Monthly Archives: April 2020

The curse of care homes

Posted on 30/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Internationally much has been said in the last week about a wave of COVID-19 in care homes. My Canadian cousin said it showed how dangerous they are, though of course it just shows that they are full of the elderly, the main target group of SARS-CoV-2.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | Leave a comment

Fie on your experiments!

Posted on 25/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

The title is a (mis)quote I used back in 2011, here. I’m reminded of it by a typical headline in the Telegraph today: “Watch: Will Sweden’s coronavirus gamble pay off?”. But as a spokesman from Sweden said not too long ago, the real gamble – or unevidenced experiment, to be more precise – is being conducted by the other nations, including America and Britain. Sweden has just based its response on universal precedent.

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

Substance and a smidgen of style

Posted on 22/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Well, Mick Jagger’s doing it and Paul McCartney’s doing it, so I thought I’d do it even though I don’t need to keep public interest alive under lock-down like they do… So yesterday I recorded a new song, and experimented with recording the effort in video. I think the thing’s come out OK, and Hump readers can view it absolutely free, gratis and for nothing below the fold.

Posted in Music, Theology | Leave a comment

Style over substance

Posted on 15/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

One group to do badly out of COVID-19 is the guild of celebrity charismatic prophets, who have uniformly both failed to predict it (except in the “Last September God gave me a secret message I can now reveal” manner), and who even got their false retrospective words from God wrong as they decreed instant death on the virus by Easter (or Passover, for some reason). Particularly instructive to watch on YouTube is Kenneth Copeland, whose spuriously authoritative curses on the thing, and demand for an instant vaccine NOW, almost tip him into apoplexy (though as he has also prophesied he will live to 120, I guess he’s safe). He dug … Continue reading →

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

Exit strategies

Posted on 13/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, COVID-19… we seem to have developed a penchant for embedding ourselves deeply into situations without fully considering how to get out of them.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Good Friday

Posted on 10/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’ve noticed something interesting in Britain during this COVID-19 crisis – perhaps not that surprising, but maybe a significant sign of the times.

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Hedging and ditching

Posted on 09/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here in rural Devon, most of the field boundaries are traditional “Devon banks,” which are banks of earth and stone originally capped with hedges, in order to contain livestock. Down in our valley, many of the banks are mediaeval. The parish boundary just down the lane, dated by counting the number of tree species that have colonized what was originally holly, probably dates right back to Saxon times. But up here on the hill most of them, including the boundaries of my own property, probably date to around 1820, when the common-land “turbary” was enclosed: a mere two hundred years.

Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

It’s the same the ‘ole world over…

Posted on 03/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

It’s the poor wot gets the blame. I’m increasingly of the opinion that the “precautionary principle” that’s so prevalent in the current crisis, and in many other recent public applications of science, is a highly dangerous one.

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

By nature objects of wrath

Posted on 02/04/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’ve belatedly realised one plausible reason why Paul places homosexual acts at the head of his list of the sinful results of denying the true God in Romans 1:18ff. On the face of it, that particular activity doesn’t seem obviously to follow on from idolatry, nor to be uniquely evil.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments