Anyone who's read this blog knows my opinion of Mike Adams, the proprietor of the quack website known as NaturalNews.com. It is not favorable, to put it mildly. All you have to do to realize that is to type his name into the search box of this blog and see what comes up: Anger at his attacks on celebrities who have died of cancer; mockery of his pretending to be a scientist and attacking Jimmy Kimmel for "hate speech" about vaccines; alarm at his threats delivered with somewhat plausible deniability against scientists; further alarm at his "natural biopreparedness" and homeopathy for Ebola; and, of course amusement at his New World Order conspiracy mongering. In terms of blog fodder, Adams is the gift that keeps on giving. Unfortunately, in terms of his influence against science and medicine and for pseudoscience and quackery, his influence is not insubstantial, so much so that when the opportunity presents itself I feel obligated to discuss him.
The opportunity has presented itself in the form of an excellent summation of the empire of pseudoscience and quackery that is Mike Adams by Sacha Feinman entitled Meet The Internet Entrepreneur Profiting Off The Anti-Vaxxer Movement. Of course, I have one quibble about this title. Adams profits off of way more than the antivaccine movement. Quackery, fear mongering about food, Scientology-like hatred of psychiatry to the point where after the Sandy Hook school massacre, he immediately blamed psychiatric medications for the rampage of Adam Lanza, the perpetrator of the massacre. But that's just a quibble. The article itself tells the tale quite well. It also confirms something I've been writing for quite a while now, namely how Adams got his quacky start selling Y2K scams:
Towards the turn of the millennium, the Y2K bug was much on the mind of the media, representing perhaps the first great conspiracy of the digital age. True believers held that the seemingly simple switchover from 12/31/99 to 1/1/00 would cause computers and electronic systems the world over to crash, triggering international crises of every conceivable sort. Adams saw the opportunity in the situation, and began to sell supposed “information products” that would insulate his paying audience from the oncoming chaos, which, of course, never came.
In a since-deleted excerpt on Adams’ site published by ZDNet, Adams boasted that in 1999, “in an effort to fine-tune his web marketing techniques, Michael [Adams] launched a six-month experiment to determine what kind of revenues are possible when combining his proprietary techniques and technologies with a high-awareness topic. The result? With the help of only one employee, he created a subscriber base of over 50,000 people and sold over $400,000 worth of information products while offering an open-ended, 100% moneyback [sic] guarantee.”
This subscriber base was largely won over by Adams’ then infamous “39 Unanswered Questions about Y2K.” In a foreshadowing of the sorts of the “listicles” that would drive traffic to both Natural News and the site’s advertisers (not to mention BuzzFeed), Adams demonstrated a remarkable ability to frame a controversial issue in a manner perfectly suited for digital consumption. The widely shared email consisted of a series of fear-mongering questions such as, “Why is there not a single Fortune 1000 firm that has said, in its 10-Q SEC statement, that it is fully, unequivocally Y2K-compliant?” Critics panned the listicle as, “a national spamming campaign against the press and politicians to stir up enough anxiety to clear the shelves of Y2K supplies” and, “the best publicity stunt I’ve seen.”
So from the beginning, Adams was talented. He saw the possibilities in web marketing to drive traffic to his sites and use that to monetize them very early on, and to monetize them selling scams. In this, we can see him honing his early techniques. Indeed, he took it far beyond just that, mastering the dark arts of using "black hat" search engine optimization, running link farms, and using those skills to drive traffic back to his site. It turns out that the skill set that made Adams so talented at crafting mass e-mail marketing campaigns that actually persuaded the marks to give up their money is the same skill set that he later honed to become an expert at SEO.
But how successful has he been? According to Feinman:
According to the service comScore, Natural News hosted over 2 million unique visitors in the month of December 2014. The website’s Google PageRank is a respectable six, the same number enjoyed by other, more mainstream preachers of the “natural” space. The CEO of Whole Foods John Mackey’s blog also receives a six, as do the landing pages for Andrew Weil and Deepak Chopra.
Adams claims that he has, “personally authored over 2,000 articles, including investigative articles, satire and op-ed,” and that “his writings have been collectively read by over 100 million people over the past decade.” Every time Adams publishes a story with a headline such as, “Medical mafia calling for gunpoint quarantines of citizens who refuse vaccinations”, it’s pushed out to the newsfeeds of the nearly 1.5 million Facebook accounts who “like” Natural News. This number far surpasses that of The Atlantic, and falls just short of the Los Angeles Times.
Ha! Well, I've personally authored over 4,000 blog posts. So there! Unfortunately, even with the boost in my traffic over the last two weeks due to the Jess Ainscough post, my traffic is nowhere near what Adams' is regularly. Neither is that of pretty much any skeptical blog or website that I am aware of. Naturally, Adams' numbers are probably inflated due to all his SEO manipulation and link farming, but, even so, that's still impressive, impressive enough to be depressing. It's particularly pressing to note that last year Adams was even featured on an episode of The Dr. Oz Show, where his not-so-mad skillz doing mass spectrometry to measure heavy metals in food were on display for real chemists to ridicule, as mentioned in the article:
Opaqueness is common throughout Adams’ world, even as he consistently lobbies for greater transparency in the variety of causes he writes about.
The Consumer Wellness Center, a tax-exempt organization based in Wyoming, operates the labs which conducted Adams’ research on purportedly toxic levels of heavy metals in organic foods. While a recent press release from the center originates from Tucson, Arizona, the organization’s website, like many in Adams’ empire, is registered to a P.O. box in Taichung City, Taiwan.
As for the lab itself and the instrumentation it utilizes, the website simply reads that, “our instrumentation is certified by our manufacturers, our external standards are traceable to NIST, and our methodologies are based on EPA-published laboratory protocols.” The letter from Adams’ lawyers states that the lab has “applied for and anticipates receipt of ISO 17025 accreditation,” a typical standard for demonstrating the technical competency of labs.
“With this sort of testing, you have to be able to replicate exactly what you are doing,” stresses Chris Vulpe, an associate professor at the UC Berkeley Center for Nutritional Sciences and Toxicology. “It has to be laid out in excruciating details.”
Yep. Just as I've explained.
I'm glad to see a mainstream website paying attention to the Mike Adams phenomenon. Adams has been laying down his misinformation about science and medicine for so long and his history so shrouded in the mists of time—Internet time, that is, where traces disappear a lot faster—that it's high time that someone has looked into his background and activities. Basically, this article doesn't really tell me what I didn't already know about Adams from having followed him over the years. That doesn't mean it isn't useful to have the information in a convenient one-stop-shop to use whenever a clueless Facebook friend posts it on your wall. I recommend using it liberally.
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a health seamster profiled
He has it sewn up nicely.
People were marvelling, a few threads ago, at the increasing white-supremacist, Turner-Diaries tendency in Adams' columns... his insistence that there is a Race War in progress (in which Greebo the other side shot first). Now if his Y2K profits are any guide, he conducts a fair bit of research into the rubes' his customers' hot buttons and vulnerabilities. So it is my guess that he's decided to focus on survivalists as a target market (survival seeds, storable footstuffs), and they're the ones that his apocalyptic rhetoric is intended to terrify.
I'm not saying that *all* preppers and survivalists are racists, but Adams is specifically aiming at the stupid ones.
It was a very good article and I'm glad that you've presented it here. Because it's rather "one stop shopping," it enabled me to present it to some friends who just didn't understand why I so frequently ranted about the man. I expect he'll be on PBS next. They've featured most of the other snake oil salespeople.
I'm surprised that he hasn't been on PBS yet. After all, if Joe Mercola is "good" enough and the Health Danger can be on The Dr. Oz show, why not PBS?
I only knew about Mike Adams from reading this blog for some months, so I never knew that he's been up to this crap since the last century. The 39 questions about Y2K thing... just, wow.
So: "he was declining all interview requests over the next six months in order to either focus on his new “EMP-proof technology rollout,” or concentrate on the launch of a new website that vaguely promises to showcase “a series of groundbreaking ‘low-tech’ inventions for humanity.”
I wonder how similar either of those things might be to his Y2K survival supplies. Or perhaps the EMP thing isn't any different than those useless microwave shielding devices for cell phones.
I was also thinking that perhaps the groundbreaking "low-tech" inventions might be drying up, but then I thought of the incredible pineapple spiral slice and chop device I saw on TV the other day, and a thing that peels boiled eggs. There may be no end to the miracles of low-tech devices.
The world would be a better place (and Mike Adams would be a happier and more respectable person) if he was just a hawker of marginally useful low-tech gadgets.
@herr dokter bimler
"I’m not saying that *all* preppers and survivalists are racists, but Adams is specifically aiming at the stupid ones."
I think Adams is pretty much just throwing crap all over the wall and seeing what sticks, and then throwing some more where it didn't stick, and then some more where it did too.
@ NoPanShabuShabu:
Mikey** is hawking low-tech inventions to save mankind already:
since the new year began he has been slowly uncovering his incredible non-electrical, non-circulating hydroponic system that will revolutionise Food Security for people worldwide!
See his most recent posts of yesterday and the day before.
( Natural News)
Yes, with Mini-Farm Grow Boxes (tm) you can make sure that you'll never go hungry whenever earthquakes, tsunamis, economic meltdowns, solar flares, police state maneouvres or riots/ gangwars ( choose one) occur.
Mike used 3D printers to create remarkable innovations and will allow you to use his plans to print your own for free or buy them at a low cost from him, fresh from his Print Farm in Texas. ( see Food Rising.com/ Supply Source.com) Seeds and plant food also available.
These inventions as so arcanely groundbreaking that they resemble what teachers put in classrooms 50 years ago to illustrate how plants grow for primary school students.
** and I do believe that I was the first to call him that
-btw-
I never saw that 'MA Nutrition' before.
Mike maintains that he studied natural health ( Health Ranger.com/ bio) but he doesn't ever say where or how.
Adams claims … that “his writings have been collectively read by over 100 million people over the past decade.”
That would be impressive if true. Until the recent switchover to IPv6, there were theoretically only about 4 billion (2^32) IP addresses available worldwide. One hundred million is just short of 2^27. So if he is counting each unique IP address as a distinct visitor (which has its issues, but I don't know of a better method), he's had about 3% of the theoretically available IP address space visit him. Of course, I don't trust his traffic claims any more than I trust his health claims.
Opaqueness is common throughout Adams’ world, even as he consistently lobbies for greater transparency in the variety of causes he writes about.
"Just do as I say, don't do as I do"
@ Eric Lund:
" I don't trust his traffic claims.."
Neither do I. Notice that his facebook numbers whilst high are nowhere near. Of course, we shouldn't expect them to be equal but still they might reflect a bit more.
I did a little digging to investigate similar claims of '100 million' listeners/ viewers/ readers/whatever to PRN/ various videos/ articles summed-
here's what I found-
- individual shows by its head loon revealed an average of a few thousand ( 3-4) plays each- 10000 was a rare single instance
( internet)
- phone listeners braggingly included ( as reported on air) 40000 minutes for a particular show ( 60 minutes long on average)
- land based stations were reported to be the lowest level of listenership
- facebook figures for the whole 'network' ( 90 shows) were about 35000.
- you-tube and other plays of videos / films were in the hundreds or thousands except for a free film with plays in the hundreds of thousands ( I forget exactly).
A more important factor would be sales figures. How much does MIkey earn from his diverse endeavors?
Ooops! i stand corrected "
The Seeds of Death ( You tube) over 1,260,000 views.
I prefer this Seeds of Death:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooDVMq_aoxE
Ice Warriors are awesome.
it wouldn't surprise me if Jude Law's character in "Contagion" was based on Adams. Fearmongering and profiteering at its best... Or worst.
I wonder what percentage of the unique visitors includes those who are stunned by the utter crazyness of Mikey's world.
I am not a doctor, but I am a professional musician. His inflated credentials regarding his "musical abilities" are as offensive to us artists as his science shenanigans are to you doctors and scientists.
May I request we coin a new term for what he does in my field? Shall we call it psuedomusic?
The following is from his "Health Ranger Profile and History". Apart from his using his "music abilities" in his "activism", this is all bullshit — complete and total bullshit.
Warning: As a responsible and ethical professional musician, I strongly recommend you do not ever listen to his bullshit — you cannot unhear it, and it will cause serious damage to your soul. (Also, my apologies for my inability to format this comment on this ipad).
"Adams composed music for several university theatrical productions and was offered a job by a large university as the head of sound design for the theater department. (He turned it down.)
As a child, Mike Adams was found to extraordinarily gifted in music composition. He began studying piano and keyboard at the age of five. He took on percussion studies at age six. By age twelve, he was creating elaborate keyboard compositions and publicly performing at music talent competitions.
In his teens, Adams acquired electronic music equipment (sound modules, tone generators, keyboards) and began to compose multi-track music pieces as a hobby. His composition and music abilities were put to good use in his activism videos against GMOs, vaccines and other topics."
Source (in the DoNotLink form): http://www.donotlink.com/framed?48356
So was I, and I'm positive my mom would describe my work in similarly glowing terms, because, well, that's what moms do.
But I have the self-awareness to know that I was actually moderately competent at piano, and mediocre at composition, so I did not pursue it as a career.
Notably, neither did Adams. He's not a professional musician; he's just too cheap to hire an outside musician for his "documentaries", but too boastful to just go use Kevin MacLeod's stuff like most YouTubers seem to do.
Did he also score nine holes-in-one the first time he ever played golf? Did he stand alone and triumph eternally over the running dog forces of pharma? Do unicorns kneel before him wherever he goes?
"it wouldn’t surprise me if Jude Law’s character in “Contagion” was based on Adams."
I actually just assumed it was, when I saw the movie... quite a decent movie, as Hollywood pandemic movies go.
A man so awesome, he served as the psuedo-inspiration for Kahn Noonien Singh...Some just know him simply as Kahn...For his, is the superior intellect.
Ripped from a website, and commercial, oft-imitated by the war-hero internet epic larger than life, but, never duplicated:
“In a world with fireballs and explosions. One man finds the time to keep his goatee in pristine condition. even without proper grooming equipment. Some say he’s incredibly handsome, others say he’s the most handsome, but everyone says he’s the wizard!”
Sadly, marooned on Ceti Alpha V after Ceti Alpha VI exploded from a giant vaccine-injured ethyl-mercury supernova. Thimerosal, once again, claims another ...
How will it end, or rather, will it ever end??
Mike Adams' profile makes him sound so full of wonderfulness, that his only possible competition for World's Most Accomplished Man is North Korea's Kim Jong-Un.
"Mike Adams’ profile makes him sound so full of wonderfulness, that his only possible competition for World’s Most Accomplished Man is North Korea’s Kim Jong-Un."
Can you imagine what would happen if they played golf together? Why, they wouldn't just each get 18 individual holes in one, they'd take a single swing and the ball would land in each and every hole on the course.
From Feinman's article:
Wait a second - people (mostly) in North America are supposed to be concerned about fallout from Chernobyl 29 years on? Look, we know about the effects of Chernobyl's fallout on human health - Eastern Europeans, mostly Ukrainians, who were kids when the accident happened, have elevated rates of thyroid cancers. It sucks, but that really seems to be about it.
Speaking as someone who grew up in the rural PNW, which is kind of survivalist central, most of them are racists, though there are also the Mormons, I suppose, and a few others here and there. My cousin Scott, upon returning from Afghanistan, had a plan for a while of buying a cabin up in Alaska and living off the land by himself. I would be able to visit, and probably his grandparents, but that was about it. He is in fact married and has babies now and is living in Vancouver WA, which I am glad about.
Yeah, I visit the site sometimes when I need a laugh.
What is so frustrating to me is how its obvious the guy is a massive narcissist, who has been able to convince others of his delusions of grandeur.
These are typically the exact type of people I try to distance myself from regardless of their beliefs...
Amazing that so many don't see through the charade...
JP
You must see-
' Health Ranger's brush with poverty, financial survival and urgent warning for humanity's future' NN, July 2014
wherein he talks about his BS in technical writing, his adventures in Taiwan, entrepreneurial success and his soul-stirring remarks about life and ranches.
EBMOD while I was typing
Sounds like Joseph Smith.
@Denice Walter
Shouldn't it be BSc - oh wait forget about it - you're correct
@ JP:
Right, homeopathic doses of radiation from Fukushima are inundating the west coast of North America AS WE SPEAK...
making the situation there much worse than it is in Japan.
@ Militant Agnostic:
He writes 'BS' so I merely quote him.
For once, he's correct.
Yeah, but I think the official LDS Church has disavowed these doctrines at this point, much like they did with polygamy. Some of the fringier elements might still hold to them, like some still do to polygamy.
One good thing I can say about the Jehovah's Witnesses, similar as they are in many ways to the Mormons, is that they are explicitly not racist. In fact, in many parts of the country, African Americans are a majority in most congregations. Not that I have much else good to say about the religion *cough* cult *cough*.
19th century, but that's just my inner pedant coming out. They have chilled quite a bit, but there are similarities with Scientology (and the JWs) when it comes to trying to exit. Shunning, etc.
I wonder if he actually knows any actual farmers or ranchers. I am related to quite a few, and know some others. Actually, that's one of the main reasons I like the film (and novella) Brokeback Mountain so much - I identify with the characters more for being the down-and-out children of ex-ranchers than I do because they're gay.
@ JP:
He claims to live on a ranch outside of Austin where he raises chickens and goats. A while back, he had a 'food forest' at his hacienda in Ecuador- I think that he was trying to establish a colonia there but he bolted:
the other idiot woo-meister suggested that a well-known natural health advocate had to leave Ecuador because of kidnapping threats ( he didn't keep goats *there*) when a follower asked if Ecuador was a sustainable health freedom- friendly place for relocation.
Well, he also has pretty substantial outside income to finance his little "ranch."
How on earth can Mikey need 6 months for his new “EMP-proof technology rollout”? - even he should be able to buy aluminum foil at the local Safeway.
Real Texans don't believe in goat ranches.
I have today added "become delightsome" to my performance objectives at work.
I can also vouch for Mormons no longer being racist, though their back-story is extremely weird (though not quite Scientology weird). One of my closest friends is a Mormon and also happens to be black; he tells me that part of Mormonism is firmly in the past. One thing I like about Mormonism is that divine revelation can change their dogma, unlike other religions with immutable Holy Writ.
My friend told me a hilarious tale about his ordination as a Mormon priest (or whatever) in which all the assembled were entirely dressed in white - suits, vests, neckties, the lot. It was all OK until one of them got a serious nosebleed....
@Krebiozen - having been in the Navy, I've seen the effect of a nosebleed (or various other bleeding) on all white uniforms. It offers contrast.
the other idiot woo-meister suggested that a well-known natural health advocate had to leave Ecuador because of kidnapping threats
And if this is referring to Mike Adams, it may even be true. Generally speaking, if you are an ordinary US citizen traveling abroad--especially in the Third World--it's a good idea to keep a low profile, because high-profile gringos are obvious targets for kidnappers. While I haven't been to Ecuador, I have been to other Latin American countries, and there is a reason gated compounds are normal for the well-off in much of Latin America. Of course, Mike has too big an ego to keep a low profile.
For that matter, Mike has too big an ego to recognize that he might not be the greatest composer, or if he is, that he may have gone into a style that has limited appeal. I have a fair amount of twentieth-century classical music in my collection, and it's definitely an acquired taste--I know people who will only with great reluctance listen to anything written after 1850. I haven't heard any of his music, so I don't have a basis for evaluating his talent (or lack thereof) in that space. But it's possible, especially if he got in the habit of writing twelve-tone rows, that he might have acclaimed skill at writing music that few people want to listen to. And even I have my limits: one problem I have with twelve-tone music is that it's too easy for the composer to play mind games instead of engaging the listener. Such music can be every bit as formulaic as twelve-bar blues, and much harder to make it sound good.
Whenever I am pointed to something so utterly and completely crazy on the web, I take a look at Mikey's website so I can get a perspective of where on the spectrum of batshit insane it belongs.
M O'B: "Real Texans don’t believe in goat ranches."
Think again. My hour long bus ride to my last year of high school* took me past many goat ranches near Ft. Hood, TX (and my dad rented a house in a middle of nowhere subdivision). Those happened to be very special goats, Angora goats, which makes Texas the third largest mohair produceer in the world.
* If you wonder why I did not drive myself, it was because my choice was to take driver's ed or graduate a full year early. I chose the latter, which was good because I went to college instead of attending a high school in more of the middle of nowhere Arizona.
@ Eric:
He had a few business ventures there which included seminars he gave with a former astronaut, an association with a real estate company ( he claimed he made no profit but he constantly wrote about them and recommended them to readers) and leading visitors on hikes and adventures in the national park.
And I can't imagine him keeping a low profile.
And actually- his music is more monotone than 12 tone.
Hey MOB @33: You said "Real Texans don’t believe in goat ranches."
But my great uncle, born and bred Texan had goats on his ranch. Angora goats, all fluffy and soft. (And cattle, because that's required.)
@JustaTech - so he had a goat farm and a cattle ranch on the same property! That's cool.
@Chris - sorry, if it's not cattle it's not a ranch. It takes cattle to make a ranch. Just sayin'.
And how much mo hair does anyone really need?
"Al Paca" sounds suspiciously Middle Eastern to me.
As an Englishman born and bred, I wouldn't argue with that. I would note that Robert O. Young has what he describes as an avocado ranch, which always conjures up bizarre images in my mind. The least challenging rodeo of all time, perhaps?
I know plenty of people who need mo hair. (I still have enough, it's just not *long* enough.)
If they were like the avocados in this song by an old friend, it could be a pretty interesting rodeo - "Now I'm sitting on a bus, a shade too tired to be annoyed, while two human avocados a shade too loudly discuss Freud..."
I just got rid of all mine again today. I had too much, almost a quarter inch!
M O'B: "@Chris – sorry, if it’s not cattle it’s not a ranch. It takes cattle to make a ranch."
Perhaps. Though there was plenty of cattle. We had to be delayed on a two lane road due to sports car versus cow. I only saw the car, it was upside down in a ditch.
Then there were the neighbors who knocked on the door asking if we had seen their cow wandering by.
There is a reason I live in medium sized city sidewalks and no cattle. Though neighbors do keep chickens, and sometimes goats. Le sigh.
You must read Mike's article ( see my # 23) where he discusses his ranch. No, no cattle and no horses. But he does have a John Deere tractor.
Living on a ranch teaches you about nature and life. Needless to say, these lessons will be invaluable- perhaps even life-saving- when the End Times arrive.
Mike, in his perceptiveness, can foretell what will soon befall Mankind and it ain't pretty. Thus, he prepares for those dark days and will guide you in self-sufficiency and other wankery.
I used to know a nurse who was attacked by a flying cow while driving in the UK (OK, it jumped from a field onto her car in a sunken country lane, but the effect was much the same). The car was a write-off and she had to be airlifted to the hospital by helicopter and ended up in a TV documentary. Her main concern, she told me afterwards, was that she was dying to pee and was mortified she might be filmed wetting herself. It's odd what goes through one's mind in a crisis.
This might sound impressive to the general public, but it's nearly meaningless as far as vetting the results. All lab instrumentation is certified by the manufacturer when it's sold. If you pay a little extra to a manufacturer for installation and preventive maintenance, they'll re-certify the machine, but he's not even claiming that much. Second, anybody can buy NIST-certified standards, but not just anybody can use them properly. There are many ways to contaminate standards. Finally, saying your methods are "based on" EPA lab protocols is like saying my cooking is "based on" Julia Childs' just because I opened her cookbook. That doesn't mean my imitation cooking is anywhere as good as hers. In summation, these claims made by the Deranger about scientific quality are utterly meaningless. All of the above could be 100% true, but if you sit a monkey (or a semi-literate layman like Mikey) in front of a delicate piece of lab equipment, I guarantee you'll get scientifically useless unpublishable results, even if the monkey means well and has the best of intentions. (I will attribute good intentions to the monkey, but not to a disreputable proven internet scammer like Mikey.)
@Denice:
Whoo boy, I just read it. Barf. Barf, barf, barf. "If you want to live, come with me" - talk about delusions of grandeur...
Also, he can predict the coming collapse of civilization because he "absolutely aced academic mathematics" once upon a time. Uh-huh.
Hazards to navigation in the form of livestock still happen around here, albeit rarely. The very last house on the way out of town (pop. 900 or so) has 4H members living there, and once or twice I've witnessed the paterfamilias in the front yard squaring off with a motorcycle-sized pig. The pig usually looks pretty cocky.
The residence is just outside the village limits, so the animal husbandry activities are quite legal.
We had one cow when I was a kid who was sort of a jerk and had a talent for escaping the pasture somehow. My dad usually required help to wrangle it back in - luckily, one of our neighbors, who happened to teach 7th grade English at the school in town that I went to, didn't mind helping.
Goats are incredibly stubborn animals, although I like them. (I housesat for a family I knew in Olympia for a couple months one summer when I was in college. One of the goats escaped the pen one day, although luckily the property itself was fenced. It was a long and irritating day trying to get that goat back in the pen, though.) My late great Zen teacher from back in Portland had some stories about dealing with goats back in his monastery days...
A bunch of years ago, I lived in Escondido, CA, a bedroom community for northern San Diego. It's in the avocado belt. The main drag of Escondido is Valley Boulevard; take Valley Blvd east out of town and you wind up next in Valley Center, the site of Young's 'Avocado Ranch.'
My wife called me at work one day. She had been startled by the sight of a cow looking in the living room window. We lived in a residential neighborhood, and the house was surrounded by a privacy fence (six feet high, redwood slats), except for about twenty feet for the driveway.The rogue bovine couldn't see a way out, so he scooted between the shrubery and the house to hide and rest after his six-mile hike up the road..
By the time I got home from San Diego, the city PD, county sheriffs, and local animal rescue, with help from the San Diego Wild Animal Park had coaxed the poor critter out of its refuge and were loading him onto the SDWAP truck to return him home. No personal, bivine, nor property damage occurred in the incident.
I really have to quit forgetting where I put the ObNatural panels.
"You see? That's just the point! You degenerate! You don't know anything about the real world! All you ever do is sit around here listening to rock and roll music on the radio and worrying about your balls ... and then you wanna know what the problem is!"
This particular goat just really liked me or something, and wanted to hang out or something, because when I finally got fed up at midday and went in the house, he walked around to the window of whatever room I was in and just stared at me. Either that or he was just playing a game of "let's irritate the sh*t out of Jamie" because when I then went outside eventually to put him on a lead, he'd run away, and when I did get him on a lead, he just threw himself down on his front knees and refused to move.
One of their daughter's parakeets also committed suicide that summer. I swear to G-d it wasn't my fault.
I have to ask, how does a parakeet commit suicide?
One of their daughter’s parakeets also committed suicide that summer.
Leaving her with a single keet.
I'm tempted to make a joke along the lines of "They would overdose on aspirin, but parrots eat 'em all", but no one in the US would understand. So I won't bother.
This particular bird was a real escape artist and had figured out a way to open his own cage and get out. (The other one never flew out when he opened the door, for some reason.) Anyway, I hadn't been able to figure out how he was doing it and thus prevent it, but for the most part it was just a minor nuisance of getting him back in the cage. (Usually he would eventually get hungry or miss his girlfriend or something and go back on his own.)
Anyway, one night I had made a big pot of brown rice, and a bunch had stuck to the bottom, so I filled it with soapy water to let it soak overnight. At around 6 or 7 in the morning, I awoke to the sounds of flapping and splashing. So I got up and ran into the kitchen, and the bird had jumped in the pot of water. I tried desperately for an hour or two to get him warm and dried off, but I think he swallowed too much water or something, because his little voice was all waterlogged. It was heartbreaking.
I really had to work up my courage to call and tell them about it. The lady of the house told me that that bird was kind of an a**hole anyway, which made me feel a tiny bit better.
@ JP:
As you may know, I live just outside one of the international centres of finance and entrenched evil, the great city of [Redacted]** which is in a temperate marine climate ( it can get cold) AND we have a colony of what are variously called 'parrots' or 'parakeets' from South America which escaped from an airport shipment decades ago that live on the wooded cliffs and nest on utility poles in enclaves of seriously over-priced housing.
There has been argument whether the birds are an endangered species or a pest. I've only seen a few once.
** there are a few people on the internet who would love to know exactly which nexus of evil it is so they can bother me or my business. No dice.
Mike Adams most definitely uses black hat techniques to boost his rankings. But he also has a lot of help from the bagillions (<--- a rough estimate) of social media shares.
A quick comparison of SBM.org and NN.com on Majestic.com reveals that NN is outranking you on both "Trust Flow" and "Citation Flow"... YIKES!
But since we're on the topic of SEO... didja know that when you are creating "followed" links in your posts to all these people you disdain, that you are actually helping to perpetuate the problem by passing Internet cred along to them? DOUBLE YIKES!!
Also, one other recommendation... double-posting your articles both here and on SBM.org is a no-no when it comes to SEO. Search engines don't like duplicate content.
Matt,
This blog automatically adds rel="nofollow" to links so that shouldn't be the case.
JP,
Poor little thing. It was probably the soap in the water that did for him. Detergents are surprisingly poisonous, even eco-friendly ones. I'm reminded of when I accidentally hit a bird with an arrow when I was a kid - I just intended to scare it away (I barely pulled the bowstring back) but by some freak coincidence the arrow hit an ugly tumor on its neck* and it dropped like a stone. All efforts to resuscitate it failed and I felt terrible.
* Clearly it must have had a junk food diet.
Hrmm... alright well if that's the case then why does this post have a followed link to the naturopath in question?
Yes. That's the posture they assume when vomiting.
Single keet haha.
Any psychiatrists out there for Mikey diagnosis.
Clever, deluded in the extreme, devoid of any self awareness, paranoid.
RE: Adams. I believe he is a diabetic who claims to be managing the disease entirely without medication. His erratic behavior appears to suggest that he is not being very successful.
@ Fergus:
Whilst I am not a psychiatrist, I do have education and training in clinical psychology
HOWEVER I could never, ever diagnose anyone on the internet because it's not ethical or meaningful.
BUT you can read up on personality disorders amongst other conditions on the DSM 5 and perhaps you'll figure it out.
A psychologist who mingled incognito with hiv/aids denialists, ventures that the leaders may be NPD.
One word of warning:
whether we're discussing alt media woo-meisters like Mike or anti-vax blogging Moms, we should remember that these people are writing for an audience and want to get views and/ or sales so their writing does not necessarily reflect their true thoughts or mode of intellectual/ emotional functioning.
They're PERFORMERS.
Matt,
It doesn't kill the link, it just tells web-crawling robots for some search engines not to use the link to improve a site's page ranking.
I am laughing at my computer over the goat shenanigans and the drowning parakeet. That is too funny. Goats are quite intelligent, but crazy climbers and stubborn. Some friends have a goat which is more a pet than anything else and her antics make for some great FB posts. You can make most anything a pet if you work at it enough. I had three pet hens in HS who would follow me everywhere I went and sit in my lap. I also bottle raised several orphaned calves who would follow me around as well. They are very tame. The only problem you have is that they think of you as momma and a friendly head butt from an 800 lb cow will knock you flying. And many animals are excellent escape artists. Houdini has nothing on a determine rat terrier.
Krebiozen,
Yes, I know what nofollow means. That particular link I pointed out is NOT nofollowed. It is passing cred to the site.
Just saw a story break on CNN, it seems more than just a pissing contest between HBO vs Scientology.
Disturbing that they were running a prison-style camp/building. The video clip retort showed their posh digs (which eerily reminded me of the Vietnam POW "clean" rooms).
More info on the HBO documentary:
http://money.cnn.com/2015/03/15/media/scientology-documentary-alex-gibn…
Is there any chance you could get off your now idiotically "SEOing" ass and point out which link and who the "naturopath in question" is?
I was tossing around an idea the other day. Say I was looking to fly from, oh let's say Atlanta to Telluride for some great skiing. Nice areas most of the time. But, on occasion can be rough weather, and of course, tricky mountain terrain & winds.
The question posed, would I want the flight crew to get an education, go through years of flight school/sim checks/oversight with mentoring given any number of situations -- decades of education, training & flight seasoning,
OR, would I rather have them watch a few videos on youtube and catch some blogs on the ole Facebook on how to fly the "right" way (let's say they did stay at the Holiday Inn Express while Facebooking the latest and greatest info before we took off)?
Obviously, I'd rather have my flight crew fresh from the Express. Best way to fly straight into the mountains....literally.
I think he needs to be nicknamed "Modest" Mike Adams. The only thing he doesn't claim to do is to leap tall buildings with ease and talk to God...
Well I would rather believe In this guy then big pharma why pay 10s of thousands from one thing to the next. One thing Is look at how dick clark died he died just a day after see a treatment from a doctor but before that he was fine. Same thing with Big Phamra Rep's some are speaking out the truth about what they are doing to us! No thanks to big pharma for me that's for sure and If It's okay for you then go for It see how you feel for years to come. Wanna really see how medical really started just look at the flexner report and ask yourself this If these ND's or others who believe In holistic medicine today then why where their more back then studying the holistic side more then conventional allopathic before ama started?? Also John D. Rockerfeller used only a homeopath while investing In allopathic medicine. Now why didn't he use his own medicine? Now In this day In age they call chiropractors has quacks according to the flexner report when the chinese have used It more then 3000 years ago without a problem for them. I'm glad I'm doing what I'm doing has I would not wanna be a victim using big pharma god knows what they really can do to our health plus they don't want us healthy we have to do It ourselves has their Is no money If your healthy.
rob legroulx,
Because 'big pharma' drugs work, and the stuff Adams sells doesn't?
You describe suffering dysarthria after a stroke that rendered him unable to speak clearly for the remainder of his life, coronary artery disease and benign prostatic hyperplasia as "fine"? Surgery does have some risks, and unfortunately Clark had a heart attack after a TURP, though for all we know he might have had a heart attack even without the surgery.What treatment would you have suggested for his prostate problem?
Are you aware that both life expectancy and active life expectancy have been steadily increasing in the US for the past several decades? How can this be the case if Adams' claims that everyone is being poisoned by food and by Big Pharma?
Flexner did an excellent job of cleaning up medical training and improving the quality of doctors in the US. Naturopathy and 'holistic medicine' are based on pseudoscience, and deserve to be abandoned. The number of people who ascribe to a belief is not a good measure of its veracity - around 2 billion people worldwide are Christians, 2 billion are Muslims and another billion are Hindus. They can't all be right, can they?
More to the point, why did Rockefeller become one of the first great benefactors of medical science, donating more than half a billion dollars, if he didn't believe in it?
No, chiropractic was invented out of whole cloth in 1895. The ancient Chinese used a pre-scientific model of the human body that was very similar to that of medieval European humors, and acupuncture was originally a form of bloodletting. Consider that life expectancy at birth in ancient China was below 30 years, and even by 1960 it was only 36.3 years. Does that sound like a country that had an ancient effective system of health care?
Personally I live in a country with socialized health care, so doctors and hospitals are on a fixed budget, with some doctors getting bonuses for better outcomes, making them highly motivated to do what is best to keep people healthy. Yet health care here is almost exactly the same as it is in the US.
^"if Adams’ claims that everyone is being poisoned by food and by Big Pharma were correct"
Seems to have had a fair amount to do with Frederick Taylor Gates and JDR Jr.