Book Review of The Cornish Beach Hut Café by Jane Linfoot

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An unusually consequential cosy Cornish romance.

(This review is based on a review copy from the publisher)

First things first: a cosy Cornish romance differs from a cosy Cornish murder mystery in large part by replacing the murderer with a property developer and those two literary devices being interchangeable a quarter of the way into the twenty-first century speaks volumes about Cornish and English culture and where we are all headed. The property developer is seen mostly at a distance and serves to present the more central characters with an ill-defined but looming threat which gets them all (mostly) working together for the common weal. This is all seen through the eyes of one Florence May, who is trying to build a new life after health issues have brought an end to her most important relationship, her hopes of a family and even her ability to voice “audible” books for a living. In the love and hope of her friends, she overcomes all of these issues through a series of hilarious accidents which teach her to accept that she deserves a new life and that others are perfectly willing to share her worst moments as well as her best.

There’s quite a lot of baking, too, and the recipes are all at the back of the book.

The Cornish Beach Hut Café by Jane Linfoot is published in the UK as of the 12^th of July 2024 by Harper Collins.

Tacitus, John Bunyan and The Hope Accord

 Here is a link to the "Hope Accord": https://thehopeaccord.org/

The past four years or so have seen quite extraordinary levels of censorship and even officially-sanctioned coercion and gaslighting, to protect certain actions* and the officials responsible for putting them into effect, even from informed scrutiny stopping well short of criticism, never mind opposition or attack. Regardless of whether the reader's stance is to agree with or furiously condemn the principles put forward in the accord, readers might want to read it before coming to either position. And if the reader already has a position on this subject the only thing they have to fear from reading the according (it is not a long or wordy document), is having their mind changed. And it is the fear that people might have their minds changed which lies behind all censorship in the modern world and back, far into history.

* Those actions were pandemic-related in this instance, but alarming precedents were set right across the board.

 There is an article about censorship in the Roman Empire on the following link, which might ring a few bells with any reader familiar with the treatment of those reckless enough to question almost any aspect of the pandemic response, let alone the "natural" origin hypothesis of the completely novel pandemic virus itself:

https://brewminate.com/book-burning-and-censorship-in-the-ancient-roman-empire-and-provincial-roman-egypt/

 From which I have copied, as fair use, this quote of Tacitus which might even be out of copyright by now:

After concluding the speech he gives to Cordus, Tacitus says in his own voice:

The [senate] ordered his books to be burned by the aediles; but copies remained, hidden and afterwards published: a fact which moves you the more to deride the folly of those who believe that by an act of despotism in the present there can be extinguished also the memory of a succeeding age. On the contrary, genius chastised grows in authority; nor have alien kings or the imitators of their cruelty effected more than to crown themselves with ignominy and their victims with renown.

 As the article makes clear, Tacitus believed in freedom of speech for himself and other well-read members of the Roman elite, however dissident they may have been. Perhaps a better (and somewhat more modern) example comes from 1673 AD and the pen of John Bunyan, because no-one can accuse the tinker from Harrowden of being a member of any "privileged elite" and, in consequence, he was arguing not only for the right to speak, but also for the right to a courteous hearing! Which is precisely what members of Parliament, including my own MP, so shamefully and stupidly denied to Mr Andrew Bridgen by running away with hands over their ears in front of TV cameras when he broached those issues related to the Hope Accord in the House Of Commons, whether in the chamber or the committee room and Westminster Hall.

Bunyan wrote this to William Kiffin:

What need you, before you have showed one syllable or a reasonable argument in opposition to what I assert, thus trample my person, my gifts and graces, have I any, so disdainfully under your feet? What kind of a YOU am I? And why is MY rank so mean, that the most gracious and godly among you may not duly and soberly consider of what I have said?

Across three and a half centuries, Bunyan addresses our political and medical-scientific establishments on our behalf. Many of those who fled from Mr Bridgen because they feared he might be speaking the truth, have lost their seats now and are indeed crowned with ignominy, but many remain in Parliament. This gives them a chance to doff their crowns of ignominy by giving the Hope Accord a polite hearing, or at least reading it before vilifying, censoring and cancelling its authors and signatories.

Book Review of The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch

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The latest novel in a series of “cosy murder mysteries”

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher via Net Galley UK)

 

A twice-retired detective sergeant attends, mainly in order to sell meat pies, a music festival site accompanied by her teenage daughter, her mother, her dog, and her fiancé who is a serving detective chief inspector. The festival is well-described and comes across as a cheerful Cornish parody of the larger, grander, much more earnest and hippy-infested, Glastonbury festival in neighbouring Somerset. It is almost certainly meant to and has much gentle fun with this theme.

There then ensues a murder (of course) a drink-spiking, a kidnap and unlawful imprisonment.

There are some (very) faded rock stars, adults bravely taking an enlightened view of teenage soft drug consumption whilst consuming rather more meat pies than enlightened medical opinion would countenance these days, an obvious suspect whom no-one really wants to be guilty and a motive hidden in the mists of time and on the other side of the Atlantic. These are good ingredients for a good story, and this is.

The Cornish Campsite Murder by Fiona Leitch is published by Harpur Collins on the 28^th of June, 2024.

 

Book review: “Of Popes and Unicorns” by David Hutchings and James C Ungureanu.

 

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How the “Conflict Thesis” threatens both Christianity and Science.

 

 (The review is based on a purchased copy.)

The authors set out both the history of the Conflict Thesis and the historical reality behind the version of history behind that thesis (that Christianity is, and always has been, the regressive enemy of Science and all progress, enlightenment and freedom) and they do this by researching and publishing rather more actual facts than the authors of that thesis, Draper and White, ever did. In doing so, they find (and go a long way towards proving) that not only did Draper and White misrepresent Christianity to the modern world, they also sold the world’s intellectuals a version of history itself that is not only untrue, but ludicrous. To take just one example of this: the idea that when Christians ruled in the Middle Ages, the streets were all ankle or even knee-deep in human and animal excrement. As George Orwell (who kept a lot of farm animals and planted a lot of fruit-trees in his time) would probably observe: to believe that one you really do need to be an intellectual and not a farmer. Because not even Hutchings and Ungureanu seem to fully grasp just how idiotic that “factoid” which so many clever people believe and endlessly repeat, actually is:

Prior to the invention of super-phosphate fertilizers, human and animal excrement (and bones) were too important to agriculture to be wasted in this manner. Even in the 19^th century, there were dung-piles near the Glasgow tenements, so that the dung could be efficiently collected and removed to the fields outside the city where it was needed! And the great clean Victorian clean-up with all its undoubted health benefits, of the Glasgow dung-heaps and the river Thames in London, only happened AFTER the availability of industrial fertilizers allowed it. If it had happened prior, too many nutrients would have been lost and there would eventually have been crop failures. This is also why we do NOT find huge numbers of graves full of bodies from great historical battles before about 1840: the dead went into mass graves until they had rotted to bones and bones were dug up again and ground to fertilizer. (French local authorities sold licences to mine the battlefield of Waterloo for bonemeal.)

That factoid is just one of a whole barrage of non-truths which Draper and White (and, importantly, their supporters) laid down to sustain their thesis. Actually, they did this so systematically and consistently that it is hard to believe that they had very many actual truths at their disposal to support their case! Now, Draper and White were not actually working together as such and they had different motives for doing what they did. The consistency comes from those who chose to support them, to recommend and promote the books that they wrote and the talks that they gave.

The determining factor behind the consistency was (and still is) an agenda, which both philosophies and institutions were created to serve.

Of Popes and Unicorns is Published by Oxford University Press, 2021.

Book Review of The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud

 

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Memoir of a real-life decision influenced by the spirit of a landscape.

(This review is based on a free review copy from the publisher, via Net Galley UK)

Initially at sea in (not-very) rural England where she is driven by the need for affordable living space, Clover has adapted to the life, even though her partner is largely absent, travelling abroad and increasingly working in the United States, to pay the bills incurred by bringing up their five children. One might note at this point that a house-price boom which consistently outpaces even the cost of living crisis is the G7’s version of the Chinese Communist Party’s demographically-catastrophic “One Child” policy, now abandoned as one BILLION unlived-in apartments are being blown up to make space for new building which is also not needed by the dwindling population.

Clover’s partner, Pete, finds himself unable to make a good-enough living to support his partner and offspring outside of a corporate setting in Washington DC (only those in elite jobs can afford to reproduce) so he wants Clover and the children to abandon the life they have, in order to join him in making a new life there. Clover has come to love the landscape of the English-Welsh borders which she initially found very alien, but she’s still desperate to live with Pete full-time, so she is torn and even frightened by his plans to move the family to America.

The thing is, in that landscape she is surrounded by people making very much less money than Pete, who somehow manage anyway: mostly by doing things of such direct practical value to others that the others are willing to pay cash-in-hand for them! The gulf between Pete and the people Clover deals with on a daily basis is a great deal wider than the great circle route from Swindon to Washington DC.

Not only does he feel that he needs much more money, he can only hope to earn that money within a business model that separates him from most contact with or awareness of those at the base of the economic pyramid: the people who help Clover every day and care for her and about her.

Just as Pete cannot make his way in rural England, it is very unlikely that Clover’s friends who can manage that without much complaint, would last long in Pete’s world. Perhaps Clover’s friends and neighbours cope by lacking the same sense of entitlement which Pete NEEDS in order to survive in a more privileged, but cut-throat and rule-bound, corporate environment?

Clover manages to say goodbye to the landscape she has come to love and takes her youngest children to be with the man she can’t stop loving. The two older children seem to be left to make their own choice and make their own way.

The Giant on the Skyline by Clover Stroud is published in the UK as of the 9^th of May 2024 by Random House

Parliamentary Petition to "review" the MHRA: it isn't just about Covid!

 Firstly, here is a link, not just to the petition to request a review of the MHRA's performance and fitness to meet the nation's future needs, but also to the Government's infuriating mandatory "response" to that petition once it reached the first milestone of 10,000 signatures.

https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/652008

The response manages to be arrogant, smug, dismissive, amazingly complacent and alarmingly ignorant, all at the same time! Gentle Reader, if, previously, you weren't convinced of the need to at least review how well the UK's Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Authority has been working in recent years (even ignoring the pandemic era as some sort of special case even though emergencies tend to punish rather than reward shortcuts) then simply reading the government's official response, and afterwards considering that this is how the UK government sees the MHRA after a long and steady stream of healthcare scandals with medicines, other products or procedures all regulated by the MHRA, might very well cause you to have another think, if for no other reason than to test whether even the government really believes its own position!

Failures of healthcare product regulation in the UK go back to the nineteen seventies and the contaminated blood products scandal, the origins of which predate the MHRA in its current form, but the cover-up and fallout from that scandal overlap with the MHRA as it is now constituted and the government is still determined to delay compensation to the victims until such time as nearly all, or perhaps even every last one, is dead.

In the meantime, numerous other dangerous products (pelvic mesh implants, for example) have slipped through the MHRA; there probably are too many instances to list them all. However, and this is crucial: no-one is publishing any data which links all the separate victim-led campaigns and class-action lawsuits together in a statistical manner which might allow Parliament or the public any insight into how well the MHRA does its job. Which begs the important question: if there is no data available to Parliament and the public allowing the performance of the MHRA to be scientifically measured in terms of how often patients are harmed by products it has approved, how can the UK government possibly know that everything is rosy in the MHRA garden?

Book review of Expired: Covid the untold story by Dr Clare Craig

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This a self-published, deeply-researched book which this reviewer purchased out of the household cat-food budget on the recommendation of Dr John Campbell. 

It can be found at this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C9FNHYTV/

Dr Craig communicates, with evidence, the failings of those who took decisions without it.

This is a SOLID book, in the sense that everything the author says is backed up by something! It is also compelling. The way the elite managed, first of all, to redefine an outbreak as a pandemic, and then to turn that outbreak into a global panic before inflicting massive social and economic damage whilst actually making everyone less healthy in the name of public health, makes for an hypnotic read.
I can sum it up in pretty well one sentence:

In order for a grave situation to be graspable by "the masses" the elite feel compelled to simplify it to the point where they themselves fail to understand it well enough to make ANY right decisions, legislating instead to make their many wrong decisions unchallengeable.

But for you the reader to see the truth both in my summary and in Dr Craig's presentation, it will be necessary for you to read the book itself and not just my review. 

Here is a link to this review on Amazon:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/review/R2CXN8NLWCTK00/