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.

ON THIS AFTERNOON IN HISTORY,

nothing really happened in Dresden, the cultural and choreographic capital of wartime Germany.

Little girls hopped Scotch in the German streets. Their brothers kicked feetball around or biked-ride at local ducks- and fish-pond. Häusenfrau whistled to themself as they sprang-clean (having sprung-clean not six months earlier—such is the hell of war). While the women threw out moldy newspaper and used teethbrush, their manfolks and brother-in-laws sipped gins and tonic and dystonically brokedance at the gentlemens’ club that lined the streets of the old city of an evening.

What might have become of Germany’s Hip Hop Prenaissance, we can only speculate.

As the clock towers struck precisely six o’three p.m., so did the Allies. There, in the amber Götterdämmerung, one ‘bird’ dove bomb Dresden after another. Down they swept in one fallen swoop after another, raining truckloadsful of heck upon the City of Gothic Love.

Unlike physics or chemistry, history is unforgivable—or so we were taught in high school. But isn’t war just a trade-off between ethics and effectiveness, like science itself? One takes no pleasure in bombing entire cities back to the Jazz Age, of course. But if, in the semi-dark of twinight, the Greatest Generation hadn’t shatstorm the living daylight out of Dresden, who knows what we’d be speaking right now?

Not grammatically-correct English, that’s for sure.

This kind of imponderable is why I never liked blogging about the restlessly restive, spastic and easily retarded progress of human civilization. Forget history. Let’s stick to what we know for certain here at Nuremberg, shall we: the future state of the planet’s atmosphere.

Don’t get me wrong. Overlapping magisteria not only is incredibly useful, but are incredibly useful.

And I’m one of the biggest, longest fans of the Naomi Oreskeses’s—of those rare intellects that can bore a fistula between Science and History. But such great bores are rare, and I’m just not that kind of tool, I’m afraid. The work Naomi does every day is far too diabolical for me.

What makes the history books so cryptic, contradictory and confusing is that they’re written by winners.

You won’t find that problem in science, Gott sei Dank. ◼︎

UPDATE: Fidel Castro has died, aged considerably, in Havana.

Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, the 17th President of Cuba, has lost his battle with thermodynamics.

In a divided world, Fidel ruled for all Cubans—whoever they voted for.

They say the President was more like a father to his people: fondly doling out a few dollars’ pocket money every year, telling them who they could and couldn’t date, being older than them, grounding them if they got lippy, coming home with his drink on and beating Che Guevara (who was like their mother) for over-microwaving his dinner.

The ruling Party’s Party Planning Committee will release fireworks every night for the next 40 nights to remind Cubans to continue mourning.

At a time when all too many Cubans had lost actual parents to the terrors of the People’s Revolution, a strong paternal figure was just what the doctor ordered to heal a hurting nation.

But like any carer of the wounded, el Comandante bore a cross he could never share with the very population closest to his heart. Castro was haunted by workaholism most of his adult life. So all-consuming was his devotion to public service that he agreed to serve as President for decades (a sacrifice that must have seemed superhuman to his many one- and two-term American counterparts). Only in 2008 did Castro finally ask his ‘children’s’ permission to retire, knowing that if he waited for them to vote him out, he could be waiting forever.

Fidel was said to be as surprised as anyone when the next-best man for the Presidency on the entire island turned out to be his own kid brother, Raúl.

Having barely turned 72 when this greatness was thrust upon him, Raúl Castro symbolized the thinking, the energy and the aspirations of a new generation of Cubans. Happily, ‘Castro 18’ soon demonstrated a political genius far beyond his years, silencing the pessimists who’d written him off as a callow young playboy, along with their families.

The nation’s favorite son has died doing what Cubans loved most: regaling them with an anecdote about his youthful adventures. Fidel’s last words not only held a baseball stadium of ordinary Cubans captive for three hours straight this morning, but seemed to be on the verge of making a point.

About what, historians of rhetoric will still be debating a century from now. But if you put a gun to their head, say witnesses, Fidel was probably building up to the announcement of a new, socialist ornithology. An ornithology of the people.

In a divided world, Fidel ruled for all Cubans—no matter who they voted for.

Ironically, the former President’s penchant for dramatic, mid-word silences (with which he was known to keep audiences in suspense for 120 minutes or more) may have led to critical delays in diagnosing his death.

“At first we assumed, like everyone else: el Comandante is fine, he’s just pausing for effect,” explained Dr. René Vallejo, one of twelve personal physicians on duty at Fidel’s standing-room-only lecture in the Havana Goodtime Dome.

The interlude was beginning to trouble Vallejo, he says, when he had to leave on a compulsory meal break. When the doctor got back to the stadium a few hours later, breathless from sprinting, the 18,000-strong crowd was still waiting “in an atmosphere of pin-drop quiet” for Castro’s next syllable.

To interrupt the motionless, slumped-over Demosthenes at that point—just when his silence was nearing peak pregnancy—would have been unthinkable, felt Dr Vallejo.

“Then at last we saw the signs, in the amber gloaming: the signs of rigor mortis setting in,” he told reporters this evening. He has no recollection of the seconds that followed. Adrenalin and muscle memory kicked in, and suddenly he was up on stage, flanked by a phalanx of paramedics, nurses and specialists at the President Emeritus’ side.

But there was nothing they could do. The rigor mortis had gone too far.

The last living guerrilla was dead.

An epidemic of whooping and dancing—classic responses to bereavement in many cultures—spread outwards from Havana at the speed of sadness this afternoon. For the men, women and children of this island paradise, suicide will be the only escape from the lugubrious alarum of the vuvuzuela tonight as a million cheeks execute Latin America’s one-note answer to Danny Boy. But for every grief-stricken reveler on the street, another ten Cubans will spend a noisy night at home, drowning their sorrows in champagne. So great has been the national outpouring (so to speak) that it’s no longer possible to buy a bottle of the Batista-era sparkling wine anywhere in the country.

Party-owned television is announcing that the next 32 to 35 days of spontaneous popular solemnity will be overseen by a special Party Planning Committee.

Meanwhile, just an intercontinental ballistic stone’s throw away, the people of Miami, Florida are determined to party ’til dawn in sympathy with their cousins across the Gulf.

Cuba’s superpower neighbor, which is barely 90 miles away on a clear day, owes the ethnic vibrancy of such metropolises as Miami, Tampa and Union City to one man—Fidel Castro—more than anyone else combined.

Barack Obama—the mestizo politician being trotted out to speak for the US regime’s interests this week—eulogized the bearded, iconoclastic icon as “a man without whom the great Diaspora of Cuba’s best and brightest people would never have been possible. Or necessary.”

Even Donald Trump, an apex capitalist who holds the real power in Washington, agreed that Castro’s pre-dawn cremation would be “a moment for Cuban-Americans and American non-Cubans to come together—not to mourn his death, but to celebrate his death.”

Nothing we say can possibly make ordinary Cubans feel any better right now.

But as a token of our tiny respect and sympathy, Climate Nuremberg will use a black font this week.

SIC SEMPER FIDEL.

Note: Whenever Fidel gives a public speech, audience casualty figures are reported on the back page of Granma, Cuba’s newspaper of record; this evening’s edition is no exception.

Proceedings at the Havana Goodtime megadrome today were officially fatality-free. The death of two males (F. Castro, 90, and J. Sepúlveda, 43) to suspected heat stress was cancelled out when an unnamed woman went into labor during the legendary orator’s opening remarks, quietly giving birth to twins at 6:12 and 6:20 pm.

Well, well, well, it seems the first rat has accepted reality and scurried off the good ship HMS Avoidance.

Last time I checked out the hottest, most rapidly-heating-up new site in the deniosphere (which I try not to do—long story), climate “skeptics” were insisting the Pause had never stopped. It’s still happening, they cried—it’s just been “masked” by “short-term noise”! We haven’t had “long enough” (whatever that means) to pronounce death yet, quacked these often self-conferred MDs. It’s Not Statistically Significant!

So I suppose congratulations are in order for high-profile denioblogger Jaime Jessop, who evidently has the rat-cunning most of her conspecifics lack.

The title of Dr Jessop’s new post says it all. In fact, the first 3 words alone are rope enough (and can therefore be quoted out of all context, without the slightest ethical or intellectual qualms on our part):

The Pause Returns […]

It’s hard to exaggerate the significance of this three-word admission, because I’m a science communicator, so every fibre of my being is viscerally opposed to hyperbole—which is literally worse than lying.

So I’ll just have to understate it:

This changes everything. The tectonic plates have shifted. The continents have realigned, and the constellations themselves are sure to follow.

What Dr Jessop has just conceded—gracelessly, backhandedly and teeth-clenchingly—is that there really was a pause in the Pause. To be sure, it’s over now—the pause in the pause has stopped, at least temporarily, and the pause is back, for the time being at least—but what matters is that the pause did stop, at some point. Just like we’ve been trying to get through their lead-lined calvaria this whole time.

I hate to say “I told you so,” but being a hero sometimes means doing things you hate. So here goes:

You were told so. By me.

I said so. To you. Do I really have to spell it out?

I—the editor-in-chief of Climate Nuremberg—told you—the science-denying community—so.

Breaking ranks is never easy, and Dr Jessop can expect to be called aside for a quiet word tonight. Bank on it. The pausist cause was just rewound by years, if not decades. There are going to be a lot of raised fingers and pointed voices in the denialist flatearthosphere in coming days, you can take that to your stockbroker.

What was she thinking?!, voices will demand to know. This won’t help the Cause of the Pause! Won’t somebody think of the Pause Cause?

Oh, to be a fly on the wall.

Or a rat under the floorboards. Both good options.

Cultural relativism; civilizational equivalentism; American unexceptionalism; call it what you will, the myth that all societies are created equal seems to be pandemic in the one country that’s more equal than others.

Despite its prima facie absurdity, this misconception takes hold at an early age among US students, as a new NEF report, released yesterday, is the latest to confirm. Here’s what the lesser outlets are saying about yesterday’s announcement.

In Europe there’s an entire tradition of jokes predicated on the American tourist who operates (loudly) under the assumption that other societies enjoy the same freedoms and standard of living as “back home,” only to find out the hard way that the local culture is retrograde in some way.

A film poking fun at the phenomenon—named If It’s Tuesday, This Must Be A Vibrant Technology Hub With High Female Literacy—was the runaway hit of 2012 in a particularly backward sliver of Europe known as the Basque area.

(As trivia-lovers and Scrabble champs will attest, Basque isn’t a word we just made up. The region is very real; its eponymous inhabitants have been dubbed the Kurds of Europe, but tend to object to the comparison to Mid-eastern, and therefore even worse-off, people.)

The filmmakers stuck to English throughout production—not just for obvious reasons, but also to avoid prison. In much of the Basque-speaking world it’s against the law to speak Basque.

Our reputation for cultural naivete precedes us almost as far East as it’s possible to go in the Far East.

“You Americans are all the same. ‘Back home nobody tells us what kind of sugar to put in our coffee. Back home we get to choose what to call our dogs, who to vote for, what to think. Back home they don’t arrest people for this. Back home we get to make one last phone call, oh god for the love of humanity please, wah wah wah,’” mocks Kim, 33, who works as a Supreme Leader, just like his father and grandfather before him.

Basketball is Kim’s real passion, but under intense pressure to carry on the family profession he resigned himself to studying Economics at Yale.

College overseas was an eye-opener for the sheltered princeling, who was shocked to find that real Americans were nowhere near as cross-culturally sophisticated as their one-dimensional portrayal back home led him to expect.

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Only 58% of students were able to point to the ass end of the world on a map.

A new National Education Foundation report is out today, based on a nationwide quiz of middle-school students. Entitled ‘The Bigotry of High Expectations: American students are deplorably ignorant about the wider, lesser world,’ the paper is set to bolster fears that the myth of American unexceptionalism has become widespread among US teens.

You might assume that in the greatest country on Earth, young adults would grasp the logical implication: that the rest of the world is, well, less great.

But if you expected that, you’ve been living in a cave, says speleobiologist David Dixon—as illustrated by scores from the NEF quiz on the nations of the world, good and otherwise.

“Let’s just say performance was… poor,” continues Dr Dixon.

“As in, Dominican Republic poor.”

Almost 60% of candidates were unable to name the capital city of a tinpot banana republic.

Fewer than half of respondents knew the preferred term for the planet’s most retarded regions (‘developmentally-delayed countries’).

And only 58% succeeded in pointing to the ass end of the world on a map. “Which was barely better than guessing,” Dixon explains.

Scores were even worse when it came to more challenging questions, like this item:

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by Brad Keyes

It seems someone called Brad Keyes has been peddling defamatory denialism over here. (Don’t click.) Many thanks to all the concerned readers who, through no fault of their own, got lost on the Internet and wound up in that hive of scum and villainy that is the hottest site in the skeptosphere, only to see this crank trading on the counterfeit credibility that comes with having the same first and last name as yours truly.

So, what do we know about my nemetic namesake?

Well, climate science is easily the most complicated, multidisciplinary can of worms our species has ever opened, so we can assume this Keyes guy must have undertaken the many years of postdoctoral scholarship necessary to mouth off reliably on the issues… right?

Imagine my surprise when a Google Scholar search for the name “Brad Keyes” shows a grand total of zero hits in any relevant field.

Yes, that’s zero with two zeros.*

Ouch. So much for credibility!

So here’s a friendly warning for my disbelievalist Doppelgänger:

In science, reputation is everything. And reputation takes a lifetime to earn, but a moment to undo.

Just ask a water scientist called Peter Gleick.

In a single act of lateral journalism now known as Water-gate, Dr Gleick—a sought-after lecturer on scientific ethics—managed to discredit the Heartland Institute forever.

Just sayin’, Braddles old pal.

*Including the alternative form “Bradley” improves the results by a factor of infinity, but this isn’t particularly impressive when you recall that the denominator was 0.

In a sign of the times, the board of directors of The Conversation has announced that the iconic blog will cease taking reader responses. For the millions of ordinary Australians who’ve come to rely on the site for intelligent discussion, bereavement is expected to give way to anger in coming days as blame is sheeted home to the climate skeptics who’ve used their disproportionate vocalness to make dialogue impossible.

The policy doesn’t take effect immediately, senior editor Michelle Grattan assured the public this morning. For now, all feedback from the community will merely be deleted as soon as it’s posted, with full abolition of the comments section to take place in February.

The government-backed blog franchise, which now has branches in the UK and US, started life in 2011 as a bold experiment in bringing intellectuals and the non-intellectual public together. But it was soon nicknamed ‘The Nonversation,’ for reasons that are not clear, but probably due to the low quality of readers’ responses to the professionally-written posts. With few exceptions, commenters failed to supply valid refutations—backed up by peer-reviewed sources—of the above-the-line thesis, and some were even known to spout ‘zombie talking-points‘ (arguments that have already been rebutted at least once on the Internet, to no apparent avail).

“Conversation is the lifeblood of democracy, but it depends on respect,” wrote founding editor Andrew Jaspan in today’s Age, “for those who actually know what they’re talking about. You can’t have a conversation if the other side insists on butting in every 10 minutes.”

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