I thought that for one of these first few blog posts a good
idea would be to let my audience know about my little ball of yarn, The Health
Ranger. The man behind the self
aggrandizing pseudonym is actually Mike Adams, an ex-software company CEO whose
advice should be labeled under the category "the idiots guide to
experiencing natural selection first hand"
There are a number of articles out in publications and blogs about Adams
that any reader should go to in order to better understand who he is and what
he does. Dr. David Gorski has written a
number of good articles about Mike Adams an example of which can be found here. Brian Dunning of Skeptoid.com, a
terrific science education site, called Adams' main site, Naturalnews.com,
"Without a doubt, the wrongest site on the internet" But I figured a novel way to go about it is
to dissect Adams' own biography on his web site Healthranger.com. I encourage anyone who wants a good laugh to
read it, as it reads like a child describing how great he is to his friends at
summer camp.
On the home page of his personal site Healthranger.com, the first thing a
person sees is a photo slide show, showing several awards Adams has won for
outstanding journalism, followed by (when I visited) a photo of Mike with the
caption "Health Ranger calls for improved science education in America". i can assure you all that the very last thing
mike Adams wants is improved science education because it would drastically
reduce his own income. These awards for
journalism were given at the Sacred Fire Of Liberty Gala. A few google searches reveals that the event
was sponsored by Emord & Associates, a law firm notorious for defending the
fringe supplement and natural products industry. They are also, according to The HuffingtonPost, attorneys for Mike Adams.
Adams' biography is incredibly long and self aggrandizing,
playing himself as a savior sent to save the world from just about
everything. It seems to have been
written around 2012 because of some dates used, but for this article's sake,
I'll assume not much has changed. To
start with, Mike calls himself an outspoken health advocate, award winning
investigative journalist, and science lab director among other things. I'll come back to the science lab director
part later, but first I want to address the award winning journalist claim. I am unaware of when and if Mike Adams
currently is or ever was a client of Emord & Associates, however if, as the Huffington Post claims, Adam's is a client of Emord, and if he was their client
before 2014 when he received his awards, then it certainly takes much of the
wind out of those awards he prominently displays on his site. Most of the other mentions of awards I was
able to find were from small radical groups in the same vein as Adams. Next, a list of several of Adams' websites,
Naturalnews.com, CounterThink.com, Foodinvestigations.com,
Healingfoodreference.com, and Honestfoodguide.com are listed, leaving out
others like Newstarget.com Naturalpedia.com and many others. All of these web sites are continuously
linked, citing each other as primary and secondary sources, to the point where
it seems Mike has built the worlds largest ideological echo chamber completely
online.
Biographical History
Next comes the biography, giving the usual date of birth and
such, but also claiming that he:
"scored in the
99.9th percentile across all U.S. students. He aced the English, Mathematics
and
Science sections of college entrance exams, scoring 100% on
3 out of 4 sections earning numerous
offers of scholarships from various universities, including
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(which he chose not to attend)."
Of course, who would ever choose to attend stupid old
MIT? That's where all the idiots go to
school. The biography does not say where Adams actually went to college, but
only that he has a bachelors in science from "a prominent university in
the midwest". It is somewhat
strange that the man who loves to trumpet his achievements and awards does not
say where he went to college or display his diplomas. The biography does say
that Adams chose not to attend graduate school, begging the question how can he
claim a scientific expertise in nutrition and health. This section also describes Mike's experience
as a CEO of what he merely calls a "software company". For a very good detailed history of this
company and what it did, read this excellent article in Health Wyze, part of a
whole series on little Mikey. What Mikes
software company was best known for is developing ways to get spam email past
spam prevention programs.
Education
The next interesting section is on little Mikey's
education. Claims made here include that
he started college before graduating high school, a practice common for many
seniors at least in California where I grew up, that he studied many different
topics (in other words a general lib arts education), and that he was offered a
position as head of sound design for a theater department at a "large
university", which of course he turned down. Then come some of my favorite claims. The bio says that he
"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."
I have listened to some of Mikes music videos on his sites
and I would describe him as anything but "extraordinarily
gifted". My little brother and i
recently spent about half an hour on You Tube laughing our asses off at the
amazing impression Mike does of a two-bit karaoke star (oh wait, those are his
music videos). I encourage anyone who is
a fan of listening to a washed up backstreet boy with a head cold and a recent
conversion to the church of what the fuckery to check it out.
Technical Projects
Continuing on are a series of claims that read as though the
dorky kid in class is claiming he lost his virginity over the summer to a girl
from out of town that you don't know, and he lost her number so don't even try to reach her guys. I'll go through them in order.
1. Adams was accused
by a teacher of practicing witchcraft for writing computer code on paper in 5th
grade.
- I'll say this one could be true, I'm not going to do the math and figure out how old Mike was in fifth grade to see what computers were available at the time and make a guess at whether this story is a fabrication or not, but since he made his money in programming, I'll mostly believe this one.
2. In seventh grade
Adams was able to solve a Rubik's cube in under a minute and had a record time
of under 26 seconds.
- Funny that Adams has never demonstrated this in any of his hundreds of YouTube videos, at least as far as i can find, but I invite him to demonstrate the ability and I will gladly say it is true.
3. That at 14 Adams
was a completely self taught computer programmer doing his own complex
algorithms and developed one of the first "cannon wars' games for the
Apple IIe.
- Again believable but not provable.
4. That at 25 he
built a program that could beat the stock market averages by 20%, of course he
chose to pursue his software company making spam email instead.
- This one makes no sense. Being able to beat market averages by 20% is incredible and would have made him incredibly wealthy. Either it is not true, Mike has very bad judgement, or he is a crazy super genius that was bored with stocks and wanted to make spam email software instead. I can guess which one he would choose, but I'll keep my guess to myself.
5. That at its peak
his software was used by 100 fortune 500 companies
- Fine, I believe it, his terrible software company was successful after all.
6. Some technical
jargon about search engines and Natural News' popularity that the programmer
friends and Redditers I asked all said is not that uncommon anyway
7. Adams' web site
Science.naturalnews.com publishes 10 million abstracts from the National
Library of Medicine.
- In other words he thinks it is an amazing achievement to have access to part of what is already freely available through PubMed, located on his site. Of, course his site doesn't get advertising revenue when people use PubMed, so making himself more money I guess is the accomplishment here.
8. Adams created
Naturalpedia.com, which he calls "a database of hundreds of thousands of
quotes from over 1,000 books on health and nutrition."
- Out of context quotes from 1000+ books that likely had to Pass Adams' test before they were included. As flawed as Google may be, it still provides amazingly better results than anything you will find on Naturalpedia.
9. My favorite
paragraph is the last one of the section, which reads as follows:
"Adams' technical specialty is in the use of computer
science algorithms to parse written text. Over
the years, he has developed numerous algorithms for finding
hidden signals in large bodies of text.
Adams possess the technology to monitor trends and make
predictions about bank runs, epidemic
disease, race wars and other issues reflected in human
communications on the 'net. To date, he has
not deployed such a technology and has not announced any
plans to do so."
- I swear that the first thing I thought of when I read this was a memory from kindergarten having someone say "well yeah I have superpowers, I just don't want to use them right now, because i'm tired". But what if Adams really does have such technology? (Which I doubt). Would it not be absolutely immoral for him to withhold life saving technology that could incredibly benefit the human race? So either way, whether this is a lie, or a truth, i think all can agree Mike is an asshole because of it.
Patents
If there's anything we have learned about Mikey so far it is
that he is a very special boy, that's really smart and had every idea
first.
So it comes to no one's surprise that Mike was the original
inventor of a Google Glass-like device.
Unfortunately he just didn't have the money for the patent process in
1995 (after he has already started his software company). Today, the cost of a
patent application is a $150 filing fee, attorneys fees, some drawing fees and
others that attorney Gene Quinn estimates average to about $14,080. That's no chump change, but for someone who
at that time had their own software company and who claims to have already
invented software at that time that could beat market averages by 20%, it
probably should have been do-able.
And of course, Mikey is developing the world's greatest
battlefield soldier active camouflage ever.
Because I'm sure Mike's superpower as a kid was always invisibility...
and every other superpower (we all remember that kid). Well Mike there's one thing we can agree on
here, I also wish you could dissapear.
If you've made it this far CONGRATULATIONS. I know this was a very long article, but I'm
not joking when I say how long, redundant, and unbelievable his own Bio page is
on his web site. Please look for yourself
at this link to the the Mike Adams Biography.
Unfortunately I'm not even done writing about this pile of slop, I'm
barely even halfway, but for my readers enjoyment and my own sanity, I will
stop for the time being until I can muster up the intestinal fortitude to write
part two. As always, thank you for
reading, and science is power.
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