Tetherd Cow Ahead

When I’m at home in my normal life, I don’t watch much tv, but living in LA without my family commitments I do end up with the odd spare half hour at the end of my day that needs to be filled with a little mindless distraction. And if mindless distraction is what you’re after, American television excels. For some reason ((I think it’s some vestige of a long-dashed hope that someday, somewhere, someone might actually make a decent science fiction movie – you know, one that is actually intelligent… Maybe that’s just too much to hope for.)) my brain is drawn to what used to be known as the Sci Fi Channel, but has recently been idiotically re-branded as SyFy. Judging by what SyFy dishes up, I can only assume this naff baby-speak appellation has been applied as an opening gambit in a profit-inspired move to drift the channel away from science fiction programming into a domain that consists of, well, anything that can be loosely assembled under the heading of ‘Crap’.

It’s a category which is headlined by one of SyFy’s own creations, Fact or Faked. Paranormal Files. ((It REALLY annoys me that there is no question mark after the ‘Faked’. If it’s not a question and is just a statement, why do we need a tv show, you morons?)) The premise of the show is this: a bunch of ‘experts’ review a selection of videos sent in each week by viewers, and then pick their favourites to ‘investigate’. The opening credit sequence, weighty with overblown seriousness, introduces us to the members of the intrepid Fact or Faked team:

Ben: Former FBI Agent

Bill: Lead Scientist

Jael: Journalist

Larry: Special Effects Expert

Chi Lan: Photography Expert

Austin: Stunt Expert

Call me shallow, but the very first time I watched the program I took an instant dislike to both Chi Lan and Jael – the former because she’s an opinionated airhead and the latter because I hate her name. Larry is basically an overly-serious nerd, Austin is a gullible prat and Ben looks like he was roped into the whole debacle against his wishes ((No doubt so the producers could flaunt his FBI credentials…)) and is constantly planning his escape from the show.

But you will have sensed that I have saved my vitriol for Bill, the ‘scientist’. Simply put, Bill is an idiot. He is certainly not a scientist in any meaningful sense of the word.

In an effort of forbearance I will refrain from further description of the dumbness of the show itself, and instead just concentrate on a story that was on last night and one that I think demonstrates the full credentials of this team, who must surely all be card-carrying alumni of Scooby Doo University.

The story in question concerns a phenomenon called the Paulding Light Mystery. A video from YouTube shows a tree-lined hill with a bright light waxing and waning in a dusk sky. A ten second long grab (which Fact or Faked repeats over and over) features a mysteriously appealing visual effect as the light is refracted by atmospheric conditions or possibly some kind of lens aberration.

The Facts: If you go to a certain spot just outside the town of Paulding, Michigan, and look toward the south after dusk, you may see, depending on the weather conditions, a bright light just on the top of the tree line. The light may vary in brightness and duration and even sometimes in colour. It is an unusual phenomenon in the annals of the paranormal, in that the light appears quite reliably, with a frequency that has allowed a bit of a tourist industry to have risen around it. In other words, if you visit Paulding, there’s a pretty good chance that you too can see the light.

The Myth: The Paulding Light is said to be the spirit of a dead railway signalman who was crushed to death while trying to warn an oncoming train about another train stalled on the tracks ahead.

So there you have the setup. Let me try and give you some idea of how the Fact or Faked crew typically proceed when investigating something like the Paulding Light.

Dusk approaches. Jael, Austin and Bill have been assigned to this story. They arrive in their Scooby Doo Mystery Machine with a fully decked-out Paranormal Investigation Kit: gas sensors, Geiger counter, FLIR camera system, walkie talkies and a two-person mini all-terrain vehicle. People are already milling about in anticipation of being on television an appearance of the mysterious light.

To fill in some time the team does a couple of vox pops. First of all they badger some poor old lady into saying that she thinks that, yes, the Light is the spirit of the dead signalman. Her demeanour is less ‘genuine conviction’ than ‘How much are you going to pay me?’ Next, a rotund geeky chap steps up to the camera and says that, in his opinion, the Paulding Light might simply be car headlights. Uh-oh. A sensible person! Quick! Cut away to Austin leaping into the ATV – the Light has appeared!

This is as close as Fact or Faked ever comes to presenting anything like a balanced point of view.

The members of the Fact or Faked team then set about deploying their peculiar notion of what constitutes ‘science’ in an attempt to find an explanation for the phenomenon. In this show, Jael and Austin head off to the place where they assume the Light ‘must be’ and traipse around in the dark with the Geiger counter and the gas detector arriving at the conclusion that the Light isn’t produced by radioactivity or swamp gas. Around now I start throwing things at the television. Of course it isn’t, you pillocks – even the most obtuse of dunderheads could make a quick assessment of that theory and throw it out the window. It is obvious that you’d need a mighty outpouring of gas or nuclear energy to generate something as bright as the video shows – that’s not the kind of thing that goes undetected for 40 years. ((These people plainly haven’t got a clue about how nuclear fission works. The amount of radioactivity generated by something that could create a light as bright as the Paulding Light would have contaminated everything within several hundred miles. The lame Ghostbusters-style traipsing-around-in-the-dark-with-a-Geiger counter is nonsense of the highest order.))

Nitwits.

Austin then heads off to a local airport and, with an ultra bright electric torch, ((Now THIS is impressive – 25 million candlepower, according to Austin. Mind you, since ForF plays loose and fast with the facts everywhere else, I’m not sure we can take his word for it. This of course is one of the problems with a show like this – if there are actually any facts present, they get swamped under the tide of make-believe, rendering everything questionable…)) attempts to duplicate the phenomenon by getting a pilot in a light plane to fly low over the area in question. Well, it does make a bright light in the sky, but it’s plainly not the ground-level geographically fixed light that everyone is seeing. How is it that I don’t need to fly around in a plane to figure out that this is also not a plausible contender?

Then the team (grudgingly it seems to me) get down to the most frequently offered explanation for the Paulding Light – that it’s caused by car headlights from either US Highway 45, or the old Highway 45. They choose a segment of the highway that they have deemed the likely place for car headlights to be the culprit and Austin and Jael use their television credentials to get the cops to block off the road. They then drive back and forwards while communicating with Bill back at Sighting Central. Not a sausage. Bill can’t see them.

Instead of even contemplating that the spot they’ve chosen might actually be the wrong stretch of the road, the team hastily dismisses the car headlight explanation. Then, conveniently, before anyone can raise a finger in objection, the Paulding Light has reappeared. Now, with no explanation that satisfies the Fact or Faked ‘professionals’, it falls to Bill to suggest the next course of action.

I want to pause here for a moment and remind you that Bill is featured as the ‘lead scientist’ of this show. Are you containing that concept in your minds? Right then, lets forge on.

So, what is the best scientific strategy that Bill, lead scientist of Fact or Faked, can come up with at this juncture? I hope you don’t snort whisky out your nose like I did, when you learn that Bill’s suggestion is that they try EVP. ((You may remember that I discussed EVP at length on The Cow some time ago, including my personal experiences with it.)) Yes, that’s right, having ‘thoroughly exhausted all possibilities’, Bill, the scientist, determines that they should attempt to contact the Spirit World to find out more about the restless wraith of the phantom signalman. The next few minutes of the show, with Austin, Jael and Bill wandering around the Ottawa State Forest attempting to coax the spirit of a dead railway worker to leave a message on their audio recorders must rank as one of the most risible things I’ve ever witnessed on television. The Scooby Doo-ers seemed genuinely deflated when their recordings turned up nothing.

Jesus H Christ. What kind of dimwitted, brainless lunacy are these people peddling?

And that was where the show ended. With every single scientific explanation exhausted and without any spirit communications from the Ghostly Signalman to set the record straight, as far as Fact or Faked. Paranormal Files is concerned, the Paulding Light remains a total and unfathomable mystery…

The End.

So utterly unconvinced was I by the team’s findings that I immediately leapt from the couch and did what any sensible modern person would do – I searched for the full YouTube clip of the Paulding Light from which Fact or Faked clipped the brief segment that they used on the show.

I’ve embedded it below for your viewing pleasure. Just listen to the credulous amazement of the onlookers as they gaze upon the perplexing riddle of the Paulding Light! Ponder on why Fact or Faked chose to present to their audience the very small snippet at the head of the clip, rather than a bit at, oh, around about the 1 minute mark. Indeed – listen to someone on the audio track at around 3:15, tell you EXACTLY WHAT THE PAULDING LIGHT IS (as if you need to be told by that point because to any normal rational person it’s as obvious as a pig at a christening).

But heck – view the clip and make up your own mind about what the ‘mysterious’ Paulding Light might be: the spectre of a dismembered signalman? A nuclear explosion? Too much gas? I’m pretty sure you’re not going to come to the same conclusion as the insightful investigators from Fact or Faked.

How often have you noticed the numbers 11:11, 12:12, 10:10, 22:22, 12:34, 2:22, 3:33, 4:44 or 5:55 popping up all over the place? These number sequences are not necessarily only time prompts. They can also be number sequences, like 333, 1111 etc. To your mind, is this a coincidence, or are they too frequent to be random? Perhaps you are puzzled or amused by this phenomenon? Possibly even a little bit nervous?

The question everyone is asking is “What does 11:11 mean?” and “Is there a reason for this?”

That’s actually two questions, as it happens, and I have, in fact, asked each of them exactly NO times in my life in relation to any of the ideas advanced on 1111 Spirit Guardians, the website from which this information comes.

1111 Spirit Guardians is a spectacular outpouring of mindless claptrap, which sounds almost like it could have been put together by the same people who brought you Special One Drop Liquid.

The basic gist of the site is that celestial beings called Midwayers are communicating with humans by arranging numbers in such a way as to send ‘signals’ to chosen recipients via digital clocks. Apparently (according to the site) this is happening to a lot of people.

11:11 signals are driving me nuts!

This is a very typical comment from folks who reach this site.

I should think a more typical kind of comment is “Wow, what a load of gobbledygook”, or “Do you also sell Space Diamonds?”

So how is it that these strange supernatural entities have become fixated on the numbers 11.11?

O-k-a-y… So they asked the digital chip makers to reserve them a few numbers…? I guess that does demonstrate some forward thinking. It seems like a kind of a roundabout way of communicating though – why the rigmarole?

Hey – they started it! I would have simply suggested conversation in the first place. It’s extremely tedious trying to get your ideas across in clock language.

What do I have to do?

Acknowledge it out loud. Say – OK guys I hear you, tell me what you want. This speaking out loud is to get around the problem that Midwayers do not automatically have access to our thoughts.

Our clocks, yes, our thoughts, not so much.

What proof have you got?

Well it’s getting so that this is now pretty much proven, simply because by following our instructions, so many other people have found these guys, and talked with them.

Yeah, now see, that’s not actually proof. That’s just you telling us something that may or may not have any truth in it. Proof is independent of personal opinions. You might like to see if you can dig up any of that.

The 1111 Guardians site is, apparently, the handiwork of one George Barnard, a self-styled ‘psychic’ and writer. Barnard claims to be able to ‘channel’ the Midwayers and has transcribed a mind-boggling amount of material from them.

George has been dealing with these guys for over 60 years. He sees them, and talks to them. Mostly he sees with his spiritual eyes, but there have been cases of physical manifestation as well. You could not expect a psych (George) to believe in the voices in his head if they did not turn up physically, could you?

The last sentence seems somehow metaphysically tautological. I don’t think anyone would be surprised if George has, aside from seeing the Midwayers with his ‘spiritual’ eyes, ((I idly find myself wondering if you need to wear ‘spiritual spectacles’ if you’re shortsighted?)) talked to them, shaken hands with them or stayed up late playing poker with them.

What I find intensely (and fascinatingly) strange about people like George, is that they are somehow completely unable to understand the process whereby our brains naturally knit together unrelated incidents in an attempt to find some kind of cohesion for them. We all do this, but most of us realise that it’s just a curious ability that evolution has bestowed upon us – some vestige of our pattern-matching skills honed way back in our time on the veldt, that has now gone into idle mode and leaps to the fore when our brains aren’t productively engaged. Sure you notice the clock is on 11:11. It’s a pattern. As is 12:12 or 10:10 or 12:34 or a wide variety of other numerical combinations. Our brains like patterns. We notice patterns because they are pretty. If the number on the clock is 10:52 or 09:48 it doesn’t ‘stick’ as much and therefore goes completely unnoticed, like nearly every other set of numbers on a digital clock that denote the time. ((Unless of course the numbers 1052 or 948 have particular meanings for you, in which case, you might remember them.)) People like George are completely unable to see that this process is totally normal. It’s as if their world filters are somehow broken and they are obliged to find meaning in the vast drifts of meaningless trivia that the rest of us are able to tune out.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty making fun of people like George. It is quite probable that he has come to completely and profoundly believe his fantasy about Midwayers and meaningful communications via clocks. How is he different, for instance, from the millions upon millions who believe they have meaningful dialogue with a discarnate entity called ‘God’ who lives in a place called ‘Heaven’ and has an adversary called ‘Satan’? How is George’s communication with his Midwayers any different from praying to God, or taking Communion or giving Confession?

Yes, sometimes I feel a little guilty, but then I glance at my digital clock and see it flip over to 4:44. And then I realise that it’s the Midwayers telling me to make fun of him. And everything is alright again.

Some entertaining links from the 1111 Guardians Site:

•A conversation between George Barnard and what appears to be a veritable cavalcade of Midwayers, in which we find out that parrots like to chat with the spirits.

•A conversation with a Midwayer named Sharmon in which we see biblical links with this mythology (the Christian links are profuse throughout Mr Barnards’ channelling).

•A conversation with a Midwayer named Mathew that sounds rather a lot like stuff I’ve read from the Unarius Society.

•Some Midwayer humour (oh, my belly still aches from the laughing!)

Acowlyte Ed points me to this late breaking news from India which I just know you all need to know.

It appears that traffic police in Nagpur have decided that the best way to deal with road accident black spots is to install 30 centimeter tall pyramids by the roadside in order to disperse ‘negative energies’. Cos’ everyone knows that’s what causes car accidents right? Bad vibes. ((It could have NOTHING to do with the huge number of untrained Indian drivers, the atrocious roads or the lax law enforcement – factors that contribute to the deaths of more than 114,000 people in India every year…))

The brains behind this scheme is one Sushil Fatehpuria, an ‘expert’ in Vastu, a kind of Indian feng shui. “I will energise the pyramids,” he says,“I will transfer my positive thoughts into the pyramids.” Mr Fatehpuria has (quite surprisingly, considering) offered his services free of charge.

I can see the reasoning behind Mr Fatehpuria’s idea – how many car accidents did the Ancient Egyptians have? Yeah – find fault with that logic if you can!

Personally, though, I think that Mr Fatehpuria is not really making a big enough commitment. Why not campaign for the the introduction of pyramid-shaped cars such as the one above featured on Geekologie? ((You should go visit Geekologie – they are cool dudes.)) Surely these cars would be completely accident proof!!!! And why stop at piddly little 30cm pyramids? What about putting in some really big motherfuckers – that’s unquestionably going to have a much greater effect! I’m sure there are some statistics to show the dramatic reduction in car accidents in Cairo and Las Vegas!

Of course it is conceivable that pyramid power works on some kind of homeopathic principle, meaning that the smaller the pyramid is the more effective its powers. In which case, Mr Fatehpuria is wasting his money with those whopping huge 30cm behemoths.

Damn. This new-fangled science is SO confusing!

(Quite coincidentally, while I was writing this, a documentary came on the History channel about pyramids. The basic gist of it was that the Ancient Egyptians couldn’t possibly have built the pyramids with the technology they had to hand, and the purpose of these huge stone monoliths was to generate microwave power via hydrogen ((I didn’t quite follow that bit…)) to communicate with aliens. I have three observations to make:

1. This is not HISTORY.

2. I’m scared that because it’s on the HISTORY channel, some people think it is.

3. There is a lot of stuff on the HISTORY channel that is like this…)

Cowpokes! The End is Nigh! Run for the hills! What with the threats of terrorism, biological warfare, solar flares, tsunamis, the flipping of the magnetic poles, an atheist woman as head of the Australian government and a black man as the head of the US government, it will be a MIRACLE if we last even another week! But, dear feiends, have no fear! Should one (or more!) of the aforementioned catastrophes overtake us, the folks over at Vivos have anticipated every eventuality for the approaching apocalypse and are offering the ultimate ‘life assurance’ and ‘the greatest chance of future restoration of the world as we know it, regardless of the catastrophe’.

Here – let them tell you about it in their own words:

Millions of people believe that we are living in the “end times”. Many are looking for a viable solution to survive potential future Earth devastating events. Eventually, our planet will realize another devastating catastrophe, whether manmade, or a cyclical force of nature. Disasters are rare and unexpected, but on any sort of long timeline, they’re inevitable. It’s time to prepare!

Vivos is a privately funded venture, with no religious affiliations, building a global network of underground shelters, to accommodate thousands of people. Vivos will provide a life assurance solution for those that wish to be prepared to survive these potential events, whether they occur now, in 2012, or in decades to come

Yes, by purchasing a share in a Vivos community bunker, or getting them to build your own bespoke shelter, you can survive the End Times and walk out refreshed into a world full of bracing post-catastrophe horror! To see what you’ll get for your money, you can take a tour around a typical Vivos facility, furnished with all the comforts of home, including attractive paintings of idyllic landscapes that you’ll never see again:

Geez guys, could you have found a more gloomy and depressing piece of music for that? Are you selling a shelter or a tomb here?

Seriously, no matter how hard I try, I can’t think of any calamity listed on the Vivos site that seems worse than ending up in some underground IKEA nightmare with a bunch of people who are inclined to believe that the world is going to end in 2012 ‘because the Mayan calendar says so’. ((You can watch a video on the Vivos site about how the ‘incredibly precise’ Mayan calendar (‘… a calendar more accurate even than our own’) predicts the world will end in 2012.)) Let me see: Electromagnetic Pulse? Nope. Killer comet? Nope. Planet X? Nope. Super volcano? Nope. ((I’m a little surprised to see that Zombie Attack and Alien Invasion aren’t featured, to be honest. If nothing else, they’d make for some really cool additional icons.)) I’d rather take my chances with any of those.

What are these people thinking? Have they never seen a post-apocalyptic movie? Have they never played Fallout? Do they really want to climb out of their bunkers after a year of mind-numbing boredom to find themselves wandering around a planet full of shotgun-wielding mutant vigilantes with no morals and bad personal hygiene? Or worse, Fundamental Islamic militia?

There are so many things wrong with this unhinged doom-laden vision that it’s hard to know where to start. From the hysterical countdown to annihilation (905 days, 06 hours, 31 minutes, 24 seconds remaining) to the hyper-paranoid ‘scenarios’ videos (Nuclear Terrorism! Surviving Anarchy! Secret Government Shelters!) the website plays out like some bad Hollywood projection of the Apocalypse. It takes mere seconds to find places where this plan will start splitting at the seams.

Take a quick tour around the Vivos Knowledge Base and see how many opportunities for failure you can find. The spectacular promises (hydroponic gardens to support 200 people for more than a year, 24 hour power generation with supplemental wind and solar, hotel-style amenities, impregnable defences to resist volcanic eruption, seismic disturbance and biological contamination) fairly reek of hyperbole. ((For a start – where are they getting their air from? Filtered air from outside will be useless in a case of chemical attack, and it’s not like they can stockpile a year’s worth of oxygen for 200 people…)) Half these things are all but impossible to achieve. And if Vivos doesn’t deliver, what are you going to do when the anarchist Muslim terrorist bio-freaks come pouring through your Vivos shelter airlock? Ask for your money back?

Tetherd Cow Advice: If you’re worried about the Apocalypse arriving in 2012, ((You can bet your Nigerian fortune that I’ll be revisiting all these predictions in 2013!)) stock up on single malt whisky and plan to be somewhere with a good view. In the meantime, send me your bank account details. After all, you can’t take it with you.

___________________________________________________________________________

Big thanks to Atlas for bringing Vivos to my attention.

A recent Cow commenter, Nancy, from Sweden, tells us that ShooTag is now on sale in her country. ((And TCA saved her some money! Like any good sensible person she did some research before she forked out.)) A quick lookup verifies that yes, the ShooTaggers are making inroads into Europe with the same unfounded claims of efficacy for their product as they’ve used elsewhere. Clearly, the critical faculties of the world are in dire trouble. I even turned up this link (page has been redacted by ShooTag revisionists) which trumpets that the Finnish Olympic Team ‘is now using shoo!TAG products for protection against mosquitos !!!’ I fervently hope that this is an idle boast from the sales agent and that the Finnish Olympic Team is not so stupid as to endorse this silly item.

My friends over at the JREF have pointed out, though, that Europe might not be the virgin territory that the ShooTaggers perhaps expect. Yes folks, Europe has their own flavour of pet wootag and it’s called The Anibio Tic-Clip®.

Anibio appears to be a German company but handily, they do have a link to a pdf in English on their site which ‘explains’ how Tic-Clip works:

Ready-to-use tic-clip tags are carrying a specially charged layer of highly radiating, bioenergetic with a very high storage capacity. (Bioenergetic = dextropolarised electromagnetic energy). This creates a special oscillation-field around the tag and thus around the animal. Tics and fleas will not react to the animal anymore.

Whoa! Dextropolarised! Now there’s a word you don’t hear every day. You can look it up if you want – I did – but really, it’s one more instance of a new contextually-meaningless woo buzz word like ‘quantum’ or ‘magnetic’ and I won’t labour the point here. You can already tell that this ‘scientific’ explanation is just another load of baloney in the same vein as the ShooTag nonsense. And this one works without a clumsy magnetic strip! ShooTag! Your technology is so-o-o-o yesterday!

The pdf also urges the visitor to read this important information: ((We assume it’s important because the exhortation has lots of exclamation marks.))

This product was developed after many years of research together with the Germany based company Hess & Volk GmbH and has archived spectacular success in tic and flea prevention all over Europe. Many successful breeders are using it. Similar to holistic approaches you are unable to see or feel ((…or, in fact, determine any effect of…)) the Bioernergetic potential, but the positive results over the last couple of years are proving the strength of this toxin-free solution.

If you thought that the highlighted and underlined areas might prove to be a link to Messrs Hess & Volk’s ‘archive of spectacular success in tick and flea prevention’, I fear you will be bitterly disappointed. That would be altogether far too convenient. In fact, searching on Hess & Volk turns up lots of links pointing back to Anibio, but not much else. Now where oh where might we have seen that kind of behaviour before?

Elsewhere, an American distributor of Tic-Clip has some more enlightenment for us:

The mechanism of the Tic-Clip’s action is a bit abstract when compared with the traditional insect repellents, but this product is the result of many years of research and delivers results that dispel skepticism. Holistic products that work similarly with bioenergetic fields, like flower essences and homeopathic remedies, still lie outside the mainstream, but devoted users will tell you that the results can be truly amazing, even without their really understanding exactly how they work.

Hahahaha! The mechanism is a bit ‘abstract’? Judging by the rest of the paragraph, I think the phrase they’re looking for might be ‘The mechanism is a big steaming heap of claptrap’.

Still, maybe something’s being lost in interpretation here? Let’s go to the original German Anibio site with our friend the Babelfish and get it straight from the mund des pferdes.

Oooh. There’s a graph. That’s scientific. It’s supposed to be showing us how the Tic-Clip’s effectiveness works over time. With an efficacy of 2 years at a price of €24.90 (US$36.39) it’s MUCH better value than ShooTag’s measly 4 months for US$39.95! What does Babelfish tell us that the manufacturer is offering for that money:

Ready for use TIC tie-clip supporter contains an bioenergetic load, a special layer with high radiation potential and has a high storage capacity. In the surrounding field of the supporter, and thus in the environment of the animal (independent of its size and kind of skin), develops then a special oscillation field, which protects now dogs and cats against Zecken and fleas. The TIC tie-clip supporter is fastened with the attached rings to collar or table-ware (material plays thereby no role). On the time, on which a ring is drawn by the supporter, the TIC tie-clip up to 2 works years

OK… that’s making about as much sense as anything else we’ve read I guess. Once the Tic-Clip is properly fastened to the table-ware, it does seem to offer everything that ShooTag does at least. The Tic-Clip appears to be more robust too: the site has some caveats on effectiveness, but they don’t include the lengthy excuses that ShooTag provides for conditions under which their product might not work.

So the Tetherd Cow Ahead shoppers’ advice is: If you’re on the lookout for a completely useless product that does absolutely nothing in the way of keeping insect pests off your pets, there’s no contest – you get hugely better value for money by wasting your cash on Anibio Tic-Clip® than you do on Energetic Solutions Shoo!TAG™ ((I really wonder what the ShooTag people make of something like this. Do they scoff at the opposition: ‘That’s SO far-fetched! Look at the dumb claims they’re making! That will never work!’, or do they gaze on in envy: ‘How are they doing this without a magnetic stripe? How the hell are they achieving a 2 year efficacy? Can we steal their technology?’. My brain does little flip-flops when I try to imagine how these people think.))

Good morning Faithful Acowlytes! I hope you got plenty of restful sleep last night because today you’ll need to have your wits about you as we start off with a quiz. This is the kind of quiz where I show you two images and you have to spot the differences between them. I’m sure you’ve done one of those before. OK, are you ready? Here we go then:

No? Look very very carefully. Still nothing? Hahaha! I apologize dear friends – I’ve tricked you with this one because image #1 is a teapot and image #2 is ALSO a teapot! In fact the only tiny difference between them is that the first one is a Royal Doulton, and the second one is a royal dolt.

Generally I try to refrain from picking on Royalty ((Well, except for King Willy of course – but he’s such good sport.)) here on The Cow because, well, it’s a bit too much like shooting fish in a barrel. I mean, it’s not their fault, really, is it? All those centuries of inbreeding does tend to take its toll. Luckily, most Royals are safely out of harm’s way for the most part, but sadly it doesn’t stop them from opening their mouths and gabbing when they have an audience.

If you know anything about the Prince of Wales you will be aware that he’s not a stranger to elliptical thinking. He has campaigned on behalf of homeopathy, freaked out about GM technology and now, in his latest escapade, blamed Galileo and science for the ills of the modern world.

In a presentation last week to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Prince Charles places culpability for all our climate problems on ‘mechanistic thinking’ which ‘goes back at least to Galileo’s assertion that there is nothing in nature but quantity and motion’. The prince thinks that the reason for our current environmental difficulties is because the Western world is having a ‘deep, inner crisis of the soul’.

This is a banal piece of reasoning that is as antiquated as the concept of the Royal Family itself. The Prince of Wales pulls one of the classic tricks of the religiously-inclined of equating a quest for knowledge with an abrogation of moral responsibility. In other words, science equals heartless amoral exploitation; religion ((The Prince doesn’t specifically campaign for religion as such, but it’s the same kind of thinking – the mention of ‘souls’ and the faux surprise when he says that he finds it ‘baffling that so many scientists profess a faith in God yet this has little bearing on the ‘damaging’ way science is used to exploit the natural world’ all mixes in to his diffuse religious view of how things work.)) equals warm and fuzzy caring and sharing. Even a schoolkid can see the stupidity inherent in this simplistic notion.

Prince Charles’ view of science as ‘cold and mechanistic’ is one that is beloved of science detractors and shows no understanding at all of scientists or scientific pursuit. Additionally, the Prince is either willful or stupid by ignoring (in favour of its perceived ills) the extraordinary benefits so obviously brought to us by science. How about the science that gave us the cure for smallpox, Your Highness? Or the science that has allowed millions of people access to clean water and nutritious food? How about the good deeds of the scientists who figured out how to clone insulin so that diabetics can have affordable treatment? How about the wonderful achievements of science that let us talk to our friends and family wherever they may be on the planet, at any time of the day or night? Or the science that allows us to make great adventures inwards to our consciousness and outward to the cosmos?

Like many of the purveyors of woo, the Prince of Wales wants it both ways; he eschews science because it is ‘evil’, but is quite happy to enjoy the countless improvements it brings to our lives. He blames science for our creating our ‘materialistic culture’ and for the ‘damaging way it is used to exploit the world’, yet offers no practical alternatives – just notions of vague, superficial, wistful magical thinking.

He advocates a world without science and without individual material aspirations. ((For the peasants, at any rate.))He pines for a world with a folky agrarian culture where superstitious thinking rules.

It’s not surprising in the end. Royalty has always done very well in such climates.