Tetherd Cow Ahead

I haven’t heard much from Peter Popoff for a few months, but this week (perhaps fearing that the Easter Bunny might steal his thunder) Prophet Pete has showered me with some very imaginative gifts indeed.

Yes, this exciting ‘audit controlled package’ was full to the brim with Popoff Fun. First of all, with this latest epistle, he’s delivered me some ACTUAL MONEY! Yes, that’s right folks, you read correctly. Peter Popoff sent me money!

Well, OK, so it’s only two pennies, but on balance, Peter Popoff has given me money, and I haven’t given him anything (well, except for some nard, maybe, but I already had that to hand). Prophet Pete also pretended to give me a much larger amount of money…

…but even a foreigner like me is not going to fall for that one. Aside from the fact that Ulysses S. Grant already appears on the US $50 bill, this supposed Ten Thousand Dollar Drinking Voucher is approximately twice the size it should be, and shiny. Nevertheless, I will be attempting to put it to good use, as you will see in a forthcoming edition of The Cow.

Diving back into the awesome lucky dip of Easter goodies I uncovered a BLOOD RED BRACELET…

…or, what we have come to know on my planet as ‘a piece of red wool’. I am supposed to tie this around my wrist and do something or other (I’ve just stopped reading the instructions on these damn things – they are so brainless it’s like reading, oh, the Bible or Scientology literature or something).

OK. Moving on. Next we have a small plastic sachet containing a communion wafer and what looks (and smells) like strawberry jelly crystals.

Now, what happens with these…? Dissolve powder… blood of Christ… body of Christ… receive these symbols… the usual Christian hocus pocus, rendered even more ludicrous in light of the fact that we’re dealing with STRAWBERRY SYRUP!

I’m beginning to think that Peter Popoff is actually doing the world a favour by illuminating the absurdity of Christian thinking. No wonder Christians try very hard to distance themselves from him – it’s all a bit close for comfort.

Now, you might think I’d be grateful getting such a swag of presents for Easter. But I’m not! I’m starting to think Prophet Pete is holding out on me. That maybe I’m not quite as ‘special’ as he’d have me believe. You will remember that Prophet Pete has already welched on his deal to send me Dead Sea Salt – well, in this latest offering he says:

No, Prophet Pete! I don’t remember getting the mustard seeds and the mirrors. And I’m a bit put out! I don’t feel I can possibly carry out your instructions when I’m not in possession of all the ingredients that I might need to conduct your spells prayers!

Still. The one remaining item in the letter almost makes up for it:

What you’re looking at here Cowpokes, in case it’s not as immediately obvious as it was to me, is DIRT FROM THE TOMB OF JESUS. Or, as Prophet Pete has it: ‘Earth from near the tomb of Jesus’. This obviously leaves some room for interpretation as to what ‘near’ actually encompasses. I’m thinking that in this case, ‘near’ may possibly be a brick quarry in inner city Sydney.*

I’m supposed to send the Jesus Dirt back to Peter Popoff so that he can ‘dip it in the Sea of Galilee’. Along with cash, unsurprisingly. I’m not sure if he intends to dip the cash in the Sea of Galilee, but with Prophet Pete, anything is possible.

Stay tuned Acowlytes. I think it’s time I wrote back to Prophet Peter Popoff and perhaps made a $10,000 dollar donation to his ministry!

___________________________________________________________________________

*Well, if you are talking in galactic scales, that’s pretty near!

___________________________________________________________________________

Today, Mister Ffoeg wrote to Sister Veronica, enclosing a picture of himself (above) and the following missive:

From: misterffoeg@hotmail.com
Subject: ever seen a real halo?
Date: 27 March 2009 2:39:03 AM
To: sisterveronica@tetherdcow.com

the photo is not edited at all. i saved it at lowest quality in hopes of merely pixelating it and sure enough (i was on a weird kick at the time) i was manifesting this halo. it tastes great and it’s less filling.

I make the following observations:

•‘Ffoeg’ is ‘Geoff’ backwards. That’s pretty lame.

•Mr Ffoeg implies that Sister Veronica’s halo is not real. That’s impolite.

•Mr Ffoeg evidently ate his halo. That’s bizarre.

•Mr Ffoeg believes his halo is tasty and ‘less filling’. Less filling than what? A plate of cheese fries? Walkabout Soup? The Zero? That’s far fetched.

•Mr Ffoeg, despite being completely off his face on halo-juice, is able to correctly punctuate his emails (despite having no Shift key on his computer). That’s suspicious.

Make of all this what you will. Sister Veronica just looked at the email and said:

“Tool.”

By the tone of her voice, I assume that’s not meant to be a compliment. Please feel free to write to Mr Ffoeg and ask him further questions about the nutritional value (or just plain tastiness) of haloes. Perhaps he has recipes, and/or serving suggestions!*

___________________________________________________________________________

*Y’know, when I was a kid, I always thought ‘serving suggestion’ meant ‘add strawberries’. That’s because I only ever saw those words each morning on the Cornflakes packet, as I munched away at my breakfast.

___________________________________________________________________________

Remember Steorn, the Irish startup who claimed to have invented a machine for creating energy out of nothing? We examined their preposterous claims on The Cow almost two years ago, here, and then again, after they comprehensively failed to reveal their stunning breakthrough to the world, here.

I’ve checked in on them from time to time, but aside from the very occasional appearance with famous personages*, there’s been absolutely no action on the Steorn Free Energy front.

Until this week.

Given the deafening silence that resulted from Steorn’s attempt to convene a panel of experts to vindicate their claims, I was pretty sure that, like so many others throughout history who’ve vaunted perpetual motion machines, the company was dead and buried. Unfortunately I was mistaken. Like a zombie that’s been struck so many times with a shovel that its spinal cord is hanging out, Steorn has staggered from the Graveyard of Improbable Claims to walk among the rational once more. Actually, they’re more like vampires come to think of it – they’ve risen freshly reconstituted, with a website makeover, and a coven of new faces, to feed again on the blood of the gullible. But the unpleasant smell of decay still lingers under the paint job.

But enough of the colourful Hammer Horror metaphors. Surely Steorn wouldn’t be brazen enough to come back with the same old crap. Surely by now they’ve got something to substantiate their preposterous claims. Well let’s see…. there’s a graph…

…and a plastic doo-dah…

And they’re even selling a USB Hall Probe† (at 250 quid it’s a steal – yep, that’s right – them stealing from you). But aside from that, it’s all the same crapola. They’ve made a video that features a trio of luminaries extolling the virtues of Orbo (Steorn’s supposed free energy ‘engine’) without really saying anything more profound than ‘Gee whiz! Ah woonta believed it unless I sawr’n it with me own eyes!’. Unsurprisingly (to me at least) none of these boffins turns up on the first five pages of a ProprietarySearchEngine™ search. C’mon Steorn! If you’re going about spruiking your new Solution to the World’s Problems™, get some people with credibility to wave your flag! That is, of course, unless you can’t…

What else have we got… oh yeah! There’s an explanation of how Orbo works! Hang on now:

Orbo is based upon time variant magnetic interactions, i.e. magnetic interactions whose efficiency varies as a function of transaction timeframes.

It is this variation of energy exchanged as a function of transaction time frame that lies at the heart of Orbo technology, and its ability to contravene the principle of the conservation of energy. Why? Conservation of energy requires that the total energy exchanged using interactions are invariant in time. This principle of time invariance is enshrined in Noether’s Theorem.

Aha! [Slaps hand on forehead] So obvious! In other words, what you’re saying is:

‘Crap crap crap crapola, crappity crap, big words, confusing technical jargon, more crap and then some crap.’

It all seems so simple in retrospect! If only I had thought of using magnets to make things go round and round forever and generate electricity in the process! Oh wait… I DID! In third grade! And then one day (the next day, as I recall) I learned from my science teacher, Mr Smythe,‡ that science is not what you want to happen, but what actually happens, and I gave up my dream of becoming the Henry Ford of the Free Energy Age.

So. What’s the game with Steorn? Can they possibly be the stellar kinds of bozos that they seem? Or have they simply outsmarted everyone with a hi-tech shell game? They’re certainly getting plenty of publicity, and now they’re selling training courses, so I’m sure they’ll fleece enough idiots of their cash to keep annoying us for at least another couple of years.

But one thing Steorn ain’t EVER going to do, is make a machine that outputs more energy than is put into it. Ever. Come back in ten years and tell me I’m wrong Steorn. Twenty, then. What the heck, I’ll give you a hundred!

Now, back to my workshop. The antigravity machine is a-l-m-o-s-t finished…

___________________________________________________________________________

*The woman in the middle of the photo is Mary McAleese, the President of Ireland. Steorn’s CEO, Sean McCarthy, is the man with the smug grin standing to her left.

†It’s basically just a gadget for measuring magnetic field strength. Ho hum.

‡Very curiously, Mr Smythe was a Christian. It was from this point that I understood that even very intelligent people could be hoodwinked, if they weren’t brave enough.

___________________________________________________________________________

WooWoo Beliefs – A TCA Educational Series: Episode #4

This is Danny Nalliah. Danny is some kind of flavour of Pentecostal Christian, and believes (or says he believes) that the Bible is the literal Word of God. Danny is a most irksome person at this very moment, because he also believes, and has made public his belief, that the terrible bushfires that are raging not more than 20 miles from my home are the result of divine retribution from God. Danny says God has done this because Victoria, my home state, recently decriminalized abortion.

On the website for his appropriately named ‘Catch the Fire Ministries’* Danny says that in November last year he had a dream in which he “saw fire everywhere with flames burning very high and uncontrollably”.† He interpreted the dream to mean that God had “removed his conditional protection on Australia, and in particular on the state of Victoria for approving the slaughter of innocent children in the womb”.

Danny Nalliah epitomizes what I despise about religion. His self-righteous posturing, and despicable ignorant proselytizing is primitive and dangerous. He has told his followers that if they pray for forgiveness, God will deliver them from this horrific tragedy, and spare further fires. Of course, Danny wins whether or not the fires stop or worsen; if they die back, then the prayers are successful, if they flare up again, then God is still pissed. This is not a new game to Nalliah – before the last Australian elections he prophesied: “I will boldly declare that Prime Minister John Howard will be re-elected in the November election (if the Body of Christ unites in prayer and action) and pass the leadership onto Peter Costello sometime after.”

Of course, he was plain wrong, but sadly, for some reason religion is rarely called to answer for blunders of such magnitude. I guess that’s what happens when you write an escape clause into everything you ‘predict’.

___________________________________________________________________________

*I’m certainly not linking to this reprehensible organization – they don’t deserve the honour.

†As prophetic dreams go, this is pretty standard fare – there’s no specific prediction of a bushfire (it could just as easily have been a bomb blast, an industrial accident or an incident of arson, or riffing metaphorically, any of a hundred other things), and there’s no specified time limit (so it could be in a month, or in a year, or a decade). You see how this goes – a fire of some kind, at some time, is hardly much of a prophesy. Especially in a land that has bushfires every summer, to a greater or lesser degree of damage.

___________________________________________________________________________

#1 Indicator of the Certifiably Insane: Invoke Jesus or Hitler as rolemodel/nemesis.

Ah, I just love it when the loonies leave their pearls of wisdom on The Cow. You may remember that some time back as part of our TCA Educational Series ‘Woowoo Beliefs’, we featured a little piece about a personage named Jasmuheen (Queen of the Breatharians). To recap, Jasmuheen claims that she does not need food and water to survive, but lives solely on air. It doesn’t require much intellectual effort to recognize this as an unmitigated barrel of hogwash.

Well, Cow Commenter Tibet23* is evidently not able/unwilling to expend said intellectual effort and has this to say:

The fact that you’ve not experienced anything else than your mcdonald-hungry body, does not exclude that people may be and behave differently.

Tibetan monks have been tested under controlled conditions…and scientist could not explain what they found.

Slowing down their heartbeats to almost stop. Being in a sleeplike state for days with no water no food, melting the snow around them while in meditation.

Is it a miracle? Are Tibetans special and we, poor mortals, can’t make it ?

Man is a machine. Somebody learn how it works and modify it. Others just use it to go to work…

Maybe we’re just scared by what we ignore.

Our intrepid correspondent T23, gives us the most wonderful metaphorical illustration of someone getting their head stuck in the banisters of logic. Significantly, notice how T23 is using science to bolster his/her argument whilst simultaneously treating it with disdain. In other words, T23 is holding up scientists as a benchmark for something that they claim is inherently unquantifiable by science.

Let’s just ignore the fact that the claim is in fact complete hogwash anyway – Tibetan monks don’t do anything that science can’t explain.† And, focally, with Jasmuheen we are not talking about a meditative state of low metabolism whilst sitting still doing nothing (which can quite easily be understood by science), but instead about her assertion that she doesn’t eat or drink anything at all and is somehow able to live a functional life. Actually, not just a functional life, but a better life than anyone else! This, as anyone with half a brain instantly recognizes, is complete rubbish.

Indeed, T23, I completely agree with you that the human body is a machine. And, just like your car, it needs fuel. But no matter how much you tinker with your Datsun, you’ll never get it running exclusively on fresh air. Just pointing at it sitting in the garage doing nothing is not proof of your wacky theory.

And if, by ‘maybe we’re just scared by what we ignore’ you mean maybe we’re scared by ignorance, well, then, yes, it certainly scares me. And, sadly, I doubt you’ll comprehend the true despondency I feel when I read comments like yours.

Now, where did I put my cheeseburger?

___________________________________________________________________________

*23! Sometimes I wonder if the Universe is just one big practical joke.

†OK, there is some neuroscience that is on the far edge of explanation, but then that is the case with a lot of neuroscience. Scientists freely admit that they don’t understand a lot of what the brain does. Scientists are really good at pointing out things they don’t understand. This is not, however, a free ticket to an endorsement of your wacky belief, no matter how much you’d like that.

___________________________________________________________________________