Weird news out of Whitby

In what is probably nothing more than a coincidence, but might have to do with hallucinogenic drugs in the water supply, today we have three stories from Whitby, England.

I remember Whitby as a lovely town, and one that I was mighty glad to see when I visited England, because it represented the end of my 110 mile solo hike across England, which had begun three weeks earlier at the Irish Sea in Blackpool.  The last part of the hike was across steep moorland country, and I still remember my relief when I saw the North Sea glittering in the distance, under virtually the only sunshine I'd enjoyed during the entire trip -- Britain was, according to a news report I saw, experiencing the rainiest summer since 1865, and I spent a good bit of the hike soaked to the skin.

So, anyway, my associations with Whitby are pleasant ones, and nothing odd or unexplained happened during my visit there.  But in the last few weeks, there has been a sudden spate of weirdness that makes me wish I could go there and investigate in person.

First we have two stories (source) regarding strange sightings.  In the first, Whitby resident Caroline Russell reports seeing an animal she describes as a huge, jet-black "cat-like creature" on February 29.

"It was my dog that flushed it out of next door’s garden," Russell told reporters.  "It flushed out a pheasant and at the same time it flushed out this black creature.  Where this had come from and why my dog didn’t chase it I’m not sure – my dog could have been scared of it.  I’ve never seen anything like it before."

The sighting, Russell said, occurred at two o'clock in the afternoon, and there's no way she's mistaken about what she saw.

"Whatever it was it disappeared.  It just shot up into the woods and it was jet black.  If it was a cat we would have heard it hissing but it was really, really quiet."

This is not the first time that there have been sightings of large black panther-like animals in the Whitby area.  In fact, the RAF base at nearby Fylingdales is rumored to be the site of a Roswell-style UFO conspiracy, but instead of bodies of aliens, the British military is alleged to be storing "the carcass of a puma-like creature."

For the record, I'm not making any of this up.

Russell, however, isn't saying whether she believes what she saw is an Alien Space Kitty.  "I’ve heard people talk about them and I’ve heard previously of someone walking through Mulgrave Woods and actually seeing a cat- like creature," she said.  "I walk along the ridge with my dogs and I’ve never seen it before or since."


It was only a day later that another Whitby resident saw a UFO in the skies above Port Mulgrave.

"I was coming out of Boulby Potash last night and had just pulled up at the junction," she told reporters, on the condition that her name not be released.  "I saw orange lights going round in a circle and I said to my daughter in the back of the car, ‘Blimey that’s a UFO’.  I did a big U-turn in the middle of the road and it had gone.  I looked into it and there was a young chap in 2007 who had seen something round about the same place on the second of March.  This was the first of March, but it was a leap year so it would have actually been the same day.  It was not an aeroplane and not a helicopter and there were about six big orange lights around it...  I got a tingle down my spine."


Myself, I wonder if what she saw was a Close Encounter of the Third Kind between Whitby councillor Simon Parkes and (literally) the Mother Ship.  This past Monday, Parkes stunned his colleagues on the Whitby Town Council by publicly stating that his mother was a nine-foot tall green alien with eight fingers on each hand.  (Source)

Parkes said he first saw his alien mum when  he was only eight months old.  Despite being only a wee baby, he recalls “a traditional kite-shaped face”, with huge eyes, tiny nostrils and a thin mouth appearing over his crib.

“Two green stick things came in," he said, in a YouTube video that you should all definitely watch.  "I was aware of some movement over my head.  I thought, ‘they’re not mummy’s hands, mummy’s hands are pink’."

He then said, "I was looking straight into its face. It enters my mind through my eyes and it sends a message down my optic nerve into my brain.  It says ‘I am your real mother, I am your more important mother’."

He also stated that he's seen his alien family many times since then, and in fact was taken for a tour of a UFO when he was eleven years old.  But, he stated reassuringly, and probably because anyone in the room at the time was inching their way toward the door by this point, no one should be worried that his mother is an alien.

"It’s a personal matter and it doesn’t affect my work. I’m more interested in fixing someone’s leaking roof or potholes.  People don’t want me to talk about aliens.  I get more common sense out of the aliens than out of Scarborough Town Hall.  The aliens are far more aware of stuff.  People in the Town Hall seem not to be aware of the needs of Whitby."

Myself, I think that a flying saucer would be handy thing to have if you were trying to fix a leaking roof.  You could simply hover over the house, and lower yourself down from a ladder.  Or possibly just fix the leak by materializing tar paper and sealant in place over the spot and fusing it with a ray gun.  So maybe it'd be useful to have alien connections on your town council.

Not that this is any comfort for the residents of Whitby, who apparently are reacting with some horror that the guy they elected is babbling like a loon.  And as for the rest of the town councillors, they seem a bit at a loss as to how to react.  There has been no official statement from the town council regarding the matter, although Parkes' fellow councillor Terry Jennison did tell reporters that he had no idea what Parkes was going on about.

"I'm completely in the dark about this," Jennison said.

So, anyway, that's the news today from lovely Whitby.  Giant extraterrestrial space pumas, orange UFOs, and aliens on the town council.  Hearing all of this makes me want to go back for a visit.  I would, however, make sure to drink only bottled water while I was there.

The naughty naughty Nephilim

In further exploration of beliefs for which there is no evidence whatsoever, today's topic is: Nephilim.

What are the Nephilim, you might ask?  Well, amongst other things, they are the subject of Scott Alan Roberts' new book, The Rise and Fall of the Nephilim: The Untold Story of Fallen Angels, Giants on the Earth, and Their Extraterrestrial Origins.  In order to save you the money of buying this book (even the Kindle edition costs $9.34), allow me to explain that the Nephilim are apparently the result of angels having sex with human women, which resulted in a race of giants.  The whole thing seems to have come out of a couple of lines in the bible, especially Genesis 6:4, "The Nephilim were on the earth in those days--and also afterward -- when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown."  They're mentioned in Numbers 13:33 as well:  "We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them."

So, the Nephilim were big dudes, evidently.  Exactly how big is uncertain.  Be that as it may, Scott Alan Roberts has examined the evidence (two passages from the bible) and come to the only possible conclusion: the "angels" mentioned in Genesis 6:4 as the fathers of the Nephilim were outer space aliens, and the Great Flood happened to destroy these "demonic hybrids" and remove all traces of alien DNA from the human gene pool.

Oh, okay.  I mean, my only question would be: seriously?  You can tell all that from two bible passages?  And I thought that angels didn't have sex, given that they don't have the required, um, equipment?  I distinctly remember in a highly scientific documentary I saw, the movie Dogma, the angel Metatron drops his drawers and lo, it was revealed unto me that although he hath wings, he hath no wang.

But I digress.

A complete lack of evidence, as I've stated before, never seems to discourage some people, and this hasn't stopped various folks from yammering on at length about the Nephilim, not to mention the sex lives of aliens and/or angels.  Take a look, for example, at this site, which not only claims that the aliens had their way with human women back in the Bronze Age, but omigod it's still happening today:

Dr. John E. Mack, who needs no introduction to UFOlogists, has stated that the alien abduction scenario seems to be a program for the development of a hybrid race. This very fact lends support to the theory that the abduction scenario is the modern resurgence of the Nephilim breeding program. Pregnant women are abducted only to find the foetus has been removed from their womb. In some cases they are reunited with their hybrid child in future abductions. Men are forced to engage in sexual activity with hybrid females, or have their sperm removed from their bodies. If there is any truth to theses alien abduction claims of literally thousands of people across the world the demonic plan of creating yet another hybrid race is already in action... It seems pretty clear we may have entered “the Days of Noah”.

Well, speaking of Noah, I'll borrow a line from Bill Cosby:  "Riiiiiight."  I don't know about you, but this is the first I've heard of guys being forced to have sex with "hybrid females;" and you'd think that if pregnant women suddenly woke up to find their babies had vanished, it would kind of make headlines, you know?  So once again, we run headlong into the speed bump of "no evidence."

Anyway, that's today's post about the naughty Nephilim, sneaking into your house to steal your sperm and/or your hybrid children, lo unto this very day.  The whole thing leaves me wondering if today's Nephilim are as big as the ones in the bible.  I'm thinking in particular of my younger son, who is 6' 7", and next to whom I verily seemeth as a grasshopper.  On the other hand, the hypothesis that he is a human/alien hybrid is confounded by the fact that he looks a lot like me, so the likelihood of his being anyone else's son is pretty slim.  And I can vouch for the fact that his mother is who she claims to be, i.e., not an alien.

At least, as far as I know.  Those aliens are pretty tricky.  Maybe my ex-wife is really from another planet.  Maybe I was abducted in 1982, and was held on board a UFO for sixteen years, and used as part of a captive breeding program.  It's as good an explanation for my first marriage as any other I can think of.

Woo-woo casserole recipe

Today, I ran across a truly wonderful site, if by "wonderful" you mean "absurd."  It is called "Divinorum Psychonauticus,"which loosely translated from sort-of Latin means "Spirit Sailor of the Divine," even though to my ears it sounds like a spell from Harry Potter.  The site is subtitled, "Where science fears to tread, art staggereth in theorem."  Whatever that means.  Its creator, Erich Kuersten, seems to be a raving wingnut, although in his defense he's up front about that.  In his "About This Author" paragraph he calls himself "legally insane ten times over," although in his posts, he seems entirely serious; I saw none of the hallmarks of "Divinorum Psychonauticus" being a spoof site.  In any case, I bumped into the site because of this post, whose title ("The Bigfoot-Ancient Alien Connection: Solved!") seemed to promise great things.

I was not disappointed.

The first thing I noticed was how deftly the article explains why we haven't seen Bigfoot.  It is not, as many think, because Bigfoot doesn't exist.  It is also not, as others explain, that Bigfoots are intelligent, wary primates who live in trackless wilderness with plenty of places to hide.

No, it's because Bigfoots have all of their junk DNA turned on, and that allows them to time travel.  In Kuersten's words:

Our DNA is tampered [sic] down, which is to say a lot of our 'junk DNA' is disconnected. We're like parrots with clipped wings, while Bigfoot's are unclipped. If we could access all 100% of our brain, 'turn on' the dormant DNA, we could do some of the things Bigfoot does, such us 'skipping' through time, being able to wink in and out of existence (and thus avoid capture). In fact this is why they are so evasive... they're on the run if you will, from the castrating scissors of the Greys.

Well, I have to admit that if a gray alien with castrating scissors was chasing me, I'd try to avoid capture, too.

Kuersten then adds a nice seasoning of biblical "history" to the mix:

The story of the Great Flood and all that - the Annunaki went to wipe us all out and start again because they made us in their image and likeness and with many of their powers, their ability to tap into the higher dimensions of consciousness (there are nine total), to vibrate their Kundalini energy in and out of existence and forward and backwards through time, and into alternate dimensions. So when the sasquatch /earlier race learned how to 'wink out' they no longer wanted to mine gold for their masters. They had the power to hide, and went on the run. The next wave of humans (the Annunaki/Greys spliced with early ape hominid DNA) had these aspects of the brain shut off, the wings clipped. But the flood couldn't reach the high up mountains, which is why the bigfoot and yeti are often found there. 

Is that why that is?  I'd always wondered.  The Himalayas, for example, have always seemed to me to be a singularly inhospitable place, what with all that snow and ice and thin air.  If I were a primitive hominid, I would choose somewhere rather nicer to live.  Maui, for example.  But evidently the reason you never see sasquatches on the beach is because they got stranded up in the mountains after the Great Flood and now, 4,000-odd years later, they still haven't been able to find their way down.

But why, you might ask, are Bigfoots frequently seen getting in and out of UFOs?  I know I've asked that question myself, and usually my response has been, "hallucinogenic drugs."  But Kuersten disagrees:

The reason Bigfoots are sometimes found getting into and out of UFOs is explainable as either a kind of bigfoot terminator or traitor, working to infiltrate the bigfoot colonies, or various 'friendly' alien visitors--the equivalent of, say, Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves. 

Okay,  now I understand!  Some of the Bigfoots are in cahoots with evil aliens.  Or friendly aliens.  Or Kevin Costner.

And finally, how does Kuersten know all of this, as clearly there is no way you could get here via any of the more standard ways of thinking?  By this time, you will not be surprised to find out that the answer is:  spirit animal guides.

I asked my 'channeled' guru panther animal spirit guide. Believe it or not, that's what he 'told' me, in the weird non-linguistic way that spirit guides will. Now, he's quite a trickster as I've learned on more than one occasion. But this all makes a lot more sense than some of the daffy theories (I've heard), so I'm posting it here. Make of it what you will, and remember, the truth is so strange no language can encompass it, so never be afraid to leave language at the door when entering the higher planes! 

Oh, I will, Erich.  I left language with baggage check, and am ready to be x-rayed by the TSA (Transcendental Safety Authority) before boarding my astral plane!

So, anyway.  That's our brief foray into the deep end of the pool for today.  It's kind of like a recipe for a woo-woo casserole, isn't it?

In a large mixing bowl, place 2 lbs. finely ground Bigfoot.  Add:

• a chopped Annunaki
• biblical references to taste
• 3 tbsp. references to poorly-understood science
• 1 cup higher dimensions of consciousness
• 1 cracked UFO
• 1 pint time travel
• 1 spirit guide (preferably "panther," but "weasel" will do)

Mix well.  Place in a greased baking dish, and bake at 350 F until well-done  Serve immediately.

Pairs excellently with most wines.  In fact, the more your guests drink, the more palatable the casserole will seem.

*ding* You've got mail!

Even though I've had this blog for a couple of years, I am still mystified as to why certain posts will grab people's attention.

To date, the two posts I've done that have garnered the most hits are ones describing the fact that Rebecca Black was not singing about JFK's assassination in her dreadful song "Friday," and the fact that the blob of rock discovered by some treasure hunters on the bottom of the Baltic Sea is not the Millennium Falcon.  Why those two still get dozens of hits a day is a little beyond me, but who am I to question my readers for reading what I write?

Still more, I am frequently puzzled as to why specific posts get people's dander up.  I still periodically get hate mail over my rather sardonic post about British ghost hunters, for example.  And this brings up the interesting phenomenon of the interconnectedness of social media -- the irate Brits who still get their knickers in a twist over my disbelief in ghosts found my blog because it showed up on Twitter and then got posted to a site devoted to ghost hunting -- with the caption, "Look at what this Yankee twit said about us!"  After that, they stopped hunting ghosts for a time to hunt the wild skeptic, and I got 300 hits in an hour.  Followed by a torrent of very irate emails.

Something similar happened on Thursday, although I have yet to figure out how it occurred.  Wednesday's post, you might recall, was about the Tennessee anti-evolution bill, and I not-so-gently pointed out that the sponsors of that bill had a poorer understanding of science than your average Bigfoot chaser.  Okay, that may have been a little inflammatory, but I've said worse things about creationists in the past and gotten little to no response.

Evidently, someone told someone who told someone, and by midday on Thursday, the floodgates had opened up.  It's a little alarming, and seldom good news, when I see a big spike on my hit tracker -- so when I saw the line rising suddenly, I said, "uh-oh."  And sure enough, the emails started shortly afterwards.  And ye gods and little fishes... If I had time and space, I’d print a bunch of excerpts.  Instead, here’s a capsule summary of their comments:

So, you think you’re so smart, Mr. Evolutionary Biology Guy.  Well, blah blah blah transitional fossils?  There are no transitional fossils at all, you freakin dumass!  Blah blah yak yak the Bible is INERRANT!  It’s God’s Word!  Yak yak Second Law of Thermodynamics!  Entropy disproves evolution yak yak blah blah you worthless wanker!  Radiometric data is inaccurate, so therefore yakkity schmackity booga booga Big Bang!  What happened before the Big Bang, huh?  Were you there to see it, Mr. Godless Atheist?  I didn’t think so!  Gotcha there!!!  Yak yak blah blah it’s just a theory, not a fact!  Even the scientists don’t have any confidence in it!  Blah blah you smug, arrogant BASTARD!  Rot in hell.

Yours in Christ,

The Creationists of America

Well, all I can say is, thank you so much for your comments.  To address a few of your points:

• I can be smug and arrogant, sometimes, so guilty as charged.  I know it’s not nice and I try not to be, but it’s one of my faults.
• As far as being a bastard, my parents were married long before I was born, so it’s a big nope on that one, and my mom, god rest her soul (if there is one and she had one) would have been scandalized by the suggestion.
• “Godless Atheist” is kind of redundant, don’t you think?  Okay, I’ll let that one go, maybe you were just being emphatic.
• I’d have taken the “dumbass” comment more seriously if the person who called me that hadn’t misspelled it.
• I’m not actually worthless, although what I am worth is left as an exercise for the reader.
• And as far as my being a wanker – well, I’m not going there.  You’ll just have to speculate.

Regarding the objections to evolution itself, those have been discussed at such length in other venues that I won’t respond, except for one.  Saying “evolution is just a theory” is not an argument.  The word “theory” has nothing to do with uncertainty, or the idea that there’s this nagging feeling in scientists’ minds that “evolution might very well be wrong.”  They call it “music theory,” and it’s not because they think that music might not exist.  Are we clear on that point?

Okay.  I feel much better, but have probably now initiated a further waterfall of hostile posts.  I guess you can’t have everything.

The monolith on Phobos, and why the aliens are avoiding us

In Stanley Kubrick's seminal science fiction movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, Earth astronauts discover a monolith on the Moon that turns out to be a signal transmitter to a super-powerful race of aliens.  Uncovering it alerts the aliens that we have become sufficiently advanced that we have made it into space -- letting them know that we had achieved a high enough technological level that we were ready to take the next step, which turned out to be spending twenty minutes watching psychedelic colored lights and the main character's eye blinking.

Well, according to a new claim, based upon NASA photographs, Kubrick's vision may have been prophetic -- he just got the location of the monolith wrong.

Take a look at this photograph of the surface of Phobos, one of the two moons of Mars:

The stick-in-the-mud, dry-as-dust scientists at NASA say this is just a tall, vaguely rectangular boulder.  This ignores the truth, which is that it is a structure placed there by a highly advanced alien species, of unknown motives, so we should proceed with caution.  After all, three separate probes have all disappeared on or near Mars -- the 1988 Phobos-2 spacecraft, the 1999 Mars Climate Orbiter, and Beagle-2 in 2003.

Oh, and also: Phobos is hollow, and is actually a spacecraft launched in 1876 that is peopled by aliens whose job is to monitor what we're up to here on Earth.

By this time, you're probably wondering who dreamed all of this up.  It will come as no surprise to hear that this is the brainchild of: Richard C. Hoagland.

Yes, Hoagland again, he of the Face on Mars, the faking of the Moon landing, hyperdimensional super-energy inside the dormant volcano Mauna Loa, the crop circles on Saturn, NASA being a thinly-disguised cult that worships the Egyptian god Osiris, and the idea that the universe is being controlled by a Giant Radioactive Bunny from the Andromeda Galaxy.  Okay, I made the last one up, but it would be hard to tell, frankly, because a lot of Hoagland's ideas leave me thinking that where most people have a brain, he has a half pound of Malt-o-Meal.

So, anyway, given Hoagland's track record I'm voting for the "big boulder" hypothesis regarding the Monolith on Phobos, boring as that may be.  But this isn't the only news from the skies -- we also should mention the claim last week, by Russian astronomer Sergey Smirnov, that the aliens aren't landing on Earth and making contact because they think we're "childish idiots."

"They don’t really like the way we are polluting our planet," Smirnov told reporters.  "Obviously, they warned all the space inhabitants to avoid contacts with the Earth, because our civilization is dangerous and all the secrets they might reveal to us will be used for constructing a new super bomb or poison."

So, basically, we're sort of the interstellar version of the creepy guy on the subway who hasn't bathed in weeks and looks like he might mug you if you get too close.

Anyhow, that's our news from the world of space research.  And maybe Smirnov's right; perhaps the take-home message is that it really would be better if we just stuck around on Earth until we learned how to clean up our act, both literally and figuratively.  This goes double if Hoagland is right about what's on Phobos.  After all, look at all the trouble the guys in 2001 got into when they started investigating the monolith.  Their computer went bonkers, a bunch of them died, and one of them got turned into an Enormous Floating Space Baby.  And lord knows, we wouldn't want that to happen.

Life Vessels and faith healers

I'm often asked why I feel so passionately about critical thinking.  "Why," the question usually goes, "does it matter so much if people believe in crazy stuff?  How does a belief in astrology, crystal healing, Tarot cards, or whatever harm anyone?"

Two recent stories will illustrate that there can be a tremendous human cost to irrational thinking.

First, we have a story broken by Karen Stollznow of the James Randi Educational Foundation (read it here) regarding a quack cure called "The Life Vessel."  The purveyors of this useless piece of woo-woo  "alternative medicine" state on their website, "THE LIFE VESSEL is a patented non-invasive technology and technique by which Frequency, Vibration, Sound and Light Waves are applied to the human body in a resonate [sic] frequency, resulting in the body being able to perform its innate Natural Ability to Heal Itself."

Note the use of our favorite words "frequency," "vibration," and "resonate" (although I think they meant "resonant").  I'm surprised they didn't throw in "quantum" for good measure.  The machines are basically a bunch of light bulbs and speakers in a box; you climb into the box, and are exposed to light and sound, and voilà!  You're healed!  Now, fork over...

... $125 per session.

And these things are showing up in "alternative medicine clinics" all over the Midwest.  An investigative reporter working for the James Randi Foundation posed as a potential client, claiming to speak on behalf of her ill mother, found that the practitioners of this foolishness claimed it could cure ovarian cancer!

How many people are forgoing medical treatment for serious conditions to pay $125 for the privilege of spending a half-hour in a box with some light bulbs?  And yet when the CBS station in Denver did an exposé regarding the practice, people came howling out of the woodwork claiming that the treatments work -- logic and the placebo effect be damned.

Then, out of South Africa we have this story, in which a popular "faith healer" presided over an event in which one man died and sixteen were hospitalized.

Brother Chris Oyakhilome, a Nigerian pastor, stages something he calls the "Higher Life Conference" at venues all over the world, attracting huge crowds and raking in money.  He has supposedly made paralyzed individuals walk, cured terminal illnesses, and performed other miracles.  And last week, he was doing his dog-and-pony show in Cape Town, South Africa, to a crowd of 150,000.

I guess the miracle pipeline was down for repairs that night, because one man collapsed from renal failure and later died, and thirty had to seek treatment at a local medical center.  Sixteen were sent from there directly to a hospital.  "Some of them had traveled long distances to get there, they had ongoing medical issues and were in a lot of pain," Dr. Wayne Smith, the doctor in charge of the emergency room, stated.

What harm if people believe in ignorant superstitions?  A lot.  Sometimes a fatal dose of harm.  Had the gentleman who died in Cape Town last week gone to a hospital directly, instead of trying to get Brother Chris to heal him through miraculous means, it's possible that he could have received treatment and might still be alive.  But no doubt Brother Chris would rationalize the man's death as being "god's will."

Sorry, I don't see it that way.  People like Brother Chris and the purveyors of the Life Vessel are charlatans and frauds.  They are making claims that are factually untrue, and are harming people in the process.  And as there seems to be no particular will on the part of governments to institute legal proceedings in these cases, the only alternative is to educate the populace in how to think critically -- and put these hoaxers out of a job.

The monster hunters and the Tennessee anti-evolution bill

There are two stories in the news that are interesting not only on their own merits, but especially in juxtaposition.

The first comes out of the world of cryptozoology, where Dr. Karl Shuker has announced the birth of a new peer-reviewed cryptozoological journal, The Journal of Cryptozoology.  (Read about it here.)  My first thought, being rather a cynic regarding human credulousness, was that it was going to be the Sasquatch hunter's answer to Fate or UFO Digest, but I'm pleased to state for the record that I was wrong.  When they say "peer-reviewed," they mean it -- and the group of people who make up the review board for submissions is no bunch of MonsterQuest rejects, it is a prestigious, highly educated group of renowned zoologists and paleontologists.

So they're doing this thing the right way.  As I've long said, my position as a skeptic does not mean that I don't believe in Bigfoot; it means that I'm withholding judgment until I have evidence.  There's nothing scientifically impossible about many of the claims of cryptozoology buffs, and there have been numerous examples of species long thought extinct being found, alive and well.  What's generally lacking is hard data, something that an unbiased scientist would accept as convincing.  And it seems to me that this review board is amply qualified to make that determination.  It's pretty clear that they don't have a dog in this race -- they're there to sift through the data and publish only those papers that meet a minimum standard for scientific validity.  And that's just as it should be.

So watch for The Journal of Cryptozoology.  It looks like the people in charge have exactly the skeptical approach that has been largely missing from discussions of this subject.

Which is more than I can say for the legislature of the state of Tennessee, which on Monday passed a bill (HB 368) by a margin of 24-8.  (Read about it here.)  Sponsored by Republican Bo Watson, the bill “provides guidelines for teachers answering students’ questions about evolution, global warming and other scientific subjects,” specifically encouraging teachers to "teach the weaknesses" of these "controversial scientific theories."

Well.  As I've said so many times that I'm beginning to feel like I should just post it as a banner headline on the top of this blog, THERE IS NO CONTROVERSY AMONGST SCIENTISTS REGARDING EVOLUTION.  And damn little about global warming.  The evolutionary model is no more subject to "weaknesses" than is the atomic theory, the theory of gravitation, or the theory of electromagnetism.  As far as global warming -- there is no doubt any more that the world is warming up; the only question is to what extent that warm-up is due to human production of carbon dioxide.

As always, this bill is just a transparent attempt to introduce a political or a religious agenda (and increasingly, those are fusing into one thing) into the sphere of governmental oversight of education policy.  It has nothing, nothing whatsoever, to do with science per se -- with the world of rational, critical evaluation of the evidence.  No one who starts from an unbiased position could fail to be swayed by the mountain of evidence supporting the evolutionary model, and in fact we know a great deal more about the mechanisms involved in evolution than we do about those involved in gravitation.

See why I found the linking of those stories wryly amusing?  It's a crazy old world when the people who are investigating Bigfoot and El Chupacabra understand the principles of scientific induction better than those who are entrusted with the welfare and education of our children.  And to the Tennessee legislators who voted for this bill; if you want a fine example of how to keep ignorant superstition and confirmation bias out of the realm of science, you might want to learn a thing or two from the Monster Hunters.