Total eclipse of the brain

In ten days, people in the United States will get the best shot at seeing a total solar eclipse we've had in years.  The path of totality crosses the country diagonally from northwest to southeast, starting near the northern border of Oregon and ending in South Carolina.

[image courtesy of NASA]

Astronomy buffs and people who simply like an unusual spectacle have been excited about this for ages.  Motels in towns within the path of totality sold out months ago, especially in places like the Midwest where you're more likely to have clear skies.

The buzz about the eclipse prompted the eminent astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson to make the following observation:

Well, far be it from me to argue with someone of NdGT's stature, but just because people aren't denying the eclipse doesn't mean that they're viewing it with any kind of scientific eye.  We're already having the wingnuts putting their unique spin on the event, and you should watch for this sort of thing to increase exponentially as we approach August 21.

First, we have Anne Graham Lotz, daughter of evangelist Billy Graham, who claims that the eclipse is a sign of the approach of the End Times.  Have you noticed how every damn time there's some interesting astronomical event, the religious nutjobs claim it's a sign of the End Times, and then the End Times kind of don't happen?

Well, a zero batting average doesn't discourage people like Lotz in the least.  It's interesting that the elder Graham, although we don't agree on much, always impressed me as a thoughtful and deeply compassionate man.  His kids, though... son Franklin is a virulently anti-LGBT firebrand, who has a real talent for ugly invective.  And now, his daughter... well, let me give it to you in her own words:

The warning is triggered by the total solar eclipse of August 21, nicknamed America's Eclipse. For the first time in almost a hundred years, a total solar eclipse will be seen from coast to coast in our nation.  People are preparing to mark this significant event with viewing parties at exclusive prime sites.  The celebratory nature regarding the eclipse brings to my mind the Babylonian King Belshazzar who threw a drunken feast the night the Medes and Persians crept under the city gate.  Belshazzar wound up dead the next day, and the Babylonian empire was destroyed...  Therefore, my perspective on the upcoming phenomenon is not celebratory.  While no one can know for sure if judgment is coming on America, it does seem that God is signaling us about something.  Time will tell what that something is.

As far as I can tell, what god seems to be signaling is that if something is in front of the sun, it creates a shadow.  End of story.

But the religious fringe aren't the only ones who are jumping up and down making excited little squeaking noises about August 21.  We also have the crypto-woo-woos, who warn us that the eclipse is going to be noticed by more than just humans:

Long-time readers of Skeptophilia might recall that I warned South Carolina residents about Lizard Man way back in 2011.  As far as Bigfoot, you may be questioning how there could be Bigfoot sightings down there in the Southeast -- after all, the real Sasquatch hotspot is the Pacific Northwest.  But just yesterday, an alert reader sent me an article about a sighting of Bigfoot last week in North Carolina, so it's evident that the cryptids are on the way.  The fact that they're converging on the path of totality is a little peculiar, as solar eclipses have no particular precursors that might warn an animal that one is imminent, and I generally don't think of Bigfoot as being particularly knowledgeable about astronomy.

Unless it's that Bigfoot is psychic, and is sensing oscillations in the quantum frequency dimensions.  You can see how that could happen.

In any case, I'm understandably not inclined to share NdGT's optimistic assessment of Americans' attitude toward the solar eclipse.  As I've observed before, there is no finding so solidly scientific, so evidence-based, that the woo-woos can't woo all over it.

So if you're going to head over to the path of totality in ten days, keep your eyes open, and make sure you drop me a line here at Skeptophilia headquarters if you see any Bigfoots, Lizard Men, or Apocalyptic Horsepersons.  I'll be happy to post an update, especially if you can take photographs.  As is required with such photographs, however, make sure you have your camera's settings on "AutoBlur."

Scoring points from tragedy

There's a time for politicizing, for spin, and for debate.  There might even be a time for grandstanding.

But sometimes, all a moral and compassionate person needs to do is stand in solidarity with people who have experienced a great loss.  And that is where we should be, as a nation, with respect to the senseless tragedy that happened two days ago in Charleston, South Carolina, where a 21-year-old man murdered nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, apparently motivated by racism, hate, and the ideology of white supremacy.  "I'm here to shoot black people," the killer allegedly said.  "You've raped our women, and you are taking over the country...  I have to do what I have to do."

The Emanuel AME Church [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Horrific, and hard to imagine that in the 21st century, we're still seeing such crimes occur, that racism is still an entrenched part of our society.  Those are the discussions we should be having today.

But not, apparently, if you work for Fox News.

The pundits over at Fox wasted no time in trotting out their "War on Christians" trope that they've been flogging for years, every time anything happens that threatens the unchallenged hegemony that Christianity has had in the United States ever since its founding.  And instead of treating the Charleston killings as what they are -- racially-motivated hate crimes -- Fox is spinning this as an attack motivated by hatred for Christianity.

They invited Earl Walker Jackson, a minister and unsuccessful candidate for both Senate and Lieutenant Governor in the state of Virginia, to give his opinion.  Jackson is an interesting choice, given that he has made statements in the past that call his sanity into serious question -- such as his claim that doing yoga will lead your to being possessed by Satan.  But apparently Fox, and Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, thought that Jackson would be the perfect person to comment.

And Jackson fell right in with the Fox party line.  In a segment entitled "Attack on Faith," Jackson said:

Wait for the facts, don't jump to conclusions, but I am deeply concerned that this gunman chose to go into a church.  There does seem to be a rising hostility against Christians in this country because of our biblical views.  It is something we have to be aware of.  We have to create an atmosphere where people don't take out their violent intentions against Christians.  I urge pastors and men in these churches to prepare to defend themselves, at least have some people in there that are prepared to defend themselves when women and children are attacked.

Doocy concurred:

Extraordinarily, they called it a ‘hate crime,’ and some look at it as, ‘Well, because it was a white guy and a black church,’ but you made a great point earlier about the hostility towards Christians.  And it was a church.  So maybe that’s what they were talking about.  They haven’t explained it to us.

So, "I'm here to shoot black people" wasn't enough for you?  You have to jump on this as a chance to prop up your ridiculous persecution complex, trying to convince Christians -- who, allow me to point out, make up 74% of the citizens of the United States -- that they're some kind of embattled minority?

Or is it because your ideology won't let you admit that enculturated racism is still part of our society?

No, we can't go there.  Not in a state where the Confederate flag is still flown over the state capitol building.

And Fox wasn't the only one who went in this direction.  Rick Santorum decided to use the murders to score political points in his run for the Republican nomination for president, as usual kowtowing to his supporters on the Religious Right and making not a single mention of race as a motivation for the murders.  In an interview on AM 970, a New York radio station, Santorum said:

All you can do is pray for those and pray for our country.  This is one of those situations where you just have to take a step back and say we — you know, you talk about the importance of prayer in this time and we’re now seeing assaults on our religious liberty we’ve never seen before.  It’s a time for deeper reflection beyond this horrible situation...   You just can’t think that things like this can happen in America.  It’s obviously a crime of hate.  Again, we don’t know the rationale, but what other rationale could there be?  You’re sort of lost that somebody could walk into a Bible study in a church and indiscriminately kill people.  It’s something that, again, you think we’re beyond that in America and it’s sad to see.

What other rationale could there be?  What, the apartheid-era South African flag on the killer's shirt in his Facebook photograph wasn't enough of a clue for you?

But I think what gets me most about all of this is the callous lack of compassion and empathy for the victims and their families.  This is beyond being tone-deaf; this is calculated, deliberate pandering.  For Santorum and the pundits on Fox & Friends, it was more important to latch onto this tragedy to advance their warped agendas than it was to step back and say, "The crucial thing right now is to stand together as Americans and repudiate racism and racially-motivated violence."

You have to wonder why that's so hard for them to say.  Afraid to lose some of their supporters, perhaps?

I don't know what else to say.  This repulsive use of a tragedy to gain political ground has left me feeling nauseated.  So I'll just add one more thing.  To Senator Santorum, and your allies over at Fox: if you can't find it in your hearts to offer unqualified support and solidarity with the families of the victims of this horrific attack, then kindly just shut the fuck up.

A conspiracy of engineered failure

Robert Heinlein said, "Never attribute to conspiracy what is adequately explained by stupidity."  I think this is a pretty good rule of thumb.  It's not that conspiracies don't exist; it's more that humans aren't very good at them (e.g. Watergate), and we're much more likely to be acting from venial motives -- greed, duplicity, desire for power -- than we are to be engaging in some kind of deep and sinister plot.

That said, I'm beginning to wonder if the implementation of the Common Core isn't some kind of conspiracy.

Let's start with the fact that the Chief Operating Officer of the South Carolina Department of Education, Elizabeth Carpentier, is threatening parents who allow their children to opt out of state tests with thirty days in jail.

State Superintendent of Education Molly Spearman, asked about Carpentier's statements, declined to comment other than saying that there is "no statutory provision for parents to opt their children out of testing."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, has been making some veiled threats of his own.  "It’s just part of most kids’ education growing up,” he said, regarding the implementation of the Common Core standardized exams.  "Sometimes the adults make a big deal and that creates some trauma for the kids...  We think most states will do [meet their targets for participation].  If states don’t do that, then we have an obligation to step in."

So the implication is that everything is just hunky-dory with the Common Core curriculum and the tests, and the only parents that will opt out are overprotective mommies and daddies who can't stand to see their kids work hard.

Oh, and those mommies and daddies might have to go to jail if they allow their kids to opt out.

So we have threats coming from the powers-that-be, but there's a flipside to this.  If the curriculum and the tests were fair measures of student achievement or teacher competence, the opt-out movement might have less of a basis for their argument.  But the implementation of these exams, and their content, has been riddled with problems.  Psychologist Dr. Charlene Williams writes:

The 6th grade ELA practice performance task for the Smarter Balance was completely inappropriate for 11-12 year olds, requiring them to toggle between several screens (on small Ipad screens), and choose multiple pieces of evidence to evaluate, select, paraphrase, compare and contrast, as well as write a multiparagraph essay. Never mind that while practicing, toggling back to the articles caused the students’ written work on the essay to be erased (lost).

Williams goes on to challenge the exams' validity on every level:

1) There is no proven Construct Validity (does your test measure what you think it measures). 

2) Cut scores are determined by an unknown (arbitrary) process - labeling children as proficient or failing appears to not be based on any scientific process.  It is not scientific to arbitrarily decide what levels of your test scores actually mean in the real world.  Scientific measurement requires cross-validation with external measures that provide evidence for your claims (like grades, or independent in-depth measures of children’s educational achievement in a a smaller sample with highly experienced evaluators). 

3) Computer adaptive tests - there have been many concerns raised about how item difficulty has been decided. Children continue to progress on these tests if they continue to get a certain number the most recent answers correct. Educational measurement specialists (true academically trained professionals) and parents and children have observed that very often items following very difficult questions are significantly easier. This raises concerns that children’s scores are artificially deflated by unscientifically determined item difficulty determinations. 

4) Inter-rater reliability - No checks exist to independently determine whether the scoring administered by these testing companies has truly reliable and valid measurements of children’s answers... The assessments are not verifiable, because they are not permitted to be subject to independent scientific evaluation.

This last point is especially troubling.  Anything we get to hear about the exam content has to be "leaked," because the people who see the exams are prohibited from discussing them.  This mandate comes not from state Departments of Education, but from Pearson Education, the corporation who designs the tests.  Educator Elizabeth Phillips, in an op-ed piece for The New York Times, writes:

I’d like to tell you what was wrong with the tests my students took last week, but I can’t. Pearson’s $32 million contract with New York State to design the exams prohibits the state from making the tests public and imposes a gag order on educators who administer them.  So teachers watched hundreds of thousands of children in grades 3 to 8 sit for between 70 and 180 minutes per day for three days taking a state English Language Arts exam that does a poor job of testing reading comprehension, and yet we’re not allowed to point out what the problems were.

But some educators care more about their students than they do about threats of repercussions by a rich corporation who is pulling the strings of upper-level administration in every state in the United States... and those educators have uncovered some frightening facts.  For example, a teacher who (understandably) wants to remain anonymous performed a reading-level analysis on a passage from the 4th grade ELA assessment, and found that it had a lexile score of 1140 -- corresponding to appropriateness for the average reading ability of an 8th grader.

The skew between the difficulty level of the exam material, and the grade for which it was targeted, prompted New York educator Stephanie Santagada to write a letter to Governor Andrew Cuomo using vocabulary culled directly from the 4th, 6th, and 8th grade reading assessments:

There is a man in Albany, who I surmise, by his clamorous paroxysms, has an extreme aversion to educators.  He sees teachers as curs, or likens them to mangy dogs.  Methinks he suffers from a rare form of psychopathology in which he absconds with our dignity by enacting laws counterintuitive to the orthodoxy of educational leadership.  We have given him sufferance for far too long.  He’s currently taking a circuitous path to DC, but he will no doubt soon find himself in litigious waters.  The time has come to bowdlerize his posits, send him many furlongs away, and maroon him there, maybe Cuba?

So yeah, I'm beginning to think there's more here than simple incompetence.  The people in charge are not stupid, and one thing these people excel at is number crunching.  I flatly refuse to believe that the inclusion of a passage that is four grade levels too hard in the ELA assessment was a simple blunder.  Which leads us into into some scary territory, because that implies that the other problems may not be accidents, either.

But why would Federal and State Departments of Education, with the collusion of a lot of elected officials like our own aforementioned governor, do this?  Cuomo himself tipped their hand earlier this year, when he said that he wanted to change the teacher evaluation system -- because too many teachers were achieving high scores by the previous metric.

So the reason for all this, I believe, is that the powers-that-be are deliberately setting students up to fail, in order to show up public education itself as a failure -- in an effort to destroy the entire edifice. Replacing it, more than likely, with a network of charter schools that are run by privately-chosen (i.e. not elected) boards, and which will have a vested interest in buying in to programs, curricula, and assessments created by for-profit corporations like Pearson.

The whole thing, I think, boils down to money, and who is lining whose pockets.  So in the end, it does turn out to be venial motives -- greed and political power.

I could be wrong.  It might be that what we're looking at is the educational equivalent of the Keystone Kops, running around frantically and bonking into walls and falling over.  That's certainly what it looked like at first.  But now, with the time we've had to smooth over problems, develop exams, streamline administration, we shouldn't be seeing these kind of mistakes.  Giving so many tests might still be a mistake, of course; but the fact that the exams themselves are so deeply, fundamentally, and obviously flawed, coupled with the gag order against discussing them, has the hallmark of deliberate downward manipulation of the scores.

Which means that it is even more important for parents to defy the threats, and opt their children out, and for educators to come forward with the content and administration problems of the exams themselves.

Public education itself might be at stake.

Scandinavian Jesus and nukes over Charleston

I ran into two examples of complete batshit lunacy in the last couple of days, and they're kind of interesting in juxtaposition.

The first was linked on the r/conspiratard subreddit, a site devoted to ridiculing conspiracy theories.  It's called "Theory: Jesus 'Yashua's' Nazarene," and if you're puzzled by the title, I can say with some authority that it makes more sense than the article itself.

The author, a man who understandably wants only his first name ("Neil") to be known, tells us some pretty earthshattering stuff.  First, we're told that there's a reason that Jesus is often depicted in the United States as a white-skinned dude with blond hair and blue eyes; it's because he was actually Scandinavian.  But not to worry -- he's not being racist, "Neil" says, because he thinks everyone is Scandinavian:

We wonder today if there is a bloodline group alive today that has the same bloodline that Jesus (Yashua) was born with and I SAY YES. This bloodline is not large in number but they represent about 10% of the global populations and can be found primarily in the United State but on all continents as well.

These descendents have a rare blood factor and have prehistoric ancestors that can be tracked back to an area in the world known as the “Garden.” This original people group on earth were what we refer to today as Scandinavians. Believe it or not, the oldest mummies all over the world had blonde hair, which also tells us that our original ancestors were Scandinavians. I mean all of us. It does not matter what color your skin is today, your original ancestors on earth were Scandinavian. When Jesus (Yashua) said we were all brothers he meant it literally.

THE BLONDE BLUE-EYED SCANDINAVIAN NAZARENE TRIBES THAT JESUS (YASHUA) WAS BORN INTO, ARE NOT TO BE CONFUSED WITH THE RED HAIR GREEN-EYED BLOODLINE KNOWN AS THE “TRIBE OF CAIN” that is also known as the “Tribe of DAN”, WHICH IS A HYBRID BLOODLINE.

So there you are, then.  Don't discriminate against people of other skin and hair colors, unless they're red-haired.  Then it's okay.

Then we hear about how "Neil" realized all of this when he found out that Scandinavians all have Rh-negative blood types, and so, apparently, did Jesus:

Science can track this Scandinavian Bloodline from the exact location Jesus (Yashua’s) Nazarene tribes lived in Northern Israel back in time thousands of years before Jesus (Yashua) was born. Jesus (Yashua) was not a Jew as people have falsely labeled him, he was a Nazarene and was probably born in the same Nazarene village where ran his ministry from in Northern Israel. The Bible clearly states that Jesus (Yashua) was a Nazarene.

The Nazarenes were Scandinavians who apparently had the PURE Rh Negative bloodline factor, which can be tracked back in time to the original human race that was born on this planet in a part of the world that was known as the “Garden”.

The problem with this -- okay, one of the many problems with this -- is that only about 16% of Scandinavians are Rh negative.  The two groups who have the highest incidence of Rh negative blood are the Basques of Spain and the Berbers of Morocco, both of whom have a percent incidence of the gene somewhere in the high 30s to low 40s.  And neither Spain nor Morocco are anywhere near Scandinavia.  And neither place is known for its blond, blue-eyed people.

But this guy doesn't let a little thing like "facts" stop him.  He goes on to tell us how there was a letter from "Pontius Pilot [sic]" that the Vatican is covering up, and it says that Jesus had hair "colored like a chestnut shell or walnut shell," which clearly is the same thing as blond.  He did not have red hair, "Neil" reiterates, making me wonder if he once had a bad experience in Ireland, or something, because he seems pretty vehement on the topic of the Ginger Jesus Theory.

So anyway.  On and on it goes.  My point is that when this site got posted on public media, "Neil" and his "theory" got excoriated.  "What kind of idiot would believe this?" one commenter wrote.  "I live in hope that wackos like him are few in number."  Another wrote, "This has to be a troll.  I flatly refuse to believe that there are people who are that ignorant."

Which brings us to our second story.

Last week, presidential hopeful Rick Santorum gave a speech in South Carolina.  The event was sponsored by Frank Gaffney, which should already put you on high alert -- Gaffney is known as a birther/truther nutjob who believes that America is soon to be under Sharia law.  So no wonder it attracted some peculiar people.

I mean the audience, not Santorum.

Rick Santorum [image courtesy of photographer Gage Skidmore and the Wikimedia Commons]

So anyway, Santorum gives his spiel about how Obama is leading America into ruin, the usual blah.  But it really got interesting during the question-and-answer session, when a woman stepped up to the microphone and said this:

Mr. Santorum, thanks for being here, my name is Virginia, I'm a retired schoolteacher, a political activist and a lifelong resident of South Carolina.  I have the same question that I asked Senator Cruz.   I'll preface it by saying that I think Michele Bachmann [unintelligible] that Boehner made a deal... my question is on defending this country, and what you did for national security, and sealing these borders and protecting the United States.  I've fought that battle all my life.  I'm losing, and that's because I'm not getting help from my congress...  Why is congress rolling over and letting this communist dictator destroy my country?  Y'all know what he is, and I know what he is.  I want him out of the White House.  He's not a citizen.  He could have been removed a long time ago...  Everything he does is illegal, he's trying to destroy the United States.  Everyone knows this.  The congress knows this.  What kind of games is [sic] the congress playing with the citizens of the United States?  Y'all need to work for us, not for the lobbyists that pay your salaries.  Get on board, let's stop all this, and save America.  What's going on, Senator Santorum?  Where do we go from here?  Ted told me I got to wait till the next election.  I don't think the country'll be around for the next election.  Obama tried to blow up a nuke in Charleston a few months ago... he's trying to destroy our military, he's fired all the generals and all the admirals that said they wouldn't fire on the American people if he asked them to do so, if he wanted to take the guns away from 'em.  This man is a communist dictator, we need him out of that White House now.

So.  Obama is a communist who has gone around firing all of our military leaders, somehow without that action making national news.  And furthermore, he tried to drop a nuclear bomb on Charleston, South Carolina so that he can get the military to shoot American citizens and then take away their guns.

Kind of makes Scandinavian Jesus seem... sane, doesn't it?

But here's what's interesting.  Unlike "Neil," whose public appearance in an online forum resulted in his getting his ass handed to him, "Virginia" was treated as if what she said made perfect sense.  Santorum could have taken this as an opportunity to say, "Look.  Let's not believe counterfactual nonsense.  Yes, we do disagree with the president and the Democrats on what the right course of action is for the country; but we're not helping our cause by making ridiculous claims that obviously aren't true."  Instead, here's how he responded:

First, I object to your laying the blame on me, because I'm not a sitting member of the Senate.  I'm not responsible for any of that stuff.  [applause]  But I will tell you this.  You've hit on one point that I absolutely agree, and it's that this is a complete lack of leadership.  The bottom line is, and I can tell you, when President Obama issued that executive order, and I don't care what the executive order was about, when he issued an executive order, an executive action that said that he was not only not going to enforce the law, that he is actively going to change that law, make new law, and be able to act, enforce the agencies to act pursuant to that law, he did something that you mentioned.  The word "tyrant" comes to mind.  It is not, the president does not have the authority to do these things.  The president has done a lot of dangerous things.  This is the most dangerous thing the president has done.

Yes, you read right.  A former senator, and current candidate for the Republican nomination for president, apparently believes that President Obama tried to nuke Charleston.

And this, Dear Reader, is why I write this blog every day.  If we don't start insisting that people sift fact from fiction, if we let crazies like "Neil" and "Virginia" blather away without calling them out on their nonsense, we end up with people like Rick Santorum, who evidently has the critical thinking ability of an avocado, being a serious contender for nominee for the highest office in the land.  Maybe I'm creating a false analogy, here; but to me, it's all the same thing.  Once you decide that facts and logic don't matter, then you'll swallow anything, whether it's some crackpot theory about Jesus having blond hair and Rh-negative blood, or the president having a plan to drop a nuclear bomb on an American city so he can take away our guns.  The only difference is the details.

It all goes back to something Voltaire said, almost three hundred years ago, a saying that I have posted above the whiteboard in my classroom:  "Those who can be made to believe absurdities can be made to commit atrocities."

Speaking up against the lunatics

It hasn't been a good week for reasonable, moderate Christians.

Which, allow me to point out, the majority of them are.  Even the ones who consider themselves very devout do, by and large, follow the most important of Jesus's dictums, namely, "Love thy neighbor" and "Treat others as you would be treated."  There are Christians whom I count amongst my very dear friends, and although we may differ regarding what we think the ultimate answers are to Life, the Universe, and Everything, we all get along pretty well by following the general rule of Don't Be An Asshole.

I can't help but think that the reasonable Christians, though, might oughta have a word with some of their leaders.  Because let me tell you, those folks need either to stick a sock in it or else get professional help, because lately the lot of them sound like they've lost their minds.

Let's start with our dear old friend Pat Robertson, who you'd think by now would have also lost most of his audience, given the way he blathers on.  He has variously claimed that Katrina was god's punishment on New Orleans, the 2010 earthquake was god's punishment on Haiti, and god was going to punish little kids for indulging in Halloween because the candy they were being given had been cursed by witches.  So old Pat has had a screw loose for some time, but for reasons that are beyond me that hasn't stopped people from watching his television show, The 700 Club.

And this week, Pat told his listeners something horrific; that what we saw with Katrina and the Haitian earthquake was peanuts.  God had something even worse in his arsenal, and it was going to happen soon.  God has had it with us.  No weaseling out of it this time.

An earth-destroying asteroid.

[image courtesy of artist Don Davis and the Wikimedia Commons]

Yes, based on Pat's extensive knowledge of science, he has concluded that wacky apocalyptic stuff in the Book of Revelation is all about an asteroid hitting the Earth.  I dunno how that accounts for the Mark of the Beast and the Scarlet Whore of Babylon and so on, but I guess his mind was made up (actually, he said he knew because god told him personally) -- sufficiently that Pat has written a book about it, called The End of the Age.

"I wrote a book!" Pat told his viewers.  "It deals with an asteroid hitting the Earth.  I don’t see anything else that fulfills the prophetic words of Jesus Christ other than an asteroid strike.  There isn’t anything that will cause the seas to roil, that will, you know, cause the skies to darken, the moon and the sun not to give their light, the nations terrified on Earth of what’s happening.  There isn’t anything that’s going to do that."

Well, alrighty, then.

Now, lest you say to yourself, "Well, that's just Pat Robertson, and we all know he's a loon," what about Franklin Graham, the pastor son of Billy Graham?

The elder Graham, however fundamentalist he is, always struck me as a compassionate and honest man.  His son, however, appears to be more cast from the "rant and rave while making random shit up" mold.  On Newsmax's "America's Forum," the younger Graham went on record as saying that Christians are being persecuted and attacked, especially by the media.

"Are we at a point now that is maybe unparalleled in history, about the amount of anti-Christian behavior and sentiment... rising around the globe?" the interviewer asked him, and Graham responded, "We do see it rising around the globe, no question about it, and it's frightening.  We see the anti-Christian position in this country, so much of it coming out of the entertainment industry, especially in certain segments of the news media.  Christians are being attacked...  We are living in a world that is changing, and it's frightening to see how quickly it's changing.  And I think we're going to see real persecution of Christians and Jews in the years to come."

Really?  Persecution?  Here in the United States?  Maybe you're confusing "no longer having carte blanche" with "being attacked," Reverend Graham.  And regarding the entertainment industry -- can I remind you that there have been two, count 'em, two movies so far this year that were biblical epics -- Noah and Son of God -- not to mention the rather defensively-titled God's Not Dead?

But the winner in the lunatic rant contest this week has to be Ray Moore, president of Frontline Ministries and candidate for lieutenant governor of South Carolina, who is trying to get Christian parents to take their kids out of public schools because he thinks that 40% of children are turned into atheists by the evil public school system -- by the end of elementary school.

"It’s our hope and prayer that a fresh obedience by Christian families and educating their children according to biblical commands will prove to be a key for the revival of our families, our churches, and our nation,” said Moore told a gathering of Tea Party activists on April 12.

"Christians must leave the Pharaoh’s school system, and seek out religious schools or home schools," he said, to wild applause.

"We cannot win this war we’re in as long as we keep handing our children over to the enemy to educate.  All of the symptoms, the things that we’re fighting and complaining about today has [sic] been caused because the culture has changed.  The culture has turned against God, against the Constitution, and against traditional values.  It’s fundamentally and largely responsible because of the public school system we’ve had (for) six or seven generations, when most of us have put our children in the godless, pagan school system.  It cannot be fixed, the socialistic model, and we need to abandon that.  As conservatives and Christians, if you think you’re going to win this war you’re in, and leave your children in those schools, it will not happen."

Right.  Because that's what I spend my time doing, along with teaching kids the parts of the cell and how the digestive tract works, in the hopes that they'll learn it well enough that they'll pass the state exams so I'll get a passing grade and actually have a job next year.  In all my spare time, I'm indoctrinating my students into godless paganism.

Whatever the hell that is.

You know, I think part of the problem here is that we're taught, in church, to listen to the leaders and mostly accept what they say.  I was raised Roman Catholic, and that was certainly my parents' approach; unless the priest did something to indicate that he really had gone off his rocker, you were supposed to just kind of sit there and listen and nod.  But I think the time has come that good, sensible Christians need to say to some of these leaders, "You are talking complete rubbish."  Better still, stop sending them money, and allowing these wingnuts to live a lavish lifestyle.  Because however they yammer on about what Jesus said and what Jesus wants people to do, evidently Jesus's comment about "give everything you have to the poor and follow me" never really sunk in.  Take John Hagee, the Texas pastor I wrote about a few days ago who claimed that the lunar eclipse was a sign of the End Times; his salary last year is estimated at $840,000, and he lives on a "$2.1 million 7,969-acre ranch outside Brackettville, with five lodges, including a 'main lodge' and a gun locker.  It also includes a manager's house, a smokehouse, a skeet range and three barns."

Not exactly emulating the Poverty of Christ, there, are you, Reverend Hagee?

Anyhow.  I know I'm to be expected to be critical, being an atheist and all, but what really galls me is that most of the Christians I know are as disgusted by these crazy pronouncements and royal lifestyles as I am, and so few of them seem motivated to do anything about it.  The problem is, I can't do much to fight this myself; as I said in a recent post, being an atheist is a one-way ticket to being completely powerless politically (despite what Franklin Graham would say to the contrary).  But if these nutjobs' constituencies and congregations stood up and said, "Look, knock it off, or we're cutting the purse strings," maybe they'd listen.

Well, most of them.  I doubt Pat Robertson would.  Anyone who thinks that Hershey's Inc. hires witches to curse Halloween candy is probably beyond help no matter what.

Gorn down south

Good news for all of you East Coast cryptozoology buffs who thought you'd have to take a trip all the way to the Pacific Northwest to see something that probably doesn't exist:  we now have a very intriguing report coming in from rural South Carolina.

Some residents of Lee County heard an odd noise at night during the July 4 weekend, and went out to investigate.  They found that the front bumper of their car had been "clawed and chewed."  Well, that can only mean one thing.

Lizard Man is back.

When the owners of the munched car notified local police, some old-timers on the force noted the similarity of the story to reports from 23 years ago.  During a five-week episode in the summer of 1988, several people had their car bumpers scratched and mauled, and there were reports that the perpetrator of the damage was not some drunken vandal, but a seven-foot-tall lizard-like creature with red eyes and three clawlike fingers on each hand.

"This part here is how it all started in 1988," said former Lee County Sheriff Liston Truesdale.  "We got a call to come and look at something that had mauled a car.  I went out there and looked at that damaged car, and I haven't seen anything like that before."

Below is an artist's rendition of the creature by one of the witnesses:

An especially nice touch is that the red eyes are labeled, because otherwise we very likely wouldn't have noticed them.

In any case, speculation is running rampant.  Who is this strange creature with scaly skin and a taste for chrome?  The two chief theories are that Lizard Man is (1) an alien, or (2) a dinosaur.  Of course, it could always be (3) an alien dinosaur.  As evidence, let's look at this picture of a Gorn from Star Trek:

That's pretty close, don't you think?  I remember this episode mostly because it had the clumsiest, most ridiculous fight scene in the entire series, and there was some serious competition in that regard.  The problem was, the actor playing the Gorn was wearing this big plastic dinosaur head and it seemed like he couldn't see where he was going very well.  He kept lunging at Captain Kirk with his knife, and Kirk would do a slow-motion dodge and roll, and the Gorn would miss him by about twelve feet.  The Gorn would then go staggering off blindly, take about five minutes to relocate Kirk, and the whole thing would begin again.  It was sort of like watching an extremely slow-moving two-person game of Marco Polo.

But even so, I think the similarity between the Gorn and the South Carolina Lizard Man is pretty striking.  Of course, I don't recall the Star Trek episode mentioning anything about the Gorn race liking to eat car bumpers, but that may be because the scriptwriters had to concentrate on more important things, such as giving Kirk an opportunity to get his shirt ripped off.

In any case, we'll be watching Lee County, South Carolina pretty closely in the coming days.  It's to be hoped that someone will get a photograph or video clip of this creepy chrome-crunching cryptid creature before he packs it in for another 23 years.  One bit of advice: if you decide to visit Lee County to try for a sighting yourself, you might want to rent a car.  Don't waive the comprehensive damage insurance.