Moth, rust, and corruption

Posted on 19/10/2024 by Jon Garvey

In my day gap years after school were not the norm they are now, but I did one anyway, and spent several months of it working as a Scientific Assistant at the Ministry of Agriculture’s Pest Control Laboratory at Worplesdon. I earned around a tenner a week, which was enough to buy lunches of toasted ham sandwiches and halves of Double Diamond at the Ship across the road, to pay my Mum 30 bob rent, to buy a second-hand guitar I still use, and finally to spend a princely five pounds on a ticket for the Isle of Wight Festival, which to this day Lefties say was a capitalist rip-off (how much is a Glastonbury pass now?).

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

The promise of the land – abrogated?

Posted on 13/10/2024 by Jon Garvey

Given the current polarisation of opinion over the legitimacy of the State of Israel, I want to consider the theological status of the promise of the land to Abraham (eg Genesis 17:8: “The whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you, and I will be their God”). This reflects the threefold blessing of the original promise to Abram of Genesis 12 (“the gospel in advance” – Galatians 3:8) of (a) a great people, (b) a settled nation and (c) blessing both for themselves and for the world’s nations. Maybe my discussion will give readers some food for thought on the present conflict.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Theology | 1 Comment

COVID stats revisited

Posted on 10/10/2024 by Jon Garvey

A new paper in the BMJ assesses the worldwide effects of COVID (and simultaneously its management) through excess death statistics.

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

Common gospel grace

Posted on 07/10/2024 by Jon Garvey

My piece on the recent invention of teenage rebellion set me thinking about the related question of inheriting a traditional faith, versus the modern smörgåsbord of spiritual choices from satanism to shamanism, via the Salvation Army. Even a generation after Ginger Lawson, essentially my own teenage choice was whether to accept Christianity in some form, or not. Only a few years later did Eastern religion become a thing, and even considering Islam would have been absurd at that time. How different things are now!

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

More cyberstrange

Posted on 05/10/2024 by Jon Garvey

Five and a half thousand hits on The Hump from Phoenix, Arizona, this last month, according to my web-stats. They’re sucking off all the WordPress “embed” files on the site, apparently. Anyone there like to explain the interest, or is it just the eight cybersecurity firms in Phoenix doing their espionage thing and wasting electricity? I await men in black at my door…

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

The demonising of authority

Posted on 05/10/2024 by Jon Garvey

I heard an interview with the Battle of Britain fighter ace Ginger Lacey the other day. Since it was recorded in the enlightened 1970s, the interviewer felt it mandatory to ask if Lacey had ever had doubts about the justness of the war, and consequently whether he had been troubled by strong emotions of hatred, or alternatively guilt, about shooting down and killing German airmen.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 2 Comments

Moving your neighbour’s boundary marker

Posted on 29/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Given the situation in the Middle East, I’m surprised to realise that I’ve never mentioned The Land and the Book by W. M Thomson, a missionary in the Levant in the nineteenth century. My edition is 1881, but I believe it was first published in 1860. As a fictionalised travelogue of “the Holy Land” with an American visitor, it is intended to relate the geography to the Bible, but of course it accidentally functions as a useful description of the region at that point in the late Ottoman Empire.

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…and they still lie

Posted on 27/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

“Some of the effects were direct from the disease, but many of them were indirect by the lockdowns, which were in and of themselves unpredictable because they weren’t part of the plan.”

Chris Whitty at COVID Enquiry.

So speaks the man who was Chief Medical Officer in 2020. Note the “Some” from COVID opposed to the “Many” from lockdowns. And he lies anyway, because even I (a retired non-CMO GP) predicted the tragic outcomes before the lockdowns happened. At the time I didn’t even know that the pandemic plans of everyone up to the WHO excluded lockdowns because their ill effects were entirely predictable. But you don’t get knighthoods for telling the truth – just for covering up your lies in retrospect, and abjectly failing to even think of including a cost-benefit analysis in your “plan.” “Negligently unpredicted because omitted from plan” is very different from “unpredictable,” Dr Whitty.

Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

Nickel-plating gold

Posted on 26/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Bret Weinstein, as many readers know, is an evolutionary biologist who has come on a long, and now familiar, journey from trusting Western institutions to seeing them as thoroughly, and even maliciously, corrupted. Most of you are probably acquainted with his departure from the woke Evergreen University over diversity, his realisation that the COVID response defied science and logic, and his coming round to perceiving that the overwhelming degree of error points to a deep-seated conspiracy of lies rather than to incompetence.

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology, Theology | 4 Comments

More on anomalies

Posted on 20/09/2024 by Jon Garvey

Not long ago I did a piece on the Shroud of Turin as an anomaly, both to science (as it appears to defy naturalistic explanations) and to faith (since, though potentially evidential, it is not mentioned in the documents or traditions of Christian faith).

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