Don’t let government take away our rights

Let’s remember the Christmas holidays are just around the corner. Are we going to sit back and let the other people, our supposed leaders tell us we can not say “Merry Christmas” and we must say “Happy Holidays?”

I am 71 years old and in all those years I have always been glad to remember the birth of our Lord and treat this time of year with genuine respect and love. Why is it we can’t do what we once did to celebrate our Christmas? I don’t care if other religions celebrate their way, so why should anyone care about how we do it. Just remember don’t sit around and let big government take any more of our rights away. We recently celebrated Veterans Day and I’ll tell anyone I’m proud to be an American because at least I know I’m free. Are you? And let me be the first to say to our paper staff one and all Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.



Lilli Kalie

Beckley



Ghost hunter should invite skeptics along

The pleasure instinct crafts us humans with time-sensitive developmental preferences for certain types of stimuli, and these preferences emerge in adults as biases.

Movies, books, music, ideas and objects grasp our attention through past associative connections and life experiences. So why should I be shocked to learn that according to the Wyoming County circuit clerk, David “Bugs” Stover, and a so-called noted world-authority parapsychologist, the Wyoming County courthouse is haunted by a ghost?

Yes, why should any 21st century national scientific-minded person not believe in vampires, ghosts, evil spirits, possession, end-of-the-time revelators and the dark side? I’ll give you a hint. Despite the endless worldwide hype there has been found no physical evidence to support claims of the supernatural. Ouch! That must hurt all mystifics and paranormal fundamentalists.

Clear the fog away and we find mysteries galore; we find wonder and fear and our fragile psyches on the brink of an abyss — but dare abiding readers, the patient observer only comes away with boogeymen of the physical plane: murderers, madmen, perverse serial killers and the mentally insane and their misguided, deluded followers. Wars and diseases are far more terrifying.

We share an uneasy truce with the horrors of life and death. Poets and writers and scientists have said it in many ways: All of our emotions and nearly all of our preferences for good and bad have been shaped by natural selection to cope with challenges and opportunities that have occurred over the course of hominid evolution.

The modern hedonistic palate is versatile and diverse. Each personality is a result of genetic and cultural and everyday experiences. Tales of the strange and out-of-place thrill us no end. But to say what is real goes one step beyond. It requires extraordinary evidence to back it up. Did the Wyoming County ghost hunters have a second qualified observer (one who was neutral) back their story up of a ghost?

No. Was the experiment subject to repeatability? No. Did any doubting Toms, like myself, get a chance at rebuttal in The Wyoming County Report newspaper? Not to my knowledge. Mr. Truth does not take such slights lightly.

So I challenge Mr. Stover and the rest. I would spend a night, any night, in your haunted abode. I will report any and all sensations experienced. Are you game? Or are you all the proverbial chicken that squawks but never lays an egg? I double dare you. Time for all ghosties and ghoulies to meet their high noon.



Lonnie Bailey

Pineville