Ketchum study redux, and why peer review isn't a conspiracy

Well, the peer review is complete on Melba Ketchum's paper claiming she had isolated Bigfoot DNA, and the verdict is:

Fail.  [Source]

No details were released on why the paper failed to pass peer review, but almost certainly it is for the same reason that all failed papers are rejected; flaws in the methodology, data, or inferences, or all three.  The peer review process is there to keep scientists honest; all papers have to be evaluated line-by-line by other scientists in the same field, to make certain that everything is what it seems to be.  Now, to be sure there have been times that flawed papers have slipped through.  Scientists, after all, are only human, and can miss things, make assumptions, make outright mistakes.  But as a process, peer review works pretty damn well at winnowing the grain from the chaff.

Of course, that's not how a lot of Bigfoot enthusiasts see it.  The first to respond was Ketchum's ally, Russian cryptozoologist Igor Burtsev (this is long, but worth reading):

We waited a couple of years the scientific publication by Dr. Melba Ketchum. But scientific magazines refuse to publish her manuscript which deserves to be published. And I want to remind some facts of the destiny of scholars in our field.

Before the First World War our zoologist Vitaly Khahlov described the creature, named it Primihomo asiaticus. He send his scientific report very circumstantial, thorough to the Russian Academy of Sciences. And what? The report was put into the box, and had stayed there till 1959, about half of century. Until Dr. Porshnev found it and published…

I don’t want the new discovery (not the first one, but the next one) to wait for another half a century to be recognised by haughty official scientific establishment!

That is why I broke the tradition, did not let this achievement to wait for near half a century to be recognised. No matter of the publication in the scientific magazine, people should know NOW, what bigfoot/sasquatch is...

Yes, the paper of Dr Ketchum is under reviewing. And it is worth to be published. Just the situation now remindes [sic] me the war between North and South in the beginning of USA history… There are a lot of her supporters as well as a lot of her opponents and even some enemies…

The problem is that some people absolutize the science. Unfortunately science now is too conservative. One third of the population of the USA believes in BFs existing, but academic science even does not want to recognize the problem of their existing or not, just rejecting to discuss this question. In such a condition this subject is under discussion of the broad public. We can’t wait decades when scientists start to study this problem, forest people need to be protect now, not after half a century, when science wakes up.

Re the paper: the reviewed journals in the US refused to publish the paper. That is why Dr Ketchum has sent it to me to arrange publishing in any Russian reviewed journal. And I showed to our geneticists and understood that it was a serious work. I gave it up to the journal, now it’s under reviewing.

Anyway, I informed public about the results of the study. The public waited for this info for more than a year, a lot of rumors were spreading around. And the public has the right to know it nevertheless “science” says about it.

And this was mild when compared with the reaction from the cryptozoological wing of the blogosphere.  Science, it's claimed, is one vast conspiracy, where the scientists who are in the Inner Circles suppress good science that is outside of the current paradigm.  "Smash the heretics!" is, apparently, the battle cry of scientists in general, and peer review boards in particular.  Nothing must be allowed to run against the current model -- and the existence of Sasquatch would overturn everything.  So, at all costs, scientists must squelch any paper that tries to claim that Bigfoot exists.

Reading all of this, my reaction is: do you people actually know any working scientists?  Because it sure as hell sounds like you've never met one.

First of all, the claim that the scientists themselves would squash a legitimate claim solely because it runs counter to the current paradigm is absurd.  In fact, the opposite is true -- the scientists I know are actively looking for new, undiscovered features of our universe to explain.  That's how careers are made!  No working scientist I've ever run into does his/her work with the goal of simply reinforcing the preexisting edifice.  As Neil DeGrasse Tyson put it, "If you're not at the drawing board, you're not doing science.  You're doing something else."  Can you imagine how many papers, grants, and projects would come out of studying a newly-discovered proto-hominid, especially one that in all likelihood would be the nearest living relative of Homo sapiens?  Do you seriously think that the world's evolutionary biologists and primatologists would try to suppress such a discovery just because they're so happy with what they're already doing?

Second, remember where the supposed "scientific edifice" came from.  Virtually all of the pieces of the main scientific model in any field you choose came from someone overturning the previous model.  Consider why names like Darwin, Mendel, Einstein, and Newton are household words.  In each case, it's because they did the scientific version of tearing the house down -- and then rebuilding it from the ground up.  Significantly, though, none of the giants of scientific discovery did so by playing outside the rules.  They used data and the process of scientific induction to show us that the way we were looking at things was wrong (or at least incomplete).  Scientists are not ignorant about their own history -- and the vast majority of them would be delighted to be the next Einstein of their field.

Third, and more specific to the case of Bigfoot; even if there was some sort of grand conspiracy amongst scientists to Protect the Dominant Paradigm, why would Bigfoot represent such a threat?  As I have said more than once in this blog: new species are discovered daily.  There is nothing particularly earthshattering about the idea that one of those as-yet undiscovered species is a near relative of ours.  If such a creature were proven to exist, it would be cool; as I mentioned earlier, my guess is that the zoologists would be elbowing each other out of the way to get dibs on studying it first, not running the other way shouting "la-la-la-la-la, not listening."  But as woo-woo claims go, Bigfoot is the one that would cause the least revision to our current scientific view of the world.  It would add a new branch to the primate tree; it would require some revisiting of humanity's evolutionary descent.  And that's all.  Proof of just about any other claim of this sort -- UFOs, ghosts, telepathy, even the Loch Ness Monster -- would force a far greater revision of our current understanding of natural processes.

Anyhow, I'd like to think that this is the last we'll hear from Ketchum et al.  Whether Bigfoot is out there remains to be seen, but apparently the Ketchum study isn't going to be the one to prove it, so it's to be hoped that they'll just bow out gracefully.  I know, unfortunately, that the conspiracy theorists won't do likewise.  They never run out of energy, more's the pity.

Acupuncture + biophotons = "colorpuncture"

Acupuncture is one of those "alternative medicine" treatments that has long seemed to me to live in that gray area between scientific soundness and woo-woo quackery.  It has a lot of woo-woo characteristics; all manner of goofy explanations about why it works (qi and chakras and energy meridians), and that mystical haze that always seems to surround something that comes from China.  However, enough friends of mine (of the non-woo-woo variety) have tried it, with positive results, that it's always made me wonder if the treatment itself might be beneficial, even though the explanations were incorrect -- in much the same way that medicinal plants were used to treat disease, and were thought to be inhabited by the spirit of healing magic, long before pharmacological chemistry was a science.

Just yesterday, however, I came across an excellent, and well-researched (and multiply-sourced) medical science blog, Respectful Insolence, that did a piece four years ago (here), that takes acupuncture's claims and evidence apart at the seams.  It particularly attacks the so-called scientific studies of acupuncture, citing major methodological flaws that render the studies that found positive results invalid.  Whether or not you are a believer in acupuncture, it's an interesting read (and I'm definitely going to put Respectful Insolence in my blog feed).

In any case, all of that is just a lead-in to what I wanted to write about today.  Today's topic is about a new therapy that grew out of acupuncture, one that was developed because you can't undergo acupuncture without letting yourself get stuck by needles.  And a lot of people are afraid of needles.  So practitioners gave a lot of thought to how you could somehow achieve the same thing -- stimulating the qi and jump-starting your energy meridians, or whatever the hell it's supposed to accomplish -- without punching the patient full of tiny holes.

Enter "colorpuncture."

Interestingly, from what I've read about it, "colorpuncture" has been around for a while.  First proposed in 1988 by a German woo-woo named Peter Mandel, it combined the ideas of acupuncture with the ideas of Fritz-Albert Popp.  Popp is a German biophysicist who believes, despite a rather unfortunate lack of evidence, that cells in living organisms communicate via "biophotons."  So, Mandel's plan: combine an alternative medical technique that is questionable at best (acupuncture) with a hypothesis that seems to be complete nonsense (biophotons), and use that as the basis of a new treatment modality.

You'd think that Mandel would be aware that the more ridiculous ideas you incorporate into your theory, the more ridiculous it becomes, but evidently that line of reasoning escaped him somehow.

So, in "colorpuncture," rather than having the practitioner stick you with a lot of nasty needles, all (s)he does is point a little beam of colored light at the correct spot on your skin, and that stimulates the qi (or whatever).  Or maybe your "biophotons" get all excited and happy.  Who the hell knows?  All of the sites I looked at spent so much time blathering on about energy meridians and vibrational frequencies that it was impossible to determine what they actually are claiming is happening in your body.  One of the funny things I read about "colorpuncture" is that "warm" colors such as red, orange, and yellow are supposed to increase your "energy flow," whereas "cool" colors such as green, blue, and violet are supposed to decrease it.  Why is this funny?  Because as you go up the spectrum from red to violet, the frequency of the light, and thus its energy, actually increases -- violet light is considerably more energetic than red light is.  But there never was any real science behind this, so why start now?

In any case, it took a while for "colorpuncture" to catch on after Mandel had his big idea back in 1988.  But apparently it's really made a jump into the woo-woo scene recently -- and given the hunger people have for "alternative treatments" that don't require a visit to an actual, trained doctor, I suspect this one is going to be big.

Interestingly, there are plenty of reputable studies that have looked into the effects of light on human physiology -- take a look at this one, done at MIT (here) and this one, from Harvard School of Medicine (here), for example.  Most of them have looked into the effects of light on human circadian rhythms -- the sleep cycle, for example.  (Reading these papers made me wonder how all of our artificial lighting is affecting our physiology, especially apropos of the entrainment of our biological cycles.)

But "colorpuncture?"  Not a single peer-reviewed study that I could find.  I suspect that the practitioners of this dubious art would claim that this is due to the closed-mindedness of scientific researchers and peer review boards, but come on -- if acupuncture, which at least involves something entering the body, can't prove any therapeutic results beyond the placebo effect, "colorpuncture" doesn't have a prayer.

At least one thing, however, is in its favor; no one ever got a blood-borne disease from a little colored flashlight.  So I suppose that medical science's first rule -- "do no harm" -- is being followed, at least as long as you're not counting your pocketbook.

Alien abduction insurance policies

Looking a holiday gift for the woo-woo in your life that has everything?

Considering purchasing something truly useful for your friend: Alien Abduction Insurance.

I'm not making this up.  British Insurance of Colchester, Essex, England has policies available for £100 per year for £1,000,000 of coverage.  (This is the same company that insured three sisters in Inverness, Scotland in 2006 against a virgin birth; evidently the three were afraid that one of them might be responsible for the Second Coming of Christ.)  Several American companies offer policies for similar rate/payout ratios.  It's reputed that noted wingnut Shirley MacLaine has purchased such a policy, although if she did get abducted a lot of the skeptics I know would be willing to pay the aliens to keep her.

If that's a little expensive for your tastes, a Florida insurance company, the St. Lawrence Agency, will send you a handsome certificate certifying your coverage of $10 million for a one-time payment of only $7.95.  Not only are you insured against alien abduction by this policy, your outpatient medical expenses (for recovering from the effects of the abduction) are covered, and you are guaranteed double indemnity if your visit to the spacecraft resulted in any half-human, half-alien children, or if (heaven forbid) the aliens come back insisting on conjugal visits.

While the St. Lawrence Agency's offer is clearly meant as a joke, the rest of these guys are apparently serious.  In fact, the London brokerage Goodfellow Rebecca Ingrams Pearson once offered a policy (now discontinued) that was remarkably like the St. Lawrence Agency one, with the addition that men could also insure themselves against impregnation -- because, after all, you never know what those crafty aliens might be capable of.  And the GRIP policy was entirely legally binding and authentic.  Which brings up a few questions:

First:  Are the people who purchase these policies insane?  Or what?

Second, this seems like an awfully good deal for the insurance company, doesn't it?  You pay them $100/year for your million-dollar coverage, and in return, they do... nothing.  If you get abducted by aliens, you would have to prove to the insurance company that it had happened in order to get a payout -- and consider the number of people who have successfully proved alien abductions thus far in the history of humanity (and that was when a million bucks wasn't on the line).

Third, I wonder how they calculated the premium?  Insurance companies hire people called actuaries, whose job it is to assess the overall risk of the company having to pay out, and then fix the premiums at a level that would allow the company to cover their expenses (including payouts) and still turn a profit.  So: the higher the risk of payout, the higher the premium.  That's why smokers pay more for life insurance, for example.  But how do you assess the risk for something that has never happened, and which (to all appearances) won't ever happen?  My guess is the actuaries just stayed up late one night discussing it, and after a few martinis they said, "Screw it, let's just charge 'em a hundred dollars yearly per million and call it good."

And last: what happens if the aliens decide not to return you to Earth?  Clearly you would be owed the payout, but you wouldn't be around to collect it.  This seems like an unfortunate loophole in the policy.  However, since it's unlikely that the aliens would honor Earthling currency, I don't suppose that having large quantities of dollars (or pounds, or euros, or whatever) would do you much good in any case, up there on the spacecraft.

So, there you are.  I'd go with the St. Lawrence Agency, myself.  It's cheaper, comes with a lovely certificate (suitable for framing), and seems to look at the whole thing in the proper light.  If anyone is looking for a gift for me for the holidays, let me just specify that I'd like my beneficiary to be my dog, Doolin.  It may seem harsh of me to bypass my wife, but I've long suspected that Doolin is an alien herself.  She is hands-down the weirdest dog I've ever known, and gives every evidence of being an extraterrestrial life form who is attempting to impersonate a dog and still can't quite manage to make it look authentic.  So it's only fitting that she should get the money.  I'm sure she'll share with Carol and our other dog, Grendel, although I suspect the cats will have to fend for themselves.

Psychics vs. psychologists

There's an interesting case being considered this week in Chesterfield County, Virginia.  [Source]

The county zoning laws require "fortunetellers" to practice their craft in a part of the county that is not, perhaps, very inviting -- an area that, in the words of the article in the Washington Post, is "populated by trailer parks, towing lots, lumber yards and utility service buildings."  A woman named Patricia Moore-King, who operates under the name "Psychic Sophie," challenged this law, and wanted to rent space in a building containing the offices of psychologists, licensed therapists, and so on.  The owners of the building refused, and Moore-King sued the owners and the county zoning board.  When the lawsuit went to court, US District Judge John Gibney sided with the defendants, saying that the laws were reasonable, and furthermore, that Moore-King's "practices are deceptive."

Moore-King, for her part, is challenging Gibney's decision in a federal appeals court.

So I took a look at Moore-King's website, to see what she's about.  First thing I noticed was that she calls herself "Legitimate-Accurate-Direct-Honest."  Second was that she charges $100/hour.  As far as her qualifications go:

My many years of study, application and/or teaching of metaphysical subjects, spirituality, and modalities include: Astrology, tarot cards, numerology, development of psychic abilities, psychometry, Reiki, natural healing, clairvoyance, telepathy, crystals, clairaudience, positive, spiritual healing energy and prayer, meditation, runes, chakras, clairsentience, auras, paranormal phenomena, parapsychology, metaphysics in general, dream interpretation, new age / Hermetic philosophy, palmistry, color, and Kabala / Kabbalah.

From her FAQ page, regarding how we should think about it if she gets an answer wrong in a reading:

Similarly, if your psychic provides an answer that seems out of perspective or unrelated to your question, it could, in fact, still be the answer! For example, if you were to say, “I want a relationship now”, you would expect your psychic to say who, what, where, etc in their response, but, what if your psychic’s intuition prompts him / her to ask, “Did you start a new job recently?” On the surface, this response is out of perspective, unrelated, and to your frustration, not directly answering your question, but what if this relationship you seek is found at your new job?

What she does when confronted by skeptics:

Since the... host pays for my psychic / tarot card readings, skeptics will try it as a lark. Usually these new encounters go very well; however, I remember one such man, whose initial behavior was quite belligerent and insulting at his approach. Almost taunting me, he made it very clear that he thought what I do is a joke and his sitting before me was for his amusement only.

When I told him that he was cheating on his wife and stealing from his business partner; his chin dropped to the floor as he looked nervously to the next table where his wife sat, fearful that she had overheard.

Well.  I think we've seen enough, haven't we?

To reiterate something I've said in this blog many times: I would not presume to say that psychic phenomena of various sorts are impossible.  However, after reading about, and seeing video recordings of, many (possibly hundreds) of alleged psychic phenomena, I have never seen a single one that was even moderately convincing.  Not only has every one fallen short of the evidence that most scientists would consider adequate, the amount of equivocation and rationalization that many psychics use leaves me with no other choice but to dismiss the claims as nonsense.  So, when Psychic Sophie gets it wrong, she actually got it right, it's just that you don't recognize it yet!  And if I come to her with a skeptical attitude, she'll announce publicly that I'm cheating on my wife!  (For heaven's sake, if she did that to me, I think my chin would drop to the floor, too, but not because what she's saying is true.)

A more interesting, and subtle question, has to to with the original problem -- should psychics be allowed to practice next door to psychologists?  It's not as easy to tease the two apart as you'd think.  Psychologists and psychiatrists are, for the most part, using scientifically supported modalities for helping their patients deal with mental/emotional issues; but I've seen more than one licensed psychologist or therapist slide over toward the middle of the spectrum -- for example, a therapist I took my son to when he was ten to help him deal with the frustration he was experiencing because of my divorce apparently also did, in addition to conventional therapy, "past-life regressions."  (Needless to say, I did not avail myself of this facet of her practice.)  Others I've seen combine reasonably reliable techniques (cognitive/behavioral therapy, psychodynamic therapy, interpersonal therapy) with chakra realignment, auras, crystals, astrology, and so on.  It's not just an either/or, unfortunately.

Judge Gibney was right, in my opinion, to relegate Psychic Sophie and others like her to a space well away from the offices of legitimate, licensed psychologists.  But applying that decision (should it stand in appeals court) might not, in practice, be so easy to do.  Woo-woo thinking is insidious, and slips in all too easily if we let it.  (Consider all of the homeopathic "remedies" on the shelves in reputable pharmacies, right next to the vitamin supplements and cold medicines.)  As usual, the best thing to do is to encourage critical thinking, and (especially) teach it in schools.  Armed with the tools of rationality, any potential clients of Psychic Sophie and her ilk will find better ways to solve their problems -- and she'll be out of a job.  No lawsuit necessary.

The crazy is strong with this one.

Here I am, waiting for the cataclysm that is supposed to happen in a little less than three weeks (I do so love a good apocalypse!), without realizing that something amazing is supposed to happen next week.  December is going to be so jam-packed, I just don't know if I can handle it.

I refer, of course, to 12/12/12.  At 12:12 (and 12 seconds).  Amazing things will happen.  Amazing things always happen when a human-designed, human-defined chronology hits some set of numbers that forms a pattern.  For example, I'm sure you all remember the chaos that ensued when my odometer hit "77,777" a couple of weeks ago.  I said, "Huh."  And then I kept on driving.  (I was a little upset when my car hit 66,666 miles, however.  I was expecting Satan to show up, and at least give me a certificate, or something, but nothing happened.)

So based upon my experience with the odometer, we should all brace ourselves for transformative events to occur next Wednesday at a little after noon.  (It is unclear which time zone we should be setting our clocks to, in order to be ready for said events, so I plan on being vigilant all day, or at least until I get bored.)

I found out about all of this in an acutely painful half-hour during which I read various posts on the site "Earth Keeper Chronicles."  This website has some of the most concentrated crazy I've ever seen.  Just consider some of the titles of the posts:

"Easter Island - Rapa Nui 144: The umbilical of the new Earth."
"Standing waves of the crystal vortex."
"Parallels of OmniEarth: The Kingdom of Fae"
"The Crystal-Electric-Auric as the manifold of power & auric effects of air travel"
"Arkansas: Quakes, grids, triple-date portals crysto coding the sun disc"
"Metatronic keys: The Mer-Ki-Va crystalline light body polarity clarification"

It's almost like someone took a bunch of woo-woo articles, shredded them, and then pulled out one word at a time at random and wrote them down.

And of course, I had to check out at least one of the actual posts, a move I now heartily regret because I hear that brain damage is irreversible.  The one I chose, for no very good reason, was "The ascension and the 144 - crystal grid."   Here are the opening paragraphs, just so you can get a flavor for what every post on this website is like:

The Crystalline Grid is the energetic lattice that covers our planet. It reflects and amplifies our ascending levels of consciousness. It is a crystalline 'light' matrix that was anchored in 1992, five years after the harmonic convergence. Although in place and functional, its total activation will involve 12 phases, with full resonant vibratory rate achieved on the 12-12-12 ...December 12, 2012.The 'triple' dates ( 01-01-01 thru 12-12-12) that occur uniquely for the next 12 years each carry numeric light codes that open & activate each of the 12 major pentacle facets of this amazing template.

Visualize the grid as a geodesic sphere, of pentagons and triangles, sparkling as a faceted, brilliant diamond. It is a seed crystal of new form, the double penta-dodecahedron. Its time has arrived, merkaba of Earthstar. The double penta dodecahedron has 144 facets, the number of Christ ascension. Each dodecahedron has 12 major pentacles with 60 facets, add the 12 truncated pentagons for 72, and double this for 144 !

The concept of planetary grids is not a new one. Plato theorized the concept as did the ancient Egyptians, Mayans and Hopi Indians. In a sense, grids are the template, the window 'program', if you will, that allows all life to accelerate in the graduated light format that is called the ascension.

If you will, the crystalline Ascension Grid, is 'Windows 2012' , and indeed, it is quite necessary for our ascension.

There is not one, but three grid templates surrounding our planet effecting human life. The three are separate, yet intricately related. The three become the one. The grids have separate functions relating individually to: (1) planetary gravitational field, (2) telluric electromagnetics, and (3) crystalline consciousness.

The Gravity grid is both within and on surface of the planet. It is anchored to the spinning crystalline core of the earth. It is in the form of a dodecahedron, a sphere with 12 facets. It is primarily rooted in the first three dimensions. The dodecahedron was the primary consciousness geometric of the planet from the time of the deluge of Atlantis, until the emergence of the icosahedron about 4,000 BC.

And this goes on for pages.  Basically every trope from every woo-woo website you've ever heard, blenderized and poured out, over and over and over.  It's kind of sad when a skeptic finds a website that badly needs debunking, and doesn't know where to start.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the website (and all of its publications) have been translated into Bulgarian, Dutch, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish.  Because obviously, we don't just want this nonsense to be available to English speakers only.  We've got to make sure that people in Bulgaria, for example, are as confused as we are.

Anyhow, I don't have much more to say about this one, except that I'm looking forward to next Wednesday, to see what happens when the last of the twelve "numeric light codes" opens up.  Given the amazing transformations we saw on 11/11/11, 10/10/10, and so on, I think we can count on its being a pretty stupendous day.  I'm gonna stock up on beer and potato chips.  I figure that even if nothing happens on the 12th, I can save it for the 21st, when the apocalypse is supposed to happen.  You can never have too much beer and potato chips during an apocalypse.
 

Vampires in Serbia, unicorns in North Korea

Today, we have two stories in from people who evidently need to review what the definition of "mythological creature" is.

First, from Serbia, we have news that the town council in Zarozje has issued a vampire alert, and has gone as far as to suggest that all residents hang garlic on their doors.  [Source]

Apparently the vampire in question is one Sava Savanovic, who in times past lived in a mill next to the Rogacica River.  Savanovic was reputed to drink the blood of people who came to use the mill to mill their grain, a move that you would think would have been bad for business.

Be that as it may, Savanovic eventually died, possibly of blood poisoning (ba-dum-bum-ksssh), and the mill was sold to the Jagodic family.  At first, they were afraid to use the place, for fear of disturbing the dead vampire (so we might also need to refresh them on the definition of "dead"), but soon realized the tourist potential of owning a mill that had vamipiric associations.  But they were afraid to do any renovation on the building itself, not wanting accidentally to uncover anything with fangs -- and now the roof has collapsed.  And this, local townsfolk believe, has pissed off Savanovic, and he's going to exact revenge by going around and drinking some more blood.

You'd think that local government officials would tell folks to take a chill pill, but no.  Zarozje mayor Miodrag Vujetic said, "People are worried, everybody knows the legend of this vampire and the thought that he is now homeless and looking for somewhere else and possibly other victims is terrifying people.  We are all frightened."  He also advised using garlic, resulting in a run on garlic sales in local markets, and added, "We have also reminded them to put a Holy Cross in every room in the house."

Well, that should take care of the problem, I'd think.  I'd hope that when a few weeks have gone by and Savanovic hasn't shown, and no one in Zarozje has been exsanguinated, everyone would heave a great big sigh of relief, have a good laugh at themselves, and say, "Wow, what goobers we've been, believing in vampires and all."  But it'll probably go more like the joke about the guy who, every time he went to a friend's house, would close his eyes, raise his hands, and chant, "May this house be safe from tigers."

After this happened several times, the friend finally said, "Look, you don't have to do that.  There aren't any tigers anywhere near here.  There's probably not a tiger within a thousand-mile radius of this house."

And the guy smiled knowingly, and said, "It really works, doesn't it?"


Then, from North Korea, we have a report that some "scientists" have discovered a secret burial ground... for a unicorn.  [Source]

One of their early kings, King Dongmyeong, who was also known as King Dongmyeongseongwang because "Dongmyeong" was thought to be too easy to pronounce, was supposed to have ridden on a unicorn.  And now the Korean Central News Agency, the official media outlet for the North Korean government, has "reconfirmed" that the burial site for King Dongmyeong's unicorn exists, in the capital city of Pyongyang.

They haven't released any photographs of bones, or (better yet) a skull with a horn.  Their proof, insofar as they've been willing to discuss it, consists solely of a claim that at the burial site, they found a marker that said, "Unicorn Lair."

Well, that proves it to me.

The problem, of course, is that the KCNA is kind of famous for making bizarre pronouncements.  Remember all the hoopla about earthquakes and weeping birds and atmospheric phenomena of various sorts when Kim Jong-Il died?  So it's not like they've established much of a reputation for sorting fact from fiction.

Oh, and there's also the thing about King Dongmyeong having not been born in the usual fashion, but having been hatched from an egg.

Anyhow.  We seem to have yet another example of people believing weird stuff based on essentially no evidence, something that has become sort of a theme on this blog.  I have to admit that it'd be nice to stop running into new examples of this phenomena.  Even though it would put me out of business, just having humanity be a little more rational would be a move in the right direction.  Now, excuse me while I go saddle up Pegasus for the flight to work.

Robertson vs. Ham vs. science

You know it's gonna be a surreal day when Pat Robertson starts making sense.

Yup.  The same guy who said that the Haitian earthquake and Hurricane Katrina were punishments sent by god because of voodoo curses, and Americans' acceptance of abortions and homosexuality, respectively.  The same guy who said that kids shouldn't go trick-or-treating, because Halloween candy had been cursed by witches.  The same guy who used to claim that he could leg-press a Volkswagen.

A couple of days ago, Robertson announced on his show, The 700 Club, that James Ussher, the 17th century clergyman who gave us our current scientifically accepted date of 4004 B.C. as the time of the creation of the universe as per the Book of Genesis, was just... wrong.  He was responding to a woman who had written in saying that her children were in danger of walking away from god because they were questioning the bible -- all because some lousy science teacher had told them about dinosaurs:  [Source]

Look, I know people will probably try to lynch me when I say this, but Bishop Ussher, God bless him, wasn't inspired by the Lord.  He said it all took six thousand years.  It just didn't.  You go back in time, you got radiocarbon dating, you got all of these things, and you've got the carcasses of dinosaurs, frozen in time up in the Dakotas, you've got Sue, that big... Tyrannosaurus Rex...  They're out there!  And so there was a time when there were these giant reptiles on the Earth, and it was before the time of the Bible, so don't try to cover it up and try to make like everything was six thousand years.  That's not the Bible, that's Bishop Ussher.  So... if you fight revealed science, you're going to lose your children.  I believe in telling it the way it was.

Predictably, the firestorm started immediately, with Ken Ham of the Creation Museum leading the fray.

"Not only do we have to work hard to not let our kids be led astray by the anti-God teaching of the secularists, we have to work hard to not let them be led astray by compromising church leaders like Pat Robertson," Ham said.  "Pat Robertson gives more fodder to the secularists.  We don't need enemies from without the church when we have such destructive teaching within the church.  I still shake my head at the number of church leaders who want to appease the secularists and accept their anti-God religion of millions of years and even molecules to man evolution.  Such leaders (including Pat Robertson) have a lot to answer to the Lord for one day.  Such leaders are guilty of putting stumbling blocks in the way of kids and adults in regards to believing God's Word and the gospel."

But despite the criticism of Ham and others, Pat Robertson's spokesperson announced, "Dr. Robertson stands by his words."

So.  Okay.  Is it too much to hope for that Pat Robertson has finally come to his senses?  Unfortunately, I think the answer is probably "yes," given that other broadcasts from The 700 Club this month have suggested that liberals "want death" because some of them support abortion and euthanasia, and that we atheists are trying to "steal Christmas" because we are "miserable and want to spread that misery around to others."  (As an aside, I don't know about you, but isn't the "war on Christmas" thing getting a bit old?  Most of the atheists I know give Christmas presents and attend Christmas parties, and many of them put up trees and lights and so on.  So for warriors, we're remarkably lazy, hedonistic ones.)

So I think that Robertson's momentary departure from the party line is only a glitch.  But still, it does give me hope.  If the obvious rationality of science can be evident, even through the fog of superstition, and even to a fire-breathing demagogue like Pat Robertson, maybe we rationalists have reason for optimism.