Category Archives: Politics and sociology

The Vegetable Man

Posted on 18/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

Here’s another lockdown video, in rather sillier vein than the last couple, to cheer up those still confined. It’s another remix of an old song of mine.

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology | 3 Comments

Save the NHS

Posted on 14/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

That slogan, together with “Stay Home,” has been dropped from England’s political messaging, but it’s an interesting one to focus on a little in the ongoing SARS-CoV-2 saga.

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

Lockdowns, stable-doors, etc

Posted on 10/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

This is really just recycling the work of others, but since such stuff gets little consistent press coverage, it’s worth pondering on the day when Boris Johnson is set to announce Lockdown v1.02. By all accounts this is more or less the same except for asking the airlines to function under a two-week visitor quarantine rule, and public transport to cover its costs with only 10% of its usual passenger numbers. The new normal, it seems, will have everybody walking and cycling to their old folk’s lunches. Who needs to leave the villages anyway, when the roads are in such disrepair because Road-tax dries up?

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

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

More more music

Posted on 06/05/2020 by Jon Garvey

I’ve posted another remix of one of my songs on YouTube, accompanied by another attempt at video support.

Posted in Music, Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment

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

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.

Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | Leave a comment