Paranoia and Patriarchy

Posted on 08/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

Paranoia 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.

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Those best placed to know

Posted on 06/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

Bret 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.

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The English, the English, the English are best…

Posted on 04/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

I 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.

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This is what got us here in the first place

Posted on 02/02/2021 by Jon Garvey

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.

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Why lockdown kills everybody

Posted on 31/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

I’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.

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

By the time we got to Gamestock

Posted on 29/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

Financial 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.

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Posted in Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

On compromise

Posted on 28/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

Looking 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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Bible Study: The finding of the Book of the Pandemic

Posted on 26/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

34 Boris was fifty four years old when he became king, and he reigned in London for four years…

3 In the third year of his lockdown the famine had become very great in the land, and he began secretly to doubt the advice he was getting from SAGE. In his fourth year he began to scour England and London for whatever remained of any value…

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Overturning Sumptions

Posted on 23/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

One of the most senior British spokemen against lockdowns, Lord Sumption, has (we are told) been discredited after exposure as a cruel and callous fascist in a TV discussion.

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Whole-cost denialism – wilful blindness or myth?

Posted on 21/01/2021 by Jon Garvey

An historical perspective

Fifty years on from that obscure episode in history between 2020 and 2023, now generally known as “The Covidiocy,” it is perhaps now time to reflect on one of its darker aspects. The whole period was one of darkness, of course, largely forgotten now only because of the greater darkness to which it led, culminating in the implosion of the World Equity Government after the sack of Beijing

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Posted in History, Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 3 Comments