Fossil Time!

I realise that posting these at nine AM isn’t going to do me any favours but screw it, there’s a slot in my schedule and I’ll be damned if I don’t grab it with both hands and take it.

Okay, maybe it’s ten AM now but I think that my point still stands, if one was ever made that is.

I’m going to the natural history museum today. The one in London, not New York, that one’s the museum of natural history and I can’t afford to go there. Hopefully one day I will, I want to stars at the dinosaurs and the blue whale model and maybe run into Neil Tyson.

We can all have dreams I suppose.

Time to wait in the always oversized queue for the dinosaurs section, hopefully we’ll get in this year. Going to the nhm was one of the defining experiences of my childhood, one of those things that really fuelled my obsessions and made me drool with glee. This happened again in London when my brother got Pokemon blue. Those however, are two completely unrelated incidents, besides the London thing I mean.

Who knows whether I’ll actually get to do the courses offered there that I’m currently eyeing up? All I know is that I adore the place.

Checkmate, Homeopaths!

Reading the guardian’s hilarious response to the mirror’s ‘celebrities who swear by homeopathy’ article (an ironic like cures like using fictional celebrities to endorse real medicine rather than real celebrities to endorse fictional medicine), I went back to the mirror article and was once again surprised by how homeopathy was characterized as ‘natural’.

Now, I really shouldn’t be surprised by this point, this is a common tagline, even though it’s obviously hogwash of the highest caliber, but it seems when I spend extended periods of time not looking up articles written for stupid people by stupid people I forget just how stupid it’s possible to be. Okay, that was mean, replace stupid with wrong and we’re back in the fairness game, because there’s no doubt about it, homeopathy is anything but ‘natural.

Natural, meaning of nature, surely refers to things that exist in the universe, and can therefore be found within it, and that’s the broad bloody definition, if you use a narrower one it gets even thinner, and yet, even with this very simple requirement, homeopathy does not qualify as natural, because it can’t be perceived in our universe. It doesn’t exist, there’s no measurable effect, it’s based on a water memory and like cures like notion that has been clearly knocked down and demonstrated over and over again to not line up with the way our universe works.

So why, when presenting these ‘celebrities’, does the mirror repeatedly show them holding flowers and talking about natural alternatives? Does the writer of the article really think that taking homeopathy’s the equivalent of munching on a daffodil, because if so they should be fired. Being so ignorant should not go along with being a journalist, that’s a profession that supposedly works by investigation and research to make sure that articles are well-informed, rather than a shit-ton of buzz words and some pictures of an actress holding lavender. Homeopathy is not represented well by plants, because plants exist, in reality. This should be pretty clear but I’m going to say it anyway: plants are NATURAL, homeopathy, by definition is UNNATURAL. You don’t get to change the definition of a word to fit your meaning, you don’t get to decide that natural means ‘not made in a lab’, because that’s a load of old bollocks. I’d even go so far as to argue that a lab is natural because it’s real; natural’s a strange word, like spirituality because people throw it about as if it means good, when it actually has a definition.

And that’s not even to begin to argue that natural does not mean good, right, or effective. In essence this whole post has been me arguing about how these homeopaths can’t even rightly make a logical fallacy in support of their ideas. Put simple, they’re wrong, and if they weren’t wrong they’d be wrong… because they’re wrong.

Sorry, but that’s the way the universe works, you don’t get to make decisions for it. If science determines that something is not a function of the universe you’d do better to move on than use celebrity endorsements as evidence, because that’s another logical fallacy and a bloody obvious one, only proving how low these promotional tactics have been sinking in recent years.

My advice is to give up, study real medicine and become real doctors, then you can actually help people and you might learn a thing or two about how medicine really works.

Adams’ Apple

Given the nature of this blog I should really be tackling what Mike Adams said about the Higgs Boson, but to be honest, with an idiot of that magnitude the ship has truly sailed, that man cannot be saved, not when he’s making money spouting nonsense and watching hundreds of people nod in unquestioned agreement all while ironically telling people to ‘think for themselves’.

Instead I will leave him to his crazy, crazy, crazy, crazy nights of being crazy, even though I don’t actually believe that he’s truly ‘crazy’, as I believe I discussed here before. What he is however, is wrong, and really when your website has ‘news’ in its title, isn’t being right kind of your duty?

What I can talk about in relation to his being wrong is that with all the talk of regulating the internet, surely ISPs should be blocking people from accessing sites with information that’s so wrong it’s dangerous, rather than instead blocking file sharing websites and pornography. I mean when was the last time porn told you to stop vaccinating your children and to ignore your cancer treatments in favour of doing some more exercise and eating the odd organic apple?

The answer to that one I think you’ll find… well I’d like to say never but I’ve heard many times that if it exists there’s a porn of it, and as much as I’d hate to see some Mike Adams double making love to a basket of organic fruit I’m sure that somewhere, someone’s made it, which leads to the unfortunate connotation that someone’s probably enjoying it out there, and enjoying it in ‘that way’.

*shudder*

The Arrogance of Ignorance

Assuming that you can see the video above me, you may recognise the man doing the terrible rapping in this song, and giving off a message that, unfortunately, people are swallowing up like the pills he despises.

Mike Adams’ youtube has thousands of subscribers, and I suspect his website (natural news) has many more regular viewers.

I find it hard to believe sometimes that people can watch this video and not see that this is the very definition of fear-mongering, there’s really no nice way of saying it. The man spreads medical lies to the masses and makes a ton of money off of it, all in the name of battling the very things that he’s doing, using health claims for monetary gain and lying about drug efficacy, and yet he’s the true culprit!

I am honestly shocked that this guy’s still allowed to run a website. Surely this stuff is more dangerous than anything the pirate bay or megaupload could do. So why are people attacking those sites, sites which allow people easier access to different kinds of media that they may not be able to access otherwise (whether because of money or cable packages), and leaving this guy alone?

I object completely to policing the internet, but if you’re going to be doing it, then go after the people who are actually dangerous to the public, not the people who are trying to help them out.

The fact that someone like Mike Adams can call the whole field of psychiatry, never mind vaccines, a scam, is a testament to the spread of misinformation in our society and the arrogance of ignorance.

In the past people were locked up and put away because they couldn’t control their urges; that was egrigious.

But there are many people whose mental disorders are so disruptive to their living in a society without their problems that they need certain drugs to function. Believe it or not, sometimes, psychiatric medication makes peoples’ lives easier!

Health foods do not solve the problem.

 

A Cesspit of Misinformation: A Commenter’s Tale

I have returned to the internet to answer the call given to me by a commenter on one of my initial burst into skepticism on this here blog. I suppose you might not have called it that in the format I wrote it in back then, a long three post rant about why Mike Adams is wrong and how much I wanted his website to be burned from the internet so we could all pretend that natural news never existed in the first place.

The commenter demanded that I ‘do my own research’, presumably about vaccines, which I have indeed done research on as far as a student can when its a large part of their course both at A2 and for their first essay of their degree.

Based on his shoddy analysis on the state of my studying he concluded that I ‘obviously believe everything the government tells [me].’

And concluded with a simple ‘poor you’.

Well, Mr. Commenter type person, when people assume that I obviously believe everything the government tells me I feel like I must bring up the comment, as I do when I find one that’s particularly amusing, and stare at it for a while until I laugh myself into a stupor.

For one thing I don’t think that it’s the right thing to do for students to have to pay 9000 pounds a year to study, despite what the government would like me to think, I don’t think Britain is a Christian nation, as I have gone over in great deal, and from what I can tell the NHS reform ideas are terrible.

I also don’t wish the government to take military action anywhere it’s currently stationed, as much as that may offend some people reading, and believe that the billions of pounds given to trident every year would be much better off going towards something that’s actually productive for the nation and not nuclear warheads.

so, now that we’ve cleared up that I don’t believe everything the government tells me, let’s get to the part where I should do my own research.

If you do a simple search for ‘vaccines smallpox’ you get a lovely run of tales of the success story of the smallpox vaccine for one, something that the commenter obviously hasn’t done the research on.

And if I really have to explain to this commenter how much shit comes out of Mike Adams’ mouth then my words are truly lost on this person.

Let’s take a look at the first page of natural news and just see how long it takes to find a completely impossible headline.

Oh, here we go: ‘just a few minutes of daily exercise alters DNA to help prevent chronic disease’.

Yes, you heard right, according to this man’s precious website, exercise alters DNA.

Where the hell would anyone get an idea like that from?

This isn’t Lamarckian evolution and even if it were that would not help without passing on a generation, so how the hell is there even a mechanism for such a thing.

And yet it’s right there.

Obviously Mike Adams should do his own research.

Excuse me, I mean, some real research.

And don’t get me started on the article next to it about Andrew Wakefield.

My God, I can’t believe how misinformed this man is, and how sad it is that his commenters seem to be lapping it up.

Let me turn this around.

Don’t listen to everything Mike Adams tells you.

In fact, I would go so far as to listen to nothing he tells you, because his website is a cesspit of bullshit floating in a sea of self-righteousness.

Go shove that up your pipe and smoke it.

Comic From A Hypocrite

Knowing that our old friend Mike Adams has taken a great stride towards the world of intense irony by soliciting a post on his runt of a child website ‘natural news’ about how to not get scammed (if you didn’t get a giggle from that investigate the website yourself and note the supplement store and the non-profit status sitting pretty close to each other) inspired me to go back to his website and find something to show just how overblown the message he’s sending to his, unfortunately, hundreds of readers, is. And unfortunately Mr. Adams does this in the name of thinking for himself, which again, should really mean I should not be surprised by his latest foray into hypocrisy.

But this man and his website is/are an amalgamation of different shades of hyperbole mixed up in a broth of paranoia and misinformation. All the more reason why I should stick this cartoon from his website on here to show you people who haven’t heard of this man, and even those who have and get some kind of kick out of watching crazy people blindly spread their crazy over the internet thinking they’re spreading the truth.

Because truly, going against vaccines, conventional medicine in general, and trying to tell people that if they just did lots of exercise and ate raw foods they would be free from all disease, is a move for the forces of good.

Watch and facepalm ladies and gentlemen, at the gross misunderstanding of how genetic modification both works and would be applied.

And if you think that cartoon’s an exaggeration of his beliefs, you should read the articles, they truly are something to behold, or at least flush down the latrine.

Meanwhile, In Castle Adams…

Okay folks, it’s time to storm the gates of the Mike Adams castle and take out his infantry with actual information!

What am I talking about? Well it would be a completely redundant statement to say that Mike Adams was at it again, the guy’s never stopped spouting unsubstantiated claims over at http://www.naturalnews.com but seeing as we can use facebook to comment over there I thought it would be rather interesting, especially considering there are already some people joining in with the discourse, to add a little something to the mix of comments.

In this rather terribly written piece of fear-mongering you can find such great comments as:

‘Anything you would not eat, should not be put on your skin either.’ – Rich Boes

To which there is a rather easy response. – ‘Rich Boes, that comment makes no sense, your skin and your digestive system work very differently, rubbing food on your skin is bad for your skin just as eating sunscreen would be bad for your digestive system, perhaps once you’ve eaten your way through your can of deodorant you can tell us how your logic worked out in the end.’

Not that the commenters are anywhere near as dangerous to the minds of the readers as Mike Adams himself; everyone’s favourite paranoid loon is still coming out with corkers such as this: ‘Think vaccines are safe? You’ve been hoodwinked by the popular media parroting drug company propaganda. Vaccines are preserved with methyl mercury, one of the most dangerous chemical forms of the toxic heavy metal. This mercury is injected directly into the bodies of children where it causes severe neurological damage. And yes, it does cause Autism, despite what you’ve read in the dumbed-down press. Only a fool would inject their child with mercury-preserved vaccines.’

And of course, as big of an internet sensation as he is, you’d think he would have the facts on his side?

He doesn’t?

Well that’s interesting.

Of course there’s always a winner in the comments section on each article and today’s hero of Mike Adams’ comments section is Matt Clark with this golden nugget: ‘The number one most dangerous thing to children is the author of this article.’

Congratulations Matt, you win my respect and a bottle of spitfire.

Behind Closed Doors…

Okay, it’s blog time again.

I was actually considering doing a post as a video today but that can wait until another time, after all, I don’t really know where my video camera’s gone and the quality isn’t too brilliant. Maybe tomorrow I can jump on it and give my little space on the internet a little more variety than it holds at the moment.

Does it ever bother you that there are certain places hidden to the public?

I know that keeping secrets in any respect is something that pisses most people off but I’m not talking about government documents or whatever military tests they were doing in area 51 that they were more than happy to let people think were aliens.

No, I want to get into the hidden parts of the natural history museum.

Now I hear you cry; ‘Eddy, that’s really nerdy.’

And to that I would say yes. Yes it is.

But I never proclaimed to be one of the popular kids so let’s get on with this shall we?

There’s a lot of interesting stuff just out of our grasp there, and I want in, I also hear there’s a gym at the back but that’s beside the point really, I just want to be able to see all of it and gorm unashamedly at the wonder of the fossils and other goodies that lie behind closed doors.

Yes, yes it’s very nerdy.

You know I had quite the fascination with the unknown anyway, but when you realise that behind most locked doors there’s just a mop and bucket you kind of lose interest in the mysteries that lead to janitorial equipment.

In my house in fact, there’s a door that leads to nowhere, and I’m not talking about some sort of void or wormhole, no, it’s just bricked up on the other side because there’s a shower there.

Mystery solved!

Definitive Ambiguity!

I thought today I’d ponder over one of those words that has always seemed incredibly vague to me. Of course there are always certain concepts that drift from their original meaning and become open to interpretation but surely there is still some sense of certainty in a definition, with ambiguity of phrase, does a word not become redundant in the fact that it no longer truly describes anything? Words are used to express what we experience through language and words that express an open-ended transparency of a definition does not truly express anything. Certainly with the one I’m thinking of, it is embraced by many different people of many dissenting viewpoints to mean their interpretation of it, often leading to each end of the definition patting each other on the backs for conforming to this vague word, and as such, confusing each other’s ideologies as the same.

So, what does spirituality actually mean?

If you think about it, I’m sure those of you who would consider yourselves spiritual have some sort of definition for it in your head, one that you fall into by the nature of this construct, but even those of us who do not, there must be some kind of meaning your brains puts towards it, lest we neglect using it at all, which I often do if I’m being honest, given the positive connotations in undoubtedly gives despite the horrible things some people do in the name of spirituality.

According to wikipedia, admittedly an unreliable source, spirituality refers to the belief of an ultimate and immaterial reality, something that admittedly, many people who consider themselves spiritual believe in. It is believed to allow a person to discover the inner values by which people live.

This second part, I have heard used to describe spirituality before, but it falls incredibly far from the previous definition that it should really be referred to as something else, most simply being a good judge of character, which many people are.

However, even excluding this the term remains incredibly vague, with many people of many different ideologies stepping on the same ground and proclaiming them part of the same belief system. This however, due to the nature of the different anti-materialistic views of reality, cannot be true. Many of them are as different from each other as they are from materialism, which makes it astonishing that there are people who practice them all at once, using special pleading to explain why they can all exist under one universal roof.

Unfortunately for them we are confined to one reality, one set of rules for the universe.

So it’s time for them to make up their minds.

ht(f)ml

So I was going to build on a useful comment someone sent me today, not one that I am inclined to go through and point out where they’re wrong, one that pointed me to a quite interesting website actually.

However, I sense this one will take a lot more time and effort than I am willing to give while still technically on holiday, however, something I did notice about this website as I scrolled through it, is that its website design is the kind of work that makes you cringe at the genericness and the obvious lack of photoshop/fireworks etc. skills that the team behind it obviously had.

And when I made this observation I realised I was already judging the website based on this fact, rather than the fact that it’s claims are close to criminal in their scope, something was wrong.

We in the age of the internet seem to have come to what I’d like to start referring to as the ‘time cube guy assumption’.

Take for example… I don’t know, time cube guy.

The time cube website (I’m sure everyone and their mother has seen it) was an atrocity. If you don’t believe me, , it’s pretty appalling.

This is probably the most extreme example of what a psychopath can do when presented with a beginners guide to html, and the claims that this guy makes are hilarious, it’s almost hard to imagine someone taking this seriously, and yet it happens.

But this does not mean all websites that do not use some sort of attractive template are akin to this.

In fact in my time I’ve come across many very useful websites that have been poorly set up attractiveness wise.

Others, such as Mike Adams’ natural news, are really nicely designed and the most atrocious abusers of the internet to date.

There’s just no real correlation, and yet he is here with me.

Confirmation bias, my old friend.

Why do you continue to pursue me and force me to make a hypocrite of myself.

Never make assumptions, think for yourself, don’t judge before you’ve seen the crap, judge when you see the crap, be smarter than me.