The following is simply all my own opinions and observations. I have no proof of anything regarding this situation either way. I'm just writing about it and speculating, as usual.
I'm still upset for what Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com has done to Jason Cairns of OrganicJar.com and though I'm sure I'll let it go soon, I'm not quite ready to do so just yet. Mike doesn't seem to be ready to let go of anything either.
I know a lot of people think that this should just go away and blue skies and rainbows should appear and we should all dance into the sunset. I'm sorry but I do not believe in putting my head in the sand. Things do not go away by ignoring them. It just gives unscrupulous people a chance to do their thing with minimal interference. If you are a spiritual person, a "The Secret" type of person, then maybe you are suppose to take that spiritual strength that your building and use it to tackle the reality that is in front of you instead of burying your nose in your navel and pretending nothing but good exists. That's a trap that appears to be the easy way out, but it's not. If you allow something the opportunity to get worse because you ignore it then it probably will get worse. Look at the state of America today. Your attention just may be the bucket of water that puts out a fire that would otherwise burn out of control.
Why do I care so much?
The Natural Health movement has enough problems to tackle without people like Mike Adams coming along and making it a big ego trip and acting like they have exclusive rights to a subject. Mike scours the ALREADY WRITTEN NEWS, changes the words around and acts like he made a discovery. If you want to get the news that Mike puts out a day before he does, just put in some keywords to Google news and let the internet bring it to you, then watch how it shows up on NaturalNews.com within the next few days slightly rewritten to Mike's style. NaturalNews.com contains very little original news people. Shall we do some comparison and then accuse Mike Adams of plagiarizing the AP, Reuters, etc...?
Gary Null has done the same thing and I've written about him also here and here. It's not about Mike Adams or Gary Null. They have not revealed any previously undiscovered news. They do not have exclusive rights to take the news and make it theirs. People like this just end up nullifying (no pun intended, but it works) all the good work done by making it more and more about themselves than about the mission.
I don't like being upset with these big players that are supposedly on the same side that I'm on. But fat headed egos are what has gotten this world into so much trouble already and WE DON'T NEED ANYMORE. I find these situations to be very upsetting, frustrating and sad. Why do they have to act this way?
I also care because if it can happen to Jason, it can happen to me or you or anyone else who is defenseless against such wrath. If someone with the readership and influence that Mike Adams of NaturalNews has can simply decide that they suspect someone of doing something they don't like and can then direct their influence over their readership to carry out their wishes against that person, who will then do it without much question, then that's pretty scary. Just because some people are able to attain power and/or influence does not mean they deserve to have it or that they will not abuse it. That should be pretty obvious to just about anyone by now. And guess what? Regardless of what he thinks of himself, Mike Adams is just a human being subject to the same flaws as the rest of us. Most of us are just more willing to admit it.
Is it really OK to endanger another persons life, put them through hell and shred their budding reputation as a fellow natural health advocate for something so trivial? I say trivial because I do not believe that Jason Cairns was being consciously malicious - unlike Mike Adams has been. Mike Adams instigated the violence by writing the article encouraging people to harass Jason as well as publishing Jason's personal info. Jason's info could, admittedly, be found on the web if you know where to look, so it was already out there. But, the phone number was not correct and another innocent person is paying for that. Mike made it very easy by handing it out. Most people would not have taken the time to search out Jason's personal info on their own. Of course none of those people would have done anything if Mike Adams hadn't directly encouraged them to act.
For all you people who followed Mr. Adams orders out of sheer blind loyalty, you are just a bunch of mindless sheep following yet another authority figure so you don't have to use your own freaking brains for anything. You will eventually end up being a target of people like Mike Adams. Mike is well aware that 70 Percent of People will Torture Others if Ordered. Even if Jason did everything Mike is accusing him of, becoming a vigilante mob is, in my opinion, not the most enlightened answer to the situation.
I don't think it's right that Mike Adams can do what he did to Jason Cairns on the World Wide Web and then, when he achieves his objective, simply delete the article that instigated the "escalating violence" from his site so most people will never see how it got started and yet continue his character assassination of Jason anyway. It's like he shot Jason and then ditched the gun and picked up a knife. So, the article is reprinted at the bottom of my rant. Mike says he removed it to stop the violence that it inspired, but I think he mainly wanted to cover his ass because his objective was plainly to get as many people as possible to harass and threaten a single individual via email, telephone and physical address for what is looking more and more to me like nothing but an error, a MISTAKE! Thousands against one is not exactly a fair fight. Mike knew that when he put that article out there, it would stay out there regardless of whether he removed it from his site or not. You cannot convince me that Mike did not know exactly what he was doing. Mike Adams truly abused his power this week.... And he is showing no signs of letting up.
Mike Adams has written an email update to this situation still accusing Jason of extreme wrong doing and yet Jason has apologized several times publicly, has corrected his errors and apologized some more. To hear Jason tell it he has complied with everything Mike Adams has requested... What happened between then and Mike's latest assault?
>From Mike's latest email update on this matter: - (Bold parentheses mine):
"As far as the update on the web content pirate goes, the guy has turned out to be quite a trickster. He insisted I call him to resolve the issue, but his phone was disconnected (The number for Jason that Mike published was old and so now, per Jason who has been contacted by attorneys, an innocent person is receiving harassing phone calls and is having to seek legal action). He emailed me and promised a public apology for pirating NaturalNews content, then went back on his word. (Really?) He claims he didn't know that stealing other peoples' work was wrong (Again, Mike is accusing Jason of being criminally libel without presenting anything but circumstantial evidence - I don't think Jason didn't know that stealing other peoples' work was wrong, but that he did not realize that he was stealing in the first place - there is a big difference), and he's suckered in quite a few people (I guess I would be one of those people but I only feel suckered by Mike Adams) by playing the victim here, claiming he's the "small guy" attacked by the NaturalNews "Goliath."
Well, I have news for everyone: I'm the small guy! (Global traffic - 853k monthly) NaturalNews is run by a tiny group of people (If you have a staff - paid or not - your not a "small guy"), and I'm 100% volunteer. I don't get paid a dime by NaturalNews (He makes his money somewhere), and I'm up against Big Pharma and the FDA, fighting for our health freedom every day and expecting no compensation in return for it. (can you hear the violins playing?) When I'm working 16 hours a day creating content to fight for our health freedoms, and (allegedly) a con artist comes along and copies it, puts his own name on it, makes money off it, gets exposed for it and then claims HE's the victim (He is a victim if he only made a mistake and meant no harm - but Mike has found Jason guilty without a trial - he has presented, thus far, NO clear-cut evidence that this was anything other than an error on Jason's part - guilty until proven innocent?!?!), I can only laugh out loud. Has morality in America sunk so low than even a common thief can claim he didn't know he was stealing anything and some people are fooled by his act?" (Like they are fooled by your self claims of being something akin to a nearly faultless super hero destined for sainthood)
Has common decency dropped so low that the only way a person can handle a perceived problem is with retaliation and attorneys?
Notice how he twists everything to make Jason look really, really bad and himself practically a saint. He never once admits that he handled the situation ALL wrong or even a little wrong. Never does he apologize for unnecessarily dragging his readers into this or for endangering someone's life over a COPYRIGHT issue for God's sake! I don't think anyone is ever 100% correct about everything, but Mike seems to think he is.
Mike then goes on in the email update to praise himself some more. It's quite amazing what Mike thinks of himself. If Mike is the "little guy" then Jason really is a nobody and shouldn't even show up on Mike's radar. So what is really going on with Mike Adams? Am I the only one that thinks charges should be brought up against Mike for libel? slander? character assassination? Reckless endangerment of life and limb?
It seems that I'm not the only one, as this comment was recently left at OrganicJar.com:
"Jason, I’m not a reader of your blog nor do I read naturalnews, but a colleague of mine does follow health news quite dutifully and he brought this specific situation up in our law ‘meetup’ this week. Well, some of us are curious now to find out if any legal action has been taken by you (or Mr. Adams because he seems to be the one intending to do so)."
"Well, the elements of the rules, which he would need to establish you broke, regarding plagiarism are vague (and usually difficult to prove). However, your position that Mr. Adams attempted to intentionally character assassinate you is much more established. Here is the definition of ‘character assassination’ according to Wikipedia,
“Character assassination is an intentional attempt to influence the portrayal or reputation of a particular person, whether living or a historical personage, in such a way as to cause others to develop an extremely negative, unethical or unappealing perception of him or her. By its nature, it involves deliberate exaggeration or manipulation of facts to present an untrue picture of the targeted person. For living individuals, this can cause the target to be rejected by his or her community, family, or members of his or her living or work environment. Such acts are typically very difficult to reverse or rectify, therefore the process is likened to a literal assassination of a human life. The damage sustained can be life-long and more, or for historical personages, last for many centuries after their death. In practice, character assassination usually consists of the use of double speak, spreading of rumors, innuendo and deliberate misinformation on topics relating to one’s morals, integrity, and reputation.”
"Do you have a copy of his initial post? Either way, I would be documenting everything. The one thing in our group everyone agreed on was that they would much rather be in your position than his."
But according to the following quotes from Mike Adams, he must feel that he is covered and justified in "having some fun" with Jason and directing a vigilante mob of people to do what's necessary to destroy him online (and offline, otherwise why publish his home address?). Because Mike Adams feels that intentional harassment, even if it leads to suicide of the victim, is not a crime and therefore there should be no punishment for it. That's taking character "assassination" a little too far, but Mike thinks it's not a crime. It's OK to kill people if you can get them to do it to themselves.
"...Listen: If a person decides to go kill themselves based on something you said, that's their problem, not yours. Words and thoughts are not crimes. ACTIONS are crimes. If Lori Drew pummeled that teen girl to death with an oversized computer monitor, then that would be a crime. But creating a false online personality and taunting the girl with words is no such crime.
It may be stupid. It may be mean. It may even be psycho. But it's not a crime...."
"...The law, you see, is selectively applied to whatever prosecution the public mob is calling for. We are no longer a nation of laws, we are a nation of Oprah-fied justice, where people are first found guilty in the tabloids, and then prosecutors scrounge around for some law they can find that might somehow apply.
The whole thing has turned out justice system into a complete joke..."
So please, Mike Adams, continue with your stupid, mean, psycho - but not a crime? - harassment. After all the system is a joke and you're protected by "Oprah-fied justice".
For a man that is practically a saint in his own eyes, Mike Adams sure does come across as extremely cold hearted. What happened to plain old right and wrong? Watch out Jason, Mike Adams evidently thinks it's OK to harass you to the point of suicide.
Here's what Jason's brother, Ryan, had to say in a comment left on one of my blogs to give you an idea of what Mike Adams started because of his insecure, vain, ego:
Ryan has left a new comment on your post "More thoughts on Mike Adams of NaturalNews.com and...":
"I'm Jason's brother and what Mike has done and pushed people to do is far worse than anyone knows. Jason is trying so hard to remain positive and NOT continue to blog about it. He’s sent Mike repeated genuinely apologetic emails, he’s fixed the citing issues, removed parts of his site, posted an apology etc etc."
"Mike has explained if he does these things he'll tell his readers that they've solved there issues, but he’s not telling them that. He keeps sending out malicious newsletter updates. This entire situation is crazy. Do you know before this Organicjar had under 20 readers, and my brother only posted several articles a month just on issues he wanted to make sure everyone knew about. He only had 44 articles total on his blog and 12 had referenced Mikes work. I’ve found hundreds of blogs that republish all of Mikes work, everyday. It seems so unfair that my brother would be targeted like this."
"I love my brother and he is truly an inspiration to everyone. About a year ago, he decided to dedicate his life to helping others in need and he always wanted to help get truthful information out there. He did forget to cite articles, he did have his authorship misplaced, he makes mistakes but they were all mistakes that could have been privately corrected."
"I would never wish what my brother is going through on anyone. It’s truly shocking how negative everyone has been, I mean to send death threats, posting his photos on xxx sites, spamming his email accounts, making sure fraud, con appear in google. I guess it only shows you how totally unconscious the world is. I wasn’t aware people couldn’t make mistakes."
Posted by Ryan to David G. Collins at January 30, 2009 11:21 PM
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This is the original article BY MIKE ADAMS OF NATURALNEWS.COM - as it originally appeared here.
------Only Jason's personal information has been deleted. Mike allows and encourages his articles to be republished as long as they contain proper credit to the source.
"As I've mentioned many times, I openly give people full permission to post my articles with proper credit. That means giving the author the credit as the author and linking back to the source. When people do that, it's all fine by me, and I actually support that practice." - Mike Adams
So here it is.
(NaturalNews) Those who can create, create. Those who can't sometimes steal other people's work and call it their own. Over the last several months, I've watched a clever content pirate called Jason Cairns rip off the NaturalNews website and content, calling our articles his own. He's created a website called OrganicJar.com which is essentially a giant rip-off of NaturalNews articles and content.
Almost all the articles published on OrganicJar were, in fact, written by me or other NaturalNews contributing writers.
For example, his article entitled "Vitamin D Reduces Risk of Cancers by 77 Percent!" is a direct rip-off of my article called New research shows vitamin D slashes risk of cancers by 77 percent; cancer industry refuses to support cancer prevention at: http://www.naturalnews.com/021892.html
In another example, the Organic Jar article Medical Students Fed Up with Professors' Secret Financial Ties to Big Pharma is a word-for-word ripoff of my original breaking news summary at: http://www.naturalnews.com/News_0005...orruption.html which just happens to be entitled Medical Students Fed Up with Professors' Secret Financial Ties to Big Pharma. My story was published November 28th, his appeared on November 30th.
By the way, as any good con man would do, Cairns might retroactively change these pages on his site to appear to be original text, so if you're reading this after January of 2009, don't expect the links to his site to corroborate my story here. But I've made a full archive of his entire website for legal purposes, and it's rife with piracy from NaturalNews and many other natural health websites. He's probably stealing from Mercola, too.
But Jason Cairns gives no one credit other than himself. He simply puts his own name on top as the author, runs a lot of ads, and uses social networking tools to try to gather a lot of traffic. He even stole my words for his "about the author" section, in which he describes himself as "...deeply dedicated to the mission of helping people transform their health, improving our planet and empowering individuals to make positive changes in their life."
It those words sound familiar, it's because I wrote them in 2005 in my own bio. What Jason Cairns is really committed to, it seems, is pirating other people's work and calling it his own. Even the look and feel of the OrganicJar website is a rip-off of NaturalNews.
(If Mike doesn't like that Jason's website has "the look and feel" of his website, then he need to call up a posse to attack the maker of that template that is for sale on the internet because they are obviously "pirating" Mike's web design and making money from it. Oh why, oh why is everyone stealing from Mike Adams?! Mike also invented nutrition, ya know.)
To some extent, his piracy has worked, too: His social network includes a lot of natural health people who have been duped by this con man into thinking HE wrote the articles! I even saw the Raw Spirit Fest as a friend on one of his social networking sites.
Like many con men, Jason Cairns is a master of social networking. His Facebook site has attracted plenty of followers who obviously don't know they've been conned.
Cairns also has a well-populated MySpace page and a LinkedIn.com page.
He even has his twitter site blazing away, claiming he's living some sort of natural health lifestyle. Does that involve eating salads between content pirating sessions?
What a loser, huh? The funny part in all this is that I openly GIVE people permission to use my articles if they just give proper credit to the author and a link back to NaturalNews. But I suppose that's too much to ask from some people: They want all the credit, even for things they didn't write.
Jason Cairns is a thief, a pirate and an embarrassment to the natural health community. We need to work together to expose the dishonest of people like Cairns. Here's how we do that...
Let's have some fun with this guy, shall we?
The last thing con men want is to be outed as con men. So the most effective thing we can all do is publicize the truth about Jason Cairns by linking to this article using his own name. That way, anybody searching for "Jason Cairns" on Google will be likely to find this article.
Here's how you do that: Just copy and paste the HTML code below onto your website:
Jason Cairns from OrganicJar is a con man
Place that on your website or just link to this article using the name "Jason Cairns."
The next thing you can do is start slamming him with emails and phone calls. His contact email is listed as XXX@XXX and his phone number is listed as xxx-xxx-xxxx, although it's worth mentioning these could all be fake. In fact, the whole name "Jason Cairns" might be fictitious.
His listed address is:
(deleted) San Francisco, California (But that's probably fake, too.)
Jason Cairns claims his education as follows: University of Iowa BS, BA, Chemistry, Biology, 1997 - 2002
Activities and Societies: Published article in Journal of Neurobiology, Editor of UIHC newsletter, Licensed EMT Drake University Physics 1999 - 2000
He also claims to be the founder of FuseMe.com, a small software development firm where he probably created the technology to steal articles from other peoples' web pages.
Perhaps the best way to reach Jason Cairns is through his MySpace page or LinkedIn.com page. He's sure to be checking those social networking sites for messages. Imagine the shock when he hears about this, huh?
By the way, all the links in this article use the "nofollow" attribute so that his websites do not benefit from the NaturalNews popularity in any way. The last thing we want to do is give him a boost in the search engines, huh?
Let me put a warning out to other would-be pirates (there are many) who are stealing NaturalNews content: We will expose you as the pirates you are, including all the pirates working over at Examiner.com who steal NaturalNews articles and pass them off as their own.
If you want to use NaturalNews content, folks, just use it with proper credit. Give the author who wrote the story the credit he or she deserves. I don't mind people copying articles if they at least have the decency to give credit to the original author and source. In other words, I support open sourcing content, but the one requirement is that you give credit where credit is due.
So, folks, if you want to have some fun with this pirate, just link to this article using words like "Jason Cairns" and "OrganicJar" and let's watch the search engine rankings rise for this article when people are searching for Jason Cairns. Google can be fun, after all! And sometimes people deserve to be publicly shamed for being such dishonest thieves of other peoples' hard work.
Once again, here are the social networking sites for Jason Cairns:
Facebook | MySpace | LinkedIn
Let him know that his mass piracy of other peoples' content is unacceptable in the natural health community.
Pretty angry and malicious, huh?
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Jason's responses to Mike's attempt to "have fun" with him can be found here:
I also wrote more about it here:
Posts
Aaron Secrest | Jan 28, 2009 | Reply
There is no way that his ‘attack post’ was merely just about you forgetting to mention him as a source; if so, than he could have easily called you or contacted you through email and corrected the problem quickly like professionals do. No, his post was engineered more to completely dis-credit and smear you in the eyes of the online community as your blog and its’ cool design, function and attempts at integrating social media are far superior to anything that his blog is involved with. Grow up Mike! As we often say in the infantry “if you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen”.
Sarah Ann | Jan 28, 2009 | Reply
Wow, interesting happenings today. There was definitely no class in Mike’s post, more people should spread health news, not less. Good luck to both of you though I hope everything works out.
Rian Attney | Jan 28, 2009 | Reply
Mike, did you even try calling or emailing him? LoL, for you to say this is only about him not listing you as a source on an article…come on, you and most people who can ‘think past their big toe’ realize that this is more about him and his blog becoming your newest competition. And it shouldn’t even be competition you should work together not fight.
Nancy | Jan 28, 2009 | Reply
I’m kind of glad he attacked you in that he gave you a lot of publicity. I agree your defense. Your site is not a copy, but a supplement to the Natural News site for alternatives to conventional health advice. Thanks!