Just a couple of UK-based graphics to consider this wintry Sunday:
Continue readingThis is a guest post by Dr Peter Hickman, an experienced UK medical practitioner, and a regular commenter on The Hump.
The phrase “every death is a tragedy” has been repeated multiple times by the Prime Minister and other politicians during the 2020/21 SARS-Cov-2 Coronavirus pandemic. What does “every death is a tragedy” actually mean, and is it a useful or appropriate thing to say?
Continue readingIn my last post I wrote about the subjectivisation of truth in the progressive programme. But it would be a mistake to think this is restricted to specific examples like race and gender, because the postmodern element of progressivism extends it to the whole of life. It is all truth that becomes subjectivised to a preferred narrative, not just particular instances. Needless to say, this has profound implications.
Continue readingParanoia is a pretty distressing symptom in its common setting of schizophrenia. My in-laws once went for a house viewing, only to find the place full of scrap metal structures intended to prevent US satellites spying on the owner. But it can occasionally be potentially lethal as well.
Continue readingBret Weinstein, in discussion with Heather Heying, makes some interesting observations on why “scientific consensus” is not always the virtuous thing it seems. His topical example is the increasing evidence that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from the virology laboratory in Wuhan, as the evidence for the “wet market” hypothesis becomes less and less persuasive.
Continue readingI guess it’s now pretty well known around the world how the one successful part of Britain’s COVID policy has been its vaccine procurement and distribution. I mean, we were pretty well the first to OK the Pfizer vaccine, and we seem to have got away with it rightly judged its safety. And the Oxford vaccine, with a little tradesmen’s help from those Swedish chaps, was a close second on the scene.
The line taken both by speakers at the WEF Davos virtual conference, and in its publicity beforehand, is that “The Great Reset” is the way to go forward, rather than a return to the previous normal, because the latter is what got us into this mess in the first place. That claim requires a little examination.
Continue readingI’m pretty sure a new word is soon going to become part of the English language: “zoomed-out.” I keep hearing the concept, if not always the phrase, used by people who are, ostensibly, doing reasonably well under lockdown. Whether it’s our own student pastor, doing all his church and college work on a screen, or historian Neil Oliver comparing dreary lockdown life with the buzz he felt from a live audience on a book tour before all this, or even my old school-fellow J. J. Burnel commenting ruefully on trying to compose a new Stranglers album via Zoom (having sadly lost his friend and keyboard player, Dave Greenfield, to COVID last year); never wanting to see another Zoom screen seems increasingly common. Someone has commented that lockdowns would never even have been conceived apart from internet conferencing.
Continue readingFinancial stories are a far cry from The Hump’s core mission of science and faith. But the scandal over a company called GameStop casts light on the dystopian nature of the human bit of our world.
Continue readingLooking back on the Soviet era, what Christians do you remember? Richard Wurmbrandt, perhaps, tortured for Christ in Ceaușescu’s Romania. Or Brother Andrew, risking his life to smuggle Bibles to believers. Or the pastor Georgi Vins, allowed out of prison to the west after an intensive campaign by Christians here. Or Solzhenitsyn, whose multiple accounts of believers both widely known and nameless, inside and outside the Gulag, show how the Spirit of Truth suffered under, yet finally triumphed over, Communism.
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