Funny you should say that...

Do coincidences mean anything?

This was the subject of a fantastic, and sadly little-known, movie -- I 'Heart' Huckabee's.  The main character (played by Jason Schwartzman) has the bizarre coincidence of seeing, in a big city, the same very tall African man several times in different places.  Freaked out by this, he hires two "existential detectives" (Lily Tomlin and Dustin Hoffman) to figure out if it really was a coincidence, or if it has some kind of significance beyond that.

In other words, if there is a coincidence, maybe even what seems to be a wildly improbable, weird, eye-opening one, does it have any meaning in the Cosmic Sense?  Or is it, to quote one of my favorite songs -- Laurie Anderson's "The Monkey's Paw" -- "a twist of fate, a shot in the dark, a roll of the die, the big wheel, the big ride?"

One of my students has been paying more attention to the little coincidences lately, and his claim is that they happen way more than is attributable to chance.  The whole thing came up yesterday because in my AP Biology class we were talking about the low caloric content of celery -- giving rise to the claim that you use more calories chewing celery than you get from eating it.  He then told me that only two periods earlier, the same topic came up in a different class... and then went on to tell me, excitedly, how "that sort of thing is always happening to me!"

Of course, if he thought that I was going to be willing to attribute coincidences to some sort of Larger Purpose At Work, perhaps due to the influence of a deity who liked celery, he was barking up the wrong tree.   My opinion is such things are simply the dart-thrower's bias -- we tend to notice the hits (in this case, the times when the same topic comes up twice) and ignore misses (all of the millions of things that don't get mentioned twice).  As a result, we tend to overestimate wildly how common such coincidences are.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

That's not to say that there aren't some peculiar ones.  I have had the experience myself of thinking about a song, turning on the radio, and the song is playing.  Take that minor mystery, and turn up the gain, and you get people whose dreams have come true, who have had premonitions of disaster and not taken the plane (or train or boat or whatever), and whose lives have been saved.  Is this true ESP, or the hand of god, or something more prosaic?

I'd opt for the latter, and I suspect that you knew I'd say that. In my opinion, for there really to be something "going on" here, there'd have to be some cause for it, some discernible mechanism at work.  I'm willing to entertain the idea -- momentarily, anyway -- that some supreme being who honestly cares about us might wish to intervene on our part, and save us from calamity via a vision, premonition, or dream.  But that opens up the troubling question about why said deity didn't bother to let the 235 other people who died in the plane crash know, so that they, too, could escape death.  That a deity exists who selectively warns some folks about impending doom while allowing others to perish is a pretty scary idea, and such a deity would have to be capricious to the point of evil.

How about the more benign explanation, that some of us are simply more "in touch" with the sixth sense than others, and therefore all those folks who died simply weren't wired to be aware of the coming catastrophe?  Again, there's that pesky lack of a mechanism.  Not one experiment designed to detect ESP of various sorts has succeeded, which is (to say the least) a bit troublesome to those who believe in such things.  Some of those true believers respond that lab conditions, run by skeptical scientists, are not conducive to the psychic energy field, and it's the lack of belief by the researchers that is interfering with the outcome.  I respond; that's mighty convenient.  Sounds like special pleading to me.

To quote Carl Sagan, from his masterful book The Demon-Haunted World (which should be required reading in every public school science program in America):

Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best.  If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what’s going on, the spirits vanish. They’re shy, we’re told, and some of us believe it.  In twentieth-century parapsychology laboratories, there is the ‘observer effect’: those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi.  What they need is darkness and gullibility.

So, we're left with the conclusion that coincidences happen just because -- they happen.  Given that we dream every night, and daydream every day, and listen to radios and read newspapers and such pretty much constantly, coincidences are bound to happen, just by the statistics of large numbers.  It doesn't make them feel any less weird when they do occur; but sooner or later, you're going to dream something, and a few days or weeks later, it will more or less "come true."  There are only so many things we dream about, and only so many kinds of things that happen in our lives, and given a large enough time axis, eventually those two will coincide.

I hope -- honestly, I do -- that I haven't just taken the magic out of your perception of the world's weirdness.  My own view is that I'd much rather know the truth than to believe a pretty falsehood.  And really, the idea of a god who selectively dabbles in the affairs of humans isn't even that pretty, when you think about it.  So if I've made the world seem a little more prosaic and dull, I sincerely apologize.  And if I get into my car in a half-hour or so, and turn on the radio, and hear Laurie Anderson's "The Monkey's Paw," it will serve me right.

Keeping your eye on the Baal

Illustrating the general principle that loopy ideas are not restricted to one religion, race, or ethnicity, today we have: a rabbi who claims that Donald Trump's presidency was predicted in the Old Testament.

The gentleman's name is Jonathan Cahn, and this isn't his first foray into the lunatic fringe.  Cahn made a name for himself by claiming that 9/11 was foretold by the Prophet Isaiah, and warned that rebuilding on the site of the attack directly contravened god's will, and would lead to us all being the target of the divine "smite" function.  Another time, he went around saying that because America was still doing all sorts of naughty stuff, we were going to get smote again (this seems to be a common theme with him), only this time he picked an actual day, September 13, 2015, on which the aforementioned smiting was supposed to take place.

When September 14, 2015 rolled around, and lo we were all still wandering around unsmot (yes, I know that's not the correct term, but it should be), neither Cahn nor his followers seemed unduly upset by his failure.  In fact, shortly after the non-apocalypse occurred, Cahn appeared on Pat Robertson's television show The 700 Club, and in a moment of unprecedented lucidity, Robertson asked Cahn why the predicted catastrophe didn't happen.

"You can’t put God in a box or He’ll get out of it," Cahn said. "God doesn’t work in exact dates."

Except that Cahn claimed god had given him an exact date.  A little awkward, that.

It didn't slow Cahn down, however.  In an interview last week on the television program It's Supernatural, Cahn described how Bill Clinton's presidency, Hillary Clinton's candidacy, and Trump's eventual win was simply repeating a pattern from the history of the Israelites:

We are replaying an ancient mystery, where we are right now, and it is amazing and it’s true and it’s real.  In the Bible, there is a king who rises up and he is the first one who pioneers, who is pushing, Baal worship.  And the name is Ahab …  He is the first one to actually champion from the throne Baal worship, which is the offering up of children.  Now, could there be parallel?  Well, there is.  There is a man who rises as president, he is Bill Clinton, he is going to follow the template of Ahab.

Righty-o.  After all, Ahab was defeated in battle by an Assyrian king, Shalmaneser III, reigned for twenty-two years despite that, and eventually was mortally wounded by an Aramean arrow, so I think we can all agree that the parallels to Bill Clinton are obvious.

The Death of Ahab (Gustave Doré, 1865) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Such logic apparently doesn't occur to Cahn, who said that this casts Hillary Clinton in the obvious role:

Just as Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, was a champion of Baal worship, so too is Hillary Clinton an advocate of female power and advocate of abortion.

What about Trump, though?  Well, Cahn has that all figured out:

Donald Trump is a modern day version of Jehu, who was raised up by God to become king and to slay Jezebel.  He’s a warrior, he’s a fighter, he fights with everybody.  His name is Jehu…  He’s used by God, but he’s the most unlikely person.

Well, I can't argue with the last bit, anyhow.

So Cahn said that Trump's win was inevitable, because the same pattern was playing out as with Jehu, who in 2 Kings 9:33 tramples Jezebel's mangled body underfoot, as befits a righteous man of god:

When the warrior meets the former queen, the warrior will defeat the former queen and there will be a downfall and that’s exactly what happened.  He wins and Jehu heads to the capital city.  Why does he head to the capital city?  To drain the swamp!  Absolutely.  And Jehu, specifically, is ending Baal worship, which is the offering up of children.  So even Trump puts as his agenda, we want to dismantle this, which leads to the next thing and that is when he goes there, he actually destroys the Temple of Baal in the capital city.  Now the Temple of Baal was built by Ahab, so he starts dismantling the system of killing children.  Well, one of the first things Trump did was sign the the executive orders to try to dismantle it.

And instead of laughing directly into Cahn's face, which is what I would have done, the host of It's Supernatural, Michael Brown, just nodded sagely as if what Cahn had said made perfect sense.

I know people have tried to explain it to me on more than one occasion, but I still can't quite fathom how the Religious Right ended up supporting Trump with such fervor.  I remember the days of Jerry Falwell, Sr., and the founding of the "Moral Majority," which decried the loose morals and general cupidity of secular society.  Here, forty-some-odd years later, we have the same cadre of evangelicals embracing a man who has built his entire life on loose morals and cupidity as if he were the Second Coming of Christ at the very least.

But even by those standards, Rabbi Cahn seems to be taking things a bit far, not to mention twisting reality around like a pretzel in trying to shoehorn modern events into the mold of history.  The problem is, this sort of thing only works when you selectively ignore certain facts and focus on others, are willing to interpret things metaphorically when it suits your purpose, and in general stretch the truth to fit your prior assumptions.

And it must be said that when essayist George Santayana uttered his famous statement that "Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," I really don't think that's what he had in mind.

Anxiety leakage

Following hard on the heels of a prominent athlete claiming that depression was basically self-inflicted and/or voluntary, we have a paper in Scientific Reports that unequivocally demonstrates the biological basis of anxiety.

The paper, entitled "Neural Circuitry Governing Anxious Individuals’ Mis-allocation of Working Memory to Threat," details research by Daniel M. Stout (of the University of California-San Diego), Alexander J. Shackman (of the University of Maryland), and Walker S. Pedersen, Tara A. Miskovich, and Christine L. Larson (of the University of Wisconsin).  The authors write:

Heightened levels of dispositional anxiety confer increased risk for the development of internalizing disorders, including anxiety and co-morbid depression.  These debilitating psychiatric disorders are common and existing treatments are inconsistently effective, underscoring the need to develop a deeper understanding of the mechanisms governing individual differences in risk... 

Building on prior behavioral and electrophysiological work, functional MRI (fMRI) was used in the present study to quantify neural activity while subjects performed a well-established emotional [working memory] task... The results of our mediation analyses suggest that the amygdala promotes the mis-allocation of [working memory] resources to threat-related distracters.  The amygdala is sensitive to a broad spectrum of emotionally salient stimuli, including threat-related facial expressions.  In addition, there is clear evidence that anxious individuals show amplified or prolonged amygdala responses to threat-related faces, even when they are task-irrelevant, consistent with our results.  Anatomically, the amygdala is well positioned to prioritize the short-term retention of threat-related cues...  

[I]t has become clear that information can enter [working memory] via either perceptual encoding or retrieval from long-term memory.  From this perspective, [working memory] reflects the temporary allocation of selective attention to recently perceived items or the temporary re-activation of representations stored in [long-term memory]...  This suggests that intrusive memories may reflect the mis-allocation of [working memory] resources to distressing material held in [long-term memory].

Put more simply, in anxious people, threat-related long-term memories "leak across" into the working memory, the short-term memory system we use to keep track of everyday occurrences.  This is mediated through increased activity in the amygdala, a part of the limbic system of the brain long known to have a connection to anxiety, stress, and obsessive behavior.  In an interview with PsyPost, study lead author Daniel M. Stout explained this in more detail:

Anxiety and depressive disorders are very common, challenging to treat, and pose an enormous burden on public health. Having an anxious personality is associated with developing future psychological disorders. 

We were interested in this topic because we do not fully understand why individuals with an anxious disposition, like those with an anxiety or depressive disorder, experience high levels of emotional distress in the absence of immediate threat, and spend an excessive amount of time thinking about potential dangers in objectively safe situations. 

These types of symptoms are particularly pernicious because they inflict their damage when we need to be focusing on the task-at-hand or at times when we don’t want them to (e.g., during a meeting at work, talking to loved ones, when trying to fall asleep at night).  If we can understand what underlies these symptoms, and the brain mechanisms involved, we may be better able to reduce the suffering that many people with high levels of anxiety report. 

Earlier work by our group using EEG technology suggested that this might reflect problems with how anxious individuals process threat-related information in working memory.  Working memory is a short-term memory system that guides on-going thoughts and behaviors.  It is the memory system involved in helping us remember things while we do a task, like remembering a phone number while dialing it. 

If threat-related information gains access to or ‘contaminates’ working memory, it can exert a negative influence on our thoughts and actions.  For instance, viewing an e-mail informing you that a bill is due can result in increased anxiety and intrusive thoughts about financial troubles; triggering a chain-reaction of uncontrolled worry that spans the entire day. 

One other important aspect of working memory is that its capacity is limited, so we can only hold a finite amount of information online in working memory at any given time.  So, if your working memory is ‘working’ on the worry-related thoughts, then less working memory capacity is available to attend to tasks important for your job or activities you are trying to complete.

Which certainly squares with my experience.  I have a good deal of social anxiety, and it doesn't seem to matter that I objectively, rationally know that I'm safe, that none of the people in the room are judging me or dislike me (or, honestly, are probably thinking about me at all).  The sensation is of having two brains; the rational one, that says, "These are your friends, there's no reason to freak out," and the emotional reptile brain that says, "I AM FREAKING OUT."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

The fact of Stout et al. showing the neurological underpinning of anxiety is a real step toward developing ways to manage it.  I'm lucky in that my anxiety is fairly mild, and hasn't impacted my day-to-day all that much (unless you count the fact that I basically have no social life).  For some people, anxiety is crippling, resulting in an inability to hold down a job, attend school, interact with anyone, and (in some cases) even get out of bed in the morning.

This fMRI study shows how such a disorder can occur, and what is happening in the brain during an anxiety attack -- allowing a much more targeted approach to treating it.  It's to be hoped that other researchers will take this study and run with it.  Because there's no other way to put it: anxiety sucks.

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.