I put out a call for twitter users to vote for DrRachie, a skeptic physician, in a silly little contest for a twitter award — and I pointed out at the time that the top nominees in the health category were crazy anti-vax fruit loops in altie ‘medicine’. Number one at that time (DrRachie leads now) was a fellow who called himself the Health Ranger AKA Mike Adams, a real crank who runs a ridiculous site called Natural Health News — I link to it to encourage you all to browse it and get a good laugh.
Adams seems to have snapped. Or maybe he was this crazy all along.
He is outraged at being bumped out of the running — not only did he get outvoted, but many of the votes for him were declared invalid, since many people just got a twitter account and posted one item, his nomination. He’s lashing out with accusations of conspiracy and fraud and cheating and is planning to sue the contest. He has totally lost it over this trivial affair.
Look, guy, it’s an internet award. For tweeting. Take the big picture and recognize that as far as significance goes, it’s like finding an especially large and fluffy bit of belly button lint.
Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent.
I do have to point out a wonderful example of irony that is going into my collection. He accuses everyone who voted for DrRachie of fraud, and claims that we’ve been making false accusations of quackery against him.
It wasn’t really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course for the vaccine and pharmaceutical industries. Their supporters apparently reflect that same lack of ethical behavior. They will apparently do anything to win, even if it means engaging in widespread false accusations and trying to get natural health people removed from the contest altogether.
That’s the background. Now brace yourself: he later posted an article describing what skeptics, that is, you and me, actually believe. He did this by ‘researching’ skeptical web sites, none of which he links to, and none of which he actually provides accurate quotes from, but instead, he invents a list of his interpretations of what they say.
Skeptics believe that ALL vaccines are safe and effective (even if they’ve never been tested), that ALL people should be vaccinated, even against their will, and that there is NO LIMIT to the number of vaccines a person can be safely given. So injecting all children with, for example, 900 vaccines all at the same time is believed to be perfectly safe and “good for your health.”
Skeptics believe that fluoride chemicals derived from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants are really good for human health. They’re so good, in fact, that they should be dumped into the water supply so that everyone is forced to drink those chemicals, regardless of their current level of exposure to fluoride from other sources.
Skeptics believe that many six-month-old infants need antidepressant drugs. In fact, they believe that people of all ages can be safely given an unlimited number of drugs all at the same time: Antidepressants, cholesterol drugs, blood pressure drugs, diabetes drugs, anti-anxiety drugs, sleeping drugs and more — simultaneously!
Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.
Skeptics believe that pregnancy is a disease and childbirth is a medical crisis. (They are opponents of natural childbirth.)
Skeptics do not believe in hypnosis. This is especially hilarious since they are all prime examples of people who are easily hypnotized by mainstream influences.
Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness. They do not believe in the mind; only in the physical brain. In fact, skeptics believe that they themselves are mindless automatons who have no free will, no soul and no consciousness whatsoever.
Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).
Skeptics believe that pesticides on the crops are safe, genetically modified foods are safe, and that any chemical food additive approved by the FDA is also safe. There is no advantage to buying organic food, they claim.
Skeptics believe that water has no role in human health other than basic hydration. Water is inert, they say, and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).
Skeptics believe that all the phytochemicals and nutrients found in ALL plants are inert, having absolutely no benefit whatsoever for human health. (The ignorance of this intellectual position is breathtaking…)
The only thing breathtaking in that list is the dishonesty. I don’t believe any of that, except that I will admit that I do hold the hilarious position that dead food does have the same nutritional properties of living food — if nothing else, everything I eat is very quickly dead after I’ve ground it to bits between my teeth and dropped it into the acid bath of my stomach. I don’t believe that I extract nutritional value from carrot souls, after all. The rest, though, is looney tunes. Water is inert? A fantastic solvent with complex physicochemical properties is inert? Wow. And at the same time, we think pesticides have no effect on us? I should mention that one of the things I study is teratology and the effect of environmental contaminants on developing embryos…I’m not sure how I rationalized that work if I think common chemicals do nothing.
Mike Adams is certifiably nuts, and worse, he is “lying and cheating,” “engaging in widespread false accusations,” and lacks “ethical behavior.”. At least he doesn’t have to worry that I’ll sue him for being a dingbat.
I would like to nominate this: Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent. for inclusion on the long list of “Particularly awesome quotes by PZ Myers”.
Now this is what I call an advanced case of psychological projection. It’s incredibly amusing that he accuses others of being “hypnotized by mainstream influences” while in the same post reveals himself to be under the spell of the organic food zealots and the folks who make a killing bottling tap water and slapping a clever label on it.
He needs a theme song.
Health Ranger!
He’s a stranger… to the truth!
(na na na na na na)
Health Ranger!
He’s a danger… to the youth!
(na na na na na na)
Health Ranger! He thinks the solution–
Is even stronger in an infinite dilution!
Health Ranger! So angry and bitter–
Because he lost a silly contest on his Twitter!
(na na na na na na)
Health Ranger
He’s a danger… to the truth!
Isn’t having lost it (or never have had it) pretty much a prerequisite for being one of the crazy people in the first place?
I think he accidentally forgot to mention that skeptics believe the Earth is flat and also eat babies.
To an alternative medicine advocate, losing a popularity contest really, really hurts. It cuts into the heart of the only kind of credibility they really care about.
As for that list, it’s like a small child grimacing and posturing and saying “see? This is what YOU look like!”
One of the first rules of honest debate is to characterize your opponent’s position correctly. It’s often a good idea to state, or re-state, what it is you think they are saying, and get their approval, before you begin to point out the flaws. Adams obviously thinks this is unnecessary, because the other side is sooooo wrong. We’re Orcs, little cartoon figures in his head which are Bad to the Bone.
Well, assuming that the chemical composition of a glass from each is exactly the same, they would be the same, wouldn’t they? Depends on what you mean by “water” — just the H2O, or the water molecule plus other stuff. Another dishonest slide on his part.
Woo-sters are generally very bad at making distinctions between things with superficial similarities. They think everyone must be doing the same thing.
Well done.
Save that list of accusations. It’s actually a pretty complete rundown of what the antivaxxer/homeopath/all-natural/ aura-balancing/water-has-memeory/spiritual crowd tell each other all the time. If they read it in an email with lots of words in big red capital letters — and it sounds sciency while condemning the scientific consensus — then they will probably believe it.
Wow. When these folks lose their beans, they really lose their freakin’ beans.
That dude didn’t even stop to water down his crazy.
I think you give yourself/us too much “credit”. It’s more parsimonious to recognise that the crazy people were already broken. You/we merely apply the appropriate disclosing agent to demonstrate that brokenness clearly.
I wish food had souls. Think how tasty carrot souls would be.
mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmrghhghrh carrot souls
/homer
Capital Dan – if he watered it down it would become even stronger!
PZ! I think you should challenge him to a duel with squirt guns. Yours can be filled will undiluted female grizzly bear urine, and his can be filled with a much “more potent” and enticing dilution.
OK, I don’t believe in free will or a soul. But apparently for Dr. Quack Adams, believing that the mind and consciousness are not supernatural is the same as believing they don’t exist. What a tardigrade.
I read this article last night and sent it over to Orac immediately in light of his history with its fucking batshit crazy author.
I mean it’s like he didn’t even attempt to be honest. He just took what he wished “skeptics” thought and then got to constructing a giant strawman just to stroke his own ego.
Think of all the wheatgrass drinks that straw could have been used in.
It’s guffaw worthy.
Well…yes. If the composition is the same, that means there’s no contamination from bacteria etc., correct? Besides, a local tv station here did a series a few years ago detailing all of the really nasty things that are in natural spring water, because a lot of people around here like to use them rather than tap water. Disgusting, scary stuff.
Speaking of which, since most water passes through a wastewater treatment plant at some point or other, or has been in a natural stream etc., how is it that water can retain the memory of specific medicines, but not all the shit that’s passed through it?
You know those funny mirror houses at state fairs, where you get to laugh at how weird and fucked up you look like reflected in those mirrors?
that’s what that list feels like.
and the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring
I don’t know about anyone else, but the image I got of “water your toilet” was full of lulz. Maybe because that’s the phrase my stepfather used instead of “taking a piss.”
Wow, that’s capital-K Krazy.
I do love my babies lightly seasoned with sertraline before roasting.
If you register to read the rest of the article (use an e-mail address you don’t mind being spammed), it gets even better. Continuing the list from where Pee Zed left off:
That’s the end of the list, albeit the rant continues on and on and on. And on. And on.
Any idea how many Starfarts?
Well, they never “had it”.
Dr. Dembski and Dr. Meyer Given Top Scientific Accomplishments for ID in 2009
I mean, like wow. Top science for ID is like top literary award in the comic strips.
And what a surprise that those two manufactured “experts” won.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
It’s a nice question: which is more dishonest and dangerous: a homeopath, or a psychopath?
Carlie:
Because homeopaths have to potentiate (= shake vigorously) the concoction to make the memory stick. Yes, really.
so does that mean you can’t ever drink water from an area that ever had an earthquake?
I see your ‘homeopathetic carrot-soul’ nutter,and raise you a ‘CFS is caused by mouse retroviruses. All my experiments show otherwise so I’m moving the goalposts’ nutter;
http://scienceblogs.com/erv/2010/01/xmrv_and_chronic_fatigue_syndr_6.php
ERV has been severely stomping these people for the best part of a week. It’s been a joy to watch.
The be-all and end-all of alt-med quackaloon stupidity is the way they keep trying to peddle conspiracy theories about “Big Pharma” suppressing surefire natural cures. Of course, if any treatment was discovered to flat-out cure cancer or AIDS or Alzheimer’s or autism or what-have-you, the person or company making that discovery would be on their way to wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. So, by altie logic, “Big Pharma” are all about money, and yet they’re out there suppressing, rather than investing in and exploiting, cures that would make them more money than a Cray supercomputer could count. Uh-huh. Right.
I just looked closer at the registration confirmation
e-mailspam. It contains these jewels:Great journalist? Consistently accurate? References scientific facts? …Is there more than one Mike Adams? None of that is even close to describing the nutcase, so it must be describing someone else.
Jadehawk.
Why, no.
It does however mean you can’t drink the water from a place that’s had an earthquake twice.
Reginald # 14
That’s an insult to tardigrades or water bears as they’re also known. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrade
They’re not as crazy as this nutjob.
#14 – I had to come to a full stop when I read this bit. Most of the points made can be attributed to Adams’s homeopathic bias, but this bit seems to come out of nowhere. I nearly stopped reading altogether when he follows up with the dead/living food bit.
blf: @20
Well, a quick scan with our Starfart-O-MeterTM puts it at a +5. Would have been higher if he had included profanity, random capitalization, and threats of artificial simulated Internet violence.
@20: Thanks for the complete list. He got extra crazy at the end there with the September 11 conspiracy story.
The things about which we are apparently not sceptical about reveals that this nutter knows nothing about the scientific method. And we most certainly are sceptical about profit-driven companies and political/ideology-driven government agencies.
Good to see you hit on this kook, PZ. It looks like he can’t take any dissent, either. I posted a comment pointing out that he hadn’t cited any sources and had just built a straw man that was easier to argue against than actual people’s positions; my comment has since been deleted, and I’m banned from commenting on his site.
Wahh, wahh, wahh. What a baby, this guy.
He’s suing the contest? He’s suing the contest! Sorry, I had to repeat that because I can’t believe he’s suing the contest.
What a joke. All the skeptics I know “believe in” natural childbirth. I shall have to inform them that they are breaking the skeptic mold as defined by Health Ranger. We can’t have skeptics escaping, willy-nilly, from the absolutist mold.
Wait … isn’t that exactly what a skeptic is, a person not readily confined by absolutist pigeon-holes?
This Health Ranger dude, Mike Adams, he makes a living? He publishes? We mindless automatons are amazed. Where does he think our knowledge of the immune system, in which he has so much faith, originated? People who were skeptical of magical explanations sussed it out … and skeptical scientists continue to delve into the wonders of the immune system. For one thing, we would like to know how Mike Adams makes a living even though he is immune to logic.
I laughed all the way through that !!
Reminds me of a book I once saw, claiming that aetheists are actually unable to exist. Strange, since last time I looked in the mirror there I was…….
So besides being a homeopath and an alt.med fanatic, “Health Ranger” is a 9/11 truther. Why am I not surprised?
Re Glen Davidson @21:
I think your comic strip anaolgy is deeply flawed. Maybe there’s something you don’t get.
Your take on ID seems quite sound. Please find a better analogy.
Umm, the guy’s a crackpot, but I’m pretty sure that “living food” is just a new-age way of saying “fresh, raw food”.
There’s really no question that “living” foods in this sense are better for you than “dead” (i.e., “cooked”) foods.
The printable version of his article is not behind the registration wall.
Jadehawk OM #24 wrote:
No — the homeopath wouldn’t expect this. Why? Because if you read their ‘explanations’ long enough, you will come across their description of what happens when they shake the bottle of diluted chemical: they psychically impart their “intentions” into the water, so that it sympathetically knows what chemical it needs to remember. Without the human component (as in an earthquake), shaking itself makes no difference.
Remember, woo-sters live in a magical universe where their desires, thoughts, and needs somehow affect the physical realm by directly changing what happens.
Lord Tristan #30 wrote:
No, this bit is foundational — a belief in a caring, mind-like spiritual reality is what girds up their belief that Nature is benevolent, it wants us to get well, to be in harmony with it. It’s the same idea as shaking the homeopathic solution.
Um yes there is.
Mike Adams is ripe for a wikipedia page. I’m surprised he doesn’t have one.
Shorter Mike Adams: Skeptics are after our precious bodily fluids!
It’s true, though — I don’t believe in hypnosis.
I remembr as a kid, my gran would be making sunday dinner. She’s boil cabbage for three years (it felt like at the time), in slightly salted water, and then drain before serving.
If there ever was anything to the raw food thing, it was in pointing out how stupid that was. I don’t know if many people are still doing this today but the idea that cooking is dogmatically harmful is still believed from this one example of wastefulness.
I have an other silly question. (I would have posted this in the undead thread but methinks that segment is about to be closed. Besides, Starfart has been brought up.) Is Starfart going to be used as a noun or as a verb?
I have no idea what universe woo-woos live in, but it isn’t the one I’m in, even when I’m dreaming.
Generally speaking, if something advertises itself as “good for the mind, body, and spirit” — it’s going to be pretty much full of crap.* **
(* I make an exception here for things which involve art, dance, or chocolate.)
(** It’s also likely to be specifically targeted to women.)
@40 – Thanks for the clarification. I was more referring to how skeptics not believing in souls leads to skeptics being “mindless automatons”. I suppose it’s a bit much to hope for any logical continuity in Adams’s arguments.
Now hang on a second. It’s funny you use carrots as your example: I’m not a chemist, but as I understand it, the chemical process of cooking (“killing”) carrots makes the vitamins within more accessible for assimilation in humans than when the carrots are eaten raw (“live”).
@38 Bueller_007
Unless you’re able to chew through every cell wall then cooked food can absolutely be better for you than raw. Yes, some nutrients are lost to cooking but so is every nutrient locked behind the cellulose walls that you cant digest and wasn’t softened during cooking.
noun – starfart, capitalised when used as the unit of measurement.
The verb describing how stars actually do fart is ‘solar flare’.
Growing up in dairy country in central Wisconsin, I knew not to drink spring water. Too many springs were near cow pastures. The water out of the spring was identical to water in the toilet.
Yeah. That seems to be a fairly common strawman. I see it quite a bit on sites like the RRS.
That’s what you get when you apply philosophy to reality.
I’m pretty sure that “living food” is just a new-age way of saying “fresh, raw food”.
I think we’re well aware of that, and we’re laughing at his use of “living” for “fresh, raw food.” Besides, this idea of “living” food might be useful in explaining that day when someone sees a bunch humans grazing in a pasture. That’s the first image that popped in my mind when I read it.
But maybe I’m twisted…
He’s a couple more -paths, & perhaps a few -enics as well.
Not just carrots. The Raw food fad is just another extension of the naturalistic fallacy.
The fact that we as humans have evolved alongside the cooking of food makes a strong case that we need cooked food in order to gain the most benefit from our food.
Now this of course doesn’t mean we need to cook the living hell out of everything, just that a purely raw food diet is just silly on many levels.
@ #36
Isn’t that just “Crank Magnetism” rearing its head again?
as soon as there is a break in the weather everyone is invited to my house for a cow on the hoof barbeque. any input from folks attending will be appreciated because i never fixed or ate live beef before. should be interesting albeit a bit messy.
Dr Rachie also overtook Joseph Mercola in the poll. He is also stung by the slight and posted a nasty attack on Rachael Dunlop’s physique and character on his Facebook page. It certainly doesn’t take much to rattle the Alt-meds’ cages, does it?
http://www.facebook.com/doctor.health
Carlie: I’ll second your nomination on the Nobel Prize quote.
As for the whole Free Will thing, there’s a lot of argumentation that goes on around it, but poor Ranger is just way back in the dualistic dark ages.
Oh GIGGLE. I love it when they’re pissy.
You lost, chum. Fair and square. The fair part’s important – cuz your voters were not. It’s clearly part of the rules – Don’t join twitter just to vote.
Try to be a good loser if you can’t be a honest, scientific person.
He didn’t even have to get past the words “Skeptics Believe” to be wrong. By definition, skeptics do not believe in anything, as belief is not part of the skeptical scientific method. Until this nutcase understands that, he has absolutely no hope of understanding the skeptical movement and the problem with his quackery.
Also, this kind of anti-vaccine, anti-scientific lunatic is revolting. Surely these people realize that vaccines have easily saved millions more lives than any other single medicinal advance in history?
There seems to be an irony in using the words “Skeptics believe” over and over.
verbing weirds even fake language
both? And no cap.
Bueller_007:
BDC:
We think Bueller’s definition of living v. dead food may be off slightly. Our interpretation is that Adams would characterize living food as: whole, natural, minimally processed foods, with a minimal amount of preservatives and additives, but not necessarily uncooked.
Consider McDonald’s take on highly processed v. minimally processed food. In Pelman v. McDonald’s Corp., McDonald’s claimed:
Wow.
That’s not a straw man, that’s an entire straw Mt. Rushmore.
Lord Tristan #48 wrote:
I think they think the ‘mind’ itself is a spiritual entity, akin to the soul, because thoughts exist, but they’re not physical. You can’t hold them in your hand or see them like little marbles in the brain. In a sense, then, they’re the template for the whole realm of the supernatural.
So they’ve mischaracterized “materialism” into being as reductive as possible, with no nuances or levels at all. It’s either totally physical, or totally immaterial. They simply can’t wrap their minds around how anyone could think the mind was the result of a physical process, and still believe they can think.
I LOLled. Awesome.
Perhaps these kind of people don’t have that many beans to start with, so when they lose a few, they’ve lost them all.
*sigh* Pyschic mothers and 9/11 trooferism. I’m not sure which is scarier–the fact that this guy believes this stuff, or that other people believe it. Either way, I think I’m going to go hide under the covers.
Well that is an all together different claim.
The homeopaths always look stupid when they start trying to rationalize their therapies by invoking “differences” in water.
If you assume the water in the toilet contains the same dissolved salts, compounds and microorganisms as the water in the natural spring (unlikely as that might be) then yes, they are the same. The setting one finds water in does not in any way alter the compound itself or the interactions it forms with other molecules and ions.
It would be disastrous if (as homeopaths claim) the effects of a dissolved substance were amplified by lessening their concentration. We would never be able to reclaim our waste water, because every time we tried to purify it, we would actually make it millions of times more toxic.
@linux7master “Also, this kind of anti-vaccine, anti-scientific lunatic is revolting. Surely these people realize that vaccines have easily saved millions more lives than any other single medicinal advance in history?”
That’s what the cabal of skeptics, Big Pharma, oh, and let’s add in the Republicans for good measure, want you to think.
Unless you’re talking about philosophical sceptics, this statement is wrong. Everyone has beliefs, the difference in general between believers and sceptics is that the belief of a sceptic is proportional to the evidence.
I wonder if Mr. Adams has tried diluting his penis.
Just idle curiosity.
New, patented Non-sequitur-Away!TM:
this:
was in response to this:
#64
So people know what you’re referencing:
http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/CalvinVerbing.jpg
Sastra @40:
“they psychically impart their “intentions” into the water, so that it sympathetically knows what chemical it needs to remember. Without the human component (as in an earthquake), shaking itself makes no difference.”
This merely provides a venue for…HOMEOPATHIC TERRORISM!! A bunch of homeopaths are on call for news of a major earthquake. Afterwards, they non-stop impart their psychic intentions to the water in the area and wait for the inevitable aftershocks to stir things up! NO ONE IS SAFE!
Yeah but is was so much fun parsing out the meaning.
I kind of like verbing weirds even fake language.
So, if Mike Adams is so keen to win a shorty award, why don’t we nominate him for one? #idiot, or #kook, or perhaps something else. I’m sure the zerg-like powers of Pharyngula can do it.
“It wasn’t really surprising to see the vaccine quacks engaging in their false accusations, of course: Lying and cheating is par for the course …”
I’ll add “plagiarizing” to that list since it’s a common list of complaints against the woo peddlers of death such as MAdams – he’s obviously just stolen it a-la-banana man and the first part of his fake introduction to “On the Origin of Species”.
Australia’s capital seems to be going down the shithole really fast – all the real science books in the “science” section of one bookshop are being replaced with garbage like “The Homeopathy Bible”, Banana Comfort’s version of Darwin’s book, nonsense by that deluded lunatic Rupert Sheldrake, and other such quackery. WTF – do they get a special award for having the only purely anti-science science section in a bookshop?
Hilarious!
What have you smoked that you use this as an insult!?! Tardigrades are teh awesomez!!1!
(The pictures change automatically every 20 seconds. Do not click on them – if you do, you’re kicked out.)
Call him a ridiculously porphyritic granitoid instead.
Humans have no such thing. And “insects, animals and humans” is just priceless.
How stupid of me not to have thought of this myself!
@80
He is winning in the #quackery category. If at the end of the contest he is still in the lead I’ll need to mail him a rubber duck or something. Cast your votes people!
Doin’ It 4 Da Shorteez!
let’s add in the Republicans
Let’s not. it’s rather well-known that amongst the anti-vaccine crowd are various loony religious sects. Many of those tend to be Republicans (although not necessarily). Besides, if you can believe the Republicans are “good” for government, then believing in that Adams screed is a piece of cake.
Beth B #77 wrote:
They never worry about things like this. As you can see from Adam’s list, the real characteristic which separates alternative medicine advocates from skeptical scientists is niceness. Skeptics are so mean, they’re perverse.
So homeopaths would be too spiritual and attuned to Nature to ever exploit their powers for evil.
ummm, okay. Then why in the next breath utter this?
There seems to be some incompatibility between accusations A and B. Perhaps that’s how absurd “Skeptics” are that they believe such nonsense.
Skeptics also don’t believe in feet, only the physical atoms that enable them to stand up.
The only thing missing from this is a photoshopped Dr Rachie eating a baby.
Only a .3 Starfart though. On topic, no misspellings.
BS
@blf: Wow, that’s one crazy list. It looks like MAdams has a serious condition which prevents him from every saying/writing anything true. His “Skeptics are [insert self-inconsistent lie here]” series is especially funny.
“So why do they copy molecules from Nature, then?” – hahaha – it may have something to do with the fact that skeptics in general, and pretty much all of the pharmaceutical industry (skeptics or not) don’t believe that nature is incapable of creating useful chemicals as MAdams claims. Let’s see – if you can easily and cheaply extract a drug from a plant (or animal, or fungus, or bacterium) rather than synthesizing it, that’s great. So in fact we don’t even copy nature in most instances, we take what’s there and render it into a much purer form (before diluting it again by mixing it with a ‘binder’ so it’s easier to swallow and to control the dose). Now and then we do synthesize things where natural extraction is not so practical or where people believe the molecule can be modified to be more effective or perhaps reduce side-effects (for example the huge amount of work gone into trying to discover an opioid with the analgesic effects but not the other opioid effects).
MAdams appears to be quite a pathological liar.
I think this is really a raw fooder, considering that the parenthetical explanation was “cooked” rather than “processed”.
So Bueller, would you claim that eating raw cassava is better for you than cooked?
How about raw lupini beans?
Or maybe some raw kidney beans?
Or even corn? Try getting enough niacin from corn without cooking it in lye first.
Bueller? Bueller?
He’s obviously succeeded in diluting his brain. His cogent concise arguments, overwhelming evidence, irrefutable logic, openness to honest discussion, and self-correction of the occasional error is only possible to those who’ve diluted and shaken their brains until nothing detectable is left, those maximising the potential and actuality.
And yet an other silly question. In order to get all of the nutrients out of raw vegetables and grains, which would be preferable; having a stomach with four sections or eating our feces?
Maybe he could ask nancymcclernan for advice ?
Considering the quantity of shit that Mr. Adam’s fans consume on a consistent basis, I think you are asking this question in the wrong forum.
Not to be too off topic, but I just want to chime in that, as a psychologist (both clinical and a researcher), the whole mind-arising-from-a-purely-physical-brain phenomenon is not only much more interesting than some silly idea of a magically separate mind, but really, really *cool*.
starfart
verb
Date: 2010
– To completely lose it and then go on a long, bizarre rant especially: doing all this over a trivial matter.
(e.g, The video of the newscaster starfarting on air after someone mispronounced his name surfaced on YouTube and became quite popular. – New York Times)
starfart (noun): one who starfarts.
m.d.skinta:
Also, more practical, as it offers a greater potential for understanding why we are the way we are rather than the unfathomable magical mind, created, of course, by a transcendent unknowable untestable being.
Hyperbolic exaggeration, thy name is Mike Adams. Whoo, this guy is out there.
How interesting. I’m a zombie? Damn, I wanted to be a vampire. Or a werewolf.
Feynmaniac @ 96
Gold I tell ya. Comedy gold.
*brainz….*
@27
Mike needs go see that Cohen chick because she is obviously hot for him. That the other guy is longing for him as well. He should put that poor guy out of his misery.
No. I think he wrote those himself and it is himself that so clearly wants to shag himself.
“““““
Oh, and I guess the poor guy doesn’t know that the water in his toilet is exactly the same water that comes out of his kitchen tap. Assuming the toilet is relatively clean, that water is relatively clean too. Well, until someone uses it.
When the whole “Natural Spring” bottled water thing started, all I could think of was the importance, drilled into anyone who wanted to spend time in the great outdoors in Alaska, of boiling or chemically treating water, even if it appears to be coming from a pure natural spring fifty miles from the nearest human habitation. This was because, while bears do shit in the woods, they are also fond of shitting in the water, and they carry giardia and trust me, friends, you do not want to get that.
“““`
And don’t get me started on natural childbirth. Of course, as long as everything is going along well there is no need for much in the way of medical interference in the process. But as someone (and I can’t remember who) once said, childbirth is a natural process–and so is dying in childbirth.
Holy crap what a dick that Mike Adams is. I joined his his site so I could comment on that pile of crap list and he effin blocked me. He can say whatever he wants about anything but don’t block my FREE SPEECH – it is one of the most precious things on earth to me. The fact that he is censoring his website tells me he is an insecure little turd. All I said was that skeptics don’t really “believe” anything unless there is some really good data backing it. That doubt is kinda the definition of the word skeptic. Then I said I consider myself a skeptic yet i take some vitamin supplements and do Yoga. He blocked my comment and prevented me from commenting anymore. He is on my perma-shit-list.
Anyway, while I’m stopping by… Does anyone have questions for me to ask Eugenie Scott. I have an hour 1 on 1 interview with her tomorrow. First serious interview I’ve ever done. http://www.tompainesghost.com/2010/01/upcoming-interview-with-eugenie-scott.html
I wonder if Mike Adams knows P. Tim Bolen, and if so, are they friends, or competitors?
Re “live food”, I bought a 60s vintage Champion juicer off Craigslist a while back, and it came with the original paperwork. Some of the claims made for fresh juice were entertaining.
There’s not only Starfart the unit, starfart the action/activity, there’s starfart the result, and starfart who startfarted the original prototype starfart, which I propose should be measured as 1.0 Starfarts.
*shambles uninterested past Mike Adams. Looking for PZ or an OM. Brainz…*
He’s suing? Over a Twitter Poll?
I hate this country.
Dr. Dembski and Dr. Meyer Given Top Scientific Accomplishments for ID in 2009
Glen, they could have given that award equally to any supporter of ID, given there is exactly 0 science involved, all are equally in competition for an award in “scientific accomplishment”.
Shit, Chalmers was correct!
Does anyone have questions for me to ask Eugenie Scott.
ask her to define “compatible”.
:)
No, not yet anyways. He’s just threatening to. I’m loathe to even try and predict what someone as unhinged as him will actually do, or listen to, but if he does try, I hope he gives a good listen when his own lawyer explains he’s being a complete dipshite.
Well, this skeptic believes quite strongly that Mr Adams has discovered a previously underused straw-man factory.
“He can say whatever he wants about anything but don’t block my FREE SPEECH – it is one of the most precious things on earth to me.”
Oh, give it a rest. That tired old chestnut is almost as annoying as the religionists and nutjobs themselves. “Freedom of speech” in the US Constitution is about absence of GOVERNMENT censorship of speech– it does not say one damn thing about what you have a “right” to say on someone else’s forum. On a private form, they have every damn right to censor your “FREE SPEECH” for any damn reason they want, and you are making yourself sound like a silly loon by using a pet argument of the nut fringe.
“I don’t believe that I extract nutritional value from carrot souls, after all.”
That would be silly unless you are…BUNNICULA!
Ask her how long it will to take for the creationists to end up like the Geocentrists? They will never go away of course, but the Sun orbits crowd is down to 20% of the population.
We can live with 20% profoundly ignorant people. We already are.
@ 21: That’s not fair. Non-Sequitur is quite incisive sometimes.
Darren-
OTOH, he could have been deliberately mocking the “Freedom of Health” movement crap es-spewed by the likes of Adams et. al.
Umm, the guy’s a crackpot, but I’m pretty sure that “living food” is just a new-age way of saying “fresh, raw food”.
There’s really no question that “living” foods in this sense are better for you than “dead” (i.e., “cooked”) foods. – Bueller_007
There’s reasonably good evidence our ancestors were controlling fire 1.5Mya ago. Time enough for our digestive systems to adapt, I think. Some foods are most nutritious raw, others cooked.
Nerd of Redhead, OM @ 105:
That’s the ticket. Watch out Nerd, that’s a tasty looking OM you have there…
Way to prove you’re not nuts, health danger… did I say danger? I must have meant ranger.
:D
This isn’t the first time this unbalanced natural nut has went off on rant of uncited and unsubstantiated drivel. IE, if I can think it, I should be able to type it.
http://www.naturalnews.com/019364_skeptics_medicine_health.html
Besides, without his first ‘award’ in his pocket, he can’t crow louder to sell his books and hike his speaking fees.
Wow Darren,
You sound fearful to me. All I’m saying is that if someone is posting something contradictory to your point it is less than scholarly to sweep it under the carpet. Silly Loon? What are you Bill-O? I was simply expressing my dismay that I was blocked for such benign comments. OK. Why are you getting upset with me?
Well, this is just further evidence that woosters and creationists have much the same mindset. It’s eerie how similar his reaction is to, say, a YEC that has just lost a debate to a real scientist.
20 % ???
O.O
It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience that will… solve all your problems.
:-S
The crazification factor.
And so batshit crazy is it that I have a post about it scheduled for tomorrow. Dammit, I blame Adams for interrupting my grant writing time this weekend! If I don’t get funded, obviously it’s his fault…
The rest of the NatRant:
Nature is bad, chemicals are good
Summing up the position of the “skeptics” is quite simple: Nature is bad, chemicals are good!
If we only had more chemicals injected into more babies, the world would be a better place, they say. If we could only ban all plants, herbs, vitamins and supplements, we’d all be so much healthier because then we’d take more pharmaceuticals!
Seriously. This is what they believe. They openly admit this is their position.
And all you people drinking green smoothies, and growing your own food, and getting natural sunlight, and taking care of your own health, and drinking herbal tea… well you’re all just fools, say the skeptics. You’re all just too stupid to understand “real” science. Because if you understood real science, you’d give up all those useless herbs and superfoods and healing vegetables and you’d be taking twenty different prescription medications instead.
Then you’d be really smart, see. Because all those chemicals make you healthy and smart. A few extra vaccine injections will make you even smarter. Then you can join the skeptics because you’re smart enough at that point to understand that chemicals are the answer to all of life’s problems: Depression, anxiety, digestion, sexual performance, sleep, even test-taking abilities… there’s a chemical “solution” to every problem you might experience.
What skeptics really are
I hope it’s fairly obvious to you by now that skeptics are the most misinformed people on the planet.
They are the easiest people to fool. They’re the easiest to hypnotize, too, because they lack independent thinking skills. Rather than thinking for themselves, they have joined a “club of skeptics” where they can be told what to think and then label themselves “intelligent” for following others in the group.
These are the people who line up to be injected with useless H1N1 vaccines. (The joke is on them, of course. Those vaccines were a complete fraud…) These are the people who stand in line at the pharmacy to buy a dozen different prescriptions (costing sometimes thousands of dollars) that their doctors told them to take. These are the people who eat processed, dead junk food laced with chemicals that make them sick — and then they wonder why they’re sick. These are the people who sit at home watching television and think to themselves how smart they are because they follow the medical advice they learned in drug company advertisements.
These are the real “skeptics.” They are so incredibly isolated from reality that they don’t even believe in their body’s own ability to heal itself.
Skeptics don’t believe in a higher power of any kind: No God, no spirit, no angels, no guides, no creative force in the universe… nada. They think the universe is a cold, empty, lonely, stupid place full of soulless, mindless, zombie biological bodies who have no free will and no consciousness.
Gee, no wonder these skeptics are so misguided. They have the most pessimistic view possible. No wonder they seek to destroy themselves with chemicals — they don’t even think they’re alive to begin with! Skeptics are bent on self destruction. And they believe that when you die, the lights just go out and you cease to exist. Nothing happens after that. You’re just a mindless biological robot whose life has no meaning, no purpose, no higher self.
This is exactly what the skeptics believe. They’ll even tell you so themselves!
Never argue with drones
Realizing this, it makes it so much easier to debate with skeptics on any topic. Whatever they say, you just answer, “WHO is saying that? Are YOU, a conscious, free-thinking person with a mind and soul saying that, or are those words simply being automatically and robotically uttered from the mouth of a bag of bones and skin that has no mind and no soul?”
If they answer you honestly, they will have to admit that they believe they are nothing more than a robotic bag of bones and skin that is mindlessly uttering whatever nonsense happens to escape their mechanical lips. At that point, you’ve already won the debate because YOU have a soul, and THEY don’t. You’re arguing with a mindless robot.
Seriously. Think about this deeply. If you believe what the skeptics want you to believe (because they are always right, of course), then you must accept the fact that THEY have no consciousness. They are not really “alive.” They are just robotic biological machines. They are drones, in other words. And drones are not equal to a being of energy with a consciousness and a soul, inhabiting a human body with purpose and awareness.
Never argue with drones. You only waste your time and annoy the drone.
Skeptics… zombies… drones… different words for the same thing. Soulless, mindless, lacking consciousness and free will, having no awareness of the value of life… these are the skeptics arguing for vaccines, mammograms and chemotherapy today. They are agents of death who can only find solace in an industry of death — the industry of modern medicine.
Man, PZ, that was a hell of a good laugh!
Ever thought of walking the Douglas Adams road?
I am a soulless agent of death? That’s gonna help my gaming skills no end, innit?
@ Opisthokont #111:
Could this be a craze, like cabbage-patch dolls and the later life-like baby dolls, in which the various straw-men are given individual identities (name and “personality” as well as colouring, clothing etc) rather than being indistinuishable generic brand-name ones (eg the original Barbie, Action Man or whatever).
Eg the fluoride straw-man should probably have a coal-fired black face with incredibly white toothy grin. Vaccination straw-man would probably look too much like an acupuncture victim or vodoun dummy.
From Mike Adams:
At its core, the entire alternative medicine movement is about re-enchanting the world, and confirming that Nature can keep you safe — if you are the right kind of person. It’s all about the supernatural. Alternative medicine is religion.
How nice of Adams to be so explicit.
Health Danger-to-Himself-and-Others,
Would it help to know that you won a special Twit Award by a landslide?
I blame Adams for interrupting my grant writing time this weekend!
on a more safe and sane note…
good luck with the grant!
NIH?
I’m horrified by the number of “right on!” comments he’s getting. Mike’s rant, and his whole comment thread, should be preserved as for display some future “whatever happened to America” museum exhibit.
There are really 3 basic strategies among specialized amniotic herbivores: foregut fermentation (ruminants, kangaroos, sloths, hoatzins), hindgut fermentation (horses, elephants, howler monkeys, koalas, tortoises, iguanas), and hindgut fermentation + coprophagy (rabbits, some rodents), and they each have their advantages and disadvantages depending on body size and diet.
For a human-sized animal, if the stuff you’re eating is at all nutritionally decent in the first place, hindgut fermentation works fine, especially with plenty of chewing first. You’ll get the usual good-for-you nutrients from inside the plant cells then ship it all downstream for the bacteria in your hindgut to have a go at what’s left (mostly cellulose and a few other complex carbs). Shit-eating is optional. Voluminous farting guaranteed.
Health Danger, quoted in # 127:
Aaaaand we’re back to zombies! Gimme braaiinz…not Adams’ though. No nutrition there. No, I don’t believe in gods, spirits, angels, supernatural guides, etc. However, I find our planet and all the things on it astonishing, amazing, awe inspiring. Same goes for the universe. But the universe isn’t going to tuck you in at night and read you a fuzzy story, dude.
Do I get a black trenchcoat and evil Fedora with all that? Oh, and a bacon wrapped baby with whiskey bbq sauce, please.
1. Erm, what is this “Starfart” concept? Evidently it can be a unit of measurement. But what does it measure?
2. In addition to “crank magnetism” I also note that many counter-factual (see, I am being civil) sites and blogs have the commonality of extreme moderation of comments with extreme prejudice. By that I mean that only comments that laud the crank position are allowed. All others are … terminated with extreme prejudice.
The site Age of Autism, the “Daily Web Newspaper of the Autism Epidemic, routinely refuses to publish comments that disagree with their assertions and mis-statements of fact.
According to Debby Bruck
I wonder if there’s a training camp for these folks.
Zombie and Robot are now proud badges of honor.
Homeopathy is the “medical” discipline for people who lack the intelligence and perseverance real science and medicine demand but really like white lab coats.
Great, so now I must eat my steak directly off the living cow in order to get its nutrients. I’m all for the freshness, don’t get me wrong, but that’s a tad inhumane.
Water is water. The various contaminants are what differs between those two sources. Refine the water to a high enough purity and I’ll cheerfully gulp it down, be it from toilet, spring, or even Satan’s anus (I’d require a pretty high level of purity for that last one).
Bueller_007 @ #38
Yes, cooking does destroy or leach out a lot of vitamins…
However, I was under the impression that there were some interesting studies which suggest that it was cooking food that led to the development of culture/knowledge etc etc as cooked food is easier to digest, which frees up more calories for other things. Like thinking.
And of course cooking kills a lot of nasty bacteria, so if you’ve got to store your food for any period of time, cooking it is a good idea.
So it really depends on what you mean by “better for you”. It also depends on what you mean by “no doubt” – I mean, I don’t know if that cooking theory is true, but it certainly casts doubt.
Aquaria @#79
‘I’d think that the typical toilet flush would qualify as vigorous shaking.’
Not to mention all the pumps, agitators, mixers,sprays and other turbulence inducers in your typical water treatment plant.
Does anyone know the source of this apt quote?
‘I don’t know what planet he’s from but I know why the mothership left him here’
I like the part where we don’t believe the human body can defend itself, but we do think everyone should be vaccinated. How does he think vaccinations work?
A really funny book would be “science explained by crackpots”. I’m sure he has some amazing scheme that vaccinations work by according to big-bad science.
Is that a logarithmic scale, like the Richter?
lizditz, hi,
You need to read this to comprehend:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/01/looking_for_grant_money_for_yo.php#comment-2219170
‘starfart’ self-imploded on that thread, in a way not many of us have seen the likes of before.
Hmm. Well, depending on where said earthquake occurs, there could be upwards of a million plus humans huddling in terror and thinking otherwise negative thoughts. Holy toxic psychic contamination, batman!
“Zombie and Robot are now proud badges of honor.”
Personally, I wish the guy would just make up his mind–are skeptics (and it would seem anyone who has the sheer audacity to disagree with this nutjob) zombies or robots? Personally, I’d rather be a robot, as zombies lack laser-vision. But that’s just me.
Aquaria, you had posted upstream to leave the Republicans out of this, since many would be inclined to agree w/ Mr. Health Danger. Point taken. But, if we leave out the Republicans, what other evil organization could the skeptics align themselves with in this obvious plot for world domination and unnatural childbirth?
ETA: I believe that ‘star fart’ is astronomical slang for a supernova. Explains a lot.
Skeptics’ Disease via Scott Adams’ “God’s Debris”
“I have some friends who are skeptics,” I said. “They’re in that Skeptics Society. I think they’d tear you apart.”
“Skeptics,” he said, “suffer from the skeptics’ disease—the problem of being right too often.” “How’s that bad?” I asked. “If you are proven to be right a hundred times in a row, no amount of evidence will convince you that you are mistaken in the hundred-and-first case. You will be seduced by your own apparent infallibility. Remember that all scientific experiments are performed by human beings and the results are subject to human interpretation. The human mind is a delusion generator, not a window to truth. Everyone, including skeptics, will generate delusions that match their views. That is how a normal and healthy brain works. Skeptics are not exempt from self-delusion.”
“Skeptics know that human perceptions are faulty,” I argued. “That’s why they have a scientific process and they insist on repeating experiments to see if results are consistent. Their scientific method virtually eliminates subjectivity.”
“The scientific approach also makes people think and act in groups,” he countered. “They form skeptical societies and create skeptical publications. They breathe each other’s
fumes and they demonize those who do not share their scientific methods. Because skeptics’ views are at odds with the majority of the world, they become emotionally and intellectually isolated. That sort of environment is a recipe for cult thinking and behavior. Skeptics are not exempt from normal human brain functions. It is a human tendency to become what you attack. Skeptics attack irrational thinkers and in the process become irrational.”
Once again with the ad hominem attacks and throw-away use of mental illness similes.
It’s the man’s ideas that are crazy, not necessarily the man himself. Of course he might well be suffering from some for of mental crisis that forces him into adopting such crazy ideas…perhaps nothing more unusual than fear of his own mortality.
However, unless PZ is deliberately “stirring the possum” with such talk (perhaps in order to get people to respond for the sake of creating blog-worthy controversy?) well, I just think it’s more mature, rational and dare I say it, scientific, to attack the argument, not the person. :-)
This reminds me of the time I skimmed through one of Kevin Trudeau’s silly little books, and came across a list of dos and don’ts. Within a single page he had the following two pieces of advice (paraphrased, as well as my memory will allow):
I know better than to accept consistency from these quacks, but still that one — within a single page — seemed a bit silly to me. I’m relieved, though, to find out that sunlight is made from unicorns and angel feathers instead of that nasty electromagnetic radiation.
roga @ 147
I think we skeptics would safely assume that to be a non-sequitur. Am I being… irrational there?
AKA “victory disease” (at least when applied to war), and often cited as a contributing factor to major military disasters, particularly ones that (in retrospect) turn the tide of the larger conflict. Such as the Japanese at Midway, the Germans at Stalingrad, the Confederates at Gettysburg, Napoleon’s Russian campaign, etc, etc. . .
My reply to that argument is simply this: If delusion is an inevitable consequence of being human, and since I cannot stop being human, then I will choose to adopt the strategy with the lowest likelihood of delusion and the most rigorous self-correcting mechanism for detecting delusion, and take my chances.
And that of course, is the scientific method.
I hope he does sue. I hope he gets Orly Taitz as his attorney.
Is the answer you’re looking for that one is hopefully locked up, and the other should be locked up?
Ah hahahahahaha!
I made a post giving him a rating of 1, then stated he was just venting because he lost a *twitter* award.
He then deleted my comment and banned me.
*snortlaughs*
What a thin-skinned weedsniffer.
Here’s what bothers me about the homeopathic craze: people are forgetting history (look what vaccines did to polio), and taking the word of lay-persons, usually because of celebrity status, instead of professionals. “Well, Jenny McCarthy said vaccines cause autism. I think I should listen to her over my pediatrician.” When, and more importantly, why did willful ignorance on matters of health and well-being become a norm?
It’s the man’s ideas that are crazy, not necessarily the man himself.
and if the man is exhibiting signs of schizophrenia or NPD, or OCD or is obviously projecting, or exhibits obvious signs of other psychological defense mechanisms like denial…
we should just ignore all that as being part and parcel of what is said and why.
uh huh.
so that leaves us with his motives being ones of pure dishonesty then.
myself, I find am fascinated by the motivations behind why people do in fact, say crazy shit like we just saw from Adams, and we often see from the likes of Hamm or Hovind.
no, there is no separating the two, really.
the man’s ideas do indeed reflect on the man.
otrame @101
Been there, done that. The worst part of the disease is that you don’t get much sympathy from your friends, what with all the farting. The best solution is to stop eating for a few days to give the flagyl time to work.
However, it might be premature to blame the bears. Some species of giardia are species specific i.e. cat giardia.
BS
/fish-in-barrel mode
*insert witty critique of nutcase containing pointing out of lies, misrepresentations and logical fallacies here*
/end fish-in-barrel mode
Priceless !!!
Same experience here, that’s why all my science books come from Amazon and not the local Borders/Dymocks/A&R.
I guess they just don’t sell as well.
Once again with the ad hominem attacks and throw-away use of mental illness similes.
Oh, and please stop using ad hominem to describe the responses to Adam’s drivel.
They aren’t, since they are indeed direct responses to something he already posted.
I fucking hate how often people misuse the term, thinking themselves clever.
If i call you a moron because you posted a misuse of the term, that is an insult not an ad hominem.
If I say that because you misused the term, you must be a moron, and therefore we can assume that anything else you say henceforth will be similarly moronic… THAT would be ad hominem.
what other evil organization could the skeptics align themselves with in this obvious plot for world domination and unnatural childbirth?
i thought it was obvious that Adams is convinced it’s the “libruls” that are the meat and taters of the “skeptic” movement?
He does see to attack the dems a lot on his site.
Sven@135
Foregut fermenters = burpers
Hindgut fermenters = farters
Coprophagous hindgut fermenters = farters with halitosis
Animals are gross.
Skeptics believe nonsense, Atheists are better though, we abort babies.
Neither of us hold a candle to God though, he plagues the egyptians with a famine, then makes them eat their own babies.
Spot on, Ichthyic. This article explains the ins and outs of ad hominem, by example:
http://plover.net/~bonds/adhominem.html
Many people (i.e. almost all creotards) mistakenly equate ad hominem with insult. It’s a bit more subtle than that.
Wow! I had no idea that I believed all those things! I really AM a loon! Thank God for Mikey, without whom I would have never known what sort of wacky things I believed!
Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).
btw, I’m sure this has been mentioned before, but IIRC from the brief exposures I’ve had to veganism in California, “living food” is actually a label for foods that have simply not been heated enough to destroy their “natural enzymes” (in the vegan case, all plant materials of course).
Morever, there is even a specific temperature associated with that, which was well below boiling temp, again, reaching into my old memories of the subject.
I weighed in on Adams’ nuttery here. I think the most interesting thing about it is how much of it relies on substance dualism. Do we underestimate the prevalence and persuasiveness of dualism to the general populace? Is there an easy way to dispel the notion?
aha, my google-fu is strong today…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raw_veganism
48 degrees Celsius
anything over that is “dead”
Many people (i.e. almost all creotards) mistakenly equate ad hominem with insult. It’s a bit more subtle than that.
It was always my understanding that an ad hom is a flavor of “poisoning the well” logical fallacy.
. . . THAT would be ad hominem. But most likely correct all the same.
Cheezus…anyone would get the impression that Mr. Adams and Mr. Mercola had already began spending the extra profits they’ve envisioned to result from proclaiming wide ranging endorsement of their product via this award.
Do we underestimate the prevalence and persuasiveness of dualism to the general populace? Is there an easy way to dispel the notion?
unfortunately no.
to both.
sources that counter the assertion are typically deemed untrustworthy by those holding the argument to begin with.
you might enjoy reading this brief article that came out in Science a while back, as it touches on this issue:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/316/5827/996
I can’t believe (actually, I can) that he’s a 9/11 truther as well. I happen to belong to the mortal enemies of the 9/11 truthers – civil engineers…
“It can’t fall down like that!”
“Yes it can.”
“No you idiot, you have no way of showing it!”
“Yes I do, here’s a rather lengthy list of calculations.”
“I don’t understand that, that can’t be right!”
Idiots.
But most likely correct all the same.
if proven accurate, then it no longer would be an ad hom!
:)
“I don’t understand that, that can’t be right!”
the argument from incredulity underlies all the denier positions I’ve ever encountered.
No he – Mike Adams – didn’t! What a tit. Accusations like that make my blood boil. He doesn’t help his cause at all by claiming to have cited “skeptical web sites” and not including links. Who could take him seriously?
Who could take him seriously?
why, all his devoted fans of course.
might as well ask who could take Pat Robertson seriously, or Ken Hamm, or Kent Hovind, or…
tfoss1983 #166
Good point by point critique of Adam’s lies. Thank you.
@David #125: It really depends on what cultivar of cassava. Although the wild cassava is deadly (but edible if you know how to process it), there have been non-deadly cultivars around for at least 400 years. I’ve always been surprised when I’ve encountered people who used the toxic cultivars; I guess some people just never discovered that the plant could be selected to produce a non-toxic tuber. When cultivated, the plant is essentially cloned (100% grown from cuttings). The only problem is there is absolutely no visual difference between the toxic and non-toxic counterparts.
British comedians Mitchell and Webb did a wonderful discussion of this kind of lunacy.
Dear Atheists,
Let me encourage you to embrace the ad hominem, for it is the foundation of Christianity and the path to understanding of the world’s One True Religion. Verily, God’s great ad hominem has ensured that we are all evil scum in need of salvation.
A reasonable person may reasonably say: “I am good!”
But God, in His mighty ad hominative wisdom will rightly reply: “You are a human, and all humans have inherited original sin because their first parents snacked on the lethal tree I was stupid enough to leave in the Garden, as a consequence of which you all became evil mo’fuckers and no good thing you say or do will change that, and to cover my own gross stupidity I’m going to sentence you all to an eternity of damnation and suffering unless you grovel a lot, bend over and spread your cheeks, and let the Holy Spirit penetrate you.”
It is the ultimate ad hominum, there’s nothing fallacious about it ‘cos God is perfect, and it’s the reason I love Jesus and y’all are gonna bubble on Satan’s griddle.
Amen
Smoggy
Icthyic @171: Thanks for the link. I seem to recall that dualism is one of the theses of “Supersense” as well; it’s pretty high on my “to buy” list.
‘Tis Himself @177: Thanks!
np.
I find myself referring back to it often, and it’s only a 3 page summary article!
I have heard that the more toxic cultivars are common in areas that have a history of between-group conflict, and one hypothesis is that farming the toxic cultivars is a way to keep foodstores from being a potential benefit to enemies. If someone has just raided and/or taken over your area of land, a store of toxic cassava ensures that they can’t eat it immediately. But that was during a conference talk on the genetics of cassava toxins, so I don’t know the original source.
What the fuck? Which bookshop is it?
Too damn funny. I haven’t laughed so hard in a good long while. All I can say is thank you to those involved in invoking his response.
#155:
Here’s what bothers me about the homeopathic craze: people are forgetting history (look what vaccines did to polio), and taking the word of lay-persons, usually because of celebrity status, instead of professionals.
Not only do they listen to celebri-tards, but it seems that they take their own good health* completely for granted. I get so angry about this “debate” because 1) idiots are putting their own children at risk and 2) those fucking assholes are putting my health at risk.
*I’m willing to bet that 99.9% of the anti-vax loonies are, in fact, vaccinated.
Hooray! Smoggy’s back.
#122
“OK. Why are you getting upset with me?”
I’m not getting “upset” with you– I’m mocking you for your whining “suppressing my free speech” crap that strips you of all credibility. THERE IS NO “RIGHT TO FREE SPEECH” IN SOMEONE ELSE’S FORUM. There never has been. Just as I can kick you out of my living room for any reason whatsoever, I could kick you out of my web site for any reason whatsoever. You crying about your “free speech rights” being violated is exactly on the same level of sillyness of his threat to sue Twitter. And it is exactly the same silly straw man used by religionists to try to push their agendas.
Great wikipedia entry:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Free_speech
I agree with Darren here. Guy keeps deleting my posts- I laugh.
He has every right to delete posts on his websight. Does exercising that right as he does make him an ass? Yep.
Does it mean he has 0 credibility? Yep.
Will his followers suddenly realize he’s a giant douche and stop following him because he can’t handle an opposing argument? Never, they’re as much douche-bags as he is.
Yeah, I’m going to have to go with that one.
“Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).”
I do admit, I prefer my chicken dead and well cooked (not a big fan of salmonella). In fact I prefer all my meats well cooked (which means they are also dead).
@TheNihilist, it is clear from his summary of what we believe in, i.e., “vaccines, mammograms, pharmaceuticals and chemotherapy”, that he spent much if not all of his time, on my website. You just have to scroll my front page to see that. Perhaps his top blew when he saw my dissection of his claims that mammograms cause cancer, containing actual references to scientific papers. I find it curious the way he provides what appear to be references in his posts, but the hyperlinks only take you to other parts of his site. Perhaps a way to increase page hits?
Dear Brother ‘Tis
Thank you for your warm welcome back. Noo Zillund closed down for a month, so I went on a road trip and found myself a job as a cook at a holiday camp. You can read about it here.
Well, that’s just the shits Smoggy.
Yawn, it is obvious that Dr Rachie has no idea of what scientific evidence is. No doubt he also quotemines nicely. The symptoms are there.
Forget my above post. I got confused who was saying what. My apologies to Dr. Rachie.
I’m confused too Nerd, I’m mangling two Julia Child recipes together and can’t figger out the french. *grin*
I got that once when I was a child from swimming in a lake. I’ll not say anything else on the matter but to clarify my position that water treatment = awesome.
I actually do drink tap water in my home. I see no point in paying extra for water that comes from a treatment facility in a neighboring state, not to mention comes in a little bottle I have to throw away. The city water here is decent for drinking and my plumbing is clean and modern enough. I have stayed in places though where the building’s plumbing was… uh… possibly worse than drinking from a toilet.
Sometimes autopilot isn’t the best strategy ;)
Patricia, if you are like the Redhead, mangling two recipes yields a delicious result. I also hear a glass or two of wine helps figure Julia Child out.
I’m going over to Mike Adams’ house this weekend to prepare him my extra-tasty, SUPER healthy chicken-tar-tar.
He’s gonna just love it!
Best one for my money: “Skeptics believe that the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.”
This blatantly contradicts itself — vaccines are supposed to work because of the body’s “ability to defend itself”. If anyone thought the immune system did not exist (which apparently is the position of “skeptics”), they would indeed be pretty stupid to think vaccination helpful.
However, of course we do not think the body has some ability to immediately “defend itself” against all diseases, all the time. Does Mike Adams think everyone who died from polio just had a comparatively lousy immune system? What, like they just all had the wrong attitude or something? Sheesh.
The human gut is evolved to eat cooked food, this is why we don’t have the big pot belly of chimpanzees. Our gut is considerably shorter because we rely on the ‘pre-digestion’ which cooking provides.
It is not possible for humans to live entirely on raw food. You just can’t get the nutrients you need and those who attempt to do so get skinnier the more they succeed. Even the most obsessive raw-fooder eventually caves and has a Big Mac or whatever floats their boat.
One of the reasons salad is so good for losing weight is that you get so few calories out of it.
@Darren:
Dude, the guy explained that he wasn’t invoking some universal right to free speech, but merely the disingenuousness of deleting any comments Adams couldn’t counter. In short, he sorted out what was a misunderstanding on your part. The classy thing to do would be to acknowledge that and apologize.
Another benefit of cooked food is the amount of time it frees up. Chewing raw meat takes about 3 times longer than cooked.
In some cases, dead food has more effective nutritional value because the live equivalent contains parasites which will rob you of some of the nutrition you consume.
Also, cooked foods contain a greater proportion of denatured proteins, which (for reasons I can’t remember at the moment) are easier to break down into their nutritional components.
Cooking food just makes it more compatible with our systems, and the amount of nutrition lost due to the cooking process is far outweighed by the amount made available.
Nerd – Great idea! Wine will go well with lamb and mushrooms. :)
#165, 167
Stupid hippies, RNase A can withstand boiling.
http://www.sigmaaldrich.com/etc/medialib/docs/Sigma/Datasheet/5/r5500dat.Par.0001.File.tmp/r5500dat.pdf
Ahem.
Srsly ??
I think that’s BS, to be honest.No problem at all to live on nuts, seeds, grapes, fruit, fish for as long as you like.
Salad would be one “raw” food you can’t live on, because it has hardly any nutritional value whatsoever.
Rorschach, Are there any foods you would suggest as being particularly good for avoiding TIAs? I had salmon, cod, lots of veggies and lots of fruit this past week. Oh, yeah, also almonds.
How to think like a homeopath:
Place one fact in the brain and dilute it with 100 ridiculous made up ideas. Shake the brain vigorously. Take the resulting mixture and dilute it with 100 more silly notions, and shake again. Repeat 30 times.
Somehow, the brain remembers every shaking, yet retains the silly notions!
Lynna,
not a dietician, but if you asked me what to avoid, saturated fats like the ones in butter or some processed cheeses come to mind, also nutritionally useless things like white bread.
In terms of what to eat, nuts, seeds, meats, fish, veggies esp beans, broccoli and the like, are meant to be good and “superfoods”. Unfortunately diet is not the sole ingredient in the formation of atherosclertotic plaque, and plaque in itself is not the only cause for ischemic events…
Uhm, that didnt help you much now, did it…:-)
Autopilot wasn’t my plan, but when you visit here at 3:30 am local time because you can’t sleep, you know you are having a rough night. Now, time to remedy the problem.
And then the comment about breathtaking ignorance.
Perhaps if I were a squid I’d have enough arms to face-palm with appropriate magnitude, because right now two just doesn’t seem like enough.
“Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods”
Of course living food is better than dead food. Any Klingon will attest to the fact that gagh needs to be fresh and still very wiggely when you eat it.
You’d think he’d provide some links or other references to his sources…unless he couldn’t figure out how to link to the information he pulled out of his ass.
Breakfast for those who know that living food is better.
P.Z.! Demand he buy you a camera!
No fucking kidding. Been there… twice. Once because of stupidity and once because my water filter broke on a week long climbing trip.
no want. ever. again.
Technically your free speech has exactly zero to do with his privately owned website.
He’s still a dishonest fuckwad though.
Oh Mikey! You hate me. You really, really hate me!
To have my Homeopathy is Full of Shit poster on Dr. Rachie’s blog was an unexpected honor. To have it quoted in Adams’ rambling, disconnected screed is like a brief preview of a sort of snarky, smartass Nirvana. To he honest, it was kind of like seeing one’s child on television unexpectedly: Look! There, behind President Obama, it’s Timmy . . . and he’s wearing that hat I knit for him!
Not just dishonest, but vile, immoral, and phenomenally bad at statistics. The idea that AIDS is a fictitious disease made up by pharmaceutical companies is nauseating. When he can give back the dozens of friends and family that my wife and I have lost to AIDS, maybe I’ll listen.
are you confusing salad with lettuce? a nice big salad with a good mix of ingredients can make a perfectly nutritional lunch; or dinner, even.
Whoa,wait a friggen minute, who the hell’s been talking to my ex!?
Salad is good but my slow roasted beef enchiladas with charred tomatillo sauce was much better.
Wait
Wrong thread?
I think I might have gained weight just reading that…
I know I did.
For anyone interested in the subject, there is a wonderful book called Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, by Richard Wrangham, (professor of biological anthropology at Harvard). His theory is that as erectus emerged from habilis, about 1.8 mya, cooked food allowed smaller stomachs and smaller teeth to be favored, which led to larger brains, among other things. Most importantly, cooking increases the amount of energy obtained from food, and the energy freed up from digestion (which requires far more energy than I had imagined), could be used for other things, such as building bigger brains. Another dramatic difference is the time spent – apes have to spend 5-6 hours a day just chewing raw foods. Cooked foods could be eaten in minutes with more nutrients absorbed. This allowed more time for hunting and planning for hunting, which favored bigger brains.
He also has a serious takedown of the raw food movement. It guarantees weight loss and reproductive failures. There is no credible report of anyone surviving more than a month on raw food in the wild. The only reason people can survive on raw food today is because they have access to high quality, farmed foods, and even then there are serious hazards to health.
Wrangham spent four decades studying chimps in Africa and once ate raw monkey meat from a leftover chimp kill, to find out why chimps favored on species of monkey over another. (One was stringy and tough, the other soft and tender.) All in all, I found the book not only convincing, but entertaining as well.
Rorschach,
There’s actually good evidence that humans need to eat some cooked foods to survive long-term. This article is an excellent place to start. Raw food diets cause fatigue and reproductive problems over time. A human culture that consumes only raw foods, even a large variety of raw foods, is unsustainable.
“Of course, he is a homeopath. Maybe to him, a twitter award is like an infinitely diluted Nobel Prize, and is especially potent”
Now that’s funny.
“Skeptics believe that … chemicals … from the scrubbers of coal-fired power plants … should be dumped into the water supply…”
Are you insane, Mr. Adams? The chemical output of coal scrubbers is, primarily, gypsum. Gypsum wallboard sells for a damn high price per unit investment.
“Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods (hilarious!).”
I’m sorry, but the fact that our digestive system kills most things we put into our mouths – for good reason – should tell you where reality stand on that one.
“Skeptics believe that there is no such thing as human consciousness.”
No, no. There is such a thing as “Human Consciousness”. It’s just that alties appear to have discarded it in favor of woo.
PL @ 231,
thanks for the link, looks like I was wrong ! Going to look into this further, interesting factoid.
Just realized that my comment is basically the same as #142 before it. Whoops.
Also, I apparently have a terrible Yahoo name. Need to fix that somehow.
Anyway, I checked out the brilliant Mitchell and Webb video linked above. I was curious about the comments — would they be filled with defense of homeopathy? Thankfully, they were not. It’s hard to say what a homeopath would have to say in response to that. There was a joke in them, reported by one lazzaw, I shall repeat here:
Did anyone hear the one about the homeopathic doctor who forgot to take his medicine? He died of an overdose.
This prompted me to make a Google search that resulted in a this story:
Boots hit by mass homeopathy ‘overdose’
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/7028989/Boots-hit-by-mass-homeopathy-overdose.html
LO to the L.
How do the Inuit figure into this?
BS
apparently via raw organ meat and lots of fat soluble vitamins in cold-sea critters… so i guess if you are going to do the Raw Food thing, the raw food better have flippers :-p
Blind Squirrel:
Inuits didn’t (and don’t) eat 100% raw. They boiled seal and fish and some other meats as well, I think.
I would be curious for some anthropologists to weigh in on this, have our guts really changed since we roast/cook our food, did neanderthals boil veggie soup, and erectus bbq tbone steaks ?
And had they died from the time and energy it takes to chew the raw product ?? Did in fact the neanderthals die out because they stayed traditionalists and refused to adopt this new technique of cooking their food ?
Inquiring minds want to know !
And why are there still Inuit ?
article about traditional diet of Inuit etc. tribes
Thanks Jadehawk,OM. I was wondering especially about the inland Inuit and the “Rabbit starvation” problem. Imagine not having enough fat to even have light during the long winter months.
BS
Does he even know the meaning of the word ‘Skeptic’?
He probably thinks that Skepticism is another religious cult, with its own bible and all.
Rorschach,
What? I don’t think so.
White bread is roughly 6:2:1 carbs:protein:fat, with some fibre and some trace elements.
How is that useless?
John,
it makes you fat (carbs), it does add miniscule amounts of things you need to your diet(protein), from an aesthetic perspective it is mushy rubbish that disintegrates when you as much as look at it, and it clogs you up.There is a reason there is a constipation clinic at the Royal Children’s Hospital.
Rorschach, calories in excess of metabolic needs make you fat.
Caloric units per mass unit are fat:carbs:protein around 9:4:4.
I note I’m a heavy white bread consumer, have never suffered constipation, and weigh 72kg at 178cm at age 49.
I’m not saying that a diet solely consisting of white bread is healthy, or high in fibre, but come on! If it forms around a tenth of one’s caloric intake, it’s not a bad spread of basic nutrients.
Ah well, you did say you weren’t a dietician.
PS the glycemic index of white bread is around 70, which is middling-high, but not exceptionally so. Only diabetics should have an issue with that.
#45:
I don’t know, but thinking about this has given me a new motto to live by: per flatulo ad astra. I feel that, if I keep this in mind, I can achieve great things.
white bread is formless, tasteless, marginally baked goo. why would you ever do that to yourself voluntarily, especially since there’s so many tastier and healthier breads out there?!
I do find it scary that anyone from a rich country should feel the need to put the word “actually” into that sentence.
John,
I havent researched this a lot, most of my experience comes from personal anecdote I guess, and from what one of my collegues who sits on the public health board of the victorian government tells me. Cutting out carbs like in white bread certainly worked for me, 5 kilos gone without any effort, and have stayed off ever since.
Jadehawk, you are talking about a land that willingly drinks stuff like Miller Lite. I usually drink Sam Adams or Goose Island but at a recent family gathering, I forgot to bring my beer and some handed me a bottle. It has been years since I drank it. It was like eating tofu. I kept staring at the bottle, wonder where the flavor was. I also was remembering why I do not spend much time with most of my relatives.
I’m still pondering a world in which my family is objectionable for their taste in beverages. It’s a much friendlier world.
You’re right Janine… but that really just makes even less sense. Why this obsession with tasteless food? and it’s worst here in North Dakota, where ketchup and sugar are the only spices, and “fatty” and “sweet” are the only permissible flavors :-/
Jadehawk, you live in the USA, right? I’ve heard things about what they call “white bread” over there… kinda like the buns at MacDonalds, no?
I had one once, it was more like a sweet bun than like bread.
Perhaps we’re talking about different things, when we speak of white bread.
—
Rorschach, no worries.
well yeah, that’s the ultimate white bread right there, but white breads everywhere else don’t inspire much love either. a fresh baguette is probably the closest to edible white bread there is.
John,
given Jadehawk and me come from the same place where they have “normal” bread that doesnt make you constipated, tastes great even if not toasted and will resist the application of butter or margerime without crumbling into a heap of mush, we probably both know that bread can be of nutritional value, but the varieties you can buy in any australian supermarket are not like that.
:-)
I’m still pondering a world in which my family is objectionable for their taste in beverages. It’s a much friendlier world.
Trust me, I have other reasons. Their taste in beer is the least of the problems.
You should see how I responded to Mike Adams here:
http://circleh.wordpress.com/2010/01/25/slandering-skeptics-in-general/
LOL!!!!!
Somehow Janine I knew you would be drinking Sam Adams. I havent touched any of the major American beers in years. After drinking Sam Adams and Guinness the American stuff tastes like toilet water (and looks like it too).
Not quite so R.
Coles in WA have Mia’s German Rye Bread, and it is VERY good. Keeps well and tastes great. Used it at times when my supplier of Pumpernickel Bread mix ran out of stock.
Disclaimer: I have no economical or other interests in Mia’s Bakeries other than being a very satisfied customer who loves rye breads.
Shonny, I was going to point out most supermarkets these days have a deli section, where one can get other than mass-produced pabulum (and most bakeries also have decent breads); now you’ve encouraged me to do so.
For me, I mostly have home-made bread. And I might also note I very rarely have take-away food.
(Yeah, I’m old-fashioned in that sense.)
something i had been meaning to say when I first saw Adams’ list of skeptic “claims”….
that was a bukake of stupid.
that is all.
@John Morales
Quite so, John, but Mia’s Rye is (was?) only $3.29 whereas the deli bread more than twice that.
Regarding take-aways I fully share your sentiment. No road-kills (aka pizza) or McD’s turd-in-a-bun.
Moved back to Norway a year ago, and the bread selection here is VERY good, and not very much more expensive than in Oz. Beef is though!
And yet an other silly question. In order to get all of the nutrients out of raw vegetables and grains, which would be preferable; having a stomach with four sections or eating our feces?
Groß! (though in the Aussie sense)
Very Freudian, J.
Though he wasn’t quite so obsessed with eating it, IIRC.
Groß! (though in the Aussie sense)
Very Freudian, J.
Though he wasn’t quite so obsessed with eating it, IIRC.
Corrected blockquotes!
I’m food stupid, but I generally end up with sourdough or wheat. What did you have in mind when you said tastier and healthier?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100125/ap_on_re_eu/eu_russia_believers_hospitalized
Ironic ain’t it?
What are the homeopaths going to do? Drown us?? Or does a 6c solution of nitroglycerine pose even more of a threat then the undiluted stuff?
The discussion thread is hilarious!
As always…the discouraging point about ignorant fucktards is that someone somewhere actually believes in every hysterical and absurd point they make.
These are the most debased and cynically clinically insane fools on the planet, but they are making money, that is not unusual… that is seemingly inevitable, and that point is not lost on manipulative and functionally depraved bags of effluent like this idiot.
He is lying for profit playing on vague fears…bit like the fudagelicals lying for jebus relying on fears of rationality.
‘Bizzyness is the bottom line…ask Ham bone!
@Rev BDC:
Recipe, now.
You would prefer to block his property rights? His server, his rules.
No wordpress account to comment there, but a minor correction – there is some food humans eat that is living, and may even stay living – yogurt.
There are two things I believe from that list, but they require careful culling of preceding and following words:
“Skeptics believe that DEAD foods have exactly the same nutritional properties as LIVING foods”
“the water your toilet is identical to water from a natural spring (assuming the chemical composition is the same, anyway).”
That’s it. I mean really, this statement: “the human body has no ability to defend itself against invading microorganism and that the only things that can save people from viral infections are vaccines.” Is entirely self-contradictory. If the human body had no ability to defend itself, then vaccines wouldn’t work!
As for hypnosis, I remain skeptical, but I honestly have no idea whether there’s anything to it. I expect that in the case of most stage demonstrations of it, that it is a fraud. If anyone has any good summary source on the state of science on hypnosis, I’d love to see it (Real science only, of course).
I can’t figure out how this Adams guy survives being on Twitter…
… anyone who has a fondness that he exhibits for verbal excess must nearly explode every time he gets to 140 characters.
Rorschach,
Neandertals were cooking their food. Hominins have been using fire for hundreds of thousands of years, and one of the most likely uses of fire is cooking. We have decent evidence that Neandertals were using fire, so they, too, were dependent on a cooked diet. Humans have the shortest guts of any great ape, which is a biological adaptation to pre-processed foods. There has been plenty of time since the use of fire started in our lineage for it to have significant impacts on our biology. After all, lactase retention evolved in the last 20,000 years or so.
re 258:
I guess it’s a good thing that Sam Adams isn’t American.
Yay, a bread thread! :-þ
Fresh baguette is good with butter and ham or honey or the like, but after half a meter or so it turns to acid in your mouth. There is some other edible white bread out there (Turkish bread notably), but apart from that, dark rye bread rulez.
It has been said that raw-food-ists would need to trade a few hundred grams of brain against a few meters of gut.
10,000, and three times independently (once in Europe, once in eastern Africa, once in western Africa, I think).
What Kook Adams calls Skeptics, are actually a subclass called “normal people” or “sane people”.
We normals built the modern 21st Hi Tech civilization. Mike Adams and his type are just being dragged along for the ride.
Contrary to what the kooks think, modern medicine doesn’t have problems with people rejecting it so much as the opposite. Demand for and ability to pay for modern medicine has outpaced the supply. That is what the current dispute in congress is all about. How to provide for and pay for more health care for the US population.
What no one has mentioned yet, alternative medicine can and does kill. I see a case or two every year. One woman stopped taking her blood pressure medicine. A few weeks later, she had a fatal stroke, age, late 40’s. The worst are the human child sacrifices performed by the xian faith healers.
Druidbros @ #258:
Did you mean Sam(uel) Smith? Sam Adams is an American beer.
this, or this, or this
and as a rule, if you can squeeze it with one finger, and it then bounces back into shape, what you have is goo, not bread. bread has a solid crust that does not permit squeezing or bouncing.
I think it was a reference to a common tactic of claiming criticism is an infringement of freedom of speech while simultaneously blocking expression. Both criticism and deleting comments are perfectly legal, but you can’t claim criticism is a blocker on free speech while ACTUALLY BLOCKING free speech.
Thanks for the specifics, David. Lactase retention evolved with the domestication of livestock starting approximately 10,000 years ago. Important to remember that it’s in northern Africa that lactase retention evolved. Most sub-Saharan Africans don’t retain lactase production into adulthood.
So you don’t have to subscribe:
‘Skeptics’ article stirs up condemnation from skeptics, praise from holistic thinkers:
NaturalNews.com printable article
Originally published January 25 2010
‘Skeptics’ article stirs up condemnation from skeptics, praise from holistic thinkers
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
(NaturalNews) The article I posted yesterday that exposed the true beliefs of “skeptics” made some major waves across the ‘net. Entitled, What “skeptics” really believe about vaccines, medicine, consciousness and the universe (http://www.naturalnews.com/028012_s…), the article turned the tables on the skeptics and detailed their bizarre beliefs for the whole world to see.
This article succeeded wildly in infuriating the “skeptics” across the ‘net by simply reminding them what they believe. They then resorted to their same old dirty tricks to attack me by doing things like joining our Facebook page then posting a message that says, “That article made me so mad, I’m quitting this forum!” (Gee, oh well.)
Meanwhile, the article received praise from supporters of natural medicine, the healing arts and holistic thinking — all of whom have had enough of being labeled quacks and kooks for believing in plant-based medicine, nutritional therapies and the healing potential of the human mind and body.
They’re tired of being insulted and demeaned by the skeptics who have for years gotten away with blasting holistic thinkers without receiving much criticism themselves. So we turned the tables on the skeptics and showed the world how crazy some of their beliefs are. It is absolutely true that the most ardent skeptics believe they themselves have no consciousness, no soul, no free will and not even a mind. People thought I made this up, but I didn’t. It’s one of the core beliefs among classic “skeptics” (they will even tell you this themselves).
Water is magical… really!
One such skeptic accused me of being a quack because he said that I believe “water is magical.” Was that supposed to be an insult? I do think water is magical!
I think pregnancy is magical. Human consciousness is magical. Plant life is magical. And water is at the very top of the list of magical substances with amazing, miraculous properties, many of which have yet to be discovered.
Think about it: Water expands when it freezes (almost everything else shrinks). Water is both a solvent and a lubricant. Water is almost impervious to compression. Water can flow upwards, against gravity, into small cracks and crevices. Water is made up of two gases, each of which is a combustible fuel on its own. Do I think water is magical? You bet I do!
I also think magnetism is magical. And gravity. And quantum physics. There isn’t a single scientist or skeptic alive today who truly understands magnetism or gravity. Sure, they can mathematically model it. They can describe it and observe it, but they don’t understand it. Mass warps the very fabric of reality and causes two objects to magically attract each other? Seriously? That’s about as magical as it gets.
Quantum physics is magical, too. As physicist Richard Feynman famously said, “I think I can safely say that no one understands quantum mechanics.” To all humans, including skeptics, quantum physics is essentially magic. If they claim to truly understand quantum physics, they are lying.
Feyman was unusually open-minded for a scientist. In fact, he was no closed-minded “skeptic.” He was infinitely curious about the way the universe works, and had he lived longer, he may have very well discovered the principles behind homeopathy and water memory. But he also knew that science has its limits — an idea that still has not occurred to most skeptics today. Feynman said, “I believe that a scientist looking at nonscientific problems is just as dumb as the next guy.” Those are his words, not mine. The words of perhaps the greatest physicist to have ever lived.
Science cannot answer the most important questions
And he’s right. Reductionism doesn’t work to study holistic phenomena. And that’s where most skeptics go completely off track. They think you can isolate, identify and categorize every bit and piece of every single thing if you just look closely enough. In that belief, they are wrong. The universe is holographic. The whole is in the parts. The universe is holistic, and it cannot be understood by ripping it apart into tiny pieces and giving them tiny names.
I wrote about this in an article about the Large Hadron Collider that has been widely read across the ‘net. It’s entitled The Higgs Boson Particle Isn’t a Particle – Why the Search for Subatomic Particles is an Illusion (http://www.naturalnews.com/025486.html)
Reductionist thinking (the preferred worldview of “skeptics”) cannot ever hope to understand plant-based medicine. Because plant-based medicine works through the synergistic effects of thousands of phytonutrients working together. Separate them all and the “magic” of plant-based medicine disappears. Western scientists can study every single molecule of a plant in great detail and yet entirely miss the healing effects of the whole plant.
When skeptics demand that we “prove that this plant has medicinal properties,” what they mean is that the plant chemicals should be studied in isolation, one by one, to see if any of them work in isolation. And that approach simply won’t work. Traditional Chinese Medicine, for example, uses ingredients that when taken in isolation can be dangerous (such as ephedra), but when combined with other supporting herbs are remarkably safe.
Skeptics don’t get this. The FDA doesn’t get this. And many consumers still don’t get this either. Holistic medicine cannot be studied with reductionist thinking.
In a similar way, the holistic nature of the universe cannot be understood, explained or even comprehended by reductionist thinking. The worldview of “skeptics,” in other words, limits them to a very narrow understanding of the world around them. That limitation is what prevents them from understanding the healing arts, or homeopathy, or mind-body medicine or any other advanced modality.
Skeptics recruit thousands of new readers for NaturalNews
Getting back to the skeptics themselves, some of them took my article way too personally, attributing every single statement to themselves. Well of course every single belief in that article isn’t followed by every single “skeptic” person. Even skeptics disagree amongst themselves on how far to take their “skeptic” beliefs. There is a spectrum of skeptics in the same way there is a spectrum of natural health practitioners.
But by blasting my article all over the web and then attacking it, they accomplished something quite amazing: They brought us over 2,500 new email newsletter subscribers in just 48 hours! As it turns out, many people are skeptical of the skeptics and they’re quite open to a differing point of view. They might believe one or two things that typify the skeptics’ position, but they don’t swallow the whole belief system of the most ardent skeptics.
And that brings me to beliefs. I don’t want you to believe anything I say. Not automatically, anyway. I want you to think for yourself. I don’t want you to follow holistic thinking just because it sounds pretty; I want you to explore for yourself what seems to be true in your own experience.
If you, in your own experience, find that herbs and massage therapy and nutrition are all utterly worthless, and you want to join the skeptics camp, then go for it! If you’ve thought about it yourself, and reached your own conclusions, and you’ve pursued truth with an open mind and an open heart, then whatever conclusion you reach is “your” truth. But don’t let your current intellectual position become a prison that prevents you from exploring other possibilities of the way the universe works.
This is the default position of free thinkers, by the way, of which I am a lifelong member. Free thinkers respect the freedoms of others to arrive at their own truths. Skeptics, on the other hand, aggressively attack anyone who disagrees with their conclusions. If you don’t believe the things they believe, then you’re a quack, or a kook or a woo woo practitioner.
They also tend to jump to false conclusions about what people are really saying. In my previous article, for example, I never stated whether I believed in God, or whether I was an athiest, or whether I followed organized religion and yet people read the article and they leaped to conclusions, assuming I was promoting organized religion, for example, or that I was condemning atheism.
Actually I never stated my position on those matters in the article at all, but the skeptics leaped to the conclusion that I did. This speaks to their tendency to warp all incoming information and restructure it to conform to the beliefs they already carry about the subject at hand.
Above all, skeptics have an extremely limited, distorted view of the world. It is that view that prevents them from grasping more advanced concepts like quantum healing, vibrational medicine, mind-body medicine or even medicinal herbs. The skeptics’ view of the universe is that of a child. Embracing the holistic nature of the universe requires a more mature understanding.
oh fuck, I actually read all that. what a headache-inducing pile of crap and lies.
The woo… it is… too strong… must… resist…
aaaAAAAaaaaa……. *head go boom*
are these people really THAT incapable of self-reflection?
I wonder if my insurance covers Crystal Resonance Therapy…
Reading this thread over lunch… All this talk of bread is making me more hungry… Mmmm! I’d love fresh focaccia with an olive oil/balsamic vinegar/garlic dip right now! *drool*
Above all, skeptics have an extremely limited, distorted view of the world.
Unlike those who accept without question that every word of the bible is incontrovertibly true.
It is that view that prevents them from grasping more advanced concepts like quantum healing, vibrational medicine, mind-body medicine or even medicinal herbs.
Comedy genius from a complete tosser!
In my book evidence is king. It trumps any amount of Mad-ams’ demented dogma every time.
hairychris @ 267
Yes, the comments there are a whole shitpile of FAIL, like:
That’s nearly the best example of TSTKTS I’ve ever seen.
But this one takes the biscuit:
That has to be a Poe. Unless she actually hit the homeopathic lotto and actually found that 1
elusive molecule of a dangerous substance in her tablet?
Nah, it’s gotta be a Poe. Overdosing on homeopathic medicine lessens its effects. D’uh.
Adams says that skeptics don’t realize that water is magical, only the woo-woo folks are aware of its amazingness. I’ve a video in the works that focusses on the amazing properties of water, most of which Adams misses (he also woos about a few that are common to most liquids). The reason that I want to make the vid is to refute the religious woo-woo crowd that says all matter is inert, and could not possible give rise to life.
Adams claims the magical properties of water, that it expands when freezing, but fails to mention the same magical properties of antimony, bismuth, gallium, germanium, silicon, acetic acid, and so forth!
I know this isn’t what he’s talking about, but I’m overcome by the mental image of Adams tackling a pig and taking a bite out of its struggling haunch.
If that is what he’s talking about, I think he’s going to learn some hard lessons about roundworms sometime soon.
From Adams’ follow on article:
If the miraculous properties have not been discovered, how does he know they exist?
By handwaving, of course. You must realize that “discovered,” in this context means “made up.” This is sort of fun and easy! Maybe I should become a woo practitioner. They’re doing better in the English speaking world than the god-men of India.
But like a crackling, straight-out-of-the-oven crust, you have a small window to get your teeth into it :-)
OK – so I understand, are people talking about highly processed, factory-made Wonder Bread/Sunblest/Kingsmill/Mighty White when they refer to ‘white bread’? Or is it anything made primarily with refined (i.e., bran and wheatgerm-less) wheat flour?
If it is the latter, it would be doing so many bakeries in Western Europe and the Americas, who use this flour, a serious injustice.
That said, even sandwich bread – similar I guess to pan de mie and the Japanese shokupan – is delicious if made fresh. It’s typically enriched with varying degrees of butter, milk, and eggs, though, so it’s probably a different beast from the breads people are talking about.
I didn’t even see all the bread talk. Now I’m hungry. I can’t stand sweet pastries or marshmallowy American-style sandwich bread, but give me a fresh [authentic] baguette and I can eat the whole thing in a day.
Hmmm… I thought the crust of a bread was determined by the humidity of the oven during baking… that’s why a baguette recipe for at home requires a tray of water in the oven since home oven rarely have a steam injection feature. So if turning goo into real bread only requires humidity, maybe water is magical after all (duck)
True, trivial.
BS
Menyambal (#282)
This is really the key to his appeal, I think. He tells people they can know reality best just by experiencing it and that makes people feel better than the idea that their perceptions are inherently flawed.
So much fail in so few words. Apparently he can’t envision a world where people consider what he’s pushing to be worthless based on something other than personal experience. Objectivity? No such beastie. The world is too holistic to be approached objectively. Right.
Except when they arrive at the “wrong” “truths.” Then they’re horrible, soulless zombies.
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*headdesk*
*falls out of chair*
well, in my case it’s this. However, I’ll still eat German white bread, whereas I will under no circumstances eat any other kind. it’s a waste of calories I could otherwise be getting from something that has actual taste.
Speaking of homeopathy….
I dated a naturopathic physician a couple of decades ago, and have read a lot about homeopathy in the years since. When I reviewed a woo-woo book in a college class, I re-read everything I could find about homeopathy once again, and used that as a basis for exposing the flaws in the book. I know as much as any well-educated non-believer can know about the subject.
I know that it homeopathy is crock, up down and sideways. It has no proof that it does work, no mechanism by which it can work, and a basis in delusional assumptions: water that once contained a poison that produces symptoms similar to a disease can cure the disease.
I even know where there is a monument to Samuel Hahnemann in Washington, DC. It is a huge, garish thing, with lots of bragging about how great and clever he was, and nothing in English about the claims of homeopathy.
There are homeless people camped out behind the monument, which gives you an idea of how big it is. To add insult to injury, I climbed up on the front of the memorial, and give the statue’s great, bald head a whack on the sconce with my walking stick.
I truly did.
In the middle of a thread about how to get enough nourishment out of raw vegetables, it would be nice if people remembered that calories are a measure of nutritional value: energy is a very important thing we get from food, however easy it is for weight-loss dieters to forget that. Yes, you can have too many. You can also overdose on vitamin A, and you really do need some salt. The dose makes the poison.
This thread had me wanting to leave work early to get rye bread at the good kosher bakery, but I still have part of a loaf of peasant bread from the local farmer’s market, so I will refrain.
Can you see, Mike Adams, what’s going on here?
These horrible, souless skeptics, who you say insist on dead foods, are talking about bread, the staff of life. And they are rejecting the bland, white, soulless and tasteless stuff that most Americans eat, and that you, yourself, reject.
Doesn’t that confuse you a bit? Or are you just going to ignore it? You could claim that you inspired them.
Somebody gave us a couple of bags of white bread last week, and nobody in this house will eat it. It goes out with the garbage–I won’t even feed it to birds.
I know McDonalds food is not good for you, but one of the many processes their meat undergoes is this process where they make it really hot for a while just before giving it to you. I think it’s called “cooking”. I’m pretty sure that makes it less harmfull than if they’d avoided that process.
I believe in “magic” in the same way I approve of “murder”. That is, when “magic” has been 180-redefined to mean “interesting natural phenomenon”and “murder” is redefined to mean “dedicated nursing”.
Mike Adams:
FAIL! Oxygen is required for combustion but not itself combustible.
Aquaria @54 “I think we’re well aware of that, and we’re laughing at his use of “living” for “fresh, raw food.” Besides, this idea of “living” food might be useful in explaining that day when someone sees a bunch humans grazing in a pasture. That’s the first image that popped in my mind when I read it.”
A joke from the sixties:
I saw four hippies almost die from drinking milk the other day. The cow fell on ’em.
How could Adams have known everything that I thought? I may have to believe in psychics after all.
This comments section is the reason that I find myself in the skeptics camp more often than not. I don’t agree with every comment posted here. Not everybody that’s posted here agrees with each other. Even though people are posting dissenting opinions about various topics the conversation doesn’t dissolve into name calling and screaming. For the most part when somebody is presented with information that contradicts what they thought before they take it and consider it and use it to improve their existing knowledge. As has been presented here that sort of thing doesn’t fly on the sites of the skeptic bashers. In other places if you show dissent you are silenced and banned. Here if you show dissent, your opinion is considered based on its validity. I love being a Skeptic.
Somebody get MentalSandbox out of here! He’s confusing and frightening me with his talk of diversity and open-mindedness! PZ, delete his post and ban him immediately, before I start to question my dogmatic benightedness.
I just realized MentalSandbox could well be a woman! See? It’s happening already!
Ooh! To drag this discussion back toward judgmental foodies, a friend just showed me this fun video!
David Marjanovic’ @ 276:
Yes it does! The best bread, I’ve loved it since I was a little kid.
PL @ 274,
This doesnt follow, but I get what you’re trying to say.
And to the bread discussion : With “white bread” I mean the amorphous tasteless goo that the US and Australia sell, not some of the white breads in continental Europe especially Germany/Austria/Switzerland, which are mostly awesome in taste.
Nothing beats Nutella on Rye bread though.
*gah!* some hippies in my local must have that list memorised – nothing worse than trying to enjoy a pint & then have to explain to a wooist what ‘skeptic’ means…
Grrrr arrgh profanity! Flame you destlund.
But seriously, I’ve noticed a lot of comments about vaccinations. Many along the lines of “how do they think vaccinations work?” Well judging from the context provided by the rest of the rant I have an idea. Obviously, vaccinations are nothing but chemicals, which we know are the only things that a Skeptic can eat/drink/breathe/coat babies with, and chemicals are are na# because they aren’t natural. Please don’t try to tell me that water is a chemical. Water is made of magic. Any free thinker knows that. You Skeptics keep drinking your poisonous dihydrogen monoxide.
Which brings me to my next point. I wonder if somebody could make some re-writes to the classic dihydrogen monoxide joke and actually get it posted on the health ranger’s blog. It would bring me great joy to see him bash H2O as he lauds water.
“Look, guy, it’s an internet award. For tweeting. Take the big picture and recognize that as far as significance goes, it’s like finding an especially large and fluffy bit of belly button lint.”
That is frickin’ funny!
check check the comment registration.
Didn’t this happen a couple of weeks ago?
http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2010/04/singh_vindicated.php
re 320:
Did you mean to leave that here?
re 320:
And no, it did not happen a few weeks ago. The BCA withrdrew its case yesterday 4/14/2010.