My little... Satan

About a year ago, I got into a fairly surreal conversation with a friend of mine over the phenomenon of "Bronies."

A "Brony," for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is an adult, usually male, fan of the television show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic.  At first my friend didn't believe that there was such a thing, and she accused me of trying to convince her of something ridiculous so that I would have ammunition for teasing her later when she found out that it wasn't true.

This forced me to dig up an article in Wired from 2011 that proved to her that, unlikely as it may seem, the Brony phenomenon is real.

The Bronies are pretty serious about their obsession, too.  They have conventions, and dress up as characters like Fluttershy and Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash, complete with wigs and costumes that are colors not found in nature.

BronyCon.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

They collect action figures.  They have online discussion groups wherein they discuss the events in recent episodes with the same gravitas you would expect if the scripts had been penned by Shakespeare, or at the very least, George R. R. Martin.  They make fan art (as of the writing of the Wired article, the site DeviantArt had over 90,000 pieces of My Little Pony-inspired art).

After discussing this with my friend, I got to thinking about the phenomenon, and I decided that I had to see what all the buzz was about.  And fortunately, the article linked above has a short clip from one of the shows.  "Who knows?" I thought.  "I'm an open-minded guy, and confident in my own masculinity.  Maybe I'll be charmed.  Maybe I'll understand how some dude could get taken in by the innocent delight of entering a pastel-colored world where stories always end well."

So I watched the clip.  And "delight" is not what I experienced.  All I can say is, the voices of the My Little Pony characters reach a level of Annoying Whine previously achieved only by the actors who voiced the little dinosaurs in The Land Before Time.  After watching ten seconds of the clip, I wanted to remove my ears, with a cheese grater if need be.  I not only cannot understand how anyone could become a Brony, I felt like I needed to chug a six-pack of Bud Light after watching the clip just to restore order to the universe.

But all of this is backstory.  Because just yesterday I found out, through a different YouTube clip that you all must watch, that there is a reason that otherwise normal guys become Bronies.  And after watching the clip, I realized what a narrow escape I had.

Because My Little Pony is rife with symbolism of Satan and the Illuminati.

From Princess Celestia, who watches the world with the Eye of Horus and is actually a pagan sun goddess; to Applejack, whose apple symbol represents the Apple of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil; to Twilight Sparkle's six-pointed star.  All symbols of evil magic and the occult.

And don't even get me started about "Pinkie Pie."

All through the video, which is eight minutes long, there is eerie, atmospheric music playing, sort of like the soundtrack to The Exorcist only less cheerful.  I watched the whole thing through twice, because it's just that wonderful.  There are all sorts of references to the Masons and the Satanists and the Illuminati and the Pagans.  An especially great part is where the subtitles tell us that there are six Pony characters, and each one has her own "magic element" and her own color, and 6+6+6 = 666.

I always thought that 6+6+6 = 18.  Maybe it's special Illuminati math or something.

Be that as it may, I guess that this explains the whole "Brony" phenomenon.  Adult guys are getting sucked in by the evil magic of My Little Pony, and through the wicked influence of characters like "Rainbow Dash" they are being induced to dedicate their lives to worshiping Satan.

So it's a truly awesome video, and very educational, although I would caution you against drinking anything while watching it unless you really want to buy a new computer monitor.

Anyway, there you have it.  Why guys become Bronies.  Me, I'm still not likely to watch, even now that I know that the show has a darker side.  Those voices are just beyond anything I could tolerate.  Not that this will convince my friend, who still thinks I'm covering up a secret obsession, to the point that she got me a "Pinkie Pie" mug for my last birthday.

But it could be worse.  She could have gotten me a plush toy with a voice box.  And then I might have made a deal with Satan just to get even with her.

The lure of young blood

You hear a lot about how we're a youth-obsessed culture, but really, humans have always been.  The ancient Greeks had a real mania for youth and beauty.  Witness the myth of Endymion and Selene, for example.  Selene, the goddess of the moon, saw the shepherd Endymion asleep one night, and thought he was so drop-dead handsome that she asked Zeus to keep him perpetually youthful -- and perpetually asleep.  So he did, proving that sometimes being blessed by the ancient Greek gods was as bad as being cursed.

On a darker note, we have the lovely figure of Countess Elizabeth Báthory of Hungary, who has been called the "most prolific female serial killer in history" -- the number of her victims perhaps being as high as 650.  Besides being a psychopath and (to put not too fine a point on it) crazy as a bedbug, Báthory allegedly liked to bathe in the blood of young women as a way to preserve her own youth and vitality.  It was this practice that she's best remembered for, and why she apparently was (along with Vlad the Impaler) the inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

Portrait of Countess Elizabeth Báthory [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I bring the whole blood thing up deliberately, because some research published just this week seems to indicate that there might be something to the whole youthful-blood thing after all.  Not bathing in it, however, or any other sort of superstitious nonsense, so don't start laying plans for beating the Blood Countess's record, or anything.

Researchers at Harvard have shown that there is a protein in blood that apparently functions to maintain physiological youthfulness.  More interesting, especially to us middle-aged folks, is that introducing that protein into the blood of an older animal seems to reverse the effects of aging.

Amy Wagers and Lee Rubin of Harvard's Department of Stem Cell and Regenerative Biology did a pioneering experiment in aging by first surgically fusing the circulatory systems of a young and an old mouse, and second, injecting an old mouse with a blood protein called "GDF11."  Both procedures had the effect of reversing the symptoms of aging in the heart, skeletomuscular system, and brain.

"I cannot recall a more exciting finding to come from stem cell science and clever experiments," said Doug Melton, co-chair of HSCRB.  "This should give us all hope for a healthier future... We all wonder why we were stronger and mentally more agile when young.  And these two unusually exciting papers actually point to a possible answer: the higher levels of the protein GDF11 we have when young.  There seems to be little question that, at least in animals, GDF11 has an amazing capacity to restore aging muscle and brain function."

Human trials of GDF11 are scheduled to commence in three to five years.

I find the whole thing simultaneously thrilling and terrifying.  I'm no great fan of aging; I'm getting to the "gray hair," "way too many smile lines," and "forgetting what I was about to say" stage myself.  And the one thing I'm truly afraid of is debility.  I can honestly say that I'd rather be dead than bedridden and dependent.  So the idea that I might be able, with a simple injection of a protein, to restore some of my youth and vitality is pretty attractive.

On the other hand, aren't there some ethical issues here?  Not least the idea that we're already, as a species, using up far more than our fair share of Earth's resources, largely because of our explosive population growth in the past two hundred years?  A population surge that was caused by our eradication of childhood diseases and increased life span because of improved medical care?  If we really could reverse the effects of aging -- and likely further extend human life span, at least amongst the privileged individuals who could access this treatment -- would that not exacerbate the problem?  Is doing something that would allow the rich greatly extended life spans truly a ethical thing to do?

I'm not sure I know the answer to this.  Nor, if someone came up to me right now with a nice little syringe filled with GDF11, whether I'd have the moral backbone to say, "No, thank you."  It seems to me to fall into that scary realm of something that looks extremely attractive but is ultimately destructive.

Which brings to mind yet another Greek myth -- the story of the goddess Eris and the Apples of Discord.

So maybe the capricious and smite-happy Greek gods might have something to teach us, after all.

The bully pulpit

Bully (v.) -- to use superior strength or influence to intimidate someone who is in a weaker position of power, typically to force him or her to do what one wants.

There.  I just thought we could clarify that from the get-go, because there are evidently people who need a refresher on the definition of the word.  I'm thinking in particular of Buddy Smith, executive vice president of the American Family Association, who apparently doesn't get it -- especially the "superior strength or influence" part.

Smith showed evidence of his poor understanding of simple English words last week, because of a discrimination issue in (surprise!) Mississippi.  You probably have heard that a few weeks ago Mississippi governor Phil Bryant signed into law a bill that allowed business owners to refuse service to LGBT individuals on the basis of "freedom of religion" (prejudice and bigotry evidently being constitutionally protected rights, or something).  Well, besides the challenges that the bill will rightfully face in the courts, fair-minded shop owners came up with a tactic of their own; to tell LGBT individuals that they were welcome in their shops.  If other stores wanted to lose business, that was fine, but they were willing to serve anyone, regardless of race, religion, or sexual orientation.

So these stickers started to appear in business windows across the state:

Well, far be it from the American Family Association to take such a stance lying down.  Nosiree.  If you won't stand by us in discriminating against gays and lesbians, well... well...

You must be a bully.

I'm not making this up.  Smith said:

It’s not really a buying campaign, but it’s a bully campaign.  And it’s being carried out by radical homosexual activists who intend to trample the freedom of Christians to live according to the dictates of scripture. 

They don’t want to hear that homosexuality is sinful behavior — and they wish to silence Christians and the church who dare to believe this truth.

And as for the shopkeepers who put the stickers in their windows, Smith has the following to say: "If you do that, you are agreeing with these businesses that Christians no longer have the freedom to live out the dictates of their Christian faith and conscience."

Right.  Because selling a gay man a Snapple is exactly the same as saying that Christians have no right to live by the rules of their faith.

The choice of the word "bully" is especially trenchant in this context, because as a high school teacher, I see instances of bullying with sorry regularity.  And I can say that in my 27 year career, the single most bullied group of teenagers I have seen has been gays and lesbians.  Far from being (in the words of the definition) "(of) superior strength and influence," LGBT teens are picked on, discriminated against, and teased, and as a result have one of the highest rates of suicide attempts of any demographic in the United States.

Then there's the issue of the sticker campaign being an attempt to "trample the freedom of Christians."  The fact is, of course, is that no one is trying to tell Christians they have to be gay; what they're saying is that you can't discriminate against other people because they're gay.  Christians have every right to think that being gay is sinful, and that gays are going to be condemned to the fiery furnace to be tortured for all eternity by the God of Love.  Christians can choose to eat meat on Fridays, or not, or drink alcohol, or not, or get a divorce, or not.  Hell, they can decide that god wants them to superglue feathers to their face and cluck like a chicken all day if they want to.

What they are not allowed to do is to refuse service to people who choose not to cluck along with them.

What always gets me is that these people don't seem to have any sense that what they are doing is precisely the same thing that was done to African Americans by the Jim Crow laws, and in a previous generation, what was done to Chinese immigrants by the Chinese Exclusion Act.  Each time, there were demonstrations against the practice of legislating bigotry, and each time, the government finally caved in and halted it (at least by law; no one is under any illusion that it halted the prejudice itself).  The phrase "ending up on the wrong side of history" comes up frequently in these discussions, but people like Smith don't seem to see the parallels.

They are too busy fretting about what consenting adults do in their bedrooms than they are living by the words that Jesus said that even we atheists can agree on -- "Love thy neighbor as thyself," and "Judge not, that ye be not judged.  For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged: and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you again.  And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?  Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye?  Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."

Especially the "thou hypocrite" part, Mr. Smith.  Especially that part.

Despite all of this, I still have the feeling that in general, we're headed in the right direction as a nation.  At least this kind of thing is making the news; thirty years ago, no one would have even considered this newsworthy, and most LGBT people were still safely in the closet.

Thirty years before that, there were still widespread lynchings and beatings of African Americans in the Deep South.

Progress is incremental, and quicker in some places than in others.  But progress is still being made, despite the efforts of people like Buddy Smith and his pals in the American Family Association to turn the United States into a Christian version of Iran.  We are not a theocracy -- which means that each of you is free to follow whatever religion you want, or none at all.

Other than that -- as my dad used to say, your rights end where my nose begins.  And if you are open for business, you have no right to refuse me service based on my skin color, hair color, religion, ethnic origin -- or sexual orientation.

Girding your loins

In the latest from the False Sense Of Security department, we have guys' underwear that contains a mesh of tiny silver threads to protect your privates from electromagnetic radiation.

It's not like this doesn't have precedent, I guess.  When you get a dental x-ray, the technician always drapes your torso with a lead apron to protect the rest of you from being irradiated.  The difference, of course, is that x-rays are high-energy ionizing radiation, while the radiation that Wireless Armour inventor Joseph Perkins is trying to protect us from is low-energy EM radiation in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum, which has not been shown to cause ill health effects (at least not in the intensity that most of us are exposed to).

Perkins, who in his promotional over at IndieGoGo says he has a background in physics, states that there has been a 59% drop in sperm count in men exposed to the EM radiation from a standard laptop, a number I seriously question -- the studies I've seen haven't shown any such thing, although there is some indication that proximity of the testicles to a cellphone in call mode for an hour can cause a decrease in sperm motility.  A study in Norway of guys working near radio transmitter aerials did show that they had lower than expected fertility, but this is a level of radio wave exposure that most of us never see.  There doesn't seem to be any connection between using a laptop or cellphone in ordinary ways and a drop in sperm count, or even an overall lower fertility level.  I mean, think about it.  Given the ubiquity of laptops and cellphones and so on these days, if they were actually causing this kind of drop in fertility, we'd be seeing a pretty serious crash in the number of pregnancies.

And I don't think that there's any evidence for that.  People, even here in the tech-crazy industrialized world, still seem to be making babies just fine, regardless of what kind of underwear we guys prefer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

But that doesn't stop Perkins.  His silver-wire-mesh boxer briefs are critical to "keep your troops from getting fried," a phrase that I didn't make up and plays off of every guy's worst nightmare.  The underwear works on the principle of a "Faraday cage," a mesh of conducting wires that blocks electromagnetic radiation, as long as the holes through the mesh are smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.

So Perkins' Wireless Armour would work for radiation in the radio and microwave regions of the spectrum, as advertised.  The problem with the whole concept, though, is that the radiation that strikes our bodies under normal circumstances is of extremely low intensity -- according to Lorne Trottier, writing for The Skeptical Inquirer in 2009, "The photon energy of a cell phone EMF is more than 10 million times weaker than the lowest energy ionizing radiation."  Citing a great many controlled studies (and mentioning a few poorly-controlled ones), The Skeptic's Dictionary states, "(T)he likelihood that our cell phones, microwave ovens, computers, and other electronic devices (cause negative health effects) is miniscule."

There is, of course, the problem with laptops causing skin burns -- not from the EM radiation, but from the fact that the heat from the underside isn't dissipating well.  An article from the National Institute of Health warns against having a laptop against your skin for long periods of time with no heat insulation between it and you.  They describe "(a) 24-year-old man (who) presented with an asymptomatic reddish brown pigmentation on the thighs...  After an extensive work-up, burning caused by use of a laptop was observed...  Burning was induced in 3 days by using laptop for 4 h daily."

But silver mesh boxer briefs aren't going to protect you from heat.  Silver is quite a good heat conductor, so if anything, having silver threads in your underwear would make the problem worse.

That's not to say that Perkins's original claim is wrong, of course.  His Faraday-cage skivvies would protect you from the effect of high-intensity radio or microwave radiation, should you ever be exposed to such.  If you were, for example, standing in front of a high-output radio transmitter, and were wearing your Wireless Armour boxer briefs, your "troops would not fry."  The rest of your body, however, would heat up in the manner of last night's leftovers in the kitchen microwave, until you were piping hot on the inside.

Your junk, however, would remain nice and cool, if that's any consolation.

If you'd like, though, Perkins's IndieGoGo page has a place where you can contribute, and receive your very own pair of anti-EMR underwear.  The price varies between £14 (about $23) for a pair with mesh in the front only,  and £24 (about $32) for "360º protection."  This seems steep, but remember that they do contain woven silver thread, so I guess they're not cheap to manufacture.

The whole thing strikes me as unnecessary, though, and I think I'll stick with my previous three-pairs-for-ten-dollars boxers from J. C. Penney.

Computerized essay, computerized grade

Honestly, I didn't need another reason to hate the increasing barrage of standardized tests that has come to characterize the American approach to public education.

I've seen enough of its ill effects already.  Demoralized kids, who daily face curricula that have turned into a hodgepodge of minutiae and generalities, with little emphasis on connections or critical thinking.  The "teach-to-the-test" mentality becoming abundant amongst teachers and administrators -- driven, it must be said, not by laziness or ineptitude, but because they are now being evaluated by how well the students perform on these metrics.  Writing that is graded on meeting a set of bullet-point rubrics that often have little to do with depth of understanding, creativity, nuance.

But just yesterday, I found yet another reason to despise the direction our educational system is going.  Because apparently, the latest push in the educational assessment world is to take essays -- the last bastion of expressive thought in an increasingly fill-in-the-bubbles world -- and score them by computer.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I'm not making this up.  There is now software out there -- Intellimetric, eRater, and Project Essay Grade, for example -- that developers claim can take an essay written by a student on a computer and come up with a score that matches to a high degree the score that would be given by a trained human reader.  There's also "WriteToLearn Automated Language Assessment" -- offered by none other than Pearson Education, who seems to be becoming to the educational world what Monsanto is to the environmentalists.

Proponents say that humans are fallible, biased, tire easily, can be sloppy, can cheat.  Which is all true, of course.  But the people who are using machine scoring of essays are confident to the point of hubris: "ETS has been at the forefront of research in automated scoring of open-ended items for over two decades," reads the description of the use of automated scoring protocols on the Educational Testing Service website, "with a long list of significant, peer-reviewed research publications as evidence of our activity in the field.  ETS scientists have published on automated scoring issues in the major journals of the educational measurement, computational linguistics and language testing fields.  Their work has also resulted in 19 U.S. patents related to applying NLP in assessment, significantly more than any other organization."

And it's already in use.  The GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) essays are at least in part machine scored, and the PARCC (Partnership for Assessment of Readiness for College and Careers) assessments are supposed to be following suit in the 2014-2015 school year.  So evidently, the ETS people and their pals at Pearson and other educational software development corporations have done their public relations jobs well.  The educational establishment, it seems, is sold on automated essay scoring.

Which puts them in a kind of awkward position apropos of a piece of research published in Phys.org just yesterday, which showed that a simple piece of software called "BABEL" (Basic Automated B.S. Essay Language), developed by programmer Les Perelman at MIT, can produce a high-scoring essay, according to the automated scoring software -- despite the fact that the output of BABEL is meaningless gibberish.

Which implies that students could do the same.  Further implying that what the automated scoring programs are detecting is not writing quality.

Given the prompt to write about "privacy," BABEL produced an essay that scored a 5.4 out of a possible 6, according to the automated scoring software, despite the fact that it contained the sentence, "Privateness has not been and undoubtedly never will be lauded, precarious, and decent."  The whole essay was written that way, i.e., complete and utter bullshit, composed of random words strung together into fancy-sounding complex sentences with lots of commas and subordinate clauses. Since the automated scoring software was looking for complexity of sentence structure, word length, and word commonness as some of its criteria for the overall score, and could not actually discern the meaning (or lack thereof) of the passage, the program was fooled.

Which means, of course, that there's no reason that humans couldn't similarly game the program.  Learn how to string some ten-dollar words together, put in a few cool phrases like "will certainly be, despite suggestions to the contrary," and figure out how to do parallel construction, and apparently it doesn't matter if you're saying anything that's meaningful.

Look, I know I'm a bit of a Luddite, but it's not that I don't trust technology per se.  I just think that thus far, it has some significant limitations.  We are not yet -- and chances are, won't be for some time -- within hailing distance of a sentient computer, that would be able to understand the nuance and connotation of written or spoken language.  All of the apps and programs and bells and whistles that seem to be taking the educational world by storm are no replacement for a truly engaging teacher.  Even if the software improves dramatically, I would question its utility as anything more than a clever teaching tool, and something that a skilled teacher really can get along just fine without.

But I find the idea that we are further mechanizing the act of teaching -- an act that is, when done well, far more an art form than it is a science -- profoundly repulsive.  As of two years ago, we were told by the state of New York that we teachers are not trusted sufficiently to grade our own final exams, so we have to give the exams to other teachers to score.  Now, apparently, we're moving to taking the assessment of our students out of human hands entirely.

Next, I fear, we will see the teachers themselves replaced by software -- with the ETS and Pearson and so on lauding the changes as visionary, and describing the "peer-reviewed research" the scientists on their payroll are doing, that shows how effective it all is.  "Students learn best with an interactive computer-based tutorial," I can see the press release saying.  "We have been at the forefront of non-teacher-based instruction for decades!"

No teachers necessary, right?  Just some low-paid aides to keep the kids pointed at the computer screens.  Consider the savings to the taxpayer!

More and more we are seeing an emphasis on processing children through factory-model schools, as if they were little automata that could be tweaked and turned and programmed and all come out identically "career and college ready."  There is scant emphasis on creative, original thought, because, after all, how could you assess that, turn it into a number?  And you know, if you can't quantify it, it doesn't exist.

And I suspect that Perelman's result with BABEL will be met with a thunderous silence.  The educational establishment has a sorry history of ignoring research that would cause them to have to make a shift in the status quo, especially when said status quo is making a lot of money for the corporations that are now holding the purse strings.

Easier, apparently, to brush off a 5.4/6 on a nonsense essay than it is to admit that the entire system is headed in exactly the wrong direction.

A side of chips

One of the most chilling tropes in my all-time favorite television series, The X Files, was the idea that the individuals involved in the conspiracy between the government and the evil aliens had simultaneously taken DNA samples and implanted microchips into our bodies when we were given vaccinations against smallpox.  The DNA was kept in a huge deep-freeze vault (the same place, I recall, that Mulder saw his first frozen alien baby), for a variety of nefarious purposes -- alien/human hybridization experiments amongst them.  Scully, at first a non-believer, finds out that Mulder was right when her doctor locates, and removes, the microchip in her own body -- with the unexpected result of her developing terminal cancer.

It's a terrifying idea, isn't it?  We're marked, tagged like animals in some kind of wildlife study, for reasons beyond our ken.  The whole thing is what we in the field technically refer to as "Some Seriously Scary Shit."

But, of course, being fiction, The X Files isn't real.  A distinction that apparently has sailed right past one Sherry Shriner, who claims that microchip implants are everywhere, and in everyone, and she knows they are because god told her so, a conclusion she tells us all about in her web page entitled "How To Detect and Nullify Chip Implants."

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Shriner thinks the government has us all microchipped, and that microchips are present in all of the following:

• vaccines
• dental fillings
• any kind of implanted medical device (e.g. pacemakers)
• surgical pins, rods, or plates
• transplanted tissue

Not only that, we have probably been microchipped even if we never go to the doctor or dentist, Shriner tells us:

If you are ever in a crowded store and you feel a sudden sting, like you got bit by a insect... [c]hances are you got zapped by a chip gun.  Yes, there are actually morons with chip guns who purposely go around implanting people.

Apparently the lord told Shriner all about this, and that not only are the chips for tracking people, They (the big "They") use the chips to control our behavior:

Our government has been knee deep in one particular area over the past 60 years and that has been to learn how to manipulate and control people.  Biblical theology would refer to as witchcraft but it is seen as advancement and technological breakthroughs by a government that on the backside serves Lucifer and is preparing the way for his rise and manipulation of the entire earth. 

Are serial killers and assassins today under government influence as lab rats to see how effective mind manipulation and control is?  I would say so.  Most of these involved with hideous crimes have recounted stories of chip implantations, missing time, or hearing voices which is typical of being a MILAB or military lab rat. 

What I have found in the Bible Codes about implantable chips in these last days is that they are 2-way transistor radio type chips.  Over the years they have perfected them from being tracking devices to being able to influence people by speaking to them directly through these chips and influencing their actions.  Through these chips they can read your thoughts, hear what you are saying, even see what you are seeing (depending on the chip, like a video chip they have and can implant you with).

We have some recourse against all of this nasty stuff, though, and fortunately, it's simple enough.  These ultrasophisticated high-tech super-secret microchips are only vulnerable to one thing, and we're lucky that it's the one thing the brilliant evil scientists that the government hired would never have thought of...

... magnets.

I have found that rare earth magnets called Neodymium magnets will nullify chips.  I bought some Neodymium magnets online from a retailer, the kind that can lift 10lbs of steel and run about .70 cents a piece and I used band aides to hold them in place.  I put magnets on the back of each ear lobe, on the side of each arm where I have received shots, on both sides of my jaws where I had wisdom teeth removed, and under each heel where I had been purposely implanted by my mother's doctor shortly after I was born.  Also on my stomach where I had a cesarean. I am finding that most people are implanted by their navels as well.  If you have had any type of surgery put a magnet near the scar for about 24 hours. 

When you use the magnets be sure to have the north side of the magnet facing your skin.  A compass will tell you which side of the magnet is north.  For newer chips or chips closer to the surface like your ears or jaws leave them on for about 12 hours.  For older chips such as vaccinations leave them on for about two days.  The Lord will lead you as to how long to keep them on or when it is deactivated and you can take the magnet off.  Just listen for His guidance in your Spirit if you are one of His. 

Seek the Lord on where you have them and He will guide your thoughts and lead you where to put the magnets.

Well, alrighty, then.

Just for the record, though, I'm not letting any neodymium magnets anywhere near my skin, because those things are freakin' powerful, and I'd rather not get a sensitive body part pinched between two of 'em.  Given the choice, I'll stick with the microchips.

Because that's just it, isn't it?  If Shriner is right, and we all have these microchips in us, the government is monitoring and controlling something like 314 million people, minus the half-dozen or so who take Shriner and her ilk seriously and have stuck magnets all over their bodies.  Can you imagine the amount of data we're talking about, here?  The government can't even seem to manage to have an error-free list of voters, and that's just managing a list of names and addresses.  Can you imagine the chaos if government officials were not only monitoring us constantly -- our conversations, what we were looking at, what we were hearing -- but were actually controlling our actions?  Like, with radio transmitters to move us around, or something?

It would be like a 314-million-player game of blind man's bluff.  We'd all be walking into walls, in front of trains, off cliffs, and so on, not to mention the fact that the drivers in Boston would be worse than they already are.

So I doubt that Sherry Shriner is right, honestly.  I haven't heard a thing about this from the lord (or any other reasonably credible source), so I'll just go on ahead living my life and assuming that the Men In Black don't give two shits what I had for dinner this Monday.  (A nice t-bone steak, steamed asparagus, and a glass of red wine, if anyone's curious, not that it matters.)  And if you do find a microchip in your smallpox vaccination scar at some point, my advice is to leave it there.  Scully took hers out, and damn near died.

Nikola Tesla vs. the Martians

I'd like to go on record as saying that claiming that a scientist said or did something crazy, which (s)he almost certainly did not say or do, is dirty pool.  Especially when said scientist is dead and cannot mount an effective counter-attack.

It's bad enough when (s)he's alive, as theoretical physicist and prominent science writer Lawrence Krauss found out, when some wackos who believe that the Earth is the center of the universe cherry-picked quotes from his talks to make it sound like he agreed with them.  (For Krauss's blistering response to the perpetrators, take a look at his article in Slate.)

But of course, one does not have that kind of recourse when one is dead.  Which explains why Einstein's quotes show up hither and yon to support all sorts of stuff, from theism to atheism to quantum-consciousness-frequency lunacy.  All of which makes me kind of hope that there's no afterlife, because it pains me to think of poor Einstein, watching his name being taken in vain by unscientific wingnuts, and not being able to do a damn thing about it.

But lately, Einstein has been supplanted as the Most Misleadingly Quoted Scientist by a different man, whose work is cited by a different group of wackos for different reasons.  This scientist is mostly cherry-picked to prop up claims like Infinite Free Energy (and the conspiracy theories regarding government coverups thereof), UFO antigravity propulsion systems, and superpowerful directed energy weapons.  He allegedly had all of this stuff figured out, but depending on whom you believe, (1) his research was actively suppressed during his lifetime, (2) all of his relevant papers were mysteriously destroyed after he died in 1943, or (3) he forgot to write it down.  All of this explains his current surge in popularity (forgive the pun) -- because of course, I am referring to the brilliant electrical engineer, Nikola Tesla.

Tesla was certainly a genius, even if you only consider the things he actually did.  There's the Tesla coil that bears his name, not to mention his well-known work with alternating current, the induction motor, radio-controlled machines, wireless telegraphy, and a bladeless turbine.  He spoke eight languages fluently, had an eidetic ("photographic") memory, and was gifted with flashes of insight that would often result in his drawing diagrams from memory that would then guide his further pursuits.  He died in possession of 278 patents -- but died in debt and impoverished, which (of course) further adds to his mystique.

So it's no wonder that Tesla is a favorite amongst the woo-woos.  Which is why just yesterday, there was an article on the fantastically wacky website Exopolitics by our pal, Skeptophilia frequent flier Alfred Lambremont Webre, called, "Nikola Tesla Re-started Earth's Exopolitical Communication with an Intelligent Civilization on Mars in 1901."

Just the title makes so many ad hoc claims that it might be sufficient simply to analyze it, but we would be remiss in not looking at the text.  And it does not disappoint.  Webre doesn't beat around the bush:

There is substantial documentation of Nikola Tesla's role as an early pioneer in re-establishing in 1901 public exopolitical communications between our Earthling human civilization and an intelligent civilization on Mars, most probably our human cousins known as homo martis terris. Public Earth-Mars exopolitical communications had most probably been severed since the solar system catastrophe of 9500 BC that greatly damaged Mars atmosphere and its surface ecology, and destroyed Earth's great maritime civilization. 

Nikola Tesla's early work in re-establishing interactive communication with an intelligent Martian laid the foundation for the U.S. government's secret DARPA time travel and teleportation program 1968-73 that employed Tesla-based technologies, and ironically perhaps for the secret CIA Mars "jump room" program that was initiated in the early 1980s that reportedly employed grey extraterrestrial technologies.

The "great maritime civilization" is, of course, Atlantis, and the "jump room" is the teleportation chamber via which the CIA has been transporting people to Mars, beam-me-up-Scotty style.  These individuals apparently include President Obama, who Webre says was seen on Mars by Seattle lawyer and noted wackmobile Andrew Basiago.   But this is just the outer skin of the onion, because apparently there are intelligent creatures on Mars -- not just lots of dust and rocks, which is pretty much all the Mars Explorer has found, despite numerous claims to the contrary.

Now, apparently it's true that Tesla once made a claim that he'd received a radio signal from Mars.  The signal, Tesla said, contained the following message: "1...2...3...4."  Which doesn't seem like a very intelligent thing to say, considering all the other things that one could say.  I mean, if I was on Mars, and I realized that someone on Earth was listening, I'd probably say, "It is really dry and cold and dusty up here, please send a rescue ship RIGHT NOW."  But Tesla thought it might be from the Martians, and proceeded to send messages back, none of which were ever answered.  We now think that he'd picked up signals from the magnetic field fluctuations of Jupiter, and eventually even Tesla moved on to other stuff.

As proof of Tesla's involvement, and his communications with Martians, Webre has large quantities of quotes from Tesla that really don't prove much of anything except that Tesla seems to have wanted to communicate with Martians.  He also has the following advertisement:

So that cinches it, then.

And all of that is apparently enough for Webre et al.  After quoting Tesla ad nauseam, he goes on into even more rarefied air.  He devotes a large section of his article to the research of Gregory Hodowanec, who has received radio transmissions that were either from somewhere in the constellation Andromeda or else from a Martian named "AAAAAATTT."  I'm not making this up.  Hodowanec told Webre all about his communications, and ended by saying, "I would appreciate that you keep this info somewhat confidential now.  The Earth may not be ready for what I will have to say eventually.  Nothing dire, just fantastic and thus perhaps unbelievable!"

So Webre put the whole thing online, including Hodowanec's request, which I find kind of funny.

The problem is, of course, that Tesla may have been a visionary, but he wasn't insane (the jury is still out on Hodowanec).  So I have no doubt that he would have been swayed by the evidence, as any good scientist is.  Or in this case, the lack of it.  Mars is significantly uninhabited, and I don't think the situation was any different 113 years ago.  Quote-mining Tesla's papers to support some crackpot theory doesn't make it true, and it's really hardly fair, given that Tesla himself is not around to defend himself.

I hate to say it, but it's getting to the point that whenever I read anything online that has Tesla's name attached to it, I immediately put on my suspicious face.  Which is unfortunate because I know he did some really forward-thinking research, much of which I have yet to investigate, and it'd suck if I missed out on learning about something Tesla actually did because of loons like Webre.

So that's today's voyage through the stratosphere.  How Nikola Tesla definitely didn't talk to someone on Mars.  There's no one up there on the Red Planet, more's the pity.  If there was, NASA would know about it by now, and scientists would be trampling each other to death trying to get first dibs on studying the Martians, because how cool would that be?

I mean, really.

And just for the record: I would certainly need more than an early 20th century advertisement for soap to convince me otherwise.