Category Archives: Politics and sociology

Warnings and bogeymen

Posted on 05/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

Threats to children about bogeymen seem to exist in all cultures. The common feature is the invocation of a non-existent monster to scare children into good behaviour. The idea is fundamentally abusive, although one must suspect that most children soon learn to take the stories with a pinch of salt, especially if their friends seem to be warned about different bugaboos. Nobody they know ever gets “taken,” and I suspect that the twinkle in the eye of the adult tale-tellers plays a mitigating part too. Even so, in his later years Charles Dickens bore resentment against a childhood nurse who terrorised his dreams with such tales.

Posted in Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

The Bat that Roared

Posted on 04/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

Maybe you remember a cold-war era humorous novel by Leonard Wibberley, entitled The Mouse that Roared? It was subsequently made into a film starring Peter Sellers.

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

Repenting for civilisation?

Posted on 01/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

I believe in original sin. But that means not that everything humans do is evil, but that everything we do is tainted by evil. My book God’s Good Earth argues that original sin has not corrupted the natural creation, which remains firmly under God’s good government. And likewise, mankind cannot corrupt that creation, which in part at least was made for humanity, by living in it and using it. I think that may have been forgotten.

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

Science goes Stalinist

Posted on 28/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

A Prestigious cardiologist (Dr Peter McCullough) : a prestigious journal (Elsevier’s Current Problems in Cardiology): a worrying paper on rates of post-vaccination myocarditis. Peer review: check. Published online: check… then taken down “temporarily” and, a week later, “unpublished,” the only explanation to the lead author being that the publisher has the right to do so in the publishing contract. Full discussion here.

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

I’m pro-vaccination, but…

Posted on 27/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

Another day, and another excellent article points to the signs of developing problems with the COVID vaccination programme. At the same time, statistician John Dee provides an alarming presentation of ONS data showing how (factoring in obvious things like the number of tests) the positivity rate of PCR tests has escalated since mass vaccination was rolled out, even as you’d expect it to wane:

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

More on green single-use plastics

Posted on 25/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

It’s appalling exegesis, I realise, but I can’t get out of my head the idea that, at the moment, the “three unclean spirits like frogs” that come out of the mouth of the dragon, the beast and the false prophet in Revelation would do for the three big lies of COVID, Identity Marxism and Climate Emergency. As a biblical interpretation it’s rubbish, of course, unless you can identify the three satanic figures of the end times as separate sources for these plagues. But you have to admit it’s a graphic illustration of the areas in which truth is most under pressure just now.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 1 Comment

Gambling with my life (with loaded dice)

Posted on 23/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’m at an interesting age. COVID’s lethality, when you’re 69, is beginning to be significant enough at around 1% to be worth considering, and that rate is beginning to increase rapidly into the 70s, which is also significant as the virus becomes endemic. And that’s why I and Mrs G made the calculus that the short terms risks of vaccination seemed low enough to get double-jabbed back in May.

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

The price of slavery

Posted on 19/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

Re-reading Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative I paid too little attention to a passage in which the enslaved African is negotiating the price of his manumission in the late 1760s. I noticed the human interaction involved with his generally benevolent Quaker owner (which was what Equiano intended as an author), but glossed over the actual monetary values, simply because to my modern eyes they seemed small.

Posted in History, Politics and sociology | Leave a comment

What really happened AFTER Wuhan?

Posted on 17/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’ve just finished Sharri Markson’s excellent and thorough book on the lab leak from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, whose reality I believe she establishes beyond reasonable doubt through testimonies from whistleblowers at the lab to Mike Pompeo, Secretary of State under the last US president, as well as through examining the science of SARS-CoV-2 itself.

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

I’m not religious, but…

Posted on 15/10/2021 by Jon Garvey

It was interesting, and not totally surprising, to hear that Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, the former Bishop of Rochester and one-time candidate for the Anglican Primacy, has given up on the Church of England and defected to Rome. His reason, as you probably guessed, is the liberal wokeness of the present C of E, and the desire to be in a church which clearly teaches the faithful the apostolic doctrine rather than fashionable intersectionality and environmentalism.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments