Things going "boom"

One thing that seems to be a characteristic of Americans, especially American men, is their love of loud noises and blowing stuff up.

I share this odd fascination myself, although in the interest of honesty I must admit that it isn't to the extent of a lot of guys.  I like fireworks, and I can remember as a kid spending many hours messing with firecrackers, bottle rockets, Roman candles, and so on.  (For the record, yes, I still have all of my digits attached and in their original locations.)  I don't know if you heard about the mishap in San Diego back on the Fourth of July in 2012, where eighteen minutes worth of expensive fireworks all went off in about twenty seconds because of a computer screw-up.  It was caught on video (of course), and I think I've watched it maybe a dozen times.

Explosions never get old.  And for some people, they seem to be the answer to everything.

So I guess it's only natural that when hurricanes threaten, somebody comes up with the solution of shooting something at them.  The first crew of rocket scientists who thought this would be a swell idea just thought of firing away at the hurricane with ordinary guns, neglecting two very important facts:

1. Hurricanes, by definition, have extremely strong winds.
2. If you fling something into an extremely strong wind, it can get flung back at you.

This prompted news agencies to diagram what could happen if you fire a gun into a hurricane:

So this brings "pissing into the wind" to an entirely new level.

Not to be outdone, another bunch of nimrods came up with an even better (i.e. more violent, with bigger explosions) solution; when a hurricane heads toward the U.S., you nuke the fucker.

I'm not making this up.  Apparently enough people were suggesting, seriously, that the way to deal with Hurricane Irma was to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of it, that NOAA felt obliged to issue an official statement about why this would be a bad idea.

The person chosen to respond, probably by drawing the short straw, was staff meteorologist Chris Landsea.  Which brings up an important point; isn't "Landsea" the perfect name for a meteorologist?  I mean, with a surname like that, it's hard to think of what other field he could have gone into.  It reminds me of a dentist in my hometown when I was a kid, whose name was "Dr. Pulliam."  You have to wonder how many people end up in professions that match their names.  Like this guy:

And this candidate for District Attorney:

But I digress.

Anyhow, Chris Landsea was pretty unequivocal about using nukes to take out hurricanes.  "[A nuclear explosion] doesn't raise the barometric pressure after the shock has passed because barometric pressure in the atmosphere reflects the weight of the air above the ground," Landsea said.  "To change a Category 5 hurricane into a Category 2 hurricane, you would have to add about a half ton of air for each square meter inside the eye, or a total of a bit more than half a billion tons for a twenty-kilometer-radius eye.  It's difficult to envision a practical way of moving that much air around."

And that's not the only problem.  An even bigger deal is that hurricanes are way more powerful than nuclear weapons, if you consider the energy expenditure.  "The main difficulty with using explosives to modify hurricanes is the amount of energy required," Landsea said.  "A fully developed hurricane can release heat energy at a rate of 5 to 20 x 10^13 watts and converts less than ten per cent of the heat into the mechanical energy of the wind. The heat release is equivalent to a ten-megaton nuclear bomb exploding every twenty minutes."

So yeah, you can shout "'Murika!" all you want, but Hurricane Irma could kick our ass.  It may not be a bad thing; a reality check about our actual place in the hierarchy of nature could remind us that we are,  honestly, way less powerful than nature.  An object lesson that the folks who think we can tinker around with atmospheric carbon dioxide levels with impunity might want to keep in mind.

Apparently Landsea's statement generated another flurry of suggestions of nuking hurricanes as they develop, before they get superpowerful.  The general upshot is that when Landsea rained on their parade, these people shuffled their feet and said, "Awww, c'mon!  Can't we nuke anything?"  But NOAA was unequivocal on that point, too.  Nuking tropical depressions as they form wouldn't work not merely because only a small number of depressions become dangerous hurricanes, but because you're still dealing with an unpredictable natural force that isn't going to settle down just because you decided to bomb the shit out of it.

So there you are.  The latest suggestion for controlling the weather, from people who failed ninth grade Earth Science.  As for me, I've got to get going.  My classes are starting the chapter on basic chemistry today, and I need to get to school to see if I can swing a way to do a demonstration for my class called the "Barking Dog Reaction."  That's the ticket.  Things going boom.  I like it.

Acceleration causation station

You might have heard that a while back, there was a recall on Toyotas because of a problem with stuck accelerator pedals, a malfunction that cost several lives and had one man unjustly imprisoned for vehicular manslaughter.  Toyota was accused of covering up the problem to avoid the cost of a recall, and ultimately paid out $1.2 billion in repairs and reparations to avoid prosecution.

What you may not know is that the entire problem was caused by...

... HAARP.

Yes, HAARP, the High-frequency Active Auroral Research Program, the array of creepy-looking antennas out on the Alaskan tundra that has been blamed for everything from the Fukushima earthquake to Hurricane Katrina.  

Okay, I know HAARP shut down in 2014.

That's what they want you to believe.

HAARP [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So now here's another thing to lay at the feet of the Illuminati, who are (of course) the ones who operate the research station.  At least, that's the contention of the people over at the David Icke Forum, which acts as some kind of clearinghouse for loonies who don't think that anything happens by chance.

Here's the actual quote:

There seems [sic] to be a lot of accidents happening lately because of electronics failure. Many aircraft have fallen out of the sky due to autopilot error, etc. 

Trains have collided because switching stations have failed. 

Now the Toyota accelerator problem.  Truth is, GM, Ford and Toyota have all had the problem for years. 

I suggest that the nanoscale particles of silver released from the Chemtrail program in the form of silver-iodide that allows electrically charged ions to be directed and controlled through HAARP technologies is getting into electronics and reeking [sic] havoc by "tricking" (shorting) electro-mechanical switches.

Well, that's definitely the first thing I think of when I have car problems.  A while back, my 2007 Honda Element, which I love even though it looks kind of like a blue toaster on wheels, started making a weird grinding noise that seemed to come from the rear passenger side.  I immediately took it to my mechanic, Rick.

"Rick," I said, "I think something's wrong with the suspension or brakes back there.  Or, possibly, silver iodide nanoparticles released in the form of chemtrails by an atmospheric monitoring station in Alaska are tricking my car's electro-mechanical parts, thus "reeking havoc."

Turned out it was a stuck brake caliper.  Or at least that's what Rick told me.  There's always the possibility that he might be a secret Illuminati member himself, in which case I've now revealed to Them that I know what they're up to.

So now that I've given myself away, I guess I better watch myself.  Who knows what they'll beam silver iodide into next?  Maybe my computer at school.  Although considering that it already takes twenty minutes just to boot up when I turn it on, maybe that'll make it work better.  Heaven knows nothing else the IT guys have tried has made any difference.  My own contention is that the problem is caused by the fact that my school computer is powered by a single hamster running in a wheel, and that it's as slow as it is because the hamster's kind of pooped out after all these years.

But I digress.

In any case, let me say it as clearly as I know how: HAARP was shut down three years ago.  Any problems you have with your car, up to and including a stuck accelerator, are caused by mechanical failures, not by "silver iodide particles," which you can't "direct and control" using some kind of magic laser beam from space anyhow.  So just relax, and go back to chewing at the straps of your straitjacket, or whatever it was you were doing before.

In any case, I'd better wrap this up, because I've got to get showered, get some breakfast and coffee, and head on out to school.  Turn my computer on, and then wait twenty minutes to see if the hamster is in the mood to run today.

Depression, sadness, and kickboxing

If I chose to comment every time a celebrity said something stupid, I'd be doing nothing but responding to idiotic statements all day long.  But every once in a while, a totally unqualified and apparently ignorant person, who is only in the public eye because of some other (sometimes questionable) talent, makes a statement so egregious, so catastrophically dumb, that I just have to say something.

This is the situation I was in when I heard about kickboxer Andrew Tate's pronouncements about depression.  Here's how it started, in his own words:

It's seldom that I've seen someone pack so much bullshit in to so few words.

First, depression is not sadness.  They're not even close to the same thing.  I'm "sad" when it's cold and rainy on a day I wanted to go for a run.  I'm "sad" when a friend cancels a get-together I'd been looking forward to.  I'm "sad" when my dog is sick.

Depression, on the other hand, affects everything.  It doesn't matter what's going on around you.  It doesn't matter how many friends you have or how your job is going or what the weather is.  Depression makes everything colorless.  Worse, it makes everything -- even the things you know are important -- seem pointless, not worth the trouble.

So you can't just "move on."  You can't just "change it."  If it was that simple, there would be no depressed people in the entire world.

Depressed person:  I feel like life's not worth living any more. 

Psychologist:  Stop feeling sad. 

No-longer-depressed person:  Oh!  Wow!  Thank you!  I'm all better now!  Doctor, you're amazing!

So as you can imagine, Tate received quite a well-deserved backlash for his idiotic statement.  But as you might expect from someone who makes a living beating the absolute shit out of other people, this just made him double down on his original position.  Here are his followup comments:

• There are very few fat lonely man [sic], aged 60.  With no money or family or hobbys [sic].  Who arnt [sic] depressed -- this is not a clinical disease.
• It is a circumstance which they must change.  Most "depressed" people are unhappy with their lives, too lazy to change it.  That simple.
• Then they pretend they caught some disease to absolve all responsibilities.  ITS [sic] NOT MY FAULT IM [sic] SAD.  Yes it is.  
• People will do anything to absolve responsibilities.  ITS [sic] NOT MY FAULT IM [sic] POOR/SAD/FAT/STUPID.  Yes it is.
• So people defend depression.  They get angry when I say this.  Because they need this bullshit to justify their own failures.
• By admitting I'm right, they need to work hard to make themselves happy.  To avoid the work -- argue with me and pretend depression is a thing.
• Sure.  Natural sometimes to FEEL depressed.  It doesn't make it a DISEASE.  I feel hungry sometimes.  Then I change it.
• Modern think bullshit has made trillions giving anti depressant pills when all they need is a better diet, exercise and a life purpose.
• How can you be too depressed to work when people in war zones arnt [sic]?  With dead family all around them?
• Now come back and call me names and defend your safety crutch with all you have.  Or accept fact and change your life.  The choice is yours.

I suppose it's understandable that I became apoplectic with anger reading these comments.  I've struggled with depression my entire adult life.  I was suicidal twice, once when I was 17 and once when I was 20, something few people know about me, even people I knew back then.  I was twice to the point of having a plan to kill myself, plans I abandoned simply out of what I perceived then as cowardice.  I have gone through the gamut of antidepressants, as one after another gave me unacceptable side effects -- complete loss of sex drive, excruciating acid reflux, and (one of them) hypermanic and uncontrollable angry and violent thoughts.  I am now on an antidepressant that works, takes the edge off my depression, and has resulted in no side effects.  Friends and family have told me they see the difference in my overall outlook, energy levels, and approach to life.

So don't tell me "depression isn't real."  Or that it's the same thing as "being sad."  Or that it can be cured with work/exercise/diet.

Or that it's circumstantial, that it comes from being "unhappy with life."  I have had depressive episodes when I was in horrible situations, bad relationships, stressful jobs.  I have also had depressive episodes when everything in my life was going wonderfully.  Depression might be easier to deal with when everything around you is good, when you have a support network and little external stress.

But that doesn't make it go away.  Depression is internal, and (very likely) caused by alterations in neurotransmitter levels in the brain.  If it could be cured by walking in the woods, I fucking well would have done that when I was 17 instead of swiping my parents' bottle of sleeping pills, then sitting there on my bed with a handful of them, gazing at them and chiding myself for not having the courage to swallow the whole lot.

I guess it's unreasonable of me to expect that celebrities are going to be any more likely to say smart things than stupid ones.  They run the gamut of intelligence levels just like the rest of us.  But dammit, given their visibility, they have a responsibility to think before they speak, to consider the effects their words will have.  Whether it's reasonable or not, the public listens to them.

And the idea that an athlete like Andrew Tate could have, by his defiant ignorance and his insensitive and incorrect statements, shamed one person out of seeking help for depression is about as reprehensible as anything I can think of.

Bulk discount on demons

As you undoubtedly know, there are people who take the whole exorcism thing with the utmost seriousness.

And given the current chaos in the world, both man-made and natural, it's no wonder that some religious types think that demons are causing it all.  If you're already a believer in supernatural forces (good and bad) controlling things, I suppose it's natural enough that when things get crazy, you're more likely to think that none of it can be due to natural causes.  So according to these folks, demons are directly causing the natural disasters -- and as far as the human-induced ones, it's demons acting through people, directing their actions, that's causing them to do awful things.

Although as far as the natural disasters go, I've heard them attributed to other sources as well.  Noted theologian Kirk Cameron, for example, thinks that Hurricane Irma was sent by god himself in order to teach us "humility, awe, and repentance." He said:

The storm is causing us to remember that it’s God who supplies our life, breath and everything else so that you and I reach out to him...  Remind [us] that God is the blessed controller of all things.  He is the one who gives us peace, security and strength in the midst of the storm and that he uses this to point us to him and to his care for us.

Myself, I doubt that people in the middle of Hurricane Irma are thinking any such thing.  I'm guessing that most of them are trying to figure out how not to have their asses blown into the next time zone, and/or dodging wind-driven projectiles like pieces of houses and, in some cases, entire cars.

Then there's Reverend Lance Wallnau, who has become something of a frequent flier here on Skeptophilia for saying things like god told him the Chicago Cubs were going to lose the World Series because President Obama was from there (the Cubs won),  that Donald Trump's administration has turned into a slow-motion train wreck because he was being cursed by witches, and now that Hurricane Irma will spare Florida if you just pray at it hard enough.  He suggests the following approach:

We command that storm… in the name of Jesus, you will go off to the ocean, you will bounce off in a direction away from the coast… we don’t have to accept this destruction.  And we’ll see it wobble and off to the ocean it goes, out into the open ocean it goes…

Well, I'm not seeing much in the way of a wobble at the moment, and in fact, every forecast I see is more and more certain that southern Florida is directly in the bullseye.  Maybe we haven't hit the minimum number of prayers that is acceptable for god to turn the hurricane aside, I dunno.

Anyhow, my point is that we have a great many people who still engage in magical thinking, and attribute everything from one's own personal behavior to large-scale events like earthquakes and hurricanes to the direct intervention by spirits, both good and bad.  So with all this demonic stuff going on, it was only a matter of time before we had an exorcist...

... offering a quantity discount on demon-eviction.

The exorcist in question is Father Cataldo Migliazzo of Palermo, Sicily, who does his group exorcisms on Tuesdays.  People gather, and he exorcises them all at once.  In fact, Migliazzo says the whole thing works better when there are at least eight possessed people there.  No explanation of why, although it does seem to be a somewhat more efficient way to approach it.  Paul Seaburn, who wrote the article I linked for Mysterious Universe, describes what happens at one of these evil entity meet-ups:

[A] woman begins to groan, a couple of people growl and spit and one man vomits.  All are then attended to by other priests who allegedly are also trained exorcists. They hold some of the people down, put crucifixes in their faces and, in one case, throw flour in the face of a woman.

Which seems like an odd thing to do.  Do demons have gluten sensitivity, or something?  In any case, the whole thing seems like a combination of auto-suggestion, superstition, and histrionics to me, but I guess that's unsurprising.

St. Francis Borgia Performing an Exorcism (Francisco Goya, 1788) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Federica di Giacomo, who a documentary on modern exorcists, seemed oddly accepting of the whole thing.  "As the priests said to me," di Giacomo said, "people go to the psychiatrist, they go to the magician, they go to other kinds of healers, and they spend a lot a lot of money.  When they finish the money, they go to the priests."

Kind of a troubling progression, that.  Implies that if the psychiatrists can't fix you right away, the only possibility is that you're possessed.  The truth is, many psychological disorders are remarkably intractable, even considering modern medicine and therapy techniques.  The idea of someone who might be schizophrenic going from a psychiatrist to a magician to a priest is actually kind of horrifying.

But Migliazzo thinks he's got the right approach, and apparently his Tuesday demonic socials are quite the rage.  The article didn't mention his success rate, at least in terms of how many people felt better afterwards.  My guess, given what these people are most likely suffering from, any successes would be short-term at best, and end with them becoming repossessed, or whatever the appropriate terminology is.

Myself, I think if you're inclined to growl, spit, or vomit in a public place, you need professional help, and not from a guy in a white robe chanting incantations or throwing flour around.  But I'm not expecting this to change anyone's mind.  If we still have people who think you can pray away a hurricane, all of this exorcism stuff doesn't seem that much crazier.

Keeping track of Dear David

Prompted by my post a few days ago about a visit I made to a haunted pub, wherein I saw almost one ghost, a reader of Skeptophilia sent me a link to the website of KIIS-FM (Los Angeles), where there's a story about a resident whose apartment is plagued by an evil ghostly child...

... and he's telling everyone about new developments in the haunting on Twitter.

The hauntee is one Adam Ellis, who is a cartoonist, and who started out by having bad dreams.  A series of tweets on August 7 mark the beginning of all this.  They're creepy, but more a case for a sleep study than for an exorcist:

• He started appearing in dreams, but I believe he's crossed over into the real world now.
• The first time I saw him, I was experiencing sleep paralysis and saw a child sitting in the green rocking chair at the foot of my bed.
• He had a huge misshapen head that was dented on one side.
• For a while he just stared at me, but then he got out of the chair and started shambling over to the bed.
• Right before he reached the bed, I woke up screaming.

Ellis then drew a picture of him (being that he's a cartoonist), which is pretty scary-looking, but in the interest of protecting his right to his own work, I'll simply direct you to the website if you'd like to take a look.

He also recounts a dream of being in a library, and a little girl came up to him and said, "You've seen Dear David, haven't you?"

Ellis replied that yes, he'd seen him.  The girl then told him that you can ask him questions as long as you address him as "Dear David," but you can only ask him two questions.  If you ask him three, he kills you.

All of which remind me of the idiotic "Bloody Mary" game that kids have played for ages, wherein you are supposed to stare at a mirror and say "Bloody Mary" some specific number of times, and in place of your face, you'll see a blood-smeared ghostly woman.

Which, trust me on this, doesn't work worth a damn, because I tried it a couple of times when I was twelve, and all I saw was my own rather unfortunate face looking back at me, which was scary enough.

The actual Bloody Mary, who doesn't appear in the mirror either [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, on the next appearance of Dear David, Ellis followed the little girl's directive, asking how he'd died (an accident in a store), and what had happened that killed him (a heavy shelf was pushed over onto him, probably explaining the huge dent in his skull).  But then Ellis asked a third question (*gasp*), namely who pushed the shelf, and Dear David just glared at him.  Then Ellis remembered the prohibition on asking a third question, and "woke up terrified."

But at least he didn't wake up dead, which is what the little girl predicted.  I guess even spirits can have incorrect information at times.

So by now Ellis was completely freaked out.  He did some research to see if he could find a kid named David who died by being crushed by a shelf, reasoning that such an event would make the news.  He found nothing.  Then, to his relief, he was able to move to a different apartment in the same building, and he thought Dear David didn't know where he'd gone.  All was quiet for a while, until...

... his cats started acting weird.  Every night at midnight, his four cats would gather at the front door and stare for a few minutes.  Then there was the time when one of them was completely calm, then jumped up in terror and ran off, tail bristling.  Ellis's contention is that apparently Dear David is at it again, and the cats are sensing his presence.

Well, I've owned a lot of cats, and I can say with some authority that all cats act weird, pretty much all the time.  We had one cat who did the sudden-leap-and-run thing with great regularity.  Our suspicion was that she had an idea, and that was such an unfamiliar sensation that it startled her.  Another cat would frequently Sing Us The Song Of His People, often at two in the morning.

But Ellis was convinced Dear David was back.  He took a photograph through the peephole of the front door while the cats were staring, and there's a gray blur on it that is either a ghost with a misshapen head or a smudge on the peephole lens.  He ran an audio recorder all night long, and got back some "strange electrical sounds" and something that sounded like a single footstep.  A Polaroid camera generated nothing but photographs that were solid black (reminding me of one of Stephen King's best, the novella The Sun Dog, which you should all read, and if it doesn't scare the absolute shit out of you, you're made of sterner stuff than I am).  He took a video of the green rocking chair, and it moved with no one anywhere near it.  (Again, if you want to see the video, I direct you to the website.)

So Ellis was getting desperate.  He tried smudging the place with sage.  This had no effect except to piss Dear David off even worse.  Ellis had a dream of being dragged through a warehouse by the kid, and woke up with a bruised arm.  He got strings of calls from an "Unknown Caller" -- he let most of them ring, so they show up as "Missed Call."  He did answer one of them and, he heard nothing but "electrical static" for a time -- and then a little voice said, "Hello."

Okay, skeptic though I am, that would have been my cue to piss my pants and then have a stroke.

Further Twitter updates from Ellis describe more feline hijinks, more noises in the middle of the night, and a couple more videos of the green chair moving.  He's still tweeting, @Moby_Dickhead (yeah, I know...) if you want to keep abreast of the latest that Dear David is up to.

A couple of things occur to me, here.  Besides the whole thing about acting weird being cats' raison d'être, we also have the fact that this whole thing has garnered Ellis 413,000 followers on Twitter.  Not bad as a publicity stunt for a budding cartoonist, if that's what it is.  The phone calls can be explained by someone who knew Ellis was claiming to be haunted (which over four hundred thousand people now do), and decided to shake him up a little.  Videos can be faked, and for the rest -- well, we have only his word about it all.  Not that I'm casting aspersions on Ellis's truthfulness, but as Neil deGrasse Tyson said, "As a scientist, if you want me to believe you, you have to have more than 'I saw it.'"

So I'm in the "unconvinced" column.  I would be, of course.  I did follow Ellis on Twitter, to see if anything else interesting comes up.  Until then, my general response is, "... next."  

But if tonight I get visited by a pissed-off little kid with a huge, misshapen head, I guess that's no better than I deserve.

Ideology vs. hurricanes

There are several topics about which I think, "Okay, I've said all that needs to be said about that.  I've plumbed the depth of absurdity and foolishness on that particular subject."

And then things keep getting worse.

It will come as no surprise to long-time readers of Skeptophilia that what I'm referring to once again is climate change.  What touched off this particular salvo on that topic was the announcement two days ago that any research grant awards from the Environmental Protection Agency have to go to a Trump administration aide to make certain they're consistent with the party line before they're officially approved.

Yes -- we're at the point where science is being held hostage to the standard of ideological purity.

In particular, the aide in charge, one John Konkus, says he looks for the "double c-word" (guess what that means) and automatically eliminates from consideration any grant proposals that mention The Piece Of Reality That Shall Not Be Named.

The EPA isn't the only place this is happening.  Last month, the Department of the Interior cancelled a $100,000 project by the National Academy of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine to study the effects of surface mining on the environment and on people living nearby because it doesn't jibe with the "Drill, Baby, Drill" policy of the current administration.

It probably bears reminding people what happens when the politicians start requiring science to abide by party agenda.  You end up with Trofim Lysenko, who became rich and famous under Josef Stalin by falsifying experimental data to make it look as if the environment could change the genetic makeup of an organism (you might recognize this as a latter-day Lamarckianism).  This idea, of course, was in line with Stalin's hatred of the idea of heredity-as-destiny, and it also bolstered his goal of revolutionizing Soviet agriculture.

Unfortunately, it was based on incorrect science and bogus data, invented because Lysenko knew what side his bread was buttered on.  The result was that Soviet scientific progress was stalled for decades, not only in genetics but in other fields, when researchers recognized how Lysenko had succeeded -- and what happened to the people who dissented.

All of this, however, is part-and-parcel of Trump's determination that ideology comes first, profitability comes second, and reality is dead last.  Especially ironic that all of this is happening while the Gulf Coast of the United States is still cleaning up from one of the costliest storms in history, and Hurricane Irma has broken every record for strength in Atlantic storms, and besides Irma there are simultaneously two other hurricanes brewing in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico.

Oh, but none of that has anything to do with climate change, according to noted meteorologist Rush Limbaugh, who said (and no, I'm not making this up) that hurricanes are part of a liberal plot to push a climate change agenda.

"There is a desire to advance this climate-change agenda, and hurricanes are one of the fastest [ways] to do it," Limbaugh said.  "You have people in all of these government areas who believe man is causing climate change, and they’re hell-bent on proving it, they’re hell-bent on demonstrating it, they’re hell-bent on persuading people of it...  Unlike UFOs, which only land in trailer parks, hurricanes are always forecast to hit major population centers.  Because, after all, major population centers [are] where the major damage will take place and where we can demonstrate that these things are getting bigger and they’re getting more frequent and they’re getting worse.  All because of climate change."

Hurricane Irma [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

It's funny, I always thought that gays were the most powerful force known to nature, given that they've been blamed for causing earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, and wildfires.  But that's apparently incorrect.  Liberals cause all of that stuff.

You know, I kind of wish that were true, because if I could create a hurricane, I'd send one to Rush Limbaugh's house, and also one to Mar-a-Lago.  But I'd want it to be a really focused hurricane, so no one else gets hurt, because I'm just a bleeding heart snowflake that way.

What gets me most about all of this is how much of this political posturing is based on ignorance.  I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that most of the Trump supporters who are snarling about "government inefficiency" and "government red tape" and "bureaucracy" couldn't give you facts about a single specific example.  It's why bloviating gasbags like Rush Limbaugh are still around; he can make idiotic claims like the one above, and people just nod and go, "Yeah!  Damn liberals!  That all makes sense!"

So here we are, once again discussing climate change deniers.  All of which makes me feel like we're moving backwards, that our leaders are actually getting progressively stupider.  And I'd like to say this is the last time I'm addressing this in Skeptophilia, but chances are, circumstances will prove me a liar.

The face in the mirror

Like many people, I've at times been in the position of having to interact with narcissists.

I'll not name names, but two, in particular, stand out.  One of them frequently said things like, "Of course, I know I'm wrong all the time," while in point of fact never admitting to being specifically wrong about anything.  Ever.  This individual never budged so much as an inch off any claim, up to and including ones that were demonstrably false and complete matters of opinion like tastes in music and even food.  (If you differed in those opinions, you were "entitled to your opinion even though it's wrong.")  Everything became about being perceived as the most smart, cultured, savvy, and astute person in the room, so every conversation turned into a battle for dominance, unless you refused to play (which, eventually, is what I did).

The second had a different strategy, albeit one that still resulted in the role of Center of the Entire Universe.  For this person, negative attention caused a complete emotional breakdown, which resulted in everyone having to circle the wagons simply to restore order.  Worse still was when something this individual said made me upset; because then, the focus shifted to someone else's needs, which was unacceptable.  My expression of annoyance, anger, or frustration was turned around into my having unreasonable expectations, which precipitated another emotional breakdown, returning me to the role of caregiver and he-who-pours-oil-on-the-waters.

It's a relief that neither of these two are part of my life any more, because being around narcissists is, among other things, absolutely exhausting.  The incessant focus on self means that no one else's needs, and often no one else's opinions, ever get heard.  Worst of all, neither one had any apparent sense of being narcissistic; I heard both expressing, at one time or another, how unfair it was that they didn't have many friends.

Funny how that happens when you don't consider anyone but yourself.

This lack of self-awareness makes narcissism difficult to study, because it's hard to analyze a condition that the patient doesn't know (s)he's got.  But now a team at the University of Graz (Austria), led by psychologist Emanuel Jauk, has not only looked at what it means to be narcissistic -- they've done neuroimaging studies to see what's going on in a narcissist's brain.  The result was a paper that appeared last week in Nature.

"Narcissism is a topic of increasing interest to science and the public, probably because cultural changes in the past decades favor narcissistic behavior," Jauk says.  "Our study was aimed at taking a closer look at the self-image of narcissistic individuals using neuroscience, which might help to unveil its less conscious aspects."

The results were fascinating.  In the authors' words:

Subclinical narcissism is a personality trait with two faces: According to social-cognitive theories it is associated with grandiosity and feelings of superiority, whereas psychodynamic theories emphasize vulnerable aspects like fluctuating self-esteem and emotional conflicts...  While social-cognitive theory would predict that self-relevant processing should be accompanied by brain activity in reward-related areas in narcissistic individuals, psychodynamic theory would suggest that it should be accompanied by activation in regions pointing to negative affect or emotional conflict.  In this study, extreme groups of high and low narcissistic individuals performed a visual self-recognition paradigm during fMRI.  Viewing one’s own face (as compared to faces of friends and strangers) was accompanied by greater activation of the dorsal and ventral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) in highly narcissistic men.  These results suggest that highly narcissistic men experience greater negative affect or emotional conflict during self-relevant processing and point to vulnerable aspects of subclinical narcissism that might not be apparent in self-report research.

The upshot is that this study suggests narcissism doesn't result in feelings of pleasure when you think of or view yourself; it increases your anxiety.  "Narcissism," Jauk explains, "in terms of an inflated self-view, goes along with negative affect towards the self on an involuntary level."

Which certainly makes sense given my interactions with narcissists.  Above all, neither of the individuals I mentioned seemed all that happy.  It appeared that the returning focus on self came out of insecurity, fear, and anxiety rather than conceit -- that it was more about reassurance than it was about praise.

So the condition itself is a little misnamed, isn't it?  The word "narcissism" comes from the Greek myth of Narcissus, who was a young man whose appearance was so beautiful that he fell in love with a reflection of himself, and couldn't tear his eyes away -- he eventually pined away and died, and the gods took pity on him and turned him into the flower that now bears his name.

Narcissus by Caravaggio (1598) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The reality is sadder.  Narcissists, apparently, think of themselves not out of self-love, but out of a constant uneasy sense that they aren't actually beautiful, intelligent, competent, or desirable.

Which is kind of a miserable way to live.  Knowing this defuses a lot of the anger I harbor from my experiences with the narcissists I described earlier.  For all of their desperation for attention, at their core they were deeply fearful people.

The authors make reference to an alternate version of the Narcissus myth that is more in line with what true narcissists experience.  They write:

In another prominent version by Pausanias, the myth has a different ending: Narcissus is gazing at himself, when suddenly a leaf falls into the water and distorts the image.  Narcissus is shocked by the ugliness of his mirror image, which ultimately leads him to death.

This more tragic ending is much closer to what the study found:

Considering the two versions of the ancient myth of Narcissus, our results are in favor of the less prominent version, in which Narcissus is shocked to death by the ugliness of his mirror image when a leaf drops into the water.  This myth can be seen to metaphorically reflect the ongoing critical self-monitoring that narcissists display when confronted with self-relevant material, presumably due to a lowered intrinsic coupling between self-representation and self-reward/liking.

Which makes me feel like narcissists are more to be pitied than scorned.