The strange world of the Sovereign Citizens

One of the features of writing this blog that turns out to be a mixed blessing is that I frequently am sent suggestions by readers for topics for future posts.  I say it's a "mixed blessing" because while some people who read Skeptophilia are fellow skeptics and rationalists who are acting as a team of free-lance (and unpaid) investigative reporters on my behalf, there are some of them who are (to put not too fine a point on it) batshit crazy.  Thus, for example, the person who joined in with me in chuckling about how silly the people are who believe in the power of crystal-infused wands to mitigate chronic pain, but only because she'd found some crystals that really worked, because they were magical rocks that came from the sky.

I considered writing back and explaining to her the definition of the words "sky," "meteorite," and "planet," but decided that it probably was better to leave well enough alone.

There's a more insidious downside to writing this blog, though, and it usually comes about because of the good intentions of my most faithful readers.  There are about a half-dozen folks who send me topics with great regularity, and although I don't think any of them know the others, you would think (by looking at their submissions) that they are in cahoots and are engaging in some sort of Loony Topic One-Upmanship Contest.  Each time I get an email with a link from one of them, it should come with a message, "You think what the others sent you was insane -- wait till you see this!"  Mostly, though, they are just accompanied by some innocent-sounding text, like, "I thought you'd find this interesting."

So, of course, I have to click the link, meaning that I spend the next half-hour with an expression like this:

Which brings me to my friend Peter.

Peter is a skeptic and rationalist par excellence, and a frequent reader and contributor to Skeptophilia.  For which, I will say up front, I am very grateful.  But last week, he sent me an email in which he asked a seemingly innocent question, which was, "Have you ever heard of the 'Sovereign Citizens' movement?"

I said that I hadn't.  In response, he sent me a link to the following video clip.  (Note: by posting this, I am in no way suggesting that you should watch it.  In fact, when I watched it, the only thing that persuaded me not to slam my head face-first into the wall was that I didn't want to have to explain a broken nose and missing front teeth to my wife.  You should only watch this video if you have a strong tolerance for music from 50s informational video shorts and narrators who sound like June Cleaver on Prozac.  Don't say you haven't been warned.)

The gist, for those of you who took my advice and didn't watch the video, is that the government owns you because of your birth certificate, and that any time you register something, it belongs to the government because "regis" means "king."  (Nota bene:  do not fuck around with a linguist.  "Register" comes from the Latin verb regerere, meaning "to record" -- from re-, again, and gerere, to carry or bear.  It has nothing to do with the Latin word for "king," which is rex, and comes from a Proto-Indo European root "*reg-" meaning "right" or "rule.")

Be that as it may, the video goes on to inform you that at birth, your existence was recorded by the government and that has created a "straw man," which is dead.  Or maybe that you're dead and the straw man is alive.  It's a little hard to tell, frankly.  The gist of it seems to be that by paying taxes and signing your name and following laws, you're creating this "fake you" that the government owns, and that the "real you" needs to just stop doing all of that stuff.

So, I was watching this, and wondering if this was some kind of parody, and increasingly it dawned on me: these people are serious.  They really want you to "destroy your straw man" by tearing up your birth certificate, car registration, marriage license, and so on.  Which is how this all connects to the "Sovereign Citizen" movement.

The idea of the Sovereign Citizen movement is that we sheep-like ordinary folk are willingly handing over our rights, money, and freedom to governments, and that we should just stand up and take 'em all back.  Stop paying taxes, stop going along with things like registering children, cars, homes, and so on, stop going along with military draft registration.  In fact, just stop having anything whatsoever to do with the government.  This movement has apparently gained a lot of traction up in Canada, where an estimated 30,000 people consider themselves "sovereign citizens" who have severed all ties with the Canadian government -- including, in some cases, following the law.

In one sense, the Sovereign Citizen movement has a point; when you think about it, it is kind of silly that we've drawn some arbitrary lines all over the Earth and said, "If you are inside this set of invisible lines, you have national health care, gays can marry, you have free public education through college, and you're expected to pay 50% income tax rates; a mile away, across that invisible line, none of that is true."

Can you imagine trying to explain that to an intelligent alien species?

The problem, of course, is that however much you go around saying you're a sovereign citizen and you don't have to pay taxes and all, the government still has a considerable power to compel you, or at least make your life miserable if you don't cooperate.  And the reality is that however strange the idea might seem, governments do provide us with some reasonably nice benefits (e.g. police, fire departments, roads, and public schools).  So even if they curtail our rights some, and require us to do jury duty and file for marriage licenses and the rest, on the balance, I'll still take this over anarchy.

So the "sovereign citizens" end up coming across a little bit like the people who have founded "micronations" by semi-officially seceding their houses from the country in which they reside.  The general response by the powers-that-be is, "Okay, have fun playing in your pillow fort, but when the time comes to do your chores, you still have to do them.  Or else."

Anyhow, my thanks to Peter for telling me about all this, even if it started out with a link that had me wearing my "horrified expression" for six minutes straight.  And I don't want to discourage people from sending me topics -- I honestly love hearing from my faithful readers.  I will continue to look at all the links you send, I promise, whatever the cost to my poor aching facial muscles.  And you can continue to read what I write, free of charge.

You don't even have to register.

Smiting the unbelievers

One question I have for people who believe that there are powerful, invisible beings in control of the universe is why those beings don't seem to object more strenuously when they are disbelieved in or mocked outright.

I'm not just talking about deities here, as you'll see in a moment, although mythology does provide a great many examples of tales which, if true, should give scoffers pause.  The Greeks gods, in particular, were always smiting people for pretty much nothing.  Remember when Athena turned Arachne into a spider for claiming that she was the best weaver ever?  Or when King Salmoneus of Pylos was vaporized with a thunderbolt by Zeus when he claimed to be a god?  Then there was poor Actaeon, who was turned into a stag and then ripped limb from limb by his dogs just because he happened to catch a glimpse of the goddess Artemis naked.

Looks from the picture like Actaeon was naked at the time, too, which certainly ups the creepiness factor and makes it understandable why Artemis freaked out a little.  But it still seems like an overreaction to me.

The Norse gods were a little better in that regard, although not if you were a Frost Giant.  Odin and Thor were always smiting the crap out of the Frost Giants, which is probably why you see so few Frost Giants around now.

And look at Yahweh in the Old Testament.  Given how many of his own followers he slew for various minor offenses, it's a wonder there are any of them left, either.  He killed seventy people just for looking at the Ark of the Covenant in 1 Samuel 6:19, bringing up visual images of the melting Nazis at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.  God also was not above using animals to do his dirty work -- remember how he sent bears to help out his pal Elisha in 2 Kings 2:23-24, and the bears ripped apart two dozen children who had teased Elisha about being bald?

And let's not even go into how Yahweh killed virtually the entire population of the Earth during the Great Flood, men, women and children, just for some unspecified "wickedness."

So, we have some serious precedent, here, that being a non-believer, or (worse) an outright scoffer, isn't a safe thing to do, inviting being turned into or eaten by various animals, struck with lightning, drowned, or just suffering a generic smiting.

And here I sit, healthy as ever.  Odd, that.

All of this comes up, however, not because of anything connected directly with religion.  You probably know about the Reptilians, a race of shapeshifting evil cold-blooded aliens who have infiltrated the political world for nefarious reasons.  We're talking about some serious bad guys, here, worse even than Ann Coulter.

Now, belief in the Reptilians does share some of the same characteristics as religion, in that it requires faith-based acceptance of powerful entities whose existence, by definition, can't be proven.  So it is perhaps unsurprising that this week, on the wonderfully weird blog Phantoms & Monsters, we found out that like Zeus and Artemis and Yahweh and the rest, the Reptilians do not take kindly to being taunted.

A man who gave his name only as "Matt R." was interviewed a week ago with Daniel Ott of The Edge Radio Show, a weekly broadcast that bills itself as "exciting interviews on topics such as 9/11, Angels, Near Death Experiences, Planetary Anomalies, Black Ops, to Alternative Science, Prophesies, Lost Continents, Aliens, Cryptozoology, Bio Warfare and much more!"  Matt R. was describing his various abductions by Reptilians (he's apparently had more than one), and Ott made some kind of wisecrack about Reptilians.  Here's what happened next:

In the last 10 minutes of the show, the host cracked a joke about killing reptilians.  What can only be described as an inhuman growl jumped into our conversation immediately after.  Apparently, whatever reptilian was on the line wanted to voice their displeasure with his joke.  During this conversation, I was sitting inside a parked car with the engine off. I was talking on my Skype app, over my phone's 4G connection.  There was no other radio or computer anywhere near me.  I can't think of anything that could have produced a growling noise that vivid.  That certainly didn't sound like line interference.  There are no audio files or ring tones on my Samsung S3 that sound like that.  There was a deep guttural quality to it, which made it similar to what I've heard from reptilians before.  Mr. Ott does not have a history of pranking people on his program.  And I know there is no possible explanation for generation of that noise on my end.

And I'm thinking, "that's it?  A nasty growl is the best that the ultrapowerful, black-hearted controllers of the Earth can do?  After crossing the galaxy in their faster-than-light spaceships, infiltrating the government and replacing world leaders by assuming human form, and engaging in all sorts of evil stuff from genetic engineering of alien/human hybrids to inducing Miley Cyrus to "twerk" at the Video Music Awards, the best they can manage when someone threatens to kill them is a 'guttural growl?'"

Maybe that's why supernatural entities get so little respect these days.  I mean, if a god appeared in my classroom and turned a mouthy student into an earthworm, I would definitely stand up and take notice.  Depending on who the student was, I might even sacrifice a sheep or something as a way of saying, "Thanks."  And just think of all of the people in the world who really deserve being vaporized by lightning bolts.

If Thor is up there with his hammer, I know we'd all appreciate it if he'd get up off his lazy ass and use the thing, preferably starting with someone like Bashar al-Assad.

But of course, that sort of thing never happens.  It's kind of inconvenient, the way we never get any direct evidence of all of these things we're supposed to believe in, isn't it?  I mean, I've scoffed at both Reptilians and various religious beliefs pretty much continuously for two decades, and I haven't even heard so much as a growl.

Of course, you never know what's around the corner, so it could be that I'll get struck by a meteorite or something on the way to work today.

If that happens, won't I feel silly?

The buffalo wings of doom

I'm all for treating animals humanely, but the people over at People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) really need to give it a rest.

I thought that they had already jumped the shark back in 2009, when they accused President Obama of committing an inhumane act when he swatted a fly during an interview on CNBC.  "Believe it or not, we've actually been contacted by multiple media outlets wanting to know PETA's official response to the executive insect execution," a PETA spokesperson explained on the group's blog shortly after the interview aired.  "In a nutshell, our position is this: He isn't the Buddha, he's a human being, and human beings have a long way to go before they think before they act."

Later that year, they put together an anti-turkey-eating ad that was intended to run before Thanksgiving,  but NBC nixed it, saying it was too graphic -- leading to charges of censorship.  This, of course, gave the ad a great deal more publicity than it otherwise would have had, although it's questionable whether it had any effect on the United States' turkey consumption.

So they've had to come up with other strategies.  And the latest one is a doozy.  Think about it:  how do you get guys -- ordinary, working-class guys -- to reconsider eating meat?

Tell 'em that eating chicken wings will make their sons' willies shrink.

You think I'm making this up, but here's the source.  And a direct quote, which I also swear I am not making up:  "The latest scientific evidence shows that the sons of pregnant women who consume chicken are more likely to have smaller penises because of a chemical found in the birds’ flesh...  Pregnant women may want to think twice before chomping on those chicken wings, or their sons could come up short."

Mmm-hmm.  Because that's plausible.  Can't you just see the grant application for that study?  "Our research methodology will involve monitoring the chicken wing consumption of two groups of pregnant women.  After they have given birth, we will measure the penises of all of the boys.  We believe that there will be a strong inverse correlation between chicken wing consumption and penis length."

But of course, however ridiculous that sounds, they didn't even do anything that rational.  Their "latest scientific evidence" turned out to be a claim that supposedly chicken meat contains high levels of a group of chemicals called phthalates, which are suspected of hindering sex organ development in fetuses when the mother is exposed to high doses.  The problem is, phthalates are present in a lot of things -- but chicken wings do not appear to be amongst them.

From the Wikipedia page on phthalates, I quote:  "Phthalates are used in a large variety of products, from enteric coatings of pharmaceutical tablets and nutritional supplements to viscosity control agents, gelling agents, film formers, stabilizers, dispersants, lubricants, binders, emulsifying agents, and suspending agents.  End-applications include adhesives and glues, electronics, agricultural adjuvants, building materials, personal-care products, medical devices, detergents and surfactants, packaging, children's toys, modeling clay, waxes, paints, printing inks and coatings, pharmaceuticals, food products, and textiles."

Note how "chicken" is not on the list.

Of course, the folks over at PETA never seem to let any inconvenient things like facts get in their way.

Now, don't get me wrong.  I think it's always best to treat life with reverence, whether or not you choose to eat meat.  Factory farming is inhumane, and the widespread use of antibiotics and hormones for meat and dairy production is likely to have untoward effects on human health.  I don't kill anything gratuitously -- I catch spiders in the house and let them go, for cryin' out loud.

But once you start claiming that swatting a fly is an "execution," you've lost your credibility.  And just for the record: you do not regain it by playing fast and loose with the facts in an attempt to scare guys into thinking their favorite organ is going to shrink if they have a plate of chicken wings at the sports bar. 

Sorry, you get an "F"

Tomorrow is the start of a new school year for me, and that probably explains why I had the reaction I did to a flyer that some friends of mine picked up.

They were in their car in downtown Ithaca, and a very earnest-looking woman came up and shoved a piece of glossy paper through their open window.  Nearby were several people with picket signs.  Resisting the impulse to roll the window up, my friend's daughter took the piece of paper, which was apparently a joint effort of two groups called GeoEngineering Watch and Global Skywatch.

A brief glance at the flyer was enough to elicit some hearty guffaws from my friends, and the daughter, riding in the passenger seat, read the contents to her dad as he drove.  Several times, he reported afterwards, he almost had to pull over because he was laughing so hard.  And the consensus was, "Oh, we have to keep this and give it to Gordon," with the probable reasoning being that my blood pressure is far too low.

So anyhow, over dinner a few days later, I was presented with the flyer.  I won't quote the whole thing, because the back is covered with fine print and it would be as tedious for me to type it out as it would be for you to read it, so I will simply present you with the high points, along with some parenthetical comments that I would have scribbled in, in red pen, if this had been a paper that one of my Environmental Science students had submitted to me.

Illegal government-controlled chemical weather modification programs are taking place over our heads right now day after day!  [Source?  This is clearly an overgeneralization.]

It's called, [misplaced comma] GeoEngineering [but you need a comma here] AKA Chemtrails, Stratospheric Aerosols or Solar Radiation Management.  [Geoengineering and stratospheric aerosols aren't the same thing, and chemtrails and "solar radiation management" appear to be made up.]  We are being sprayed with tiny particles of Aluminum, Barium, Strontium, and other highly toxic chemicals that go right into our red blood cells.  [No, we aren't, and no, they don't.]

These chemicals spread across the sky and block out the sun.  [Yesterday was nice and sunny, but thanks for asking.]  The lack of sunlight and the nano size particles are poisoning everything and making us sick.  [Strangely enough, I feel fine.]  Respiratory and brain disorders have risen off the charts.  [Source?]  The aluminum is poisoning our farms so only Monsanto's aluminum resistant GMO seeds will grow.  [Odd that my vegetable garden is doing so well this year, isn't it?]

See through the lies!  Do your own research!  [Oh, I do.]

Save the planet!  [Doing my best.  The first thing I'd choose to save it from is "stupidity," but at the moment I'm thinking this is a losing battle.]

Governments and corporations are deliberately manipulating and altering Earth's climate, endangering the lives of people all over the world.  [Source?]  Two of the most extreme cases of geo-engineering are chemtrails -- the release of toxic chemicals into the air that are poisoning people and the planet [please review the definition of "geoengineering"] -- and HAARP -- an electromagnetic antenna array in Alaska that can send radio frequency radiation over large geographical areas [so do television station transmitters] and manipulate weather patterns causing earthquakes, tsunamis, and more.  [Earthquakes and tsunamis are not "weather patterns"]  These projects represent some of the worst crimes in history, yet most people are unaware of them.  [Perhaps because you're making this up as you go along?]

For over ten years, observers have been noticing white aerosol trails being dispersed in the skies that don't behave like usual condensing jet exhaust.  When seeking explanation, investigators are told by the government that these are just the normal "contrails" that we see coming from commercial jets and that they are perfectly safe.  [Seems right to me.]  However, they don't dissipate the way regular condensation trails do.  [Yes, they do.  The evaporation time of a contrail is dependent on the weather conditions in the upper atmosphere -- temperature, windspeed, and humidity -- but they all eventually evaporate.  Water does that, you know.]  They linger for hours, spreading across the sky, and are often laid out in cross hatch patterns.  [Check out maps of common air traffic flight paths in your area for an explanation of this.]  The government has refused to test samples collected underneath the trails.  [Better things to do, I would imagine.]  Now a TV news report from Germany has confirmed that their military is in fact doing aerial spraying of chemtrails.  [Oh!  A TV news report from Germany!  Well, then!  All the proof I need!]

An article from the NIH, the National Institutes of Health, confirms that not only are chemtrails real, [Bull.  Shit.]  but they are suspected to be responsible for a variety of neurotoxic conditions including MS, Alzheimer's, dementia, Parkinson's, and Lou Gehrig's disease (ALS).  [All of these conditions are caused by different things.  Have you ever passed a biology class in your life?]

Intense spraying of dangerous chemicals from planes has been reported in, at least, the US, Canada, Germany, England, Australia, Mexico, South Africa, Bahamas, Puerto Rico, and Croatia.  [Source?]  A nasty mixture of parasites, pathogens, toxic heavy metals, and nano-engineered particles have been found falling to earth from the trails of certain planes.  [Living parasites and pathogens somehow survive the combustion process in the jet engine?  Really?  Do you have even the vaguest understanding of how jet engines work?]  Aluminum, barium, bacillus spores, radioactive thorium, cadmium, chromium, nickel, dessicated blood, mold spores, yellow mycototoxins, ethylene dibromide and synthetic nano-fibers are among the ingredients found in collected samples.  [Wasn't this the recipe for a magic spell by the witches in Macbeth?  Oh, and I think you mean "mycotoxin."  Are the yellow ones really bad?]  As these fill the atmosphere and lodge in our lungs and blood streams through the air we breathe and the food we eat, it represents the most unavoidable toxic pollution in history!  [Odd, then, that you aren't wearing a filter mask right now.  Why is that, I wonder?]

And so forth and so on.

So, yes, the chemtrail people have come to very close to my home town, and they are pissed.  Which they should be, because I would definitely give them an "F" for this report.  I might even call home and talk to their parents, perhaps recommending that they drop my class and sign up for some remedial-level science courses. 

Because it sure as hell sounds like they need them.

The case for optimism

A friend and frequent contributor of topics to Skeptophilia asked me recently how I don't completely lose faith in humanity, after all these years of focusing on the ridiculous things people believe.

"How you continue to post, day after day," he wrote to me, "and not end up raising your arms in the air, fists clenched in rage, throwing your head back, and screaming a slew of expletives that would make the San Quentin warden blush, is beyond me."

Well, sometimes I do, you know.  I spend a lot of time yelling at my computer, which may explain why it doesn't work sometimes.  But honestly, I'm an optimist.  If I thought that humanity was irredeemable -- that we will never learn, will never figure out how to think rationally, will always be mired in superstition -- my writing this blog would be kind of pointless.

So would my being a science teacher, now that I come to think of it.

 I am by nature an optimist.  A cautious optimist, but an optimist nonetheless.  And three stories that just came out in the last couple of days give me some support in my contention that humankind is capable of moving in positive directions.

First, from Australia, we have a story from The Brisbane Times, wherein we learn that a court in Queensland has denied a woman taxpayer-funded assistance for a $20,000 "spiritual healing" she received in Canada.  [Source]

The woman, who is identified only as "BN," sounds like she has had a rough time of it -- she was assaulted, and had trauma associated with a motor vehicle accident -- and I do not mean to sound unsympathetic with her plight.  In fact, the Queensland Civil and Administrative Tribunal agreed; in their ruling, they said, "It is not disputed that BN suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder."

But the woman's claim was that she needed "Native spiritual healing," and the only place that she was willing to go was to a Cree spiritual retreat center in Canada.  She required the flight to and from Canada not pass through any American or Asian airports, because she found them "stressful."  The total bill, for travel and for the "spiritual healing"  came to close to $20,000, which she expected would be covered by the Australian health care system.

It is crazy that taxpayers should be expected to bear the costs when someone wants to pursue unscientific alternatives to conventional medical treatment.  I'm happy to report that the courts agreed.  Attorney General Jarrod Bleijie said, "I absolutely respect and understand the benefits of rehabilitation for victims of crime, but it was inconceivable that treatment couldn't be found here in Queensland."


A second story that gives me hope that rationality can sometimes win the day comes out of Florida, where a psychic is currently on trial for fraud to the tune of $25 million.

Rose Marks, who has used her alleged powers to advise such well-known figures as romance writer Jude Deveraux, is unrepentant.  Her lawyer, Fred Schwartz, said in an interview, "She said she uses psychic powers to help advise people as a life coach and that she's a spiritual adviser," and added that Ms. Marks' powers have "been in her family for 1,500 years."

You have to wonder how she knows that.  Psychically, I'd imagine.

Well, the U.S. Attorney's office isn't buying it.  The indictment, in part, reads, "Rose Marks, a/k/a Joyce Michael, along with co-conspirators, represented herself as a psychic and clairvoyant, gifted by God to communicate with spirit guides to assist her clients through personal difficulties...  [She] would offer services to walk-in customers, some of whom would be suffering from mental and emotional disorders, who had recently gone through personal traumatic events and/or who were emotionally vulnerable, fragile and/or gullible...  [Marks induced clients] to make 'sacrifices', usually consisting of large amounts of money (but also at times including jewelry, gold coins and other property) because 'money was the root of all evil.'"

Oh, indeed it can be, which is why these charlatans do what they do.  Well, if the prosecutors do their job, we may see one fewer of them out there defrauding their customers, a possibility that should give Sylvia Browne, Derek Acorah, Theresa Caputo, and Sally Morgan pause.


Our last story seems to indicate that courts are disinclined to let people get away with harming someone because of irrational beliefs even if those beliefs are part of their religion.  "It's my religion" has, for a long time, been a Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card in the United States, and in many other parts of the world -- but that may be ending.  Just last week, two members of The Church of the First Born, a fundamentalist faith-healing sect in Albany, Oregon, were arrested for manslaughter after their daughter died of untreated type I diabetes.

Travis and Wenona Rossiter prayed over their twelve-year-old daughter, Syble, convinced that the line from James chapter 5 was true -- "Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord." 

This, despite the fact that two other children of members of this sect of loonies have died in similar circumstances -- a seven-year-old of leukemia in 1996, and a seventeen-year-old just last year of appendicitis.  You'd think they'd realize it wasn't working, wouldn't you?  Nope.  They probably just thought they weren't praying hard enough, or rationalized it by saying it was "god's will," or some such nonsense.

The courts aren't buying it.  The Rossiters are in jail, and with luck, will stay there.


Now, all of this is some pretty harsh stuff, and it might be hard to see how this supports my original contention that we have cause for optimism.  But look at the overall trend -- we've gone from rampant superstition, faith healing, and anti-science sentiment being the majority opinion, to its being repeatedly slapped down by the courts, in only a hundred or so years.  Even as little as fifty years ago, the authorities were reluctant to step in when cases involved "matters of faith" -- churches and "spiritual practices" were given carte blanche.

Now?  We're seeing an increasing push to revoke the tax-exempt status of churches, especially in cases where church leaders publicly push political agendas.  We're seeing courts uphold sentences in cases where people inflict damage, whether personal or financial, on the gullible, innocent, or helpless because of their commitment to counterfactional irrationality.  It's getting harder and harder to get away with murder -- sometimes literally -- because you hold an umbrella labeled "god's will" over your head.

And I, for one, find this to be movement in the right direction.

A "9.8" on the Sacredometer

Today, we have a story out of Canada that is a combination of heartening and puzzling, sent to me by my friend (and frequent Skeptophilia contributor) Andrew Butters, author of the wonderful blog Potato Chip Math.  (And do yourself a favor -- add his blog to your list, it's thought-provoking and funny and generally all kinds of awesome.)

The story comes from The National Post, and has the headline, "Atheism a creed that needs the same religious protections of Christianity and Islam: Ontario Human Rights Tribunal."  The whole thing comes up because of an odd, although probably not unique, policy by the Niagara School District, wherein all fifth graders were offered Gideon Bibles as long as they got parental consent to receive one.

Well, the "parental consent" clause seemed to cover any possible charges of proselytization in public schools -- until René Chouinard, of Grimsby, Ontario, who is a self-described secular humanist, offered to provide copies of Just Pretend: A Freethought Book for Children to fifth graders, and the school board told him he couldn't do that.

Chouinard complained to the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal, and the school district, in a rather frantic attempt to cover their asses, changed their policy -- to allow the distribution of other religious texts, "so long as the religion is included in the Ontario Multifaith Information Manual" and "the text in question qualifies as a sacred text."

Now, what exactly does that mean?  Is there some kind of sacredometer that measures the sacredness of a text?  Does the Egyptian Book of the Dead, for example, count as sufficiently sacred?  I mean, no one much worships Thoth and Anubis any more, far as I can tell.

And the problem, of course, is that this specifically eliminates consideration of any secular texts, since they are by definition not sacred, given that atheism is a religion in the same sense that not collecting stamps is a hobby.

Fortunately -- in one way, at least, and I'll get to that in a moment -- the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal agreed with Chouinard.  On August 13, they issued a ruling stating that the policy, even as it was modified, was discriminatory.  "The policy was discriminatory because its definition of acceptable materials violated substantive equality by excluding the kinds of materials central to many creeds," the ruling, in part, reads.  "The restriction to sacred or foundational texts excludes some creeds and is therefore discriminatory."

Well, right on, and I agree with that... but.  Here's the problem.  Is it the job of the school to get involved in religious instruction at all, beyond teaching students about world religions as a lens into history and culture?  It seems to me that this is exchanging one problem for another, and saddling schools with yet another responsibility, namely, making sure that all kids get access to the sacred (or not-so-sacred, depending on the reading that pops up on the sacredometer) text that they, and their parents, want.

But isn't this the job of the parents?  I mean, fer cryin' in the sink, if my fifth grade kid had wanted a bible, I'd have gotten him a bible, not waited for the school to hand him a freebie based on some kind of weird sacred-text-distribution policy.  Same goes for The Book of Mormon, the Qu'ran, the Talmud, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, or The God Delusion.  Honestly, in fifth grade my sons were more interested in reading Animorphs and playing with Lego, but hey, kids are different, and maybe there are fifth graders out there who are desperate to delve into sacred texts.  I dunno.

Anyhow, that's the current news from our neighbors to the north, and another shout-out to my bud Andrew for turning me on to the story.  It's nice to have folks send me leads, and this was an especially good one.  I'll make sure and say a good word to Anubis in Andrew's favor, next time I'm in the temple.  You know how it goes.

Elements of style

When scientists this week at Lund University in Sweden confirmed the production of an atom of element 115, I thought it was just a story that would be of interest to physicists, chemists, and assorted science nerds.

The atom, like those of all "superheavy" elements, disintegrated almost instantaneously.  All of the high-atomic-weight atoms -- those on the bottom tiers of the periodic table -- are extremely unstable, and undergo radioactive decay within a fraction of a second after they're created in the lab.  None of them occur naturally.

This confirms a claim made by Russian scientists in 2004, and completes another row of the periodic table, bringing to 118 the number of confirmed elements.  Like its near neighbors with atomic numbers of 113, 117, and 118, it doesn't have an official permanent name yet, so it is called "ununpentium" (a placeholder name that simply means "115").

So far, only a story that would interest people who are fond of esoteric chemistry.  Thus my surprise when stories started popping up all over woo-woo websites with headlines like, "Element 115 proven to be real!  Bob Lazar was right!"

My first reaction was, "Who the hell is Bob Lazar?"  So I looked him up, and found that he's a pretty famous guy, even though I had never heard of him.  He even has a Wikipedia page.  And his story turned out to be quite interesting.

Lazar is (appropriate for our unofficial theme-of-the-week) a conspiracy theorist of the first water.  He claims to be a physicist with degrees from both the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; attempts to confirm this have turned up nothing, although he did once take an electronics course at Pierce Junior College.  Lazar says this is because the government tampered with his academic records to discredit him.

Why would the government do that?  Because Lazar worked at Area 51, of course.  And while at Area 51, he was allegedly the leader of a group of physicists who studied some downed extraterrestrial spaceships.  And guess what he claimed was the fuel that powered said flying saucers?

Got it in one.  Element 115.

Ununpentium, Lazar said, created "antigravity effects" when bombarded with protons.  Antimatter was also somehow involved.  Put 'em all together, says Lazar, and the "intense strong nuclear force of element 115's nucleus" would warp space and time, creating a way to cross interstellar space.

Oh, and he knows where these aliens came from.  Zeta Reticuli, the favorite star of conspiracy theorists everywhere, alleged home to both the Reptilians and the Greys.  Which ties in neatly with stories of government collaboration with extraterrestrials, and the replacement of various world figures by shapeshifting evil aliens.  This last allegation might be true, of course.  I myself am suspicious about recently-disgraced San Diego mayor Bob Filner.  Doesn't he look like someone trying to mimic a human, but who can't quite make it look authentic yet?

I think that is exactly the expression you'd see on the face of an alien who had just learned the rule, "When you smile, retract the lips and expose the teeth."

But I digress.  Let's return to our consideration of Bob #1.

Bob Lazar's ideas have achieved considerable buzz in the UFO community, and also in the world of the conspiracy theorists, being that his ideas combine the best from both.  And he was taken at least seriously enough to have an actual physicist, Dr. David L. Morgan, give a close look to his ideas.  And after careful consideration, Morgan has concluded that Lazar is a raving wingnut.

"After reading an account by Bob Lazar of the 'physics' of his Area 51 UFO propulsion system," Morgan stated, "my conclusion is this: Mr. Lazar presents a scenario which, if it is correct, violates a whole handful of currently accepted physical theories...  The presentation of the scenario by Lazar is troubling from a scientific standpoint.  Mr. Lazar on many occasions demonstrates an obvious lack of understanding of current physical theories."

Which is much nicer than I would have put it, but amounts to the same thing.

Any time someone comes up with a "theory" that will "destroy all of physics as we know it," I'm always inclined to give him the raspberry and walk away.  It might be narrow-minded of me, but think about it; what's the chance that the best brains the Earth has produced -- people like Einstein, Stephen Hawking, Richard Feynman, Lise Meitner, Murray Gell-Mann, and Peter Higgs -- are all wrong?  That they've missed the boat completely, and some new guy, with no particular access to research facilities or technical equipment, or possibly even a college degree, has figured it all out?  Okay, I guess it's possible, but I need more than just his word for it, especially when that word contains mention of "the Grey aliens from Zeta Reticuli."

The bottom line is: if you think that you've got a revolutionary idea, turn it over to peer review like the rest of the scientific world.  If it stands, I'll be happy to eat my words.

Anyway, this explains why the woo-woos all started jumping up and down and making excited little squeaking noises about element 115, in spite of the fact that the Swedish scientists only succeeded in making one atom of it, which would hardly be enough to power a spacecraft.  And the atom in question (1) decayed in less than a tenth of a second, and (2) showed no signs of generating an "anti-gravity field."

But I guess when you are resting your claims on no evidence, then any evidence is an improvement.