by J. ‘Giant’ Patel, MD

I never did understand the ancient Chinese benediction. Interesting times aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. In fact now that I’ve experienced them for the first time, I don’t think I’d wish them on my worst enemy.

In these apocalyptic days you could be forgiven for thinking the New York Times was the New Testament—only there’s nothing fictional about it! Still, I doubt even St John, in his most malarial fever-dreams, during his own lockdown on Patmos, could have come up with headlines like these:

Comics Finally Grow Up: DC’s Batman to be Killed off by Zoonotic Respiratory Virus

Wave of Unattractive Babies Locked in for Early 2021 as Housewives Forced to Sleep With Own Husbands

With Pangolin Sector Bleeding $1bn a Day, Can an Edgy Ad Campaign Restore Faith in Locally-Slaughtered Product?

As promised, here are the top (and only) eight things you need to bear in mind during this crisis. By committing these knows and known’ts to memory you can cut your risk of becoming another statistic by 82%, say statisticians.

Remember, knowledge is power so avoid infection by using the proper terminology. COVID-19 is a syndrome, caused by infection with the SARS-CoV-2 virus. This is wrongly called corona, or coronavirus, by people who deserve to catch it, according to the latest doctors. It’s actually just one of several coronaviridae—the “novel” one identified last year. (Yes, the number 19 is a date, not an ordinal). 

Here’s a simple mnemonic: you wouldn’t say you “respect science,” would you? 

Of course not. The noun requires a definite article, or better yet the definite article.

Also known as chinaviruses, coronaviruses are members of the cervezavirus group.

Emergency surgery is still being performed throughout Europe and the US, but operating theatres and trauma clinics are at breaking point. As always, most of the strain on the system is due to the Big Cs—complications of childbirth, cerebrovascular crises, and cancer—so avoid having these until the pandemic blows over.

Keep traditional journalistic values alive with a yearly subscription to Climate Nuremberg. Exclusive to this month’s Nuremberger Weekender Print Edition: 10 Pangolin Alternatives You Won’t Believe Aren’t Pangolin!

If you must move from domicile to domicile, stick to the roads. Leave the canals and skies free for the use of essential workers like medical and executive types. And, of course, climate researchers. 

For the world’s leading scientists, videoconferencing is simply no substitute for meeting face to face. That’s where the hurly-burly of hypothesis testing takes place: at a United Nations IPCC retreat or Conferences of Parties, where up to 2,500 partygoers can come together to look each other in the eyes and ask questions, observing body language, vocal quality, pupil dilation and the rest of the 90% of human communication that occurs non-verbally [source: science].

Until a theory passes this test of peer approval, explains Harvard’s Naomi Oreskes, “it remains just that: a crank opinion.”

Social-distancing laws for conjoined twins—or Siamese twins, as they prefer to be known—differ from country to country. In a number of controversial cases in Europe, both twins have been fined for breaching the 1.5m rule.

If you and your Siamese twin—or Thai twin, to use the geopolitically-correct term—each have a paying job, this might be a risk you can live with.

Otherwise, why not use the pandemic as an excuse to get that separation you’ve been promising yourselves? Before you pencil the procedure in, though, always consult with your other half to make sure the date works for both of you. If you need to cancel because of a clash, it may be weeks or even months before your surgeon can fit you in again.

Hypercloroxaemia is no joke. We’ve still got surprisingly little hard data on the ideal blood-bleach level [BBL] for humans. What is emerging clearly, however, is that people seem to have different thresholds for experiencing the less desirable effects of imbibing and mainlining over-the-counter disinfectants. 

That’s why you need to stay on the lookout for delirium detergens (‘Lysol brain’) and other signs of Disinfectant Overdose Syndrome. The White House Coronavirus Task Force website lists the most common symptoms and is updated regularly as case reports come in.

If you think you or someone in your family member has overindulged on cleaning agents, don’t panic. A germ-based antidote is easy to prepare, using only the filth found in the average home. Garden fertilizer, shower-mold scrapings and kitchen waste are all rich in essential pathogens and can be diluted with water to taste. The resulting greasy broth should be taken by mouth—or, if rapid relief is needed, intravenously—until any excess disinfectant in your system is cancelled out. 

Once you’ve had the dreaded DDs, you won’t soon forget the dangers of drinking bleach irresponsibly!

Ever noticed how rat meat, when boiled or steamed, looks pretty much the same as de-shelled pangolin? So yeah, there’s probably something in that.

One thing you should binge on is television.

According to some doctors your so-called ‘mental’ health is almost as important as actual, real health. But in these times of medical angst, social alienation and financial stress, a bottomless well of depression is only a glance at the mirror away. To avoid it, simply distract your brain with an equally-bottomless feedbag of audiovisual stimulation. 

Climate Nuremberg recommends starting with The Orville, a show that’s been honored with just about every Most Original category the Emmy Awards have to offer. Set aboard a spaceship of the same name, The Orville stunned aficionados in late 2017 by bringing the ideas of sci-fi legend Gene Roddenberry to the screen for the first time. 

Roddenberry’s mythos had long been regarded as un-filmable—too anodyne and (at the same time) anhedonic to hold an audience’s attention. The challenge might have deterred a lesser show-runner, but for Seth McFarlane it was an Everest to be conquered, a bastard to be climbed because it was there. Fortunately for viewers, Fox had enough faith in the Family Guy auteur to give McFarlane full creative rope.

Imagine, if you will, a future where mankind has eliminated suffering and disease but without falling into the easy trap of replacing them with anything (such as humor, art, music, sexuality, running or any other expression of joy); a sterile paradise where diversity quotas and meritocratic principles turn out to be in complete non-contradiction after all. This is the civilizational matrix that produces our heroes, the crew of the USS Orville, and sends them forth as emissaries and explorers to alien worlds. 

Their mission: to discover backward new cultures and document their benighted ways on a strictly hands-off basis, like blue-helmeted eunuchs at a central African massacre. 

Producer and writer McFarlane also plays the show’s protagonist Captain Ed Mercer, and it’s his versatility as an actor which is perhaps the biggest revelation of all. You probably know him for being funny, but The Orville proves he’s equally at home with desperately unfunny material.

Purists have faulted the series for the occasional detail that deviates from Roddenberry’s vision. Most egregiously, some of the primary-colored uniforms that distinguish ranks within the Planetary Union fleet have been switched around. But the trifling scale of such objections only highlights how meticulously the show hews to its sources, all things considered.

Less astute readers may have formed the impression by now that The Orville is the only TV show, but this is far from the case, with up to several non-Orville-based programs also in existence. So even after you’ve enjoyed both seasons in full—making a total of 26 episodes—two or three times, there’s no need to switch activities. Scientists have estimated that the televisual product range of a single studio like Netflix is enough to keep you in a continuous state of diversion, even if you never sleep. So sit down, strap in, tap or swipe and veg out; you’ll never need to think about adult themes like your own life again.

Keep your distance. As a layperson, you probably have difficulty getting your brain around fancy scientific facts and figures like 1.5 metres and 0.000932 miles. But with a little lateral thinking, basic hygiene doesn’t have to do your head in! When in public, simply get a 4’11” woman or child to lie on the ground and act as a ‘compass,’ drawing a ‘Circle of Safety’ between you and any potential plague-carriers. 

But social distancing is a complete philosophy, and personal space is only one small aspect of it. The use of “othering” language at all times is just as important, so as to reinforce the us-versus-them relationship between Have-COVIDs and Have-Nots.

Fortunately the climate debate itself is the ideal rehearsal for this. As Nuremberg readers you’ve had years of practice deprivileging members of the out-group. 

It can be easy to think and speak of the sick as somehow human. While the pestiferous are certainly a higher species than climate skeptics, they should never be confused with fully-realized, worthwhile beings in the sense in which we recognize science-abiding citizens.

Change your locks regularly.

With the first reports emerging from Northern Spain and the Lombardy region of room-to-room transmission, scientists who study evolution say the virus is learning how to use door handles faster than anyone expected.

What Would Anton Chigurh Do? This one should be self-explanatory.

Support Climate Nuremberg: buy your WWACD? engraved bracelet or limited-edition signed print today.

At the end of the day, it’s about listening to that little voice of germophobia in your head.

Never eat a pangolin you didn’t flay yourself. Next time someone offers you pangolin flesh they cooked in advance—whether it’s a complete stranger or a good friend— politely but firmly decline, citing the latest common sense. Some people find this embarrassing the first few times, but a little social awkwardness is a small price to pay for avoiding pneumonia, death and possible loss of your sense of smell (anosmia).

If you must order pangolin at a restaurant, ask them to peel it in front of you. A good pangolinier should be happy to prepare the flesh at the patron’s table.

Take some ancient advice and lock your wives down in separate rooms. Familiarize yourself with the sexual-distancing laws that apply to you. The number of wives you’re permitted to have sex with at one time varies from country to country, and is continually changing as we learn more about the virus.

This post is not a substitute for advice from your Shari’a scholar.

Use science. As more and more members of the community recover from COVID-19 infection on a daily basis, so-called ‘convalescent serum’ has become a promising anti-viral resource. The question is how, exactly, to tap into this growing reservoir of immunity.

Taking a hint from historians, scientists recommend taking a hint from history’s great scientists: the pioneers of the vaccine revolution, to be precise.

Even when someone is no longer COVID-positive it doesn’t always mean they’re immune to another cause of death—like being proverbially ‘hit by a bus’ you’re driving. Pedestrian casualties are a daily occurrence and, while tragic, rarely attract much attention from the authorities. 

First, harvest the spinal cord from the body. Using a clean mortar and pestle, grind the nerves and cerebrospinal fluid into a paste, aiming for a consistency and taste halfway between cheap coffee and a molar pregnancy. Then dilute this with antibody-rich blood until the unholy elixir, or miracle jab, is easily drawn into a syringe et voilà! 

In less than 30 minutes you’ve produced the potion it supposedly takes Big Health eighteen months to discover, invent, and invent a way of producing.

Remember, inoculate yourself first. Then you can assist children and other family members who may be having difficulty getting the needle into their deltoids.  

Liquidate everything you own and put it in vanadium futures.

Thats vanadium with a V explain later DO IT NOW

■

Before becoming CN’s Senior Health Correspondent, Dr Jayant Patel spent a long medical career dealing with outbreaks of disease seemingly everywhere he was posted. His decision to wash his hands in 2005 was credited with finally putting an end to the wave of iatrogenic infections that had devastated Bundaberg Hospital in Queensland, Australia.

Sometimes, when your eyes have adjusted to the darkness, you start to discern in the dark even darker darknesses than you ever knew possible. Tomorrow you’ll forget the truth like a bad dream; you know this now, as surely as you know that in the morning everything you know about the dark will be an unknown unknown all over again. Scientists at Cornell West University’s Black Studies Institute now recognize fifty different shades of #000000FF, but only at night; when the cock crows they’ll deny it point-blank. At first light they’ll denigrate the whole, rich spectrum of sables by reducing them to the name of a crayon.

And so it goes right now, with this pandemic we’re waiting out. Yes, it’s a pain in the rectum. Yes, things are looking dark. But squint real hard and you might just make out, at the end of the tunnel, the light-extinguishing singularity that is climate change.

Nobody really wants to be killed by the new coronavirus. If it happens it happens, but let’s be honest: back in first grade, when Ms Strzlecki asked us what we wanted to die of when we grew up, how many of us said COVID-19?

Life has to end sometime so we can experience other things. But we’d rather be a little older when it happens, wouldn’t we? And we want it to be from climate. In our own house, a house we’ve paid off, a house echoing with the screams of children, the pitter-patter of tiny rats’ feet and the lamentations of the women.

There’s no social distancing in extremis. What keeps us living today is the promise of dying in the arms of our loved ones tomorrow—embalmed by fire, acid-etched by ocean, fused together in confusion, welded in holy matrimony. Flesh made lime, stone made incorruptible.

White or olive or Asian or female of color, we all return to black in this fantasy: black and charred like the burghers of Pompeii, the black from which you can never go back.

That’s the family thanatograph you carry in your mind’s wallet like the sepia icons of saints, next to your ass at all times.

(Have you ever wondered why we keep our valuables as close as possible to our centre of mass? The Aztecs must have known, because—with an understanding of both anatomy and Spanish that was centuries ahead of its time—they called the human pelvis la calavera mayor: the larger of two skulls.)

We’ve all made peace with our mortality by now. We know we’re going to die—a Guardian subscription and a couple of SPMs will do that. But it wasn’t meant to happen for another ten years, maybe 12 if the world gets serious about carbon austerity. Life owes us that much. The science owes us. Understandings were exchanged; elbows were shaken.

When an immediate threat like COVID-19 comes along, we start to question everything. At our lowest ebb we even lash out at the people who least deserve it: the climate scientists. Why didn’t they warn us?, we cry, shaking our fists at the atmosphere.

Then, as suddenly as it came over us, the rage recedes, leaving only a deep shame at our own ingratitude. Where do we get off taking every scholarly body of national or international standing for granted? What about everything they did predict—and I don’t mean the actual trends, which any farm-boy with a ruler and a Farmer’s Almanac could have extrapolated. I’m talking the thousands of extra things they’ve told us about, most of which won’t even come true!

And here we are ensconced in our homes, the opulence of which the first Emperor of China could never have imagined, bitching about a single false negative? Shame on us for taking out our wounded entitlement on the very people who’ve devoted their lives to giving us paper after paper after paper full of false positives. Once we turn on each other, the virus wins. The scientists might be smarter than us. They might fly Premium Business to tropical science conferences while we grow malnourished and deconditioned in our fraidy-holes. But at the end of the day we’re all in this together.

Viruses don’t last forever, unless ‘under the Siberian permafrost’ counts, and anyway, studies show that in a few years’ time kids aren’t going to know what Siberia is.

Life will find a way. It will return to the New Normal of weather death, diffuse disseminated ecolysis, climate acidification and cosmological anomie. Together we can make it through this vale of shadows and into the Black Hole of Carkoon that lies beyond. And all you have to do is everything Climate Nuremberg tells you.

Tomorrow we’ll summarize the world’s 2,500 leading Knows and Known’ts of COVID-19. Read them uncritically and I guarantee: one day we’re going to look back on all this and laugh mirthlessly.

Another Scicom classic, this time from Hawking’s 2007 A Grave History of Levity (p. 80). Consider it my small contribution to tiding you over (and annoying your denialist housemates) in these days of self- and other-isolation.

Everybody knows the joke: time flies like an arrow, but fruit tends to fly like a banana—or parabola, in mathspeak—smoothly arcing through the air to return ineluctably to the ground from which you plucked it.

But it wasn’t until the 17th century, when one fell on the head of an ambitious English physicist, that we began to understand the science behind the pun. […] It would be hard to overstate the gravity of the discovery made that day by a man whose name you may have already guessed, particularly if you’ve read The Da Vinci Code.

© Pengwing Books, with permission

Rapid Fire Zone!

with guest shooter John Cook

Phat Albert writes from Wash., DC, USA:

Dear RFZ c/o CN,

I guess you could call me a professional influencer. Not to blow my own trumpet, but the evidence does point to my being pretty good at my job.

From my earliest years on my family’s tobacco farm, I was expected to know how to make folks hand over legal currency in exchange for lung cancer, which may sound hard, but isn’t as easy as it sounds.

When that challenge wore off I went into politics. On an average day I might have to, say, convince Americans to re-elect Bill Clinton to the Oval Office—which, despite recognizing the name Bill Clinton, they actually did, thanks to my initiative in going ahead and inventing the ’Office Sex-perverts Should Get Four More Years’ law-and-order platform.

After retirement I wanted a change of pace, so I decided to sell something easier: the science of climate urgency.

Everyone said it would be a piece of cake, especially for the youngest person ever to drop out of Vanderbilt’s Masters in Preaching program, having surpassed my Rhetoric professors by the end of sophomore year.

Everyone said the promotional video I made for my climate-prevention company, Generation Investment Management, could be cut in half and still win an Oscar.

Everyone said I’d have the carbon debate in the bag by intermission.

Well, 13 years later, I think you can guess whose advice I wouldn’t piss on if it was at increased risk of once-in-a-century extreme temperatures: everyone’s.

Long story short, from a peak brand approval of 49% we’ve made literally zero headway in over a decade. No matter how sad and angry I get, people just prefer not to sign up anymore. How dare they?

When I do cold calls these days, it feels like 51% of the time, they don’t even want to be talked into subscribing. You can’t say the word ‘carbon credit’ in mixed company any more…

[Blah blah blah, woe is me, a few swears for good measure—eds.

It goes on like this.]

….serious thought to selling out and getting back into the respiratory-malignancies game.

So I guess my question is:

What’s the #1 WEIRD tip that can TURBOCHARGE my climate-insurance sales and save up to 200 HOURS of impotent frustration/week? That’s more than I pay for coffee.

BASIC ANSWER:

Stop preaching to the unconverted.

ADVANCED ANSWER:

As Sun Tzu says, pick your battles with a view, whenever practicable, to avoiding suicide. A surfeit of Anzac spirit is all well and good if your only ambition is to have an Australian cookie recipe named after you, Phat Albert, if that really is your name. But nobody ever wrote a book about the idiot who charged at a wind turbine—they were too busy trying to identify the resulting mince from dental records.—J.C.

Well, Rapid Fire has outdone itself this time, mereckons you’ll agree.

Because you asked for it.

Rapid Fire Zone!

Woman:

My question is to the rather animated gentleman on the far left, psychologist I think? [Pointing to Winthrop Professor Stephan Lewandowsky.] Hi, yeah. In two bullet points or less, how does science explain the fact that nobody bothers doing anything to avert climate catastrophe?

Winthrop Prof. Lewandowsky: Whoa! [Wiping brow theatrically. General laughter.]

That’s pretty much the question, isn’t it? So while I’m not remotely convinced you were asking it in good faith, I want to answer it anyway:

• The human brain evolved to ignore problems that don’t matter.

• Which is great for solving the real problems we encounter day to day—but leaves us totally ill-equipped to deal with made-up ones.

No empty calories. Gluten free. Single-origin. 97% fact-free. That’s our promise to you when you enter the CN Rapid Fire Zone.

Rapid Fire: because you asked for it.

Rapid Fire Zone!

Q: [Inaudible] Like this? [Tap tap] Sorry, yeah, like I was saying, I wanted to ask the panel:

What’s the ‘Mission Statement’ of Climate Nuremberg’s new Semi-automatic Fire Zone [sic] section? What corporate values [inaudible]? Thanks.

A: Our new Rapid Fire Zone embodies excellence in:

• succinctness

Who was next?

We hope you enjoyed this zero-sugar, 97% fact-free, no-added-values science-sized snack, courtesy of Climate Nuremberg’s Rapid Fire Zone.

Rapid Fire: because you asked for it.

Today we’re humbled with pride to announce what scientists say will be a game-changing feature at the Berg, offering faster elimination of your lingering questions than ever. And don’t worry: CN’s new Rapid Fire Zone will learn from, and build on, the mistakes of the abortive CN Explainer—now deleted—a format we really should have known was overambitious. (The clue is in the name, der freds.)

After that episode—of which let us never speak again—we turned to our readers for ideas. You. The people. The 99% of Internet users who trust Climate Nuremberg, not Breitbart, for their daily science.

And one consistent message came through, right from the day our reader survey opened in 2003. What you’ve been telling us, year after year, is that you don’t care about the Whys and Wherefores—that’s “troll catnip,” “pandering to the immoral minority” and “false balance,” in the words of one courageous young reader, ‘Mikeman,’ from PA., USA.

What you want is the Whats, How Bads, How Fasts and Therefores.

When do you want it? Now.

Well, we listened. That’s what we do to you here at the Berg. We be agile.

After all, sitting around waiting for some evidence is so… Anthropocene. These days, the Days of Thunberg, #We simply #DontHaveTime (as my 16-year-old granddaughter keeps reminding me) for such indulgences.

Just ask any industry-free scientist: by the time the science comes true, it’ll be too late to falsify it, no matter what level of carbon austerity we submit to. The people who publish on the theory of tipping points have been in indefeasible consensus about this since 1850, and what they tell us reads more like the New Testament than a sober IPCC meta-analysis: the shit, they say, shall hit the fan like a thief in the night. And the picture in the crystal ball’s only getting more turbid. It’s as if the more we know about how uncertainty works, the less we know we know (and the more we know we don’t) about the tripwires for explosive climate derealization.

The latest scientists are now putting it like this, in private, after a few drinks: “In the climate-change world—unlike the real world—you can’t always count on getting a trigger warning.”

Michael Mann studies historical trends in tree temperatures, a question we’ve known the answer to since Victorian times. He says the junior scientists who queue outside his office for mentoring are young and—in various cases—diverse, and therefore grasp the urgency of the war on our broken climate better than the dead white geriatrics who occupy the Professorial Chairs ever could.

For Mann’s conga-line of protégés it’s no longer a science, it’s an arms race. And they’ve got no patience for the language of background checks, references, mental health screening, and other dilatory cunctations so beloved by climate delayers.

“‘Cooling-off period’ isn’t even in the vocabulary of tomorrow’s researcher superstars,” he explains, authoritatively but without falling into the easy trap of mannsplaining. “And if it is, it belongs in the same sentence as ‘phlogiston’ and ‘Little Ice Age.'”

Isn’t it time we learnt from them?

So say goodbye to step-by-step walking-you-throughs down tortuous, and often tendentious, garden paths of premise and inference that are all-too-seldom convincing—if they’re even intelligible.

From now on we’re cutting straight to the take-home point[s]. Because people—like you, for example—respond to bullets, not numbers. Climate psychologists were perfectly aware of this when Arrhenius was just a spermatozoon in his father’s eye.

Isn’t it time we learnt from them?

Without further ado, let’s answer your most burning, acidifying questions already. All that and little more when Climate Nuremberg returns with the inaugural Rapid Fire Zone, in a fortnight or so.

Shoot. ■

You just touched down at the Australian National Airport. You’re champing at the bit to experience the fully sick country you’ve heard so much about. But before you disembark, or just plain deplane, here’s a couple of warnings.

First off, we Aussies speak English with a conspicuous lack of any accent. Such phonetic purity can be disorienting at first to visitors, like you, who’ve spent their lives immersed in a national or regional dialect. After your awe wears off, however, another culture shock awaits: the brands you trust are nowhere to be seen! (If it makes you feel any better, newly-paroled Aussies suffer exactly the same disappointment on arrival in non-Australian territory, mutatis mutandis.)

But The Berg has good news for a change. Yes, you read that right, reader: it’s not as bad as you thought.

The truth is, all the big names are still around—they’ve just been renamed. Here are the corporate Australianisms that trip most people up on their maiden voyage Down Here.

For better or worse (and we can safely rule out the former), there’s nothing much any of us can do about this megacorporate habit. According to a 2015 survey in Business Weekly, the top 5 excuses cited for rebranding were:

• political correctness gone perfectly sensible
• to avoid any risk of  hilarity in a world that’s more deeply divided along dialectical fault-lines than ever
• to respect local ethnic, religious and cultural groups, especially the violent ones
• because leading US brands “look funny” if seen from the left side of the road
• forget everything you thought you knew about chicken that was fried in Kentucky ■

*This pioneer and icon of Sino-Yiddish fusion cuisine traded as The Jewish Dragon until 1972, when the owners finally bowed to community outkvetch and switched to the name we’re all familiar with today.

A scientific dream team led by Climate Nuremberg dot com’s own John Cook is contemplating an online complaint about the denier blog Climate Scepticism dot com, in the wake of a “flawed and potentially misleading” interview (don’t click) regarding the latest post at Skeptical Science dot com.

In a scathing article today the climate scientist Joseph Romm, who teaches at DeSmogBlog dot com, gives the CliScep piece a D- for scientific credibility, citing “serial unseriousness, blatant dog-whistling and the decontextualization of literally every paragraph, from beginning to end, of the original [SkepSci] post.”

Writing at The Conversation dot com dot au, Professor Clive Hamilton says the scandal people are calling SkepticismGate illustrates the worthlessness of the blogosphere as a source of information. He reminds readers that—unlike deniers—legitimate scholars never express themselves on the Internet, viewing it as “an attempt to bypass the checks and balances of the peer-reviewed literature. Those are the two words you need to remember, folks—peer and review.”

Cook and his mother, Professor Naomi Oreskes, say they only agreed to CliScep’s interview request because the name and contents of the now-discredited website tricked them into mistaking it for a reputable, anti-skeptic blog, like Skeptical Science.

“History will judge whether the post [at Skeptical Science] that’s got deniers hot and bothered struck the right balance between honesty and effectiveness,” says Prof. Naomi Oreskes [above, juggling the twin values of science].

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, a Bristol-based cognitive scientist, lent his credibility to the SkepSci post as a co-author. He believes it’s no accident that the shadowy coalition of Australo-, Americo-, Anglo- and Euro-deniers behind CliScep chose a blog name so easily confused with Dr Cook’s. His regretful conclusion is that, “at this point, the only way to keep words like ‘sceptical’ and ‘skeptical’ safe from misappropriation by skeptics is to trademark them.”

In a special post at ShapingTomorrowsWorld dot org today, Lewandowsky reluctantly appeals for donations to a legal fund.

“The tragedy is that the good guys here are vastly out-funded by the skeptic blogs,” he writes. “As the underdogs in this cock-fight, we have no choice but to beg for your help, dear public. I’ve personally pledged to give whatever I can afford, but—with life becoming an endless series of airline tickets—I doubt that’ll cover the initial consult[-ation with an intellectual property lawyer].”

●

Doctors Cook and Oreskes have been on a three-continent tour to dispel public unawareness of their blog entry. But in light of the seriousness of the skeptic distortions of its message yesterday, they ditched their itinerary to meet us in Sydney, where they gave us the authentic, scientific version of events.

Continue reading →

Three meninges bathe and sheathe my financially-valuable brain: the dura mater, arachnoid meninx and pia mater, in ascending order of intimacy.

Perhaps I’ll tell you about them sometime. Today I want to talk about something even more intimate: my alma mater, the place where I spent my formative 13th thru 18th winters.

I hate to love Trinity School for Boys, whereas what I really love is to hate her.

Last week I had occasion to return to Trinity’s picturesque Apple Chapel on sentimental business: a friend was getting married, or something. Like good little Trinitarians, my circle of mates has never really outgrown her. I suppose there’s no shame in having your wedding at your own high school—but please shoot me if I ever have my funeral there.

It was like stepping back in space to the 1990s.

As I entered the Chapel (a satellite of the much larger cathedral where morning assembly is held), you can probably imagine the various stigmata of Mariolatry that surrounded me.

Let me stop you right there. The sight that hit me in the apse was nothing like that, I assure you.

For, despite her name, Trinity is no den of Catholicism. Her founders and First Boys were High Anglicans, a type of Protestant best known for only protesting a little bit, reluctant as they were to rock the boat like their Lower brethren. (Readers confused by Christendom’s sectarian denomenclature may find succor in CN’s Mannsplainer® section below, which is prepared to answer any and all good-faith questions.)

In short, the Trinity I knew had nothing to do with the Father, the Warrior and the Stranger. No, the equilateral sigil of our school stood for one thing and one thing only: cricket, footy and assemblies—the three pillars of a private Anglican education (or to put it in Anglo-English, a public Anglican education).

As a young sportsman, assemblies were my forte.

To this day I still don’t understand all the fuss about footy. Apparently there was a ball involved somewhere—hence the sport’s full name, rugbyball—but I never did get my hands on this McGuffin. A fellow intellectual once got close enough to describe it as “an inflatable piece of cow.” How bathetic.

Cricket was more bearable, I suppose, because for the most part you could just mind your own business in the outfield. It was certainly easier to get your homework done when you didn’t have to keep one eye open for bearded behemoths bearing down on you like pituitary Panzers, bent on using your spinal column as a tackling pad. My Saturday mornings became even closer to tolerable once I’d attained the position I was born to play: twelfth man for the Last Elevens.

Of course it wasn’t all sport. The ideal Trinitarian divided his “life” at school equally between honing his leg spin in the nets, Growing In Stature And In Service To God And Man, and hitting the academics.

Which wasn’t much fun for an academic like me. Still, to quote Nietzsche word for word, what almost kills me almost makes me admire the Klebolds and Harrises of the world. At least they had the balls, ramrods and powder to turn the tables on the jockocracy.

●

Like most boys I wanted nothing more than to be an onward Christian soldier, so I was devastated when they exempted me from Cadets, forcing me to join the debating society. And it was all thanks to my fraidy-cat mother, who’d snitched about a condition I suffered from at the time (“haemophilia,” for the medical geeks).

Then as now, debating was the fallback activity for noncombatant Nigels. We asthmatic, bespectacled, Warfarin-blooded perorators could only listen in skeptical awe to the tales of what went on “on bivouac”—like the story of a certain Latin master who once in the safety of Belanglo National Forest no longer insisted on swearing in Classical tongues. “Fucking Abos!” replaced “indigenes in crucem, eos in crucem,” et yadda.

To my regret I never did find out what the recoil of an Enfield feels like, or if bivouac is an actual thing. (I have my doubts.)

Meanwhile at the local state school, Fairfield Boys High, they didn’t even have their own river for rowing practice. It must’ve been out of socioeconomic envy that they tried to beat us up on the bus every afternoon. Successfully, as a rule. Thank the Three Gods their parents couldn’t afford rifles and bayonets, or they’d have utterly routed us.

But there were good times as well [subs—need a bullshit example here]

●

They say it’s February 2018 now. Australian society has moved on a bit since the time of Hammer. The average employer is no longer quite so impressed by an applicant who can speak New Testament Greek or cover himself in glory as a front-row hooker in the four-man cox.

Meanwhile life at Trinity, or what passes for it, has proven to be reassuringly immutable. They tell me Latin is still the lingua franca of daily worship, sports practice and the English classroom. (Not the French classroom, obviously.) The great leafy Quadrangle is still one side short, as it has been since the 1960s—courtesy of a handful of rioting borders inflamed with school spirit or similar inflammation.

And me? I turned out all right. Anti-Catholic guilt eventually lost its hold on me. Like my idols Mao Zedong and Christopher Flannery, I realized idolatry was poison. It was the cursing of a drunken Irishman—”Mary mother of m*therfucking God!”—that tipped me off, of all things, to the fatuity of faith. How could anyone worship, with a straight face, a demigod born of a one-night stand between God and His own mother, I asked myself? You may as well be a Scientologist or a Presbyterian, for God Delusion’s sake.

But it was those six years, the Trinitarian years, that made me the man I am today, says my therapist.

CN Mannsplanation™ Zone!

What does ‘High’ Anglicanism involve?

The first High Anglicans earned their vertical denomination not only for their fondness for psychedelic stained-glass polyptychs but their insistence that all around them was continually turning into plasma, serum and bodily tissue. These hallucinations are thought to have been a side-effect of their signature vice: the recreational use of liturgical censers.

(Pass the thurible, said the bishop to the vicar, as they sat in a circle getting incensed.)

Ah, but I fear I’ve already lost my Muslim readers, haven’t I? Let’s rewind a tad—to the Middle Ages, which occurred in Medieval times.

It is the Middle Ages. The Catholic Church holds undisputed temporal and spiritual sway over the peoples of Europe. (‘Catholic’ literally means all-inclusive, indiscriminate, ecumenical; think holistic, Holocaust or holodomor.)

But one peoples, who call itself Anglicans, are none too happy living under the thumb of a fat man in a dress in Avignon. The final straw comes when the Pope refuses to relax the canonization criteria for their favorite candidate, the popular mystic Jesus. He simply doesn’t have the necessary number of magic powers, explains His Holiness with faux regret. (You can’t beat pancreatic cancer by praying to Jesus, for instance.)

So the Anglicans secede from the Mother Church, with understandable sequelae: centuries of internecine pogroms.

My grandparents in Germany still remember the Catho militias who traveled door to door cleansing the community of “Prods” (to use the hate-word they applied to devotees of St Jesus). But because all religions are about the same thing—being a better person and loving your neighbor—it was no easy task to tell members of one sect from another. Save for a certain lascivious avariciousness of the lips, the average Papist doesn’t look palpably different from the average Christolator. So the roaming Romists needed some kind of shibboleth to sift the wheat from the chaff of Christendom.

Their solution was as simple as it was fiendishly elaborate.

When you answered the door they’d either hit you on the thumb with a hammer or pretend to break some bad news, like “someone scratched your car,” or “you left your headlights on.”

Any homeowner who blurted out “Jesus!” was killed on the spot. Only if you blasphemed properly (“Mary mother of thr*ce-beshitten God,” or “Begorrah” for short) would they let you off with a savage beating in front of your family for sullying the name of the patron saint of teen pregnancy.

Naturally, this great Old World tradition was exported Down Under in an attenuated, half-assed form. I was too young to understand why, but I vividly recall Dad nailing a sign to the door of our house—a sign that was to save our lives more than once: No Salesmen, Charities, Death Squads Or Take-Away Menus Please. It worked wonders, thanks to the unique laziness of the Australo-ustashe.

The age of sectarian genocide was over by the time I started seventh grade, thank God. In the Vatican, a few years prior to the events of today’s post, a fiat^† of Pope Lawrence had shuttered once and for all The Office for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith, better known as the Holy Inquisition. (The site now houses a state-of-the-art burns ward.)

But the mistrust lingered. Even in an extremely moderate family like mine we weren’t allowed to have Catholic girlfriends. Since it’s not entirely clear what the point of dating a non-Catholic schoolgirl is, this was tantamount to saying your genitals are grounded for the next six years, young man. ■

^†In religion a fiat is a kind of executive ruling, coming from the word fatwa.

We trust this CN Mannsplanatory Zone! has eliminated all your outstanding questions about world religions (not to mention your mediocre ones). If questions persist, please see your religion provider.