this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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Image is of smoke rising after Iranian missiles impact a US military site in Bahrain.
My weekly preamble is in spoiler tags below.
preamble
After a few weeks of both diplomatic and military manuevering - mostly over Iranian control of Hormuz - we have hit the hottest phase of military exchanges since at least the MoU period began. The US has generally focussed on striking southern Iran, although they have also sporadically hit transportation infrastructure elsewhere, which was repaired in less than 24 hours. Meanwhile, Iran has struck a wide range of targets, with an interesting focus on Jordan, but has, up to the time of me writing this, so far relented on striking the Zionist entity. The US and Iran have had little periods of mutual military strikes during the "ceasefire" before, and so it's hard to tell for sure whether this yet another temporary spat or if it represents a full return to the pre-ceasefire conflict.
A complicating factor in this conflict is that Ansarallah has become increasingly active, and seems eager to start to break the siege it has been put under by threatening to attack Saudi Arabia and Saudi-aligned forces. This has put Iran in a somewhat awkward spot. On the one hand, it has greatly helped Ansarallah resist foreign attackers and has even recently sent civilian airplanes into Sana'a to begin to break the siege. On the other hand, Iran has, with China's help, generally desired to improve its relationship with the Saudis over the years. While in this latest war there have been a major dispute between them over whether Iran is "allowed" to strike US military infrastructure located in Saudi Arabia, the Saudis strike me as considerably less anti-Iran as the UAE, let alone the Zionists, and did send a delegation to Khamenei's funeral. I guess we'll just have to see what happens next, but I strongly suspect that Iran is going to help Yemen over the Saudis.
And finally, Lindsay Graham has died of a sudden heart attack a suspiciously short time after visiting Ukraine. He was a true enemy of civilian populations all the way to the end of his life, and he seemed to particularly despise children. He advocated for using nukes against Gaza and the total annihilation of anybody and everybody who had even the meekest criticism of Zionism. If God (and, more pertinently in this case, Satan) does exist, I hope Graham is extended the exact same level of courtesy and respect in the afterlife that Graham extended to all Palestinians.
Last week's thread is here.
The Imperialism Reading Group is here.
Please check out the RedAtlas!
The bulletins site is here. Currently not used.
The RSS feed is here. Also currently not used.
The Zionist Entity's Genocide of Palestine
Sources on the fighting in Palestine against the temporary Zionist entity. In general, CW for footage of battles, explosions, dead people, and so on:
UNRWA reports on the Zionists' destruction and siege of Gaza and the West Bank.
English-language Palestinian Marxist-Leninist twitter account. Alt here.
English-language twitter account that collates news.
Arab-language twitter account with videos and images of fighting.
English-language (with some Arab retweets) Twitter account based in Lebanon. - Telegram is @IbnRiad.
English-language Palestinian Twitter account which reports on news from the Resistance Axis. - Telegram is @EyesOnSouth.
English-language Twitter account in the same group as the previous two. - Telegram here.
Mirrors of Telegram channels that have been erased by Zionist censorship.
Russia-Ukraine Conflict
Examples of Ukrainian Nazis and fascists
Examples of racism/euro-centrism during the Russia-Ukraine conflict
Sources:
Moon of Alabama, which tends to have interesting analysis. Avoid the comment section.
Understanding War and the Saker: reactionary sources that have occasional insights on the war.
Alexander Mercouris, who does daily videos on the conflict. While he is a reactionary and surrounds himself with likeminded people, his daily update videos are relatively brainworm-free and good if you don't want to follow Russian telegram channels to get news. He also co-hosts The Duran, which is more explicitly conservative, racist, sexist, transphobic, anti-communist, etc when guests are invited on, but is just about tolerable when it's just the two of them if you want a little more analysis.
Simplicius, who publishes on Substack. Like others, his political analysis should be soundly ignored, but his knowledge of weaponry and military strategy is generally quite good.
On the ground: Patrick Lancaster, an independent and very good journalist reporting in the warzone on the separatists' side.
Unedited videos of Russian/Ukrainian press conferences and speeches.
Pro-Russian Telegram Channels:
Again, CW for anti-LGBT and racist, sexist, etc speech, as well as combat footage.
https://t.me/aleksandr_skif ~ DPR's former Defense Minister and Colonel in the DPR's forces. Russian language.
https://t.me/Slavyangrad ~ A few different pro-Russian people gather frequent content for this channel (~100 posts per day), some socialist, but all socially reactionary. If you can only tolerate using one Russian telegram channel, I would recommend this one.
https://t.me/s/levigodman ~ Does daily update posts.
https://t.me/patricklancasternewstoday ~ Patrick Lancaster's telegram channel.
https://t.me/gonzowarr ~ A big Russian commentator.
https://t.me/rybar ~ One of, if not the, biggest Russian telegram channels focussing on the war out there. Actually quite balanced, maybe even pessimistic about Russia. Produces interesting and useful maps.
https://t.me/epoddubny ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/boris_rozhin ~ Russian language.
https://t.me/mod_russia_en ~ Russian Ministry of Defense. Does daily, if rather bland updates on the number of Ukrainians killed, etc. The figures appear to be approximately accurate; if you want, reduce all numbers by 25% as a 'propaganda tax', if you don't believe them. Does not cover everything, for obvious reasons, and virtually never details Russian losses.
https://t.me/UkraineHumanRightsAbuses ~ Pro-Russian, documents abuses that Ukraine commits.
Pro-Ukraine Telegram Channels:
Almost every Western media outlet.
https://discord.gg/projectowl ~ Pro-Ukrainian OSINT Discord.
https://t.me/ice_inii ~ Alleged Ukrainian account with a rather cynical take on the entire thing.
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I'm not the resident Hexbear oil understander, but I don't think you need to go very deep to understand that there's something wrong going on. Look at this picture:
The SPR is at its lowest levels since the 80's, and keeps falling, although at a lower rate. From what I could gather, there's a legal limit of 250MMBbl, which means that, effectively, the current 319MMBbl in the SPR is actually 69MMBbl (nice).
However, anything below 300MMBBl is uncharted territory, since there are structural concerns that start coming into play once you draw down to these levels. The salt caves start having structural integrity issues, and problems will start way before you reach the physical limit of 100MMBbl, under which there's no way to remove the oil from the underground salt caverns, kind of like the leftover hand soap below the tip of the tube of a soap dispenser.
One of the problems is that crude is like Turkish coffee, in that the sludge at the bottom is undrinkable. This means flow and quality are increasingly compromised the lower the SPR goes. The previous drawdown was, on average, 6MMBbl, but last week it was 3MMBbl.
Demand is probably on the rise with the recently increased military activity in Iran, which consumes a metric fuckton of jet fuel. There's also a push to lower gas prices in the US artificially. Crude oil prices are shooting up again. All of these factors seem to me like they would suggest that the drawdown should increase, not decrease. Are we going to see the SPR hitting a practical, real-life tank bottom sooner than expected?
Stick a big spoon down there and stir it up a little
I kept watching after the part about the salt caverns. The guy on the left (physically, certainly not politically!) is one of the real-est realists I've heard talk about this war in such a pro-global-north forum in a long time. The interviewer either is really playing into the devil's advocate interview style, or he's an idiot who's drunk the koolaid. The interviewee was actually talking straight-up material conditions. He's a ghoul, but a smart ghoul. I really hope American policymakers are ignoring him.
Edit: I got to a later point where he's talking about supporting an AI boom. So maybe he's not such a realist. Still smarter than the average ghoul though.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
If the war drags on long enough that we truly reach this point, I’m very curious to see whether or not this is another legal limit that the Trump regime will try to ignore. Will they continue to draw on reserves to artificially lower the cost of gas, risking a shortage for military use and/or a collapse of the storage facilities? Or will competent managers of empire step in to save the reserves?
Trump’s plan so far seems to be to keep everyone happy and ignorant about the war’s cost and impact to the US (which is working, do any USians really notice or care right now outside of slightly higher gas prices?), so I imagine he’ll fight to keep releasing the reserves as long as possible. It’s a lose-lose situation. Either try and prepare ahead of time by halting the release of reserves, driving prices up and pissing people off, or keep doing what they’ve been doing and face the consequences when it becomes a crisis and we drive off the cliff.
I guess the one winning scenario would be for the war to end soon and things go back to normalish, and drawing down the reserves was a gamble that pays off, but it seems like that only has a few months left to happen.
Looking at the graph. Is the initial drop 2022 due to Russian SMO or COVID?
Both, here's a history of release events.
The interesting thing will be seeing how it happens. Demand isn't decreasing, so once one tank somewhere is empty, all other tanks have to increase output to compensate. Meanwhile, the SPR output is more and more limited. The crash could be a big cascading failure instead of a managed drawdown.
That’s an easy fix, just pour a little water in there and you’re golden. Stupid tankies don’t know anything.
the crude oil isn't stored in tanks, so we're gonna need some salt cavies to weigh in on the matter
The US and Israel have had a 'if Israel ever needs oil we have to sell it to them from the SPR' deal that they've never used but kept going on paper just in case since the 70's. Netanyahu could do the funniest thing possible here
Shit is really gonna hit the fan
Wonder if there’s another mafia-esque contractor Trump is banking on totally fixing the structural issues for hundreds of millions of dollars
You could probably displace the oil with water. (Unless the oil is denser then water I guess.)
Would it be wise to introduce vast amounts of water into the types of salt caverns used for oil storage? I'm not being sarcastic, I'm genuinely hoping somebody with knowledge of oil storage in salt caverns could chime in on that.
Apparently pumping water into the caverns is how they remove the oil.
https://www.energy.gov/hgeo/opr/spr-storage-sites
After reading through this page I'm wondering where the idea that the salt caverns could collapse came from. It seems as easy as pumping water in (which they're doing already to extract the stored oil) to prevent the caverns from collapsing.
Actually, now that I think about it, they create the caverns in the first place by dissolving the salt with fresh water, so maybe leaving the caverns completely full of water causes them to dissolve over time, and they rely on a regular amount of oil to maintain their integrity?
i wouldn't think they are particularly prone to dissolution, but i rather suspect they look like inverted (and very wide) trees, so unless you put pipes every which way, the oil will get stuck in small branches and mini caverns just naturally
Oil is more dense than water though?
Less dense. That's why it floats on water.
That's what I meant and I still got it backwards somehow
Dumb question: is it stored in individual barrels or a gaint pool of oil?
It's stored in four sites which each consist of one or more caverns around the Gulf of Mexico. The caverns are artificial and made by dissolving natural subterranean salt dome structures with water, then filling them with oil.
The process of drawing oil out is to pump water in. Because crude is lighter than water it'll float up and be piped out. To store oil, surface systems forcefully pump oil into the cave and drive the water out through the bottom, where it can be piped back out by the piston force of the oil above. Both actions gradually expand the cave, as water will dissolve salt to brine. This is fine, because it just grants more capacity over time, for free.
However, the caverns must always be full, because hydraulic pressure is the only thing stopping their collapse. Further, a minimum amount of oil needs to be stored to form a "blanket" against the roof of the caverns. If water hits the ceiling, it will erode it rapidly and cause cave-in. That oil blanket also needs to be thick enough to guarantee that brine isn't drawn into the oil drawdown pipes.
Lots of pools in different areas (although a lot are clustered in certain regions).
It just fills up the salt caverns, so giant pools of oil. And the more it's drawn down, the more you risk structural damage to the caverns.
Big underground caves that may collapse if they get too low
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: