jabbed

Well organised, friendly, efficient and effortless. Thank you, NHS.

Quarantine

It seems strange that the discussion about Hotel quarantine is only just taking place. 

We were around London Heathrow almost a year ago. We'd booked into a hotel before a flight and a man in a tin hat came out of a booth when we arrived. He told us the hotel was closed and that we should go along the road to another one. I should have noticed that the windows to the hotel were boarded up.

In truth, I'd gone to the wrong Holiday Inn.

He handed me a piece of paper, which explained that the original hotel had been taken over by the NHS/Public Health England as was to be used as an isolation location for people suspected of carrying COVID-19 to the UK. 

I remember thinking at the time it was like something out of the X-Files.

Contextually, it was ahead of a lockdown or even general awareness of the COVID pandemic.

What happened to those early preparations?
 

Up to no good?

My latest novel is back from the printers earlier than I expected, so I now have Corrupt, by Ed Adams listed as a Kindle on Amazon and available also as a re-assuringly expensive paperback, although not available in that format until 6 April 2021.

This one is a political thriller about the corridors of power in Whitehall and some dreadful lobbyists, who try to make money via sleaze and corruption. I know it sounds a bit far fetched, they are even doing it by manipulating healthcare.

The baddie organisation in the novel is Brant, which is a subsidiary of Raven and they seem to be up to no good. Clare gets enlisted as an MP Researcher, to help Amanda Miller to investigate.

Snake in the Tunnel graphs

Interesting that the latest Public Health England/New York Times graph for the vaccinations shows the completion date of the total vaccinations for all adults between May 22 and June 18. 

Admittedly it is only the first of two jabs - with the second jab trailing at around 2,500 per day, but it is encouraging news. 

I'd previously reckoned on it taking 4 quarters to inoculate everyone, based upon about 11 million jabs in 3 months for annual flu vaccine, so this is considerablly faster.

New Novel: Ed Adams : Corrupt

It looks as if my next book (officially released on 6th April 2021) is already available as an eBook in pre-release on Amazon. It will make its way to good booksellers everywhere over the next few weeks and then also be available as a paperback. 

Hear, speak and see no evil. 

Can power, greed, and money create corruption? 

Could an honest politician ever win an election? 

How does a politician hold his value?  

Clare joins Parliament as a Researcher. 

See her, and her friends, uncover a ruthless plan

and realize a single politician can’t make a government. 

He needs accomplices.

 *****

“a conspiracy theory that is dangerous” 

“a reality that is way past speculation” 

“feels like I’m in it” 

“they lied to us” 

“Clare’s got the moves” 

“blows the lid off what goes on in the corridors” 

 I've used the same gang as in the original 'The Triangle', plus Christina Nott. In this story (kind of Archangel series number 5), Clare joins her sister Samantha in Parliament as a Researcher. 

The customary mayhem breaks loose. 

 My plan is to show a lineage from 'The Triangle', via Archangel, then Corrupt, to Pulse and then eventually onward to the Edge series. 

The one book that is hanging out on the edge of everything now is Coin, but I do have a plan to bring that into the series too. I'll have to start 'The madness is creeping over me.'

peaceful transfer of power?

Reminds me of that old movie during which Joni Mitchell sings The Circle Game. 

Yesterday a child came out to wander 

Caught a dragonfly inside a jar 

Fearful when the sky was full of thunder 

And tearful at the falling of a star 

And the seasons, they go round and round 

And the painted ponies go up and down 

We're captive on the carousel of time 

We can't return, we can only look 

Behind, from where we came 

And go round and round and round, in the circle game 

The Strawberry Statement - although it paints a very difference picture of the conflict from the current trauma.

Meanwhile 70-year-old B52s circle the middle-east on so-called presence patrols.

end of reel

The whole soundtrack has gone a bit Radiohead. The jutter of Trump's sprockets play out as the last reel unwinds. But what to do to keep their interest? Media love a noisy, off-kilter man, to keep their eyeball counts high. 

Looks like tonight, the sky is heavy 

Feels like the winds, are gonna change 

Beneath my feet, the Earth is ready I know it's time,

 for heavens rain It's gonna rain, yeah yeah 

No-one considered that he is deeply damaged. Histrionics for history.

And autocue playback of a line of defence.

Cause living water we desire 

To flood our hearts with holy fire 

Rain down 

All around the world we're singing 

Rain down 

He doesn't care. It's about power, money and recognition to this hustler and huckster.

Can you hear the Earth is singing 

Rain down 

My heart is dry but still i'm singing 

Rain down 

Rain it down on me

Listen to the flip-flap-flapping at the end of his reel. 

c'est la vie

A frosty start to the new year around these parts. Still, there's a hint of sunlight on the distant fields.

We are so far from the lorry parks of Kent that it will only be if grocery shortages start to come our way that I think we'd notice. 

I did spot the signage on the motorways over the Christmas period, helpfully denoting which Tier we were driving through (Mainly Tier 2, although that would have changed by now to mainly Tier 4). 

And like just before our trip to Iceland earlier in the pre-lockdown year, we were subjected to other sudden hotel closures and considerable re-routing to stay safe and legal.

Then, the actual transfer agreement came along without much fanfare. 

I guess everyone was bored and I can't work out what happened when, according to our thumbs-up premier, we seemed to get the deal of the century despite all of the earlier noisy misgivings. 

It almost seems too good to be true although I suppose the Free Trade Zone aspects were slipped through in a separate paper- 'Singapore on steroids' - free-market, pro-business economy, as Martin Sorrell positioned it to Downing Street. 

Well, it was clearly no failure of statecraft and an oven-ready deal in a million. 

We can already notice most politicians' speeches peppered with 'British discoveries' and 'British inventions' so it must all be true. 

Johnson's own family are running to the French hills, with his dad Stanley already applying for a French passport and Boris' sister Rachel indicating she'd like to follow if her father gets the French papers. 

On va s'aimer, on va danser 

Oui c'est la vie, la la la la la

Hancock's flights of misdirection #Covid #Covid-G #Covid-GR #COVID-GH #COVID-V #COVID-S #COVID-L #COVID-O

 

If I hadn't been writing my recent novel, I doubt whether I would have stumbled across this recent set of science. It is from Daniele Mercatelli and Federico M. Giorgi and was written up in Daily Science last August. 

They looked at a wide bunch of COVID cases and sequenced the genomes. And guess what? They found seven variants of COVID. There was the original Wuhan one and six others, including the three G clades with are referred to as G, GH and GR and create around 75% of the COVID infections in Europe. Check out the graphs below to see the distribution of the COVID variants. Now Matt Hancock has chosen today to release information about 'a new COVID Type' which he implies is ravaging the south east of England. He claims it has just been found by UK's world leading scientists. 

I can't help thinking he is telling fibs to get off detention. Why not tell everyone about the various types - back up his findings with some science? Because the variants have all been around since the first UK lockdown. Some of the variations are unable to create the spike proteins. The Wuhan variant isn't even the main one in play now. It all changed in February.

Analysis of 48,635 SARS-CoV-2 genomic sequences. Think of it like a mag tape reader reading blocks of data, delimited with tape headers, block headers and then chains of actual data. Then squirt some oil and iron filings into the heads to create some distortions.

A load of fairly predictable transcription errors occur. Sometimes a block gets skipped or accidentally misread. Then in the world of Messenger RNA (like a mag tape) the genomic sequence can be messed up. 

Genomes have 4 neucleotides: U C A G. It only takes a few Cs to be converted to Ts (Terminators) or As to Gs and it all starts to look different. Fortunately there are only a few common mistranslates, as follows:

or, graphically, by region.

In particular, clade G, prevalent in Europe, carries a D614G mutation in the Spike protein, which is responsible for the initial interaction of the virus with the host human cell.  Other interesting variants are clade V (variant of the ORF3a coding protein NS3-G251), and clade S (variant ORF8-L84S)

The G clade has three variants G, GH, GR and that makes up 75% of the population of the virus. (See the Europe chart at top)

Within a 10% variation, there is a massive prevalence of single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) over short insertion/deletion events (indels) worldwide and in every continent. 

Ignoring the crud, you get SNP and SNP_silent as by far the biggest variable affecting the chain and creating the majority of the common variations. So look, Matt, even within the current pandemic, your NHS is handling the seven variants, but with G as the strident one and ironically the Case Zero 'S' type almost at zero now. Mid Feb was when the two extra Gs split out GH and GR. GR is now the largest and G the second, In Europe, all the Gs account for around 75-80% of cases. Then L and V.

So I'm worried now that you are running spin. Announcing the 'new variant' on the same day as London Tier 3 to run some deflection? My questions are whether you know about this stuff and are doing it deliberately? - not good - or whether you don't know or understand this stuff and are doing it unwittingly? - not good also. There was something in the manifesto about taking back control. I'm not convinced.

Robber Baron alert

We all forgot that Boris doesn’t function off-shore. Someone else compared him to one of those supermarket trollies along Cromwell Road which refuse to go past the boundary of  Waitrose. But I suppose the supermarket trollies have some utility value.

 

Boris tried his usual gimmicks. Attempting to get around the chief negotiator with sly off-camera phone calls didn’t work. Neither does it help to slag off the head of another major EU stakeholder. 

 

Then he brings back a selection of half-truths about the real negotiated position, ably supported by the Daily Mail which is talking about the UK having to crawl over broken glass. Pah. A Bojo invention if ever I heard one. Oh yes, and don’t get me started on the gun-boats.

 

I’m reminded of the equally underwhelming David Davis negotiation, when he could not be bothered to turn up for the first 18 months. It was as if he had been let into the secret that all the smart Tories would just short everything to make a lot of money.

 

Let’s see: £4.6 billion of aggregate short positions on a no deal Brexit, taken out by hedge funds that bankrolled Johnson’s leadership campaign. Maybe £8.3 billion of aggregate shorts taken by the Vote Leave campaign representatives.  

 

I know, maybe maxing the shorts at £12 billion doesn’t sound a lot, compared with the amount that Boris has been shelling out in all directions recently, but the profits from a UK pound collapse go into individual oily pockets rather than to State initiatives. 

 

It is somewhat reminiscent of the build-up to the collapse of the Russian state a few years ago, when robber barons were able to buy banks, lend themselves money and sell off the state at knock-down prices. I wrote about it in Play On, Christina Nott.

 

And Boris is being economical with the truth, too. The current EU offer to the UK is a deal in which if we align, we get full access. Then, if in future, we diverge they limit access or put up tariffs on the areas of variance. Maybe its his last-minute salvation move?

 

But it would be too simple to go for that, when No deal and all that fat cat profit-taking is the other option. 

 

Johnson really is useless and hand-wave histrionics across a fish supper with Ursula don’t show off his Etonian manners in a good light. He is simply out-classed and out-manoeuvred. So what if Johnson negotiated in bad faith throughout? Rees-Mogg and the Understains from the ERG had told him that No Deal was the target outcome. I’ve not checked the new version of the 600-pager, but I have a big suspicion that it doesn’t look much different from the one that Theresa May produced. None of the Cabinet have spoken up though. It shows the reach of his tidy little Whatsapp group, whipped by the Quad.

 

The devastation created from a no-deal exit will spray out across the entire country. We will all be punished, through an economic downturn. Struggling areas will be hit the worst. Ex red-wall communities will be levelled down. 

 But what about sovereignty? The ability to make our own decisions. It’s another lie. We had so much influence from the inside of the EU that we could make our sovereign decisions count. Except when that annoying frog-eyed man tried to sabotage everything.

 

Johnson keeps doing TV straight to camera with an eye for the History Books in 20 years time. It should all be seen for what it is, the posturing of Mr ‘Oven-Ready’ the Liar, unable to handle statecraft on behalf of a nation. 

The Australia Effect

When not digging a hole for himelf, Boris has told everyone that his new (not a No) Deal - will be like Australia. I think he probably means it will be like a World Trade Organisation Tarrif-based arrangement. 

We can expect the oelaginous Mr Gove to spread treacle over that soon in one of his clear explanations. 

 Boris is trying now to organise a hole through the earth to provide a short cut for the trading route. I decided to take a peek at Australian Trade with the UK. I was going to compare it with the EU trade. But I decided not to bother after I'd looked at the first couple of charts. Here's Australia imports from the UK

And here's Australia exports to the UK

I decided to compare it with firstly France

Alone, the Australian figures were one-third of the French ones, but it is not so obvious on the de-origined graphs. So, I thought I'd build my own. I decided to do UK exports to Australia, France and Germany. Just to see what it looked like.

It needs to be enlarged to see the detail. Suffice to say that Australia is Blue and the other two countries are much longer lines. 

Maybe the hustler has forgotten to follow the science on his last (non) decision? Here's Australia as a line against France and Germany. That's 2 of the 27 EY countries.

Face palm unbelievable.

boris unspooled.

The final stages of Boris are unspooling today. 

He's done what we all expected. Been such a buffon that he frittered away the entire negotiating time to leave Britain with a Jacob Rees-Mogg-friendly No Deal.

who's laughing now?  

During the great fire of London, some of the wealthy had time to bury their wine in pits. Samual Pepys even buried his parmesan cheese. The ERG crowd will have secured their futures, some of which will be off-shore.

Everyone was expecting this no deal situation so it has been baked into the FTSE and FX numbers for months. Even a deal now will really be a lightly flambéed no deal.

It's about the only part of the 'easy-peasy' deal that could be considered oven-ready. 

I'll be interested to see how the Pomps bluster their way through explanations over the next few weeks and which of the inappropriate idiots will start to position themselves to boot hapless Boris out. 

 Usually in Project Management there are three dimensions from which you can have two but may have to sacrifice the third: for example Scope/Time/Cost. 

The clown has managed to have three things but been unable to achieve any of them. Sovreignty/level playing field/fishing waters. Not only that, he has mixed up the dimensions in a 'Power Station and the Bike Sheds' manner. 

Useless.