Zombie cult feud

A Senegalese saying goes, "There are forty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."

I got an object lesson in this principle from a link sent to me by a friend and loyal reader of Skeptophilia a few days ago, wherein I learned that two rival zombie apocalypse cults are currently embroiled in a feud.  The article, by Robyn Pennacchia over at Wonkette, is well worth reading in its entirety.  But my ears perked up instantly when I found out that one of the feuders is one Sherry Shriner.  I knew I'd seen her name before, but where?

A brief search was enough to determine why my memory was jogged.  Back in 2014, I did a post about how the Evil Shadow Government is outfitting us all with microchips in our dental fillings and implanted medical devices, not to mention through vaccination, with the ultimate aim of controlling our behavior in much the same fashion as a ten-year-old uses the remote control to steer his plastic car directly into a wall.

Fortunately, Shriner is one smart cookie, and found out a way to neutralize the chips, something so unexpected and technical and sophisticated there's no way the Evil Scientists would ever have thought of it: magnets. Apparently the chips kind of conk out when they're placed in a magnetic field.  So they turn out to be not such a threat after all, especially if you've ever had an MRI, which must cause the chips to short-circuit so badly that it causes Bad Guy Scientific Laboratories the world over to go up in flames.

But the failure of Shriner's microchip-implant claim apparently didn't discourage her in the least.  She is still around, and has come into the news lately through her alleged connection to a crime you might have heard about -- a woman in Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania shot and killed her boyfriend, supposedly when he asked her to because he'd found out that the leader of the cult they belonged to was a "reptilian alien."

Because that makes total sense.

Anyhow, the leader of the cult, and alleged reptilian alien, is none other than Shriner herself.  Apparently Shriner tried to warn Steven Mineo, the victim of the shooting, that his girlfriend (Barbara Rogers) was a loon.  Not in so many words, of course; what Shriner said was that Rogers was a "Super Soldier."  From Shriner's Facebook page:

They're trying to spin it that I'm responsible for Steve's death?  No, Barb is.  I tried to protect Steve.  I tried to warn him about Barbara Rogers, but he wouldn't listen to me.  He thought I was insulting his 'wife'... when I was just trying to protect him from her!  I knew what she was!  He began to realize that what I said about her was true, and that's why she killed him, to protect her lies and keep her secrets.  They want to call me a cult leader?  No, I am just a humble servant and a Messenger of the Most High.  I spent my life serving HIM, and for that I get beat up by Cain's kids, libtards, Satanists, witches, and haters everywhere.  If you open your eyes it's clear to see she was involved with witchcraft and Satanism.  Steve didn't want to believe it and now he's dead from her hands.  Steve wasn't suicidal, it was her plan all along to destroy him.  So all the lies and garbage against me and others just needs to stop... 

I warned him she was a Super Soldier who would kill him and move on... but I'm the 'False Prophet'...  Perhaps he finally figured her out but it was too late for him.  It wasn't the 'online cult' that killed him, it was Barbara Rogers who they had all warned him about!  They always try to paint me as a cult... nice try libtards.

So yeah, that sounds like the pinnacle of rationality.  The picture becomes even more vivid when you add to that the fact that Pennacchia found out that Shriner also thinks she's Lucifer's sister, and that she's personally interviewed her brother (and in fact wrote a book about it, one review of which begins with the memorable line, "This woman is a delusional loon.").  Oh, and she also sells crystals called "Orgone Blasters," which supposedly will destroy chemtrails, and which are (this is a direct quote from her website) "the only thing that works against Alien-Demonic-Zombie-Vampire beings."

In case those are a problem in your neighborhood.

[image courtesy of photographer Bob Jagendorf and the Wikimedia Commons]

Interestingly, Shriner's "Orgone Blasters" are something I've also addressed here at Skeptophilia.  "Orgone," if you're curious, is a fantastically powerful kind of energy that is the force of "psychosexual release" that happens at orgasm.  How on earth you could use such an energy even if it exists is kind of a mystery, because when most folks have an orgasm they're thinking about other things than how to combat Alien-Demonic-Zombie-Vampire beings.

Or maybe that's just me.  I dunno.

You'd think that'd be enough to think about for today, but in the words of the infomercial: "Wait!  There's more!"  Shriner is currently engaged in a feud with another zombie apocalypse cult, which is called either "Amightywind" or "Almightywind" (even the cult itself seems to be unsure which is correct).  The leaders of this cult, Ezra and Elizabeth Elijah Nikomia, have come up with something even better than Shriner's use of magnets to defeat implanted microchips; they say you can defeat zombies by hitting them with a board:

I tell you this now so when you see these things come to pass you will not fear his army of ZOMBIES that will be slain by the POWER OF THE CROSS of YAHUSHUA ha MASHIACH!  Remember hit them with a board or wood that represents the CROSS.  The dead in YAHUSHUA (Christ) which shall walk and witness to MY Glory will walk as in times of old and testify of Heaven, not to take the MARK of the BEAST!  They shall prove there is life after death.  MY saints you will hear and see in Glorified Bodies that CAN NOT BE KILLED!

So anyhow, Shriner absolutely hates A(l)mightywind, almost as much as she hates "libtards."  Alleged boyfriend-killer Barbara Rogers, Shriner says, was an evil witch affiliated with the Nikomias' group, and there's been a years-long war between their rival cults of an intensity reminiscent of the Hatfields and McCoys:

So all the witches online seem to be rallying their covens and fake Christian ministries to protect fellow witch Barbara Rogers and come against me and paint the lie Steve wanted to die.  Almightywind Witch Cult is run by a woman who was a witch in the Great White Brotherhood of Indiana, broke off from them to begin her own “ministry’ online.  She’s been making hate videos about me for years.  Steve was well aware of them.

And apparently the idea is that the Nikomias talked Barbara into shooting Steve because Steve had allied himself with Sherry Shriner.  From here on it gets kind of confusing, however, so I'll simply direct you to Pennacchia's excellent article if you want more information.

Myself, I'm just glad that Shriner and the Nikomias all live in different states than I do.  I'm sure that New York has its share of wackos, but these three seem like they're in a class by themselves.  And the fact that they're feuding is honestly kind of scary, because when you have people whose grasp on sanity is so tenuous, you never know what they might do.

Or maybe I'm one of the Secret Reptilian Alien Zombie Vampire Libtards.  You can see how that would be just as likely.

Zombie awareness training

There's a saying that has been repeated often enough that it is nearly a cliché, and that is: Be careful what you wish for, you may get it.

The Center for Disease Control just found that out.

Last year, you may recall, the CDC posted a page on their website called "Zombie Preparedness."  The creators of this page said that the whole thing was a tongue-in-cheek way of calling attention to the wisdom of knowing what to do during an emergency, and recommended such measures as having an up-to-date first-aid kit, knowing escape routes from the house (and also which roads to take if you need to escape in a bigger way), and teaching younger members of the family what to do when bad things happen.  All of it, they said, could equally well apply to other, more mundane disasters, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and the like.

Well, I'm sure that all of you have heard about the recent bizarre spate of human mutilations.  First, there was the drugged-out guy in Florida who ate a homeless man's face, putting him in the hospital with life-threatening injuries; the face-eater himself was ordered to stop by the police, but just looked up at them... and growled.  The police shot and killed him.  Then, a guy in Hackensack, New Jersey was holed up in his apartment with a knife, threatening to kill himself, and police ordered him to surrender -- so the guy stabbed himself, and proceeded to hurl pieces of his own intestines at the stunned cops.  Then a Canadian nutjob killed a former lover, ate part of him, and mailed other assorted parts to the Canadian governmental headquarters.  And then, just two days ago, two guys got in a fight in a Staten Island diner, and bit off and swallowed part of the guy's ear.

Not to mention the recent outbreak of "flesh-eating bacteria" in the American Southeast.

All of this has resulted in a flood of emails and calls into the CDC, from people terrified about the ongoing "zombie outbreak."  Sites have popped up all over the internet that we are seeing the beginning of the "zombie apocalypse" -- and that the CDC knew about it ahead of time, and that's what gave rise to the link on the CDC site about "zombie preparedness."  More insidiously, some conspiracy-minded types are suggesting that the CDC engineered the whole thing, and what we're seeing is a zombie-virus outbreak, à la 28 Days Later.

Predictably, I'm not buying any of it.

The truth of the matter is that the whole thing boils down to a standard principle of media; once you've found a catchy idea that causes people to read what you write, continue to riff indefinitely on the same theme.  The Florida face-eater was certainly a wild story, and its release in national media was probably justified.  But once that happened, and people mentioned the z-word, the other stories were cast in the same light, to get the same kind of attention -- the suicidal self-stabber in Hackensack probably wouldn't have reached national media if it hadn't been for the first story, and neither would the ear-biter in Staten Island.  The Canadian killer was certainly big news... but the news agencies that released that story all mentioned the Florida case, cinching up the connection in people's minds between the two unrelated incidents.

And now, the CDC is catching major amounts of flak for their "Zombie Preparedness" site, from people who (1) believe that Shaun of the Dead was a scientific documentary, and (2) wouldn't recognize a joke if it walked up and, um, bit them.  The CDC Zombie Preparedness page itself has had so much traffic that several of the subsidiary links on the site have crashed or have been taken down.

So anyway, let's keep our eye on the ball, people.  There are no such things as zombies.  There have been a lot of movies about zombies, but they're fiction.  (If you're curious, here's the Wikipedia canonic list of zombie movies -- including such obvious winners as Zombie Attack from Outer Space and Violent Shit III: The Infantry of Doom.)  The CDC was just trying to be funny, but also call attention to emergency preparedness, with their site, and are neither covering up a zombie apocalypse, nor are they responsible for one.

Okay, have we got that straight, now?  Because I have to go make sure my shotgun is loaded.

Modeling the zombie apocalypse

I usually tell you a little about my topic before I give you my solemn promise that I didn't make any of it up.

This one is so weird that I'm going to put the disclaimer first:

I swear I'm not making any of this up.

A team of medical researchers from two universities in Ottawa have released a paper (published in the Journal of Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress) containing a mathematical model of what would happen to a population during a zombie attack.

The team was comprised of Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad, and Robert J. Smith?.  And no, I'm not being tentative, there, with that last name.  The question mark is part of Dr. Smith?'s name.  I wonder how it's pronounced, don't you?   Do you have to say it like a question?  At parties, do people go up to him and say, "Hello there, Dr... Smith?"

Myself, I wouldn't have thought it was legal to have a punctuation mark as part of your name.  But now that I find that apparently it is, I think I'll follow suit.  From now on, my name will be Gordon Bonnet!  That way, people will always seem excited to see me.

In any case, the aforementioned medical research team seems to take the whole zombie-study thing awfully seriously.  Here's the actual abstract of the paper:

Zombies are a popular figure in pop culture/entertainment and they are usually portrayed as being brought about through an outbreak or epidemic. Consequently, we model a zombie attack, using biological assumptions based on popular zombie movies. We introduce a basic model for zombie infection, determine equilibria and their stability, and illustrate the outcome with numerical solutions. We then refine the model to introduce a latent period of zombification, whereby humans are infected, but not infectious, before becoming undead. We then modify the model to include the effects of possible quarantine or a cure. Finally, we examine the impact of regular, impulsive reductions in the number of zombies and derive conditions under which eradication can occur. We show that only quick, aggressive attacks can stave off the doomsday scenario: the collapse of society as zombies overtake us all.

I also have to quote the first line of the paper itself, just because it's so memorable: "A zombie is a reanimated human corpse that feeds on living human flesh [1]."  The coolest thing about this is that they sourced this information.  The source, if you're curious, is The Zombie Survival Guide - Complete Protection from the Living Dead, by Max Brooks (2003, Three Rivers Press, pp. 2-23).

The article then goes on through some amazingly abstruse mathematics to show that a zombie outbreak would be "catastrophic" and could be "disastrous, unless extremely aggressive tactics are employed against the undead."

Have I mentioned that I am not making any of this up?

In the conclusion of the article, Munz, Hudea, Imad, and Smith? state:

In summary, a zombie outbreak is likely to lead to the collapse of civilisation, unless it is dealt with quickly. While aggressive quarantine may contain the epidemic, or a cure may lead to coexistence of humans and zombies, the most effective way to contain the rise of the undead is to hit hard and hit often.

What I find most amazing about all of this is that there was no attempt to tie this to any real, actual epidemic; the whole article was about zombies.  Doesn't that strike you as a little weird?  Now personally, I  love it when scientists take something whimsical and use it as a model for a real phenomenon; one of my all-time favorite studies was when a team of evolutionary biologists used "mutations" (i.e. typos and changes in wording) in chain letters as an analogy to random alterations in DNA, and used it to model how cladistic taxonomy works.  It was sheer brilliance.

This, though... well, I'm not sure I see the relevance.  I can't think of any disease that works anything like, um, zombification, so all of the mathematical twiddling about doesn't really have any apparent application.  Not, of course, that I object to scientists having a little fun once in a while -- but this made it into a peer-reviewed journal, and presumably was the result of a grant from a funding agency of some sort.  Dr. Neil Ferguson, who is one of the UK's top governmental medical advisers, seemed a little uncomfortable when asked about the study.  "My understanding of zombie biology is that if you manage to decapitate a zombie, then it's dead forever," he said, in an interview, and went on to state that other than that characteristic, "zombification" didn't really seem to parallel any known disease particularly well.  "[No infectious illness known] actually causes large-scale death or disease, but certainly there are some fungal infections which are difficult to eradicate."

Smith?, however, was undaunted, and told a BBC reporter, "When you try to model an unfamiliar disease, you try to find out what's happening, try to approximate it.  You then refine it, go back and try again."  Even, apparently, when said unfamiliar disease doesn't, technically, exist.

So, there you have it, then.  A mathematical model for the zombie apocalypse.

Oh, and by the way, if you still don't believe me, here's a link to a BBC article about the study.  In the lower right hand part of the page there's a link that says "Zombies Study (University of Ottawa)" that will allow you to download a free pdf of the entire paper.

Reading all of this stuff leaves me feeling kind of dazed, incapable of doing anything but stumbling around the house with a blank expression, making moaning noises.  Of course, that may be because I'm still waiting for the coffee to finish brewing.  No need to show up at my door with axes.  Honestly.