Fleeing our democratic values

Posted on 15/01/2023 by Jon Garvey

There is a fascinating long-form discussion on The Duran, surely the best geopolitics channel on YouTube, including a very big fish indeed – Sergey Karaganov. His Wikipedia page shows some signs of anti-Russian bias, and a better idea of him can be gained from the few references in Richard Sakwa’s enlightening work, The Putin Paradox.

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

The shape of things that ought to have gone

Posted on 12/01/2023 by Jon Garvey

I couldn’t resist watching, when YouTube’s algorithms offered it, the full print of Alexander Korda’s 1936 adaptation of H. G. Wells’s 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come. That’s because I watched it on our 14in TV back in the late 1950s, when the 1940 world war Wells accurately predicted, as Hitler came to power, was in the film still only half over. At the age of seven or so I was, naturally, impressed with the sci-fi sets and costumes – which were certainly not bad for the 1930s.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

The logic of murder follows naturally from climate deception

Posted on 05/01/2023 by Jon Garvey

One old trope of horror movies is that the witness to implacable evil is never believed. The sweet old lady you notice speaking to your friend in the lane suddenly morphs to reveal its true nature: “I saw it – it had huge eyes and green skin, and dragged Thelma down a hole.”

“It’s just your imagination – she’s only gone to buy some bread, and will be back soon.”

Since the Great Gloom, many of us (usually isolated from each other) have felt the same way, as our friends and relatives either humour or mock us for what, in fact, we know and they don’t. Very often they seem, over time, to have accepted saucer-eyed, green-skinned monsters as being normal anyway. And they’ve forgotten about Thelma.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 5 Comments

The Great Gloom – a theological perspective

Posted on 02/01/2023 by Jon Garvey

With the hindsight of history – or, perhaps, of eternity – the Great Gloom that was imposed upon the world in 2020, and continues into 2023, is likely to be seen primarily as a failure of political leadership. Most of the world now is led by the kind of “false shepherds” condemned by the prophet Ezekiel in the Old Testament. In those days the agenda was idolatry and personal gain, and in one way or another the same is probably true now.

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Posted in History, Politics and sociology, Theology | 6 Comments

Scales falling – an observational study

Posted on 31/12/2022 by Jon Garvey

I’ve mentioned a few times here how interesting it has been to see, mainly via social media, many leading practitioners of science gradually morphing into conspiracy theorists over the course of the COVID affair. Prospectively it was fascinating to see the gradual unraveling of belief in what we were being told in so many individual cases, culminating not only in disillusionment about the state of science and medicine, but the embracing of suspicions about the dark forces behind it. Retrospectively, it is of huge, but under-recognised, significance that an unprecedented number of the most rigorously evidence-orientated professionals have come to wear tin-foil hats.

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

Essential workers

Posted on 30/12/2022 by Jon Garvey

It’s taken me a while to figure out what it is that consistently annoys me about such a worthwhile provision as the BBC local TV news. In fact, it took my reaction to King Charles’s first Christmas broadcast to achieve the realisation that I’m not simply a jaded cynic. I am a jaded cynic, but not simply one.

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The COVID Club (membership restricted)

Posted on 26/12/2022 by Jon Garvey

Listening to a revealing little interview with Jeffery Sachs it occurs to me that we’re now in a position to review and explain, in a broad way, the madness that was (and still is) the COVID spamdemic. At least we can now surmise how the connections work between quite a restricted band of players, albeit it including some of the most powerful entities in the world. Whilst too much remains unknown to call it a conspiracy, we have sufficient evidence to say confidently that it contained at least one conspiracy. As for the rest, perhaps it depends how you define “conspiracy”: if unelected intelligence agencies break the law and go behind their President’s back to pursue policies that the public would abhor, but which are kept from them, is that “conspiracy” or “government as usual”?

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

When is religion not like religion?

Posted on 23/12/2022 by Jon Garvey

There are some news articles and YouTube videos around concerning the discovery of the fabled star catalogue of Hipparchus (c190-c120BC) as a palimpsest in a mediaeval manuscript from the ancient monastery of St Catherine on Mount Sinai, whence also came one of the oldest near-complete manuscripts of the Greek Bible, Codex Sinaiticus.

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Passive absorption of propaganda

Posted on 17/12/2022 by Jon Garvey

As is well known, a society’s worldview (and hence ours as individuals in it) is formed unconsciously. We absorb it, as blotting paper absorbs ink (or as a Kleenex absorbs snot, sometimes), rather than weighing the pros and cons of propositions and forming a judgement. That is why it is so hard, yet so important, to examine one’s most basic assumptions – that is, if you want to live by truth rather than societal convention.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 7 Comments

The causes of our excess deaths

Posted on 15/12/2022 by Jon Garvey

…More on mRNA snake oil

As a follow up to yesterday’s post, there’s an excellent presentation here by statistical mathematician Martin Neill, which actually follows up one by Norman Fenton.

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