They were saying that they need like $100 billion in investments to get Venezuela back up just to its own peak oil production (which is still small compared to other producers) and only like single digit percentages of that have been pledged over the next five years. Also Venezuela’s oil is a poor quality acidic sludge which can only be refined with specialized equipment like at America’s Gulf Coast refineries and it must be diluted with expensive imported fluids prior to shipping to be usable so exporting it is uneconomical when oil prices go down.

I wouldn’t totally count out the recognized government of Yemen. Not on their own merits, they long ago lost the majority of Yemen’s population to Ansar Allah’s control and almost got wiped out by the STC (UAE-backed South Yemen separatists) earlier this year before Saudi Arabia intervened…

But, to have Saudi Arabia and much of the rest of their world diplomatically in their corner is a really great benefit that can hardly be overstated. In the aforementioned case when the STC almost destroyed the recognized government in a rapid offensive, the Saudi intervention resulted in not only the gains being reversed but the STC itself being formally dissolved all of one month later. They have quite a lot of weight to swing around.

Now, that’s NOT to say Saudi Arabia can just push Ansar Allah around like that, they’re on a completely different level than the STC. Ansar Allah, despite the small appearance on the map, is basically a state level entity with like three quarters of Yemen’s population under its control (the number they control is not terribly far behind Saudi Arabia’s own population!) and much of that population are in rugged mountains. Not easy to dislodge fighters from highly populated mountainous terrain where the population sees you as an intruder! That became abundantly clear in the last conflict where the last real coalition momentum was instead put to taking the coasts and the siege of Hudaydah. The idea being, if you can’t directly challenge Ansar Allah in their mountain fortresses as they are, instead cut off the supplies they need to wage war so their logistics fall to pieces as without access to the sea they are totally surrounded.

The problem with that however is that with the tens of millions of people densely packed in north Yemen who now require a huge amount of foreign aid, disruptions to that flow of aid like say from putting the giant port it mostly flows through under siege risks massive famine. With the intervention attracting tons of controversy due to terrible airstrikes in civilian areas on like hospitals and schools and increasing notoriety of Saudi Arabia also from things like the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, there was tremendous international pressure being placed on Saudi Arabia to back off or be made a pariah.

However… it is not certain that Saudi Arabia would face similar pressures if they undertook similar efforts to choke off Ansar Allah these days. This is not really as humanitarian minded a world as it was even eight years ago, for one. For two, Ansar Allah has through the attacks on Red Sea shipping against many different countries burned up a lot of the patience it may otherwise have been afforded by countries that previously objected to the Saudi intervention. Now, they must balance how strongly they would want to object against such measures morally vs. the damage that halts on Red Sea shipping or explosions on Saudi oil infrastructure do to their own economies.

Also, now Saudi Arabia may have some more allies up its sleeve in such an endeavor depending on how the fighting goes and if Ansar Allah continues to attack outside of Yemen’s boundaries.

Pakistan’s Defence Minister Khawaja Asif said any attack on Saudi Arabia could activate the recently signed Mecca Joint Defence Agreement, days after Yemen’s Houthis launched a barrage of missiles at the kingdom.

“If there is unprovoked aggression, or a spillover of whatever is happening in Yemen into Saudi Arabia, definitely the Mecca agreement will become operational,” he told Pakistani media outlet Geo News on Tuesday night.

“There should be no doubt about that. We are bound by the terms and conditions of this pact, and … we will honour them in case there is a need.”

Previously Pakistan outright proclaimed no interest in the matter and stayed back. Them and Turkey could add quite a great deal of diplomatic or military weight and limit escalation with Iran (Iran is fine at yeeting missiles across the waves to whoever but is not really interested in antagonizing countries with powerful ground forces directly bordering it). Plus the US itself though with zero interest in providing ground forces may well be willing to actually supply other forms of help given that Ansar Allah is aligned with Iran and the present situation with Iran is deeply embarassing to the US and they would really rather not having more of Saudi oil and refined products getting knocked out or made inaccessible to the global market.

The attacks are too big for Saudi Arabia not to do something to not look like a punk that will take anything on the international stage… competing with that though, Saudi Arabia does not want to give the appearance of local instability to investors, and getting directly involved in a war doesn’t help that sentiment. And getting too involved also makes the recognized government of Yemen look like total puppets which is not very helpful for Saudi Arabia’s interests.

We’ll see probably quite a lot of updates in the time to come but anyway my prediction is that the recognized government of Yemen does not entirely crumple quite so easily (at least, not without a strong intervention shortly thereafter putting it back on life support again).

Reminder that oil is refined before it is made into products such as gasoline. If say a refinery gets blown up, that can make refined products like gasoline much more expensive due to less supply and simultaneously lower the price of crude oil because with less refining there is less demand for crude oil.

The price of crude oil going in to be refined is important because if that is crazy expensive then generally so will be products that are made from it but there are some other factors at play

The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale

I wonder what was promised to Chevron to change their minds. Companies are usually pretty hesitant to throw around billions of dollars into a country that has previously seized similar investments, and the pay-off is a sour crude that is more difficult to refine and not as desired so they can’t command that high of a price. There’s a reason why Exxon-Mobil is quoted in the article as saying that Venezuela is un-investable, despite that pissing off Trump. And one of the other links in the article was saying Venezuela could require more on the order of one hundred billion dollars to get to four million barrels a day (which is roughly the peak production they once enjoyed) so in light of that seven billion while enough to be a giant risk for an individual company it doesn’t come close to rejuvenating the industry for Venezuela either barring wild success on a slim budget.

Maybe it’s like a play for the cameras. Say some words and Trump can throw around his favorite words like deal and billions, cash in on whatever approval that nets you, then quietly curtail much of the money some years down the line when Trump is out of office.

Fedorov was the guy in the Ministry of Digital Transformation who back in February 2022 tweeted at Elon asking for Starlink which got them that shortly afterwards back in the time when it was very good publicity to back Ukraine. In more recent times he was in charge of trying to convince Elon to restrict Russia’s use of Starlink and to allow Ukraine to use Starlink in Russia. So they’ve been having a lot of texting and video calls to that end which evidently worked.

With Fedorov having gotten what he wanted out of those talks, being an acquaintance of him and knowing that Elon sometimes supports foreign politicians, I guess he figures it doesn’t hurt to puff Elon up with this sort of message made a day or two back in case Elon helps support his bid for the leadership:

Elon Musk is prorably the most important tech person and entrepreneur in the world for our country. By shutting down Russia’s illegal use of Starlink on Ukrainian territory, @elonmusk and @SpaceX protected our air defense, saved our air force, and spared thousands of civilian

For background Fedorov has become very popular in Ukraine for his modernization efforts to crack down on corruption in military procurement and focus on drone warfare. Zelensky recently fired Fedorov from his new position of Defense Minister which was a very controversial move that no doubt worsened their relations with each other.

That’s like the worst of both worlds because it both barely does any damage to Russia’s war effort but people would think it was devastating to civilians

They’re in a defense pact with Pakistan and Pakistan already has nukes that can reach Israel, nuke sharing should be possible.

Also Turkey has a decent airforce that operates on NATO standards with slightly more aircraft than Israel. Not quite as good aircraft but they’re hoping to change that by getting the F-35 which Israel is staunchly opposing since that would both erode their air advantage and get some Israeli technology used to make it in Turkish hands. Anyway regardless Turkey is not a place that Israel can bomb with impunity with no real threat to the bombers like for Syria.

He’s been crashing out since the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement was signed between Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Turkey.

Saudi Arabia and Pakistan had already made an earlier defense agreement with each other about a week after Qatar was bombed by Israel, which theoretically puts Saudi Arabia under Pakistan’s nuclear umbrella. Now with Turkey in that brings aboard a rather large military with NATO standards… and one that has mutually terrible relations with Israel.

For a while Israel has been angling to pull in Saudi Arabia on the other more Abraham Accords side of things without giving into the Saudi condition that they first start an irreversible path to establishing Palestinian statehood before normalizing relations but Saudi Arabia taking this step with Turkey shows rather publicly that those efforts have been frustrated.

Amichai also urged Israel to deepen alliances with Greece, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates and the otherwise unrecognized government of Somaliland as a counter. Obviously Greece and Cyprus pin down Turkish forces to their west and on Cyprus to limit what Turkey could hypothetically bring to bare against Israel. To those who don’t know the UAE and “Somaliland” may seem kind of random. But the UAE has been supporting a lot of coups, civil war factions and so on whenever there’s instability in the region and doing heavy investments in Africa. So the UAE has considerable sway in Sudan via the RSF, Somalia via supporting Somaliland and Puntland, Haftar in Libya (who has allowed eastern Libya to be used as a channel to funnel weapons into Sudan even over protests from Egypt), and so on. Even paying Ethiopia to train RSF rebels and fire drone attacks into Sudan.

As Turkey and Saudi Arabia are invested into the existing recognized governments of Somalia and Sudan, this splits their focus and could force them to have to pick and choose among their various projects or still try to support them all but be less likely to succeed.

Unfortunately for Syria the proximity to Israel and being under Turkish influence also means that when Israel wants to lash out against Turkey, it is very easy to do that by harming Syria. When Syria was fresh out of the revolution Turkey tried to send personnel to evaluate existing air bases so that Turkish airforce could be stationed there and Israel reaponded by bombing those bases over the entire country and destroying the Syrian airforce. Syria invaded the UNDOF buffer zone and claimed the heights of Mount Hermon which gives it huge unblocked range for what it can see and respond to with radar. When the Suwayda clashes happened, Israeli issued demands to demilitarize southern Syria and began airstrikes to destroy the government forces sent to the area (plus an airstrike on the presidential palace in Damascus), allowing Hijri’s forces to consolidate their power in Suwayda and remove the local Bedouins. Sharaa can’t do much of anything about it by himself because his military is not even large enough to properly restore order in all of Syria with all the militia running around. Trying to concentrate enough forces to ward off Israel (a tall task indeed) means some areas will get stretched. If security is too stretched in an environment with a huge number of people out for revenge killings, a provocation that overwhelms local professional forces in an area (ex. like the ambushes at the coast) could easily spiral out into massacres again as the trigger-happy militia running around in to settle scores. And such massacres further stoke sectarian tensions to make a repeat easier and makes it harder for other governments to support Syria, so either way Israel is winning.

Anyway any guesses on this guy’s reaction if the rest of the faction can talk Egypt into signing onto the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement? Egypt is also invested in protecting Eritrea, Sudan and Somalia’s existing governments; they do not want Ethiopia growing overstrong by cheaply accessing ports out of those countries lest a powerful Ethiopia use the leverage of the Nile River to make Egypt so whatever it wants. This was important enough to flip Egypt out of alignment with the UAE which had backed the military coup against the elected government. And the worse Israel acts in Palestine, the worse the pressure of the enraged people becomes on the government of Egypt for their existing ties with Israel. So although Egypt is kind of the odd man out among Turkey, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia they have all been acting more and more closely despite their differences.

The primary goal of it is containing Israel, note that the preceding Strategic Mutual Defense Agreement between Saudi Arabia & Pakistan was rushed through just over a week after Israel bombed Qatar. That caused a lot of alarm bells to ring in Saudi Arabia because Qatar has the largest US base in the region (Al Udeid Air Base) and while Israel justified it by saying they were targeting Hamas leadership there, the US were the ones who told Qatar to invite the leadership of Hamas in the first place. (It’s much more comfortable for American & Israeli diplomats to talk with Hamas officials in Doha, Qatar than out of Iran [which has taken previously taken American diplomats hostage] where they were based before.) So Qatar was basically doing as much as it could to back America and had even personally bribed Trump with the massive plane but America still let Qatar be bombed by Israel with very limited repercussions, which makes relying on the US for security look foolish to actors in the region.

Nevertheless, all in this pact (plus others not formally in but still on board with the faction like Egypt and Qatar) still maintain fairly decent relations with the US (and Trump in particular) and are happy to buy American weapons and so on, so to be clear it’s not really angled as a “US out” sort of alliance at all at this point. The inclusion of Turkey makes this very clear since Turkey is having a re-approachment with the US to obtain the F-35 but Israel has been propagandizing against Turkey as “the new Iran” heavily.

Other aims include countering the UAE, India, Greece and Ethiopia who are in an emerging faction with Israel. The UAE sees Islamists as an existential threat and has been backing coups and civil wars to get more secular alternative governments in power whether through outright flipping or fragmenting existing states. Ex. backing authoritarian Haftar’s side in Libya, the military coup in Egypt (though their relations later deteriorated), South Yemen separatists for splitting from Yemen (though Saudi Arabia recently squished them), Somaliland and Puntland in splitting from Somalia, and the Arab supremacist RSF in Sudan. If this all worked then that faction would have held sway over a massive chunk of Africa from Libya down through both chokepoints of the Red Sea and that would have been fantastic leverage over Saudi Arabia with the UAE parked at their only other sea export route. Ethiopia for its part wants access to the ocean for cheaper than Djibouti offers its portsfor and so has been saber rattling against Eritrea and providing support for the UAE in trying to flip Sudan and partition Somalia. (Note Egypt is scared of a powerful Ethiopia capable of throttling the Nile River since almost everyone in Egypt lives on the banks of that river so that led them to flip sides to try to keep Ethiopia from nabbing ports and becoming that powerful.) India of course opposes Pakistan’s efforts as their rival and has been massively expanding gas from the UAE while furthering strategic partnerships with Israel and Ethiopia as well.

Regarding Iran, I think Saudi Arabia would like the pact to be against them as well but I don’t think the other members are as interested in that. Pakistan’s economy is terrible and their only friendly neighbor right now is Iran so they’d prefer Iran be intact and not a chaotic place where their mutually shared separatists can grow strong dancing around the border. Turkey had some friction before in Iran supporting Assad’s Syria but with Assad & Hezb both out of Syria Turkey would prefer to focus on things they have in common like supporting Palestine and the recognized government of Sudan, plus their economy has had some difficulties and there are shared Kurdish militants on the border so again not wanting Iran to get destroyed as that worsens the economy and makes shared separatists stronger. Saudi Arabia on the other hand is in the hot seat because it has been directly targeted by Iran (easy to do as they have few economic links and with no adjacent army there isn’t much Saudi Arabia can do to punish Iran that they aren’t getting way worse from the US) and they have competing proxies in Yemen, the Saudi-supported recognized government with most of the land but about the quarter of the population and Iran-aligned Ansar Allah (aka Houthis) with the bulk of Yemen’s population and a small but strategically important bit of land that can choke travel through the southern end of the Red Sea and provide a launching point for their very capable drones.

With Saudi Arabia and Iran having terrible relations and competing proxies on Saudi Arabia’s doorstep while the others in the pact are invested in keeping things peaceful with Iran and trying to keep the focus on a shared disdain for Israel, I’m curious but hoping not to find out as to whether this pact will actually be enforced if Iran strikes Saudi Arabia again or if kind of nothing in military action comes of it and it looks flaccid like what happened with the SMDA when Saudi Arabia was bombed earlier and Pakistan mostly just kept championing the attempts at ceasefires.

https://greekcitytimes.com/2026/08/10/mecca-alliance-israel-chikli-greece-cyprus/

In this article the Diaspora Affairs Minister of Israel calls the alliance “a development that is very, very bad for us, for Israel,” and called for Israel to deepen its strategic partnerships with Greece and Cyprus, as well as with the United Arab Emirates and Somaliland.

PM Modi of India posted on X: “Received a phone call from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. We reviewed progress on various aspects of the India–Israel Special Strategic Partnership which continues to grow from strength to strength. We also exchanged views on the current situation in West Asia.”

So you can see this is stirring something of a reaction among the Israel aligned block.

Now Turkey is officially onboard. The other most significant players in the block that haven’t tagged along are Egypt and Qatar although Egypt is a bit of the odd man out.

This is mostly pointed at the faction including Israel and the UAE (plus Greece, India, Ethiopia etc…) but the Iran War puts a twist on things. Iran has intermittently bombed Saudi Arabia or had its proxies in northern Yemen attack them and its unclear if this pact will activate to protect Saudi Arabia against such things… those are the countries that Iran would least want getting involved in a war because they have powerful land armies right on the doorstep that can attack from opposite sides so maybe that gives Iran pause to attack Saudi Arabia, but those countries also really do not want war with Iran themselves as they have fragile economies and instability which is why they have been really involved with trying to negotiate peace. If some Iranian officer attacks without authorization and the pact is actually activated for it that could be a pretty big deal.

Yeah Israel is very unhappy about the thought of the military technology they manufacture winding up in Turkey’s possession since they’re in increasingly opposed blocks right now. Greece isn’t happy either since it’s on that same side.

Idk why people do this. Leaving aside Ukraine there’s also Russia to worry about.

Ex. American tankie Russell Bentley moved over to join the war in eastern Ukraine on Russia’s side, but Ukraine wasn’t what got him. As an “information warrior”, he was taking a video of the aftermath of a Ukrainian strike to make some propaganda about it. His own guys saw this suspicious character filming the site and declared him to be a spy helping with Ukrainian spotting despite his protests to the contrary that he was a ‘journalist’.

Dude was sexually abused, tortured to death by his own side (this particular group has been filmed hooking up field telephones to electrocute the genitals in its torture methods) and his body was blown up in a car with a TNT charge in an attempt to get rid of the evidence after realizing he was on their side after the fact.

What a weird way to open a banana. I always open a seam along the back and pop it out of there.

They are extremely overpopulated in much of the US, in part because most of the natural predators capable of keeping their numbers down have been killed off and there has been a huge artificial increase in field/forest interfaces where they thrive. Huge amounts of starving deer abound and descend on diminishing native vegetation with a voracious appetite while generally ignoring weird invasive foreign plants. Many native plant gardeners are vexed by their tendency to gnaw native plants, trees and shrubs to death unless those are caged in and some got a taste for venison out of revenge haha.

Would be cool if we could re-introduce red wolves and the like to keep a lid on the deer without like half of the predators ending up shot or run over