You Will Anyway: The King Is Dead, Long Live the King

Thursday, January 22, 2015

The King Is Dead, Long Live the King

Oil prices jumped in early Asian trading on Friday as news of the death of Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah added to uncertainty in energy markets already facing some of the biggest shifts in decades.

Abdullah died early on Friday and his brother Salman became king, the royal court in the world's top oil exporter and birthplace of Islam said in a statement carried by state television.

[...]

Oil prices have more than halved since peaking in June last year as soaring supplies clash with slowing demand.

Booming U.S. shale production has turned the United States from the world's biggest oil importer into the biggest producer, producing more than 9 million barrel per day.

To combat soaring output and falling prices, many oil exporters, such as Venezuela, wanted the 13-member Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) to cut output in order to support prices and revenues.

Yet, led by Saudi Arabia, OPEC announced last November it was keeping output steady at 30 million barrels per day.

Reuters

That an 80-year-old with health issues of his own—he reportedly suffers from dementia—is now taking over means Abdullah’s grandsons could soon be jostling over who should be the long term successor. In the meantime, Salman is expected to maintain the kingdom’s alliance with the United States.

The Daily Beast

The new king has dementia? Great. Apparently, so does the kingdom.

U.S. crude prices rose about 1.5 percent immediately after the kingdom announced the news Thursday evening. [...] The kingdom reportedly delayed the announcement so that his date of death would fall on a Friday, the Muslim holy day of the week.

Just because they don’t announce it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.

And, that’s not all that happened in the region on Thursday…

Earlier in the day, the Yemeni government was in shambles after the president and cabinet resigned in the face of pressure from the Houthis, backed by Iran. It is unclear who will lead Yemen; the Houthis said Thursday they will form a presidential council.

In single day, two of the United States’ most important partners in the region are gone. What follows next is unclear.

So, now we turn to the ever excellent Middle East expert Jeremy Scahill….

And up next...Jeremy on the latest in Yemen...

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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"It takes only a bit of knowledge of history to realize how dangerous it is to think that the people who run the country know what they are doing." -- Howard Zinn

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"What we have is a foreign policy which is essentially a marketing strategy for selling weapons." -- Jill Stein

"We should always remember that the danger to societies from security services is not that they will spontaneously decide to embrace [Stasi style] mustache twirling and jackboots to bear us bodily into dark places, but that the slowly shifting foundation of policy will make it such that mustaches and jackboots are discovered to prove an operational advantage toward a necessary purpose.” ~ Edward Snowden

"America: just a nation of two hundred million used car salesmen with all the money we need to buy guns and no qualms about killing anybody else in the world who tries to make us uncomfortable." ~ Hunter S. Thompson

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." ~ Mayer Rothschild

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"What matters in journalism isn't politics, which are as universal and inescapable as breathing. What matters -- along with a fundamentally adversarial attitude toward government, without which "journalism" is simply public relations -- is integrity, transparency, evidence, coherence, and principle. These are the principles on which we should evaluate the quality of journalism, and their absence is why some journalists are so desperate to get you to focus on something else." ~ Barry Eisler

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Life, as Explained in "Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead"

GUILDENSTERN: What a fine persecution---to be kept intrigued without ever quite being enlightened.

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ROSENCRANTZ : The only thing that makes it bearable is the irrational belief that somebody interesting will come on in a minute.

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GUILDENSTERN: But for God's sake what are we supposed to do?!

PLAYER: Relax. Respond. That's what people do. You can't go through life questioning your situation at every turn.

GUILDENSTERN: But we don't know what's going on, or what to do with ourselves. We don't know how to act.

PLAYER: Act natural. You know why you're here at least.

GUILDENSTERN: We only know what we're told, and that's little enough. And for all we know it isn't even true.

PLAYER: For all anyone knows, nothing is. Everything has to be taken on trust; truth is only that which is taken to be true. It's the currency of living. There may be nothing behind it, but it doesn't make any difference so long as it is honoured. One acts on assumptions.

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GUILDENSTERN : We act on scraps of information... sifting half-remembered directions that we can hardly separate from instinct.

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PLAYER: Life is a gamble, at terrible odds-if it was a bet you wouldn't take it.