They just don’t get it…another example.

Shawn Evidence:  Steve Kulls mentioned in his article today that all he did was contacted them via email for the answer. This is a scapegoat tactic in my opinion, because they won’t say they don’t have a body publicly, instead they will tell you that they will tell anyone who wishes to know what the real deal is.

See the article wasn’t to condemn folks, you see it’s about making them responsible in what they report.

Here’s another example of how people jump to conclusions,

I DID NOT CONTACT THEM VIA EMAIL OR PHONE. I NEVER CONTACTED ED SMITH, DW OR RANDY OR ANYONE FROM THE MABRC FOR THAT MATTER.  I USED  SOURCES WHICH AS A JOURNALIST OR INVESTIGATOR YOU NEED TO HAVE. DIRECT WORD NEVER CAME FROM THEM.

Again…this is what I’m talking about…jumping to conclusions. This needs to stop and be taken constructively.

Shawn Evidence: Sheriff Kulls said he called and asked them if they had a body and they told him straight up "no". That’s part of their game plan.

Oh… so instead of picking up the phone and calling me, and Shawn has my number, lets refer to name calling, rather than find out what really happened.

 When one chooses to “name call” they have lost the debate.

Especially when they follow it it up with incorrect facts.

Now I will admit, Sheriff could be taken in a couple of ways good or bad.

I’m not going to prejudge, but it was not warranted. But some are choosing to take it personal instead of taking the approach, “Okay how can we make things better?”

In this technological age, we are so quick to retort on a forum, Facebook, Twitter, rather than pick up the phone and get the real story.

THAT”S THE POINT.

Reporting on rumor and subterfuge is not responsible journalism. This is not a lesson on “one upping” someone, nor do I think it was DW’s or the MABRC’s attempt at such.

It’s a life lesson for journalists, one I’ve had to take. Stop taking things so personally, and accept responsibility, not the one of the follow up report, but of the original story to begin with, that was chosen to be reposted. That point has been lost.

If I repost crap… my blog is crap… if I research an article that is posted and come to a different conclusion, who’s the winner? The readers, that’s who.

Robert Lindsay is a big boy, and as shown, if I come to a different conclusion, based in evidence and fact, he man’s up and admits it, as he did with the Erickson post last month. That’s journalistic professionalism.

To repost something, without a caveat or some research of your own, all you are simply doing is reposting. Nothing more. What I ask that you do more. I mean wouldn’t it be great to repost a blog of a researcher with a quote of your own from them about their story? Is that too much to ask?

This argument even transcends the libelous and slanderous commentary that is allowed on the bottom which allows that particular blog more hits and revenue sourcing at the expense of the person whose article has been reposted or featured.

But following up on a repost will “up” your game, but it could also take you out of your comfort zone, and possibly put you in an adversarial tone, but you’ve done your homework and you should rest on those laurels. And that is Journalistic ethics.

In this scenario, we have one blogger that jumped to a conclusion and another that reposts it without fact checking. DW nor the MABRC invited that. And from DW, the threats and emails came flooding in prior to their tactic of making the “neither confirm nor deny,” statement. Another fact that is overlooked. It had nothing to do with their statement.

Is that how I would have done it. Honestly I don’t think so. But what they did was prove home a point. A point which was missed by at least one of the intended targets. I understand the folks mentality that we don’t need anymore games in the field. That’s why I wouldn’t have gone that route, but I whole heartedly support the message of which they were trying to convey.

Shawn is a good guy folks. He’s not evil, he’s human. And we as humans sometimes need some prodding to see the light. That was the point here.

Robert Lindsay, is a good guy, he is not evil, quirky albeit, but a good guy nonetheless.

Steve Streufert is a good guy, he may be snarky in some of his prose to some, but that’s his writing style.

This goes for all sides, stop making it personal.

What was done was to show them how in some aspects of how NOT to do something for the sake of keeping the community, at least in some aspect on par, and perhaps raising the bar.

Well anyway, this closes my take on this.

Till Next Time,

Squatch-D

Cooked Food and Primates… an interesting hypothesis.

What makes a Primate, a Primate?

In the past, we’ve concluded that Sasquatch belong to the order of primates for a very good reason; for all the same reasons why humans are in that order.

What makes a primate, a primate, well lets look at what the Smithsonian.com has to say…

• First, primates have excellent vision. They have forward-facing eyes that sit close together, which allows the eyes’ fields of view to overlap and create stereoscopic, or 3-D, vision. (In contrast, for example, a cow or giraffe has widely spaced eyes and therefore poor depth perception.) Related to this great eyesight is the presence of a post-orbital bar, a ring of bone that surrounds the eyeball. Many primates also have a completely bony socket that encloses the eye. This bone probably protects the eye from contractions of chewing muscles that run down the side of the face, from the jaw to the top of the head. Many mammals that rely less on vision don’t have a post-orbital bar. Because primates depend on their vision so much, they generally have a reduced sense of smell relative to other mammals.
• Primates are also very dexterous. They can manipulate objects with great skill because they have opposable thumbs and/or big toes, tactile finger pads and nails instead of claws…This is actually a very ancient trait. The earliest mammals had five digits, and over time, many mammalian lineages lost a few fingers and toes while primates kept all of them. Primates also retain collar bones, which allow for greater mobility in the shoulder; mammals that strictly walk on all fours, such as horses, lack collar bones so their limbs are more stable and don’t slip to the side while running.
• Primates tend to have larger brains than other mammals of a similar size.
• Primates have smaller litters—often just one baby at a time—and longer periods of gestation and childhood.

 Source: http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/hominids/2012/10/why-are-humans-primates/

Did cooking food make our brains larger?

 

Now here’s an interesting hypothesis that scientists are putting forward which seems plausible and may explain why the Sasquatch has not evolved in a manner in which we have…

“Eating a raw food diet is a recipe for disaster if you’re trying to boost your species’ brainpower. That’s because humans would have to spend more than 9 hours a day eating to get enough energy from unprocessed raw food alone to support our large brains, according to a new study that calculates the energetic costs of growing a bigger brain or body in primates. But our ancestors managed to get enough energy to grow brains that have three times as many neurons as those in apes such as gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. How did they do it? They got cooking, according to a study published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Humans have more brain neurons than any other primate—about 86 billion, on average, compared with about 33 billion neurons in gorillas and 28 billion in chimpanzees. While these extra neurons endow us with many benefits, they come at a price—our brains consume 20% of our body’s energy when resting, compared with 9% in other primates. So a long-standing riddle has been where did our ancestors get that extra energy to expand their minds as they evolved from animals with brains and bodies the size of chimpanzees?

One answer came in the late 1990s when Harvard University primatologist Richard Wrangham proposed that the brain began to expand rapidly 1.6 million to 1.8 million years ago in our ancestor, Homo erectus, because this early human learned how to roast meat and tuberous root vegetables over a fire. Cooking, Wrangham argued, effectively predigested the food, making it easier and more efficient for our guts to absorb calories more rapidly. Since then, he and his colleagues have shown in lab studies of rodents and pythons that these animals grow up bigger and faster when they eat cooked meat instead of raw meat—and that it takes less energy to digest cooked meat than raw meat.”

For more read the article at: http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2012/10/raw-food-not-enough-to-feed-big-.html

 

What this hypothesis suggests is that by eating cooked food it increases our ability to absorb the nutrients into our neuro-fibers allowing our brains to absorb it’s caloric energies quicker than raw food.

Now this leads to some interesting speculation and negates some of the “Bigfoot are the same as us” people argument. If this theory is correct, folks will have to rethink that philosophy.

In reading the article further, you see an experiment conducted in  other species to bolster the hypothesis.

Since there has been nil reports of Sasquatch using fire, which Homo Erectus first used, it negates their brains developed in a similar manner to ours.

According to an article posted in the Who Lies Sleeping Blog, (An anthropological blog):

“Among primates, animals with larger body sizes grew bigger molars and spent more time eating—great apes of similar size to humans spend about 48 percent of the day consuming calories. The Harvard study says that, while modern humans spend 4.7 percent of their days eating…

Homo erectus and Homo neanderthalensis spent 6.1 percent and 7 percent, respectively, of their active day feeding. Human feeding time and molar size are truly exceptional compared with other primates, and their oddity began around the start of the Pleistocene.

The Pleistocene is the epoch that began about the time that hominines started to make stone tools, and now, it seems, when they started to cook! Cooking may actually have originated with other species that also lived in Africa and came just before Homo erectus, including Homo habilis and Homo rudolfensis. The tools and behaviors necessary to support a cooking culture related to feeding and now necessary for long term survival of modern humans evolved by the time of Homo erectus and before our lineage left Africa.”

Source: http://askwhy.co.uk/dinosauroids/?p=10303

To me this has a huge impact on how we should perceive the Sasquatch should this hypothesis be further validated. It would signify that the Sasquatch may be limited in its brain power due to dietary restrictions of eating raw diet, because of the absorption of the nutrients into the brains neuro-fibers.

This would explain things such as a Sasquatch not using complex shelters, (another sign of advanced brain use such as ours) technology development, such as advancement of simple tools or using skins of other animals to protect itself.

Well the jury is still out on this hypothesis, but from some of the studies may very well be on the correct track.

Food for thought for the day… let it cook in your brain for a while.

Till Next Time,

Squatch-D

Getting Facts Straight.

I’m sitting here today listening to MNBRT Radio with DW Lee from the MABRC, and DW makes some great points.

Last month blogger Robert Lindsay came out with a blog stating he was under the belief that Ed Smith and the MABRC had a Sasquatch body.

Since it was completely erroneous, DW and the MABRC issued a statement:

that they could, “neither confirm nor deny the existence of a body,” and Ed Smith is a friend.

 

The community went into a frenzy.

It immediately started an influx of emails and phone calls, and…death threats.

Death threats…seriously?

It always makes me shake my head in disgust that some people that want to protect a different species would be so eager to take the life of their own.

It’s deplorable someone would stoop to that level. People need to grow up and not take themselves too seriously.

Also folks who do that, especially behind a computer, are full of themselves, are also committing a crime, called “terroristic threats.”

Those laws were created thanks to the evolution of the internet being a sounding board before someone goes on a rampage. And the law is equally applied regardless of the actual validity of the threat.

Nonetheless, the people whom make those sorts of threats, are usually the ones who get sand thrown in their face at the beach and get tied to the pier for high tide.

Entitlement…really?

The next point was people demanding answers…demanding!

Demanding people to reveal anonymity and identities of people they in confidence stated they would not betray.

Now in my investigation life, even in a public setting, the investigator’s do not owe anyone an explanation… only to the prosecutors and to the court. Only after it goes on record is the public entitled to it.

Seems in the last couple of years some of the newer people in the field have this stigma of entitlement, be it a an armchair, blogger or otherwise. Newsflash… You’re not entitled to other people’s hard work. DO the research, earn it.

We don’t rush to judgment on anything here. We get our facts straight to the best of our ability, and sometimes the process can be painstakingly slow…but at least it’s quality.

And it makes you feel much better about sharing it then.

Now let’s look journalism aspect…

Email, Facebook, PM’s on forums, phones and personal contacts all exist.

I, before blogging about this particular statement made by the MABRC, and before making any conclusions, I made some phone calls and got to the truth of the matter in minutes. Minutes.

How hard was that?

No story there…hence no blog to write, or forum post to make. Case closed.

But we are in a stage with some, where it IS about hits and quantity, rather than quality. Reposting other people’s blogs on slow news days, for the sake of growing content.

That’s what I strive NOT to do here. Here we strive for original content. That’s what these blogs should strive to do.

Now there are some fine blogs out there to read. But regardless, when reading blogs, even this one, when reporting Sasquatch News, rather than editorial pieces (which this is) please weigh the article on the amount research that has gone into it, and take it at face value.

We stand with the MABRC, DW and Randy,  and the call for more responsible reporting. 

 

Till Next Time,

Squatch-D

Interesting developments…

Our “friend” on the west coast, Tom Biscardi has been off my radar for a while. But a brief foray into what the “museum-less one”, (despite having documentation that he received amounts in the 6 figure range to put up museums but has yet to) has yielded a couple of things of note.

First, his foreign corporation, New Limited Concept Inc. turned out to be very limited indeed, The business Biscardi co-founded with convicted Ponzi Schemer David Nilsen is no more. The state of Nevada having revoked their certification on 6/30/2011. The move came after their registered agent company resigned.

Nilsen was sentenced to 8 years in April and began his sentence on June 1st of this year.

An interesting development

Biscardi, according to documents to the Department of State in Nevada, has started yet another business with $250,000 startup capital, called Bigfoot Project Investments, Inc.

The listed principals in the company are listed as one President (Biscardi) and the rest as directors:

• Carmine T Biscardi (aka Tom Biscardi)
• Carmine T Biscardi, Jr.(Tom’s son aka TJ)
• Dennis J Kazubowski (Tom’s Attorney)
• Greta Goth
• Youssef “Joe” Y Kelada, MD
• Richard Fletcher (Tom’s former boss at Amalgamated Insurance)
• William F Marlette (aka Marco Bill)

This is also in addition to Searching For Bigfoot, Inc. and Bigfoot Lives LLC, which currently is in default for not supplying the yearly list of officers as required by Nevada Law, since October, 2011.

Till Next Time,

Squatch-D

Critical Thinking and it’s place in Sasquatch research

Last night on Squatchdetective Radio, I went on a diatribe about Critical Thinking (CT).

I guess it really wasn’t meant towards critical thinking but rather the misguided thought processes by some, both skeptic and believer alike and calling it CT.

The components of CT are:

• Observation
• Interpretation
• Analysis
• Inference
• Evaluation
• Explanation,
• Meta-cognition

But there is a subtle flaw in the CT process, which is not necessarily a problem with the process, but with people in general.

The problem with people is explored by Roderick Hindery, author of “Indoctrination and Self-Deception or Free and Critical Thought?”

 

“The dispositional dimension of critical thinking is characterological. Its focus is in learning and developing the habitual intention to be truth-seeking, open-minded, systematic, analytical, inquisitive, confident in reasoning, and prudent in making judgments.

Those who are ambivalent on one or more of these aspects of the disposition toward critical thinking or who have an opposite disposition (intellectually arrogant, biased, intolerant, emotional, disorganized, lazy, heedless of consequences, indifferent toward new information, mistrustful of reasoning, or imprudent) are more likely to encounter problems in using their critical-thinking skills.

Failure to recognize the importance of correct dispositions can lead to various forms of self-deception and closed-mindedness, both individually and collectively.”

 

In truth, if someone says the use CT to call something a hoax or real, then they should be able to tell you concisely and clearly what has lead them to that assumption.

I said assumption, because so far no one has proven a Sasquatch to be real, nor really proven half what we call hoaxes…hoaxes.

See folks the way I see it and I think that most may agree, as a rule of thumb, I use something that trumps CT every time: Common Sense (CS).

Merriam-Webster defines CS as “sound and prudent judgment based on a simple perception of the situation or facts."

Professor Michael S. Roth

In CT, in many cases CT can be used improperly as “intellectual one-up-man-ship,” according to an article written by Professor Michael S. Roth, intellectual historian and president of Wesleyan University. He goes on to write in his essay:

“A common way to show that one has sharpened one’s critical thinking is to display an ability to see through or undermine statements made by (or beliefs held by) others. Thus, our best students are really good at one aspect of critical thinking­—being critical. For many students today, being smart means being critical. To be able to show that Hegel’s concept of narrative foreclosed the non-European, or that Butler’s stance on vulnerability contradicts her conception of performativity, or that a tenured professor has failed to account for his own "privilege"—these are marks of sophistication, signs of one’s ability to participate fully in the academic tribe. But this participation, being entirely negative, is not only seriously unsatisfying; it is ultimately counterproductive.

…..we should be wary of creating a class of self-satisfied debunkers or, to use a currently fashionable word on campuses, people who like to "trouble" ideas. In overdeveloping the capacity to show how texts, institutions, or people fail to accomplish what they set out to do, we may be depriving students of the capacity to learn as much as possible from what they study. In a humanities culture in which being smart often means being a critical unmasker, our students may become too good at showing how things don’t make sense. That very skill may diminish their capacity to find or create meaning and direction in the books they read and the world in which they live.

Once outside the university, our students continue to score points by displaying the critical prowess for which they were rewarded in school. They wind up contributing to a cultural climate that has little tolerance for finding or making meaning, whose intellectuals and cultural commentators delight in being able to show that somebody else is not to be believed.”

 

So as the reader can see, CT has its advantages as well as major flaws, whether it is bias or some often seen in the community as political or “academic” one up-man-ship, in either case, the things that trump all is hard facts and evidence.

You cannot prove something a Bigfoot through CT, nor can you prove a hoax, unless you have evidence and hard facts.

There is no substitute for getting your hands dirty and getting evidence and facts and boots on the ground. CT is not a justification for not doing the field work.

Never mind all this  hoopla over CT, because in my opinion it rarely works to its full effect, due to people’s predisposed bias and beliefs, on both sides of the argument. It is definitely no substitute for a good ole fashioned good investigation work.

Because no matter how much CT is done, it cannot change evidence or the facts in a given situation.

Less thinky….more worky people!!

Till Next Time,

Squatch-D