Gott mit uns. Posted by Pointman on February 6, 2014 · 12 Comments

Literally, it means “God with us” or more colloquially, God’s on our side. It originated as a battle cry of the legions towards the end of the Roman empire, when it had become fully Christianised and the words have rippled down the centuries into various cultures, with the German version more recently appearing on the belt buckle of ordinary soldiers fighting for their Fatherland in WWI.

Of course, the idea it encapsulates is as old as religion itself – whichever side you’re on in any war, there’ll always be some religious leader to assure you that God’s actually on your side, not the enemy’s. A more prosaic interpretation of its meaning, and the one undoubtedly taken up by all soldiers, is that when a number of things appear to be breaking in your favour, then someone up there seems to like you.

While people who go into harm’s way may occasionally become religious rather than the more usual reverse, they can always be guaranteed to become chronically superstitious, interpreting anything or everything as either a good sign or a bad sign. Ending up among the living or dead seems to be a horribly random business, which is to say, a matter of pure luck, so you look for primitive and mad things like good portents. It’s our compulsive nature to match cause to effect, and where there’s no discernible causality, we’ll go with illogical every time. Pass me my lucky pen.

There were certain things favourable to us which I knew would inevitably happen, the major one being a recession to finish off an extraordinarily long economic boom, but exactly when that would occur was an imponderable. It did happen in the end because it had to, but there’s been a shed load of other stuff in recent years which really balanced out the good Karma run they’d enjoyed before that.

It may not be God, or at least God as we know him, but it’s definitely their God Gaia, or Mother Nature as we might call it, which is putting the boot into any idea of global warming. Uneasy as I am with the idea, I have the sneaking feeling that God is with us, if only because of a curiously long sequence of events.

The first one was the Copenhagen climate fiasco of 2009, where 30,000 of the enthusiasts swarmed the city to agree the reshaping of the global economy along crypto-socialist lines. It was of course always doomed to failure but what slipped by almost unnoticed was the unseasonably cold snap, even for Denmark.

An extreme cold or unusually chilly event seems to have plagued every climate conference since then, to the point where it’s been nicknamed the Gore effect – anywhere Al appears warning of the dangers of global warming, everyone gets their butt frozen off. Incidentally, never oblige them by talking about climate change, always keep sticking it to them by talking about global warming. Let them move the goal posts wherever they want, I’ll keep booting the ball between the global warming posts.

Every winter seems to get worse, and by God, this one is breaking records left, right and centre. It’s so bad, the alarmists are seriously saying that it’s all caused by global warming and anyway, it’s only certain areas of the world which are cold, the rest are having unseasonably mild winters! Well, fuck me sideways, as an old girlfriend of mine used to say. She had a certain earthy but direct way of expressing herself and my Momma really didn’t approve of her, but anyway I digress.

I’m sure there’s a God’s little green acre somewhere that’s having a balmy winter but looking around the world, everyone else is having the sort of bracing winter that can only be most charitably described as character building.

A quick whizz around the globe looking at weather reports comes up with some extraordinary events. Snow-like material in Jerusalem, Cairo getting dusted with strange white stuff dropping out of the sky? Iran subsumed under seven feet of the mysterious white stuff in its northern provinces?

Surely it can’t be the snow which that climate genius David Viner warned us would disappear for good in a few years, that children wouldn’t recognise? I know we’re about fourteen years down the line from that scientific prediction Dave, but I think there are a few individuals around the world outside the uncommonly hot winter zones who might mistake that white stuff for snow.

Even allowing for the usual jiggery pokery with temperatures, it was reported that forty-eight out of fifty states in the Union had temperatures below zero and some of them even had quite generous amounts of that mysterious white stuff, and I’m not talking about the gear you snort through a rolled up dollar bill either.

Apparently, over 4,400 areas also had low temperatures which set new records. Nearly everywhere you look, that white stuff keeps piling up; Maine, Nebraska, Ohio, Texas, Chicago (ungrateful recipient of 33.7 inches of white stuff), Kansas City, Indianapolis and New York City. Central Park is under eight inches of the stuff with another nine expected. New Jersey is even declaring a white stuff state of emergency.

Other countries seem to be having white stuff emergencies too. Europe appears to be getting more than its fair splash of the white stuff brush, with not even the little countries being spared. Somewhere under a persistent blizzard of white stuff is Poland. Nobody’s quite sure where the Baltic states end and the Arctic sea begins. A rescue expedition mounted from Austria got buried under a metre of white stuff in two days, and the backup from Romania ran foul of their own two metres of the stuff.

Even the tiddlers like Croatia, Serbia and Slovenia are having white stuff emergencies caused by three solid days of blizzards. It’s even solidified into a hard glass-like material six inches thick, necessitating people wielding axes to free their cars. Apparently global warming is sending even more blizzards according to their environmental agencies but what’s really concerning is that if this white stuff does actually turn out to be snow, as some cynical individuals have begun to suspect, what’ll happen when it all melts?

I suppose at that point, global warming will cause massive flooding. On the other hand, what with all the global warming, the white stuff could instantaneously turn into a white misty gas reminiscent of steam. Then again, the steam-like material might rise, cool, condense, turn into heavy rain and we’ll get floods anyway. Or even more white stuff. What do you think, Dave?

They’ve got all the bases covered. There’s really no winning against this global warming guff.

©Pointman

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