Soggy Moon Theory And More

This blog calls on me to go on the occasional deep dive into a weirdo’s whole oeuvre, because they never seem to focus their efforts in one area. Rather, their divergence from the usual reality in one vein tends to bleed over into others as well. The following is a trip into the world of Eurica Califorrniaa, a far-right inventor whose interests appear to span from extraterrestrial water harvesting, through micro nations, to extreme anti-abortion politics. Consider this your content warning.

Let’s start with the moon. As he says in his patent, “The uses of water are well known.” USP 9,061,235, col. 1, ln 23.

Mr. Califorrniaa’s approach to harvesting water on the moon relies on the idea that there is water in space, which bodies like the moon are constantly flying through. Califorrniaa even wrote a paper about it, which was published in the journal Advances in Space Research, an actual peer-reviewed publication with an impact factor of 2.152 (not great, but also not awful). Based on the detection of water on the moon, he comes up with a number for the number of water molecules per second per unit area hit the surface of the moon.

So his solution is to dump a bunch of water-absorbing material on the moon’s surface, which would collect this water for later harvesting. It’s a cute idea, though difficult to test for obvious reasons. He has a similar patent on doing the same thing with a space ship.

In this case, while the science is pretty speculative, it doesn’t seem to veer off into the clearly impossible. Instead, the question is: Why bother? Nobody is going to be doing anything like this in the lifetime of the patents, so it just comes off as a display of the inventor’s ego.

That ego comes out pretty quickly when you search for the inventor’s name (not something I really recommend). He has a website to collect his efforts under the name, “Juridic Embassy,” related to his apparent micronation, “The Juridic State of Nature,” which seems to be focused on his life-begins-at-conception politics and scientific interest. Aside from his forays into space water, he appears to spend his efforts on creating “micro intensive care units” to create incubators for zygotes. Again, an interesting idea, but no evidence that any efforts have been made to actually create or test such things (other than a trademark filing). Oh, and IMDB says he made a documentary about electroconvulsive therapy? Not to mention the letters he sends to the

True to form, Califorrniaa seems to be opinionated and litigious. For example, he sued the USPTO because he felt he was due an extra 51 days of patent term on one of his patents (and lost, pending appeal to the Federal Circuit). He has weighed in on matters of patent policy, conflating “conception” of an invention with “conception” of a life, and further taking a position on whether a machine can be an inventor.

I am opposed to the first to file initiative because it does not reflect the reality of the first to conceive. It would be like saying you did not exist until you were delivered at the hospital, or in this case the patent office, when the truth is you existed since conception.

Eurica Califorrniaa, comment on USPTO blog, Nov. 11, 2009

Think of an invention like a “baby.” A first-to-file system means your baby has no rights until delivered into the hands of the USPTO. But your baby has been growing in the womb of innovation since conception. 

Eurica Califorrniaa, comment on USPTO blog, Mar. 3, 2011

Meanwhile, Califorrniaa seems to be involved with other anti-abortion extremists. For example, this court document shows him attempting to act as a courier for Scott Roeder, a man who is serving a life sentence for the murder of George Tiller, a Kansas abortion doctor. That was all part of a stunt to file a petition for habeas corpus on behalf of “unborn and partially born individuals under sentence of death” in Kansas.

Most recently, he has apparently been working on a “voter consistency test” for detecting election fraud. Unsurprisingly, his YouTube account shows him to be a MAGA extremist, with titles such as, “How Abortion and Rap Music Cause Mass Shootings.” I’m not going to link to it.

My father always maintained, “Nobody has just one bumper sticker.” In his view, once a person has made the choice to put a single bumper sticker on their car, others would inevitably follow. It’s the same with bad ideas, which propagate through a person’s reality from some initial chip in the surface until the entire structure is riddled through. I expect Califorrniaa will continue on this road for quite some time. And he seems like the type who googles his own name, so there’s a fair chance I’ll hear from him directly before long.