"What does it all mean?"
It's a question you hear posed an awful lot. The search for meaning is behind most of the world's religions. It is a major driver for science as well; perhaps the only common ground science and religion share is that both stem from a quest to find connections, and explanations for what we see around us. Humans are always looking for patterns and correlations. It is one of the things we do the best.
Like any behavior, however, it can be applied too broadly, or in the wrong context. The phenomenon of pareidolia that was the subject of this blog two days ago is one example. I stumbled upon another one just this morning -- in an article that claims that thousands of companies deliberately include "occult witchcraft symbols" in their logos and advertisements. (Source)
The article starts out reasonably enough, describing the use of symbols in various historical contexts, such as the use of the fish by early Christians to mark households who belonged. Then, the author, Gabrielle Pickard, gets a little closer to the central point of her article by describing the use of the star-inscribed-within-a-circle symbol by Wiccans, and quotes one Wiccan source as stating that this symbol "cannot be mistaken as belonging to any other religion or deity."
Seriously? No other culture could have, at some point, drawn a star within a circle, and used it to mean something entirely different? At this point, we have crossed the line between symbols being used by certain people to mean something, and the symbol somehow having inherent meaning -- a contention that is ridiculous. Just as language is defined as "arbitrary symbolic communication" -- with the exception of a few onomatopoeic words, there is no particular connection between a word's sound and its meaning -- symbols gain meaning only through context. Outside of that context, the same symbol can mean something entirely different -- or nothing at all.
However, this doesn't stop Pickard from imbuing a whole bunch of corporate logos with sinister undertones. The winged disc, she states, is an Egyptian symbol that connotes life after death, and has now been used in the logos for Bentley, Mini, Harley Davidson, Chrysler, Aston Martin and Chevrolet. She also says that the symbol shows up in the "seemingly unrelated" contexts of Freemasonry and the Rosicrucians.
"Seemingly." *cue sinister music*
But she still hasn't gone quite as far off the deep end as she's going to, because the next thing she introduces is the symbol of the "Vesica Piscis," consisting of two interlocking circles. This symbol is part of "sacred geometry," she says, where it represents the vagina of the Goddess, and thus has "sexual associations." And (horrors!) this symbol has worked its way into a number of logos, including Chanel, Gucci... and MasterCard!
Yes, people, next time you look at the two interlocking circles on your MasterCard, just remember that you are gazing at the Sacred Vagina of the Goddess. I think I might switch to Visa.
At first, I thought she might just be commenting upon how ancient symbols have been co-opted by corporations, and have lost their meanings -- which would be an interesting observation. As context changes, meaning changes. But no -- she seems to be saying that the symbols all retain their original meanings, even for people who didn't know what those meanings were. For example, until reading this article, I'd never heard of the "Vesica Piscis." So, you'd think, any sexual connotations of the Gucci logo would have been lost on me. But no, she says; she quotes one of her sources, The Vigilant Citizen, as stating that these symbols are "magically charged to focus the subconscious to perform particular tasks," and she goes on to say, "these logos are much more powerful than we may think... It is only when we stop to look more closely that we can reveal more sinister and hidden ancient meanings behind those symbols."
It was a common claim amongst our ancestors that symbols and words had inherent meaning -- this is the basis of a lot of magical practice, where drawings, patterns, or even spoken words were thought to carry a sort of psychic charge. (This is the origin of the magician's stock chant, "abracadabra" -- a word once thought to be imbued with tremendous power, and now usually laughed at.) Of course, there's no inherent anything in symbols. Symbols can mean one thing in one culture and something completely different in another -- witness the way the sentiment behind the one-finger salute is expressed. In America, it's a raised middle finger; in France, it's done with the same finger, but palm upward; in some cultures, the equivalent is the thumbs-up gesture or the peace sign, which has led to some unfortunate misunderstandings!
So the idea that corporations are attempting to infiltrate our brains with magical symbols for some sort of malign purpose is ridiculous. They choose their logos for a lot of reasons -- some historical, some cultural, and some just because they look cool. Undoubtedly, a few do come originally from associations with the occult (such as the crowned snake in the Alfa Romeo logo), but as the context shifts, any sinister meaning that the symbol had gets lost. The vast majority, however, are just there to be eye-catching and memorable, and as such are no more sinister than commercial jingles. The bottom line is that unfortunately for the magical thinkers, everything doesn't have to "mean something."
So relax; you are not invoking sexual magic when you wear Gucci, and I am not summoning up Egyptian sun gods when I drive my wife's Mini Cooper. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a pair of interlocking circles is just a pair of interlocking circles.
Friday, June 8, 2012
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Mangy coyotes, mad cows, and mythological creatures
Today at Worldwide Wacko Watch we're keeping a close eye on three developing stories. At least I am. My research team, made up of my dogs Grendel and Doolin, are currently asleep, having just completed a critical mission of barking at nothing at 4 AM.
Of course, maybe there was something there, and I just didn't notice it. Some people in Cedar Park, Texas, were probably wishing they had dogs as brave as mine to protect them when they saw, skulking in a field near Hill Country Winery, a pack of Chupacabras. (Source)
"I don't know what it is," said Rick Cumptson, who has also seen the animals in a field outside of his store. "I'd never even heard of Chupacabra until about two weeks ago. I started looking, trying to figure out what the hell these were. They were just hanging out there in the field. It looked like maybe they had just had breakfast, and were out there playing around."
Well, already that has to make you wonder. Chupacabras don't "play around." They terrorize residents with their horrifying visages, rippling muscles, and glowing red eyes, and look around for goats to disembowel. Be that as it may, Cumpston and others who have seen the animals are certain that what they're seeing is the renowned blood-sucking cryptid.
Me, I'm not so sure. Every time someone has seen a Chupacabra, or taken a photograph, or shot one, it's turned out to be a coyote with sarcoptic mange. Jack Bonner, who works for Williamson County Animal Control, concurs. "Anybody that calls in a Chupacabra -- it's a coyote with mange," Bonner said, adding that there was a "really, really, really nasty, ugly, mangy coyote that was over in that area" a few months ago.
Cumpston, of course, isn't convinced. "I don't think it's possible," he told reporters for the Austin Statesman. "I've seen coyotes and I've seen this -- two of them within 25 feet -- their head is nowhere similar to a coyote at all. Their ears are different, their eyes are different. I just can't believe that."
So, if you visit Texas, watch out for Chupacabras on the rampage. Or mangy coyotes. Either one, I would imagine, would be really, really, really nasty to meet.
But not, perhaps, as scary as a bunch of deranged cows, which is what some farmers in Indiana had to contend with after their field got buzzed by a UFO. (Source)
MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) posted a story on June 5 that there was a report from an undisclosed location in Indiana, telling about a sighting of a UFO that "streaked across the sky very fast and had a long tail behind it." This, so far, isn't that unusual -- dozens of such reports come in every day. But what happened afterwards sets it apart.
Minutes later, the eyewitness said that his cows began "going nuts, making noises and slamming themselves into the gate." He himself reports feeling "strange and shaky," and says that shortly thereafter, he "heard sirens and saw several emergency response vehicles headed in the direction that the 'UFO' was traveling."
The whole thing puts me in mind of the strangely satisfying CowAbduction, where you see a photograph of a calmly grazing cow, and when you click on it, the cow moos and gets flung upwards into the air, as if with a tractor beam. No, nothing else happens, but it's still funny enough that just I spent ten minutes messing around with it, probably because I need to have another cup of coffee so that my brain will actually start working. On the other hand, the tracker on the CowAbduction page says that the website has logged 1,650,553 cow abductions to date, so I guess I'm not the only one who is easily amused.
And even cow abductions aren't as scary as what's going on in Chesterfield, Michigan, where a mythological creature is stalking the woods. (Source)
A Macomb County police report from June 6 states that a Chesterfield resident had a rock thrown through his window, with a scary note attached. The note "said a mythological creature was in the woods nearby and that children should be made aware of the danger."
Police scoured the woods nearby and "did not find any suspects, nor any mythological creatures."
Me, if I was trying to warn my neighbors about rampaging mythological creatures, (1) I would find a less antisocial way to warn them than throwing a rock through their window, and (2) I would be a little more specific regarding what I was warning them about. What kind of mythological creature? A centaur? A leprechaun? A balrog? You can see that the kinds of responsive measures you might want to take would be different in each of those cases -- respectively (1) hide the women-folk, (2) look for a pot in which to bring home your gold, or (3) piss yourself and scream like a little girl. So it would have been nice if they could have given the Chesterfield resident a little more information regarding what they were up against. However, there were no further reports of balrogs in the woods, so it all ended happily enough.
So, anyway, that's our report for the day. I think that about winds us up here, which is a good thing, because my dogs have woken up and are barking again. Maybe this time there's actually something out there in the back yard -- possibly a mangy chupacabra, a mad, UFO-crazed cow, or a "mythological creature." Or maybe they're just barking because they like to bark. Myself, I suspect it's the latter.
Of course, maybe there was something there, and I just didn't notice it. Some people in Cedar Park, Texas, were probably wishing they had dogs as brave as mine to protect them when they saw, skulking in a field near Hill Country Winery, a pack of Chupacabras. (Source)
"I don't know what it is," said Rick Cumptson, who has also seen the animals in a field outside of his store. "I'd never even heard of Chupacabra until about two weeks ago. I started looking, trying to figure out what the hell these were. They were just hanging out there in the field. It looked like maybe they had just had breakfast, and were out there playing around."
Well, already that has to make you wonder. Chupacabras don't "play around." They terrorize residents with their horrifying visages, rippling muscles, and glowing red eyes, and look around for goats to disembowel. Be that as it may, Cumpston and others who have seen the animals are certain that what they're seeing is the renowned blood-sucking cryptid.
Me, I'm not so sure. Every time someone has seen a Chupacabra, or taken a photograph, or shot one, it's turned out to be a coyote with sarcoptic mange. Jack Bonner, who works for Williamson County Animal Control, concurs. "Anybody that calls in a Chupacabra -- it's a coyote with mange," Bonner said, adding that there was a "really, really, really nasty, ugly, mangy coyote that was over in that area" a few months ago.
Cumpston, of course, isn't convinced. "I don't think it's possible," he told reporters for the Austin Statesman. "I've seen coyotes and I've seen this -- two of them within 25 feet -- their head is nowhere similar to a coyote at all. Their ears are different, their eyes are different. I just can't believe that."
So, if you visit Texas, watch out for Chupacabras on the rampage. Or mangy coyotes. Either one, I would imagine, would be really, really, really nasty to meet.
But not, perhaps, as scary as a bunch of deranged cows, which is what some farmers in Indiana had to contend with after their field got buzzed by a UFO. (Source)
MUFON (the Mutual UFO Network) posted a story on June 5 that there was a report from an undisclosed location in Indiana, telling about a sighting of a UFO that "streaked across the sky very fast and had a long tail behind it." This, so far, isn't that unusual -- dozens of such reports come in every day. But what happened afterwards sets it apart.
Minutes later, the eyewitness said that his cows began "going nuts, making noises and slamming themselves into the gate." He himself reports feeling "strange and shaky," and says that shortly thereafter, he "heard sirens and saw several emergency response vehicles headed in the direction that the 'UFO' was traveling."
The whole thing puts me in mind of the strangely satisfying CowAbduction, where you see a photograph of a calmly grazing cow, and when you click on it, the cow moos and gets flung upwards into the air, as if with a tractor beam. No, nothing else happens, but it's still funny enough that just I spent ten minutes messing around with it, probably because I need to have another cup of coffee so that my brain will actually start working. On the other hand, the tracker on the CowAbduction page says that the website has logged 1,650,553 cow abductions to date, so I guess I'm not the only one who is easily amused.
And even cow abductions aren't as scary as what's going on in Chesterfield, Michigan, where a mythological creature is stalking the woods. (Source)
A Macomb County police report from June 6 states that a Chesterfield resident had a rock thrown through his window, with a scary note attached. The note "said a mythological creature was in the woods nearby and that children should be made aware of the danger."
Police scoured the woods nearby and "did not find any suspects, nor any mythological creatures."
Me, if I was trying to warn my neighbors about rampaging mythological creatures, (1) I would find a less antisocial way to warn them than throwing a rock through their window, and (2) I would be a little more specific regarding what I was warning them about. What kind of mythological creature? A centaur? A leprechaun? A balrog? You can see that the kinds of responsive measures you might want to take would be different in each of those cases -- respectively (1) hide the women-folk, (2) look for a pot in which to bring home your gold, or (3) piss yourself and scream like a little girl. So it would have been nice if they could have given the Chesterfield resident a little more information regarding what they were up against. However, there were no further reports of balrogs in the woods, so it all ended happily enough.
So, anyway, that's our report for the day. I think that about winds us up here, which is a good thing, because my dogs have woken up and are barking again. Maybe this time there's actually something out there in the back yard -- possibly a mangy chupacabra, a mad, UFO-crazed cow, or a "mythological creature." Or maybe they're just barking because they like to bark. Myself, I suspect it's the latter.
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
Faces in the woods
One of the first things I ever wrote about in this blog was the phenomenon of pareidolia -- because the human brain is wired to recognize faces, we sometimes see faces where there are only random patterns of lights and shadows that resemble a face. This is why, as children, we all saw faces in clouds and on the Moon; and it also explains the Face on Mars, most "ghost photographs," and the countless instances of seeing the face of Jesus on grilled cheese sandwiches, tortillas, and concrete walls.
When I first mentioned pareidolia, four years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it. Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity. Which is all to the good.
But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it? If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?
Well, a recent post at OccultView gives us the answer.
Entitled "Photographing Spirits, Faeries, and Trolls," the writer admits that pareidolia does occur:
Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient. "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph." What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.
The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters. "For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" the main character, Mrs. Miller, says. "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It's found its way through."
It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore. For a reason.
Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place. Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce. This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true. If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses. Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab. If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity. Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me. Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror. ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")
In any case, the article on OccultView gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and woo-woo define the word "evidence" rather differently. The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable. So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day, but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.
When I first mentioned pareidolia, four years ago, it seemed like most people hadn't heard of it. Recently, however, the idea has gained wider currency, and now when some facelike thing is spotted, and makes it into the mainstream press, the word seems to come up with fair regularity. Which is all to the good.
But it does leave the woo-woos in a bit of a quandary, doesn't it? If all of their ghost photographs and Faces on Mars and grilled cheese Jesuses (Jesi?) are just random patterns, perceived as faces because that's how the human brain works, what's a woo-woo to do?
Well, a recent post at OccultView gives us the answer.
Entitled "Photographing Spirits, Faeries, and Trolls," the writer admits that pareidolia does occur:
Photographing nature spirits is tricky business. Nature spirits, fairies and trolls don’t exactly resemble human beings. Any image of such an entity could simply be pareidolia, which is imagining meaningful shapes in random patterns. Then again, there is always a chance what appears to be a fairy is actually a fairy.Okay, so far so good. So how do we tell the difference? We can't, the writer says, because even if it is pareidolia, the spirits are still there:
There is also a third possibility…intentionally created pareidolia. Even if non-physical beings can’t necessarily be photographed, perhaps they can manipulate their surroundings to give themselves shape. Might they use branches and leaves to give substance to their formlessness? What appears as pareidolia may not always be the result of purely random patterns but the result of serendipity and synchronicity.So, in other words -- if I'm understanding him correctly -- even if analysis of the photograph showed that the image we thought was a Forest Troll turned out to be a happenstance arrangement of leaves and branches, it's still a troll -- it's just that the troll used the leaves and branches to create his face? (At this point, you should go back and click the guy's link, if you haven't already done so -- he includes some photographs of "Woodland Spirits" that he took, and that are at least mildly entertaining.)
Well, to a skeptic's ear, all of this sounds mighty convenient. "No -- the ghostly image wasn't just a smudge on the camera lens; the ghost created a smudge on your camera lens in order to leave his image on the photograph." What this does, of course, is to remove photographic evidence from the realm of the even potentially falsifiable -- any alternate explanations simply show that the denizens of the Spirit World can manipulate their surroundings, your mind, and the camera or recording equipment.
The whole thing puts me in mind of China Miéville's amazing (and terrifying) short story "Details," in which a woman admits that cracks in sidewalks and stains on walls and patterns in carpet that happen to resemble faces are just random and meaningless -- but at the same time, they are monsters. "For most people, it's just chance, isn't it?" the main character, Mrs. Miller, says. "What shapes they see in a tangle of wire. There's a thousand pictures there, and when you look, some of them just appear. But now... the thing in the lines chooses the pictures for me. It can thrust itself forward. It makes me see it. It's found its way through."
It does bear keeping in mind, though, that however wonderful Miéville's story is, you will find it on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore. For a reason.
Of course, it's not like any hardcore skeptic considers photographic evidence all that reliable in the first place. Besides pareidolia and simple camera malfunctions, programs like Photoshop have made convincing fakes too easy to produce. This is why scientists demand hard evidence when people make outlandish claims -- show me, in a controlled setting, that what you are saying is true. If you think there's a troll in the woods, let's see him show up in front of reliable witnesses. Let's have a sample of troll hair on which to perform DNA analysis, or a troll bone to study in the lab. If you say a house is haunted by a "spirit," design me a Spirit-o-Meter that can detect the "energy field" that you people always blather on about -- don't just tell me that you sensed a Great Disturbance in the Force, and if I didn't, it's just too bad that I don't have your level of psychic sensitivity. Also, for cryin' in the sink, don't tell me that my "disbelief is getting in the way," which is another accusation I've had leveled at me. Honestly, you'd think that, far from being discouraged by my disbelief, a ghost would want to appear in front of skeptics like myself, just for the fun of watching us piss our pants in abject terror. ("I do believe in spooks, I do believe in spooks, I do believe, I do believe...")
In any case, the article on OccultView gives us yet another example of how the worlds of science and woo-woo define the word "evidence" rather differently. The two views, I think, are probably irreconcilable. So I'll end here, on that rather pessimistic note, not only because I've reached the end of my post for the day, but also because I just spilled a little bit of coffee on my desk, and I want to wipe it up before the Coffee Fairy fashions it into a scary-looking face.
Tuesday, June 5, 2012
Woo-woo accreditation
Some of the things I run into, while doing research for this blog, are simply baffling.
Okay, a lot of them are baffling. But at least for the majority of them, you can sort of understand why people would believe them, or at least want to. There's an inherent attractiveness to the concept of an afterlife, a grandeur implicit in the idea of extraterrestrial life, and an inarguable coolness to cryptids like Bigfoot and El Chupacabra. So even if I don't exactly understand why someone would believe in all that stuff, given the absence of any kind of scientifically admissible evidence, at least I get why someone would want to believe it.
I ran into something yesterday, however, that I find puzzling on a very deep level. It started when I clicked on an advertisement called "Parapsychology - Online Training Courses." I guess that on some level, I knew that these sorts of things existed -- there certainly are thousands of books out there that give would-be psychics information (to stretch the definition of the word some) about how it all works, and how to access your inner woo-woo. But training courses?
Let's consider how that could work by comparing it to training in another field -- medicine.
If you have aspirations to become a doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner, or other medical professional, you enter an accredited training program, and undergo a rigorous set of classes in which you learn how the human body works, how to recognize when systems aren't working properly, and what can be done to return the body to normal functioning. After several years of courses and labs, you begin to work with real people in a supervised setting -- learning first how to perform simple, and later more complex, treatment modalities. In the process, experienced medical staff watch you, help you, and correct you when your technique isn't up to par. Eventually, you gain certification to work, at whatever level of care you were trained for, and are trusted thereafter to give good care to your patients.
How, then, could a parapsychological training course work?
The website states that "Curriculum concepts cover crystals, auras, spirits, ghosts, dreams, psychic abilities... numerology, astral travel, and tarot." The first part of my analogy to medical training isn't problematic, at least on the surface -- certainly an "experienced psychic" (whatever that means in practice) could teach me all sorts of things about how to use crystal energies or how to project my astral body into another plane of reality. But however would anyone know if you were doing it correctly? Being that the sorts of things these courses purport to teach have no valid scientific basis, there's no touchstone of evidence by which anyone could be evaluated.
Parapsychology Course Teacher: "Take a look at the woman seated in the chair in front of you. What color is her aura?"
Student: "Well, it looks to me sort of tangerine-colored, with little streaks of puce and magenta around the edges."
Teacher: "Wrong! It's chartreuse! You are assigned to do twelve more aura-viewings, until you get it right."
Now, you might think that being an online course, students are freer to just play along, to make stuff up (same as their teachers are apparently doing), and as long as they say the right made-up stuff, they get a passing grade and a nice certificate and can go on to hang out their shingles and begin to collect $20 per Tarot card reading. But another site I found (here) states that some of these programs offer associates, bachelors, masters, and even doctoral degrees... and that the programs listed on the site have all achieved accreditation through the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or the US Department of Education.
And I'm thinking: how can that possibly work? It would be easy, for example, to tell a bad medical school from a good one; a bad one (for example) might teach that the best method to treat an ulcer is to bleed you using leeches, and a good one would not. But how on earth could you tell a good parapsychology school from a bad one, given that (to put not too fine a point on it), both of them are engaging you in a course of study of something that doesn't, technically, exist? On what basis would accreditation be awarded?
So the whole thing has left me more baffled than usual. I must admit that the schools involved have quite a lucrative racket going; taking students' tuition money and putting them through a training program where the teachers essentially spend four years or longer making stuff up, and give students passing grades when they can make stuff up as well as the teachers can, seems like a pretty clever way to make money. But it does appall me that the CHEA and USDOE are, on some level, putting their stamp of approval on this stuff. It wouldn't be the first time that I've been horrified at something that those who oversee education have done, but this seems pretty extreme, even for them.
Okay, a lot of them are baffling. But at least for the majority of them, you can sort of understand why people would believe them, or at least want to. There's an inherent attractiveness to the concept of an afterlife, a grandeur implicit in the idea of extraterrestrial life, and an inarguable coolness to cryptids like Bigfoot and El Chupacabra. So even if I don't exactly understand why someone would believe in all that stuff, given the absence of any kind of scientifically admissible evidence, at least I get why someone would want to believe it.
I ran into something yesterday, however, that I find puzzling on a very deep level. It started when I clicked on an advertisement called "Parapsychology - Online Training Courses." I guess that on some level, I knew that these sorts of things existed -- there certainly are thousands of books out there that give would-be psychics information (to stretch the definition of the word some) about how it all works, and how to access your inner woo-woo. But training courses?
Let's consider how that could work by comparing it to training in another field -- medicine.
If you have aspirations to become a doctor, nurse, nurse practitioner, or other medical professional, you enter an accredited training program, and undergo a rigorous set of classes in which you learn how the human body works, how to recognize when systems aren't working properly, and what can be done to return the body to normal functioning. After several years of courses and labs, you begin to work with real people in a supervised setting -- learning first how to perform simple, and later more complex, treatment modalities. In the process, experienced medical staff watch you, help you, and correct you when your technique isn't up to par. Eventually, you gain certification to work, at whatever level of care you were trained for, and are trusted thereafter to give good care to your patients.
How, then, could a parapsychological training course work?
The website states that "Curriculum concepts cover crystals, auras, spirits, ghosts, dreams, psychic abilities... numerology, astral travel, and tarot." The first part of my analogy to medical training isn't problematic, at least on the surface -- certainly an "experienced psychic" (whatever that means in practice) could teach me all sorts of things about how to use crystal energies or how to project my astral body into another plane of reality. But however would anyone know if you were doing it correctly? Being that the sorts of things these courses purport to teach have no valid scientific basis, there's no touchstone of evidence by which anyone could be evaluated.
Parapsychology Course Teacher: "Take a look at the woman seated in the chair in front of you. What color is her aura?"
Student: "Well, it looks to me sort of tangerine-colored, with little streaks of puce and magenta around the edges."
Teacher: "Wrong! It's chartreuse! You are assigned to do twelve more aura-viewings, until you get it right."
Now, you might think that being an online course, students are freer to just play along, to make stuff up (same as their teachers are apparently doing), and as long as they say the right made-up stuff, they get a passing grade and a nice certificate and can go on to hang out their shingles and begin to collect $20 per Tarot card reading. But another site I found (here) states that some of these programs offer associates, bachelors, masters, and even doctoral degrees... and that the programs listed on the site have all achieved accreditation through the Council for Higher Education Accreditation or the US Department of Education.
And I'm thinking: how can that possibly work? It would be easy, for example, to tell a bad medical school from a good one; a bad one (for example) might teach that the best method to treat an ulcer is to bleed you using leeches, and a good one would not. But how on earth could you tell a good parapsychology school from a bad one, given that (to put not too fine a point on it), both of them are engaging you in a course of study of something that doesn't, technically, exist? On what basis would accreditation be awarded?
So the whole thing has left me more baffled than usual. I must admit that the schools involved have quite a lucrative racket going; taking students' tuition money and putting them through a training program where the teachers essentially spend four years or longer making stuff up, and give students passing grades when they can make stuff up as well as the teachers can, seems like a pretty clever way to make money. But it does appall me that the CHEA and USDOE are, on some level, putting their stamp of approval on this stuff. It wouldn't be the first time that I've been horrified at something that those who oversee education have done, but this seems pretty extreme, even for them.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Zombie awareness training
There's a saying that has been repeated often enough that it is nearly a cliché, and that is: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.
The Center for Disease Control just found that out.
Last year, you may recall, the CDC posted a page on their website called "Zombie Preparedness." The creators of this page said that the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek way of calling attention to the wisdom of knowing what to do during an emergency, and recommended such measures as having an up-to-date first-aid kit, knowing escape routes from the house (and also which roads to take if you need to escape in a bigger way), and teaching younger members of the family what to do when bad things happen. All of it, they said, could equally well apply to other, more mundane disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.
Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard about the recent bizarre spate of human mutilations. First, there was the drugged-out guy in Florida who ate a homeless man's face, putting him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries; the face-eater himself was ordered to stop by the police, but just looked up at them... and growled. The police shot and killed him. Then, a guy in Hackensack, New Jersey was holed up in his apartment with a knife, threatening to kill himself, and police ordered him to surrender -- so the guy stabbed himself, and proceeded to hurl pieces of his own intestines at the stunned cops. Then a Canadian nutjob killed a former lover, ate part of him, and mailed other assorted parts to the Canadian governmental headquarters. And then, just two days ago, two guys got in a fight in a Staten Island diner, and bit off and swallowed part of the guy's ear.
Not to mention the recent outbreak of "flesh-eating bacteria" in the American Southeast.
All of this has resulted in a flood of emails and calls into the CDC, from people terrified about the ongoing "zombie outbreak." Sites have popped up all over the internet that we are seeing the beginning of the "zombie apocalypse" -- and that the CDC knew about it ahead of time, and that's what gave rise to the link on the CDC site about "zombie preparedness." More insidiously, some conspiracy-minded types are suggesting that the CDC engineered the whole thing, and what we're seeing is a zombie-virus outbreak, à la 28 Days Later.
Predictably, I'm not buying any of it.
The truth of the matter is that the whole thing boils down to a standard principle of media; once you've found a catchy idea that causes people to read what you write, continue to riff indefinitely on the same theme. The Florida face-eater was certainly a wild story, and its release in national media was probably justified. But once that happened, and people mentioned the z-word, the other stories were cast in the same light, to get the same kind of attention -- the suicidal self-stabber in Hackensack probably wouldn't have reached national media if it hadn't been for the first story, and neither would the ear-biter in Staten Island. The Canadian killer was certainly big news... but the news agencies that released that story all mentioned the Florida case, cinching up the connection in people's minds between the two unrelated incidents.
And now, the CDC is catching major amounts of flak for their "Zombie Preparedness" site, from people who (1) believe that Shaun of the Dead was a scientific documentary, and (2) wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked up and, um, bit them. The CDC Zombie Preparedness page itself has had so much traffic that several of the subsidiary links on the site have crashed or have been taken down.
So anyway, let's keep our eye on the ball, people. There are no such things as zombies. There have been a lot of movies about zombies, but they're fiction. (If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia canonic list of zombie movies -- including such obvious winners as Zombie Attack from Outer Space and Violent Shit III: The Infantry of Doom.) The CDC was just trying to be funny, but also call attention to emergency preparedness, with their site, and are neither covering up a zombie apocalypse, nor are they responsible for one.
Okay, have we got that straight, now? Because I have to go make sure my shotgun is loaded.
The Center for Disease Control just found that out.
Last year, you may recall, the CDC posted a page on their website called "Zombie Preparedness." The creators of this page said that the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek way of calling attention to the wisdom of knowing what to do during an emergency, and recommended such measures as having an up-to-date first-aid kit, knowing escape routes from the house (and also which roads to take if you need to escape in a bigger way), and teaching younger members of the family what to do when bad things happen. All of it, they said, could equally well apply to other, more mundane disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.
Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard about the recent bizarre spate of human mutilations. First, there was the drugged-out guy in Florida who ate a homeless man's face, putting him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries; the face-eater himself was ordered to stop by the police, but just looked up at them... and growled. The police shot and killed him. Then, a guy in Hackensack, New Jersey was holed up in his apartment with a knife, threatening to kill himself, and police ordered him to surrender -- so the guy stabbed himself, and proceeded to hurl pieces of his own intestines at the stunned cops. Then a Canadian nutjob killed a former lover, ate part of him, and mailed other assorted parts to the Canadian governmental headquarters. And then, just two days ago, two guys got in a fight in a Staten Island diner, and bit off and swallowed part of the guy's ear.
Not to mention the recent outbreak of "flesh-eating bacteria" in the American Southeast.
All of this has resulted in a flood of emails and calls into the CDC, from people terrified about the ongoing "zombie outbreak." Sites have popped up all over the internet that we are seeing the beginning of the "zombie apocalypse" -- and that the CDC knew about it ahead of time, and that's what gave rise to the link on the CDC site about "zombie preparedness." More insidiously, some conspiracy-minded types are suggesting that the CDC engineered the whole thing, and what we're seeing is a zombie-virus outbreak, à la 28 Days Later.
Predictably, I'm not buying any of it.
The truth of the matter is that the whole thing boils down to a standard principle of media; once you've found a catchy idea that causes people to read what you write, continue to riff indefinitely on the same theme. The Florida face-eater was certainly a wild story, and its release in national media was probably justified. But once that happened, and people mentioned the z-word, the other stories were cast in the same light, to get the same kind of attention -- the suicidal self-stabber in Hackensack probably wouldn't have reached national media if it hadn't been for the first story, and neither would the ear-biter in Staten Island. The Canadian killer was certainly big news... but the news agencies that released that story all mentioned the Florida case, cinching up the connection in people's minds between the two unrelated incidents.
And now, the CDC is catching major amounts of flak for their "Zombie Preparedness" site, from people who (1) believe that Shaun of the Dead was a scientific documentary, and (2) wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked up and, um, bit them. The CDC Zombie Preparedness page itself has had so much traffic that several of the subsidiary links on the site have crashed or have been taken down.
So anyway, let's keep our eye on the ball, people. There are no such things as zombies. There have been a lot of movies about zombies, but they're fiction. (If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia canonic list of zombie movies -- including such obvious winners as Zombie Attack from Outer Space and Violent Shit III: The Infantry of Doom.) The CDC was just trying to be funny, but also call attention to emergency preparedness, with their site, and are neither covering up a zombie apocalypse, nor are they responsible for one.
Okay, have we got that straight, now? Because I have to go make sure my shotgun is loaded.
Saturday, June 2, 2012
The enduring mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident
Despite my claims of being a hard-headed rationalist, I have to admit to being fascinated by a mystery. There is simply something intriguing about the unexplained. While most of the sorts of stories you read in books with titles like Amazing Unexplained Mysteries of the Universe can be attributed to hoaxes, urban legends, flawed eyewitness testimony, and the like, there are a few that stand out as being thoroughly documented, researched in depth, and yet which defy conventional explanation.
One of the most curious ones is a story right out of The X Files, and one which I didn't know about until a friend sent me a link a couple of days ago. It's called the Dyatlov Pass Incident, and occurred in February of 1959. The mystery -- what caused the deaths of the nine backcountry skiers?
Events began in January of that year, when a group of students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Yekaterinburg decided to take a cross-country ski trip across the northern Urals. It was led by Igor Dyatlov, and was composed of eight men and two women, who took a train to the town of Vizhai, and then went off on skis toward Mount Otorten. One member, Yuri Yudin, became ill right at the beginning of the expedition and returned to Yekaterinburg via train, leaving the nine others to trek off into the wilderness.
All nine were experienced skiers and backcountry hikers. All were in excellent physical condition, and had done similar treks before without incident. By January 31 they had camped in a wooded valley, cached food and supplies, and the next morning headed up toward the pass that would one day bear the name of the leader of the ill-fated group.
On February 1, a snowstorm moved in, and the group lost their way -- instead of maintaining their heading toward Dyatlov Pass, they veered west, toward the peak of Kholat Syakhi. At some point they realized their mistake, but instead of retracing their path, they chose to camp on the mountainside and wait out the storm.
Then... something happened, and all nine hikers died.
Igor Dyatlov had told Yuri Yudin that they should be back in Vizhai by February 12, and that he would send a message by telegraph when they got there. When no word from the hikers was sent back to friends in Yekaterinburg by February 20, a rescue expedition was formed. On February 26, the camp on the side of Kholat Syakhi was found, but there the mystery deepened. The camp was uninhabited -- but the single large tent had been cut open from the inside. Within the ruined tent were all of the hikers' supplies -- and all of their shoes. A line of footprints led from the camp down the side of Kholat Syakhi, and all of the footprints showed that the individuals who made them were barefoot or clad in socks. Five hundred meters from the camp the rescuers found the bodies of Yuri Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko, shoeless and clad only in their underwear. Further along, and in similar states of undress, were the corpses of Dyatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustem Slobodin. The remaining four members of the expedition were not found until May 4, when the thawing snow uncovered their bodies 75 meters further down the hillside.
The bodies were examined by doctors, and the first five were all found to have died of hypothermia. Slobodin had a minor skull fracture, but not sufficient to be the cause of his death. The four who were found on May 4, however, were a different story. Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had major head injuries, and Ludmila Dubunina and Alexander Kolevatov had huge chest injuries, "similar to those that would result from a car crash." However, none had external damage -- it looked more like "injuries resulting from high, crushing levels of pressure." Dubunina's tongue was missing. The hikers who had died from injuries rather than hypothermia showed no signs of having been killed in a fight -- the doctor who examined them, Dr. Boris Vozrozhdenny, stated under oath that the damage could not have been inflicted by a human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged."
A friend of the hikers, Yury Kuntsevich, who was at the time of the incident twelve years old, recalls that when the bodies of the hikers were brought back to Yekaterinburg, their faces looked "scorched," as if they had "deep brown tans." Forensic radiation tests found that the hikers' clothing had high levels of radioactivity.
Now, if that wasn't weird enough, another group of hikers who was 50 kilometers to the south of Kholat Syakhi reported that on the night of February 2, they saw "orange spheres" hovering over the mountains in the direction of Dyatlov Pass. Similar reports continued during February and March in the entire area, sightings that were corroborated by independent witnesses including meteorological services and members of the Soviet military.
The inquest into what had happened to the hikers was closed during the third week of May, because of the "absence of a guilty party." All that could be concluded, the inquest said, was that the hikers had died because of a "compelling unknown force." What caused their deaths remains a mystery.
There are a number of rational possibilities, of course. The Russians were, at that time, testing missiles of various sorts, and it's possible that all of the facts of the case could be explained by a nuclear-powered missile firing gone wrong. It is curious, however, that if this was the case, the military would have admitted to seeing the "orange spheres" sighted above Kholat Syekhi in February -- the Soviets were not exactly known for openness with regards to their military maneuvers. It could be that the hikers stumbled upon the remains of an earlier nuclear test, and the combination of radiation poisoning and hypothermia led them to wander off unclad and shoeless -- but how, then, to explain the catastrophic compression injuries of Thibeaux-Brignolles, Dubunina, and Kolevatov?
However you look at it, the Dyatlov Pass Incident remains a perplexing and terrifying mystery. I am still certain that there is a rational explanation for the whole thing, but even after reading a great deal about the facts of the case, I'm damned if I can see what it is. All we know, 53 years later, is what we knew then -- that nine hikers died, under bizarre circumstances, on a snowy mountainside in the Urals, and no one knows why.
One of the most curious ones is a story right out of The X Files, and one which I didn't know about until a friend sent me a link a couple of days ago. It's called the Dyatlov Pass Incident, and occurred in February of 1959. The mystery -- what caused the deaths of the nine backcountry skiers?
Events began in January of that year, when a group of students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Yekaterinburg decided to take a cross-country ski trip across the northern Urals. It was led by Igor Dyatlov, and was composed of eight men and two women, who took a train to the town of Vizhai, and then went off on skis toward Mount Otorten. One member, Yuri Yudin, became ill right at the beginning of the expedition and returned to Yekaterinburg via train, leaving the nine others to trek off into the wilderness.
All nine were experienced skiers and backcountry hikers. All were in excellent physical condition, and had done similar treks before without incident. By January 31 they had camped in a wooded valley, cached food and supplies, and the next morning headed up toward the pass that would one day bear the name of the leader of the ill-fated group.
On February 1, a snowstorm moved in, and the group lost their way -- instead of maintaining their heading toward Dyatlov Pass, they veered west, toward the peak of Kholat Syakhi. At some point they realized their mistake, but instead of retracing their path, they chose to camp on the mountainside and wait out the storm.
Then... something happened, and all nine hikers died.
Igor Dyatlov had told Yuri Yudin that they should be back in Vizhai by February 12, and that he would send a message by telegraph when they got there. When no word from the hikers was sent back to friends in Yekaterinburg by February 20, a rescue expedition was formed. On February 26, the camp on the side of Kholat Syakhi was found, but there the mystery deepened. The camp was uninhabited -- but the single large tent had been cut open from the inside. Within the ruined tent were all of the hikers' supplies -- and all of their shoes. A line of footprints led from the camp down the side of Kholat Syakhi, and all of the footprints showed that the individuals who made them were barefoot or clad in socks. Five hundred meters from the camp the rescuers found the bodies of Yuri Krivonischenko and Yuri Doroshenko, shoeless and clad only in their underwear. Further along, and in similar states of undress, were the corpses of Dyatlov, Zina Kolmogorova and Rustem Slobodin. The remaining four members of the expedition were not found until May 4, when the thawing snow uncovered their bodies 75 meters further down the hillside.
The bodies were examined by doctors, and the first five were all found to have died of hypothermia. Slobodin had a minor skull fracture, but not sufficient to be the cause of his death. The four who were found on May 4, however, were a different story. Nicolai Thibeaux-Brignolles had major head injuries, and Ludmila Dubunina and Alexander Kolevatov had huge chest injuries, "similar to those that would result from a car crash." However, none had external damage -- it looked more like "injuries resulting from high, crushing levels of pressure." Dubunina's tongue was missing. The hikers who had died from injuries rather than hypothermia showed no signs of having been killed in a fight -- the doctor who examined them, Dr. Boris Vozrozhdenny, stated under oath that the damage could not have been inflicted by a human being, "because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged."
A friend of the hikers, Yury Kuntsevich, who was at the time of the incident twelve years old, recalls that when the bodies of the hikers were brought back to Yekaterinburg, their faces looked "scorched," as if they had "deep brown tans." Forensic radiation tests found that the hikers' clothing had high levels of radioactivity.
Now, if that wasn't weird enough, another group of hikers who was 50 kilometers to the south of Kholat Syakhi reported that on the night of February 2, they saw "orange spheres" hovering over the mountains in the direction of Dyatlov Pass. Similar reports continued during February and March in the entire area, sightings that were corroborated by independent witnesses including meteorological services and members of the Soviet military.
The inquest into what had happened to the hikers was closed during the third week of May, because of the "absence of a guilty party." All that could be concluded, the inquest said, was that the hikers had died because of a "compelling unknown force." What caused their deaths remains a mystery.
There are a number of rational possibilities, of course. The Russians were, at that time, testing missiles of various sorts, and it's possible that all of the facts of the case could be explained by a nuclear-powered missile firing gone wrong. It is curious, however, that if this was the case, the military would have admitted to seeing the "orange spheres" sighted above Kholat Syekhi in February -- the Soviets were not exactly known for openness with regards to their military maneuvers. It could be that the hikers stumbled upon the remains of an earlier nuclear test, and the combination of radiation poisoning and hypothermia led them to wander off unclad and shoeless -- but how, then, to explain the catastrophic compression injuries of Thibeaux-Brignolles, Dubunina, and Kolevatov?
However you look at it, the Dyatlov Pass Incident remains a perplexing and terrifying mystery. I am still certain that there is a rational explanation for the whole thing, but even after reading a great deal about the facts of the case, I'm damned if I can see what it is. All we know, 53 years later, is what we knew then -- that nine hikers died, under bizarre circumstances, on a snowy mountainside in the Urals, and no one knows why.
Friday, June 1, 2012
Jinn, witches, and bad behavior
A couple of days ago, I speculated that woo-woo beliefs stem primarily from three human psychological causes: (1) wishful thinking, (2) paranoia, and (3) a reluctance to consider alternative, and unpleasant, explanations. I submit to you that there is a fourth reason -- some woo-woo beliefs give people an excuse for their own bad behavior.
A marginal example of this is the recent upsurge in fraudulent "professional psychics," who bilk people for thousands of dollars to predict futures, give personal advice, and get in touch with deceased family members. I call this a "marginal" example because I'm pretty sure that the charlatans are aware, deep down, that they are charlatans -- that really, they're just doing convincing magic tricks and swindling the gullible. As such, it doesn't really qualify as a true belief. There might be some people who are convinced that they really are psychic, but I suspect that most of those do not include the big money-makers, who go on tours and perform their acts in front of thousands.
I ran into another example of woo-woo-ism used as a justification for antisocial behavior just yesterday, with the story of the young Saudi Arabian guys who went berserk and demolished an abandoned hospital because it was "haunted by jinn." (Source)
Riyadh's Irqa Hospital, which treated Gulf War combatants twenty years ago, was left empty because of ill-repair and safety issues, and (as is common with abandoned buildings) got a reputation for being haunted. The haunting, however, was not by the spirits of the dead; no, Irqa Hospital was haunted by jinn, who are malevolent spirits from Middle Eastern mythology, whose presence can tempt people into sinful behavior.
Well. Evidently a bunch of people never learned the basic concept of "Mythology means it isn't true." Of course, the fact that the jinn are mentioned several times in the Koran didn't help. So they decided to take action. First, an anti-jinn article appeared in the Saudi Gazette recommending the formation of a committee to decide what to do about jinn. The article ended with the facepalm-inducing statement, "It would be no understatement to say that we are sick and tired of evil sorcerers."
Then, things escalated. Twitter feeds from Saudi users began to buzz with recommendations that the anti-jinn cadre needed to take matters into their own hands. And finally, a raid was organized on Irqa Hospital, and hundreds of young men descended on the place, smashing windows, punching holes in walls, and ultimately burning 60% of the building.
So, what did all of this accomplish? My sources said nothing about hordes of dismayed, defeated jinn retreating in disarray. My guess as to the number of jinn that were encountered that night is right out of Monty Python's "Camel Spotting" sketch; I'll bet they saw almost... one. Given the lack of success, in the typical definition of the word, what possible motivation for the raid could these guys possibly have?
Well, it allowed them to do an activity that young men, world-wide, seem to love to do; to get together at night, in large numbers, and smash stuff up. But unlike most places, where smashing stuff up that doesn't belong to you is considered a relatively antisocial thing to do, here the woo-woo belief system is invoked -- "Hey! We're not just demolishing random hospitals; we demolished a hospital to save you all from the evil jinn! You should thank us!"
It's the same sort of tendencies that lead to even worse behavior -- such as the people whose fundamental disdain for their fellow human beings, coupled with an enjoyment of causing suffering, drives them to participate in the persecution of "witches." (And lest you think that all of that went out of fashion in the 18th century, allow me to point out that a recent news release from the Legal and Human Rights Center stated that 642 people were lynched in Tanzania last year for "practicing witchcraft.")
It's hard to face this dark side of human nature -- and once understood, it is even harder to do something to combat it. The only thing that can conquer this kind of behavior is education; knowledge is, perhaps, the opposite of fear. In understanding how the world actually works, we can leave behind superstitious fears and prejudices -- that jinn haunt abandoned buildings, or that people deserve death because they can cast evil spells. Progress is slow, plodding, incremental, and there is a significant fraction of the world's population that still espouses these sorts of beliefs. Still, we are progressing. When you consider that it was not so very long ago that witches were hanged right here in the United States, it gives you some cause for optimism.
A marginal example of this is the recent upsurge in fraudulent "professional psychics," who bilk people for thousands of dollars to predict futures, give personal advice, and get in touch with deceased family members. I call this a "marginal" example because I'm pretty sure that the charlatans are aware, deep down, that they are charlatans -- that really, they're just doing convincing magic tricks and swindling the gullible. As such, it doesn't really qualify as a true belief. There might be some people who are convinced that they really are psychic, but I suspect that most of those do not include the big money-makers, who go on tours and perform their acts in front of thousands.
I ran into another example of woo-woo-ism used as a justification for antisocial behavior just yesterday, with the story of the young Saudi Arabian guys who went berserk and demolished an abandoned hospital because it was "haunted by jinn." (Source)
Riyadh's Irqa Hospital, which treated Gulf War combatants twenty years ago, was left empty because of ill-repair and safety issues, and (as is common with abandoned buildings) got a reputation for being haunted. The haunting, however, was not by the spirits of the dead; no, Irqa Hospital was haunted by jinn, who are malevolent spirits from Middle Eastern mythology, whose presence can tempt people into sinful behavior.
Well. Evidently a bunch of people never learned the basic concept of "Mythology means it isn't true." Of course, the fact that the jinn are mentioned several times in the Koran didn't help. So they decided to take action. First, an anti-jinn article appeared in the Saudi Gazette recommending the formation of a committee to decide what to do about jinn. The article ended with the facepalm-inducing statement, "It would be no understatement to say that we are sick and tired of evil sorcerers."
Then, things escalated. Twitter feeds from Saudi users began to buzz with recommendations that the anti-jinn cadre needed to take matters into their own hands. And finally, a raid was organized on Irqa Hospital, and hundreds of young men descended on the place, smashing windows, punching holes in walls, and ultimately burning 60% of the building.
So, what did all of this accomplish? My sources said nothing about hordes of dismayed, defeated jinn retreating in disarray. My guess as to the number of jinn that were encountered that night is right out of Monty Python's "Camel Spotting" sketch; I'll bet they saw almost... one. Given the lack of success, in the typical definition of the word, what possible motivation for the raid could these guys possibly have?
Well, it allowed them to do an activity that young men, world-wide, seem to love to do; to get together at night, in large numbers, and smash stuff up. But unlike most places, where smashing stuff up that doesn't belong to you is considered a relatively antisocial thing to do, here the woo-woo belief system is invoked -- "Hey! We're not just demolishing random hospitals; we demolished a hospital to save you all from the evil jinn! You should thank us!"
It's the same sort of tendencies that lead to even worse behavior -- such as the people whose fundamental disdain for their fellow human beings, coupled with an enjoyment of causing suffering, drives them to participate in the persecution of "witches." (And lest you think that all of that went out of fashion in the 18th century, allow me to point out that a recent news release from the Legal and Human Rights Center stated that 642 people were lynched in Tanzania last year for "practicing witchcraft.")
It's hard to face this dark side of human nature -- and once understood, it is even harder to do something to combat it. The only thing that can conquer this kind of behavior is education; knowledge is, perhaps, the opposite of fear. In understanding how the world actually works, we can leave behind superstitious fears and prejudices -- that jinn haunt abandoned buildings, or that people deserve death because they can cast evil spells. Progress is slow, plodding, incremental, and there is a significant fraction of the world's population that still espouses these sorts of beliefs. Still, we are progressing. When you consider that it was not so very long ago that witches were hanged right here in the United States, it gives you some cause for optimism.
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