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Why is 13 Considered Unlucky? Explaining the Power of Its Bad Reputation

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Would you think it weird if I refused to travel on Sundays that fall on the 22nd day of the month?

How about if I lobbied the homeowner association in my high-rise condo to skip the 22nd floor, jumping from the 21st to 23rd?

It’s highly unusual to fear 22 – so, yes, it would be appropriate to see me as a bit odd. But what if, in just my country alone, more than 40 million people shared the same baseless aversion?

That’s how many Americans admit it would bother them to stay on one particular floor in high-rise hotels: the 13th.

According to the Otis Elevator Co., for every building with a floor numbered “13,” six other buildings pretend to not have one, skipping right to 14.

Many Westerners alter their behaviors on Friday the 13th. Of course bad things do sometimes happen on that date, but there’s no evidence they do so disproportionately.

As a sociologist specializing in social psychology and group processes, I’m not so interested in individual fears and obsessions. What fascinates me is when millions of people share the same misconception to the extent that it affects behavior on a broad scale. Such is the power of 13.

Origins of the superstition

The source of 13’s bad reputation – “triskaidekaphobia” – is murky and speculative. The historical explanation may be as simple as its chance juxtaposition with lucky 12. Joe Nickell investigates paranormal claims for the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, a nonprofit that scientifically examines controversial and extraordinary claims.

He points out that 12 often represents “completeness”: the number of months in the year, gods on Olympus, signs of the zodiac and apostles of Jesus. Thirteen contrasts with this sense of goodness and perfection.

The number 13 may be associated with some famous but undesirable dinner guests. In Norse mythology, the god Loki was 13th to arrive at a feast in Valhalla, where he tricked another attendee into killing the god Baldur. In Christianity, Judas – the apostle who betrayed Jesus – was the 13th guest at the Last Supper.

But the truth is, sociocultural processes can associate bad luck with any number. When the conditions are favorable, a rumor or superstition generates its own social reality, snowballing like an urban legend as it rolls down the hill of time.

In Japan, 9 is unlucky, probably because it sounds similar to the Japanese word for “suffering.” In Italy, it’s 17. In China, 4 sounds like “death” and is more actively avoided in everyday life than 13 is in Western culture – including a willingness to pay higher fees to avoid it in cellphone numbers.

And though 666 is considered lucky in China, many Christians around the world associate it with an evil beast described in the biblical Book of Revelation. There is even a word for an intense fear of 666: hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia.

Social and psychological explanations

There are many kinds of specific phobias, and people hold them for a variety of psychological reasons. They can arise from direct negative experiences – fearing bees after being stung by one, for example.

Other risk factors for developing a phobia include being very young, having relatives with phobias, having a more sensitive personality and being exposed to others with phobias.

Part of 13’s reputation may be connected to a feeling of unfamiliarity, or “felt sense of anomaly,” as it is called in the psychological literature. In everyday life, 13 is less common than 12.

There’s no 13th month, 13-inch ruler, or 13 o’clock. By itself a sense of unfamiliarity won’t cause a phobia, but psychological research shows that we favor what is familiar and disfavor what is not. This makes it easier to associate 13 with negative attributes.

People also may assign dark attributes to 13 for the same reason that many believe in “full moon effects.” Beliefs that the full moon influences mental health, crime rates, accidents and other human calamities have been thoroughly debunked.

Still, when people are looking to confirm their beliefs, they are prone to infer connections between unrelated factors. For example, having a car accident during a full moon, or on a Friday the 13th, makes the event seem all the more memorable and significant. Once locked in, such beliefs are very hard to shake.

Then there are the potent effects of social influences. It takes a village – or Twitter – to make fears coalesce around a particular harmless number. The emergence of any superstition in a social group – fear of 13, walking under ladders, not stepping on a crack, knocking on wood, etc. – is not unlike the rise of a “meme.”

Although now the term most often refers to widely shared online images, it was first introduced by biologist Richard Dawkins to help describe how an idea, innovation, fashion or other bit of information can diffuse through a population.

A meme, in his definition, is similar to a piece of genetic code: It reproduces itself as it is communicated among people, with the potential to mutate into alternative versions of itself.

The 13 meme is a simple bit of information associated with bad luck. It resonates with people for reasons given above, and then spreads throughout the culture. Once acquired, this piece of pseudo-knowledge gives believers a sense of control over the evils associated with it.

False beliefs, true consequences

Groups concerned with public relations seem to feel the need to kowtow to popular superstitions. Perhaps owing to the near-tragic Apollo 13 mission, NASA stopped sequentially numbering space shuttle missions, dubbing the 13th shuttle flight STS-41-G.

In Belgium, complaints from superstitious passengers led Brussels Airlines to revamp its logo in 2006. It had been a “b”-like image made of 13 dots. The airline added a 14th. Like many other airlines, its planes’ row numbering skips 13.

Because superstitious beliefs are inherently false, they are as likely to do harm as good – consider health frauds, for example.

I’d like to believe influential organizations – perhaps even elevator companies – would do better to warn the public about the dangers of clinging to false beliefs than to continue legitimizing them.

Barry Markovsky, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of South Carolina

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article

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Exposed: Hollywood Elite’s Adrenochrome Rituals Revealed on French TV – Media Blackout

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A man with close links to the political and entertainment industry elite dropped a series of truth bombs on French TV this week, naming and shaming multiple celebrities for using adrenochrome as part of depraved occult rituals to get high and stay young.

Gérard Fauré is well-known in France due to his previous career as drug dealer to the stars. Because there are few secrets of the elite Fauré does not know about, he’s a regular guest on TV shows including Touche Pas à Mon Poste, the highly popular show that invited him on this week to discuss Pierre Palmade, a comedian who was involved in a scandalous car crash involving rent boys, enormous doses of cocaine, pedophilic material, and the death of a pregnant woman’s unborn child.

In other words, Palmade was involved in typical occult elite degeneracy.

But the producers of the show got more than they bargained for when Fauré decided to reveal the truth about the degenerate rituals of far more famous names than just Pierre Palmade. Here is the moment Fauré mentions adrenochrome, to the shock and horror of the other panelists.

Another guest (who seemed less outraged than the others) stated that the adrenochrome “conspiracy theory” is rather plausible. She explained that the substance is extracted from children’s blood and is consumed by rich and powerful people to remain youthful.

Fauré claimed that several celebrities consume adrenochrome on a regular basis and named Celine Dion as a prime example. In recent months, Fauré stated that Dion’s mysterious degenerative illness was due to her abusive consumption of adrenochrome.

When asked by an incredulous guest where these sacrificed children come from, Fauré answered that they’re mainly kidnapped. He stated that over 58,000 children are kidnapped in France every year and that only two-thirds are found. He then asked: Where is the remaining third?

Later, Fauré stated that he testified in a case where a woman was looking to sell her daughter to an adrenochrome lab in Dijon. Seemingly on a roll, he added that Yves St-Laurent and other people in the fashion industry were pedo criminals.

When Fauré mentioned the names of France’s President Emmanuel Macron and his 69-year-old wife Brigitte, the interview was suddenly cut short. One can only wonder what he was about to reveal.

It’s not just in France where brave insiders are beginning to come forward and shed light on the depraved secrets of the occult elite.

Hollywood actor Jim Caviezel, who played the role of Jesus in Mel Gibson’s epic Passion of the Christ, has also gone on record admitting that children are being kidnapped and trafficked by Hollywood elites.

Caviezel appeared at the Clay Clark’s Health and Freedom Conference near Tulsa, Oklahoma in November and addressed the issue of child trafficking in Hollywood, revealing that the entertainment industry elite are “raping and murdering” children for adrenochrome.

According to Caviezel, who was promoting new movie Sound of Freedom, Hollywood elites are addicted to adrenochrome and “gut kids alive” to get their fix of the drug which is released as a chemical in the body of terrified children.

Sound of Freedom tells the story of Tim Ballard, a former CIA operative, who quits his job as a Special Agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

Caviezel also revealed that Tim Ballard, the author who he portrays in the film, is “down there saving children as we speak, because they’re pulling kids out of the darkest recesses of hell right now, in dumps and all kinds of places. The adrenochroming of children, look…”

Caviezal is a Hollywood veteran, with leading roles in blockbuster films including Pay It Forward, The Thin Red Line, the Count of Monte Cristo, and Frequency. The man clearly knows his way around Hollywood, which is why it is so impressive that he is coming forward and risking his career – and even his life – to expose the evil at the top of the industry.

It’s not the first time Caviezel has exposed the horror of child trafficking by Hollywood elite, describing it as “the worst horror I have ever seen.”

“Essentially, you have adrenaline in your body and when you are scared you produce adrenaline. If you are an athlete in the fourth quarter, you have adrenaline that comes out of you. If a child knows he is going to die, his body will secrete this adrenaline and they have a lot of terms they use, but umm… It’s the worst horror I’ve ever seen. It’s screaming alone, even if I never saw it. These people that do it, there will be no mercy for them.”

Jim Caviezal not the only one who is coming forward and exposing the elites. Mel Gibson, who directed Caviezal in The Passion of the Christ, has also gone on record denouncing Hollywood as a “den of parasites” who “feast on the blood of kids.”

During a “controversial” appearance on the Graham Norton Show on the BBC in 2017, Gibson educated shocked guests about the real nature of Hollywood elites in the green room backstage after his appearance.

Hollywood studios are “drenched in the blood of innocent children” according to Mel Gibson who claimed the consumption of “baby blood is so popular in Hollywood that it basically operates as a currency of its own.

Hollywood elites are an “enemy of mankind continually acting contrary to our best interests” and “breaking every God given taboo known to man, including the sanctity of children,” Gibson continued.

“It’s an open secret in Hollywood,” he said. These people have their own religious and spiritual teachings and their own social and moral frameworks. They have their sacred texts – they are sick, believe me – and they couldn’t be more at odds with what America stands for.

The mainstream media quickly pounced on Gibson’s revelations, deployed fact checkers including Snopes to declare the comments fake news, and proceeded to delete every video and article from the internet. In short, the mainstream media memory-holed them. Mel Gibson’s voice was silenced.

A celebrity cannot speak out against the system without being silenced and punished. Gibson’s career has not been the same since.

That’s why it’s so important as many people as possible get to hear Jim Caviezal’s words before the mainstream media cancel him and destroy the evidence.

We have seen it happen so many times before. In recent times, Nicole Kidman and Lindsay Lohan also spoke out about pedophilia in Hollywood, before backtracking, attempting to cover their tracks, and pretending they never said what they did. Lohan and Kidman understand the nature of the consequences for those who bite the hand that feeds them.

Close friends of Chris Cornell, Chester Bennington, Coolio and Anne Heche have come forward with remarkably similar stories, revealing the stars were working on exposing the pedophile ring at the heart of the music industry – and it cost them their lives.

These are dark times and bravery is required to live with eyes wide open.

It’s vital that Jim Caviezel’s revelations about pedophilia among the elite is heard by as many people as possible before mainstream media and the tech giants censor and silence him, as they did to his friend and mentor Mel Gibson.

No doubt the fact checkers are planning to delete his words from the internet and declare them fake news. That’s how they continue to keep the majority in the dark about the nature of the globalist elite who control the media and entertainment industries.

(Article by Baxter Dmitry republished from newspunch.com)

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28 girls pass out in Colombia after playing with Ouija board

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A group of 28 schoolgirls were recently taken to a Columbia hospital after they passed out under very strange circumstances. It is indicated that this happened during a lesson at the Galeras educational institution in Pasto in the south of the country.

Information about the diagnoses of the students was not disclosed, however, many parents blame the Ouija boards, with which the schoolgirls allegedly had fun shortly before losing consciousness.

Ouija boards were created in the US in 1886 as a form of entertainment, but quickly became an integral part of the occult. It is believed that spirits can communicate with the world of the living through the Ouija board.

The girls reportedly had panic attacks and other strange symptoms before they passed out and were hospitalized.

The head of the school, Hugo Torres, meanwhile, asks people not to panic and not spread unverified information: “There were 28 possible cases of anxiety in school students.

“Given the reported cases, a series of comments were unleashed on the community that, rather than helping to resolve the situation, led to confusion and an adverse environment for our work.

“The students were referred to the local municipal hospital according to protocols in place. Directors and teachers accompanied the students during the evaluation process.

“The respective parents and/or guardians were informed of the situation at the time.”

The school is now awaiting medical reports before providing an update on the incident. One mother who works at the hospital said she saw three or four children arrive here after fainting.

She said: “Parents, you have to move, investigate what’s happening at school because our children cannot continue in this situation. Our children always have a good breakfast and it cannot be said that what’s happening is due to lack of food.”

It is curious that in November 2022, in the same Colombia, a similar case also occurred with schoolchildren who lost consciousness after playing with the Ouija board.

Then 5 teenagers were taken to the hospital, but in total there were 11 people aged 13 to 17 who were injured. They were found lying unconscious in the school corridor.

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