Book Review of “We Are All the Same in the Dark” by Julia Heaberlin

This is a compelling psychological thriller, which is well-researched and also does well on local colour in its Central Texas setting. The novel primarily sets out to show how "life changing injuries" as the police describe them when they are inflicted on someone, actually change lives.

The author mostly manages to avoid careless stereotypes, although the psychologist character is seriously bonkers (that may be based on experience rather than prejudice and I am not finding real fault there) and the Baptist Minister is not only described as being like something out of the Handmaid’s Tale by one of the other characters: the character does indeed seem to hail from there.

This book is being offered to a British readership and whilst American readers may presumably take it as read that a Baptist minister is going to be a snake oil and brimstone phoney, “Baptist Minister” is one of those terms which has a much more positive meaning in the United Kingdom than it appears to have in the United States. Unless the negative view is something unique to the author or some faction which she represents. The positive image has a lot to do with John Bunyan, who preached and wrote, in England after the Pilgrim Fathers had sailed.

The suspense lasts until the end of the book, though the mystery frankly does not.

Published in the UK by by Michael Joseph on 6/8/2020

Book Review of Hidden Hand by Clive Hamilton and Mareike Ohlberg

Portrait of Xi Jingping flanked by CCP slogans replaces Christian images in a Catholic Church

Review based on an E-book copy obtained directly from Optimum Publishing International.

This is an excellent, if somewhat remorseless study of the unprecedented and ongoing campaigns of global influence and intelligence-gathering operated by the Chinese Communist Party. It names names, and goes on to name very many names indeed, of individual and corporate CCP collaborators in many Western countries. It deserves to be read for that alone, and any credible journalist should keep a copy handy, to consult prior to interviewing any member of their own country’s great and good on any matter pertaining to China, the CCP or “foreign influence.” Especially to determine if anyone frequently crying “foul” about his opponent’s alleged ties to Russia or the Ukraine, for example, has equally juicy ties of his own to the brutal totalitarian dictatorship that is the CCP.

The one flaw in this book is that it conflates “Brexit” with “CCP influence” despite the fact that it also details many, many examples of influence and intelligence-gathering within EU-related bodies and the governments of ALL EU member states. (Germany seems to be the most compromised state of all, possibly because the CCP programme to compromise German politicians is firmly rooted in the mighty German car industry.) Furthermore, the long and dispiriting list of great and good Britons who have proved to be entirely in the CCP’s pocket, includes a former Prime Minister, a former Northern Ireland Secretary and a former First Secretary and President of the Board of Trade, all three of them much better known for their unswerving devotion to the EU project in all its forms and at every level. Possibly the only obvious Brexiteer actually mentioned in the book as being influenced by China is Boris Johnson, currently leading the charge against the CCP over Hong Kong and the Uighurs, even as the aforementioned trio of the great and good persist in denying that there are any human rights abuses in China.

Boris aside, pretty well every Briton the book actually names as a red-flag-waving collaborator is also a blue-flag-waving Remainer and there is an obvious reason for this: these people have all chosen to support the CCP at a visceral rather than a sentient level, because they tend to either disparage democracy or only pay it lip-service whilst undermining it in practice and they are instinctively authoritarian with a Communitarian outlook on social and political affairs. Those are also the hat-measurements for unquestioning support for the European Project so it is almost inevitable that people who buy into the one should buy into the other. It’s like this: if you order “Federal European Utopia” on Amazon, your order confirmation will helpfully tell you that people buying this also purchased “world domination by the Chinese Communist Party.”

The reason why the CCP feels it needs to dominate the world is that it is convinced (again, somewhat like the Eurocrats), that it is perfect and that problems can only come from “outside” or a”tiny minority” (always 5% or less) of its own subjects. The global influence and intelligence-gathering campaign is ultimately intended to ensure that there is no “outside” to the CCP in this world, and the equally well-funded campaign by the CCP’s “610 Office” against all forms of religious practice and belief, both within China and outside, too, is similarly intended to make sure that there is no “outside” to the CCP in the world beyond. This is why images of the CCP’s core leader are now replacing images of Jesus and the Virgin Mary in churches and Uighurs are being blindfolded and herded onto trains carrying them who knows where.

Read this book, but do not do so unthinkingly. And do bear in mind that “unprecedented” usually means that there’s a very good reason why nobody has done this before.

Book Review of Idle Hands by Cassondra Windwalker

This is a novel about a mother trying to cope with an abusive husband and protect her children from ALL harm. The husband is portrayed in a way which fits fairly well with the sociopathic ex-partners of some women that I know. The twist is that the narrative is interspersed with passages in italics ostensibly giving the Devil’s view of proceedings and humanity in general. At the beginning of “The Screwtape Letters” by C.S. Lewis the author warns the reader that the Devil is by nature a liar and nothing he says can be relied upon. “Idle Hands,” with its female Devil, contains no such warning. Readers looking for insight and guidance about the human condition need to give this book a few cautious pokes with a long stick first because there is a very subtle and clever spin on this subject throughout, which gets stronger towards the end. (The Devil denies responsibility for humans behaving devilishly in a manner that’s worthy of Tony Blair.)

It is a good book, but not recommended to the unsceptical reader.

Idle Hands is Published by Agora Books on 23/7/20.

Book Review of The Resident by David Jackson

This is a compelling tale of Thomas Brogan, a self-described “serial killer” who is, technically speaking, more of a spree killer. Despite the somewhat nightmarish content, it is strangely easy to read, which is a bit disturbing in itself.

The main plot device is a row of terraced houses with interconnecting loft spaces, and this works very well and is quite plausible, because I can remember a junior school classmate who exploited just such a situation to commit his own little crime spree: in that case, the long row of 1960s terraced houses had a communal loft space which gave access to the tops of stud walls all the way along. My classmate exploited this situation to steal all sorts of things from all sorts of places, and hide them by tying bits of string to each valuable item and hanging them down inside the stud walls, where even police searches of the loft failed to find them. The masterplan was ruined, however, when one of the stolen items proved to be an alarm clock, which my classmate neglected to disarm before lowering it into its hiding place.

These communal loft spaces predictably turned out to be a lethal fire risk, however, especially in more modern terraces with stud walls as described above, and local councils made efforts to get them all fire-walled in the seventies and eighties. So it is also quite plausible that such a loft-space would be partitioned in the course of the story. I am not sure if any still exist in England, in fact: they may do, but they shouldn’t, for reasons that have nothing to do with serial killers.

The story is narrated largely by Brogan arguing with a voice in his own head, which lays the back story out nicely.

However, the one fault with this novel is that the author allows himself to fall into the trap of thinking that the back story of a serial killer has to include a real-life horror scene of some kind, for them to want to inflict similar horrors on others. This isn’t necessarily true. Often, the actual triggers are so banal that investigators think they must have missed something more significant. The biggest risk is not a horror scene in early childhood: young children undoubtedly suffer from such experiences, but without being turned into monsters. What creates the monsters is instability at home affecting male children between nine and eleven years old, or children in that age range being subjected to unremedied bullying in any setting. The lack of remedy or resolution matters, and the absence of a stable, preferably loving, relationship with a male parent or authority figure. This is not meant to be an attack on single Mums, it is an observation that absent or abusive fathers or carers can create threats to society as a whole. The author gets this bit pretty much right, but only after he’s put in the seemingly obligatory nightmare scene in early childhood, which confuses the issue.

There is a good surprise ending to the book. 

The Resident by David Jackson is published by Serpent’s Tail/Profile Books on 16/7/2020

Book Review of The Phone Box at the Edge of the World by Laura Imai Messina

This is an excellent novel about a community forming around a Japanese garden -and a phone box- that allows the bereaved to talk to those whom they have lost. None of the modern Western cliches: “closure”, “coming to terms”, “moving on” or the new one: “life affirming” really apply. Japanese people do not move on from dead loved ones, nor do they wish to close them off from their present and future lives and, instead of coming to terms with their loss, they communicate with those they have lost and, in this novel, those whom they have gained.

The setting is between a terrible Tsunami and a massive Typhoon, but some of the bereavements are the consequence of individual illness or accident, including a stupid accident. One of them isn’t strictly speaking a bereavement at all. There is an extraordinary amount of kindness and respect in this book and there is no religious exclusivity: the characters are interested in each other’s insights regardless of where they get them from. I commend this book to all readers; atheists may have to work at it to some extent, but the small effort involved will be worth it.

The Phone Box at the Edge of the World is published on 25/6/2020 by Manilla Press.

Book Review of Dark Waters by G.R. Halliday

Scottish Noir isn’t as well defined in the public consciousness as Nordic Noir but most people will know when they see it, especially when they read this book. Someone once wrote in The Guardian (it must have been Nancy Banks-Smith) apropos of a BBC wildlife documentary, that a Scottish Wildcat was a Tabby with knuckledusters. G.R. Halliday is sort of John Fowles with knuckledusters, even though no actual knuckleduster is referenced in the text. The author is properly Scottish and there would be Hell to pay if an English author wrote Scottish characters quite like this.

Everyone is flawed and taboos of all sorts are broken, though not trivial ones. A Scottish biker-gang leader widely believed to be responsible for a Manson-family type double murder proves to be one of the more helpful characters which the heroine, Detective Inspector Monica Kennedy, encounters. Tension is maintained throughout and the police find that the available leads do not build a case so much as a nightmare. Even once the heroine knows what is actually going on, she is consigned to helplessness by the situation she uncovers. And some matters remain unresolved. Perhaps for future novels, perhaps forever.

This is a good and compelling read, but it is unlikely that Tourism Scotland are going to happily endorse it for sale in souvenir shops and there are shocks as well as mysteries, and some very disturbing ideas and images are conveyed by the text. Spike Milligan couldn’t think of a fate worse than death: G.R. Halliday has a brave and bold try at inventing one.

Dark Waters is published by Random House, Vintage Publishing on 16/7/2020

Covid-19 and Genetic Engineering by Environmental Manipulation

As far as possible, the blog author intends that his readers should assimilate a few ideas and arrive at their own conclusions.

Several authorities have stated that the virus responsible for Covid-19, SARS-CoV2, has "not been genetically engineered." In the first of the videos linked to below, an authoritative scientific figure states that there is no evidence to support that conclusion. What he actually means is: the authorities who made this statement, very early on in the history of the current pandemic, had grounds only for saying that there was no evidence of the sort of gene-splicing that is the layman's and journalist's primary concept of genetic engineering. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but that's not quite the point. The real point is that there are at least two ways of manipulating the genetic make-up of viruses that do not require any direct gene splicing, therefore they will not leave any of the signatures that the various scientific authorities piously looked for.

One method is a variation on the sort of environmental selective breeding that has, over many years, created many different breeds of sheep, suited to different parts of the United Kingdom. Essentially, you dump a herd down in a new environment and keep breeding from it in that environment. If the environment is harsh and lacking in food, sooner or later your sheep will become small, tough and agile (like Soay Sheep), to make the best of what they've got. On the other hand, take a herd of Suffolk sheep who have grown large to suit a more comfortable and frankly lush East Anglian environment and move them to even better pastures in Bedfordshire, and they will grow bigger still in less than a hundred years. Nobody is directly controlling what the sheep shall become: the sheep's own survival and fertility rate is doing that. A sheep generation is only a few years, but even a few weeks could represent an awful lot of virus generations.

To make a virus adapt itself to a new host, it is only really necessary to inject blood from an infected animal at the peak of its infectivity, into several animals of a different species. Then, samples of blood are taken from those animals that actually become infected (it might well only be one to start with), not at peak infectivity but at the point where the animal's immune system is close to getting rid of the virus altogether. Because that is when you are most likely to come across viruses which have a degree of adaptation to the new species. You then take samples from that animal and inject them into more animals of the same species. And you can go on doing this at regular intervals, dependent on the immune response of the new species. Four weeks would be a realistic interval, apparently. The virus will keep on mutating for as long as you care to do this, but the mutations will only survive as long as they better adapt the virus to its new host species. Eventually, and it might take several months or a couple of years rather than a century, the virus will cease to change significantly with each repetition: it will have stabilised in its new host species. By all accounts, SARS-CoV2 does not seem to be mutating all that fast in humans, which would rather suggest that it was already stabilised in humans before it escaped into the wild. (This could be circumstantial evidence for a serious breach of medical ethics by someone or other.)

Another method, which also leaves no trace of artificial gene-splicing, is to create hybrid viruses by infecting one animal (or tissue sample in this case) of the species you have adapted your virus/es to, with two viruses of the same family at once. They will inevitably swap genetic material (RNA rather than DNA with many viruses) and the main work will be infecting a few more test animals or cultures to separate out the different hybrids and selecting the ones you want, much as in the first method above.

A painstaking application and appropriate combination of these two simple methods is all that would be necessary to achieve the sort of novel virus creation being discussed by the professor in the first video, below.

These two videos are not connected with each other in any place other than this blog (by the time of publication at least!) and the two content creators have nothing to do with each other. There are thousands of other videos out there on related subjects, but if you watch these two videos one after the other, with the first one (and the methods described above) still in your mind, you might start having ideas...

Blogger no longer allows YouTube videos to be simply embedded. This means you may have to skip adverts to get to the actual videos.

Here is a link to the first video, by Sky News in Australia.

Here is a link to the second video, by the YouTuber Laowhy86.

He has lived in China for a decade and is fluent in Chinese. 

The other answer to "how can a virus like SARS-CoV2 be created?" is: "by accident, or at least by a series of deliberate actions that were meant to have another outcome."

Because SARS-CoV2 appears to have no cardinal virtues, other than being unusually well-adapted to binding to the human ACE-2 receptor described in the first video. A biological weapon would need to be much more lethal than this: most victims are not even incapacitated for more than a few days and some infected people are not incapacitated at all! A biological weapon is also rarely created without some way of shielding the creator's own population, which seems to be what's missing here. 

It does not appear to manipulate the victim's DNA as other viruses (notably HIV) are known to do. In fact, binding to ACE-2 receptors on cell membranes in the lungs and blood vessels is pretty much all that it does: it even reproduces without necessarily damaging the nucleus of the infected cell! The life-threatening symptoms all seem to be related either to the effect that binding itself has on the normal functions of the cells concerned, or to an over-reaction of the immune system to the presence of the virus. (This would explain why vitamin-D seems to help: vitamin D helps the body's  immune system to modulate its own responses.)

With regard to the potential breach of ethics. The blog author published (nearly two years ago) a carefully-researched novel "The Lord of Billionaires' Row", which, amongst many other ideas, tried to convey, through adventure fiction, that at least some factions within the Chinese Communist Party see no value in individuals who fail to conform to their ideology and obey their rule, other than the value of the assets that can be forcibly confiscated from them, which even extend to bodily organs which can be harvested and sold for their value on the illegal transplant organ market. If you can take that idea on board, you have within your grasp an understanding of how the SARS-CoV2 virus appears to have come into the world from an unknown animal host (the professor in the first interview took a proper look at bats and pangolins and it wasn't either of those), already exceptionally well-adapted to binding onto specifically human ACE-2 receptors. 

A recurring theme in Chinese medical research and medicine-marketing is longevity. There is a search for an elixir of youth that Western medical research largely dismisses as superstition. (In the West, the average lifespan has increased bit by bit as medicine concentrates on cures for specific ways of dying, one by one. This is good enough for Western scientists but perhaps not for others.) The odds are: if the research was generously-funded and done in China, then it was expected one day to extend the lifespans of the elite, rather than kill people. But it wouldn't have mattered if numbers of non-elite people gave their all for the research along the way.

The novel (like this article) is not an exercise in China-bashing, because, for example, it also sets out to show how establishment complacency about the corruption of police officers by UK Organised Crime is now a life and death issue for British democracy, which is going largely unreported, barely debated and is not being opposed in any effective manner. The novel sets out to show that two different political cultures can each create their own unique failure modes. It also shows how corruption in those two different cultures can be working hand in hand, even if minds do not exactly meet!