Rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's

A lot of what you hear talked about under the heading of "religious freedom" seems to me to boil down to "reasonable expectations of what a particular profession or institution's responsibilities are."

Take, for example, the kerfuffle last week over a Killeen, Texas public school administrator's choice to take down a poster of Linus (of Peanuts fame) that included the biblical quote he recites in A Charlie Brown Christmas: "For unto you is born this day in the city of David a savior which is Christ the Lord.  That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown."  Dedra Shannon, the school nurse who had put up the poster, said she was told "it had to come down because it might offend kids from other religions or those who do not have a religion" and that the administrator's decision was "a slap in the face of Christianity."

When I saw this posted on social media a few days ago, it was accompanied by a comment to the effect that diversity and tolerance are apparently all fine except when they apply to white Christians.  Todd Starnes, who wrote the Fox News article I linked above, clearly agrees.  "Those who holler about tolerance are the least tolerant of all," Starnes writes.  "Public schools are supposed to be in the education business and Ms. Shannon was simply educating students about the true meaning of Christmas."

My question is why on earth public schools should be in the role of teaching religion in the first place, except insofar as it has an impact on history and literature.  Imagine, for example, if a teacher decided to teach children the "true meaning of the holiness of the Qu'ran" and put "There is no god but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet" on the door of the classroom.  My guess is the same people who flipped out about the removal of the Linus poster would flip out in the other direction (and rightly so).

Schools are not in the business of religious instruction.  And why should they be?  Don't churchgoers get enough religious instruction in their churches?  You wouldn't go to the doctor's office and object when they didn't give you advice on your investments -- it's outside of the purview of their responsibilities.  Likewise, it's not the job of a public school to give students instruction about the "true meaning of Christmas."

Then we have the story about Linda Harvey, founder of Mission: America and host of a radio show of the same name, who lamented last week that she had nowhere to shop now that so many businesses have stood up for equal treatment of LGBT individuals.  Harvey said:

For any Christian who wants to spend hard-earned dollars with family-friendly, Christian-affirming retailers, restaurants and service providers, the list is growing shorter all the time.  I stopped shopping at Macy’s in 2011 after learning about the retailer’s grossly unjust policy against women. 

Macy’s management said ‘yes’ to a transsexual young man’s demand to change in the women’s dressing room and rejected a Christian employee’s attempt to block his inappropriate access, even firing her because of her principled actions...  Then there’s Target.  Where to start?  Selling ‘gay pride’ T-shirts a few years back was bad enough, but Target is now ‘proudly standing’ with homosexuals and cross-dressers who want to change America’s 1964 Civil Rights Act to add ‘sexual orientation’ and ‘gender identity’. 

Joining Target in supporting this anti-American, pro-deviance legislation are Amazon, General Mills, Google, Facebook, Paypal, Levi-Strauss and others.

Well, first, saying "I am not going to discriminate against LGBT people" is not synonymous with saying "I am anti-Christian."  No one at Target, or Macy's, or anywhere else is trying to convince anyone of anything except that you should buy what they're selling.  All they said is that they're going to make sure that the rights of their workers and customers are protected regardless of their sexual orientation.

So she, too, is expecting an institution to do something that's outside its purview -- expecting department stores to adhere to Christian values, as if retail outlets were branch offices of the local church.  The point is that the stores are saying they'll serve anyone; what Harvey wants is not only to follow her own code of ethics, but to mandate that everyone else does, too.

The same kind of thing applies to B&B and bakery owners who won't serve gays, and strict Catholic pharmacists who won't sell people birth control.  None of those people are in the business of dictating others' ethics and morals; they are in a service job and therefore should expect that under anti-discrimination statutes, they would be expected to serve any customer who comes in.  And in fact, a B&B owner, baker, or pharmacist who went into the business unaware that they would have customers who differed from them in terms of religion or sexual preference is, in a word, dumb.

C'mon, a pharmacist who didn't know he was going to be expected to sell birth control pills and condoms?  Really?

But all of this is cast as part of the more general War on Christianity, as if telling people "you can't act in a bigoted fashion" is some kind of infringement of their rights to practice their religion.

It comes down to the general rule that you are completely free to attend the church of your choice and adhere to any and all rules the religion requires, but you are not free to expect that businesses and public institutions adhere to any of it.  So honestly, Linda Harvey is completely within her rights not to patronize Target et al.; but expecting that department stores are going to be venues for "Christian values" is a little ridiculous.

So I guess if you believe that tolerance of diversity equates to intolerance of the majority, you'll never be without something to be offended by.  Me, I'd rather try to get along with the people around me than constantly harp on the fact that everyone isn't like me.  All in all, I think it's a much happier way to be.

Foxes running the henhouse

I can't remember when I've ever been this worried about our capacity for seriously fucking up the world we live in.

Strong words, I realize.  I'm 56 years old, so I remember Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.  I remember the BP Gulf oil spill and the Exxon Valdez disaster.  I've read about the collapse of the entire ecosystem around the Aral Sea, and the slow-motion train wreck of deforestation in the Congo, Amazon, and Southeast Asia rainforests.

All of that is peanuts compared to what we face today.

As the most powerful economy in the world, the United States is uniquely poised either to do tremendous good or to accelerate our downward slide beyond the point where it can be halted.  And this weekend I read three horrifying articles that are leading me to believe that our government is choosing the latter option.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The first is a piece in CNN Politics in which we find out that President-elect Donald Trump is still claiming that "no one knows" if climate change is real.  In interview on Fox News, he made the following statement:

I'm still open-minded.  Nobody really knows.  Look, I'm somebody that gets it, and nobody really knows. It's not something that's so hard and fast...  Now, Paris, I'm studying.  I do say this.  I don't want that agreement to put us at a competitive disadvantage with other countries.  And as you know, there are different times and different time limits on that agreement.  I don't want that to give China, or other countries signing agreements an advantage over us.

So we've taken a nine-year step backwards in time to George W. Bush's tired mantra that "we need more data" before we can act.  Which, of course, is simply a way to stall, a way to let corporate interests trump science -- because the fact is, we do know that climate change is real.  We've known for years.  There is no more an argument among the scientists over whether climate change is real than there is over whether evolution is real.

Oh, wait, we're still fighting that battle, too.

Then we have a New York Times piece by Coral Davenport in which we find out that the transition team of President-elect Trump has sent out a 74-piece questionnaire to employees of the Department of Energy asking if they had attended climate change policy conferences -- and if so, who else they might have seen there.  It asks that copies of emails referencing climate change be submitted for review.

If this brings up comparisons in your mind to the McCarthy blacklists, you're spot-on.  But Michael McKenna, a former member of Trump's transition team who stepped down when his status as a lobbyist became known, begs to differ.  "If meetings happened and important stuff was decided, voters have a right to know," McKenna said.  "It’s not a matter of national security.  The transition is not asking about nuclear weapons.  They are asking about meetings about modeling for God’s sake...  The career staff at D.O.E. is great. There’s not a soul in the world who wants to do any harm to those guys."

No?  Take a look at Lamar Smith, head of the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, who has spent the last three years harassing administrators at NASA and NOAA for supporting research into climate change.  And Trump's team has already pledged to defund the Earth Sciences Division of NASA -- the department that is in charge of climate research -- calling their findings "politicized science."

So I'm perhaps to be forgiven for thinking that Mr. McKenna's reassurances are horseshit.  And my suspicions only strengthened when I read the report of a Nexus Media reporter, Philip Newell, about his attendance at an all-day Heritage Foundation event last week -- an event that can be summed up as the fossil fuel industry saying over and over, "We're in charge now, we can do whatever the hell we want."

Lamar Smith was in attendance, as were Representatives Gary Palmer and Pete Olson, and Senators Mike Lee and James "Senator Snowball" Inhofe.  All of them heaped praise upon the Trump choice for head of the Environmental Protection Agency, Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who has been described as "a blunt tool of the fossil fuel industry."

Inhofe was the one who made the most puzzling statement, that he "believed in climate change until he heard about the costs of doing something about it."  Because clearly if your car's transmission is going, and the mechanic says it'll cost $1000 to replace, you can magically make the transmission work again by saying "That's too expensive."

But such a meeting would not be complete without a contribution from climate denialist and general crank Craig Idso, who was the lead author of the cherry-picked and scientifically invalid report from the "Non-Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change," and who ended his talk by saying that "carbon dioxide is the elixir of life."

So the foxes are running the henhouse, and we're in for a slaughter unless responsible, informed people start confronting corrupt elected officials and corporate interests.  We need ethical congresspeople -- and I know there are some out there -- to make a commitment to fight tooth and nail against the ones who would sell our planet's future to the highest bidder.  The pro-science members of our government, on the local, state, and federal level, need to say to the President-elect, "You are dead wrong.  Anthropogenic climate change is real, and the consequences will be devastating."  They need to stand up to goons like Inhofe and Smith and say "Enough.  Go ahead and add me to your blacklist.  I will fight you every step of the way."

Resisting strong-arm tactics can work.  If you need an example, read this New Yorker piece about the David-vs.-Goliath fight of California state controller John Chiang against then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.  Schwarzenegger, in an attempt to leverage the Democratic-led state legislature into accepting his budget, issued an executive order reducing the salaries of two hundred thousand state employees to the minimum wage (then $6.55 an hour) until they met his demands.

Chiang stood up and said, "No.  Not on my watch, you won't."  Schwarzenegger sued him, but the suit languished in the courts and found little popular support.  In 2011, Schwarzenegger stepped down, his ratings at near record lows, and the incoming governor, Jerry Brown, dropped the suit entirely.

As for Chiang, far from being hurt by his act of bravery in the face of authority, he became California's State Treasurer and plans to run for governor in 2018.

So it can be done, but it requires backbone, and a willingness to stand up to power being wielded unethically.  And I hope like hell that the Congress has its members who are willing to be this fight's John Chiangs.  Because this time, what is being gambled is not the salaries of state employees, but the long-term habitability of our planet.

Strange attractors

You would think that after this many years of writing Skeptophilia, I'd be completely inured to weird ideas, that nothing would shock me.  But I still occasionally run into a claim that leaves me saying, "Um... uh.  Um.  Nope, I got nothin'."

That happened yesterday, when a loyal reader sent me a link to the website of the Spiritual Science Research Foundation.  The website subheader is "Bridging the Known and Unknown Worlds," so I was at least on guard that I was entering the realm of the woo-woo.  But I wasn't ready for the actual details of the claim therein, which turned out to be that gay people are gay...

... because they're being coerced by ghosts.

I bet my LGBT readers had no idea this was what was going on.  I bet they simply thought their brains were wired that way, which is supported by recent studies that showed genetic and epigenetic effects in LGBT individuals that are at least correlated with homosexuality, and may actually be causative.

Nope.  That's not it at all.  The real reason is that you've got a ghost following you around who is making lewd same-sex suggestions, and you're falling for it.

The worst part is that this isn't all they claim, and in fact, isn't even their weirdest claim.  Upon perusing the website, we find out that there are other ways you can tell if you've got a spirit-world hanger-on besides being gay.  Apparently, symptoms are a "foul taste in the mouth," "experience of eyes being pulled inside," "a sticky layer... formed on the face and body of the affected person," and "experience of strangulation."  Then we read the following, which I quote verbatim:

[T]he ghosts (demons, devils, negative energies, etc.) leave the body through any of the nine openings, i.e. two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, mouth, penis/vagina and anus.  The person may experience as if gas is going out of any of these openings or one may experience cough, yawning, burping, sneezing, etc. as per the opening involved.

Allow me to interject here for the good of the order that if any of my readers experience coughing through their eyes, they probably should see a doctor.

And that goes double if your penis burps.

But in the words of the infomercial, "Wait... there's more!"  We also find out that if you have a ghostly groupie, you will "make moaning and weird sounds and not remember anything after," will be "fidgeting and restless," and will be prone to "domestic accidents such as heated oil flying from the frying pan."  Me, I thought the latter was just one of the hazards of cooking, one I first learned about while simultaneously discovering the general rule "Never cook bacon while shirtless."  I don't think I made moaning or weird sounds when it happened, although I do recall using some seriously bad language.

Of course, given that supposedly the affected individual doesn't remember anything afterwards, maybe I've just forgotten about the moaning noises.

But the pièce de résistance is the part about "sexual symptoms," wherein we get to the heart of the matter, which is that if you have a ghostly invisible friend, you'll become gay:

The main reason behind the gay orientation of some men is that they are possessed by female ghosts. It is the female ghost in them that is attracted to other men.  Conversely the attraction to females experienced by some lesbians is due to the presence of male ghosts in them.  The ghost’s consciousness overpowers the person’s normal behaviour to produce the homosexual attraction.  Spiritual research has shown that the cause for homosexual preferences lie predominantly in the spiritual realm.

We're then given some statistics, which is that homosexual orientation is 5% physical causes/hormonal changes, 10% psychological causes, and 85% ghosts.  I have no idea how they derived those numbers, but because it's statistics, it's bound to be correct, right?

Of course right.

So there you have it.  I'm not sure what else to say that the dog didn't cover.  I think the thing that bothers me about this most is that I'm sure there are people who read this website and nodded, saying, "Yup, makes total sense."  Which is kind of terrifying when you think about it.

Although who knows.  Maybe they have their reasons for believing all this.  Maybe someone was startled one day when her vagina sneezed, and was wondering why, and stumbled on this website.  Makes as much sense as any other explanation I can think of.

Viral reality

If you are of the opinion that more evidence is necessary for demonstrating the correctness of the evolutionary model, I give you: a paper by biologist Justin R. Meyer of the University of California-San Diego et al. that has conclusively demonstrated speciation occurring in the laboratory.

The gist of what the team did is to grow populations of bacteriophage Lambda (a virus that attacks and kills bacteria) in the presence of populations of two different potential food sources, more specifically E. coli that had one of two different receptors where the virus could attach.  What happened was that the original bacteriophages were non-specialists -- they could attach to either receptor, but not very efficiently -- but over time, more of them accrued mutations that allowed them to specialize in attacking one receptor over the other.  Ultimately, the non-specialists became extinct, leaving a split population where each new species could not survive on the other's food source.

Diagram of a bacteriophage [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Pretty amazing stuff.  My response was, "If that isn't evolution, what the hell is it?"  Of course, I'm expecting the litany of goofy rejoinders to start any time now.  "It's only microevolution."  "There was no novel gene produced."  "But both of them are still viruses.  If you showed me a virus evolving into a wombat, then I'd believe you."

Nevertheless, this sticks another nail in the coffin of the anti-evolutionists -- both Intelligent Design proponents and the young-Earth creationists, the latter of whom believe that all of the Earth's species were created as-is 6,000 or so years ago along with the Earth itself, and that the 200 million year old trilobite fossils one sometimes finds simply dropped out of god's pocket while he was walking through the Garden of Eden or something.

So as usual, you can't logic your way out of a stance you didn't logic your way into.  Still, I have hope that the tide is gradually turning.  Certainly one cheering incident comes our way from Richard Lenski, who is justly famous for his groundbreaking study of evolution in bacteria and who co-authored the Meyer paper I began with.  But Lenski will forever be one of my heroes for the way he handled Andrew Schlafly, who runs Conservapedia, a Wikipedia clone that attempts to remodel the world so that all of the ultra-conservative talking points are true.  Schlafly had written a dismissive piece about Lenski's work on Conservapedia, to which Lenski responded.  The ensuing exchange resulted in one of the most epic smackdowns by a scientist I've ever seen.  Lenski takes apart Schlafly's objections piece by piece, citing data, kicking ass, and taking names.  I excerpt the end of it below, but you can (and should) read the whole thing at the article on the "Lenski Affair" over at RationalWiki:

I know that I’ve been a bit less polite in this response than in my previous one, but I’m still behaving far more politely than you deserve given your rude, willfully ignorant, and slanderous behavior.  And I’ve spent far more time responding than you deserve.  However, as I said at the outset, I take education seriously, and I know some of your acolytes still have the ability and desire to think, as do many others who will read this exchange. 

Sincerely, Richard Lenski

And if that's not spectacular enough, check out one of the four P.S.s:

I noticed that you say that one of your favorite articles on your website is the one on “Deceit.”  That article begins as follows: “Deceit is the deliberate distortion or denial of the truth with an intent to trick or fool another. Christianity and Judaism teach that deceit is wrong.  For example, the Old Testament says, ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.’”  You really should think more carefully about what that commandment means before you go around bearing false witness against others.

I can only hope that there was a mic around after that so that Lenski could drop it.

So there you have it.  Science finding out cool stuff once again, because after all, that's what science does.  The creationists, it is to be hoped, retreating further and further into the corner into which they've painted themselves.  It's probably a forlorn wish that this'll make Ken Ham shut up, but maybe he'll eventually have to adapt his strategy to address reality instead of avoiding it.

You might even say... he'll need to evolve.

Making the world safe for meerkats

This past weekend my wife and I put up our Christmas tree.  It's always a special moment for me -- we have ornaments collected from years ago (including one given to my son Lucas on his first Christmas), ornaments we've made, ornaments we've collected on trips to various places.  We went a little crazy on the lights this year, but I think it's pretty doggone festive.

In case you're wondering, yes, that is a stuffed meerkat on the top of the tree.  The one thing we've never been able to agree upon is a good tree-topper, so we've started the tradition of using our stuffed meerkat in the place of the traditional star.  Unfortunately, in the tiny, underdeveloped brain of our hound, Lena, the search parameters "fuzzy" + "in a tree" results in the answer "squirrel," so she spends an average of two hours a day staring at the meerkat waiting for it to move.

At least it gives her an alternative hobby to going outside followed by going inside followed by going outside followed by going inside, which is her other favorite thing to do.

Anyhow, this all comes up because a couple of days ago, Corey Lewandowski, Donald Trump's former campaign manager, was interviewed on Fox News by Sean Hannity, and said, "America is in store for a great Christmas, which you can say again, ‘Merry Christmas,’ because Donald Trump is now the president, you can say it again, it’s okay to say, it’s not a pejorative word anymore."  This hit the news at almost the same time as did a Pew Research Group poll that found that half of all Americans say that discrimination against Christians is as bad as that against minorities; this number rises to 75% if you just poll Trump supporters, and 80% if you only count white evangelical Christians.

My first question upon hearing this was to wonder what the hell these people are smoking.  Then I amended that to wondering if any of the people who answered that way have ever actually talked to a minority about what they experience on a daily basis -- the kind of prejudice and bigotry, explicit or implicit, minorities live with every day of every year.

My guess is no.  Because that would require peeking outside their comforting shell of Being Right About Everything, which apparently comes with the added feature of Fearing Anyone Different.  These people are mistaking their no longer having unquestioned hegemony with discrimination, a difference that pretty much any member of any minority would be happy to explain.

The problem is, the white Protestant Christians have for two hundred years run damn near everything, to the point where if you weren't a white Protestant Christian, your chance of being elected to public office was just about zero.  (An exception is my home region of southern Louisiana.  There, you could also be elected if you were Catholic.)  Thankfully, things are changing, albeit slowly -- even in some of the most conservative parts of the country, there are minorities and people of other religious beliefs (and no religion at all, although that's still uncommon) being elected.

But this is profoundly terrifying to some people.  (Not all, as I hasten to point out, and upon which I will elaborate in a moment.)  But there are people for whom this is so frightening that they invented some convenient myths -- that liberals in general and atheists in particular are trying to outlaw saying Merry Christmas, that electing non-Christians means that the first thing they'll do is tear down the churches and make saying "Jesus" a capital offense.  Of course, this is ridiculous; even the most atheistic of atheists (me, for example) couldn't care less if you say Merry Christmas, have Christmas displays in your yard so bright they disrupt air traffic, and go to church twice a day every day of the year.  We don't care what you do with your life, we only care when you start telling others what they have to do with their lives, and also when you use taxpayer dollars to fund religion.

Odd, isn't it, that it's not generally the atheists who have problems with how people greet each other during the holiday season -- we're usually content to respond in kind, and take a friendly greeting as friendly instead of as some kind of insult to the core of our beliefs.  100% of the squealing I've seen about who says what to whom, holiday-wise, has come from staunch Christians.

I'm overgeneralizing, of course, because there are obnoxious atheists just as there are obnoxious people of every other stripe.  Also, some of my Christian friends are outspokenly in favor of everyone following their own star regarding what they believe and how they observe it.  But people like Lewandowski make everyone look bad -- he makes the evangelicals seem like they're only content when they're running the show, and the atheists sound like they'd be thrilled to turn Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer into venison cutlets.

Which explains the results of the poll.  The sad part is that this sort of rhetoric will do nothing but reinforce the rifts we already have -- especially awful given that it's based on a falsehood.

So that's pretty depressing.  Me, I think I'm going to go try to cheer myself up.  Maybe I'll sit on the floor next to Lena and stare at the Christmas Meerkat.  It certainly seems to make her happy.

Deflating "Pizzagate"

A question I get asked a lot is why, here in Skeptophilia, I take time away from serious matters to look at the lunatic fringe, as I did yesterday with my piece on the reappearance of Mothman.  Let the weirdos be weird, seems to be the gist.  You're not going to convince them, you're not going to expunge all weirdos from the world, so it really is kind of pointless.  One friend said it was a little like masturbation; it makes you feel good for a little while, but in the end it doesn't really accomplish anything.

Well, I obviously disagree, because I keep at it on a daily basis.  (Writing Skeptophilia, I mean, not masturbating.)  And I do think there's a point to highlighting the activities of the loonies -- two, in fact.  First, there is the unfortunate tendency that once you've accepted one crazy idea, you're more likely to fall for others, because you've abandoned evidence and logic as the sine qua non of understanding.  Second, there's the even more unfortunate tendency that given enough encouragement, the wingnuts sometimes act on their beliefs.

This all comes up because of a Skeptophilia frequent flier, namely Alex Jones, who in the last few weeks has been ranting about something called "Pizzagate."  Which brings something else up, namely the fact that the media's tendency to turn anything into a scandal by adding "-gate" to the end of it really grinds my gears.  This annoys me almost as much as Alex Jones does himself, which is saying something, because if I had to choose between a root canal and listening to an entire episode of InfoWars, I'd choose the root canal because at least then I'd get some good drugs to help me through the experience.

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, "Pizzagate" is the insane idea that Hillary and Bill Clinton and various other influential people in the Democratic Party are using the Washington D. C. pizza joint "Comet Ping Pong" as a front for pedophilia and satanic rituals.  At first, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, James Alefantis, tried to go online and defend himself from the allegations, but I'm sure you can predict how successful that was.  The message "Don't let up.  #PIZZAGATE Everywhere!" was posted on Twitter and got thousands of likes and reposts.  "It was like trying to shoot a swarm of bees with a gun," said Bryce Reh, Comet's general manager, who was nearly pushed into quitting his job because of harassment and death threats.

Then Alex Jones got involved.  He posted a "special message" on his website about how serious Pizzagate was, and the horrible the things they were covering up.  "InfoWars and the Pizzagate investigators are just trying to uncover the truth," he said.

Jones, of course, gets not thousands but millions of views, so suddenly the whole thing exploded.  And a couple of days ago, a guy showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle, saying he was there to "do some investigating of Pizzagate" for himself.  He fired off at least one, possibly more, shots, but thankfully no one was injured.

The attacker, Edgar Maddison Welch, said that he heard about the pedophilia ring from Alex Jones and decided he needed to do something about it.

Poor James Alefantis, of course, is just trying to keep a business he's sunk ten years of his life into building from tanking.  "I really hope that all of these people fanning the flames of this conspiracy would take a moment to contemplate what has gone on here today and maybe to stop," he said.  I hope so too, but from experience, I can tell you that once conspiracy theorists latch on to an idea, they never give up.

So a lot of wacky beliefs are harmless, but they establish a pattern.  You stop asking questions, you start trusting purveyors of bullshit like Alex Jones, and all of a sudden you move from "odd but not a problem" to "possible incitement to do some serious damage."  And that's why I spend so much time railing against the woo-woos -- even those who, on the surface, seem pretty innocuous.

I'll keep after the big stuff, too.  As you know if you have read this blog for any length of time, I'm not one to suffer in silence.  But the small stuff and the low-hanging fruit deserves some attention too, from time to time.  As the adage goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  And that applies whether you're headed to someplace nice, or CloudCuckooLand.

The Mothman returneth

A loyal reader of Skeptophilia commented a few days ago that given the uproar currently happening in the United States and elsewhere, it'd been a while since I had the opportunity to comment upon important matters such as recent sightings of aliens and Bigfoot.  So just to show that I am not shirking in my duties in the wacko news department, today we have: a sighting of Mothman in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

What is interesting about this, besides the immediate "what the hell?  Mothman?" factor, is that Point Pleasant is the place where there was a rash of Mothman sightings exactly fifty years ago.  And I do mean exactly; the peak of sightings was in November and December of 1966, although sporadic reports did continue to occur until the following December, when the Point Pleasant Bridge collapsed, resulting in 46 deaths.  Structural engineers say that the bridge collapse was caused by the failure of an eyebar in the suspension chain, but those who are in the know about such matters tell us that it was clearly Mothman's final hurrah.

From there, the Man went into seclusion, with only widely scattered sightings over the following decades.  But it looks like things may be ramping up again, because just last week, a Point Pleasant man took a video from which the following still is excerpted:

The man claims that he had only "recently moved to Point Pleasant" and "didn't even know about the legend."  So that's all I need.  I think this constitutes what those of us in the Science Business call "airtight proof."

Yeah, yeah, okay, so maybe not so much.  As Neil deGrasse Tyson puts it, Photoshop these days probably comes equipped with an "add UFO" button.  And most serious analysts think that the original reports were the result of a combination of hoaxes, sightings of large birds (such as barn owls), and liberal amounts of alcohol.  But still, you should go to the original link (which is to Sharon Hill's wonderful site Doubtful News) and take a look at the video.  The video not only shows you the entire clip from the anonymous man who shot it, but some interviews with true believers in Point Pleasant, of which there are apparently quite a few, including Carolin Harris, who owns the "Mothman Diner" and Jeff Wamsley, who runs the "Mothman Museum."

So of course, I'm sure that this has nothing to do with tourism and publicity and attracting crowds to Point Pleasant on the fiftieth anniversary of the original Mothman craze.  Nothing whatsoever.  Nope.

Anway, other than this, I haven't been hearing much from the cryptozoological crowd.  My guess is that given the current political situation, Bigfoot might well be packing his bags and leaving the country to join his cousins in Nepal.  After all, given how precarious things are for actual people in the United States these days, I wouldn't want to be a hairy proto-hominid.  Even the plain old humans are worried enough about their rights.