Category Archives: History

The state execution of science

Posted on 30/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

I finally got round to reading Scientocracy, (eds. Patrick J. Michaels and Terence Kealey). It’s only nine months old and already outdated by COVID-19 – or rather, thoroughly vindicated by the rapid descent into censorship of all but official government policy on what “the science” says, despite the clear and demonstrable failure of the predictive models most governments are still following.

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

Environmental Fascism

Posted on 27/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

In the current civil unrest, which has been blamed on an “institutional white racism” that led to a slavery which somehow persists nearly two centuries after its abolition, a number of people from Thomas Sowell to Baroness Caroline Cox have drawn attention both to a more complete history of slavery, and to the widespread existence of black slavery in Africa today.

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Foundations and empires

Posted on 07/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

Together with the current campaign to direct of our entire moral attention on an ill-defined thing called “racism” (worth critiquing in a post of its own), that programme also calls on us to repudiate the evils of another thing called “imperialism” (or “colonialism”) as one of the worst tributaries of that racist stream.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 3 Comments

How many fingers am I holding up?

Posted on 24/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

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

Twenty percent infallible

Posted on 20/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

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

This is the Night

Posted on 04/06/2020 by Jon Garvey

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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Myth-making in action

Posted on 08/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

Today is VE Day, and is notable for the fact that my sax quartet has been deprived of two lucrative engagements at commemorations in two adjacent seaside towns, because of lockdown. What self-sacrifice war engenders!

Posted in History, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

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

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.

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Hump retrospective 6: worldwide flood

Posted on 02/03/2020 by Jon Garvey

In my “quest” to sort out origins questions, this “old chestnut” problem was really a question of filling in details, rather than finding entirely new solutions, because I was already aware of work by exegetes arguing that Scripture allows for a regional Flood.

Posted in History, Hump Retrospective, Science, Theology | 1 Comment