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waveThis happened a few weeks ago, and I've been pretty quiet about it... but I had an actual sighting of the legendary sea monster "Champ." I was on a 19' sailboat heading out for a sunset cruise when I saw a something  similar to the what's in the photograph to the right.

He, she, or it was about 20 feet from me in Mallet's Bay, Vermont. I saw it, and it was real. 

For those of you unfamiliar with "Champ," the term refers to the "monster" or "living fossil" that lives in the waters of Lake Champlain in New York and Vermont. The creature has been "sighted" hundreds of times, and was reportedly known to indigenous peoples long before Samuel de Champlain recorded his own monster sighting, though he was probably describing a sturgeon.

It seems to me that every large body of water has "sightings," but for the first time, I'd had my own, and I can no longer deny that there's something in the lake. 

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Princess Martha Louise, of Norway, has cheesed off most of European Christendom by announcing early this month that she is in regular contact with the dead, as well as with angels. Reception, alas, is poor: She intends to participate in a class to improve the fidelity of her trans-dimensional communications.

The announcement upset those inclined to be upset by such things. As reported at Digital Journal, the bishop of the diocese of Tunsberg in the Church of Norway, Laila Rikaasen Dahl, has said: "[...] the dead belong to God and must rest in peace, and try to alter that can unleash unknown hidden forces." (sic)

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I recently returned from a rather remarkable event known as Dragon*Con, a four-day gathering in Atlanta which fills several major hotels there to the brim. I was there two years ago as a visitor, was quite taken with the character of the conference, and asked if I might be invited to speak there. Happily, I was granted that privilege this year.

 How to describe DragonCon? Try to imagine 30,000+ people of all ages and a variety of genders dressed up as robots, monsters, science-fiction characters, Star Wars storm troopers, Batman, and every mythical character that can somehow be represented by costume or makeup. Distribute them all over downtown Atlanta in the hotels and restaurants, in the streets and parks, and you have DragonCon.
 

What follows is hardly meant to be unkind, and no one involved with this giddy bunch will take umbrage at my analysis, I'm very sure. But in my opinion, those who show up at this affair are misfits of one sort or another. We find disabled persons in wheelchairs, young and old with a variety of disadvantages, simply "different" individuals and pairs, and – generally speaking – the kind of folks who seem to be not well suited to the general population, for one reason or another. Ah, but for 72 hours they are immersed in their element, surrounded by others with whom they are very compatible and comfortable. It's a seriously beautiful thing to see. (We are misfits in our own ways too, of course.)

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Before I came to work for the James Randi Educational Foundation, and even before I became a writer/author, I was a registered nurse. I became an R.N. back at a time when men in the profession (and I struggle to call it a profession) were an insignificant minority. In the 20+ years since I was in school this ratio has changed, but one thing that hasn’t seemingly changed is the intense amount of ‘woo’ that seeps into nursing curriculum. In terms of specifics, I can only refer back to my personal experience at a major teaching hospital in a major city in Canada, but it would seem that my experiences are not unique.

Before I entered nursing school I was at university taking microbiology and biochemistry; and while I was not a motivated student I was learning enough to have an idea of what the scientific method is and how it is applied in science, life, and medicine. So imagine my surprise when the teaching staff spent time teaching us about the ‘healing properties of touch’ and the ‘power of the mind to heal’. I might have been more open to these concepts if my instructors hadn’t already destroyed all their credibility by describing Legionnaire’s Disease as a ‘virus’ (it’s caused by a bacterial infection).

My personal experience in nursing school was that the instructors were mostly reading out of textbooks, had little understanding of the science behind what they were teaching, and tended to stray into the land of ‘woo-woo’ all too often. More than once I got into arguments with instructors about homeopathy, with the instructors insisting that homeopathy was valid because ‘real drugs come from plants’. This is the sort of thing I was up against, and it is actually still accurate in my personal experience. Many nurses have such a weak education in the actual science of disease and pharmacology that they have very simple ideas about what alternative medicine is, and they are all too often open to ideas that just a pinch of critical thinking would crush.

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In his new lecture James Randi examines the new monsters brought forth to victimize a credulous public, worldwide. In this hour-long talk, he discusses the major causes of modern irrationality, such as the rise of sensationalist journalism and the decline of responsible investigative reportage; the origins of "complimentary/alternative medicine" and the means by which it edges ever closer to acceptability; and how the outrageous claims of religions and their leaders encourage the public to accept the outrageous claims of secular hucksters.

These forces of irrationality mean to drag us into a new Dark Ages -- and to the extent that religious demagoguery, superstition, and magical thinking succeed in our world, The Enlightenment has failed. Only when we decide to reject belief in demons, gods, prophecy, eternal life and similar nonsense, can we fulfill our historic responsibility and ensure that The Enlightenment and its values endure.

Watch all 7 parts here.

  1. James Randi Appears at the Magic Castle
  2. Is There New Atheism at the JREF?
  3. Alan Leipzig Awarded Educator Grant from the James Randi Educational Foundation
  4. Skepticism Alive and Well at Dragon*Con