Category Archives: Politics and sociology

Rules are there to break us

Posted on 05/12/2021 by Jon Garvey

We had an excellent pub lunch on our daughter’s birthday yesterday. A lovely warm and cosy thatched village hostelry, with a log fire. It was obviously very popular because every table was full. We spent a couple of hours there over an excellent meal and their home-brewed bitter. And the only masks in sight were on a few of the newcomers sporting their cosmetically-compliant face-rags as they came through the deserted lobby to the sparsely-occupied bar, before being ushered to their convivially-packed tables and removing the masks.

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

The evolution of British primary health care

Posted on 03/12/2021 by Jon Garvey

Back in the days of Richard Baxter, George Herbert or John Wesley, medical care was part of the remit of the church minister. Whilst physicians balanced the humours of the rich in cities, out in the sticks the poor could seldom afford their fees, and the pastor, as the most educated member of the community, made it his business to know some herbal cures and folk remedies. How effective they were – other than by demonstrating compassion, not to be denigrated in these days when the suffering are left to die alone – is hard to say, but then the same is true of the professional bleeders and purgers of … Continue reading →

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Pseudoscience and a challenge from history

Posted on 30/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

Phillip Johnson gives an intriguing quote from Karl Popper on pseudoscience. He points out that Popper was raised in Vienna, a centre both for Marxism and Freudian theory, both of which claimed to be scientific and, for many decades, were accepted as such. Belief in either had

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

Opinion polls as mind control

Posted on 29/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

A YouGov poll out today suggests that a large majority of Britons wish to make COVID booster injections mandatory. One would think that is a fairly surprising change in views in a democracy. But also out today is a video including input from a doctor who actually took the poll.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

Get the shot or get shot

Posted on 23/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

One just has to say something about the new racking up of totalitarian control across Europe and, indeed, the world. Apart from “I told you so,” of course.

Posted in Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

A passage to India

Posted on 18/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

A friend of mine is wrestling, candidly and productively in my view, with the hype of climate change. On the one hand he sees that there is so much in the mainstream account that is just nonsense, both regarding climate change itself, and the proposed solutions such as those fudged at COP26. On the other (if I don’t misrepresent him) he finds it hard to believe that a whole scientific community is complicit in deception, and also feels that the existence of harmful warming is undeniable, affecting the poor most of all. One example he cites is his own experience of extreme temperatures when visiting Delhi a few years ago.

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Religious plebs, salt and light

Posted on 15/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

Everybody I know who appreciates the pervasive lies surrounding us, and notably every Christian in that position, feels isolated and, if the truth be told, rather impotent as they experience the vehement opposition of family members, friends, and church associates. And that is certainly justified, since the capture of the institutions by fashionable progressivism has reached even into the evangelical churches.

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

Joining up the frogs

Posted on 11/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

Back in 2019, when I wrote Seeing through Smoke, I surprised myself by becoming not only skeptical of the whole climate science narrative, but convinced that it is part of the same deception at work in the post-modern moral system that James Lindsay usefully labels “Identity Marxism.” Up to that time I’d taken it for granted the general picture was true, despite the dishonesty of the some of the rhetoric of people like Michael Mann and David Attenborough. Enlightenment came, as it usually does, by looking beneath the bonnet.

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The world gets (false) trinitarian religion.

Posted on 08/11/2021 by Jon Garvey

There is a perceptive article on Christian Concern by Rev Dr Joe Boot, originally from England and now based in Toronto. His focus is on the religious nature of the response to COVID over the last two years.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

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.

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