are not above bribing them to backstab each other.

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