Dear Sir or Madame:
I have been an satisfied AS&S customer for many years now. I have purchased my first Dobsonian telescope from your store, and your friendly staff helped me adjust its collimation. I have shopped AS&S for tools and neodymium magnets for hobby projects as well as any gadgets or novelties that tickled my fancy. However, I fear that you're most recent signage at your Milwaukee store, advertising "Ghost Hunting Equipment," has forced me to reconsider my future patronage.
I find it very disingenuous for an establishment that claims to promote science education giving credence to pseudoscience. Science education in our country has enough to deal with from budgetary cut backs to right-wing religious zealots trying to pass Bronze Age fairy tales off as biology. It doesn't need anymore nonsense further corroding it, especially by those who are supposed to be championing it. America is awash in superstition, credulity and magical thinking, a problem that is dragging our civilization downward into ignorance. This trend isn't helped by the con-artists who sell themselves off as "psychics" or "faith healers," celebrities that try to advocate "alternative medicine" and drive the fearful and uneducated away from actual medical treatments, or a "science" store that tries to sell spiritualist malarkey wrapped in a scientific facade.
While I am well aware that it's near Halloween, I don't think that's much of an excuse. It's one thing to tell ghost stories, it quite another to claim that they are real. I can't tell you how to run your business, but I can decide where to spend my money. I can not in good conscious spend it at a store that condones this sort of irrationality in what is supposed to be a "modern" age.
Cordially,
Mark A. Siefert
