A sane voice in a crazy world of Bad Science

 I can't pretend I read The Guardian every day, I barely get through the Saturday special.  

Thank goodness I can refer to the Bad Science column online.

Ben Goldacre comments on science reporting - good, bad and bogus...

He may not always defend your viewpoint (say, animal testing) - but he rips apart some media nonsense and so-called 'facts' getting used as propaganda.  Check him out demolishing the hysteria about cannabis, for instance.  

e.g. The new super-strong breeds of marijuana that drive people crazy.   Reefer Badness Ben Goldacre Saturday March 24, 2007 

 And in fact, what’s most amazing is that this scare isn’t new. In the US, in the mid 1980s, during Reagan’s “war on drugs”, it was claimed that cannabis was 14 times stronger than in 1970, which rather sets you thinking. If it was 14 times stronger in 1986 than in 1970, and it’s 25 times stronger today than the beginning of the 1990s, does that mean it is now, in fact, 350 times stronger than 1970?

That’s not even a crystal in a plant pot. That’s impossible. That would require more THC to be present in the plant than the total volume of space taken up by the plant itself. That would require matter to be condensed. If I was a physics-minded branding manager, I would suggest Quark Gluon Plasma as the most appropriate street name for this substance: and I look forward to reading about the scare in the Independent tomorrow.

 Um, yes - 6 million people in the UK smoke it, and this may incur a certain risk for the 800 people that could get triggered into schizophrenic breaks, etc.

He doesn't deny risk, just tries to keep it in perspective (think of the no-news of the 'acceptable losses' in the statistics of letting people drive, or drink, or even do both at the same time...)

This link will show you a sample of a range of cannabis articles (for instance).  

Use the Search on his site, for subjects that interest you.

 

Bogus's picture
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Blah blah cannabis blah blah blah

This particular article appears quite low on the blog search, but I so loved the title for a rational newspaper article that I had to post it!

Blah blah cannabis blah blah blah

"You mean my whole fallacy’s wrong?"
Marshall McLuhan

fly agaric 23's picture
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what skunk?

Aha, brilliant, thankyou Bogus. Helpful tools in daily bullshit detective work. Roll on.

fuzzbuddy's picture
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Good article Bogus
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excellent stuff :-)

I hear that miraculously more potent stuff all the time. Also, pretty much every other thing a person comes in contact with can offset their schizophrenia. One example: your cat! Crazy Cat Lady syndrome is actually pretty valid. A bacteria in the kitty litter that can get spread onto your tables & ingested can also offset schizphrenia. Mice who carry this bacteria (I call it Tom & Jerry disease) actually are affected neurologically to provoke them to fuck with cats, get eaten & pass the bacteria to where it most likes to live.

Also, they've found endocannabinoids which are ligands of cannabinoid receptors - an analog of marijuana that is produced by the brain! Our brains are built for our symbiotic relationship with this awesome plant. And it's a time traveling neurotransmitter. They function as retrograde messengers conveying messages backwards from postsynaptic cells to presynaptic cells!

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Pot protects against excitotoxic damage??

 

Anandamide is a highly studied endocannabinoid that has diverse effects, one of which is protection from excitotoxic brain damage.

Now, excitotoxins give me TERRIBLE migraines, so I've researched them extensively. Below, I pasted a summary of my findings. What bothers me, is that the more I read from so many different sources, the more evidence I see of governments' involvement in inflicting major excitotoxic brain damage to the masses. So finding out that an endocannabinoid protects our brains from this damage makes even more sense of how persecuted cannabanoid producing plants are in this country.MSG & MK Ultra Connections

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"When they don't want you to get near excitement, and in protest of that you just stay home."                                                                       - Gogol Bordello

I used to have really bad migraines, and nothing I took would make them go away, so I started paying attention to everything I was doing & eating before the onset of them to figure out the causes. After a bunch of experimentation, I narrowed it down to exitotoxins but mostly MSG. If I ate a boca burger (which has 4 different hidden names for MSG at the top of its ingredient list), I'd get a migraine for like 40 hours. The ingredient in common with all the things giving me migraines or headaches was msg; I never cared about it before that. I thought it was interesting that it was hidden under different names & created such drastic effects in some people. I read somewhere that people who have violent seizures & drop to the floor practically biting their tongues off in reaction to msg are luckier than the rest of us who are suffering cumuluative long term damage. I used to love extra sugar free gum all my life, & I had headaches all my life. I thought that it was interesting that Donald Rumsfeld was responsible for the legalization of aspartame.

I also thought it was interesting that Rumsfeld was involved with MK Ultra & other CIA mind control research at around the same time Aspartame & MSG became generally accepted as safe or whatever (I'm paraphrasing very sloppily). I know that MK Ultra experiments began in the 50s, but they continued & changed names for quite some time. I know that there was a big exchange of employees working for the FDA & Searle who distributes lots of aspartame type shit. I thought it was interesting that both were exitotoxins that kill neurons where they concentrate.

So the connection was just a half-serious theory of mine, and then someone lent me this book called Excitotoxins: the taste that kills written by a neurosurgeon. Now, Rumsfeld also has money in pharmaceuticals, and many pharmaceuticals deal with problems people have related to appetite, hormone balance, etc. It is assumed that the brain is safe from exitotoxins because the blood brain barrier is supposed to protect the brain from excess glutamate getting in. However, the blood brain barrier is not complete in children (and baby food used to be full of msg) and is often not intact with people who already have neruodegenerative diseases or have ever had a head injury that could compromise areas of the blood brain barrier. But even if our barrier is intact, our pituitary glands, hypothalmus, & a few other things that I can't remember off the top of my head are outside the blood brain barrier, and glutamate gets concentrated in those areas for periods of like 4-6 hours causing a great deal of damage & imbalance there. And that is where our hormones, appetites, energy, and mood levels are governed.

Also, exitotoxins trick our brain into thinking we like what we're tasting even if it tastes like shit by over exciting our neurons to death. Therefore, it's in lots of health food, junk food, fake meat type shit. The neurons where the exitotoxins are concentrated, are those that govern our ability to respond when we determine action is necessary. That's the purpose of the excitatory function in our brains that's being manipulated by these ingredients.

Now this is what tripped me out about the book & made me think I might be right with my crazy theory. The research submitted to the FDA to get it labeled generally recognized as safe is of course done by scientists working for the glutamate companies. Another neurosurgeon (not the one who wrote the book) was fighting against their inclusion in baby foods where it did so much harm to developing brains. He was surprised that the glutamate scientist gave the monkeys she experimented on such a large dose of glutumate, as any animal would have to immediately vomit a quantity that high. He asked her if they vomited, she said they did, he said, then the study is not valid because we don't know how much actually got into their bloodstream & then brains. This was at a hearing in front of like 90 people. 4 years later, she denied they vomitted and denied ever saying that (even though 88 other people heard her). 4 years after that, she admitted that they did vomit and added a new piece of information: THE MONKEYS WERE UNDER AN ANESTHETIC THAT PROTECTS THE BRAIN FROM LESIONS CAUSED BY MSG CALLED MK80.

Why is it called an MK and all the CIA mind control shit also called MK names? Just to make me more crazy, I'm sure. This other book that I read that fucked me all up (read it yourself if you want to get completely all fucked up) is called Behold a Pale Horse written by an ex Naval Intelligence Officer - William Cooper. In one of the appendices he shows documents that talk about how a mind control procedure in the
USA could only be successful if it's done gradually on a mass scale in a way that nobody can really notice. It also talks about electromagnetic radiation as a technique and Cell phone towers are everywhere emitting that. AND Cell phone companies are very involved in the war in Iraq & mass slaughter in the Congo, so I wouldn't think they're too ethical to be fucking up all our brains.

I very very rarely ever have headaches now & only a little feeling of extra pressure in my head once a month where debilitating migraines used to be.  I try really hard to not make people rich in exchange for making me sick.  You may want to research hidden sources of msg & stick to regular sugar over aspartame or ignore this all together.  Mind you, aspartame is also supposed to make it harder for your body to break down fat and worse for diabetics than the average person.  So if you're drinking diet soda because you want to lose weight or control your blood sugar, you're eating your enemy.  Again, feel free to research or discard this information . . . if you even bother reading it :-)


Oh, and what do I think the purpose of this MK Ultra - MSG Mind control experiment would seek to control people to do?  Exactly absolutely nothing.  Tell me it's not working.

(P.S.  Boca Burgers are made by Philip Morris)