You know who scares me? It’s not the trolls on the internet. It’s the local loons.
I got a weird demand from some guy named Terry Dean Nemmers (for some reason, he calls himself “Terry Dean, Nemmers” — I’ll refer to him as Comma from now on). This was sent to me and many other people at UMM, but it’s really irrelevant to me, since he’s going to have to go through campus police and the administration to get any of those things he is requesting. But he’s clearly been fed well on Fox News to direct his hatred at me.
Chancellor Johnson:
Chapter 13 data request – Email me the 13.82 Comprehensive Law Enforcement Data. Subd. 7. Criminal investigative data for the incident involving PZ Myers, associate professor at UMM. Email me the incident reports, handwriting samples, audio files and the referral to the prosecutor for prosecution. It shocks the conscience that UMM personnel would incite others to engage in censorship and criminal activity, isn’t it?
Oh, and in case you intentionally forgot, you are currently illegally withholding (censorship, right?) the following public data: 1. Names of all UMM personnel 2. Salaries of all UMM personnel (In dollars and cents – if coded provide key to code) 3. Incident reports for the 09-05-13 botched West Central SWAT raid (publicity stunt) at America’s Best Value Inn in Glenwood. You remember: The willful misuse of municipal, county, state and federal funds on a wild goose chase for Andrew Dikken.
Terry Dean, Nemmers
The scary bit is that second paragraph. Comma has a bug up his butt about an incident that happened over a year ago, and which I had nothing to do with, and only found out about through this email.
Apparently, the campus police and several local counties have a mutual agreement to support a single SWAT team for the region — which makes some sense. We shouldn’t duplicate a rarely used resource, and combining this effort to support a couple of thinly populated counties sounds smart to me.
Comma doesn’t like this. Why, I don’t know.
He is obsessed with an incident in which this SWAT team was deployed to try and arrest a murderer, Andrew Dikken, in Glenwood. He wasn’t there. He was later caught and convicted of a rather callous double murder. Not a nice guy. He’s in prison now.
Why Comma is concerned about the one failed arrest attempt is a mystery. Why he thinks UMM has anything to do with it (Glenwood is about a half hour away from us) is another mystery. Why he’s tagging me in his pursuit of this story is baffling.
But I do know one thing: Comma is a convicted felon and gun kook.
So that’s what I worry about. Not some guy in Florida screaming on the interwebs, but our very own local right wing lunatics living in my back yard.
At least I know what Comma looks like — he has a ranty youtube channel. He also has a website he calls Lion News, which is an incoherent scattershot mess that he calls a “grassroots media outlet”. It’s terribly written, and he claims to be a UMM graduate — I stared and stared at his article on the UMM “scandal”, as he calls it, and it makes no sense at all. It’s a pixel salad.
America, land of the kooks. These people are everywhere.
Maybe Nemmers is his royal title. Forsooth, ’tis Terry Dean, the Nemmers of Morris!
Comma is a Sovereign Citizen loon. They add punctuation to their names in the bizarre belief this somehow makes them exempt from the laws.
Yeah, I just learned that. Here’s a link to a list of sovereign citizen affectations.
That was indeed an email.
isn’t it? It is, isn’t it?*
*so, uh, is this a common verbiage in Minnesota? he seems to use it quite a lot, doesn’t he? he does, doesn’t he?
I thought it was just where he lived à la “Disgruntled, Chipping-Sudbury”.
Gun nut, sovereign citizen, kook. What’s to worry about?
Funny how those SC and FOTL cranks are willing to call down the law on other people.
I love this! It’s absolutely hysterical. Like a law enforcement agency simply wouldn’t put an “AKA” on any new records collected about an individual, or entirely ignore nonsense forms of capitalization and punctuation. Laughable.
Incidentally, “idioticon” is not a joke. The big dictionary of the Swiss dialects really is called Schweizer Idiotikon
My sympathies, PZ
But wow, that’s a serious amount of bizarre
No, they think that what they’re doing is creating a separate persona that gives them immunity to litigation (somehow- probably via magic). The real hilarious part is how despite their arcane attempts to claim immunity from litigation they tend to be prone to filing frivolous lawsuits against everyone and everything.
Also, they tend to be crazy, gun-fondling Right Wingers, so yeah, they’re kind of scary, too.
PZ @3:
Read it. Wow. They’re even crazier than I thought. It’s like they’re trying to devise counter-magic against Azorius axiomancy, rather than actually deal with how laws work in the real world.
“Ha! You can’t arrest me because this circle of salt gives me shroud, thereby making me untargetable by spells and prosecution!”
“Ha! My mana cost may say I’m a blue creature, but I was misprinted with a green border, so I’m legally a tax-exempt green creature!”
Take care PZ, people are evil.
See “Negative averment” via PZ’s link, would you? It’s some kind of bullshit linguistic trickery, don’t you think? These guys are as batshit as Scientologidiots, aren’t they? They are, aren’t they?
@Rabid- and like Scientologists, they’re also vindictive as hell.
There’s quite a bit of cargo cult in this, too.
PZ, if you have kooks like this in your backyard, you really should mow the lawn more often or something.
Seriously though, that guy sounds a bit of a worry. Stay safe :-/
Yeah, negative averment is one of their big things. I had a SC try to tell me it was the Socratic Method. I laughed.
But they are dangerous. SCs have killed police officers and threatened numerous judges and court officials.
@#3/PZ
…the fuuuuuck…? That looks almost as nutty as the Time Cube. Like, all the words are English, and they individually make sense? But the order they’re in is producing utter bollocks. Do they have a DM sitting in a basement somewhere surrounded by orange-fingerprinted rifles pumping this stuff out…?
The Canadian versions of these jokers use some of the same language as in the SPLC link above, minus the references to the US Constitution. They replace those with references to the Magna Carta, the British Crown, and the King James Bible as a legal text. So far none of our Sovereign Citizens/Freeman on the Land etc. have apparently killed anyone, but it wouldn’t surprise me if one was openly violent sooner or later.
@timgueguen- do they consider Albert Johnson as their hero?
A while back someone mentioned that we should found our own little FTB commune. While it was probably said as a bit of a joke, the idea is looking better and better to me. We should choose a place that will be the least affected by climate change, is in a solidly blue state, and would be a safe and welcoming place for a group of freethinkers. (Northern California? Oregon? Washington State?)
We could pool our money, buy some land, develop it and build our own little town or suburb.
As I watch how far this country is sinking, I feel more and more like retiring to such a place.
For some reason that structure reminds me of “On a field, sable, the letter A, gules”. Probably not the image he wanted to put in people’s minds.
Oregon isn’t a solid blue state. Portland, Eugene, and Ashland are blue, the rest of the state is extremely red. Northern California is even worse.
magistramarla@22, USAlienastani is not a good place to prepare utopia. This planet is not a good place. Another universe is required. Perhaps one where discs, support by elephants, move between stars on turtles?
ah.
@22…Belize.
Isn’t Kent Hovind a “Sovereign Citizen”, too?
there are thousands of islands in French Polynesia that are still uninhabited.
oh, wait… global warming. right.
Translated into realworkspeak — complete kook or total nutter — yes.
That’s cute. He appears to be citing the laws of a state he claims not to be part of.
Of course they don’t apply to him! His interpretation of, and modifications thereof, the laws of a state are only to be applied to others. This is so obvious it cannot be contested, and even questioning it is not only treason but an insult to both his sky faeries and whatever he explains them/him/her as having said.
It’s like those sovereign citizen types are trying to ignore/override 6 million years of human evolution as a hierarchical social and cooperative species.
I suppose a fair number of them don’t believe in evolution….
It reminds me a bit of the original meaning of the word “outlaw”, at least as far as I have heard, in that in declaring someone an “outlaw” it actually meant that they were placed *outside* the protection of the law. The law no longer applied to them, including all the laws that protect individuals from actions by other individuals and groups. So they were fair game to be robbed, beaten, killed (no longer murdered, since murder is a legal term) by anyone, and that person would not be subject to the normal sanction of the law.
Because that in the end is what these people want. Maybe they don’t THINK that’s what they want, but that’s the logical consequence of what they want. They become sovereign states all on their lonesome, and the states around them can treat them in the same manner as nation states have always treated one another, to the extent that they can get away with. So they can be conquered, occupied, have their resources expropriated, have financial sanctions imposed on them, and so forth. They can go complain to the UN, and the UN will pay them as much (less, actually) attention as the UN pays to Luxembourg when it complains about Russia’s cavalier attitudes….
I used to live down the road from a nation-state disguised as a human family. They very much understood and spent and made tons of money, but as for the rest of it, yes.
It’s like an alt-med supplements/quackery, legal edition. Alt-law if you will. “One weird trick,” found by some guy nobody believes, undoes all the legal powers of the US Government, because someone said so in this book which you can buy for 19.99.
I know there have been a few of these guys in the news lately, but… the biggest dangers we faced from our kooks were A: Ricochets (daily, target practice) B: Excessive ranting. and C: Falling into their bunker/armory on accident.
I thought the punctuation thing might be semicolons or quote marks or something to try to mess with poorly coded database front ends, like so:
http://xkcd.com/327/
Turns out, it’s just stupid.
After reading that full SPLC article, I now realize–the founders of the Sovereign Citizen movement were Mad Political Scientists.
QFT:
Does Commas keyboard have any punctuation, other than the question mark?? Every statement on that page is punctuated as a question. I assume he thinks that makes him immune to accusations of false accusations (aka “slander”, or “libel”). But like PZ said, that page is basically “pixel salad”, incomprehensible.
I’d sad, now I’m really interested in how you and UMM have anything to do with the “scandal”, but this guy is incapable of explaining the connections he sees in his head.
The punctuation is terribly important to the SC crew, it’s where the magic happens. They’re also very excited about ink colours, courtroom decor, and their alternate dictionary, which insists that certain combos of words are effectively magic.
People like this, especially in a heavily-armed “society” like that the US claims to be, can be extremely dangerous. I would definitely be documenting interactions, and considering dropping by the local plod to see if they’re interested in taking a report. They don’t often take being ignored very well, since they’re sovereign and you aren’t ( haven’t done the rituals have you? Got you there!).
Yes, base rate, blah blah, but Schrödinger’s SC: which one is the cuddly but weird magic believer, and which one the murderous terrorist? I wouldn’t be changing my life, but I’d definitely be making sure the police know. And I’m not one to rush to the police for much.
My third year law school daughter warns that when dealing with SC’s check for frivolous liens on your house. Kent Hovind was putting a lien on his own seized property to harass the feds.
There’s quite a bit about these people at http://quatloosia.blogspot.com/
Amusing habits of the Canadian sovcits include their tendency to invoke the Uniform Commercial Code (which of course does not apply in Canada).
@20 timgueguen
The Canadian ones also sometimes point to the Statute of Westminster, one I bumped into even specifically pointed to section 8. A bit of foolishness[1] that made it memorable.
[1] Section 8 is one of the two that don’t apply to Canada as it’s about the Constitution Acts of Australia and New Zealand.
Stay safe, PZ.
People like this guy keep me awake at night. There’s more than an average amount of them around my neck of the woods and everybody goes out of their way to ignore them.
From that very enlightening link that PZ provided –
Punctuation, weird language rules, weird word combinations are all magic in this particular version of bizarro world.
The Sovereign Citizen rules are so specific and so bizarre that I wonder how people learn them. Do they apply these practices uniformly or does each one have their own idiosyncratic take on it? Is there a formal training program like Scientology? (I doubt it, but who knows?)
From the link PZ posted, it looks like there are Sovereign citizen training centers around the country.
Karl Mamer’s The Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast had an episode about the SC / FOTL kooks featuring a father and son who were traveling around giving Sovereign Citizen seminars. They died in a shootout with the police after they murdered a pair of police officers during a routine traffic stop. It would be interesting to compare the publicity given these murders and the public reaction compared to the the recent murder of the 2 policemen in New York city by a black man.
The people attending there SC seminars on how to claim the secret bank account the government has in your true name by saying the magic words in court never wonder the people putting on the seminars haven’t been able to claim their secret bank account and instead are traveling around putting in seminars in cheap motels. The same applies to the seminars in how to make millions in real estate with no money down etc.
Canadian “Freemen on the Land” like to argue that the motto on the Canadian Coat of Arms (From Sea to Sea – in Latin) on the wall in the courtroom means that the courts can only apply “admiralty law” and therefore have no jurisdiction on land. When we lived in the Brentwood district in NW Calgary we used to get “Good Day Judge Fay” flyers in our mailbox on a regular basis. These were all directed at a judge who had convicted the author for operating a motor vehicle without insurance in the nearby town of Cochrane. They were full of rants about common law and the King’s highway. I saw the kook who was distributing these one day. He was traveling by bicycle.
I second kenb’s recommendation regarding frivolous liens @41
@47, PaulBC
I have a strong suspicion that, as with religion, the rituals are complicated precisely to provide justifications to explain why they don’t work:
ZOMG:
Comma has written to the monitors. I won’t reveal more than a few of the exact words used (it’s up to PZ if he wishes to publish anything from it, IMO), but he claims harassment by PZ’s “cult” and that his youtube channel contains “accusations” that Comma is a “Sovereign Citizen” (in this last case, the quotes are Comma’s).
The concluding para is all questions. Yeesh.
Does Comma think that the monitors monitor PZ? Does Comma think we monitor the whole internet for the writings of anyone ever posting on Pharyngula? Does the average person nicknamed Comma even realize the absurdity of these positions? These are expectations that are both ethically absurd and unlikely to be met, aren’t they? What would a reasonable person expect a blog-monitor to do in such a case?
Stay tuned! This one may be fresh from sharing a bowl with a toucan from Battle Creek, Michigan.
Hey, I wrote you an email!
Hey, I also request that people give me all the information they have about you!
You posted my email, you’re harasssssssssing meeeeeeee!
@ Crip Dyke, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden #51
Encountered an unfamiliar species, have you? Well, not to worry. Until you can do your own research (always with a partner who will immediately intervene upon noticing any aberrant behaviour) these answers might be useful.
Yes. Yes. No. Yes, yes. Keep Calm and Carry On.
I agree with some others here this guy sounds like one of the dangerous ones glad you posted it here and hope you let other interested parties know about him also. Though he may do some of that himself.
uncle frogy
It’s not helping him much. He was due to be released from prison this year (after being jailed in 2007 for tax evasion and obstruction) but he’s now been indicted for mail fraud, and will go on trial next month.
“The incident”?
DO NOT THINK ABOUT the incident!!!
Wait… does that mean that I, in my capacity as a Pharyngula commenter at least, by virtue of my comma containing handle am exempt from laws?
Athywren, wasn’t that the event, not the incident. And that was some damn fine TV, by the way.
Speaking of punctuation, Nemmers stole my question mark.
:D
Well Moggie, I could hardly shoehorn the event in there when the quote was for the incident but… umm… *makes a thing up* actually the incident was a happening of a much smaller scale than the event but it is one about which we must also ensure we do not think.
Mostly for marshmallow related reasons.
The enlightened will understand – AND MUST NOT THINK ABOUT IT!!
This is the kind of legal training they get in prison when not servicing ‘Bubba’
freemage @ 37:
I thought being mad was an entry requirement for political science. At least that’s the impression I got from my stint in a Master’s level polsci program…
Amphiox @ 34:
The etymology is actually kind of curious there. In Iceland, the noun is ‘útlagi’, and the adjective ‘útlægur’, which may be related to ‘lög’ (law) but more likely has the literal meaning “he who lies outside”. (There is, incidentally, no question that the English word ‘outlaw’ is from Old English, which shares significant similarities with Icelandic. The etymology is almost certainly shared.) The meaning of the word, then, is ‘exile’. However, in the early Icelandic legal system people could be exiled in only one way: By declaring them outside the court system, and thus erasing all formal obligations others had to respect their rights. This was understood to have the meaning that anyone who came across them would be entirely within their rights to kill them.
Curiously, though, the legal term for this is entirely unrelated to the word ‘útlagi’. That word has been used as a description of these people since at the very latest the fourteenth century, though.
Yes, I am a historian. Why do you ask? :)
You should respond to him via e-mail immediately. Tell him that you are exempt from his inquiries because “subornation of false muster.”
myleslawrence
What the fuck is wrong with you? Fuck off with that bullshit.
Merwin Coolidge @ #60:
So not only do you think rape is a laughing matter, but you also think a homophobic “joke” is okay? Jal is right: What the fuck is wrong with you?
/goes back to lurking
@JAL, thank you.
ooops, and Marilove.
Moggie and Athywren- I see where the confusion is coming from.
See the incident wasn’t actually a part of the the event but of the occurrence. However, the occurrence coincided with the the event and they combined into the affair. Then there was the episode (the less said of that the better) soon after which just caused all of them to snowball into the consequence. Somewhere along the line this was all followed by the occasion and the the experience and resulted in the result but the timeline shifted from a timey-whimey ball to a mangled cube so they are all one and the same yet completely separate and fictional crisis called the outcome.
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?! This guy is truly nuts, and his response to this post shows a serious hate-on…
2. Salaries of all UMM personnel (In dollars and cents – if coded provide key to code)
HA!! You thought you could fool him by quoting UMM salaries in Polish zlotys, and he saw right though your pathetic ploy! Not only that, he’s anticipated your next move by demanding the key to the code you plan to use in your next reply. Checkmate, pinko atheist!
Wait… does that mean that I, in my capacity as a Pharyngula commenter at least, by virtue of my comma containing handle am exempt from laws?
Yup, you can plagiarize all you want, and no one here will be able to do anything about it. Let no one else’s work evade your eyes…
Jeremy: what about The Happening?
One of the odd things about working for the state of Minnesota is that all of our salaries are available as open information — we can easily look up our colleague’s salaries, and learn, for instance, that computer science faculty get paid a hell of a lot more than lowly biologists. But we’re in Minnesota, so we politely avoid mentioning it, and I, except for one brief look many years ago, generally won’t even look.
I can’t explain most of it for you, but I can commiserate on the “being tagged in all ranty angry emails from an obviously unhinged person for no apparent reason” part. Back when I was teaching, one of my students was a paranoid schizophrenic (medically diagnosed, and only taking part of his medication, which made him worse), who had standing grudges against our registrars, campus police, physics department, and the prof for the course that was a prerequisite to mine. As of the second day of classes, he added my email address to his harassment list, in which he would send “legally justified demands” that:
1) The Campus Police buy him a new computer, because the physics department had planted a bomb in his old one
2) That the physics department stop flying stealth bombers over his appartment
3) That he be retroactively granted A+ grades in all courses he had previously taken (and mostly failed) as compensation for the cyber terrorists who had stolen his password, and vandalized his car
After a few months, he added:
4) That witnesses to the traffic incident where a truck driver with road rage ran over his car come forward so he could sue.
The only one of those that involved me at all was the truck incident, which I was already on police record as a witness for (and was never called to testify as it wasn’t needed) – he had actually rammed his own car into the side of a parked 18-wheel transport truck hard enough to drive the entire front end underneath the middle side wheels. The thing nearly fell over on top of me. (I was on the other side of it.)
None the less, I was sent all of the complaints, and was contacted separately by campus police and told to avoid responding, or drawing attention from him if possible.
I won’t offer any kind of diagnosis on Mr. Comma, but be careful! Even if his spelling and grammar are better than my old student’s, he still sounds likely to blame anyone he’s thinking about for anything he imagines happening while thinking about them, and that can turn out badly.
Damn, HappyHead, your physics department has STEALTH BOMBERS?! Your football team must have sold a LOT of game tickets to buy you that kind of kit.
@Raging Bee
Our football team was kinda bad, but as a Canadian university, we were much more interested in our Hockey team (which was also kinda bad).
When I asked the physics people about their stealth bombers, I was told “They’re stealth. You can’t see them.” while the secretary pointed upwards and out of window.
I read the comma as an indicator that the name order has been altered to position the given name after the family name, like “Horstman, John”. So I interpret that as a guy whose given name is “Nemmers” and whose surname is “Terry Dean“.
@HappyHead:
Why on earth were the physics department wasting money on stealth bombers when they could have spent it much more productively on a giant supercollider and collapsed the planet into a singularity?
Tch. Some people just have no ambition.
@12:
That’s basically it. Sovereign citizens/tax protestors perceive the law as a literal form of magic in which various rituals and incantations combine in mysterious ways to produce particular outcomes. If you alter the rituals or the words in just the right way, you come up with a counter-spell to undo those outcomes and produce different ones. Hence, they’re obsessed with process and formalism while ignoring the actual meaning of the law, which they think is irrelevant.
In fairness, the perception of the law as something quasi-mystical is held by lots of people, not just crazy ones. Some people have a hard time understanding the law as merely human institution and social construct.
Yeah, he’s the sovereign of the nation of Hovindstan, population one. Its territory consists of 10 x 7 foot cell in a Federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
Those of the commentariat who are not previously familiar with it might enjoy looking through Richard Feynman’s essay on “Cargo Cult Science” (available several places on the web).
Those who are familiar with it might care to consider the notion of the sovereign citizen legal antics as Cargo Cult Law. As with Cargo Cult Science (and the original Cargo Cult’s practice of logistics), there is a failure to grasp the most essential elements of the methodology, confuse ritual conventions for those essentials, and gaining only accidental success. (The blog “Lowering the Bar” includes in its Hall of Fame the Canadian case of R v Duncan, which in turn refers to the “Meads v Meads” ruling which discusses the nuts in detail.) It also has some similarities to what Dale Cannon terms “shamanic mediation” — loosely, trying to harness the ultimate cosmic powers of the universe via peculiar rituals. (Incidentally, so does engineering — albeit unusually effectively in achieving results.)
I’ll also note the punctuation stuff reminds me of the ancient mystical notion of “True Names”, dating back to Biblical times.
Not that I see how any of these observations enlighten me on how to defuse such walking time-bombs, but maybe someone else more clever than I might find a way to take such as skeletal theoretical framework to such application.
twas brillig… (et al) @ # 38 (et cetera): Every statement on that page is punctuated as a question. I assume he thinks that makes him immune to accusations of false accusations …
Is this the vocal equivalent of upspeak, and did the SovCits pick it up from the Valley Girls, or vice-versa?
Ah yes, I remember those killings well. It was all over the news for weeks and provoked a national conversation about the dangers of right-wing extremism, and there was widespread condemnation of peaceful Tea Party protestors for having incited the violence. Police officers from the town turned their backs on the Republican mayor and openly disrespected him for his history of blaming civil servants for the nation’s problems. The leader of the police union even went so far as to say that Republican politicians had “blood on their hands” for their anti-government rhetoric.
Ha ha, you weren’t being serious about them being comparable, right? I hadn’t even heard of this incident until I googled it.
Oh, I don’t know. I stopped watching Shyamalan movies after Signs but I’m fairly certain that movie was crap.
Area Man:
I believe that was their point.
White guys kill two cops for being stopped in traffic in order to defend their Soverignty and no one gives a shit.
A black guy kills two cops for Revenge and everyone is up in arms and weeping for the sake of Poor Persecuted Policedom and condemning anyone who dares speak out against police violence and oppression and discrimination elsewhere.
The comparison is definitely of interest.
http://ffn.nodwick.com/?p=550
You put too many commas in there – it’s simply in French word order, adjectives behind nouns. On a sable field the gules letter A.
Much less. Luxembourg is in the EU.
The German-speaking area had such a concept as well.