The crypto zoo

This morning I was perusing my usual round of woo-woo websites when I came across a story called "Is this the Ohio Grassman?"  It featured the following photograph:

Turns out some guys from The Appalachian Investigators of Mysterious Sightings recently caught the image on a game camera, and it became the subject of an episode of Destination America: Mountain Monsters.

Well, first, I'd never heard of the television series, which isn't all that odd, because (1) I don't watch television, and (2) new series about paranormal stuff crop up every week, sort of like crabgrass in my garden only less appealing.  But more surprising was that I hadn't heard of the Grassman either, despite my rather guilty fascination with cryptozoology since I was a teenager.

So I decided to do some research on the Grassman, which led me to his Wikipedia page, wherein I learned that the Grassman is basically a shaggy subspecies of Bigfoot that lives near Akron, Ohio, and whose "main food source is wheat grass" but who "also enjoys eating small dogs such as poodles."

I guess you have to get your protein somewhere.

So while I was on the Grassman's Wikipedia page, I scrolled down, and found a link that said "List of Cryptids."   Naturally, I had to go there, figuring that if I'd missed the Ohio Grassman I might have missed others.

Boy, did that turn out to be an understatement.

Turns out there's a whole petting zoo's worth of cryptids that I didn't know about.  Here's a sampler:

• The Adjule of North Africa, a giant type of wild dog
• The Agogwe of East Africa, a small bipedal forest hominin
• The Ahool of Indonesia, a giant flying pterodactyloid cryptid
• The Akkorokamul of Thailand, a giant squidlike thing (sort of a Southeast Asian Cthulhu clone)
• The Almas of the Caucasus Mountains, a Sasquatch sort
• The Altamahaha of Georgia (the American Georgia), an enormous river monster
• The Amomongo of the Philippines, a huge forest ape
• The Aswang of the Philippines, a vampiric shape-shifting beast
• The Arica Monster of Chile, a velociraptor
• The Ayia Napa Sea Monster of Cyprus, a sea serpent

I hadn't heard of any of those, and those are just the A's.  And each one has its own Wikipedia page, wherein you can find out about its habits, range, behavior, and natural history.  (I found it amusing that the "status" for each of these was listed as "unconfirmed."  Well, duh.  Once it's confirmed, it's no longer a "cryptid," just an "animal.")

All of this just highlights some things that I've noted before: 

(1) Humans have excellent imaginations. 

(2) It's easy to mistake one thing for another -- for example, a bat for a pterodactyl.  Especially at night, and especially when you've been drinking. 

(3) There are some odd critters out there, and it is possible that some of these things are real.  But to accept that, I would need better evidence than a blurry photograph.  I know how to take blurry photographs myself, and I know how easily they can be digitally manipulated -- i.e., faked.  However, it must be said that the sheer number of different cryptid claims is so high that it seems unlikely in the extreme that all, or even most, of them are true.

So, anyway, that's our cryptozoological report for the day, along with a suggestion of further reading.  If you go through all the Wikipedia links for all of the cryptids, it'll take you a while, so I suggest you get yourself a nice big cup of coffee and get right on that.   Let me know which ones strike your fancy -- there are some real contenders, here, such as the "Flatwoods Monster" of Braxton County, West Virginia, which is described as follows:

Most agree that it was at least 10 feet tall and that it had a red face which appeared to glow from within, and a green body. Witnesses described the creature's head as having bulging, non-human eyes and as either being shaped like a heart, or as having a large heart shaped cowling behind it. The creature's body was described as being man-shaped and clad in a dark pleated skirt; later described as being green. Some accounts record that the creature had no visible arms, while others describe it as having short, stubby arms; ending in long, claw-like fingers, which protruded from the front of its body.

I don't know how you can beat a ten-foot-tall red-faced bulgy-eyed monster with claws, wearing a pleated skirt.  But that's just me.

See the violence inherent in the system!

Yesterday I ran across an article on the bizarre website The Mind Unleashed that is mostly interesting for what it says about scientists.

Called "Suppressed Scientific Evidence Proves Free Energy Source Dating Back 25,000 Years," the majority of the article is just the usual tired old claptrap about pyramids concentrating Quantum Wave Frequency Vibration Oscillation Resonance Energies, or something like that.  As usual, it's hard to tell exactly what they are saying, because rigorous analysis is something woo-woos avoid like the plague.  We're not given any actual evidence, of course; we're just treated to passages like this one:

[Author Phillip Coppens said,] “The pyramids are proof that our ancestors knew and worked with an energy technology that we are now finally able to measure, but are still short of fully understanding.” Coppens along with Klaus Dona of Austria and dozens of speakers attended the International Conference Bosnia Pyramid in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina which is held annually to release findings to the public.

[Archaeologist Dr. Sam] Osmanagich has had a host of experts in various fields come to see his Bosnian pyramids, and measure anomalies associated with them. They have included the noted British scientist and inventor Harry Oldfield, who used a special camera system to photograph alleged electromagnetic (EM) waves in the vicinity of Visocica Hill.

So there's nothing really new here in terms of actual data.  But what caught my attention was the way the author claimed that scientists are suppressing this information, out of some sort of misplaced loyalty to the status quo:

Overwhelming evidence, supported by scientific research from all over the archaeological community proves that our recorded history is wrong concerning turn changes [sic] religion, science and academics... Prominent archaeologists have attempted smear campaigns on Dr. Osmanagich’s work out of fear of how the impact of his discoveries will make on their own work...

Is it possible that the fossil fuel based energy system we now rely on could have been prevented if inventor Nikola Tesla’s work on free energy hadn’t been suppressed? Why did the FBI seize his papers upon his death? Tesla’s (1856-1943) patented free energy methods were rejected due to their inability to be metered and monetized. “We urgently need to change our mistaken point of view that our ancestors were stupid and accept that they had an advanced understanding of the fabric of nature and the universe, just like Nikola Tesla, whose ideas were suppressed as they did not and do not fit in the reigning model,” states Phillip Coppens, author and investigative journalist.

My first thought upon reading this was: do you know any actual scientists?  Because it sure as hell sounds like you've never met one.

Let's consider the following scenario.  A physicist, working in a lab, runs an experiment and finds that her data seems to indicate that there are exceptions to the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics -- that you can, in fact, create energy from nothing.  Such a finding, if verified, would overturn all of physics as we know it.  So said physicist shows a few of her colleagues, the experiment is repeated, and lo and behold, it seems to be true.  What does she do?

1)  She writes a paper on it, urging other physicists to test her results and see if it can be explained.

2)  She doesn't tell anyone, because the Laws of Thermodynamics are laws, dammit.  You get in serious trouble for breaking laws.  Besides, we can't have any challenges to the pre-existing paradigm!  This is science!

I hope the answer is obvious.  If there really was evidence that any of the hitherto-accepted laws of physics were wrong, scientists would be trampling each other to death trying to get to the grant money first.  Doing groundbreaking research is how careers are made.  It's how Nobel Prizes are won.  The idea that scientists would avoid doing something edgy because they love the theories they already have is ridiculous.

Consider what happened when the scientists at CERN found what appeared to be a neutrino traveling faster than the speed of light.  Did they suppress the evidence, because (after all) you can't challenge Einstein?  Of course not.  They wrote a paper, issued a press release, and asked all of the qualified physicists in the world to try to explain the data.  As it turned out, the analysis seems to support a flaw in the data.  Einstein was vindicated again, not because anyone was engaged in a repressive campaign of Silence the Dissenters, but because the original analysis was wrong.

That's the problem here, isn't it?  There's no actual evidence that "Free Energy" exists (at least not in the sense that these people mean; "free energy," lower case, is a real scientific term, but it doesn't mean the something-for-nothing nonsense that the woo-woos are so fond of).  Throwing around Nikola Tesla's name isn't going to make these claims correct.  It's much easier to rant about a hidebound and oppressive scientific establishment than it is to do any actual science.  And as for the scientists who are criticizing the work of people like Sam Osmanagich as unscientific, hand-waving, poorly-executed rubbish, I'm sorry -- they're simply right.

Having your ideas criticized does not mean you're being repressed.  That's how science works.  And as for the researchers mentioned in this article, who claim that no one believes them -- if you can't deal with being challenged, with being asked for hard evidence for your claims, you're probably in the wrong field.

The grave's a fine and private place...

This morning we have a story in from the lovely country of Thailand, where a woman from Phuket wants someone to get rid of ghosts who insist on having sex in her house.

46-year-old Onanong Waltham made a public appeal for help at the Phuket Press Club last week.  Accompanied by her housemate, Sujitraporn Tephabutra, Ms. Waltham told the story of what she's been enduring from her horny spectral neighbors.

"I keep hearing moaning sounds in my house.  It sounds like people making love," she said.  "Also, late at night, my phone rings and I answer it, but all I hear is a man’s voice saying he wants to make love to me. When I call back the number, I get some guy in Rayong province."

Understandably perturbed by all of this, Ms. Waltham filed a complaint with the Chalong Police.  "They came to my house and even heard the same noises, but they couldn’t find where the sounds were coming from.  I don't know what to do."

Not knowing what to do didn't stop her from seeking out help from local woo-woos, however.  "I have even seen a mor doo [a local soothsayer] and a spirit medium for advice, but nothing seems to have helped. I now think that someone is using black magic on me," she said.  "If anyone thinks they can make the noises stop, please contact the Press Club at 076-244 047 or email phuketreporter@gmail.com."

Well, I must say that I've heard a lot of weird stories, but this is a new one.  While I've heard many claims of ghostly voices, and even listened to a few recordings alleged to be spectral speech (for the record, none of which convinced me), I've never heard of anyone complaining of ghosts making sex noises.  So I decided to Google "ghosts having sex" to see if I could find any other instances of phantoms fooling around.

This may have been a mistake.

Of course there are other instances of this.  Lots of them.  You'd think, after years of writing this blog, that I'd have figured out that if you come up with a ridiculous idea, so ridiculous that you think, "No one could possibly believe this," there will not only be people who believe it fervently, there will be a Facebook page devoted to it.  There will be a Wikipedia page on the topic.  There will be an entirely serious article by a "spiritual intuitive" that explores the question of why ghosts still, apparently, need to get off every once in a while.  There will be an interview with an Ohio woman who claims that not only has she seen ghosts having sex, she has the photographs to prove it.  There will be a pop star who will one-up that by saying that she has actually had sex with a ghost herself.  ("I don't know his name," she said.)  There will be a how-to page if you'd like to find out how to summon a ghost to have sex with.

All of this leaves me wanting to weep softly and bang my head on my desk.

I mean, really.  There's nothing whatsoever wrong with enjoying a nice roll in the hay.  I'm hardly a prude, or anything.  And if you believe in the afterlife, well, I guess there's also nothing wrong with some speculation regarding whether that particular part of life will continue once you've shuffled off this mortal coil.  But I have the feeling that for some of these folks, this speculation has crossed the line from idle curiosity to a mild mental illness.

The 17th century English poet Andrew Marvell wrote a lovely poem called "To His Coy Mistress," which was summed up by a friend of mine as (pardon the obscenity) "Life's short, let's fuck."  (It really is a beautiful poem, despite its being one long plea for a hot hook-up.)  In it, he penned the lines, "The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace."  I guess Marvell might have reconsidered his position had he met some of the people involved in the links I posted above.  If you're horny, maybe there's no rush.

Maybe there's a lot of time.  Maybe an eternity.

Or maybe these people are just loons.  I know that's my vote.

Grandpa the pig

It bears mention that having a Ph.D. (or other advanced credentials) is no guarantee against being a complete wingnut.  This topic comes up because of a website link sent to me by a regular reader of Skeptophilia that was authored by Eugene McCarthy, Ph.D. in genetics, and author of Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World.

It starts off reasonably enough; McCarthy describes the fact that, contrary to our perception of species as being little watertight compartments, hybridization (and thus gene flow between species) is rather common.  Not all hybrids are sterile, like the familiar example of the mule; a lot of them are back-fertile to either parental species (an example is the "Brewster's Warbler," which was once thought to be a separate species and is now known to be a hybrid between the Golden-winged and Blue-winged Warblers).

So McCarthy asks an interesting question: are humans a hybrid?  The answer, apparently, is yes; recent studies have shown that most human populations show the genetic signature of three ancestral populations -- modern humans, Neanderthals, and Denisovans.  (Biologists disagree, however, as to whether these three represent different species -- a distinction that, in reality, probably doesn't mean very much.  The concept of species is one of the hardest-to-pin-down terms in all of biological science.)

But, unfortunately, it isn't this intermixing between three proto-hominins that McCarthy is talking about.  He thinks we're a much more interesting hybrid than that.  He gives his evidence first: humans have low fertility, and males produce a great many abnormal sperm (kind of a surprise given our reproductive success -- you have to wonder, if this is true, how there can be seven billion of us).

What?  You want more evidence than that?  Sorry, that's it.  Guys produce lots of abnormal sperm, and allegedly we have low fertility.  So we're hybrids.  That's enough, right?

Of course right.  So now, if we're hybrids, we have to figure out which two species gave rise to humans.  One of them, McCarthy says, was clearly something like a chimp.  But he states, in all apparent seriousness, "Many characteristics that clearly distinguish humans from chimps have been noted by various authorities over the years."  Can't argue with that.  But then he goes right off the edge of the cliff:

One fact, however, suggests the need for an open mind: as it turns out, many features that distinguish humans from chimpanzees also distinguish them from all other primates. Features found in human beings, but not in other primates, cannot be accounted for by hybridization of a primate with some other primate. If hybridization is to explain such features, the cross will have to be between a chimpanzee and a nonprimate — an unusual, distant cross to create an unusual creature.

If this sets alarm bells off, good -- because this would require a fertile hybrid being produced from a mating of animals not just from two different genera, or two different families, but two different orders.  Entirely possible, McCarthy says, despite the fact that there is not a single example -- not one -- of an interordinal hybrid known from nature.  Anywhere.  That includes animals, plants, fungi, and so on.

Nevertheless, that doesn't stop McCarthy:

Looking at a subset of the listed traits [unique features of humans are listed in the sidebar on page two of his website; there are too many to list here], however, it's clear that the other parent in this hypothetical cross that produced the first human would be an intelligent animal with a protrusive, cartilaginous nose, a thick layer of subcutaneous fat, short digits, and a naked skin. It would be terrestrial, not arboreal, and adaptable to a wide range of foods and environments. 

So, let's not dillydally any more; if a chimp is one of our parental species, what's the other?

What is this other animal that has all these traits? The answer is Sus scrofa, the ordinary pig. What are we to think of this fact? If we conclude that pigs did in fact cross with apes to produce the human race, then an avalanche of old ideas must crash to the earth. But, of course, the usual response to any new perspective is "That can't be right, because I don't already believe it." This is the very response that many people had when Darwin first proposed that humans might be descended from apes, an idea that was perceived as ridiculous, or even as subversive and dangerous. And yet, today this exact viewpoint is widely entertained. Its wide acceptance can be attributed primarily to the established fact that humans hold many traits in common with primates. That's what made it convincing... Let us take it as our hypothesis, then, that humans are the product of ancient hybridization between pig and chimpanzee.

So, basically, the logic is, "people laughed at Darwin, and he turned out to be right, so if people laugh at me, I must be right?"

But I don't want to be accused of jumping to conclusions ("That can't be right, because I don't already believe it"), so I took what I think is a critical look at the list of allegedly unique features of humans -- ones that, in McCarthy's view, must have come from our other, non-primate parental species.  And most of them have to do with quantities and sizes -- "sparse" hair, "large amounts" of elastic fiber in the skin, "richly" vascularized dermis, "narrow" eye opening, "heavy" eyelashes, and so on.  Traits involving quantities and sizes are highly responsive to selective pressures, the idea being once you have genes for the production of a feature, it is relatively straightforward to evolve to produce more or less of it.

Of the features he claims are found only in humans and pigs, it appears that in several cases, he is simply wrong.  Take multipyramidal kidneys -- he is correct that only humans have this feature amongst primates, but it is hardly unique in the mammalian world.  Besides humans and pigs, elephants have multipyramidal kidneys, as do bears, rhinoceroses, bison, and "nearly all marine mammals," according to a paper by M. F. Williams (available here).  Williams' contention is that multipyramidal kidneys evolved in animals that lived in coastal or marine environments in order to deal with high levels of salt -- and that each of these lineages evolved it independently, as it represents a unique feature on separate, distantly related branches of the phylogenetic tree (evolutionary biologists call these features "apomorphies").

Then, of course, he has some things on the list of allegedly unique human characteristics that are simply weird.  "Particular about place of defecation?"  (Has he ever owned a cat?)  "Snuggling?"  "Extended male copulation time?"  "Good swimmer?"

I'm sorry, Dr. McCarthy, but I'm calling bullshit on this.

Now, please understand; it's not like I have any particular problem with our having a checkered ancestry.  I'm an evolutionary biologist by training, for cryin' in the sink, I know we're animals.  But the idea that Homo sapiens arose when a chimp had sex with a pig... that stretches credulity too far.

Even if you do have a Ph.D.

Human/alien sex and impossible blood types

As I have mentioned before, my commitment to a rationalist approach is not because I think that odd explanations are impossible.  Ockham's Razor, after all, is a rule of thumb, not an unbreakable law.  Sometimes nature is weird and messy; sometimes it is counterintuitive; sometimes the convoluted explanation turns out to be correct.

Still, it's frustrating to see the ease with which some people jump to a bizarre conclusion.  Witness the contention, currently making the round of social media such as Facebook, that you should have your blood type checked and do a little standard genetic analysis, because you may have an "impossible blood type" -- one that is impossible, given the blood types of your parents.

Which means that you were actually sired by an alien from another planet.

Okay, let's just step back from this claim for a moment.

First, here's a short statistical genetics lesson to refresh the basics with folks who may not remember high school biology too well.

Let's say we have a couple who has just conceived a baby.  The man is AB- and the woman O-.  The ABO antigen group and the Rh (negative or positive) antigen inherit independently, so we can consider them separately.  The fact that the man is AB and the woman O means that, given Mendel's Law of Inheritance, the baby will have gotten one allele from each parent.  The dad can pass on an A or a B (but not both); the mom can only pass on an O (O is recessive, so she has two copies of the O allele).  The baby therefore could have a blood type of A or B, and in fact has a 50% likelihood of one versus the other.  As the Rh negative allele is recessive, we know each parent has two copies of the Rh negative allele; the baby can only be Rh negative him (or her) self.  Thus, the baby could be A- or B-; all other blood types are impossible.

Recently, though, we have a claim spinning its way around the internet that there are folks out there who do have "impossible blood types" -- children with blood types that could not occur, according to standard statistical genetics, from the pair of parents who produced them.  And these children, the claim says, are the results of aliens abducting, and then impregnating, human women.

And my response is:  Really?

There are two much better explanations as to why a child may have an "impossible blood type" (or any other "impossible" combination of genetic traits) than assuming that the mother of the child was beamed up to a waiting spaceship to engage in some hot human/alien sex.

The first is that there is a perfectly natural, albeit rather peculiar, genetic explanation for the odd result.  I know of two genetic conditions that result in abnormal blood type inheritance -- Bombay syndrome (in which another gene "cancels" the blood type the child inherited, causing an aberrant type O) and cis-AB (in which because of an improper crossover event, the child inherits both the A and the B antigen from the same parent -- so the child is an AB regardless of what the other parent contributed).  Both of these conditions are rather rare, but each certainly gives a natural explanation for the odd results in the claim.

The other explanation is even more likely, but is one I hesitate to bring up -- and that is that the child might not be the biological offspring of that father.  Euphemistically-named "non-paternity events" -- cases where a child is not the biological offspring of the man who thinks he sired it -- are more common than you'd think.  Genetic testing in America, Canada, and western Europe give amazingly consistent results, averaging 1% of the children tested being the result of extramarital sex -- and that's excluding children who are adopted or who are known to be the product of a previous relationship.

So one child out of a hundred isn't the genetic offspring of the man who claims to have done the deed.  No aliens necessary, although an explanation from the mother may be.

So, anyhow, it's not that I think that aliens are impossible.  It's not even that I think that it's impossible that they've visited the Earth, although I do think it's unlikely.  Even more unlikely is that the aliens are so out-of-control horny that the first thing they do upon arrival is to look around for some human women to hook up with.  So as an explanation of why some children have unexpected blood types, it kind of sucks.  Why the people who made this claim -- and those who are now forwarding it endlessly around the internet -- think this makes better sense than some perfectly natural explanation, such as a genetic aberration or the baby being sired by the mailman -- makes no sense to me at all.  Unless, perhaps, these people would fancy having an illicit liaison with Mr. Spock themselves, and think that if they wish upon a star, their dream will come true.

The abominable cotton-polyester blend

So, a couple of days ago, in my post about how gays cause wildfires, I commented on how the biblical literalists seem to focus on specific commands from the Old Testament (such as the prohibition on homosexual acts) and ignore others entirely (such as the prohibition on eating shellfish).  I suggested that I might amuse myself that day by breaking some weird, arbitrary biblical commands, such as the prohibition against wearing clothing made of two different kinds of thread woven together, a command that was apparently so important that it was mentioned twice (Leviticus 19:19 and Deuteronomy 22:11).

Well, imagine my surprise when I found out that these verses have recently been the subject of an intense discussion on the Christianity subreddit.  I'm to be forgiven for not having seen it; I tend to avoid this subreddit, suspecting that even if I went there as a lurker, the more rabid members would somehow realize it, and shouts of "BURN THE UNBELIEVER!" would echo down the fiber optics cables of the internet.

But fortunately for me, a regular reader of Skeptophilia saw it and sent me the link.  And you should read the whole thread.  It's a doozy.

First, though, let's take a look at what the actual biblical passages say:

Leviticus 19:19:  "You are to keep My statutes. You shall not breed together two kinds of your cattle; you shall not sow your field with two kinds of seed, nor wear a garment upon you of two kinds of material mixed together."

Deuteronomy 22:11: "You shall not wear a material mixed of wool and linen together."

So, the second one seems only to be concerned with wool and linen, leaving you the option of a nice cotton-polyester blend, but the first one seems to indicate that this would be An Abomination In God's Eyes as well.

There's no mention of what the penalty is for all of this naughty stuff.  I'd imagine stoning to death, since that seems to be the penalty for damn near everything.  Maybe just flogging, especially if it's only socks or something.

Anyhow, this all seems pretty straightforward (albeit bizarre), so I was kind of confused when I saw that the title of the thread on the Christianity subreddit was "Help understanding Leviticus 19:19."  My general opinion is, if you need help understanding this passage, you probably would be out of your depth with Green Eggs and Ham.  It's not that hard, really.  Don't wear clothes made of two kinds of material.  End of story.

But I was wrong.  Here are some of the bits of commentary on the passage, as laid out by the readers of the Christianity subreddit:

Linen is a plant derivative, wool an animal derivative. And how we should not allow our nature to overcome our humanity is the basic message behind this commandment.

You have to look at it in historical context. Linen was often used back then for religious purposes (like curtains in the tabernacle, or the priest's garments, or the temple veil). Wool, on the other hand, was the more common fabric. This law is often taken as symbolism for mixing the secular with the sacred.

I would like to point out how there is much less resistance to taking this passage less literally than other parts of Leviticus. Coincidentally, 90% of the world is not fundamentally disgusted by the image of wool and linen being mixed. Hmmmm.

I watched a lecture that mentioned Jesus and the Mosaic laws(@ 21:00) just this afternoon. The presenter was making the case that Jesus must not have been clear on how/if the laws would have applied to gentiles, otherwise there wouldn't be so much debate about it now.

Mosaic law spoke to external behaviors. Jesus spoke to internal states of mind. It's why he was always going, "You have heard it said such and such, but I tell you some other thing." An exegesis of sorts...  This is a very utilitarian way to look at it. Sure, the "do not do such and such" seems like a wet paint sign at first, but when you understand that it speaks to the idea of thinking healthy vs. unhealthy thoughts, that really brings it all together. And it turns out it was for my benefit after all.

There are a lot of laws about not mixing different kinds of things to remind the Israelites that they're a particular people, called out to be different from everyone around them.

Sure, it's meant to be taken literally. The question that nobody ever asks, with regard to Leviticus, is by whom? Leviticus is the set of rules written for the priest class formed after the disaster at Sinai. The tribe of Levi was the only one to stand with Moses, so from then on all priests came from his tribe. Leviticus are the rules written to prevent those priests from falling into error. 

So, I'm reading through all of this, and I'm thinking; don't these people realize that all they're doing is taking the passage, and then making shit up?

If you read something in the bible you don't like, you rationalize it.  Or say "it had a historical context that doesn't apply now."  Or say it was meant for someone else.  Or say that Jesus superseded it.  Or whatever.  All of it just strikes me as special pleading; I want to be able to discriminate against gays and claim a biblical basis for it (after all, because some people find gays "fundamentally disgusting") but I still want to be able to eat my shrimp alfredo and roast pork.  So the parts I like are the inerrant word of god, and the parts I don't like are just some arbitrary rules that Jesus gave us a pass on anyhow.

It reminded me of a joke that was sent to me by a Jewish friend, regarding the kosher law.  Apparently God and Moses had a conversation on Mt. Sinai:

God:  And remember, Moses, in the laws of keeping Kosher, never cook a calf in its mother's milk. It is cruel.

Moses:  I see!  So what you are saying  is that we should never eat milk and meat together.

God:  No, what I'm saying is, never cook a calf in its mother's milk.  It is cruel.

Moses:  Oh, Lord forgive my ignorance! What you are really saying is we should wait six hours after eating meat to drink milk so the two are not in our stomachs, right?

God:  No, Moses, what I'm saying is, don't cook a calf in its mother's milk.

Moses:  Oh, Lord! Please don't strike me down for my stupidity! What you mean is we should have a separate set of dishes for milk and a separate set for meat and if we make a mistake we have to bury that dish in the dirt outside...

God:  Do whatever the fuck you want, Moses.

All of this is wryly funny in light of the latest intrusion of religion into American politics, in the person of California state senator Mimi Walters, who has just announced she is running for the House seat to be vacated by the retirement of Representative John Campbell.  [Source]  Walters' biggest financial backer is Fieldstead & Co., run by Christian reconstructionist and general wingnut Howard Fieldstead Ahmanson, who publicly advocated "total integration of biblical law into our lives."

Presumably, this "biblical law" also includes 1 Timothy 2:12:  "I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet."  So you have to wonder how Ms. Walters, should she be elected, will ever get anything done.  Which, honestly, might not be a bad thing.

The Vampire Beast of Bladenboro

So, today we're going to investigate a topic that I know is weighing heavily on all of your minds: is the Vampire Beast of North Carolina back?

Yesterday, in the delightfully wacky weird news outlet Who Forted?, writer Dana Matthews tells the tale of a bizarre beast that troubled the good citizens of Bladen County, North Carolina in 1953.  Matthews says, about the first round of attacks:

In 1953 the Bladenboro Newspaper covered a story about a strange creature that had blamed for the deaths of numerous dogs, draining them of their blood. Local eyewitnesses who spotted the beast claimed it possessed the body of a bear, the head of a cat, and that when it opened its mouth to growl it made the sound of a woman screaming.

The creature then proceeded to vanish for fifty years.  Attacks didn't begin again until 2003.  This makes you wonder what it was eating all that time, doesn't it?  Be that as it may, the second round of deaths sounded pretty much like the first:

The bizarre animal exsanguination began again in 2003, only this time it seemed the creature had broadened his horizons and was now killing in a 150-miles radius beyond Bladenboro.  During its second blood-run, the Vampire Beast of North Carolina was managing to slay even the bulkiest of Pit Bulls with ease and many Bladenboro residents claimed to have found strange tracks around their dead pets that even wildlife biologists couldn’t explain.

Pretty scary stuff.  So imagine the terror of the residents when, just last week, the Vampire Beast got hungry this time after only a ten-year hiatus, and it all started up again:

According to a report by paranormal investigator Thomas Byers, on June 15^th 2013, Bladenboro, NC resident Misty Turner and her son Tyler contacted local police after something visited their farm in the dead of night, killing three of their horses and a large Bull Mastiff dog. Misty’s son Tyler found the horses after the barking dog had alerted the family to the fact that something was skulking around the property. The dog continued to bark for quite some time, obsessed with the dense wooded area alongside the farm.

Arriving police and veterinarians were shocked to discover that the horses had died from very deep puncture wounds to the neck. Even more shocking was that it seemed that the purpose of the marks was to allow the blood to be drained from the animals. The horses were also reported to have been wet with sweat, almost as if they had been running hard to avoid whatever was chasing them down.

The following evening, much to the Turner’s display, their dog was also killed in the exact same fashion, with two puncture marks to the neck, found with its blood drained. Misty claims to have seen the thing that had killed her animals as it was running from the lifeless body of her pet. Her description of the creature matched the same eyewitness reports of the Vampire Beast reported in 1953.

We are also treated to an artist's rendition of the Vampire Beast, in case your imagination hadn't been sufficiently stirred by the eyewitness description:

I'm guessing that the bats are artistic license and don't actually follow the Vampire Beast around, but I could be wrong.

Well, no offense to the people of Bladenboro, but I tend to be doubtful about all of this.  The whole story -- reports of animal killings and exsanguination, strange wounds, unnamed veterinarians and wildlife biologists admitting bafflement, a mysterious beast that is supposedly responsible -- sounds much like the alleged depredations of El Chupacabra, coupled with all of the cattle mutilation stories you hear (variously attributed to satanists, aliens, or monsters).  And I suspect that if anyone really does do a thorough investigation, the whole thing won't hold water, at least not as an "unexplained monster attack."

The problem is that ordinary animal attacks often lead to rather oddball wounds.  A study done by the Washington County (Arkansas) Sheriff's Department, in response to claims of bizarre livestock mutilation, found the following [Source]:

They placed a dead cow in a field and had observers watch what happened over the next 48 hours. When they reported that bloating led to incision-like tears in the skin and that blowflies and maggots had cleaned out the soft tissue so that the carcass looked exactly like those that had been attributed to aliens or satanic cultists, they were generally ignored by the community of true believers.

Claims of exsanguination -- removal of all of the blood from a dead or dying animal -- have never been substantiated.  According to Benjamin Radford, whose book Tracking the Chupacabra: the Vampire Beast in Fact, Fiction, and Folklore was a finalist for the ForeWord Review Book of the Year and was called a "slam-dunk debunk" by The Skeptical Inquirer, the apparent exsanguination has a completely natural cause:

The apparent loss of blood could be explained by internal hemorrhaging and pooling of blood at the bottom of the corpse.  The attribution of the attacks on livestock to a vampiric entity can be explained by the puncture wounds resulting from the canine teeth left by most predators, who often instinctively go for the neck, according to taxidermist Jerry Ayer.

Put another way, once the heart stops pushing the blood around, the blood settles downward due to gravity, and the upper parts -- the parts immediately accessible to anyone investigating the case -- appear to be completely devoid of blood when cut open.

So, sorry to puncture your scary, monster-shaped balloon, but it looks like the Vampire Beast is just a plain old beast of some kind.  Not that this should go uninvestigated, mind you; if I had my horses killed by some large predatory animal, I'd want to do something about it.  Horses were attacked by rabid bobcats in Florida in 2010 and again in 2011 -- if I had to place a bet on what was responsible for the Bladenboro attacks, it'd be that.

Anyhow, that's our news from the cryptozoological world.  At least this story was more interesting that the latest from Melba Ketchum, who is once again blathering on about how she really did know what she was doing, there really is a Bigfoot, and all of the people who are criticizing her are big ol' poopyheads.  Given the choice, I'd rather face a Vampire Beast than a delusional geneticist any day of the week.