It's Christmas Eve, and the blogging is light. I was going to have some fun with a truly ridiculous—is there ever any other kind?—segment on Dr. Oz's show in which he actually combined a quack and a psychic with some EEGs to become a "100% believer" in psychic scammer "Long Island Medium" Theresa Caputo. However, Steve Novella got to it before I did; so there isn't much left, and with Christmas tomorrow my blogging schedule will become a lot more intermittent for the next few days. By the time I get back into the regular groove, other quackery will likely have popped up, and Oz's latest offense against science and reason will have faded into the background noise of his quackery. Or maybe there will have been a new, even worse offense. With Dr. Oz, you never know.

Be that as it may, as I wish all my readers a joyous Yuletide season and a happy New Years, there is something that I am very much looking forward to in early 2014 and something that I'm so grateful for right now that I can't resist mentioning it right here, as a little Christmas present to all my readers. Remember three weeks ago, when contender for the title of One Quack To Rule Them All, Mike Adams, bragged about his impending announcement of a groundbreaking "discovery" that would, according to him, revolutionize food science, as he sat in front of scientific equipment without a lab coat, lab safety glasses on top of his head rather than being worn to protect his eyes, all with a feces-slurping grin. Elsewhere, Adams posted YouTube videos like this touting his "revolutionary" science:

The date for that announcement is fast approaching.

In fact, just yesterday, Adams decided to dole out more information about this "revolutionary" and "groundbreaking" discovery that he claims to have made. It turns out that this will be more than just a single announcement. It will be "announcements," and there will be "several new mini-documentary videos, feature story announcements as well as unscripted videos from the lab."

Comedy gold! Blog fodder galore! I can hardly wait! Thank you, Mike, for making my new year a potentially happy and fruitful one (from a blogging standpoint, anyway). I know it will be hilarious because of how Adams describes his impending announcements:

Not everything is being announced in just one day. These are complex, high-level scientific breakthroughs that require considerable explanation to convey. It's going to take us the entire week to get all the important announcements released, so plan to see breakthrough announcements on January 7, January 8, January 9 and beyond.

Yes, he still seems to think that he's a real scientist, except that I don't know any real scientists who would announce a discovery this way. I'm not claiming that some real scientists don't engage in showboating. However, real scientists publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature first. "Scientists" who don't publish their findings in the peer-reviewed literature first (or who don't at least first present them at a scientific meeting) are looked upon in the scientific community as dubious—and rightly so. Of course, Adams is so far beyond dubious that if dubious were on earth he'd be in another galaxy somewhere, but the same principle applies. What makes this case amusing is that Adams is playing at being a scientist. What makes it sad is that he's apparently managed to get his hands on real and expensive scientific equipment, which he's using in the service of pseudoscience. Given how poor funding levels are right now and how many scientists are doing without equipment that they could use, it's a travesty that a quack like Adams is playing—and, again, that's all he's doing—with expensive scientific equipment like a mass spectrometer.

In my last post about Adams, I speculated that he's probably going to be using mass spectroscopy to measure various elements and molecules in supplements and food. I also wondered if he had acquired a real time PCR machine and was planning on looking for GMO-associated genetic sequences, to prove that virtually every food has GMOs in it. The purpose? To sell you his own brand of supplements and health foods, of course! Now, I'm even more convinced that that's what he's up to:

I can't give you all the details yet because I need to show you the full data set along with explanations, but there are many claims which have been made about some dietary substances which are simply not true. Some of these myths have been propagated around the natural products industry for so long -- and repeatedly quoted by "experts" -- that they are assumed to be true. Yet our research reveals that they are not true at all. Some of these myths have been promoted by well-known holistic doctors.

And:

Because one of the things I've found in all this research is that natural product formulators are often just "wildly guessing" about the efficacy of their products. Through meticulous research, I have been able to discover that many of the most highly-touted products in certain categories are actually not every effective at all... and there are far more effective substances that accomplish the same goals at a significantly lower cost.

Anyone want to bet whether part of Mikey's announcement will be that he's now selling (or teaming up with a company selling) these "far more effective substances"? Yeah, that'd be a sucker's bet. But Mike can sure make it sound science-y:

Thank you for your patience as we have been intensely engaged in the high-level chemistry and atomic spectroscopy necessary to develop and document this breakthrough science. None of this has been easy. For several months, I have personally spent 12-hour days in the lab doing things like developing methodologies, testing concentration variabilities and running what now amounts to thousands of samples of foods, superfoods and nutritional supplements. This research takes a tremendous amount of time, money and effort to conduct. There has already been conspiracy speculation on how we were able to access the hugely expensive instrumentation necessary to conduct this research, but the simple (and boring) answer is that we funded this from your purchases at the Natural News Store. We collected the profits from that effort, in other words, and instead of stuffing them into our own pockets, we made huge investments in food science research that's now just two weeks from changing our world for the better.

"High level chemistry"? Oh, Mr. Adams, you owe me yet another new keyboard. I was drinking coffee as I read that. I really should know better by now, but I was. Mikey's so cute, too. He really does think he's doing real science. Am I supposed to be impressed that Mike claims to have spent 12-hour days in the lab? Where's his dedication? That's short! What about weekends? Of course, you can spend all the time in the world at the lab, but if you don't know what you're doing all that will result from it is more copious quantities of useless, invalid results. Given Adams' lack of scientific ability, his apparent lack of concern for controls and instrument calibration, we can anticipate that that's what he'll come up with.

As I said before, though, it'll be comedy gold and highly amusing blog fodder for 2014. His announcing more of his intention is also the most beautiful unwitting Christmas gift to skeptics like me. Merry Christmas!

ADDENDUM: Holy crap. How did I miss this? It's been pointed out in the comments below that Mike Adams has given us another Christmas present. Even better, he's sitting in his lab as he gives it! Check it out!

He even makes a racist comment about its being "like Christmas in Harlem" based on a gangster rap coloring book he's included in his song. Wow.