Mike Adams: Quack of All Quackery
Recently I
was asked if it was true that the mercury in vaccines caused autism. After a 15-minute
giggle to myself, I attempted to correct the misinformation that had been
provided. The person sent me the image below:
As you can
imagine, this is utter pseudoscience. (I will not get into the science of
vaccines and the abhorrent ridiculous behaviour and propaganda propagated by
anti-vaccinators here, but they are idiotic). The post made me immediately
think; Why are people still using Natural News for information? I mean, most of the posts read as actual satire, its hard to distinguish between Natural News and The Onion.
What is Natural News?
"(NaturalNews) The future of weaponry won't necessarily involve higher
capacity firearms, more advanced bombs or better fighter jets. It will
encompass an entirely new realm of genetically-modified (GM) bioweapons
that threaten to destroy the human brain and cause irreversible
genetic-level damage to the planet."
He also claims that the pharmaceutical industry is creating HIV Vaccinations to populate the masses with HIV so they can treat it for more money. That alone
is surely logic enough for you to question the website and this mans integrity. But I’ll go on. All of the post by Adams and his band of pseudoscientific scaremongers have little to no evidence to back up any of the highly inaccurate claims they appear to have unearthed.
Hell No, GMO
Not all too
unsurprisingly, the anti-GMO activists write a hell of a lot about GMO’s making
people ill, much more specifically, propagating the myth they are carcinogenic.
Last year I stumbled upon this press release by Mike Adams calling (however
indirectly) that journalist, publishes and scientists working on the subject of
GMO’s be killed. Yes, killed:
"Just
as history needed to record the names and deeds of Nazi war criminals, so too
must all those collaborators who are promoting the death and destruction caused
by GMOs be named for the historical record. The true extent of their
collaboration with an anti-human regime will all become readily apparent once
the GMO delusion collapses and mass global starvation becomes an inescapable
reality."
Yeah,
pretty much despicable in the face of overwhelming evidence (I recently wrote a post on GMO’s and looking at the actual science behind them, if you don’t know
much about them read it). From this post, made by Adams, has stemmed a lot of
support from Anti-GMO activists. After comparing GMO scientists to Nazis, Adams
issued a post saying that It was ‘misprinted’ and ‘taken out of context’. This
spewed a website, (weirdly in German) that has a list of all the scientists ‘proven’ to be working
on GMO’s – for what reason? Destroy their credibility or injure them? Hopefully
neither. But it exists, which is disgusting enough (the section with names on is 'under scientific construction).
In his post
defending the words published he closes with a disclaimer saying that the
article isn’t a ‘call for violence, as I holy
disvow any such actions, I am a person who demand due process under the law for
all those accused of crimes’. Following this, he states:
"But
what is the appropriate punishment for the criminal act of unleashing genetic
pollution across our planet, contributing to mass crop failures, collapsing
indigenous seed diversity, instigating widespread human starvation, suppressing
scientific knowledge and dousing the world's farmlands with the toxic chemical
glyphosate? How do you even decide on a punishment that can fit the scale and
magnitude of such a collection of crimes?"
Yeah, holy
disvow indeed. There is no shortage of studies proving that GMOS are perfectly
safe. No ill effects have ever been proven from the ingestion of GMO food. Burden of proof is still on you guys;
the scientific community is waiting. And whilst we are on the case, what is the price of fear-mongering and spreading pseudoscience? This stuff can (and does) actually harm people. Whereas there is no evidence for GMO and vaccinations harming people.
Astrology
In 2010, Adams wrote a post entitled: ‘Principle ofastrology proven to be scientific: planetary position imprints biological clocks of mammals’. Let that sentence sink in. Breath. Good, yeah? Ready for it. First paragraph of the post:
“(NaturalNews)
Mention the word "astrology" and skeptics go into an epileptic fit.
The idea that someone's personality could be imprinted at birth according to
the position of the sun, moon and planets has long been derided as
"quackery" by the so-called "scientific" community which
resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the
cosmos. According to the conventional view, your genes and your parenting
determine your personality, and the position of planet Earth at the time of
your birth has nothing to do with it.”
I
genuinely think this is the best paragraph I have ever read in my life. You can
almost sense the tone that if he was stood in front you he would be smirking as
he is trying to balance on his pedestal. The study in question was published in
the journal Nature entitled Perinatal Photoperiod Imprints the Circadian Clock. Basically the study is looking at the seasonal light cycles effects
on the biological rhythms of mice, showing that the biological rhythms of mice
are effected by the varying day/night light (circadian cycle) with varying seasons.
Funnily enough, not one planetary position is mentioned in the paper. Conclusion:
how the f**k does this prove astrology?!
“To
believe in astrology, all that's really required is to grasp the basic concepts
of the interrelationships between all living things”
And to
let go of the basic concepts of science right? I find it ironic that this man
has actually typed the sentence “grasp basic concepts”. As a scientist and
skeptic I know the good journals from the bad, as soon as I found out that this
paper was published in Nature a high
(if not the highest) impact factor journal. That tends to mean that the peer
review process is so very rigorous, its probably not even worth trying to
publish anything there if you have even the slightest bit of ambiguity in your
study (I get that peer review is a bit up in arms at the moment, but Nature is very good for not publishing quackery)
Natural Cures for EVERYTHING
Now
my favourite, if not specialism; the cures for everything. Mostly on Natural
News you will find various cures for a lot of incurable diseases - the odd curable disease, but the natural remedy is better than the actual clinical trialed drugs. These cures
just happenstance to also be sold on their website. My degree is in Analytical
Chemistry and Forensics, so finding their ‘forensic food laboratory’ they
put on their website about food labels and them ‘uncovering’ the truth from
their ‘laboratory’ is actually hilarious. It is just a mass spectrometer – and the
state of the lab is more than enough to removed the word ‘forensic’ from there.
Forensics means: ‘application of science to the law’ not ‘science to back up
pseudoscientific quackery’ (I use the term science very loosely there).
The website
has plenty of articles on cures, and I mean plenty. I will take the first on I have
seen on the ‘top 7 natural cures for cancer revealed’. Standard, we get the
junk about cancer being so profitable that big pharma wont release the cure for
it. Pharmaceutical companies aren't stupid, and they are quick
to jump on the avenues for effective treatment therapies. There are always ways
to repackage and patent molecules, no matter what they are, which would give
them a return on the investment required to develop and test them in clinical
trials. To suggest that the cure is being hidden with literally no evidence, is
not only ridiculous it’s offensive to the community of dedicated, ridiculously
hardworking scientists, to the staff and supporters of cancer research to
cancer patients and their families. Each one of their ‘cures’ has shockingly little evidence and
links to actual studies. Let me state this clearly, if a website is releasing multitudes
of posts that are highly contradictory and highly fly in the face of scientific
consensus. Don’t just read that one post and believe it, look around, it may be
true, but there is a high probability that it probably isn’t, just like in he
case with the ‘scientific proof’ for astrology above and this ridiculous post
on how cannabis cures cancer and the skeptics are completely wrong about it – and this is my account of the actual science behind the myth. And even more; basil to cure cancer? There isn’t even one link in this article. Not even one to a
ridiculous study or news article. Someone has sat down and typed this crap out
without any evidence. Excellent reinforcement of my point here. There isn’t
much left to say. 
wow
ReplyDeleteWow indeed...
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