Oh, clap clap, reader. Yeah, you caught me: that’s a thinly-rephrased headline from The Onion.*
Enjoy your victory (as the citizens of Asculum told Pyrrhus). You probably think you’ve outsmarted me, but you’ve merely revealed what you were browsing all day in the early noughties, at that web-streaming startup, instead of coding. It’s because of goateed, Converse-shod wastrels like you that at least 110% of dot coms never turn a profit.
Well—enough about people bearing no resemblance to me, let’s talk about me. Want to read something original? I’ve just committed a major update to the Dark History of the Climate Debate. This version includes several fixes to the period 2011 onwards, which had an issue causing surreal episodes to be underrepresented.
The update is recommended for all Mac users who aren’t particularly PC, as it contains adult truths and searing, urethritic coarseness.
As usual, it comes with CliScep History’s Warranty of Novelty: if any factual claim is corroborated elsewhere on the World Wide Web, we will hack into our competitor’s website and remove the duplicated information.
When the facts accrete a new stratum of dust and pottery shards, my mind accretes a new stratum of dust and pottery shards. What do you do, huh? What do you do?
And among that tribe it was said, that History was like an Onion,
being cryogenic one moment, comedogenic the next, according as it was capitalized.
—Herodotus, The Apocrypha
*Having at length located the original article, I find The Onion’s gag differs almost unrecognizably from my rendition. It appears my attempt at plagiarism is a failure, and in my forgetfulness I’ve written something substantially new, and not nearly as funny. Which just goes to show: he who fails to remember the past is incapable of repeating it.
Climate Scepticism 
I didn’t know Graham Spanier (2010) was a sexologist. In fact I didn’t know what a sexologist was, so I clicked the link, which took me to a Barnes & Noble page with the message: “Sorry, we couldn’t find what you’re looking for. Please try another search or browse our recommendations below.”
Their first recommendation was “A woman of No Importance”, and I’m pretty sure that neither Graham Spanier nor a sexologist are that, so I looked up at the top of the page and clicked on the likely-looking word “NOOK” which opened a menu with the heading:
GIFT FINDER – for mom
and there I gave up.
So who is Graham Spanier?
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Spanier was an academic sexologist who, by many accidents of history, one day found himself in a place of organizational superiority to both:
Michael Mann
and
Jerry Sandusky,
the coincidence that launched a thousand mutually-unflattering analogies. Spanier cleared both men of heinous crimes, and was himself brought low and incarcerated for what increasingly appears to have been the more forgivable of these decisions. I’m not claiming for a moment to know that Sandusky was convicted wrongfully, nor to be persuaded either way: the more I read about the case, the stronger the suggestion of forensic corner-cutting and cultural interference. That’s why I probably wouldn’t be as shocked as the median person by the news that he was blackwashed, hypothetically, and I’d rather not give a hostage to legal fortune.
Therefore I mean to use my prerogative as Party Chairman, First Citizen and President for Life of this post to rendition, kill and disappear the corpse of that paragraph, in one of those special counterexamples to the monotonicity of historical accumulation. Behold: in a moment, there will be less past than there was a nanosecond before.
I think I’ll go further and say persons unknown wrote this, and that they’ve been counselled.
DELETED PARA:
Mann is vindicated and will always treasure the glowing character reference he receives from his superior, the highly-competent sexologist Graham Spanier.
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What’d you do that for? It was by clicking on the glowing character reference that I learned who the person Graham was. I didn’t read all McIntyre’s explanation, just enough (two lines or so) to know that Gary or whoever was only doing what University Presidents are supposed to do, which is protect their milch cows as a shepherd would his flock. Thank Gaia or your local deity for academia, the last refuge of the strict morals of a pastoral society. Keep the sheep in line and skin the wolf, taking care to leave its arteries intact; then set it loose in the Urals to run in desperate search of release from its agony until it collides with a lone larch and collapses in a heap of fertiliser, where it may lay for a thousand years.
(I got the last image from a poem by Victor Serge, who has been similarly scrubbed from history. Don’t do it.)
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> What’d you do that for?
I felt the paragraph depended too much on the joke about Spanier’s competence as a sexologist, in other words: he’s such a great sexpert he didn’t notice children being raped in the locker rooms, and such a great -ologist he didn’t notice science being raped a few stories higher. Since I’m much surer that the latter crime took place, I’m reluctant to entangle it with the former. (Yes, I realize I have a more unassailable legal right to say one than the other, but the epistemics—and thus the ethics—are the other way round.)
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I was going to ask whatever happened to Victor Serge when I had a sudden thought about that guy, with whom Andre Gide toured USSR in the 30s, who fell ill and never reappeared
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“When the facts accrete a new stratum of dust and pottery shards, my mind accretes a new stratum of dust and pottery shards. What do you do, huh? What do you do?”
Jest too funny – yessir!
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Brad’s being a stand up guy (for me), unlike Michael Mann (for Graham Spanier):
https://canmancannedfacts.blogspot.com/2019/04/a-mannly-thing-that-mann-could-do.html
I’ve been trying to interest Brad in my two year old hobbyhorse, the Penn State Paterno/Sandusky case, and he’s showing some public support — probably, not the smartest thing either of us have ever done.
If journalist, John Ziegler ever catches a break in his ongoing quest to get this truly amazing story into the mainstream media (and becomes the next Matt Drudge/Larry King media star), it should offer some interesting angles, when/if Mann/Steyn/Simberg ever goes to trial. As always, summaries are linked in my pinned tweet:
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