Always winter, never Christmas

Another round of draconian restrictions has been introduced in the UK, restricting all social gatherings to six people, with threats of dictatorship-style curfews in future. This causes mayhem to our newly re-introduced church services, if we have to gather in (socially distanced) groups of six. And it cancels the restart of my saxophone choir, my only musical activity to have survived lockdown. Christmas too, just as in Narnia under the wicked Queen, looks like being cancelled for the sake of … well, we’ll see.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 6 Comments

Now Charles Darwin cancelled by BLM

My thanks to Extinction Rebellion, whose blockading of newspaper offices because they are insufficiently fanatical about climate alarmism has enabled me to read an entire piece in the Telegraph online. The Telegraph has made it free until tomorrow morning in the interests of free speech.

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

More on lived experience

Last month I did a piece comparing the insistence of critical race theory, and intersectionality in general, on accepting “lived experience” as definitive, with the liquidation of the kulaks in Soviet Russia. In both cases, I argued, lived experience could easily be conditioned by careful propaganda.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 2 Comments

Information on misinformation (or vice-versa)

How do you decide which sources from two fairly well-demarcated sides in a disputed situation are more likely to be truthful? You go on the basis of what can be tested, don’t you?

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Children, young and old

When the NHS was, in effect, closed down in March to make it a dedicated COVID-19 Health Service, it could be predicted (and was, even by me) to result in many excess deaths from other under-treated illnesses. There have already been official and academic reports on excess coronary disease and cancer deaths, as well as articles on the enormous waiting times in what, even before COVID, was an under-performing service.

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False positives unpacked

Here’s an interesting extract from the official UK government website:

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

Equality

The ongoing process of subverting our culture partly involves inventing a wholly new set of deadly sins in which the old culture (including all of us) is implicated. Some are exaggerations of old sins (“racism” being the uniquely Christian “Love your neighbour as yourself” restricted to the realm of skin colour and then deprived of its moral content by making it institutional), and others are new-minted to outlaw any criticism of what were formerly considered evils (such as “homophobia,” “cis-normalism” etc) or of alien ideologies (such as “islamophobia,” or in its current usage “fascist” (meaning non-Marxist).

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Stop Press: how the models worked out in data

There has been surprisingly little mention in the news (ie none that I have seen) of the first major analysis of the world data from the COVID-19 pandemic, published in The Lancet on July 21st, before H.M. Government started to panic over increased positive PCR tests, executed local lockdowns, and threatened national ones if the “R-number” virtual canary begins to look green around the gills.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology, Science | 4 Comments

I believe in the Gospel + state science

I had a circular e-mail from BioLogos recently, asking me to sign a statement about Christians supporting Science during the COVID epidemic. Yesterday I got a personalised mailing from Jim Stump noting that I hadn’t yet signed it.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Science, Theology | 3 Comments

Getting wet in the dry

When Mrs G. and I were on our honeymoon in the West Country, a whole sapphire ago last month, we took a trip to the remote Doone Valley on Exmoor.

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