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*

PSA!

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program for this very special public service announcement:

Kids!

Tired of being told that girls can only buy the pink toys on the shelf?

Upset because X-man barbie isn’t pink enough for you to purchase but putting make-up on barbie is supposedly right up your alley?

Confused by the fact that the kids menus in restaurants are the same unsustainable, organic vegetables that your parents are so into because the posh couple from number 42 recommended it, that they want to seem classy despite their average income despite the fact that they’re both very expensive and require more land to be taken up that could have been used by wildlife or for a variety of foods?

Confused by the fact that the paragraph above didn’t make much sense?

Amazed by the fact that it just seems I made a sentence that was way too long and stuck commas in wherever they could fit?

Amazed that you were right about that?

Even more amazed that I want to be a writer with that kind of attitude?

Scratching your head as to why I’m asking you so many questions?

Too bad!

Yours sincerely, society.

Deception In Your Best Interests?

How much goes unnoticed during our daily lives? How much bs just goes under the radar and taken for granted? Whether due to the influence of an authority figure or due to a lack of the information needed to extrapolate the origin of a claim or a product, surely people and companies should be more upfront about what they want their products/services to stand for and stick their claims out there on the face of it, rather than leaving them sitting quietly behind until someone who agrees with the principle hops along. At which point of course the happy load of bollocks comes leaping out with a smile on its phallic face and its heavily memorised buzzwords in tow.

Alas, I don’t know anything close to the amount of marketing knowledge you need in order to make sense of their strategies, and what I’d want them to do as a more reasonable approach would probably break some sort of secret code.

So as we avoid talking about marketing club let’s move on shall we?

As a somewhat mild example of this, depending on your opinion of the subject and the degree to which you feel it affects the world (despite the consequences of a growth in the market for this kind of stuff) is the way that, especially in more rural or upper class areas, it’s hard to find food at restaurants or cafés that isn’t organic.

Whether it turns out to be ice cream in Devon or a sandwich in John Lewis, despite their target market obviously being rather susceptible to this crap, as they are to a certain much more dangerous subgenre of lies, I would quite like to be able to have the choice between organic and non-organic food and not have to go with the organic option.

I’d rather have my food grown easily in a sustainable manner, using less resources and with other crops in enough mass that it’s not a collosal waste of money and land that could be used for, let’s say, growing more crops, possibly even to people that need them.

I find it very ironic within the organic food circles that not only are people claiming it’s good for the environment (unsustainable nature in the face of a growing population doesn’t really amount to that) but that those who can afford food are driving forward a cause that prevents the amount of food we can grow in a certain space, therefore giving less chance for the people who really need it to eat.

The same could be said of alternative medicine in a sense, where there is a strong movement across many people who have plenty of money for drugs and health insurance, that are fighting for a cause that will make it more difficult for families who can’t afford basic medical care to make the right choices with the little money they have.

Some people can’t manage the basics, let them take priority before you start shoving your unproven ideologies onto them.

Fuckin’ Masters, They Don’t Work This Way!

And so we return to the awful confines of my rant about how you shouldn’t be able to get a masters degree in ‘holistic science’, to recap, because it’s not science, is that simple enough? Well not for some people apparently, I’m just on the verge of breaking into their nice little blurb, bear in mind here that they flash all the alternative medicine buzzwords on multiple occasions throughout this leaflet I happen to have found in a ‘spiritual bookshop’ (what does that word even mean in this context? Surely alternative medicine has nothing to do with spirits except for the obvious lack of evidence etc.) which sported quite a few gems including a couple of martial arts leaflets which really got me wondering what they think happens in karate.

Because I did it for many years and I may have got a few belts but I didn’t feel very zen, and let me tell you, calling a builder sensei doesn’t make him seem any more like oogway from kung fu panda than vin diezel.

But that may have been because that character was a tortoise…

Back to my point, which I seem to have strayed from rather extravagantly.

So what does Schumacher college aim to do?

Apparently:

-Engage the whole person in learning how to work effectively in an interdependent world

Now spot the problem with this sentence for me.

That’s right, it doesn’t mean anything, it’s pure jargon, buzzwords they know will get attention despite the meaning of every clause being ridiculously vague. For some people this comes across as mysterious and inviting, but what we should see looking at this sentence is that the people who wrote it were essentially full of it, arrogant enough to assume they didn’t need to do more than hint at something that sounds engaging enough to pull in those of us who are looking for some excitement in our mundane lives so much that their fantasies take over reality.

It’s a little like when you were a child and you thought you were a superhero.

No? Just me?

to continue:

-whilst all of their courses have a focus, they see the greater picture and the important connections between practices and ideas, in that way their programme has grown over the last 20 years to incorporate many aspects of social and environmental concern.

Spot their aim here.

The first half of this sentence is pretty similar to the first, ‘they see the greater picture’ ‘important connections between practices and ideas’, these are meaningless clauses that could be applied to anything and still make as much sense.

Again these are used to pull in the fantasy prone and those looking for a world deeper than the world around them, one that already contains enough magic to keep myself at bay, it’s beautiful, and one thing I really don’t understand is why you’d need anything more than the majesty we see before us.

The last half of the sentence is a rather half arsed attempt at a CV, again, not explaining anything, but writing in a little at the end to try to appeal to those who think that supporting things like alternative medicine and organic food will help the environment.

They won’t, because CAM has been proven not to work, and organic food is unsustainable, and what is environmentalism all about? Sustainability.

Hurrr, sorry that one always confuses me, it’s an extremely counter intuitive stance that many environmental groups fall under with their unconditional love for the naturalistic fallacy.

There may be more on this later, there may not.

Dear Mr. F.U. Adams

Dear Mike Adams,

I know I rag on you a lot, and I know you probably don’t read this blog or give half a shit of what I or any other sceptic think about your website with its horrendous promotion of anti-vaccination, homeopathy and basically anything that you can stick the word natural onto despite their dissenting explanations and clashing explanations of how basic physics can be defined because of anecdotal evidence and the fact that instead of being a vital part of ‘big pharma’ they are yet another huge business that gets off by pointing its finger at another one that actually produces efficacious medicine that can help people.

Sure all corporate men and women are greedy, but I prefer my megalomaniacs to actually be doing something useful rather than handing out bollocks like they’re hot dogs on sticks, although I suppose since bollocks are ‘natural’ and hot dogs are not you’d much rather eat a bollock, I hear they’re not vegetarian but hey, at least they’re natural eh?

Now where was I? Oh yes.

Mr. Adams have you ever heard of a thing called sustainability? You see not only do you tirelessly promote organic food (no doubt in an effort to sell your plethora of overhyped and overexpensive products) which is not sustainable for the growing population at large, but in one of your recent articles about lab-grown meat you suggest that the world return to traditional animal raising methods rather than this speculative alternative.

You see Mr. Adams, these ‘natural’ derivatives you so pine for are not given any more power of argument from your argument from antiquity. In the years where traditional farming methods were employed above other more efficient schemes and medicine as useless as that which you promote and vaccines were not widespread, a large fraction of a couples’ children would die incredibly early and adult humans were lucky to reach middle age.

Since scientific progress has been increasing, as has human health, quality of life and life expectancy.

What you are promoting is purely based on the fact that you believe it to be natural.

That again is a logical fallacy, as is your career pretty much.

you so easily brush of reducing CO2 emissions by 96% and reducing energy uptake by 45% to be ‘hardly the logical next step in resolving the problem [of environmental impacts of farming]“.

Now here’s where you need to understand what sustainability is. When you do, you might notice that it’s a lot more logical than your proposal.

You see those percentages above? Sustainable levels, much more than what we have at the moment if this estimation is to be believed (which I’m not dead certain about considering how long we probably have left to go until we see the end result).

With lab grown meat, the animal casualties will be absolutely minimal so the ethical issues are tackled rather efficiently, and with just a few animal cells, creating as much meat as they are proposing would be an incredible step to feeding the world and creating a sustainable food source to ensure that our growing population will be equipped to survive the nutritional bottleneck we could potentially create in the future with our breeding rates.

Now I’m not here to talk about organic food but just to give you an idea, GM crops are modified to try and solve this problem, and they are truly, at least in my opinion, the unsung heroes of today’s society, opposed only by those who do not quite understand the basis behind the modifications and what outward effects they create.

Mr. Adams, traditional farming would not be sustainable to feed a growing population, in fact not even one our size could manage with as high a quality of nutrition as we get at the moment by relying on this lifestyle.

In fact I’d like to see you abandon your website and almost criminal business to try your hand at traditional farming.

Write me back with the results and if you feed the world I’ll put away this needle I intended to stealthily vaccinate you with.

Yours Sincerely, Edward Strickson.

P.S. You self righteous prick.

Hypocrisy!

So in the throes of many species’ ecstasy spring has arrived in full force and with it a load of optimistic eco warriors are beginning to arrange something for the upcoming season, the infamous summer.

I have nothing against these people, in fact I would be more than willing to do my part for the earth but it turns out that they’re not.

So sometime in May, in a park very close to where I live many organisations and businesses are gathering to promote a sustainable environment.

But somewhere along the way they must have gotten lost because they seem to have mixed up the words ‘natural’ and ‘sustainable’.

I don’t have to point out to you that given that we are all within the confines of the universe there really isn’t anything that isn’t natural around us, and the lines that people draw for this natural world still include poisons, earthquakes etc. good start.

However, the main problem I have is with the fact that Organic food is being promoted as sustainable under this guise and if there is anything that organic food isn’t it’s sustainable.

There’s no proof that it’s more nutritious for one thing, but what’s more important is that it’s NOT sustainable.

In fact, the reason non-organic food exists is to be sustainable, GM crops and modern farming have the potential to feed many billions of people, whereas organic food alone would struggle to feed the world’s population at its current state, it just doesn’t work.

Never mind the CAM stuff, I know that on my crusade of truth I should really be angry at the complementary medicine booth that’s going to be there but that’s just off topic, it’s got nothing to do with the environment and for the moment, I think I need to take a few deep breaths before I jump on that shit again, but seriously, this is just a case of simple fact checking.

Crops are altered to make them better, why would anyone make a crop worse and then spread it around, that much is common sense.

So, when we’re meant to be promoting a sustainable ecosystem, promoting something inherently unsustainable is just one of those hypocrisies that drives me insane.

I stared at this leaflet for minutes shouting at it in my head, praying that it was some kind of twisted, ironic joke, but sadly not, my area, it seems, just like everywhere else, is littered with ignorance and assumption.

Need I say think for yourself again? No, that’s sort of becoming cliché.

Isn’t that right kitty?

Organic Fools

Why is it that mothering books are always a little misinformed?

It seems that everyone and their mother thinks that they can write a book about pregnancy etc. especially women because they have the capacity to become pregnant themselves, but it’s not people who haven’t experienced it writing about it that bothers me, it was just one statement in the generally empowering book ‘hot mama’.

I work in a children’s store so I have an excuse for having taken a peek at this.

The statement that worried me was claiming that organic food should be used whenever possible due to the build up of toxins.

This picture should read, bad for nature, just as good as regular food for you.

Now as everyone should know, and most do not, the whole detox, toxin build up thing is ridiculous, your body can fight most of it off and even eating deep sea fish (which the book uses as an example) won’t give you enough mercury to cause any lasting effect, in fact the kind of people that seem to be worried about this toxin scare seem to be the same ones that inject botox into their face, which is the worst toxin humans regulate (or so I believe, there was probably a better word than regulate but I can’t think of it at the moment, my mind has gone blank, I work in a children’s store, go figure).

The thing is however, that using organic foods won’t provide anything close to a significant health benefit, and organic food has their own fair share of ‘toxins’, whether it be from neighbouring fields, or from the older, more deadly pesticides they sometimes use instead of the newer, less dangerous, more efficient ones which so many people consider as ‘evil’ without giving their opinions any rigorous scrutiny.

This might just stem from the naturalistic fallacy which I’m sure we’re all familiar with but the offhand promotion of this false advice should not be let to slide, organic foods are more expensive and have not been proven to offer any benefits to the consumer.

But what it does do, is reduce the number of crops that can be produced on the same size field and level of nutrition, in effect, organic food is unsustainable, and in a world where the population is ever growing, that is a scary thing to notice in a rapidly growing market.

In fact, the most sustainable crops are GM – the worst hit victims of the naturalistic fallacy, crops that are a godsend and yet are bashed because people don’t like it when DNA is poked around at.

So what should we do about it?

Well we can’t do much except provide a voice for the other side but I propose a boycott of organic food, from now on everything I eat will come straight from the laboratory, fresh with sterile test tubes and I will only eat it in a white coat and safety goggles. Take that organic food!

This picture isn’t relevant I just found it amusing.

FUCK YOU: naturalnews.com – continued

Yes that muscular vegan above you is the glorious douchebag from my last blog, who’d have known, well if you had gone onto his website and discovered that he claims 95% of chronic diseases are caused by bad nutrition, food toxins and lack of exercise you might have just conjured up that image in your head, I however, picture him more like this…

So since yesterday’s pounce on the atrocity that is http://www.naturalnews.com I took the time to try and make sure that something so incredibly misinformed was not in fact a parody; what I found instead, was a disclaimer hidden at the bottom of the webpage, declaring that everything on the website was opinion and not intended as professional advice of any kind. And that would be fine were it not for the fact that it is in fact giving out opinions under the guise of professional advice. What the blurb seemed to be to be akin to was a legal get-out clause; they cannot be held responsible therefore, for people not being cured by the bogus cancer cures etc. plastered all over the website. The fact that the comments on his many articles thank him for dishing out ‘the truth’ really does push that point, and you do wonder whether they even bothered to check that little disclaimer I mentioned previously. The whole thing is an atrocity, and the proponents of these medical misunderstandings are lapping this up like magic chocolate milk, although I suppose the more appropriate expression would be kool aid; although given that neither of those products profess to be organic I don’t suppose they’d admit to either of them.

Now, before I get back onto the prior article, which I fully intend to do; let me show you an interview Mike Adams, the ‘natural ranger’ did with http://www.infowars.com; a website that seems to be taking his word as gospel. In the video he reports that vaccines are weakening the immune system; and that just isn’t the case, the entire point of vaccines is to improve the immune system and there is no question that they do so; years and years of research and experience, the salvation of many many lives is a testament to the reality that vaccines prepare the immune system for a repeat infection; the reason seasonal flu vaccines are given, as I mentioned in the last blog post, is due to the frequency of mutations in these virus molecules; the speed of these changes is as such that by the time the next year rolls around, the antigens of the viruses can look completely different. I don’t know if Mike Adams has ever made an attempt to understand how vaccines work but if he did he obviously didn’t understand it, which really begs the question of how he could come to such a conclusion, even after all the studies, all the lives saved; and the facts of the process laid out in front of him on a plate; I suppose that as a vegan he’d have to seriously consider how ethical it would be to eat a steak full of truth but that’s besides the point; the man is clearly misunderstanding or misleading; and I really do hope that the former is correct, because I’d much rather he was not the sharpest knife in the drawer than a false prophet.

The man also claims to have ‘read the science’ which clearly he hasn’t, coming to the conclusion that vaccines are 1% effective even by the drug companies’ standards, how could he be so horrifically wrong and what could his possible motive be? I really don’t understand, but the real truth is he shouldn’t be allowed to spread these kind of lies across a mass information outlet such as the internet, and get away with it, because this really is injustice. I would recommend any of his followers rattling on about how they’ve only had a couple of vaccines or none at all and they’re still alive to look up herd immunity and get it into their heads that they are still protected by the development and administration of this frankly, miraculous treatment.

Even the interviewer, Alex Jones, displays a complete ignorance, claiming that the vast majority of scientific papers show that vaccines suppress the immune system. Does he understand how vaccines work? Because if he did, he’d know that the immune system is involved in attacking weakened or dead versions of the virus that are easily destroyed, and thus helping the body to remember the antibodies they will need to use in future in an attack of the active virus through B Lymphocytes, used for memory purposes in the immune system. If this use of the immune system counts as weakening then I’d better go and look weakening up in the dictionary because I really can’t see any resemblance to my understanding of the word.

Mike Adams then goes on to claim that vaccines cause an inflammatory response; which oddly for him is correct; but this isn’t a bad thing, this is exactly how the protection from vaccines administers itself. Perhaps Mr. Adams should do some basic A level biology, because he would learn all about how this system works, and maybe after that he’ll change his mind about all the bollocks he’s coming out with and spreading into the minds of normal but gullible individuals.

Anyway, enough about the video, you can probably work out from that that it’s all lies, alternatively you could watch it yourself and come to the same conclusion, and then do what I did and wonder how that garbage gets thrown around as if it was news.

More on his ridiculous website soon, I can assure you.

In the meantime I have a lovely video for Mr. Adams, showing a basic immune response, in hopes that he will be enlightened with real science rather than his own ridiculous claims.