Religious expression in science class

Did you hear about Ohio House Bill 164?

It's been called the "Student Religious Liberties Act."  It contains four provisions:

• It requires public schools to give students the same access to facilities if they want to meet for religious expression as they’d give secular groups.
• It removes a provision that allows school districts to limit religious expression to lunch periods or other non-instructional times.
• It allows students to engage in religious expression before, during and after school hours to the same extent as a student in secular activities or expression.
• It prohibits schools from restricting a student from engaging in religious expression in completion of homework, artwork and other assignments.

It's the last one that made me sit up and take notice.

Despite being an atheist, I have no problem with public schools allowing religious groups to meet on their property, as long as there's no statement (overt or implied) that students are required be there.  I don't really have a problem with provision #2 except that it's ambiguous -- who is leading the religious expression?  If students want to say a prayer before an exam, no big deal.

If the teacher leads the class in a prayer before an exam, big deal.

Eastman Johnson, A Child at Prayer (1873) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Likewise, #3 is no real issue as long as there's no coercion.  But #4?

Just hang on a moment.

So what you're telling me is that my biology students could "engage in religious expression" in their homework, to the extent of saying the Earth is 6,000 years old and life was whooshed into existence by a Big Dude in the Sky?  That they could claim radioisotope dating doesn't work?  That they could state that the Grand Canyon was formed in a big, worldwide flood, and the only survivors were a 700-year-old man and his family who rescued two of each of the nine-million-odd species on Earth, conveniently dropping them off in their ancestral homelands afterward?  And all the water just sort of "went away?"

If an administrator told me I had to do that, my response would include the word "No," but the rest of it would be barely printable without a "strong language" warning.

Teachers are under no obligation to coddle students' erroneous beliefs, whether or not they come under the heading of "religion."  If a kid comes in and tries to convince me homeopathy works or that vaccines cause autism or that there's a secret code in our DNA implanted there by Ancient Aliens, I am abrogating my duty as a science teacher if I don't (gently and kindly) show them why they're wrong.  That's what science is about -- using the tools of inference, logic, and evidence to figure out how things work.

If your wild imaginings, fears, or wishful thinking lead you to an answer that is demonstrably wrong, I'm sorry, but I'm not going to pretend you're right just out of some misguided sympathy.   And I don't care particularly where the aforementioned wrong stuff came from.  It could come from Monster Quest or from Chariots of the Gods... or the Bible.  The source is completely irrelevant.

What matters is that science is about figuring out the truth, not about making us comfortable.

There are folks who might think my fury about this is an overreaction, that provision #4 just guarantees that students can put religious imagery or references into art, personal essays, and so on.  This is nonsense; students have always been able to do that.  (There was a claim zooming around the internet a while back about a kid who had turned in a paper saying her biggest inspiration was Jesus, but the Evil Secular Teacher wrote in red ink "Remove Jesus Please!" and gave her an F.  The illustration was obviously photoshopped, and the whole story made up, but that didn't stop a lot of extremely religious people from posting indignant screeds about how the United States was going to hell.)

No, provision #4 is yet another attack on science teachers, an attempt to shoehorn Genesis and the Great Flood into the classroom.  It's a sneaky way to protect kids who claim there's doubt about evolution (there isn't), that there's no evidence of the Big Bang (there is, plenty of it), and that plate tectonics is false (it's not), allowing them to write down blatant falsehoods in a discipline that is supposed to value the truth, and still not be penalized for it.

It is, simply put, another attempt to destroy the separation of church and state.

Oh, and I didn't tell you the worst news: Ohio House Bill 164 passed.

By a margin of 61 to 3.

I can only hope that the fight's not over, that this legislation will generate lawsuits about constitutionality, but it does demonstrate the fact that the people who would love to see the United States become a fundamentalist theocracy aren't giving up.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for people who have found themselves befuddled by such bizarre stuff as Schrödinger's Cat and the Pigeonhole Paradox and the Uncertainty Principle -- which, truthfully speaking, is probably the vast majority of us.

In Six Impossible Things: The Mystery of the Quantum World, acclaimed science writer John Gribbin looks at six possible interpretations of the odd results from quantum theory.  Gribbin himself declares himself a "quantum agnostic," that he is not espousing any one of them in particular.  "They all on some level sound crazy," Gribbin says.  "But in quantum theory, 'crazy' doesn't necessarily mean 'wrong.'"

His writing is clear, lucid, and compelling, and will give you an idea what the cutting edge of modern physics is coming up with.  It'll also blow your mind -- but isn't good science always supposed to do that?

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The wind beneath my wings

We're at a dire crossroads, here in the United States, with a president under investigation, foreign and domestic policy decisions being driven by far right political commentators, political appointees making statements implying they can curtail constitutionally-protected rights.  Looking at the news has become a daily exercise in fighting back a sense of horror.

So today, I'm going to consider: a rash of recent pterodactyl sightings.

I learned about this phenomenon over at Cryptozoology News, where aficionados of creatures that don't technically exist can go for updates.  It turns out that we've had a sudden spike in reports of giant winged creatures, inevitably described as "bat-like" although many times larger than the biggest bats.

And since such explanations as "the eyewitness was drunk, confused, or just making shit up" clearly aren't applicable here, we are forced to the conclusion that pterodactyloids didn't become extinct 66 million years ago, they stuck around and are now appearing in places such as Wisconsin.

In fact, the Wisconsin sighting is only one of many in the last few months.  This particular report tells of an anonymous (of course) eyewitness who last August was driving home one afternoon and saw "a weird thing flying in the sky."  The creature was estimated at being two meters in length, and had "skin on its wings instead of feathers."

"Like a bat," he said.  "It looked like a pterodactyl or some kind of angel."

For reference, let's consider each of these:

Fig. 1: A bat  [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Barracuda1983, Pipistrellus flight2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

Fig. 2: A pterodactyloid [Image is in the Public Domain]

Fig. 3: An angel [Image is in the Public Domain]

So I think we can all agree that it'd be easy to confuse the three.

But our gentleman in Wisconsin isn't the only one to see a strange flying creature recently.  In November, a woman in Chester County, Pennsylvania saw a huge thing with wings while she was zooming down the interstate.  "I realized just how big it actually was," she said.  "The wingspan was twice the width of the car, as it flew over it and headed straight toward my car.  The feathers were black, or very dark brown.  As it flew over my car, I ducked a bit, to look up at it, through the windshield.  It was amazing to see such a beautiful sight. If I hadn’t been driving so fast – the speed limit is 70 mph – I could have attempted to take a photo."

An even bigger one was spotted only a few days later in Ohio.  A woman was driving with her fiance in Ravenna, Ohio, and stopped at a stoplight, only to see something enormous gliding overhead.  "It was two or three times larger than our SUV," she said.  "It had elbow-like wings.  It was darker than the sky.  The thing was huge."

The most recent sighting was just last week, once again in Pennsylvania, which seems to have more than its fair share of pterodactyls.  This time, a 47-year-old construction worker said he was out cutting firewood when the thing flew over.

"A large shadow appeared above me," he said.  "I ran inside to grab my phone, but by the time I came outside the bird was gone.  I’ve been terrified to go outside since that event."

He described it as a "green bird with a twenty-foot wingspan, covered in scales, [with] a spike on the end of its tail and razor-sharp talons."  He added, "It looked like a lizard."

Once again, for reference:

Fig. 4: A lizard.  [Image is licensed under the Creative Commons SajjadF, Lizard - e, CC BY 3.0]

So apparently, what we have here is a prehistoric-looking lizard angel bat-bird.  At least all the eyewitnesses agree on the fact that they're huge.

For my loyal readers in Wisconsin, Ohio, and (especially) Pennsylvania, keep your eyes on the skies, and let me know if any enormous winged creatures soar over.  Feel free to report your sightings here.  I realize seeing something like this could be scary, but the upside of it is that it'll take your mind off Mitch McConnell and Donald Trump, so as far as I'm concerned, bring on the pterodactyls.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a little on the dark side.

The Radium Girls, by Kate Moore, tells the story of how the element radium -- discovered in 1898 by Pierre and Marie Curie -- went from being the early 20th century's miracle cure, put in everything from jockstraps to toothpaste, to being recognized as a deadly poison and carcinogen.  At first, it was innocent enough, if scarily unscientific.  The stuff gives off a beautiful greenish glow in the dark; how could that be dangerous?  But then the girls who worked in the factories of Radium Luminous Materials Corporation, which processed most of the radium-laced paints and dyes that were used not only in the crazy commodities I mentioned but in glow-in-the-dark clock and watch dials, started falling ill.  Their hair fell out, their bones ached... and they died.

But capitalism being what it is, the owners of the company couldn't, or wouldn't, consider the possibility that their precious element was what was causing the problem.  It didn't help that the girls themselves were mostly poor, not to mention the fact that back then, women's voices were routinely ignored in just about every realm.  Eventually it was stopped, and radium only processed by people using significant protective equipment,  but only after the deaths of hundreds of young women.

The story is fascinating and horrifying.  Moore's prose is captivating -- and if you don't feel enraged while you're reading it, you have a heart of stone.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

A win for the scientists

Some days, we all need some good news, and I got mine when I heard over on Patheos that the CEO of a public school district has ordered their science faculty to stop using creationist materials for teaching biology and geology.

Of course, the fact that they were doing this in the first place is kind of appalling.  According to Zack Kopplin, who has been crusading since he was a teenager for teaching actual science in science classes:

A curriculum map… recommends teachers in this public school district show a creationist video, Cambrian Fossils and the Creation of Species, as part of 10th-grade science education.  The video claims that the Cambrian Explosion “totally invalidates the theory of evolution.”  The Cambrian Explosion was a time period, nearly 550 million years ago, where, over the next tens of millions of years, the number of species on Earth experienced a (relatively) rapid expansion by evolutionary standards.  Christian creationists regularly point to this explosion of life as evidence for creation by God and against evolution.

Which is using one of the strongest pieces of evidence from the fossil record for evolution as evidence against evolution.  It's as if you used the fact that there are different constellations in the Southern Hemisphere than in the Northern Hemisphere as evidence that the Earth was flat.

Oh, wait, there are people who do that.  Never mind.

Anyhow, Krish Mohip, the new CEO of Youngstown (Ohio) City Schools, has put a stop to this nonsense.  He has mandated that Youngstown, just like every other public school district in Ohio, has to use curricula consistent with the Ohio State Science Standards, which mention the words "evolution" and "evolutionary" almost fifty times, and (surprise!) never mention "creation," "creationism," or "intelligent design" at all.  Mohip doesn't pull any punches.  In his memo, he says that "beginning this 2016-2017 school year any reference to intelligent design, creationism, or any like concepts are eliminated from the science curriculum."

Which is exactly as it should be.  Materials from the Discovery Institute, such as the video Darwin's Dilemma, have no place in the public school.  They are religious indoctrination, pure and simple, claiming that there is a controversy where no controversy -- among the scientists, at least -- exists.

However, I'm sure that this will just open up more fun lawsuits from aggrieved hyper-Christians who think that the bible needs to be the basis of science classes throughout the nation.  They're not nearly defeated yet, considering the borderline white supremacist history texts being adopted statewide in Texas, which make it look like the Founding Fathers copied the Constitution straight from the bible, and the Native Americans and African slaves were just thrilled to pieces to be taught about the American Way by the white settlers.

So it's not that I think the war is over, but at least this particular battle is won, thanks to a forward-thinking CEO who actually cares whether the students in his district come away understanding how science works.  And at the moment, I'll take all the good news I can get.

Close encounter of the weird kind

If there's one thing I've said over and over about this presidential election, it's, "This really can't get any weirder, can it?"  (Of course, I've also said "What the fuck?" more than once, but I suspect I'm not alone in that.)  Yesterday was the first day of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Democratic National Convention is next week in Philadelphia.  I'm fully expecting to use both of those phrases several times over the next couple of weeks

Starting with the fact that Karl Rove was stopped while trying to board his plane to the RNC by none other than Alex Jones.  Jones is well known to those of us who like to keep our pulse on the lunatic fringe.  He runs the "news" outlet InfoWars, which mostly seems devoted to proving that President Obama is an America-hating Muslim, when it's not claiming that every damn thing that happens in the world is a "false flag."  ("False flags," you probably know, are government-staged riots and so on designed to distract us from the real news.  Given the recent spate of terrorist attacks and police shootings, we're distracted enough, okay?  You can lay the hell off.)

Rove, on the other hand, was one of President George W. Bush's chief strategists, and distinguished himself mostly on the basis of (1) looking like a huge mutant baby with an enormous forehead, and (2) somehow, inexplicably, meriting the nickname of "Turd Blossom" from the Commander in Chief himself.  Other than that, he mostly involved himself with smearing politicians he didn't like (such as his trash-talking the military service record of Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who is a triple amputee due to injuries in the line of duty).

So any meeting between these two would have to be epic.  Jones launched into some hard questions right away, such as asking if Rove was going to support Trump or if he was "siphoning money off of him to make sure Hillary wins."  Rove declined to answer, only saying that as he was now working for Fox News, he was not interested in appearing on the Alex Jones Show.

Need I mention that the whole time, one of Jones's operatives was filming the encounter?

So Rove started to get pissed off, with Jones crowing that this just proves his point.  Whatever "his point," actually was, something I've had a hard time identifying myself whenever my blood pressure is too low and I listen to his latest rant on InfoWars.  By this time Rove realized that arguing with Alex Jones is about as fruitful an occupation as discussing philosophy with a chicken, so he tried to get away to safety.  Jones, unsurprisingly, followed him, considering any kind of retreat a victory for his side.

Until, that is, it became apparent that Rove wasn't just trying to flee, he was going to a Customer Service desk to ask them to summon security.  Jones at that point decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and did what the Knights of the Round Table did when confronted with the Killer Rabbit of Caer Bannog.

I strongly encourage you to watch the entire thing, because it's hilarious in a scary sort of way.  You can watch the whole encounter on the link I posted above.

Anyhow, the next couple of weeks should be pretty interesting, if this incident is any indication.  Myself, I'm content to watch from a distance, and if I lived in Cleveland, I'd probably do whatever I could to make sure I was gone for the next week.  (Considering it's Cleveland, I'd probably do whatever I could to make sure I was gone permanently, but that's beside the point.)

So keep your eye on the news, especially given that at the RNC large numbers of the attendees are expected to be armed.  Because there's no way that that could end badly, right?

Of course right.

Fracking our way to disaster

Yesterday there was yet another article about an accident at a hydrofracking site.  In this one, an Ohio fracking well sprung a leak, causing a methane cloud that forced 25 families out of their homes for days.  The crew was "unable to stop" the leak, sources with the natural gas company said, followed with the cheery message, "the well is not on fire, but the gas could be explosive."

Merry Christmas, y'all.  I hope you remembered to bring your presents with you before you fled from your houses, so you can celebrate Christmas in whatever shelter you end up in.

[image courtesy of photographer Joshua Doubek and the Wikimedia Commons]

Of course, this isn't an isolated incident.  It's been a bad year for Ohio, in fact.  In May, a fracking well leak spilled 1,600 of oil drilling lubricant into a river.  The following month, a second explosion and spill leaked a stew of toxic chemicals into yet another river, killing an estimated 70,000 fish -- and the company that owned the well refused to release information on which chemicals were involved, calling it a "trade secret."  Then in October, a methane leak drove 400 people from their homes.

It's not limited to Ohio, of course.  Earlier this year, a blowout at a fracking site in North Dakota caused a gusher spraying over ten thousand gallons a day of a mixed slurry of oil and chemical-laced wastewater.  It took almost a week to stop the leak.  In 2013 an accident at a well in Colorado leaked benzene, a known carcinogen, into a stream in Colorado.  More "trade secret" chemicals were dumped into a popular trout-fishing stream when thousands of gallons of highly saline fracking fluid erupted during a well explosion in Pennsylvania in 2011.

Add to that the fact that fracking is a huge draw on water resources, and you have to wonder how it can still be legal in drought-stricken states like Texas and California.  At least here in my home state of New York, Governor Andrew Cuomo sided with the good guys and announced a statewide ban on fracking yesterday, citing health effects as his reason.

Health, and the environment, and, you know, clean drinking water for human consumption and agricultural use.  It's a mystery to me how anyone can still support this crazy idea, given its track record.

But they do.  Fracking still has its champions.  Karen Moreau, executive director of the New York State Petroleum Council, was irate over Governor Cuomo's decision.  "Our citizens in the Southern Tier have had to watch their neighbors and friends across the border in Pennsylvania thriving economically," she said. "It’s like they were a kid in a candy store window, looking through the window, and not able to touch that opportunity."

Not exactly an accurate analogy, Ms. Moreau.  Given that there have been twenty major fracking accidents in Pennsylvania alone, it's more like people looking through a window at a neighbor's house burning down, and weeping because they can't do anything to stop it -- while simultaneously being thankful that their own house isn't on fire.

Some of our legislators are siding with Ms. Moreau and the gas companies, however.  Representative Tom Reed, who represents my local district, said of Cuomo's decision:

I am extremely disappointed in today’s announcement from Governor Cuomo which bans hydraulic fracturing.  This move effectively blocks the development of natural gas and oil resources in New York State.  This is devastating news for the Southern Tier economy and its residents who are struggling every day.  This decision makes it even more difficult to replace the good jobs that have already left due to New York’s unfriendly business climate.  Once again Albany shows that it wants to enact an extreme liberal agenda rather than care about individual property rights and job opportunities.  I care about Southern Tier residents and will fight for them every day.  Simply put this extreme liberal agenda is not right and not fair for our future.

Because, you know, only extreme liberals like to be able to turn on their faucets without risking an explosion.  (Reed's comment caused one of my friends to respond, "Suck it, corporate puppet," which I quote here mainly because I wish I'd thought of it first.)

The fight isn't over in New York State, of course.  Just around the corner from my village we're still struggling to stop the Crestwood Expansion, a plan to double storage of natural gas and LPG (liquefied petroleum gas) in salt caverns underneath Seneca Lake, which supplies drinking and agricultural water to tens of thousands of people.  You'd think there'd be enough evidence already that this is a horrible idea, wouldn't you?  To wit:

• A methane seep from a gas storage salt cavern in Hutchinson, Kansas that caused explosions and "geysers of salt water" seven miles away.
• A collapse of a gas-filled salt cavern in Livingston County, New York in 1994 that cased methane to leak into basements and permanently fouled a drinking water aquifer.
• A 400,000 ton roof collapse that occurred in an empty salt cavern, which coincidentally is one of the ones underneath Seneca Lake that Crestwood wants to use in their expansion project.

All of which makes you wonder when we will stop placing expediency and short-term profits above concern for human health and safety.

It's not too late, and it's to be hoped that the drubbing the gas companies got at Governor Cuomo's hands yesterday will start a domino effect.  Locally, you can join or donate to Gas Free Seneca, or join the Crestwood Blockade.  (To find out more, check out the "We Are Seneca Lake" page on Facebook.)  If you're in a state or a province of Canada that allows hydrofracking, put pressure on your legislators to join in a ban.  This has progressed far beyond "Not In My Back Yard;" this kind of technology shouldn't be in anyone's back yard.  And if that means we have to cut back on natural gas production, or maybe even (gasp!) start investing in renewables, then so be it.

Take a stand.  We have allowed corporate interests and "trade secrets" to imperil our water supplies for long enough.  It's time for it to stop.

Holes in the truth

I know I have a lot of faults.  I can be prickly and snarky sometimes, I'm easily frustrated, and I have a broad streak of impatience.  Sometimes I swear too much.  (Okay, I often swear too much.)  I'm too hard on people when I feel like they're making excuses or are devolving responsibility that should rightfully be theirs onto someone else's shoulders.  Sometimes I'm not a team player when it would be easier (and kinder) just to cooperate and be pleasant.

But one fault I can say I do not fall prey to, and in fact cannot really understand; and that is being sneaky and dishonest.

If I tell you something, you can pretty much rely on its being the truth.  I've said it to my students, I've said it to my own children: you'll make mistakes, but when you do, own up.  Don't compound your mistakes by lying to me about them.  You get into a habit of lying, and you'll find it comes more and more easily -- and you become more and more facile at justifying your lies to yourself and others.  One lie, I've found, so often leads to another.

And another.

It's why I had a reaction of complete revulsion to the news yesterday that Rickey Wagoner, the driver for the Dayton (Ohio) Regional Transportation Authority who claimed that he'd been shot and stabbed by three black teenagers, seems to have made the whole thing up, including the claim that gunshots aimed at his chest had been stopped by a bible that he carried in his shirt pocket.  As Exhibit A, he had a small paper-bound bible with not one, but two bullets lodged in it.

A miracle, he claimed.

[image courtesy of Open Clip Art Library]

And so did a lot of his fellow Christians.  God had his hand over Wagoner, had shielded him from harm through an attack that could well have killed him.  A lot of non-theists were less impressed -- I was reminded of the wonderful quote from Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel Jingo:

"This belonged to my great-granddad," [the sergeant] said.  "He was in the scrap we had against Pseudopolis and my great-gran gave him this book of prayer for soldiers, ‘cos you need all the prayers you can get, believe you me, and he stuck it in the top pocket of his jerkin, ‘cos he couldn’t afford armour, and next day in battle - whoosh, this arrow came out of nowhere, wham, straight into this book and it went all the way through to the last page before stopping, look, you can see the hole." 

"Pretty miraculous," Carrot agreed. 

"Yeah, it was, I s’pose," said the sergeant.  He looked ruefully at the battered volume.  "Shame about the other seventeen arrows, really."

But even so, even the atheists did admit that Wagoner had been (if nothing more) damned lucky.

It turns out instead that what he seems to be is a damned liar.

Not only did Wagoner apparently fabricate the whole attack -- the allegation is that he shot himself in the leg and inflicted several shallow cuts on his own body -- he seems to have shot the bible himself.  Forensics tests with an identical book, placed on a gel dummy, showed that at the distance the gunshots were discharged toward Wagoner, the bible couldn't have stopped the bullets -- they'd have gone right through, and traveled another fifteen centimeters into his body.  All of the injuries, investigators say, were consistent with self-inflicted wounds, and the entire story is not just implausible, but impossible.

What, exactly, was he hoping to accomplish by his fabrication?  To create the appearance of a miracle to edify the religious?  To convince the non-religious of the error of their ways?  Or, even worse, to cast aspersions on black teenagers, further ramping up the fear and suspicion of minorities and youth?  Or some combination of the above?

Whatever his motivation was, he's not saying.  He hasn't spoken to police or reporters regarding the allegations, and has refused to make a statement.  DRTA has apparently fired him, though, so the case against his story seems pretty solid.  "After conducting a comprehensive investigation that has spanned nearly four months, the police department has concluded Mr. Wagoner fabricated his statements," DRTA executive director Mark Donaghy said.  "All of us at RTA are angry at the thought that an employee would allegedly mislead the police, the public and us and use ugly racial stereotypes in doing so."

Yup.  And make all of the well-wishers, not to mention his fellow Christians who were duped into thinking they'd been touched by a genuine miracle, look like fools.  The whole thing is just repulsive.

And, for me, kind of incomprehensible.  What could possibly motivate someone to go to these lengths -- cutting himself, and shooting himself in the leg?  Wagoner had been employed by DRTA for ten years and had an "excellent work record" -- an indication, at least, that he wasn't showing any obvious signs of mental illness.  It seems to be a hoax, a fabrication, a lie outright, crafted for his own reasons, with deliberate intent to deceive.

That I cannot understand.  Although I disagreed from the start with the religious folks who praised Wagoner's apparent narrow escape from death as a miracle, I find myself feeling pretty sympathetic toward them at the moment.  It's always hard to have your trust betrayed, which is why dishonesty cuts so deep.

Other than charges of lying to the police, I'm not sure what legal action can be taken against Wagoner, but it certainly seems unjust that he should get off scot free after duping so many people.  I hope that at least, he is made to face the media and the public, and give a statement admitting that he lied.  Because to come back to where I started: dishonesty sucks.  There is no gentler way to put it.

Slender Man, violence, and blame

When bad things happen, it seems to be a reflex that people look around for someone or something to blame.  And this week, Slender Man (more recently written run together as "Slenderman") is the convenient target.

I've written about Slender Man before, in a post two years ago in which I pondered the question of why people believe in things for which there is exactly zero factual evidence.  And in the last two weeks, there have been two, and possibly three, violent occurrences in which Slender Man had a part.

For those of you who aren't familiar with this particular paranormal apparition, Slender Man is a tall, skinny guy with long, spidery arms, dressed all in black, whose head is entirely featureless -- it is as smooth, and white, as an egg.  He is supposed to be associated with abductions, especially of children.  But unlike most paranormal claims, he is up-front-and-for-sure fictional -- in fact, we can even pinpoint Slender Man's exact time of birth as June of 2009, when a fellow named Victor Surge invented him as part of a contest on the Something Awful forums.  But since then, Slender Man has taken on a life of his own, spawning a whole genre of fiction (even I've succumbed -- Slender Man makes an appearance in my novel Signal to Noise.)

[image courtesy of an anonymous graffiti artist in Raleigh, North Carolina, and the Wikimedia Commons]

But here's the problem.  Whenever there's something that gains fame, there's a chance that mentally disturbed people might (1) think it's real, or (2) become obsessed with it, or (3) both.  Which seems to be what's happened here.

First, we had an attack on a twelve-year-old girl by two of her friends in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in which the girl was stabbed no less than nineteen times.  The friends, who are facing trial as adults despite the fact that they are also twelve years old, allegedly stabbed the girl because they wanted to act as "proxies for Slender Man" and had planned to escape into Nicolet National Park, where they believed Slender Man lives, afterward.  They had been planning the attack, they said, for six months.

Then, a mother who lives in Hamilton County, Ohio, came home from work a couple of days ago to find her thirteen-year-old daughter waiting for her -- wearing a white mask and holding a knife.  The mother was stabbed, but unlike the Wisconsin victim, escaped with minor injuries.  The daughter was said to have been inspired by an obsession with Slender Man.

Even the shootings two days ago in Las Vegas, Nevada have a connection.  The killers, Jerad and Amanda Miller, were enamored of ultra-right-wing politics and conspiracy theories (allegedly the couple had been part of the Cliven Bundy Ranch debacle, and are fans of Alex Jones); but Jerad Miller had been seen around their neighborhood in costume, including one of -- you guessed it -- Slender Man.

So of course, the links between the cases are flying about in the media, and (on one level) rightly so.  It is a question worth asking, when some odd commonality occurs between such nearly simultaneous occurrences.  But along with the links, there is a lot of blame being aimed at people who have popularized the evil character.

Is it the fault of Victor Surge, or Something Awful, or the site Creepypasta (which is largely responsible for Slender Man's popularity), or Eric Knudsen and David Morales, who administer the Slender Man site on the website, or even of authors like myself who have helped to popularize it?  It's tempting to say yes, because (more than likely) had the girls in the first two cases never come across the idea of Slender Man, it's unlikely they would have committed the crimes they did.  (The Millers clearly had other issues, and Slender Man was hardly a chief motivator for the murders they committed.)

Life, however, is seldom simple, and there is no single source we can point to for the origin of these tragedies.  Nor is there any way we can keep disturbing images and unsettling ideas away from people who are determined to seek them out.  And this is hardly the first time this has happened; Dungeons & Dragons, Magic: The Gathering, World of Warcraft, and various other role-playing games have all been targeted at various times for inciting kids to lose themselves in violent fantasy worlds.  But it needn't be anything even that sketchy to result in obsession.  Back in 2011, a woman in Japan ended up in jail after she discovered that her husband was cheating on her, so she hacked into his online role-playing game and killed his avatar.  The husband was so infuriated that he called the police, who promptly arrested her.

And I still remember -- although I can't find a source online that verifies it -- that in the late 1970s, when the book Watership Down was published, a teenage boy read the book cover to cover and then promptly killed himself.  He left behind a note that his suicide was motivated by his longing to join the world of the book, and he'd become convinced that when he died, he'd be reincarnated as a rabbit.

The sad truth is that even if you remove the triggers -- the role-playing games, the books and movies and online memes with disturbing imagery -- the bottom line is that these are all the acts of people who could not tell fact from fiction, and who (therefore) were dealing with some level of mental illness.  It may be that the girls who stabbed their friend, the daughter who stabbed her mother, and the young man who killed himself over Watership Down would not have committed those acts had they not been spurred to do so by the fictional worlds they had entered.  But the fiction wasn't the root cause.  The root cause was mental illness that (apparently) had never been recognized and treated.

As sad as these acts are, we aren't going to make them go away by eliminating such tropes as Slender Man from our fiction.  For every one we eliminate, there are hundreds of others out there, as disturbing (or more so).  From the Cthulhu mythos of Lovecraft, to the various horror worlds created by Stephen King, to The X Files, to Supernatural and Dexter and Fringe, we are never going to want for scary imagery to draw from.  It would be nice to think that children are being shielded from these until they are old enough to handle them (and I was heartened to see that Creepypasta now has a "Warning to Those Under 18" on their website), but the unfortunate truth is that mental illness is all too common -- and the world is a dangerous place.  And the real question, the one our leaders don't want to face because it's far tougher than simply pointing fingers, is why access to mental health care isn't universal, accessible, and cheap.

Squatch of the day

In yesterday's post, we took a look at the latest from the world of extraterrestrial enthusiasts; today, we'll do the same for another topic we haven't visited in a while:

Bigfoot.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Yup, Skeptophilia has been quiet for a while on the subject of our giant hairy cousins.  Which is a shame, because cryptozoology was kind of how I got into all of this skepticism stuff.  I've had a thing for creepy cryptids since I was a kid.  All I can say is, however cheesy Finding Bigfoot is, if that show had been on when I was a teenager, I would not have missed an episode.

Of course, the same would have been true for Ghost Hunters and Scariest Places on Earth and Most Haunted and The Unexplained and probably even Destination: Truth.

Let's just say that I have learned some discernment as I have matured.

Be that as it may, we've had a busy couple of weeks in the field of Yetiology.  So let's take a look at what we've missed while we were focusing on such trivia as educational policy and the role of religion in the public sphere.

First, from British Columbia, we have a story about a hiker who took a video of an alleged Sasquatch.  The video, which is available from YouTube, I append here:

The hiker, who narrates the video, comments, "This is the middle of absolutely nowhere...  If that's human why would you walk up that ridge or that snow line?  Why would he not just go straight down?...  Good thing we brought beers.  Maybe we can lure him over here. I don't know how high we are, but we're probably close to 7,000 feet and this guy's just scampering up snow lines like it's no big deal."

He goes to significant lengths to point out that it is absolutely, totally remote, the middle of nowhere, but doesn't seem to recognize that it can't be all that remote, because after all, they're there.  And brought along beer.  I used to backcountry camp -- and I know from experience that if you are heading to a really remote place, that requires a long, arduous hike, you don't bring along unnecessary weight.  If they brought beer, then they were clearly close enough to civilization there could have been other hikers out there.

Or bears.  Or whatever.  Because the biggest problem is, this image is so tiny that there's no way to tell what it is.  It's not even a Blobsquatch.  It's a Dotsquatch.  Maybe this is the fabled wild hominid of the Northwest, but you certainly couldn't be sure from this video.


Even further out in left field is something from the Discovery channel, which has joined the History channel and Animal Planet in devoting themselves almost entirely to pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But they outdid themselves last week with a press release announcing an upcoming two-hour special about the infamous Dyatlov Pass Incident.

Loyal readers of Skeptophilia may remember that I did a post about this about two years ago, to which I direct you if you're curious about details.  But for our purposes here, it suffices to say that it centers around the mysterious deaths of nine experienced backcountry skiers in the Ural Mountains of Russia back in 1959.

It's an odd set of circumstances, and in my mind has never been adequately explained, although there are some compelling hypotheses about what may have caused their deaths.  But Discovery has added a hypothesis of their own to the list, although instead of "compelling" it is more "ridiculous:"

The Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by wild Yetis.

I'm not making this up.  Here's the relevant paragraph of the press release:

RUSSIAN YETI: THE KILLER LIVES, a 2-hour special airing Sunday, June 1 at 9 PM ET/PT on the Discovery Channel, follows Mike [Libecki] as he traces the clues and gathers compelling evidence that suggests the students’ deaths could be the work of a creature thought only to exist in folklore.

Oh, hell, if you're going to make shit up, why not go all the way?  I think they should make a two-hour special about how the Dyatlov Pass skiers were killed by the Lovecraftian Elder Gods because some Russian necromancer wannabe opened up a gateway to Yog Sothoth.  The one hiker with the major chest injuries had had his heart sucked out by a Shoggoth.

Makes about as much sense.


Speaking of "not making sense," just last week we had a new proposal out there to explain why Bigfoot photos are all blurry.  It's not because they're fakes, or vague images of something sort-of-Bigfoot-like (i.e. an example of cryptozoological pareidolia).

It's because Bigfoot himself is blurry.

You probably think I'm making this up, but over at Occult View, this has been thrown out there as a serious suggestion in a post called "Bigfoot as a Blurry Vibration That Lives in the Forest."  A short passage should suffice to give you the flavor:

These sightings are not hominids, but something all together different. These Bigfoot are vibrations that live in the forest. Call them blurry beings. 

When these blurry vibrations are spotted, we see something that really doesn’t make sense. Our brains then fill in the blanks; our minds complete the details. We see a creature that looks natural, but if we took a picture of it at the same time it would appear only as a blur or a fuzzy image. 

There really hasn’t been a clear photo of Bigfoot (that I assume wasn’t a hoax). But there have been photos of these blurs, these dark shapes. If I am correct, we’ll never get a clear picture of the semi-rural Bigfoot. Yet it might be worth studying these images of dark shapes and see if we can learn something from them. These blurry images might provide clues to the true nature of the vibrations that live in the forest.

What does it even mean to say that something is a "living vibration?"  I'm assuming that the author is using the term in the usual hand-waving way that woo-woos do -- like the mystics saying that humans are "energy field vibrations," even though I doubt they could define the words "energy" and "field" if I held them at gunpoint.  So we won't press any further with this, except to say that anyone who thinks this is a rational explanation is a little blurry around the edges himself.

To end on an entertaining note, we have another video clip, this one from a gentleman named Larry Surface, that he claims is a recording of Bigfoot vocalizations from Ohio.  Take a listen:

My favorite part of this is the way Surface tries to transliterate what they're saying into English spelling, thusly:  "Hamit mahamit whoop whoop hamit wa wa wa wahit mahamit hondabay hondabay hondabay kaoo mahamit whoh hamit fusayo oa getmuh whoop ma oh."

Okay, I know that there's a possibility (slim, in my opinion) that these are really Bigfoot sounds.  But human perception being what it is, if someone tells you what you're hearing -- subtitles it, even -- you are way more likely to hear "hondabay hondabay hondabay" than you are to hear random animal vocalizations.  Consider how the whole "backmasking" thing works -- the conspiracy guys always tell you ahead of time what message has been inserted backwards into the song or speech you're listening to.  Then, when you listen to it backwards... lo and behold... there it is.

So me, I'm not convinced.  I've heard enough bizarre vocalizations from perfectly ordinary non-cryptids -- animals like foxes and raccoons and skunks and barred owls can make some really peculiar, unearthly noises.  (So if you really want to find out what the fox says, you can listen to hundreds of examples on YouTube.  You will not, for the record, find one recording of a fox saying "gering-a-ding-ding-ding-ding-ding.")

Anyway, that's the news from the cryptozoology world.  Dotsquatch, Blursquatch, Russian Skier-Killers, and the strange language of the Ohio Bigfoot.  All in all, about what we'd expect, given the level of evidence that has been heretofore amassed.  So until next time, I'll sign off with a cheerful "Hamit mahamit whoop ma oh," and I hope you feel likewise.

Choosing an intelligent designer

Here we go again.

Last week, the Springboro (Ohio) City Community School District announced that they are considering a policy that would "encourage students to 'think critically' about 'controversial' issues like evolution, abortion, climate change, UN Agenda 21 and sustainable development. The policy directs teachers to fully explore 'all sides' of these issues."

To take the two pieces of the proposed policy that I actually know enough to comment on, there is no controversy in scientific circles about evolution and climate change -- a point I have made often enough that I don't see the need to defend it further here.

What makes this situation interesting was something that appeared on Reddit yesterday -- a back-and-forth email exchange between an Ohio resident who is outraged by the policy, and Kelly Kohls, president of the Springboro School Board.  I quote the posted emails below:

Ms Kohls et al,

As someone who grew up in Cincinnati during the 70s and 80s, I well remember the attempts to bring religious teachings into the classroom. As it has been ruled clearly unconstitutional many times, you are merely wasting time and resources better spent on actually helping children of your school district. Please keep religion at home or in your houses of worship. It has no place in a science classroom. There is no scientific controversy with respect to Evolution except within the ranks of the fundamentalists.
In case you or your board are unsure about the legal precedents, please see:
Epperson v. Arkansas (1968)
Segraves v State of California (1981)
McLean v Arkansas BOE (1982)
Edwards v. Aguillard (1897)
Webster v New Lenox (1990)
Peloza v Capistrano (1994)
Freiler v Tangipahoa Paris BOE (1997) - this one SPECIFICALLY mentions "critical thinking" by the way, and calls it what it is, a ruse.
Kitzmiller v. Dover (2005)
There are more but I think you get my point.
Please, please, please...focus on facts. You are educators. You should act like it.
Thank you for your time,

Stuart Thomas

Ms. Kohls responded as follows.  I would run out of "sics" so you'll just have to keep in mind that this is verbatim:

Please read the rulings, they are not saying unconstitutional or illegal. Please also go to the Discovery Institute and view the science the blows gigantic wholes in Evolution. I also went to school in the 70's and 80 and and do not agree with you.

Please focus on the facts and read the rulings for yourself.

Kelly Kohls

The original poster, in apparent bafflement at getting a response from a school board president that barely qualified as English, wrote back the following:

Ms Kohls,

I'm, first of all, surprised that you would actually cite The Discovery Institute, which is clearly a heavily biased lobbying group and advances only one view, the completely unscientific concept of creationism.

Second, you ask me to "read the rulings", which I have. I would not have cited the cases if I hadn't. Granted, in some cases, it may have been a lower court ruling which may not be citable in a higher court but, and I know you know this, the Circuit Court or the Supreme Court cases clearly define constitutionality. In no case did creationists prevail. This should be of particular interest and goes back to my earlier point that this attempt to inject religion into a secular environment is futile at best, and ultimately harmful to the students in your district.

Let me address your points one by one, and, while I grant that not every case was lifted to the Supreme Court, creationism was never upheld and religious rights were never violated by the teaching of evolution:

"they are not saying unconstitutional or illegal"
I'll just start at the first three...
Epperson v. Arkansas - The U.S Supreme Court found that, ultimately, it was unconstitutional. The Arkansas Supreme Court ruling was overturned by the US Supreme Court. "The vigilant protection of constitutional freedoms is nowhere more vital than in the community of American schools." Please note the use of the word "constitutional".
Segraves v State of California - Summarized as "learning about evolution in public schools does not infringe upon the free exercise of religion." Your First Amendment rights are not violated. Note that if you teach the Christian version, you then automatically violate the rights of people of other religions.
McLean v Arkansas - "the Act was passed with the specific purpose by the General Assembly of advancing religion," which violates the First Amendment.

"I also went to school in the 70's and 80 and and do not agree with you"
Whether or not you agree with me is not the issue here. The issue is Constitutionality. On this point, you are already at a disadvantage. I am unclear why you think you can overturn decades of previous rulings.
Would you like me to continue or do you understand that your "facts" are not, in any way, facts.

"blows gigantic wholes in Evolution"
Honestly, I'm appalled that in your reply, you, as an educator, did not even know the difference between "whole" and "hole". Now, I know this is not a specific refutation of your argument and normally I would have overlooked it, but you are on the Board of Education. By now, I would have hoped that the simple act of proof-reading would have been second nature.

This is a battle which you will not win. Again, you are welcome to your beliefs, but keep them out of the classroom unless you are willing to allow scientists into your church to "teach the controversy".

Regards,

Stuart Thomas

At this point Ms. Kohls had evidently had enough of Mr. Thomas and his damn logical, rational thinking, because she sent back a one liner:

Thanks for your opinion and I respectfully disagree.

 I, too, thought it was interesting that she would immediately blow her cover and mention the Discovery Institute, the Seattle-based "think tank" (although I use that phrase with some reluctance) that has championed forcing Christian intelligent design and climate change denialism into public school curricula.  They are adamant especially about the former, and more than one of the posts on the Institute website tears into the idea of abiogenesis, stating that the origins of life required a "skilled technical chemist" -- i.e., a deity who got life going.

Fine.  God started life, did he?  I'll be sure to teach that next year in my biology classes.  The problem is, which Scientific Theory of God do you want me to use?  Intelligent designers abound in the mythology of humanity.  We have more than a few to choose from:

The first humans were generated by the Sky (Marduk) having sex with the Earth (Tiamat).  [Babylonian]

The Earth is made of the dead body of a frost giant, and the first humans were carved out of logs.  [Norse]

Dry land was formed by a deity (Izanagi) stirring the Celestial Sea with his spear.  The first humans were the children of Izanagi by his wife (Izanami), but she had also previously given birth to a leech, a floating island, and a child who was on fire, which musta hurt like hell.  [Japanese]

The first people were made out of rocks and minerals by a god called "Black Hactcin."  [Jicarilla Apache]

The first life was created out of pond muck by a guy named Obatala.  Some of the weirder-looking creatures in the world were made while Obatala was drunk, which I would expect accounts for the duck-billed platypus.  [Yoruba]

So, anyhow.  I'd guess that Mr. Thomas is right, and that this latest assault on science is doomed to fail, but for cryin' in the sink, it does get tiresome fighting the same battles over and over again.  In any case, keep your eye on Ohio.  As for me, I'm off to go prepare my lesson on how the different races of humans came about because a god named "Kche Mnedo" didn't bake some of them long enough, and the half-baked ones came out as white people.