Mike Adams
oracknows | April 5, 2013Over the years this blog's been in existence, I've fallen into a habit in which I tend to like to finish off the week taking on a bit of science (well, usually pseudoscience) that is either really out there, really funny, or in general not as heavy as, for example, writing about someone like Stanislaw Burzysnki. Indeed, for nearly two years, I even turned into a feature, Your Friday Dose of Woo. Eventually, I got a bit tired of being straitjacketed into having to find something kooky or wacky every Friday, and I let the feature lapse. That doesn't mean that I don't still deliver an occasional…
denialism | April 1, 2013I still think that list is pretty incomplete, the RationalWiki has more, but it's interesting to see a potential internal ideological conflict as Adams sides with big business and the fossil fuel industry to suggest CO2 is the best gas ever. While he doesn't appear to directly deny CO2 is a greenhouse gas, he's managed to merge his anti-government conspiratorial tendencies with his overriding naturalistic fantasy to decide the government (and Al Gore) are conspiring to destroy our power infrastructure with carbon taxes, and deny the world the benefit of 1000ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. His…
oracknows | December 21, 2012Quacks despise science-based medicine in general, but there are certain specialties that they detest more than others. Arguably, the specialty most attacked by quacks is psychiatry. Many are the reasons, some legitimate, many not. In particular, Scientologists despise psychiatry, even going so far as to maintain a "museum" dedicated to psychiatry that they charmingly call Psychiatry: Industry of Death. It's so ridiculously over-the-top, a virtual self-parody, that it almost inadvertently undermines attacks on psychiatry frequently leveled by Scientologists and quacks.
Let's face it,…
oracknows | December 20, 2012Some antivaccine (and quack, but I repeat myself) tropes come up time and time again, and I've blogged about them time and time again. Obviously, at times this can get a bit repetitive, particularly when I've been blogging nearly every day for eight years. On the other hand, even after eight years, I still regularly come across new variants (almost always mixed with the old, naturally) of common quack and antivaccine (but I repeat myself again) tropes. After having written about such topics so many times over so many years, I sometimes wonder if I'm getting through to my readers. So I decided…
denialism | December 15, 2012Crazy Luddite Libertarian Mike Adams is following his usual script, ghoulishly using the school shooting in Newton to pillory his usual bogeymen he blames for anything. True to form he is blaming psychiatry and medications for the school shooting. What was it I said yesterday?
At some point it is likely he’ll find a way to blame his other favorite bogeymen, GMOs, pharmaceuticals, doctors (especially psychiatrists), and scientists.
Did I call this or what?
What is really stunning is how the cranks have continuously, and incorrectly flogged the IOM's "to err is human" study for the last…
denialism | December 14, 2012As anyone who reads my blog or Orac's knows, Mike Adams, the "health ranger", is a deranged individual who denies HIV causes AIDS, promotes some of the most absurd quackery in the world, and also is such an all around crank you can rely on him to wax conspiratorial about almost any dramatic news story. He's done it again, already alleging a conspiracy and coverup in this most recent school shooting, and citing his bizarre conspiracy theories about Aurora as further evidence of these shootings being "staged" by the US government. I wouldn't suggest clicking the link unless you want to lose…
oracknows | October 25, 2012Well, I'm here. That's right. As I mentioned yesterday, I'm at CSICon. As is the case when I'm at conferences, be they skeptical conferences or professional conferences, it's hard to predict the blogging time available. It could be a lot; it could be a little. Or it could be none. (Well, obviously it's not none, or you wouldn't be reading this.) In any case, there was lots of stuff going on, plus there was the second game of the World Series, which made me miss the live recording of The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. Oh, well. Steve understood. So I wasn't up for any heavy lifting or taking…
oracknows | May 29, 2012When I saw the latest screed from that very living embodiment of crank magnetism, Mike Adams, I chuckled. I sent it around to some fellow skeptics, including, for instance, the crew at The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe, as well as acquaintances and friends of mine because I couldn't believe it. Adams, as loony as he is, had topped himself. In the meantime, I couldn't decide whether or not to write about it, particularly after Steve Novella took a swipe at it. After all, there are things that are so loony, so out there, that one seriously has to worry about whether they are the result of…
denialism | February 29, 2012Mike Adams, HIV/AIDS denialist, anti-vaccine crusader, germ theory denialist, and most recently, promoter of a child-protective services vaccine/sex trade conspiracy, actually has a contributor-submitted article on how to spot a scam guru.
The advice in the article isn't terrible. Don't believe inflated claims. Don't believe people who say "anyone can do it" or create fake organizations to legitimize themselves. I just can't figure out what it's doing at Natural News. It also is missing some other signs you are being scammed by a false guru such as:
You are at Natural News
You are…
oracknows | September 22, 2010I've expounded on the principle of crank magnetism. Basically, crank magnetism is the tendency of cranks not to mind the crankery of other cranks, even if the two forms of crankery are mutually exclusive. But it's more than that. It's the tendency of a single crank to be attracted to several forms of crankery. We've seen it in creationists who are also attracted to "alternative medicine," in anti-vaccine loons who are also attracted to alternative medicine and various conspiracy theories, including "9/11 Truth." I've seen it in Holocaust deniers who are also attracted to both "alternative"…
jstemwedel | July 6, 2010I noticed a short item today at Inside Higher Education about Mike Adams, an associate professor of of criminal justice at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington , who is suing the university on the grounds that his promotion to full professor was denied due to his conservative Christian views. (Apparently, this legal action has been underway since 2007.)
I know very few details of the case, so I'm in no position to opine about whether Adams should or should not have been promoted. But there's one element of the case that seems to be legally interesting:
But part of the judge's…
oracknows | June 10, 2010Let's see. Now that I'm back from Chicago, having recently attended a major cancer meeting, not to mention having already blogged about the meeting, what to do next? Sure, the whole thing about Andrew Wakefield finding himself just one step away from appearing on Jeff Rense's or Alex Jones's radio show was amusing in the extreme to me, and no doubt there will be much more blogging material to mine in that vein, but if you really want to bring home the crazy there's only one place shy of Whale.to to visit.
That's right, I'm talking about that wretched hive of medical scum and villainy, Mike…
oracknows | April 22, 2010It's good to be home.
True, while I was away for five days, first to NECSS and then to the AACR Meeting, mail piled up, and I had to go through it last night. Also, just for the heck of it, my wife and I went out to dinner at a local diner. Finally, to complete the unwinding process, last night I sat on my posterior and watched a couple of shows that I had missed during my absence, while lazily searching the web for material to get me back into the blogging thing. Yes, I know I spent a fair amount of verbiage yesterday taking down a mountain of burning stupid by everybody's favorite science…
oracknows | March 25, 2010I've said it before, and I'll say it again. I'm not really a political blogger. True, I do from time to time succumb to the blogger's temptation of being a pundit on current events or pontificating on politics, but in general I don't do that very often because political bloggers are a dime a dozen and politics isn't my area of strength. Writing about science and science-based medicine is. That's part of the reason why I really haven't said much about the massive health care reform bill that was passed on Sunday or the political process, except when on occasion the utter insanity of it all (…
oracknows | January 24, 2010Mike Adams is confused.
I know, I know. Such a statement is akin to saying that water is wet (and that it doesn't have memory, at least not the mystical magical memories ascribed to it by homeopaths), that the sun rises in the East, or that writing an NIH R01 grant is hard, but there you go. Speaking of writing an NIH R01, that's exactly what I'm doing now, hence the decreased blogorrhea over the last few days, but sometimes trying to cram a five year project into the 13 pages (one page for specific aims and twelve to describe the project) makes my head hurt so much that reading and…
oracknows | January 23, 2010Oh, yes, my brothers and sisters, we have done it!
My pharma paymasters are very, very pleased indeed with me and all of their other blogging and Twittering minions. Very, very pleased indeed. In fact, they are cackling with glee over the discomfiture of one of their greatest enemies, Mike Adams, a.k.a. The Health Ranger! This brave rebel's plan to attack the conspiracy by winning a Shorty Award in Health has been thwarted, thanks to the efforts of you and me, oh my brothers and sisters, and The Health Ranger has gone completely mental about it:
I was set to take the top prize, and Dr.…
oracknows | September 16, 2009It looks like my prediction about Patrick Swayze came true. Not that it was a stretch to foresee that the Woo-meister Supreme Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com would waste no time in violating the corpse of Patrick Swayze before he was even cold by using Swayze's death as an excuse to repeat once again his oft-repeated misinformation and lies about chemotherapy and "natural" therapies. After all, he did it before for Tony Snow, so why not Patrick Swayze? In fact, I strongly suspect that Adams had this rant written months ago, ready and waiting for Patrick Swayze's death. All he had to do then was…
denialism | August 22, 2008A fellow medical student once asked me why I thought people become hostile to science-based medicine. Certainly our own failures contribute. When we have no treatments for a disease, or if the treatments themselves may also incur significant morbidity, it is understandable that patients will become disillusioned with what doctors have to offer.
However there is another cause for this hostility towards medicine, and it isn't the occasional crank scibling with an axe to grind against MDs. It's the constant anti-science propaganda being spouted out by the hawkers of alternative medicine.…
sb admin | April 24, 2008Here at denialism blog, we've written a bit about so-called Morgellons syndrome. Every once in a while, when I tire of sanity, I scan the news for more Morgellons madness, and when it comes to madness, Mike Adams never disappoints.
In his latest foray into paranoid idiocy, he tries to link this non-existent illness to genetically modified (GM) foods. And what abuses of logic does he use to create this connection?
He starts with the classic "begging the question". The entire first section of his article simply assumes that Morgellons exists as some sort of unique pathology. On what…
denialism | April 15, 2008Sometimes I just can't get too angry about some particularly insane rant from a denialist. In this case, HIV/AIDS denialist, scientific medicine denialist and all-around crank Mike Adams rants about the prospect of food sterilization by irradiation:
Let's be blunt about this: The corporations running this country (which also run the U.S. government) want the U.S. food supply to be dead. They don't want foods to be used as medicines, and they sure don't want the natural medicines found in foods competing with their own patented pharmaceutical medicines (that just happen to earn them a whole…