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Complementary and alternative medicine Medicine Quackery Skepticism/critical thinking

Mike Adams launches a sustained campaign of lies against a friend of the blog

Several of you have noticed that a certain friend of the blog has been under attack from one of the quackiest of Internet quacks out there. Here is his response. The paranoia and stupidity are black hole level density. (Yes, instead of posting the whole thing, I’ve simply posted a link to our friend’s discussion and rebuttal of Adams’ charges.)

By Orac

Orac is the nom de blog of a humble surgeon/scientist who has an ego just big enough to delude himself that someone, somewhere might actually give a rodent's posterior about his copious verbal meanderings, but just barely small enough to admit to himself that few probably will. That surgeon is otherwise known as David Gorski.

That this particular surgeon has chosen his nom de blog based on a rather cranky and arrogant computer shaped like a clear box of blinking lights that he originally encountered when he became a fan of a 35 year old British SF television show whose special effects were renowned for their BBC/Doctor Who-style low budget look, but whose stories nonetheless resulted in some of the best, most innovative science fiction ever televised, should tell you nearly all that you need to know about Orac. (That, and the length of the preceding sentence.)

DISCLAIMER:: The various written meanderings here are the opinions of Orac and Orac alone, written on his own time. They should never be construed as representing the opinions of any other person or entity, especially Orac's cancer center, department of surgery, medical school, or university. Also note that Orac is nonpartisan; he is more than willing to criticize the statements of anyone, regardless of of political leanings, if that anyone advocates pseudoscience or quackery. Finally, medical commentary is not to be construed in any way as medical advice.

To contact Orac: [email protected]

64 replies on “Mike Adams launches a sustained campaign of lies against a friend of the blog”

What kind of strenuous physical activities takes place in a lab to warrant the water bottle, I wonder…?

If the good doctor has such superpowers, where he can edit websites he doesn’t have accounts on, what superpowers to I possess, as I am a Wikipedia editor?
The history of an article’s editing is trivially available, clicking “View history” and all edits are displayed. One can even see diffs on the edits.
Users have their own page and a talk page and the user with the most participation on the article on Vaxxed most certainly is not our good doctor.
Still, as was observed, we’re dealing with a fact free crowd, where denunciations trump facts, easily verified or debunked claims are accepted at face value and more bullshit is peddled than all of the combined cattle on the planet – throughout the history of cattle!
It’s just a shame that the good doctor had to waste his time on this nonsense from a Neanderthal ninny.

I’m kinda surprised you didn’t go after him for his usage of the vile term Vaccine Holocaust Denial” considering your interest in debunking the real deal.

I mean it is such a disgusting hijacking and abuse of the term (not to mention obviously trying to get the negative connotations of Holocaust Denial rub off on you!).

Adams better hope your incredibly busy blogging schedule doesn’t permit time to drag him to court, as I bet his disgusting Fata smear is highly actionable. What a noxious donkey shart.

First:

“Vaccine Holocaust Denialists (…) Or was his mind already deranged before the lead came along?”

Then, later:

“People who are infested with intense evil and hatred almost never see it themselves.”

Oh, the irony.

I think it’s interesting that he appears to be threatening to make legal complaints against Gorski which have no basis in fact. That could lead to up to six months in jail (http://is.gd/MaliciousProsecution).

As tot he claim that Gorski is MastCell and has hijacked the Vaxxed article, that is trivially disproven. MastCell has never edited the article (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Vaxxed&offset=&limit=5000&action=history) or commented on the Talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Vaxxed&offset=&limit=5000&action=history). Actually I think I (JzG) am the admin who has most zealously defended that article against nutters.

He has an open water bottle, on a laboratory cart, in a laboratory and is not wearing a lab coat. If there was *any* research carried out in this lab, we’d be looking at a serious Health and Safety violation that should lead to an investigation into risk assessments, and H&S training in that lab. Since all of that is just for YouTube movie props I guess it’s ok.

@ Amethyst

Eh, talking all day to the camera is strenuous activity, especially for one’s tongue and salivary glands. Hence, water.

OT: As an aside, food and drink in a lab are generally frowned upon. You don’t want to contaminate your samples with your ham sandwich, or risking spicing your cup of tea with a sprinkle from the jug of hazardous material next bench.

As for the Holocaust part… Adams has been invoking the Hitler Zombie so often, we are getting blasé. Still bad taste and unimaginative.

—————————————-
As for Adams’ delirious and libelous sh!tstorm…
Hold tight, Orac.

[…] two toxic metals known to contribute to mental illness […]

Has he just inserted an advertisement for his lab’s heavy metal dosing services into his denunciation rant? Cannot help himself, I guess, business comes first.

J’accuse, and come eat at Joe’s.

Ah, Catherina beat me to the topic of the drink in the lab, and in sharper terms.

“People who are infested with intense evil and hatred almost never see it themselves. They are consumed by it but it feels “normal” to them, so they think there’s something wrong with everybody else, never suspecting the severity of their own mental illness. ”

Projection much, Mike?

@ Guy Chapman

Oi! Don’t suggest he goes into a joint venture with Andy. They will start spinning around one another and the woo density will create a black hole.
On the other hand, that would give us gravitational waves to study.

Having met Dr Gorski (though not professionally), if any of my family needed a breast cancer surgeon, I’d happily send them to him.

I’d sooner perform surgery on myself than trust Mike Adams.

OK…don’t know why my last comment went into moderation. Unless mentioning the name is like summoning Beetlejuice…

He has an open water bottle, on a laboratory cart, in a laboratory and is not wearing a lab coat.

A lab coat is not necessary unless you are doing something in the lab which may contaminate your clothes or vice versa. PC labs excepted.

However, an open drink bottle would see him booted so fast from my lab that his butt would not even touch the stairs*.

* I inhabit a basement.

Mike Adams tells lies.

The Pope remains catholic.

Bears sh!t in the woods.

The sun comes up tomorrow.

Actually I think I (JzG) am the admin who has most zealously defended that article against nutters.

I am impressed by the general level of comity that prevails in W-pedia debate, e.g. between JzG and Contzar and Jytdog and Mjolnirpants.

I found a measle in that lab. *points to Mikey*

Or a small, furry animal that rhymes with “measle”.

“sustained campaign of lies”

As if Adams has ever engaged in a campaign of truthful statements.

Someone finally got to IMDB and “corrected” the Plot Keywords for Vaxxed. Until recently, the keywords were “nonsense, pseudoscience, box office flop, and critically bashed.” I thought that was lovely.

Now the keywords are “Corruption, autism, enlightening, quackery, heartbreaking.”

Kudos to the IMDB individual who originally set it up. I don’t know how the details get changed, but I liked the original list better.

@ Chris Preston

I don’t know about number 2 and 3…

Pope Francis had some refreshing thoughts and actions, I’m not sure he is really catholic anymore. Well, especially if I compare him to one French bishop who became recently famous for stating publicly that he was not sure that pedophilia was a sin.
As for bears, does anyone remember someone complaining about stepping on bear dung while hiking in a wooden area? Stepping on the Health Ranger doesn’t count.

As for number 4, ask me again tomorrow. Only way to be sure 🙂

@ Daniel Corcos

He has become a water specialist.

He is just concentrating his business vertically, is all. He always has been a master of convincing people it was rain he was pouring on their shoes. Golden rain.

Just look at the rating VAXXED has on IMDB. Something like 8/10 last I checked. It is a friggin’ joke. No wait, the opposite – it is a bloody tragedy.

@chris preston — An early issue of the National Lampoon had a parody of the then-new magazine Psychology Today, entitled “Psychology Ptoday”. The cover advertised articles such as “Religious Orientation of the Pontiff” and “Ursine Defecation Habits”.

Ewww! He looks so pasty and UNhealthy. Who would take his advice about anything, let alone health?

Still, it’s good to know that Dr. G is becoming a name worth knowing.

If sued, Adams would probably argue that he was just responding to vicious, unprovoked attacks by this blog. We know from the Barrett case what can happen when a judge is sympathetic to claims that someone’s right to free speech (i.e. lies) is being infringed.

It looks like Mike had a great deal of pent-up hysterical rage over his skewerings on RI and has finally blown a woo gasket.

Dr. G. is indeed in distinguished company along with other respected battlers against pseudoscience, Drs. Offit and Folta.

[double posting, hoping to beat Beetlejuice moderation flag]

Being attacked by Mike Adams is a badge of honor.

But I get that Dr. DHG. already has a chest full of medals from being the target of rhetoric much more repulsive than Health Ranger’s, and the weight of the honors gets to be too much. So when a desperate Adams apparently has nothing better to do — having already saved the word with 3D printed efficiency apartment agriculture gizmos – and turns the outrageous horse sheet nozzle up to eleven, there’s a camel’s straw thing, and hell yeah, we’re way past hearty-chuckle-time and ‘thanks for the confirmation of righteousness.”

I recall to this day the first time, a good few years back now, when i actually followed a link into an anti-vax thread and read some stuff spewed there about Dr. G. Dark absurdist laughter runs in my veins, but any reading of that kind became out of the question but quick. My reaction was visceral. I felt deeply ill. I had to click out. I turned off the computer. I regained some equilibrium by the next day, but it was literally years before I could ever brave looking at that website again – and I am not exactly a delicate faint-hearted flower. We’re not talking “idiotic” here. We’re talking the most vile blind hatred — down the mouth of the Lord of the Flies and into The Heart of Darkness.

But Adams is something different. His schtick usually IS laughable. It reeks of performance and callous exploitation rather than genuine ugly passions. The hyper-Godwin’ Monsanto Collaborators’ page and Mikey’s ‘false flag’ disavowal were the kind of stuff that’s beyond satire, as the parody is built in. You get the feeling Adams is laughing when he churns this stuff out, that it’s a carny act for the rubes.

But when that ramps up into an obsessive, one-on-one vilification campaign the lack of blood in the act turns the silly into something deeply disturbing — Adams is just trying to sell more sh!t, gather more attention, build his brand… Looking into an ad hominem screed based in that, is looking into the Void.

It seems Dr. DHG can’t do it. He thinks Adams has made an “unforgivable attempt to claim” he worked with Fata or “approved of Fata’s evil.” Because that wouldn’t be a Void. That sort of defamation would be a truly hateful and hatable thing….

But Adams hasn’t claimed anything of the sort. He cranked out over 975 words about how ‘connections’ between just about every medical institution in Detroit constitute some sort of conspiratorial cabal with Farid Fata at the center – because Fata rented space for one of his private cancer clinics in one of their buildings. No, seriously, that’s the ‘argument. And none of those 975 words mention Dr. DHG.

Then, Adams tacks this on the end.

So who exactly were Fata’s accomplices? Is it possible pro-vaccine troll David G****i was somehow involved in Fata’s scam or at least privy to it? G****i’s professional career is embedded in the same circle as Fata’s. He works as a surgical oncologist at the Karmanos Cancer Institute, and though he has no reports of disciplinary action, neither did Fata, that is until just a few years before his scheme was exposed.

Sorry, Dr. G., that’s not libel. To defame someone, you actually have to say something, about them, that makes a factual claim, that is demonstrably false. Adams falls short at “to say something”. IANAL, but the headline “Pro-vaccine shill Dr. David G****i linked to cancer fraudster…” just might be defamatory. Perhaps you could argue that DHG and Fata are ‘linked’ by virtue of both being mammals. Ok, Mikey’s ‘patient complaints’ post says DHG is “a colleague of Dr. Farid Fata” which is manifestly false as Fata is serving a 45 sentence in Federal Prison…

It’s kind of weird that Dr. G. appears to have been able to laugh off the de facto if not de jure defamatory claims Adams makes about him in the ‘patient complaints’ post, but as silly an excuse for a ‘link’ as has ever been penned in seriousness or jest seems to have gotten under his skin. Maybe the good Dr. simply can’t comprehend the mind or heart that could create anything that cynical… Maybe some cognitive-dissonance-ish thing is leading him to see a defamatory substance in Mikey’s Fata-mumbling that isn’t there. Because that would in some way make sense – in that you could understand a human being accusing DHG of having “worked with or approved of Dr. Farid Fata’s evil” if they believed it. But how do you respond the Void? Maybe the faulty parallel structure there is a toll of how disturbing it would be for Dr. G. to face that emptiness square up. At several other points, too, in “Dear Mr. Adams”, DHG’s prose – usually erudite and sharp – feels about to unravel at the seams…

F*** that a**hole, doc. He ain’t worth five minutes of your time.

#23 Helianthus

As for bears, does anyone remember someone complaining about stepping on bear dung while hiking in a wooden area?

Well no, but I have had to do some creative bicycle handling when cycling on paths in the woods. Those were not mouse droppings. I did not witness a bear in the act.

And something BIG and clumsy also wiped out most of my favourite raspberry patch.

#26 darwinslapdog,

Yeah, he’s got the complexion of Lily Munster. He looks very unhealthy. I guess all his “farming” is all done at night by the light of the full moon. The guy lives in Texas where it is short sleeves and shorts weather into November and can’t get any sun? Maybe he should buy a tanning bed. I happen to know a scamming quack DO who may have quite a few he needs to get rid of cheap:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-sunbed-doc-settles-0415-biz-20160414-story.html

Or maybe he should get some smear-on fake tan. He can even test it for “toxins” and write a woo-tastic article and write it off.

Amethyst@1: Mike’s “laboratory” work largely consists of leaps of logic and jumping to conclusions. These are quite athletic for somebody of his physique. Thus the water bottle. (As others have noted above, that he has a water bottle in lab is the tell that it isn’t a real lab–among other things, there is the risk of poisoning yourself if the stuff you are studying gets into the water.)

As to whether our host should sue Mike for libel, I am in the “no” camp. Mike can plausibly argue that our host is a public figure, and in the US it is almost impossible for a public figure to win a libel suit. In particular, he can weasel out of it because of this phrasing:

Is it possible pro-vaccine troll David G****i was somehow involved in Fata’s scam or at least privy to it?

The punctuation mark at the end of that sentence is sometimes called a Cavuto mark, after one of its leading practitioners, Fox News personality Neil Cavuto. It’s an insidious form of JAQing off: it is meant to imply a link, but because Mike was careful not to actually answer the question he can claim that he never actually said there was a link.

Speaking of “manipulating articles on Wikipedia.” Here’s the beginning of the entry on Farid Fata I found this morning:

[Latest revision as of 10:39, 20 April 2016]
Farid T. Fata (born 1965) is a Lebanese-born former hematologist and the admitted mastermind of one of the largest health care frauds in American history. Once a leader of Karmanos Cancer Institute, with one of the largest cancer practices in Michigan, he was arrested in 2013 on charges of prescribing chemotherapy to patients who were either perfectly healthy or whose condition didn’t warrant chemo…

Before that revision, the second sentence began; “Once the owner of one of the largest cancer practices in Michigan”, and that’s all that was changed. The edit was made by an unregistered user listed as IP address 82.21.88.44.

I registered, and changed it back, adding the following ‘edit summary’ on the ‘History’ page: “(UNDO: Fata was not in any way a “leader” of the Karmanos Institute. He merely leased space for one of his 7 private clinics in the Institutes building. Apparent attempt to defame Karmanos by false association.”

A few things..

– last week I noted here that another post ( I forget which website- not one of my usuals) carried on about Dr DG and VAXXED- interestingly, Mikey uses the same photo.

– Mikey claims to do hard work outdoors on his ranch: shouldn’t he be more tanned?
Older photos of him showing off his muscles are tan.

-I especially ‘enjoyed’ his foray into psychological diagnosis and speculation about Orac, who was ” perhaps *violated* as a child” leading to “sociopathy” and being “psychologically unbalanced’ who ” needs to be a patient”. ” It doesn’t take a trained psychologist” to see that, he says.

Which he decidedly is NOT.
No one who has studied/ trained/ worked in this area would write as he does. He knows neither what he’s talking about nor his arse from a hole in the ground.

(Isn’t trying to defame someone illegal in the US?)

But maybe we should look at Mikey- WITHOUT diagnosing him because we have never met him and he didn’t request it-
and how he has earned his living over the past 20 years.

According to NN, Health Ranger.com and articles on NN ( esp his “Brush with Poverty” – look it up) :
he had a degree in technical writing, married a woman from Taiwan and went there to seek his fortune. Broke, he persuaded venders at tech conventions to let him write brochures for their products in English- using his wife’s skill in Chinese languages as the basis of communication.

In the US, he started a fear mongering website about Y2K, News Target, and created spamming software, Atrial. He put his money into Natural News ( 2007) and various projects that he promotes there. He has sold supplements, foods, prepper supplies, filters, books, films, MLM, real estate what-have-you. He tried to start a *colonia* to Ecuador to escape American Fascism but returned**.

Lately, his lab scares people about food and water so he can sell them products at high prices. He has supported the work of AJW- a fellow who was struck off because of his dishonest research. His bio ( Health Ranger.com) says that one of his role models is Gary Null, another scam artist whose healthy products once poisoned customers and himself. Both posture and pose as scientists and humanitarians to sell products. And themselves.

Mike didn’t have the intelligence, fortitude and endurance to get an education in science, be tried and tested by the system and then work in a field that directly helps people.
Dr DG did. And he’s also a much better writer.
Which tells me LOTS.

** prn’s guru claims that a high-profile natural heath guru was threatened with kidnapping there and left the country in response to a caller inquiring about Ecuador.

He’s found his niche to make some serious $$ and anyone that’s a threat to that is going to get attacked. Happens in any industry. However, it doesn’t make him less sleazy.

Another telling characteristic:
both woo-meisters claim that they don’t drink alcohol.
EVER.

Now would you trust an adult man ( who is not a member of an abstaining religious group or has a serious health condition) aged between 45-70+ who claims to NEVER drink ( in one case NOT ever in his life)?

I find that highly unlikely and if true, very very odd.

OT, but this NY Times blog article about a decrease in childhood ear infections, attributed partly to vaccines, was in my University’s news feed this morning, in case you need a blogging topic in the near future. I was expecting to see screaming in the quack-o-sphere, but it seems they’re all too busy getting their panties in a twist over the Vaxxed movie to notice.

“Another telling characteristic:
both woo-meisters claim that they don’t drink alcohol.
EVER.”

They do not wish to pollute their bodily temples of purity and wonderfulness.

“Wine, wine, wine
Pass that bottle to me”

– Stick McGhee

I realize that Mikey is probably not worth any more of Dr. G’s time, however since several commenters here seem to agree he’s crossed a legal line (re: libel, defamation, accusations, etc.) I’d love to see how Mikey would react to a dose of reality in the form of a lawyer’s letter from Popehat demanding all libellous material be removed and corrections posted.

Free speech and opinions are one thing, but c’mon, there has to be a point where Adams’s lunatic rantings are actionable. Someone has to teach him a lesson eventually.

He’d probably turn it around and cry how he’s being “censored” and “repressed” by the legal system, in cahoots with the evil gubbmint, the NWO, the “banksters”, Hillary Clinton and of course the Jooos.

I would disagree that legal action is warranted. Why bother even if there was libel? It would lend credibility to a whacko like Adams and besides, I don’t think our gracious overlord even suggested that’s a route he would bother with. You simply counter with the facts and leave frivolous litigation to the likes of the cranks.

@ Dangerous Bacon:

I sometimes ask myself” ” Where would I be without gin? ”
ABSOLUTELY true:
– my ancestors accumulated money through the manufacture of gin and later selling their business- this funded a grandparent leading to other businesses and
– I drank Tanqueray, tonic with benzodiazepine. in order to survive
qualifying exams ( not that much meds or else I’d be dead and unable to relate the tale.).

MI Dawn, I’d love to, but alas, I’m halfway across the country from you.

@ Woo Fighter:

Mike and company make their fortune by lying so why would they be any different about Dr DG or anyone else?

I think that Mike can be made accountable for his sins by other means such as countering his nonsense with reality over the ‘net.

I don’t know if I would sue if I were Dr DG. I’d have to think a lot about it.
HOWEVER he works for an institute or two that are also being slimed. I wonder what they think?

I just recalled something about Mike that doesn’t jive/ is jive:

– on the old Health Ranger site ( disappeared but accessible) in his bio he says that his parents worked doing drug trials or suchlike for Big Pharma so he followed that paradigm- drs, meds- until he became sick and fat ( as a software entrepreneur) when he saw the light and repented, learning nutrition.
– HOWEVER on the new HR site, bio, he says he had to choose a state university and couldn’t continue in grad school because his parents couldn’t afford it etc.

Wouldn’t TWO parents working in research earn enough ?

“Son, never trust a man who doesn’t drink because he’s probably a self-righteous sort, a man who thinks he knows right from wrong all the time. Some of them are good men, but in the name of goodness, they cause most of the suffering in the world. They’re the judges, the meddlers. And, son, never trust a man who drinks but refuses to get drunk. They’re usually afraid of something deep down inside, either that they’re a coward or a fool or mean and violent. You can’t trust a man who’s afraid of himself.”

– James Crumley

I still that lab he’s pictured in is green screen.

And, reading one of the articles there yesterday (don’t know what got into me), he referred to [i]epidemiologist[/i] Jake Crosby.

Wait. What?

We should feel sorry for poor Mikey. He’s been slapped up beside the head so many times when men, women, life, science, animals, fish have rejected him that he probably has CTE and dementia. If only he would donate his brain or whatever is between his ears to science to see if CTE is really his problem.

I am not a doctor so there is no medical validity to the above comments.

I drank Tanqueray, tonic with benzodiazepine. in order to survive
qualifying exams ( not that much meds or else I’d be dead and unable to relate the tale.).

I’ve been mixing booze and gabapentin myself recently; less dangerous than booze and benzos, I imagine. (That plus benzos are addictive, and neither my shrink nor I think that they’re very good for me. I did get some good doses of them in the psych ward(s).)

Currently drinking some home-brewed (by my uncle, who lives a ten or fifteen minute walk away) porter. It’ll cure what ails you.

I was up to 3.5 liters of whiskey a week, the nurse taking my new patient history must have thought I was joking.
Once my primary learned how much I was drinking to sleep through the night, he gave me tramadol (I requested that or codeine), just enough to take the edge off and let me sleep the night.
Now, I’m down to a much lower ethanol consumption.
Amazingly, my liver enzymes are all still good.

less dangerous than booze and benzos, I imagine
Both GABA agonists, if memory serves, so pretty substitutable.

he referred to [i]epidemiologist[/i] Jake Crosby. Wait. What?

My BA is in Chinese, so that makes me a Sinologist, right?

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Detroit office
Special Agent in Charge David P. Gelios
477 Michigan Ave., 26th Floor
Detroit, MI 48226

OFFICIAL COMPLAINT OF SUSPICION OF ONGOING CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY, NOTIFICATION OF IMMINENT DANGER TO PUBLIC SAFETY AND A CALL FOR INVESTIGATION OF KARMANOS PERSONNEL INCLUDING DR. DAVID GORSKI

@ JP:

That was before you were born.
I only did it 2-3 times a week for a few months. Low doses.
I never was addicted to anything except cigarettes. I quit that.

I wouldn’t recommend any of these combos.

Oddly enough, one of my friends just described her long flight regime: similar meds and red wine for a Transatlantic flight.

@ Tony C:

Re Jake epi.
He does have an MPH degree. But SERIOUSLY.
Ren doesn’t think so.

I wouldn’t recommend any of these combos.

There is a story involving a friend of mine who had taken Valium during a difficult time, then called me to see if I wanted to go out for drinks. Interesting night. He’s gay, but we ended up fooling around. (He and his long-distance beau in Croatia had just broken things off, I think he was feeling a little needy.)

It led to some heartbreak. He recently fell in love with another woman, but it didn’t go anywhere because he couldn’t figure out to do with her. Kind of the same story.

@ shay:

To answer your question form the other blog, SBM:

Mike, on Health Ranger, brags about all of the science and maths he studied, his fabulous grades and that he has a BS degree
but he never says what degree and from where ( a state university in the Midwest)

but putting things together ( as I do so well )

– he’s from Kansas
– on his post about his “Brush with Poverty” ( NN/ 2014 IIRC g–gle it),
he says he has a degree in Technical Writing-
whatever that is. So who knows. Is it science?

@Denice:

I am a former USMC weapons and tactics instructor who just retired from a position as a terrorism expert for the government.

The above statement is 100% true. It’s also misleading as hell, since a) WTIs in the Marine Corps conduct classroom instruction for air wing types on Soviet weapons systems and b) I was the county bioterrorism/public health planner.

But heck, the other way sounds so much more exciting, dunnit?

Both GABA agonists, if memory serves, so pretty substitutable.

Not really in practice. It’s also nearly impossible to kill oneself by overdosing on benzodiazepines alone.

I’m 62. Don’t drink. Never have. I was an only child in a single parent home, and moving into adolescence never even considered getting into teenage behavior that could cause trouble for my mom. By the time I got to high school, my mom had a pretty serious drinking problem, and I didn’t want to get into that. My few close friends, my BFF in particular, were weirdo brainiacs and minor sport jocks who didn’t ‘party’. We had other outlets for iconoclastic rebellion. None of us were self-righteous moralists about sobriety, either for ourselves or against the norm. We just wanted to keep our edge. We were loose and loopy w/o chemicals. During my UG years, two of my young childhood friends ODed, and others messed up their lives with booze.

Our wider social group, rec league softball guys, were typical Midwestern young dudes. They threw to a potluck tail-gate party in a stadium parking lot, I was assigned to bring chips so that’s all I did, and of course, the guys who brought drinks didn’t bring anything non-alcoholic, and there was no place around to go buy a two liter. I wasn’t about to bail in a snit or anything, so we all hung out, and as I chowed down on the burgers and salty snacks, I drank just enough soda-pop wine (Spaniada, IIRC) to wash down some of the salt and stay hydrated. I wound up an inadvertant buzz, and I absolutely. effing. hated it. I was far from drunk – no alteration of speech or motor skills – but my head wasn’t clear and was wandering off in odd directions. I just wanted to go back to being me, my own default vector of ‘weird’.

I have absolutely nothing in common with Mike Adams. i wrote this because when I read Denise #37, I felt genuinely hurt and sad.

I probably shouldn’t drink, but I do, even though it has gotten me into trouble before. Things might have turned out better in general if I had taken sadmar’s route.

Penn Jillette claims to never have had a drink of alcohol in his life. My dad was a teetotaler, having had a drinking problem in his 20s. There are plenty of people out there who don’t drink, and possibly never have, for all kinds of reasons.

jason – Based on the few FBI agents I know, that one’s going to get exactly the amount of attention it warrants.

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