Cosmic infidelity

Here in the United States, we are all too aware that politicians can sometimes act in an erratic fashion.

Just recently, we had the candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia claim that you shouldn't do yoga, because you'll end up possessed by Satan; a state senator from Louisiana who asked in a public hearing why, if evolution is true, you don't see bacteria turning into humans; and a state representative from Iowa who claimed, in print, that we should follow the biblical rule that allows parents to execute rebellious children (although, in his defense, he did say that he thought that the instances where it was carried out should be "rare").  Just last year, the Republican candidates for Congress seemed to be in a heated competition to see who could make the most bizarre, offensive statement about women, with the odds-on favorite being Richard Mourdock of Indiana, who said that if a woman was raped and got pregnant, that was "something that God intended."  (Mourdock ended up losing to Joe Donnelly, who was able to keep his foot out of his mouth and won the general election to the Senate.)

So, we're no strangers to politicians who make fools of themselves, sometimes in very weird ways.  After all, Dan Quayle's vice presidency was one long derpfest, to the point that comedians and cartoonists went into a protracted period of mourning once he was no longer in office.  But no one here in the US, I think, can beat a British politician who has been in the news recently...

... for claiming that he had sex with an alien and fathered a hybrid child.

The Northern Echo has reported more than once on Simon Parkes of Stakesby, who serves on the Whitby Town Council, and who seems to have a screw loose even if you judge him by American standards.  Beginning with the fact that he claims to have been abducted by aliens, not once, but many times.

"The only thing I can remember after that is it saying to me you will never be hurt, your will never be harmed," Parkes claimed in an interview for an upcoming documentary called Confessions of an Alien Abductee.  "I think I am fairly clear in my head that I am being monitored [by aliens] very closely and if there is anything that’s seriously about to happen or does happen then I am fairly confident in my own mind that they will intervene, they have in the past."

Simon Parkes of Stakesby, communicating with the Mother Ship via interpretive dance

But it gets even more interesting, because Parkes doesn't just get to chat with the aliens, he gets to mate with them.

No, I am not making this up.  Apparently Parkes' interactions with extraterrestrials includes four-times-a-year jaunts up to a waiting Spacecraft of Love, where Parkes gets to engage in some serious bow-chicka-bow-wow with an alien woman named "the Cat Queen."

"My wife found out about it and was very unhappy, clearly," Parkes said.  "That caused a few problems, but it is not on a human level, so I don’t see it as wrong."

I think if I told my wife that I wouldn't be home for dinner because I was heading up to the spaceship to have sex with "the Cat Queen," she would react in a way that was significantly past "very unhappy."  I think she would call the men in the white lab jackets to come pick me up.

"Make sure you bring along your tranquilizer rifle," I can hear her say.  "I think you're gonna need it."

But of course, a general rule from biology is that sex leads to babies, and Parkes' liaison with "the Cat Queen" was no exception.  They have a hybrid child, Parkes said, whose name is "Zarka."

Oh, yeah, and Parkes' actual mother is a nine-foot-tall alien with green skin and eight fingers per hand.

Parkes as a child, interacting with Mom

What is astonishing about all of this is that nobody much seems to mind.  "Ha ha," they all seem to say, over there in Whitby.  "That Simon Parkes, he certainly is a character."  He apparently has been babbling about aliens for years, long before his election to the Town Council in 2012, and everyone pretty much shrugs it off.

So, anyhow, that's the news from the UK.  I must say, for the record, that I rather prefer their variety of wacko to ours.  Parkes seems harmless enough, and one article about him states that he is the "most active member of the Town Council," which is (after all) what he was elected for.  All in all, if you  have to choose between politicians who are crazy, dumb, or bigoted, go with crazy every time.

At least the crazy ones are kind of fun to watch, which is more than I can say for the dumb and bigoted types we seem to be dealing with over here on the other side of the Atlantic.

The highway to theocracy

Two stories popped up just in the last couple of days that have me shaking my head.

First, we have a story out of New York City, where the local Satanic Temple is trying to crowdsource a project to acquire funding that would allow them to be part of the state's Adopt-a-Highway program.  [Source]

The Church of Satan, whose actions in this regard are being chronicled by Spectacle Films, Inc. for a possible documentary, is soliciting donations through the crowdsourcing site Indiegogo.  (Here's a link to the donation site.)  According to the article linked above, written by Sarah Wilson of Illuminati conspiracy theory fame, the church claims to have innocent motives:

Why would the Satanic Temple wish to join the adopt-a-highway program? The group says that they would like to use the opportunity to enhance the public's understanding of Satanism, and hopefully gain a bit more acceptance within the community. The Satanic Temple would uphold the voluntary upkeep (including ridding the area of garbage) of a stretch of public highway for at least two years. They also plan to do a little landscaping as well.

In order to adopt their own piece of highway and maintain clean-up duties for the two years, the Temple must pay an estimated $10,000, which is why they are accepting donations by using the crowd-source funding option of indiegogo.com.

Of course, Wilson isn't buying that they're really just trying to do their part to care for the community:

If the group gains approval, the New York Department of Transportation will post the all-too-known blue-and-white sign acknowledging the adopting party (in which case, it would say Satanic Temple), and in the end, gain promotion for a group that is not readily embraced by the general public. Why? Because although the Satanic Temple hopes to use this action to spread their message of "Satanic civic pride and social responsibility," those associated with the Temple still believe in and worship Satan.

You should keep in mind, however, that Wilson is the same person who thought that Beyoncé made magical Illuminati signs at the Superbowl this year and that's why they had a power failure, so anything she claims should be taken with a grain of salt.  Be that as it may, she is undoubtedly correct that having signs that say "This section of highway has been adopted by THE CHURCH OF SATAN" isn't going to go down well with a good many people.  In fact, I can say with some certainty that 34% of Americans are going to take serious issue with it, which brings me to our second story.

A story in Huffington Post yesterday describes a YouGov Omnibus poll taken this spring in which a random sampling of Americans were asked two questions:

1) Would you support a measure that would make Christianity the official religion of your state?

2) Would you support a constitutional amendment that would make Christianity the official religion of the United States?

34% of the Americans polled answered yes to the first one, and 32% to the second.

"This was a national poll," writes the author of the article, Fred Rich.  "Imagine what the numbers must have been in Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma."

So, once again we have the mystifying desire on the part of one third of Americans to turn the United States into a theocracy.  Which, of course, makes it abundantly clear why this group is consistently the same bunch that howls about claims that Sharia law will be instituted in the United States, and are certainly the ones who would flip out if "Adopt-a-Highway: Satanic Temple of New York" signs appeared by the roadside.  The problem is not (in the first case) that people are using an antiquated book of bizarre, arbitrary, and inhumane rules to govern their behavior, nor (in the second) that some group of people who worship an almost certainly nonexistent being want a chance to throw that fact in the public's face.  No, the motivation is just fine with them.

The problem is that it isn't the right book of bizarre, arbitrary, and inhumane rules, and the right almost certainly nonexistent being.

Now, I'm not going to debate the second part; I've gone into the reasons for my atheism in enough detail here that anyone who is a regular reader will not need to be reminded in that regard.  But if you objected to the first statement -- that the Christian Bible is just as weird and bloodthirsty as the worst sections of the Qu'ran -- I would suggest that you that you haven't read it very carefully.  People like to quote the happy parts of the Bible, such as Matthew 19:14: "Jesus said, 'Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.'"  They conveniently forget Psalm 137:9:  "Blessed shall he be who takes your babies and dashes them against the rock!"  People who call the Muslims barbarians for stoning people for having sex outside of marriage forget how many offenses in the Bible called for stoning to death, including teenagers being rebellious (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) and gathering firewood on the Sabbath (Numbers 15:32-36).

Even people who are fond of using the bible to justify their hatred of gays and lesbians, who cite Leviticus 20:13 as their support -- "You shall not lie with a man as one does with a woman" -- conveniently don't mention that the next bit goes, "They are both to be put to death, and let their blood be on their own heads."

So, tell me honestly, those of you who would love to see the United States become a Christian theocracy; are you really eager to institute biblical rules for governing life?  I doubt seriously whether even the most devout Christians are "living biblically" right now.  If they were, they'd be in jail.

As far as I'm concerned, I have no problem with the Church of Satan adopting a highway in New York.  We've got too much damn litter and too few people who are willing to pick it up, and I don't see how it matters if it's picked up by someone who thinks it makes sense to worship a guy with horns and goats' feet.  If you think that the biblical God is somehow better than Satan, I suggest you go through your bible and do a body count -- count up the number of people killed by Satan and the number killed by God directly, or on his command.  One writer, with far more patience and time than I have, has combed the bible, and found that the count puts God in the lead, at God's 2,476,633 people murdered as compared to Satan's 10.  So if Satan wants to catch up, in the evil department, he'd best get busy.

Of course, in my opinion, they're both imaginary friends, but I suspect you knew I'd say that.  I guess the bottom line is that you need to be picking up trash for the right imaginary friend to get any kind of approval.

And to those of you who really think that a theocracy is the way to go, I suggest you look, honestly and impartially, at how such a method of governance has worked in places like Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Then go, and read your bible, and consider carefully what life would really be like if those rules were instituted, not just for true believers, but for everyone.  Consider what life was like when the religious leaders did run the government and the justice system, and created such wonderful institutions as the Inquisition and the Crusades.

If at that point you still tell me that we'd be better off having Christianity as the state religion, then I suspect that either (1) you're lying, or (2) you're batshit crazy.  And in neither case should we take what you say seriously.

The interstellar lighthouse

I must admit to having a fascination with aliens.

I recall being the tender age of five years old and sitting spellbound watching the impossibly ridiculous aliens on the television show Lost in Space -- and being only a couple of years older and being positively captivated by the marginally-less-ridiculous aliens on the original Star Trek.  Even now I still have a soft spot in my heart for bug-eyed little gray guys, and I have the posters on my classroom wall to prove it (including a replica of Fox Mulder's famous UFO poster with the caption "I Want To Believe").  I also once paid a visit to the International UFO Museum of Roswell, New Mexico, with interesting results:

So I suppose it's to be expected that I was pretty excited about a new project called "Lone Signal" that aims to transmit messages to nearby star systems with habitable planets.

Lone Signal says, on its home page, "At Lone Signal, we believe that crowdsourcing messaging to extraterrestrial intelligence (METI) is the ideal approach to establishing a stable, cohesive, and well-resourced interstellar beacon on Earth.  We invite you to join us in the first collective and continuous METI experiment in human history. Lone Signal allows anyone with Internet access to compose and transmit messages to strategically selected stellar systems."

You can send one Twitter-style 140-character message for free, and four additional ones for 99 cents.  The idea is then to use satellite equipment in Carmel Valley, California that Lone Signal's CEO, Jamie King, purchased, to send these messages to the star Gliese 526, which is 17 light years away and has a planet in the so-called "Goldilocks Zone" where the temperature is right to have water in its liquid form.

King is currently trying to raise enough money to buy additional satellite equipment -- and we're not just talking about a couple of dishes, here.  He wants to generate enough interest in his project to raise $100 million -- sufficient to turn the Earth into a "transmitting beacon," sending continuous signals to nearby stars that seem like good candidates for hosting intelligent life.  Creating an interstellar lighthouse, is what it amounts to.

I'm not entirely sure what I think about this.

First, on the positive side, there's the coolness factor.  The idea that we might be capable of sending a coordinated message to intelligent life elsewhere in the galaxy is nothing short of thrilling.  Ever since watching Captain Kirk interact with Balok and the Andorians and the Salt Vampire, I've lived in hope of one day finding out that we really aren't alone in the universe.  To me, finding unequivocal evidence of life on another planet would be just about the most exciting thing I can imagine, even if they don't turn out to have blue skin and antennae.

The problem, though, is that this message is going to be composed by... random humans.  And I hate to point it out, and I say this with all due affection (being a random human myself), but when you put something like this in the hands of average people, the results can be kind of... dumb.  For example, take a look at the next three messages queued up on Lone Signal's site:

"A dog can't get struck by lightning. you know why? 'Cause he's too close to the ground. See, lightning strikes tall things. Now if they were giraffes out there in the field, now then..."

"I'm not all bad but I'm a faithful sinner, might get lost but I'll be home for dinner."

"EELRIJUE."

Okay, right.  What?

I mean, come on, people.  Do you really want humanity to be the subject of a documentary on an alien world called The Derpinoids of Dumbass-3?

And of course, this opens up another, darker possibility, which is that if we do succeed in contacting extraterrestrial life, the results might be unfortunate for us.  No less a scientific luminary than Stephen Hawking weighed in on the possibilities three years ago.

"To my mathematical brain, the numbers alone make thinking about aliens perfectly rational," Hawking said, in an interview with The Sunday Times in 2010.  "The real challenge is working out what aliens might actually be like.  We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn't want to meet.  I imagine they might exist in massive ships, having used up all the resources from their home planet. Such advanced aliens would perhaps become nomads, looking to conquer and colonise whatever planets they can reach.  If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn't turn out very well for the American Indians."

So, that's a little off-putting.

The other inevitable downside is the time it's going to take.  Even if Gliese 526 has intelligent life, that are capable of receiving and interpreting Lone Signal's message, and are already able to send a response more or less immediately, it will take 34 years before we get it.  By that time I'll be... well, I'll be old.  Let's leave it at that.  A conversation that has a 34-year lag time between messages would be kind of... difficult:

Us:  "Hi Aliens."

<34 years elapse>

Them:  "Hi, how are you today?"

<another 34 years elapse>

Us:  "Oh, we're fine, how are you?  How's the weather where you are?"

<34 more years>

Them:  "Can't complain.  Sunny and warm here, just took the kids to the beach.  Little Billy got sand in all six of his eyes, can you imagine?  Kids, right?"

And so on.

Now, it's not that I'm actually against what Lone Signal is trying to accomplish, but it does seem like it has some pretty significant pitfalls.  Be that as it may, I hope Jamie King succeeds in his wild scheme.  It would be cool if we humans would finally do something with our money other than designing bigger and better ways of torturing and killing each other.

So I encourage you to donate to Lone Signal, and also to log in and post a message.  It's nice to see that there are still a few people who have their hearts and minds turned toward the stars.

But if you do decide to send a message to the aliens of Gliese 526, try to come up with something better than "EELRIJUE," okay?

News from the squatching world

I have two pieces of good news and one piece of bad news for any readers who are Bigfoot hunters.

Now, mind you, it's a job I wouldn't mind having myself, notwithstanding that to steal a line from Monty Python's Camel Spotters, we so far have acceptable hard evidence of nearly one Bigfoot.  But to a guy who almost didn't go to college because he wanted to go into the National Park Service training program, living your life outdoors with a backpack on doesn't seem like such a bad way to go.

So let's start with one piece of good news, which is that we have a new set of audio recordings to listen to.

Craig Woolheater, of Cryptomundo, posted yesterday a report and some audio clips from "Sasquatch Ontario."  The clips are well worth listening to, although they are a little creepy, what with the sound of rain falling in the background, and no video to go with it other than what your imagination comes up with.  "This is what you get with 8 months of habituation with a sasquatch," the text from Sasquatch Ontario reads.  "This is the result of dedication, perseverance and consistency.  As the PGF [the "Patterson-Gimlin film," one of the most famous video clips of a Bigfoot] has stood the test of time, so will this audio.  If there are any audio analysts who work with law enforcement whose word is relied upon for convictions, please contact us through our channel if interested in pursuing the truth of this matter.  Your cooperation is greatly appreciated."

Now, despite the fact that this audio is of a scariness level such that, if I were out in a tent alone in the wilderness and heard these noises, I would piss myself and then have an aneurysm, I must say that I'm not completely convinced that we're hearing Bigfoot.  To my ears, this could be Bigfoot, or it could equally easily be a guy out there saying "YARP" and "GRRROP" and sometimes "WOOOOO."  So as convincing evidence goes, I'm not sold, although (as always) I am happy to defer to anyone who can prove otherwise.

Now for the bad news.  One of the standard claims in the analysis of alleged Bigfootprints is that they show an apelike "midtarsal break" -- that the flexibility in the ligaments in ape feet cause the depression of the middle part of the foot, so that footprints show a ridge left behind where the foot flexed.  This, Sasquatch researchers claim, shows that the prints could not have been made by a human.

Unfortunately for this conjecture, some anthropologists checked out the feet of 398 visitors to the Boston Museum of Science, and found that 13% of them had the midtarsal break -- i.e., flexible, apelike feet.  This neatly punches a hole in the Sasquatch footprints theory and the creationist claim that we're not apes simultaneously, although it must be said that I'm a helluva lot happier about the second one than I am about the first.

So it's a bit of a rough go for the serious squatchers, such as Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, who made a lot out of this piece of evidence.  As Sharon Hill, over at the excellent site Doubtful News, put it, "[T]his puts Dr. Jeffrey Meldrum, Idaho State University professor and Bigfoot expert, in an interesting position.  He has stated, and published that Sasquatch/Bigfoot prints frequently show a mid-tarsal break and this is indicative of the prints NOT being human...  Meldrum has to revise his ideas now. This is how science works. What does this mean for Bigfoot evidence? Well, it weakens it just a bit more. After all these years, in normal science progress, the support for a theory should be getting better. We do not see that in Bigfoot research. The cards just continue to fall."

So that kind of sucks, for the squatching world.   But to end on a high note, figuratively if not literally, just last Friday we had news of a new squatching tool that all of you should purchase as soon as it's available.  Called SquatchIt, it is a "Sasquatch sound simulator" about which the press release boasts as follows:

SquatchIt has been scientifically designed to be the most accurate, powerful and loud Sasquatch call for use by Bigfoot finders, to scare friends on a camping trip, to heckle politicians and raise a ruckus in general.  It is loud and scary sounding and is sure to soil many pair of underwear on camping trips...  There are so many uses for SquatchIt from using it to round up the kids for dinner to scaring your friends to attracting the ultimate big game, Sasquatch himself!...  The SquatchIt call is a beautifully crafted piece made out of wood and plastic. The nose of the call is a plastic ribbed accordion like piece we refer to as a “gender bender” that allows the user to change the call pitch between higher tone feminine and low tone masculine mode allowing users to make the screaming sounds that many believe a Sasquatch would make if Bigfoot were proven to exist.

Well, I think this is just splendid, and I certainly will certainly buy one as soon as they're available.  After all, the alternative is to stand in the rain saying "YARP," and that doesn't sound like nearly as much fun.

Demon-B-Gon

I usually try not to spend much time on stories from people who are simply delusional, but this one was too good to pass up.

Paul Schroeder is a frequent writer for UFO Digest, which should put you on notice right from the get-go.  He made a brief appearance in Skeptophilia a couple of years ago, with a claim that a Reptilian had visited him in his shower, causing "unprovoked sexual urges and negative ideations."  But Schroeder hasn't made the pages of this blog with near the regularity of, say, Diane Tessman or Dirk VanderPloeg.

This time, though, Schroeder seems to have a winner, with a piece called "Self-help Against Demons."  In it, we learn how to detect a demonic presence (I wouldn't have thought it'd be that hard, what with the sulfur and brimstone smell, not to mention the appearance of a giant half-naked guy with wings), and also how to get rid of said demon once he shows up.

He starts off with a bang -- literally:

Lightning flashes in a thunderstorm, which hit trees and go into the ground, act as a food media, a power grid for demonics to utilize and to manifest.  When kaleidoscopic colors and animated figures storm your mind's eye, when you close your eyes to retire to sleep, you are with a demonic, standing gauntly by your bedside.

They use this animated psychic fascination to keep children awake all night, night after night, to weaken them towards jumping onto and then into, children's energies field.  Demons and other nasty spirits, often visit, but don't normally reside for long in our 3-D physical dimensional plane of existence.  Since demons do not have a corporeal, earthly form, it is very energy costly and quite difficult for them to wander freely, or to have their full destructive force, in our physical dimensional world.  But they CAN and DO hitchhike around, bound to human- others' energies.

So that's why horror movies usually seem to involve thunderstorms.  I'd wondered why, for example, evil ghosts always waited until night fell, and the storm started up, before appearing.  If what they're trying to do is terrify people, I've always thought it would be far more effective for a spirit to appear in broad daylight, right in the middle of a tenth-grade biology class, for example.

I know that's what I'm going to do, if I ever get to be a ghost.

Be that as it may, Schroeder tells us that it's easy to get rid of a demon, once it appears:

It is remarkably true, as is much, in wrongly scorned and forgotten legends, that ghosts and demons cannot cross a running stream.  Running water creates a subtle yet powerful electrical current, that will easily de-manifest them.  One beset with demons can easily surround one's feet with a running garden hose to break connections.  Underground streams, sewers, water mains, and below pavement conduits exist, and in much the same fashion, function as major obstacles to demonic motility and mobility.

Man, I bet Faust wishes he'd known that!  Of course, he lived in the days before garden hoses, so that might have been a problem.  But if running water is all it takes, I wonder if you could just pee on a demon?  If I were a demon, I'd find that highly discouraging.

In other good news, Schroeder tells us that demons can't stick around for long unless we let them:

(D)emons are vested with temporary powers to be used here - unless and until they can find a way to gather more energy.  For them, it is much as swimming is, for us; one can dive down deeply into the water and hold one's breath for some time...  After a short while, out of oxygen, we need to come back to "our world" breaking the water's surface.

It's the same for demons.

Demons "hold their breath"to come into our world for a time, but can't stay for long.  A major exception is similar to swimming.  Just as longer dives are enabled with breathing apparatus, a demonic can have longer stays in our existence if they have energy.

Given that there's not much we can do about lightning storms, we have to be careful about our own "negative energy," Schroeder says:

To keep demons from affecting you, control your energy.

Visualize that you have large extension (imagined) arms, that lightly brush your body's skin, from top to bottom and back again; this astral exercise changes the magnetic field of your body and affects a demon like a magnet affects iron filings on a sheet of paper, dislodging EMF connections.

Avoid anger and unlearn fear and remain calm as a heavy stone dropped into a deep lake; abandon resentments and grudges; let absolutely nothing ruffle your feathers.

Evil spirits need negative energy, so starve a demon of all negative energy, effectively suffocate it from this world, a diver with no oxygen.

Negative energy is the engine that makes it work.

Well, that seems like good advice for a variety of reasons, even if you don't weigh in "suffocating demons" with the rest.

So, anyhow, that's our self-help advice for the day.  Stay away from lightning strikes, always have your garden hose handy, and accentuate the positive.  Sure seems like an easier solution than the Catholic Church's answer, with all of the exorcism rituals, and having to remember to say "Vade retro Satana," and all that.

On the other hand, I think if a demon ever shows up in my house, I'm gonna just try peeing on him.  So be forewarned, Beelzebub.

Suing psychics for slander

Regular readers of Skeptophilia may recall that in June of last year, I wrote about an alleged psychic (at that time identified only by her nickname of "Angel") who had called the police in Liberty County, Texas, claiming that some folks living nearby had a mass grave on their property.  The police, instead of doing what I would have done (which is to hang up on her), went in to check the story out.

"Checking it out" turned out to be digging up the entire yard of the two who were accused, Joe Bankson and Gena Charlton.  After excavating their property with a backhoe, the police basically said, "Oh, all right, I guess there isn't a mass grave here after all," and left -- not, of course, repairing the damage.  By this time, the story had gotten out to the media, and Bankson and Charlton were subjected to taunts, scorn, and threats over their alleged role in the imaginary murders.

Well, Bankson and Charlton sued the county, several media outlets, and "Angel," and (although their suits against the county and the media were dismissed) just last week won an award from "Angel" -- whose real name is Presley Rhonda Gridley -- of nearly seven million dollars.

I don't know why the suits against the county and media were dismissed.  I can speculate that the reason may be that both the police, and the television stations and newspapers that covered the story, were "acting in good faith," pursuing a lead that seemed to have merit at the time.  I find this unfortunate, for two reasons.  First, there is a history of police turning to psychics to solve crimes -- most famously, in the case of Holly Bobo, a Tennessee woman who was abducted in 2011 and who is still missing.  I can say with some authority that there has never been a case where evidence gained through "psychic abilities" has turned out to be accurate or helpful.  It is reprehensible that the state of Texas is not holding the police department responsible for damaging two law-abiding citizens' reputations by acting on a "lead" that was obviously bogus.

Second, I doubt that Bankson and Charlton will ever see much of their seven million dollar award.  Presley Gridley is no Sylvia Browne, with deep pockets and a large bank account.  While it must be validating finally to have their defamation claims supported in a court of law, it would be nice if they were able to come out with something to show for the ordeal they've been through.  The situation might be different if the suits against the county and the media had been upheld -- Bankson and Charlton would have undoubtedly been more successful at collecting at least part of the award from them.

Still, it's to be hoped that this sends a message, both to "psychics" and to anyone in the media or in law enforcement who is inclined to take their ridiculous pronouncements as fact.  If you want to rip off the public by claiming you can read palms or divine with Tarot cards, or simply (as Gridley did) say you're receiving information from god and the angels, go ahead.  But be careful what you say to your clients, especially when it includes accusations that could be construed as slander.

And for cryin' in the sink, police agencies, let's be clear on what the word "evidence" means.  From Webster's: "evidence (n.) -- The available body of facts or information indicating whether a belief or proposition is true or valid."  Note the word "facts" in there -- i.e., not the delusional ravings of someone who thinks (s)he's getting information from the spirit world.  Hope that clarifies things for you.

Getting to the point

There is one alternative medicine modality that I've always been hesitant to criticize.  That hesitancy has come from the fact that it is widespread, so widespread that I know a dozen people who have used it and reported positive results.  Even though I could see no biologically sound reason why it would work the way its practitioners claimed, it's always seemed to me to fall into that gray area of "things that may work for some as-yet unknown reason."

That modality is acupuncture.  I get asked about it regularly, both in my Biology classes and in my Critical Thinking classes, and I've usually shrugged, and said, "Well, I don't believe in prana and chakras and the rest of it, but could acupuncture be triggering some positive response, in some way we have yet to elucidate?  Sure.  People used medicinal plants long before they understood pharmacology, and the fact that they attributed the plants' success at treating disease to good magic or benevolent spirits doesn't mean that the plants didn't work.  It could be the same here."

Well, I can't make that claim any more.

Just last week, David Colquhoun (University College of London) and Steven Novella (Yale School of Medicine) published a paper in Anesthesia & Analgesia (available here) that evaluates the results of every controlled study of acupuncture in the past ten years, and reaches the following conclusion:

The outcome of this research, we propose, is that the benefits of acupuncture, if any, are too small and too transient to be of any clinical significance.  It seems that acupuncture is little or no more than a theatrical placebo... 

The best controlled studies show a clear pattern – with acupuncture the outcome does not depend on needle location or even needle insertion. Since these variables are what define "acupuncture" the only sensible conclusion is that acupuncture does not work. Everything else is the expected noise of clinical trials, and this noise seems particularly high with acupuncture research. The most parsimonious conclusion is that with acupuncture there is no signal, only noise.

The interests of medicine would be best-served if we emulated the Chinese Emperor Dao Guang and issued an edict stating that acupuncture and moxibustion should no longer be used in clinical practice. 

I have to admit that when I read this paper, my first reaction was to wince.  Part of me, I suppose, really wanted acupuncture to work -- even if we had no idea how it worked, the idea that you could alleviate pain (or anxiety, or insomnia, or depression) simply by sticking someone with little needles seemed preferable to telling people that they simply had to live with chronic conditions if standard medical treatment failed.  But one of the harsher sides of the rationalist view is that you go wherever the evidence drives you, even if you don't want to.  And after reading the paper by Colquhoun and Novella, and taking a look at their sources, I am brought to the inescapable conclusion that they are correct.

It's frequently that way, though, isn't it?  I think most of us, even the most hard-nosed skeptics in the world, would be delighted if some of the wild things the woo-woos claim turned out to be true.  Being a biologist, I would be thrilled if there were surviving proto-hominids like Sasquatch or surviving dinosaurs like Nessie, Champ, Mokele-Mbembe, Kelpies, and the Bunyip.  A convincing demonstration of intelligent alien life would be about the coolest thing I can imagine.  Even the existence of an afterlife is something I'd be mighty happy about (as long as it wasn't the being-tortured-by-Satan-for-all-eternity variety).

But, as my grandma used to say, "Wishin' don't make it so."  And it appears that in the case of acupuncture, the Colquhoun/Novella study conclusively demonstrates that there's nothing much there besides the placebo effect -- sorry though I am to have to say so.

Of course, that doesn't mean that acupuncturists are going to go out of business any time soon.  There are still a lot of true believers out there, and they can pull in clients from odd sources, sometimes.  Just last week, the veterinarians at a Tel Aviv zoo decided to call in acupuncturists because their attempts to treat a chronic ear infection in one of the zoo animals had failed.  The patient?

A fourteen-year-old Sumatran tiger.

Now that's some conviction in your beliefs.  You think acupuncture works?  Here, go stick some needles in this live tiger.

Be that as it may, apparently they anesthetized the tiger beforehand (smart move), and the acupuncturists all survived unscathed.  No word yet on whether Kitty's ears have stopped hurting.  My guess, given the Colquhoun/Novella study, is no, since the placebo effect doesn't work too well on cats.

Although to be fair, judging by my success rate at giving pills to my own cats, traditional veterinary medicine generates its own, unique set of problems as well.