No apocalypse, but monopolies aplenty

Posted on 16/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

I gave a heads-up to Michael Shellenberger’s book Apocalypse Never a little while ago. On Amazon.com it is still #1 in climatology, environmental policy, and environmental science, though I understand it was removed from the New York Times bestsellers list for much the same reasons that works by Blaise Pascal, Francis Bacon or John Calvin were put on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum. I’ve not heard of its being burned by Extinction Rebellion yet, possibly because the woke activists are too busy burning Bibles for BLM.

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Posted in Politics and sociology, Science | 2 Comments

Divination science

Posted on 14/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

The furore in the UK over the “virtual” grades awarded to school students prevented from taking their A-levels, or their Scottish equivalents, because of lockdown is in full swing over here. Arguably, kids unjustly excluded from universities thereby are the lucky ones, given the way academia has become an indoctrination machine for identity politics and postmodernist superstition.

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

Anything by any other name is… nothing at all

Posted on 12/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

The word “black,” as in “Black Lives Matter”, is simultaneously both strictly defined, and as slippery as an eel. That’s a bad omen.

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Posted in Philosophy, Politics and sociology | 4 Comments

UK COVID stats and policy

Posted on 09/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

After the UK government halted the lifting of lockdown with a screech of brakes, because of an increased number of cases over the last month, I’ve taken a closer interest in the official stats. It’s better than reading endless e-mails about the exact meaning of the regulations on wearing facemasks in church, but leaves me equally bemused.

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Posted in Medicine, Politics and sociology | 13 Comments

Music – more supernatural than mathematical

Posted on 07/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

One for you music-lovers. Back in 2014 I did a couple of pieces on the musical concept of “swing,” to demonstrate how central human subjectivity is to important things, and in this instance, to the beauty of music. The links are here and here, though unfortunately most of the YouTube links are broken now. Great music is something generated by the human spirit, and is not simply tapping into mathematical concepts of rhythm, harmony and so on (though it builds on those).

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Posted in Creation, Music, Science, Theology, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Lived experience and the liquidation of the kulaks

Posted on 04/08/2020 by Jon Garvey

One of the most shameful examples of Bolshevik class hatred, amongst so many in that evil empire, was the “liquidation of the kulaks,” or prosperous peasants, during the 1920s when the revolution was young and pure. Millions died, often at the hands of their own neighbours and relatives.

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Cancelling Malthus

Posted on 31/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

The Antiques Roadshow being forbidden to film normally because of the lockdown madness, the BEEB showed one of last year’s editions on Sunday, filmed at an historic Scottish Castle.

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

The state execution of science

Posted on 30/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

I finally got round to reading Scientocracy, (eds. Patrick J. Michaels and Terence Kealey). It’s only nine months old and already outdated by COVID-19 – or rather, thoroughly vindicated by the rapid descent into censorship of all but official government policy on what “the science” says, despite the clear and demonstrable failure of the predictive models most governments are still following.

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

Environmental Fascism

Posted on 27/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

In the current civil unrest, which has been blamed on an “institutional white racism” that led to a slavery which somehow persists nearly two centuries after its abolition, a number of people from Thomas Sowell to Baroness Caroline Cox have drawn attention both to a more complete history of slavery, and to the widespread existence of black slavery in Africa today.

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Posted in Creation, History, Politics and sociology, Science | Leave a comment

Doubling the fear

Posted on 25/07/2020 by Jon Garvey

As the largest recession in British history begins to bite, the government has decided to spend a good chunk of its debt on campaigns (and more “draconian” legislation curtailing freedom of advertising, etc) on fighting obesity. The justification? That it has emerged that obese patients are perhaps twice as likely to die from Coronavirus infection as others.

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