Monthly Archives: January 2021

Why lockdown kills everybody

I’m pretty sure a new word is soon going to become part of the English language: “zoomed-out.” I keep hearing the concept, if not always the phrase, used by people who are, ostensibly, doing reasonably well under lockdown. Whether it’s our own student pastor, doing all his church and college work on a screen, or historian Neil Oliver comparing dreary lockdown life with the buzz he felt from a live audience on a book tour before all this, or even my old school-fellow J. J. Burnel commenting ruefully on trying to compose a new Stranglers album via Zoom (having sadly lost his friend and keyboard player, Dave Greenfield, to COVID … Continue reading

Posted in Medicine, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 1 Comment

By the time we got to Gamestock

Financial stories are a far cry from The Hump’s core mission of science and faith. But the scandal over a company called GameStop casts light on the dystopian nature of the human bit of our world.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

On compromise

Looking back on the Soviet era, what Christians do you remember? Richard Wurmbrandt, perhaps, tortured for Christ in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Or Brother Andrew, risking his life to smuggle Bibles to believers. Or the pastor Georgi Vins, allowed out of prison to the west after an intensive campaign by Christians here. Or Solzhenitsyn, whose multiple accounts of believers both widely known and nameless, inside and outside the Gulag, show how the Spirit of Truth suffered under, yet finally triumphed over, Communism.

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Bible Study: The finding of the Book of the Pandemic

34 Boris was fifty four years old when he became king, and he reigned in London for four years… 3 In the third year of his lockdown the famine had become very great in the land, and he began secretly to doubt the advice he was getting from SAGE. In his fourth year he began to scour England and London for whatever remained of any value…

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Overturning Sumptions

One of the most senior British spokemen against lockdowns, Lord Sumption, has (we are told) been discredited after exposure as a cruel and callous fascist in a TV discussion.

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Whole-cost denialism – wilful blindness or myth?

An historical perspective Fifty years on from that obscure episode in history between 2020 and 2023, now generally known as “The Covidiocy,” it is perhaps now time to reflect on one of its darker aspects. The whole period was one of darkness, of course, largely forgotten now only because of the greater darkness to which it led, culminating in the implosion of the World Equity Government after the sack of Beijing

Posted in History, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 3 Comments

Lockdown – a nationwide prospective study (update 2)

I think the data collection is complete enough now to be confident of the trend in COVID-19 positive tests since UK Lockdown #3 began on 5th of January. Here is today’s chart:

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

How Christ released Prometheus (but not like Adam did)

I’m reading a recent book by Carl Trueman, recommended by a Cambridge contemporary who read my e-book, Seeing Through Smoke (and generally liked it). It’s entitled The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self. Trueman is a Christian historian who seeks to explain the origin of our contemporary moral confusion. To capture his theme, how did a sentence like “I am a woman trapped in a man’s body” come to make sense?

Posted in History, Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Prometheus, Theology | 1 Comment

Why lockdown even matters

So today’s ONS data look even more confirmatory of a sharp improvement in national positive COVID tests beginning on January 1st. Assuming it takes 6-8 days for sudden changes in infections to show up in test patterns, it can’t be due to a lockdown starting on Jan 5th, and is very late for Tier 4 beginning on 19th December. In fact, the most obvious event in chronological terms is everyone getting together at Christmas, which is unlikely to be credited for the downturn by SAG! Most likely, as ever, it is the natural course of this particular combination of local surgesthat is the real explanation. But why does it even … Continue reading

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Lockdown – a nationwide prospective study (update 1)

It’s hard to be sure as yet, but there now seems a definite downturn in the latest overall ONS “cases” data, for 4th January. The problem is that if it’s real, it begins on 1st January, 4 days before lockdown. Therefore if it continues, without a clear change in slope, lockdown is both ineffective and unnecessary. I’ll keep updating. Here’s the chart:

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments