And I've been taking aside some of my co-workers and quietly warning them not to join in.

The explanation I've used is "if this had a chance in hell of working, the Feds would have killed him by now".

Because no major power structure is going to allow its authority to be voided just be filing some papers. If there were some way you had to be special to be sovereign, maybe. But all it supposedly takes is filing some papers. And once everybody files the papers, the organization that controls more than half the weapons ever created is rendered powerless by its own respect for the papers. Yeah, that's going to happen.

Maybe a simpler one would be "ask an Indian how well sovereignty works around here".

He's a nice enough guy, but seriously deluded. He once explained to me that he knew the lunar missions were faked because, as his friend had pointed out, the temperature on the Moon is +2000F during the day and -2000F at night, and the Goodyear tires on the lunar rover could never have survived that. I told him immediately that wasn't exactly possible - without looking it up, I know there is no such temperature as -2000F, absolute zero is in the general vicinity of -500F. A few minutes with Google showed the Moon's temperature range is mellow enough (-300F to +215F) that a stock Goodyear tire could easily last at least a week as long as they aren't moved at night (215F just isn't that hot) and the Goodyear guys were smart enough to come up with a special formula that does a little better than that. Even back in the '60s. Got a sincere "hmmm" out of him.

I don't think he is an anti-government extremist, I think he is just convinced that he's due a big pile of money and that taxes don't apply to him. Not long ago, sailboats were his thing. Then it was high-efficiency composting. And solar-powered recharging of his netbook battery. Now it's this. I'm a little tired of him informing me that I'm a slave.

I think the outcome is going to be very expensive for him.

The story is that the government (which is a corporation registered in Delaware) went bankrupt in 1934 and borrowed money using citizens (including future citizens) as collateral, and when your parents signed your birth certificate they unwittingly created the strawman, a corporation with your name but in all caps, which is worth $1,000,000 (actually $600K
and change, compound interest (crappy rate - it less than doubles in 70 years) over your lifetime makes it $1M) and only the strawman is subject to, well, anything. If you file the right papers, you void the contracts (which you can void void because your parents signed them, you didn't, and your parents were tricked into signing them) of your birth certificate and social security number, so you (the biological entity) get to own your strawman including the $1M. If you don't the government owns you as a slave. Admiralty law fits into this somehow, and the UCC is inscribed in fire-letters inside the One Ring.

This stuff is all very complicated. And completely insane. And if it is right, it doesn't matter because why would such an illegitimate government respect your paperwork anyway?

I looked at some of it last night. Completely nuts. But there is a certain genius to it - they get their victims to brainwash themselves. Anybody that objects is told that they need to study more, that it takes at least 18 hours of intense study to understand it. It took me about 10 minutes to get that it is nonsense, but I stared at the train-wreck, the insanity, for several hours.