Bending Over Backwards To Be Swabbed

China has discovered a new way to test for Covid-19, and the swab isn't going up your nose or down your throat.
Over a million Beijing residents have been swabbed anally to test for infection by the more contagious British strain of Covid-19, according to Chinese authorities, who state that the method is more accurate than nasal swabs.
The science bit is that traces of the virus stay longer in the anus than in the respiratory tract and British scientists seem to agree although i don't know if it will replace the one up the nose here.
The Brits, as Corporal Jones was fond of saying, don't like it up 'em and my reaction would be the same as anyone's if a doctor approached me with a testing kit and asked me to bend over, they can take their swab and stick it right up their....oh.

Meddling With Elections

It is pretty unlikely that Russia's Putin has a videotape of Joe Biden locked away somewhere so he will not have the same blackmail power as he had over old pissy bed Trump and Biden has already warned him in a telephone call to not mess with US Elections anymore.
It is long thought that Russia helped Trump become the President and once he was there, the criticism of poisoning and invading their neighbours stopped but Biden is in the big seat now and messing in American elections is off limits, Amercian's meddling in other nations elections not quite so much.
Carnegie Mellon University has published research showing that the US has intervened in foreign elections over 80 times in a 47 different countries since 1945 including the 1996 Russian elections.
In one corner was the Communist candidate Gennady Zyuganov who had a policy of rolling back the reforms that had emerged in Russia following the fall of Communism and in the other corner, the much more Western friendly and favoured American candidate Boris Yeltsin.  
Boris, fond of the falling down water and generally a bit of a numpty, was lagging badly behind Zyuganov until the Americans under Bill Clinton persuaded the IMF to provide the Yeltsin government with a loan of about $10bn, the second-largest IMF loan ever granted at that time, of which $1.3bn arrived before the election.
Yeltsin used these funds for a wide range of popularity-courting public spending sprees and the US also sent over campaign advisors to help organize Yeltsin’s re-election bid.
Yeltsin won the election and America got its patsy in the Kremlin, roll forward two decades and Russia got its own tiny handed patsy in the White House so the rules seem to be we can mess with yours but you try and mess with ours and we will really, really cry a lot about it.

GameStop??

I don't really understand what is going on with the Gamestop story but as it involves people sticking it to 'The Man', i'm all for it.
As i understand it, GameStop is an American high street shop that sells games, consoles and other electronics which was struggling due to the pandemic and Hedge Funds were short selling their shares, hoping to make a bundle when it failed and the shares price dropped.
Apparently, Hedge Funds borrow shares in the company and sell them, with a promise to buy them back at a later date when they are cheaper and making themselves a packet.
The analogy on Radio 5 this morning was to imagine borrowing your friends phone and agreeing to give it back to them in a month.Then you sell it to someone else for £100, again promising to buy it back off them in a month but a month later the phone is  not so new and exciting anymore so you buy it back for £50 and congratulations, you've made £50!
Obviously a massively simplified explanation of short selling and hedge funds make billions doing it and that's what they tried to do with the GameStop shares betting they would lose value but huge numbers of people in the Reddit forum bought shares in GameStop and the demand raised its share price massively, 700% in a week, and everyone who had banked on it dropping in value had to buy their shares back to prevent bigger losses, losing them billions.
Obviously the Hedge Funds are not happy about it and anything which makes them not happy makes me happy although i am not sure what Elon Musk's role in it is and i swing dramatically between hating and loving him so he is back in my good books at the moment.

Johnson Doing All He Could

Although we shouldn’t rule out the possibility that he's both, either Boris Johnson is completely shameless or totally clueless as he states that despite the grim counter ticking over to 100,000 deaths, him and his Government have done 'all that we could to minimise deaths' in response to a question of why the UK has one of the worst mortality rates in the world.
Predictably, everyone piled in on the hapless Prime Minister including bereaved families, government scientific advisers and public health experts who all rattled off a list of measures the government had taken that had been too little, too late or not at all.
The Office of National Statistics data which is more accurate than the Governments figures show that over 100,000 people in the UK had already died with Covid on their death certificate by 7 January, nearly three weeks ago, and put the total as of today almost at 120,000.
Johnson says that he takes full responsibility for the Governments strategy and an inquiry into his handling will surely find that the chaos of test and trace, the ignoring the scientific advice, the delays in locking down the country and not controlling who came in and out of the country until 12 months after everyone else will prove that he really didn't do all he could, or worse, he did and this was Johnson doing his best.

Beautifully Sad

So much death and sadness during the pandemic but amidst it all one story from the Royal Stoke Hospital bought a lump to my throat today.

An elderly couple seriously ill with Coronavirus were brought together by hospital staff so they could share their final days after 67 years together. The couple were put next to each other so they could hold hands and listen to Glenn Miller, their favourite musician.

Scott Summerfield, who was part of the team which organised the gesture, tweeted: "A Couple on the ward dying from Covid. Been together for 67 years. We have rearranged the ward so they can be together & hold each others hands, we have put their favourite music on Glenn Miller so they can spend some quality last few hours together'.

Beautifully sad.

Dykes, Cocks and Fanny's Banned by Facebook

Facebook have banned local residents of certain British towns and cities from mentioning the names of their places as it falls foul of their algorithm so if you live in Wash Dyke, Forest Dyke, Cockermouth, Cockfosters, Great Cockup and Little Cockup, Cockplay, Three Cocks, Fanny Barks, Fanny Avenue, Fanny Hands, Fingringhoe, Honey Knob Hill, Devils Dyke, Clap Hill, Shaggs, Droop, you may want to switch to Twitter.

EU Wrong In Vaccine Row

Something that i find really cringe-worthy is the jingoistic flag waving some people get up to and us Brits are no exception, we can wave our Union Flag as long and as loud as anyone so my position in the Vaccine argument currently going on between the UK and the EU is not from a position of xenophobia but a position of the EU trying to hide their mistakes by blaming the UK.    
The EU is furious about AstraZeneca's vaccine delays and has accused AstraZeneca of breaking its contract by not supplying enough vaccine doses and is demanding that the company divert some of the vaccines destined for the UK to them fulfill contractual obligations.
The EU is angry for the simple reason that Europe's approach to vaccination has been stuttering and sluggish, the UK signed a deal for 100 million doses in May, three months before the EU signed its contract for 300 million.
The EU leaders are saying that it should not receive fewer doses just because the UK signed a contract with the company earlier but on this occasion, Brussels are wrong and are trying hard to deflect blame from their own failures.

Boris on Donald

Boris Johnson on Donald Trump pre-Presidency:

"I think Donald Trump is clearly out of his mind" 
"Beholds a quite stupefying ignorance that makes him, frankly, unfit to hold the office of president of the United States"
"I wouldn’t want to expose Londoners to any unnecessary risk of meeting Donald Trump"
"I wouldn’t go to some parts of New York is the real risk of meeting Donald Trump" 
"What he’s doing is playing the game of the terrorists and those who seek to divide us"  
"I am genuinely worried that he could become president"

Boris Johnson on Donald Trump during Presidency

"I don’t see why he’s any less of a candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize than Barack Obama"
"He has many, many, good qualities and is making America great again"
"He is having results, and we should pay tribute to that"

Boris Johnson on Donald Trump post Presidency:
"Glad to see the back of him"

More faces than a clock factory but then we always knew that anyway.

Pound Being A Dick Over Tokyo Olympics

I do love watching the the Olympics and Paralympics even if it is on at stupid o'clock due to be playing out in some far flung part of the globe but the draw of watching the second heat of the 200m butterfly at 3am means a heavy caffeine and nicotine next day and i'm fine with that.
The 2020 events were to be held in Japan last year until the Coronavirus pandemic put paid to that idea and it has been pushed back to this year but the rise of several new Coronavirus variants and the steep jump in cases in Japan which reported a record number of cases this week, means that there are murmers that the 2021 version could be pushed back again or even cancelled altogether.
In a survey conducted amongst the Japanese population, 34% believe the upcoming Summer Games should be postponed further while 34% want it scrapped completely due to Covid-19 concerns but the Japanese Government are insisting that there was no truth in the claims they are considering cancelling it and are determined to see the event take place.
Having spent £20 billion on constructing sporting venues, infrastructure, and other preparations for the event, you can understand why they are keen to do the damned thing, the sponsorship and TV rights alone would go some way towards balancing the books and the cash is probably behind the desperation of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to get the athletes running, jumping and throwing this summer.
What has been suggested and has been firmly WTF'd by most people is the idea that nations find a way to vacinnate the athletes first so that the Tokyo Games can go ahead safely in July.
While insisting that they are not calling for athletes to 'queue jump ahead of the vulnerable and key workers' the IOC called for exactly that with the unfortunately named IOC Vice President, Dick Pound, saying that her thought that the public would probably be okay with it  if athletes did jump the queue if it ensured that the Tokyo Olympics could go ahead.
To their credit the British Olympic Association and UK Sport have said: 'The priority has to be the people who need it most, frontline workers, the elderly and the vulnerable. There will come a time, hopefully ahead of the Olympic Games, when the athletes can be considered for vaccination but we’ll only do that when it’s appropriate'.
Good for them and i hope more nations come out and say the same because keeping people safe should always trump a sporting event, regardless of much money it will lose if it gets cancelled or at the very least, pushed back to whenever it is safe to be held.

Climate Change Didn't Self Isolate in 2020

There was quite a lot going on during 2020 but something that didn't stop and self isolate was our warming Planet and unfortunately there is no vaccine for what is coming.
The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere reached record levels in 2020, hitting 417 parts per million in May and the last time CO2 levels exceeded 400 parts per million was four million years ago. Humans have piled 100ppm in the last 60 years alone, an amount that it took Nature 10,000 years to increase it by at the end of the last ice age
The year 2020 was 1.2C hotter than the average year in the 19th Century, Europe had it's hottest year ever and the World experienced it's joint hottest year, tying with 2016 as the warmest triggering the largest wildfires ever recorded in the US states of California and Colorado, and the fires in eastern Australia which turned the sky black.
The temperature reached 38C in Siberia, the hottest ever recorded within the Arctic Circle which saw the sea ice area at its second lowest on record which has the knock on effect of less area of white to reflect the heat from the Sun back out into space, leading the Arctic to heat twice as quickly as the rest of the world and more sea means more absorption of heat, fueling global warming further.
Across the northern hemisphere, there was less ground that remains frozen all year round which has released billions of tonnes of CO2 and methane which is usually locked away in frozen ground, further clogging the atmosphere.
The United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres said in his State of the Planet speech that we are at the threshold of wrecking our own Planet but the Planet won't care because to be honest, without us, it's job would be much easier without us messing it up.
It isn't in the business of keeping us alive and stop us from doing stupid things like poisoning our own air and water, we are very low down on it's list of things to give a toss about.