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rationing motor oil
https://apnews.com/article/costco-mo...b61f7cdf3d3e38...Costco has raised the price of motor oil sold under its exclusive private-label brand as well as limited how much of it customers can buy weekly as oil prices climb yet again.
Americans looking to try to save some money by purchasing motor oil to do their own oil changes may consider this yet another blow to their wallets, as they are already contending with high grocery prices and inflation worries.
Costco’s Kirkland Signature full-synthetic motor oil 5-quart two pack now costs around $58, well above the approximately $30 it had been selling for just last year. Costco is also only allowing customers to purchase two boxes a week.....
rationing motor oil
Andy Burnham is considering requests from Saudi Arabia for a range of military support to counter attacks from the Houthis, as the UK fears a “catastrophic” economic hit from a new front in the Iran war.
The Saudi asks include operational support for its military to repel the Houthis’ push along the Red Sea coast toward the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, a key trade chokepoint, and help to defend against strikes on its oil infrastructure.-Bloomberg
General Directorate of Saudi Civil Defense:
"An alert has been issued by the National Early Warning Platform for Emergency Cases in Jeddah Governorate to warn of a danger."This actually seems to be a larger scale attack on Saudi Arabia, with warnings now for Jeddah, Taif, Yanbu, Jazan, Abha and Al-Ula.
https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2026/09/14/trump-nominates-texas-rep-wesley-hunt-u-s-ambassador-saudi-arabia/Trump Nominates Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt as U.S. Ambassador to Saudi ArabiaMark Felix/Bloomberg via Getty Images
Saudi Arabia bear-hugging Trump and laying massive bribes on his family seem not necessarily to have been advantageous to the security of the kingdom
Nonzero chance Saudi Arabia as we have known it will soon no longer exist
None of this is comprehensible without the arc that produced it. The Houthis seized Sanaa in September 2014. In March 2015, a Saudi-led coalition — armed, fueled, and intelligence-fed by the United States across successive administrations — launched Operation Decisive Storm to reverse the takeover and restore the government. What followed was not victory but stalemate: more than ten years of bombing that flattened much of the country, produced what the UN repeatedly called the world’s worst humanitarian catastrophe, and killed well over a hundred thousand people directly with many more dead from hunger and disease.
The coalition never retook the north. By 2022, an exhausted Saudi Arabia signed onto a UN truce and, over the following two years, pursued a quiet exit — a de-escalation roadmap encouraged by its 2023 rapprochement with Iran. The Houthis, meanwhile, converted survival into strength. When Israel’s war in Gaza began in October 2023, they opened the Red Sea front, attacking shipping through Bab al-Mandeb and drawing the US and Britain into an air campaign that ran through 2024 and into 2025 — and that ended, as noted, in a ceasefire the Houthis reasonably claimed as a win.
The lesson the Houthis appear to have drawn is the correct one: they have outlasted everyone. They survived a decade of Saudi airpower, absorbed the best the US Navy and Air Force were willing to throw at them, and emerged still holding the capital and now reaching for the strait. The lesson Riyadh has drawn is that Yemen is a quagmire it entered in 2015 and has been trying to leave ever since. And the lesson Washington has drawn is that the Houthis are not worth a third simultaneous front when Iran and Hormuz command the priority.
The picture that emerges is one of Houthi ascendancy meeting American retrenchment, with Saudi Arabia caught in between. The movement that a superpower coalition set out to crush in 2015 is, in 2026, advancing on one of the world’s most important waterways and striking Saudi oil infrastructure at will — while the United States, having failed to defeat it from the air and unwilling to try again, confines itself to passing intelligence and targeting coordinates from the sidelines. For a Gulf monarchy that spent a decade assuming American power would ultimately be there when it mattered, the message from this week is stark.
to date, pass-through inflation not counted
https://iranwarcost.watson.brown.edu$811.65 per US household
Across both gasoline and diesel
Kushner has been squeezing GCC countries like oranges
https://archive.is/20260914185135/ht...7.425-2597.599Earlier this year, as Kushner engaged in talks with Iran, he was also discreetly raising another five billion dollars for Affinnity in the Middle East. After the attacks on Tehran began, su ions arose that the two endeavors were linked. “My sense is that he thinks he was killing two birds with one stone—he was helping the Arabs defeat the Iranians, and he wanted to be paid for it,” an American with deep ties to Middle Eastern leaders told me.
I can only hate the fact it's Kushy who is ripping off the Arab royalty.
not interfering with Ansar Allah interfering with Saudi Arabia
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveb...t-hormuz-minesIsrael’s military has urged the government to refrain from launching attacks against the Houthis in Yemen, an Israeli news report says.
Unnamed security officials, quoted by the Haaretz newspaper, said Israel’s leaders should instead pursue a diplomatic course to form an international coalition to deal with Houthi territorial gains and new influence over the critical Bab al-Mandeb strait.
Tying the Houthi matter to the interests of the international community would help keep Iran at the centre of the global discourse, sources said.
Chart of diesel prices for past yearDiesel new highs, China crude making new record premiums vs Brent, backwardation accelerating, tanker rates exploding. All of this suggests the crude market is tightening rapidly because China has stopped relying on strategic draws.
Chart of spread ($/bbl) between Chinese crude futures (medium-sour grade, delivered to China's coast) vs Brent
Chart of spread between front-month Brent and fourth-month Brent, with higher readings indicating a greater premium for barrels near-terms vs deferred barrels.
Spot freight rate for a Persian Gulf tanker to the US Gulf Coast since 1991
Last edited by Winehole23; 09-15-2026 at 06:46 AM.
Pentagon IG report drops
Trump and Hegseth have screwed the pooch
https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-mil...rcraft-damage/A US government watchdog released its first report Monday on the impact of the Iran war, acknowledging the military’s advanced weapons shortfalls and offering the first public look at the damage to American aircraft, bases and diplomatic outposts in the Middle East.
Much of the information has been previously reported over the past six months, but the Pentagon inspector general’s report offered the fullest official accounting so far of the conflict’s costs in American lives, taxpayer dollars and physical damage. It included information from the watchdogs for the Defense and State departments as well as the US Agency for International Development.
The report, whose publication was first reported by NBC News, noted that the US war with Iran “has resulted in strategic inventory shortfalls and revealed industrial base bottlenecks for munitions resupply” in regard to advanced weapons. Experts have previously said it will take about three years for military contractors to replenish advanced missiles and defensive missile interceptors to prewar levels.
Department of Losing to a mid-tier power
The watchdog report, which covers April 1 to June 30, also acknowledged that Iranian strikes damaged and destroyed hundreds of buildings and other structures at US bases in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Oman and Jordan.
It noted that the US naval base in Bahrain, a Navy logistics hub in the region, was targeted with Iranian drones and ballistic missiles. US Central Command had to shift supply lines to alternate hubs that were much farther away, including Diego Garcia, a US-UK base on an island in the Indian Ocean. It required “14- to 18-day logistics cycles” to support operations in the Middle East, the report said.
Acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao acknowledged in an interview with The Epoch Times last week that “they blew the out of Bahrain” and said he has a task force looking into whether the Navy would need to repair the base in Bahrain to sustain its forces in the region.
Dozens of American aircraft and drones also were destroyed or damaged by Iran, including the destruction of as many as 30 MQ-9 Reaper drones that cost around $30 million apiece, the report said. Seven KC-135 refueling aircraft were damaged or destroyed, including five that were struck by Iranian munitions while on the ground in Saudi Arabia.
Another KC-135 crashed in Iraq, killing six service members, following a collision with another KC-135.
Those deaths, and the death of a pilot of a helicopter that crashed into the Arabian Sea, are listed as occurring during non-hostile events. Eleven other service members are listed as “killed in action” in Kuwait, Iraq, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told Congress in late July that the war had cost $37.5 billion so far.
The costs in physical damage to US diplomatic facilities, however, had not been previously publicly released. Such outposts in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and the UAE were damaged by Iranian strikes, with an estimated cost of $184 million, according to the report.
The State Department reported in early June that its other costs from the conflict came to $113 million, with nearly $80 million used to respond to contingency plans, including evacuation expenses for US personnel and their families as well as other American citizens and eligible third-country nationals.
well short of prewar levels, but a rising trend
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/15/aws-...n-strikes.htmlAWS says it can’t restore service to Bahrain, UAE facilities 6 months after Iran strikes
Amazon Web Services said Tuesday it can’t restore access to cloud-computing facilities in Bahrain and parts of the United Arab Emirates, more than six months after the sites were damaged by drone strikes in the early days of the Iran war.
The company said in an update posted to AWS’ health dashboard that the damage at multiple Bahrain-based sites exceeded what its services are designed to withstand.
“After a thorough assessment, we have determined that we are unable to restore access to the resources and data hosted exclusively in this region,” AWS wrote.
In a separate post, AWS said it’s similarly been unable to recover resources and data stored in one of its availability zones in the UAE. It continues to work to restore two other UAE zones that were affected.
...
with a grain of salt, of course -- it's a Yemen Gov't press release
Deutsche Presse-Agentur is sort of the German AP
A Yemeni military source: "The Houthi militants have dug trenches in the mountains overlooking the Bab al-Mandab Strait and planted mines in areas of the waterway."
-Deutsche Presse-Agentur
export controls on diesel to keep US prices down?
cooking with gas
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-G...l-Exports.html
https://archive.ph/sXeed
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/pent...ry-classified/The mission statement for the United States’ military’s ongoing war with Iran — one that has lasted months, left hundreds of service members injured and 18 dead — is not only shrouded in mystery but classified.
In the Pentagon’s first full accounting of the Iran war, the Defense Department’s Office of the Inspector General wrote in its report to Congress that “The full [Operation Epic Fury] mission statement is classified.”
In response to the Inspector General’s request for information to U.S. Central Command, officials also told the watchdog that it “continued to refine and adjust the [Operation Epic Fury mission] after it began.”
Adding to the ever-changing narratives around the war, the military’s public-facing le appears to have changed.
On Feb. 28, the Department of Defense officially launched Operation Epic Fury. Over the next several months, casualties climbed, and multiple ceasefires took place, before see-sawing back to open hostilities. News reports began scrutinizing the Pentagon’s casualty database, and by July, the Pentagon began recording wounded troops under “overseas operations,” rather than under “Operation Epic Fury.”
While the Inspector General report appears to be using Operation Epic Fury as the official designation for the entirety of the Iran war, administration officials at different times have appeared to declare that Operation Epic Fury had ended, with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio saying it had ended on May 5, and the Pentagon reportedly urging troops not to refer to the war in Iran by its operational le.
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