Monthly Archives: June 2020

Believe governments

Lord Putnam (famous as the Director of the film Chariots of Fire) was on the Beeb this morning in his role as leadetr of a government all-party commission on misinformation. He was bemoaning delays in the government’s getting a bill passed to outlaw such “misinformation.”

Posted in Politics and sociology | 1 Comment

Things in the news are not always as they seem…

The first UK street protests over the George Floyd killing, in which many police were injured and statues damaged, occurred on 6-7 June. The very next day, a private limited company called Black Lives Matter (UK) Ltd was registered at Companies House, by a white guy from the middle-class ghettoes of Wallingford, Surrey, named David Wilks-Carmichael, its sole director.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 13 Comments

How many fingers am I holding up?

Theodore Dalrymple is the nom de plume of an English forensic psychiatrist. Way back in 2005, in an interview, he spoke about the end-stage of propaganda in a totalitarian state – the stage when it no longer matters that you know what you’re being told is the opposite of the truth:

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

New Commandments I give unto you

Only last year (and I’ve no doubt it’s still the case throughout the media) the Independent dismissed the concept of Cultural Marxism’s “long march through the institutions” as a far-right conspiracy theory. This may be the case, but if so we are seeing this month exactly the same phenomenon made starkly manifest under whatever name you choose to give it.

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Twenty percent infallible

I heard an interesting quotation from Pastor Mike Bickle, to the effect that over forty years of charismatic ministry he considered that 80% of the prophecies and miracles he’d witnessed were false, but that 20% were genuinely from the Lord. Let’s look at that idea, which roughly matches my own, more limited, experience… or to be brutally honest, is a lot more optimistic than my experience.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

Post-(modern-)millennialism

Post-millennialism is the interpretation of the Book of Revelation that holds that the Church, empowered by Christ, will bring about God’s Kingdom on Earth, after which Christ will return to a world already fitted for his reign. The main alternative views are pre-millennialism, in which Christ returns climactically to a world in chaos and establishes an earthly kingdom for a thousand years before the new creation; and a-millennialism, which interprets the “thousand years” as the “already but not yet” rule of Christ in the Church Age, prior to the Great Rebellion and his triumphant return to transform the cosmos.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

Aposematism again

I just like the word, actually, but over the years the local caterpillars have given me several opportunities to take pretty pictures and think about their presumably defensive, or maybe just creative, colouration.

Posted in Creation, Science, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Weasel Communities and weasel identity

Just a couple of days after the police let rioters destroy a statue of the 17th century philanthropist and slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol, I saw on the BBC website that the Canal and River Trust, apparently under instruction from the Museum of London Docklands, removed a statue of Robert Milligan that it owns in London, outside the museum.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 7 Comments

A necessary weevil

I noticed one of these little chaps outside our house last week:

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This is the Night

Here’s another lockdown video for you , once more from a remix of an old recording of one of my songs. The views of The Vegetable Man have been encouraging, so the effort seems worthwhile. This one’s in darker vein than the last, and would probably be more effective when countries produce their first emergency budgets after lockdown and, in the UK particularly, reveal just how big a knife we’ve stuck in the economy. The Nobel Prizewinner Michael Levitt estimates that, whereas the usual averaged cost of a death (using “quality added life years,” or “QUALYs”), and therefore the “economic” health cost of saving it medically, is £40,000, the cost … Continue reading

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