AtomCat
968 posts
@OutlawHeart68
Perpetually Exhausted Dad. Socialist. Gamer. Law grad. In that order. Nocturnal. He/him or they/them
This morning I wrote that you do not need to close a strait. You just need to make it uninsurable. It took six hours. A Palau-flagged oil tanker named Skylight was attacked five nautical miles north of Khasab Port in the Strait of Hormuz. Four crew members were injured. All twenty were evacuated, fifteen Indian nationals and five Iranians. Oman’s Maritime Security Centre confirmed the attack and coordinated the rescue. The vessel is eleven thousand deadweight tons, sanctioned by the US Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control in December for enabling Iranian petroleum exports. Iran attacked its own sanctions-evasion tanker. Read that again. This is not about destroying shipping. This is about establishing precedent. One tanker hit in the Strait of Hormuz converts a theoretical insurance repricing into an actuarial event. Every underwriter on the planet now has a loss to book. Every war risk policy in the Gulf is recalculated not from a hypothetical but from an incident with casualties, an evacuation, and an Omani government confirmation. But the tanker is not the most important development. The most important development is what the IRGC began broadcasting on VHF Channel 16, the international maritime distress and calling frequency. According to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations, multiple ships received broadcasts from Iranian forces claiming that the Strait of Hormuz is closed and that no vessel is permitted to transit. The Joint Maritime Information Center confirmed that no official notice of closure has been issued. The IRGC Navy then clarified that the strait is open to all tankers except American vessels. It does not matter. Ships are already turning around. Seatrade Maritime reported that the CMA CGM San Antonio, one of the world’s largest container vessels, executed a U-turn while exiting the Persian Gulf. It is not waiting for an official closure. It is not waiting for its underwriter to call. The captain looked at a burning tanker, listened to a VHF broadcast from a navy that just fired three hundred munitions at six countries, and turned his ship around. This is the mechanism. You broadcast a closure on the frequency every ship monitors. You hit one tanker to prove you mean it. You do not need to mine the strait. You do not need a blockade. You need a captain to make a risk calculation, and that calculation just changed. Oman was the mediator between Tehran and Washington in nuclear talks. Its port at Duqm was also targeted by drone strikes today. The one neutral country in the Gulf is now taking fire. One tanker. One broadcast. One U-turn. The insurance premium I described this morning is no longer theoretical. It is priced in blood and burning oil. open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…
An unelected Lord, appointed “antisemitism adviser”, now feels entitled or even qualified to explain antisemitism to a Jewish national party leader. To add to all this - he's not Jewish. Truly rabbit hole stuff.
City of Sanctuary UK posts photo of asylum seekers (“people seeking sanctuary”, as they call them) visiting the York Railway Museum. Lots of women and children there…
Former Head of Comms for the IEA, Annabel Denham, says the super rich will leave if we have a wealth tax. Yes, the very same IEA that brought us Liz Truss’ disastrous mini budget. 🤦🏽♂️ Green Party leader Zack Polanski explains that their taxable assets can’t leave. #bbcqt
