I have seen some stupid shit in my day, much of it emanating from Mike Adams' website, but this one takes the taco. It's...so...mind-warpingly endumbening that there is nothing left to do but declare Mike Adams' career as a self-styled "Health Ranger" over and inaugurate an era of his new career, wombat-licking crazy hobo shouting on the street corner. Seriously.
It's called, and I am not at all exaggerating:
It opens with this charming sentence:
Mention the word "astrology" and skeptics go into an epileptic fit.
For a health ranger, you sure treat epileptics like garbage, you turd-blast.
The idea that someone's personality could be imprinted at birth according to the position of the sun, moon and planets has long been derided as "quackery" by the so-called "scientific" community which resists any notion based on holistic connections between individuals and the cosmos.
The problems with this sentence are many, so let's just dwell on the most obvious ones. 1) "Holistic" is undefined. 2) It was made by Mike Adams. 3) We are all connected to the cosmos; hell, we're part of it--didn't you ever see Sagan's...sorry, thought I was talking to an adult. Of course you haven't, you ridiculous man-child. 4) Position of planets relative to what? Earth? The sun? Each other? 5) By so-called, he means, "actual." 6) We'd love to understand any actual effect on personality of the celestial world, but there is as of yet no evidence that this is the case, there is no plausible mechanism by which those effects could be felt, and 7) HOLYSHITWHATAREYOULIVINGINTHE
FUCKINGMIDDLEAGESYOUHOPELESSFAILURE?
It's not even quackery. Astrology is an embarrassment to quackery!
According to the conventional view, your genes and your parenting determine your personality, and the position of planet Earth at the time of your birth has nothing to do with it.
Then again, conventional scientists don't believe the position of the moon has anything to do with life on Earth, either.
The phrase "conventional scientists" shouldn't exist, first of all. The only scientists are the ones who bend to convention, not flaky spandex-wearing half-men like you, Mike.
They dismiss the wisdom that farmers have known for ages -- that planting seeds or transplanting living plants in harmony with the moon cycles results in higher crop yields.
Well, if a farmer says it, it must be true. It's like a new type of logical fallacy: ad agricolam. Show me your fucking data, pants-boy.
Even the seeds inside humans are strongly influenced by the moon, as menstruation cycles and moon cycles are closely synchronized (28 days, roughly).
That's why when a woman takes birth control, the phases of the moon stop! Also, it's why all women's periods are perfectly synchron...'Aaaang on!!
Skeptics must be further bewildered by the new research published in Nature Neuroscience and conducted at Vanderbilt University which unintentionally provides scientific support for the fundamental principle of astrology -- namely, that the position of the planets at your time of birth influences your personality.
In this study, not only did the birth month impact personality; it also resulted in measurable functional changes in the brain.
This study, conducted on mice, showed that mice born in the winter showed a "consistent slowing" of their daytime activity. They were also more susceptible to symptoms that we might call "Seasonal Affective Disorder."
How much do you want to bet that he misreads this study? Anyone? Anyone?
It turns out, these researchers drew up natal charts for a bunch of rats and, holy shit, they were able to predict that the little guys would have bald tails and love cheese! Actually, not really. According to the abstract, the study, "
Perinatal photoperiod imprints the circadian clock," reveals:
Using real-time gene expression imaging and behavioral analysis, we found that the perinatal photoperiod has lasting effects on the circadian rhythms expressed by clock neurons as well as on mouse behavior, and sets the responsiveness of the biological clock to subsequent changes in photoperiod. These developmental gene × environment interactions tune circadian clock responses to subsequent seasonal photoperiods and may contribute to the influence of season on neurobehavioral disorders in humans.
Uh...astrology? I see..."developmental gene × environment interactions", which sounds an assload like "your genes and your parenting"--that is, genetics and environment, and if part of your environment is the length of the day...well, so be it. Hardly a radical shift in our thinking about how personalities come about. It's not predicting events, it's making no exact predictions about individuals, it has exactly fuck-all to do with the position of the planets. It has to do with the length of the day.
Of course, this has as much to do with astrology as does a related article on the same web page as the abstract of the article you are failing to understand: "
Photoperiodism in the Plant Kingdom". Mike goes on, fizzle that he is:
The study was carried out by Professor of Biological Sciences Douglas McMahon, graduate student Chris Ciarleglio, post-doctoral fellow Karen Gamble and two additional undergraduate students, none of whom believe in astrology, apparently. They do, of course, believe in science, which is why all their study findings have been draped in the language of science even though the findings are essentially supporting principles of astrology.
They don't believe in astrology. They don't believe in astrology. They don't believe in astrology. They don't believe in astrology. Tattoo that on the ass of your sheep, just to make sure that you remind yourself of it every night. The people who you are citing, you enfeebled nitwit, don't believe in astrology. Day length is determined by the speed of a planet's rotation on its axis, not its position relative to the sun or planets. You're pathetic.
"What is particularly striking about our results is the fact that the imprinting affects both the animal's behavior and the cycling of the neurons in the master biological clock in their brains," said Ciarleglio. This is one of the core principles of astrology: That the position of the planets at the time of your birth (which might be called the "season" of your birth) can actually result in changes in your brain physiology which impact lifelong behavior.
Swing and a miss! Here you have it, people! A man bad at everything! (Except, inexplicably, selling vitamins and quack cures.)
Once again, such an idea sounds preposterous to the scientifically trained, unless of course they discover it for themselves, at which point it's all suddenly very "scientific." Instead of calling it "astrology," they're now referring to it as "seasonal biology."
Another thing that occurs to me as I mull over epithets to describe you, your family, your pets, and your primary school teachers, is that this is an animal study, not a study of humans. That even if you were right, and, man (I use the term loosely), are you so wrong in every way, you still could not extrapolate and say that it reliably predicted anything in humans, much less any individual human.
We are made of star stuff, says Carl Sagan. He he's right: We are not only made of star stuff, we are influenced by that stuff, too. And finally, modern science is beginning to catch up to this greater truth that astrologers have known since the dawn of human existence on our tiny planet.
Carl Sagan would hold you down and fuck you retarded, Adams.
I need to calm down. Kitties it is.
HJ
UPDATE! GOOGLE RUINED MY MOMENT OF KITTY ZEN IN, LIKE, THE WORST WAY IMAGINABLE!