Sally Lockwood of Sky reporting from Dubai has asked the government officials if the gulf states are asking Trump to back off, and their response was absolutely not and they support the US
Iran has made enemies of its friends
The Gulf States -with the possibly exception of Oman- have never been Iran (or Persia's) friends.
Faisal Islam @faisalislam · 28m This is really bad now - UK natural gas a month ahead just hit 170p a therm - it’s more than DOUBLED in a day and is now approaching the level (which was sustained for months) which caused problems in 2022… needed the energy price guarantee etc…
Pray for sun and wind. At least we're approaching the spring/summer.
Ace
That makes it okay then 👍
Of course not, but it makes it less bad than if this were to kick off in November.
(cf Scargill's stupidity in launching the 1984/5 miners strike in the spring.)
What might be a groundlet for hope is that I'm pretty sure that Trump has less stomach for the consequences of an extended conflict than Putin.
I get that it’s just the glib ‘don’t worry it’s spring’ retort. It doesn’t make it okay. This war won’t be quick and we have problems looming
I didn't say "don't worry". Our exposure to fossil fuels is going to wreck our economy, once again.
In no small part because we've exposed ourselves to the wrong fossil fuels. 20 years ago this would be been pretty much a non-event as we could pretty much power the country on coal, which is eminently stockpileable, can be shipped round the world in bog standard bulk carriers, and is available from dozens of sources, many of them not middle eastern despots. At a pinch, there's even quite a lot of it left under our feet, some of which we could open cast mine quite quickly.
But because out politicians are idiots, we closed it all and knocked it all down in favour of a fuel we can't really store, which comes mainly from the most unstable regions of the world, and also decided to close down what domestic production we did have, as it's better for the environment to import it from dodgy places in the middle east or something.
The price of coal and the price of natural gas move in lockstep, because (fossil fuel) energy is highly fungible. If gas prices go up... then so do coal prices. (See my Substack.)
Yes... But:
1) Coal is consistently cheaper than gas 2) Coal can be stored, so it's viable to sit on a decent strategic reserve of it (which would probably tide us over the peak of the current crisis nicely) 3) Coal can be transported on a very ordinary bulk carriers, of which the world has lots, unlike LNG. If I've understood correctly, a lot of the current price spike is because of LNG tankers having to go round Africa - the increased journey times mean there aren't enough tankers to go round, and they aren't something you can knock up more of over a weekend. 4) If the crisis continues, and there are shortages, we could reopen coal production in the UK from places like Foss y Fran opencast in a matter of weeks (the government would have to ride roughshod over the planning process, but there's no engineering reason preventing this). We simply don't have that option for gas.
All of which are good reasons why we should have left a decent amount of coal capacity on the system, rather than knocking it all down with insane zealoty, without really commissioning suitable replacements.
Well thanks for asking. I went to an old seafood market hoping for some dinner. It’s quite a famous market. But now it’s all closed down
Then I felt a bit uneasy - more food poisoning? - so I walked the 400 metres south to a really really really convenient medical facility. The Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, where up until 2019 they were famously storing bags for bizarre and dangerous experiments in “Wild West” conditions
That’s right. I went to the lab where it came from. The thing that recently killed 20 million people and upended all of humanity. Yes. I went there. Me. Went there. Me
Yes
My money is on it coming from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, rather than the CDC, because the evidence for them doing bat virus research there is much stronger
That's the problem the lab leak theorists have. The theories were all constructed around the WIV, including all the nutty conspiracy theory stuff about it being Fauci's fault. But the evidence is too strong that the infections came from the market, the other side of a city to the WIV, so there's this big hole in the theory. How do you get a leak from a lab on one side of the city popping up in a wet market on the other side of the city?
So, some conspiracy theorists have jumped on the CDC, an institute that's close to the market. But that opens up a different big hole in the theory, because it's a different institute that's not doing the same coronavirus research. There's no link to Fauci. There's no link to the bat virus work.
If only there was some other explanation for how the virus first appeared in the wet market. Like, maybe we could look at all the warnings for years before that said that a very likely place for a novel pandemic to start is a wet market, because nearly all novel pandemics come from zoonoses? Instead of coming up with more and more convoluted explanations for how a lab leak someone got to a wet market, we could just accept that it came directly from the wet market!!!
Thing is, the lab leak theories are reassuring in a way. Horrible thing happened, either because of a mad scientist tinkering with forces they can't control, or an unfortunate lapse by an individual. Both of those are aberrations, and can be managed by better control and punishment.
If the plague just sort of happened, because nature throws things at us from time to time, because that's what randomness does, that's much scarier.
Basically, it's the old "did that earthquake happen because the sinful city needed to be destroyed, or because of the release of tectonic forces?" argument, updated for the 21st century.
One of my students is presenting work on MERS later this semester. Fatality rate of 35%. Pray to god that never gets to spread assymptomatically and as easily as Covid did and does.
Indeed: you don't *need* a lab leak for new and horrible viruses to emerge and spread.
With that said, that it was a bat virus, and came from the same city as the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which had a well known bat virus expert, Shi Zhengli is an awful big coincidence.
(The evidence for bat viruses being studied at the CDC in the period immediately preceding the Covid outbreak is pretty weak, I thought. But I might be wrong.)
Coincidences do happen.
Is it a big coincidence? As we've discussed before, SARS scared the shit out of the Chinese (rightly, as it turned out) and they poured money into coronavirus research. It's not a coincidence they were doing lots of bat virus work: they were doing lots of bat virus work because that's where there was really a threat. You have to judge against that context.
One of the funniest things to come out of this are the brits who won’t leave Dubai even as it’s being bombed. One influencer adjacent guy went on a live stream on his balcony and said he’d rather be killed by Iran than go back to Wigan
I've been to Wigan. If those really are his only two choices, I can see why he's opting for the Iranian bombs!
No, its ok, I've been assured on PB that she is definitely guilty and that a jury looked at the evidence and everything...
I will be amazed if there isn't some kind of appeal allowed. Too much has come out since.
Its an awful situation. If she killed no babies then you have an innocent woman in prison for crimes that never happened. And you have grieving parents who believe that their children were killed when the reality was that they died from poor care on a ward that should not have been looking after them.
OR
She is the devil incarnate, an evil murderer who has wrecked hundreds of lives.
And at the moment I don't believe anyone knows for sure which it is.
I don’t either. It could well be a mix - she is guilty, but the ward was shit as well. See the GK Chesterton short story where a murder hides his crime by causing a battle to happen there.
I just know that the idea, floated here, that “we shouldn’t prosecute her for further crimes, because they might fail to get a conviction, and that might cause the original conviction to fail. Which would really upset the parents” is simply wrong.
Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.
I’m increasingly unsure that the sub judice rules do not serve the interests of justice well: People deserve to have their day in court & not be pilloried by the press, but this case is a classic example of where the sub judice rules made it impossible for those with qualms about the case to be heard.
The state spent about £10million prosecuting Letby & gave her £1.5million to defend herself, most of which was spent on barrrister prep & court time. How much of that was available to spend on finding & paying expert witnesses to counter the CPS narrative? Not much, one suspects, given the ruinous expense of good lawyers! Defence solicitors only have so much resource to spend finding expert witnesses in fields that they are (inevitably) not themselves experts in.
A justice system where those who are convinced that the defendant is guilty can rock up to the police making all kinds of claims with no basis in science whatsoever & are enthusiastically co-opted as prosecution expert witnesses but those who take the other view are silenced & not permitted to speak will inevitably lead to miscarriages of justice.
There are significant flaws in this post. Which I should think is fairly apparent to anyone. In particular the thought that just any random enthusiast is allowed to be an expert witness is just wrong.
(That the defence called no expert evidence in either trial is interesting. The obvious conclusion is the most likely, but the information is privileged to Letby, not her lawyers, and SFAICS she has not waived it.)
Private Eye’s coverage has including an explanation of how it came to be that the defence called no expert witnesses. I don’t know whether they’re explanation is correct, but it seems plausible.
Noted with thanks re waiver WRT the CCRC on 11 December 2025.
I have not followed recent PE coverage but their early attempts to explain the failure to call defence expert evidence (basically that the defence thought their case so strong they need not bother to call it) was not credible. Have they advanced on that?
Comments
1) Coal is consistently cheaper than gas
2) Coal can be stored, so it's viable to sit on a decent strategic reserve of it (which would probably tide us over the peak of the current crisis nicely)
3) Coal can be transported on a very ordinary bulk carriers, of which the world has lots, unlike LNG. If I've understood correctly, a lot of the current price spike is because of LNG tankers having to go round Africa - the increased journey times mean there aren't enough tankers to go round, and they aren't something you can knock up more of over a weekend.
4) If the crisis continues, and there are shortages, we could reopen coal production in the UK from places like Foss y Fran opencast in a matter of weeks (the government would have to ride roughshod over the planning process, but there's no engineering reason preventing this). We simply don't have that option for gas.
All of which are good reasons why we should have left a decent amount of coal capacity on the system, rather than knocking it all down with insane zealoty, without really commissioning suitable replacements.
Is it a big coincidence? As we've discussed before, SARS scared the shit out of the Chinese (rightly, as it turned out) and they poured money into coronavirus research. It's not a coincidence they were doing lots of bat virus work: they were doing lots of bat virus work because that's where there was really a threat. You have to judge against that context.