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Nope. Antarctic ice is melting, at an accelerating rate no less. You are referring to the temporary sea ice that forms each winter. The ice melting off the land makes the ocean less salty, and fresher water freezes at a higher temperature than saltier water. But even though there is a bit more sea ice in the winter, the overall effect is that the ice is melting at an accelerating rate. Yeah, those pesky facts, huh?

The New York Times Opines:

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.

A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, teaches at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," to be published later this month by W.W. Norton.

Of course, Krugman, a Nobel prize winning economist, does actually know about the broken window fallacy:

[A liquidity trap] puts us in a world of topsy-turvy, in which many of the usual rules of economics cease to hold. Thrift leads to lower investment; wage cuts reduce employment; even higher productivity can be a bad thing. And the broken windows fallacy ceases to be a fallacy: something that forces firms to replace capital, even if that something seemingly makes them poorer, can stimulate spending and raise employment. Indeed, in the absence of effective policy, that’s how recovery eventually happens: as Keynes put it, a slump goes on until “the shortage of capital through use, decay and obsolescence” gets firms spending again to replace their plant and equipment.

Mind you, Keynesians don't actually propose that the government should go around smashing windows, given that there is plenty of useful infrastructure spending to be done.

Having said that, military spending apparently has a negative multiplier, so it may be a bad idea even if you're down with Keynes.

Considering there was the recent killings of doctors who were trying to educate the unwashed masses on how to prevent or mitigate the spread of Ebola, along with the other attacks and general mistrust of health workers, letting the disease spread might not be a bad option.

Those who don't want to listen to experts die off, those who are too panicked to touch the dead bodies live, and things work themselves out.

Cruel? Maybe. But when you're already putting your life on the line trying to help people and those people attack and kill you, sometimes you have to make the tough decision to let nature take its course.

Hitting their command/control and training operations, from which tens of thousands of them are directed and supplied, is DEFENSIVE, not aggressive.

So you want to hit Langley, Virginia?

The optimal time to launch a larger model would've been then, not a full year later. They missed the boat.

Yeah, to the tune of 10 million sales over the weekend. ;-)

GP is a chickenhawk.

Bzzz... Ad-hominem detected. Attaching labels to your opponents does not win an argument.

People like him are the reason for the current mess in Iraq.

The current mess in Iraq (and Libya) is the doing of your Nobel Peace Prize boy-wonder. Had we pulled troops from Western Germany in 1950ies, there would've been a new wave of violence there too — gleefully supported by the Communists occupying the Eastern part...

Sure, it was Bush, who prepared the plan for our withdrawal, but only someone trying to appease the "anti-war" crowd would execute the final part of it, given the ISIS' growing power.

Obama's weakness — and the catastrophic results of that weakness — were predictable. And unavoidable, given the sort of lunatic, that is the fount of "foreign policy expertise" of the Administration.

Besides, the mess in Korea was American's fault in first place - they have supported a bloody dictator for the sole reason of being an anticommunist. It was so bad that up to the 1970ies North Korea had higher standard of living. Without that meddling things could have been way better.

I can well see, how a kinder gentler Southern regime would get overrun by Communist North — turning the entire Korean peninsula into a hellhole. But I fail to understand, what would have made things better for today's North Koreans, had the South Korea become democratic earlier. Could you elaborate?

Are we secure from the Putins though? He seems to have fun with the idea his nukes let him do whatever he wants.

Putin's doctrine is that Russia ought to "protect" both ethnic Russians and Russian-speaking people of any ethnicity anywhere in the world. That you don't see "polite" gunmen organizing a referendum in Brighton Beach is a sign, our force does deter Putin still.

I'm very glad, America is rearming itself, because Russia spent the past 20 years nourishing a buttheart like no one had ever had before. They lost the Cold War and they want a revanche. With a Nobel Peace Price dimwit in the White House, and a bona-fide lunatic providing foreign-policy expertise, this is Russia's hour...

I agree, I just want to add that I believe the last part of the scientific process, confirming results, needs more attention. We should have more confirming experiments when possible. For example, why did it take so long to discover male researchers were effecting lab rats? http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04...

Even more pointless blathering. Cutting out the hand waving and responding to parts where you get within a few miles of having a point.

But you were too obtuse to grasp that sometimes words are used in name only. In the eurozone case independent doesn't mean independent monetary policy.

Are you submitting your name to the Nobel Prize Committee for discovering that water is wet? That the leaders if the Scottish Independence movement wanted to stick with the pound is not only not news, people were pointing out the potential problems of doing so before the vote.

And no practical exit from it either. In the military case, well, NATO members don't have much independence in terms of military spending, choices of systems - and in particular - when it comes to defending another member.

Who was sitting of the coast of Scotland ready to invade if the country did not join NATO or sign some sort of defense treaty with Britain? Scotland needs military protection as much as they need Tiger Stones.

"Sanctions" are merely a method of stimulating cash flow from market to market, like any other trade deal, if you don't have "favored nation" status, you are being "sanctioned". This is how prices are determined. The fantasy of "supply and demand" doesn't even come up in meetings. It is tidal, cyclical in nature, like seasonal weight gain and water retention. Please get the silly politics out of your head, *Mr. Beal*. If you would like to know why the Russians appear a bit "pissed" these days, this should point you in the general direction of what makes the world go 'round. The Obama administration is amongst the most accomplished ever to the people that matter. I can assure you they have no complaints about his "foreign policy".

Now that chances of the intruder actually being a threat is actually really small. The odds of him having anything realistically dangerous without a sufficiently sized container to hide it in, like the previously mentioned backpack, is also really small.

This intruder had a knife, though I can't find details on what kind it was (12" bowie, or 1.5" Swiss army). A hostile person with a knife, within 21 feet of you, is widely considered a lethal threat. Many police departments teach their officers that they can use lethal force against a hostile person with a knife within 21 feet. The same is taught in concealed handgun licensing classes in many states. Twenty-one feet is chosen because that's the distance an average person can travel, from a standstill, in one second.

Over the decades, there have been lots of people that have broken into the white house grounds. I've never heard even a single one of those reports in the last century being of hostile intent. (Weird and or confused, but not hostile.)

Plane crashed INTO the White House on purpose in 1994

This guy didn't break in... Guy deemed not crazy shoots at White House, trying to kill President Clinton.

Neither did this guy, but both of them were active threats, and either one of them could have just tossed their guns over the fence before climbing it themselves.

The secret service is in a tough spot: they can't really just shoot dead every deranged person who comes over the fence, but sooner or later someone wearing a suicide vest or explosive underwear is going to come over the fence with a dead-man's switch. And we all know he doesn't need to hurt anyone or do any damage for the government and populace to overreact and start doing things much worse than terrorists could ever do.

It's a real threat.

You need to sign for certified mail to verify that you at least received it, after which the onus is on you to consider it important and actually read it. If someone else signs for it or it is never signed for, then there is no verification that *you* received it and that can be proven with a simple signature comparison.

There is no way to verify that this has been done with any sort of online delivery. Saying that "well, it went to his inbox" (or worse, "it went to his fucking facebook messages") or even "his inbox or facebook messages show that they have been read" do not in any way confirm that the message has reached the point upon which the onus is now upon you. There is no way to verify that a human processed the message. Or that a human actually saw and read it. Or that the correct human did. Especially in a world of cracked accounts, handing over your credentials to your bosses, idiots "sharing facebook logins to confirm their love", userscripts, browser extensions, malware, fake accounts, and any number of things.

I mean, relying on facebook or twitter or any other service as some sort of delivery verification is even less reliable than banking on an SMTP DSN, which is itself practically meaningless.

Seriously, are you retarded? Is that your problem? You do know this is the internet, right?
Where everyone can see that you are full of shit with just a click or two?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09...

Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.

You know, it's good that you come to me instead of the morons you've been talking to you, because I can definitely substantiate this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

See, the reason "Silicon Valley" (meaning the tech industry) is allowed to play this game is because they're willing to let the NSA upskirt your private information and communications. And since they've already got their hand up your dress, they're going to cop a little feel for themselves, you know? So the US Government is happy, the corporations get to make a shitload of money from your private information and communications, and they get to keep playing their little tax game.

If you had a government worth a damn (like during the trust-busting era), they wouldn't allow companies like Apple to perpetrate their little willful fraud.

Now, the next time somebody tells you about Apple and the government playing footsie to protect Apple's tax advantage, I hope you won't continue to say it's bullshit.

Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.

Same here. Now when somebody asks you "Which anti-trust laws is Apple violating?" you'll be able to tell them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

http://www.jstor.org/discover/...

See, the problem is "vertical integration". You can't control both the product, the store that sells the product, the insurance that covers the product, the consumables (media) that plays on the product and on and on down the distribution chain. Even making both the hardware and the software is arguably a violation of anti-trust. But when you start to also own the only store that sells software for the product and have a vested interest in every bit of software that runs on the product you've crossed so many lines that Apple should have been broken up into several companies long ago. Same with Microsoft and many others. They're not just over the line, they're WAY over the line. The technical term is an oligopoly. They are anti-competitive and they destroy entire markets. Oligopolies are what happen in fascist countries.

I hope you appreciate the time and energy I spend disabusing you of your notion that "it's bullshit". And I hope you enjoyed edification as much as I enjoyed providing it.

Can you substantiate this? Every time somebody has said this to me and they've gone into specifics, it's been bullshit.

You know, it's good that you come to me instead of the morons you've been talking to you, because I can definitely substantiate this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interac...

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04...

http://arstechnica.com/busines...

See, the reason "Silicon Valley" (meaning the tech industry) is allowed to play this game is because they're willing to let the NSA upskirt your private information and communications. And since they've already got their hand up your dress, they're going to cop a little feel for themselves, you know? So the US Government is happy, the corporations get to make a shitload of money from your private information and communications, and they get to keep playing their little tax game.

If you had a government worth a damn (like during the trust-busting era), they wouldn't allow companies like Apple to perpetrate their little willful fraud.

Now, the next time somebody tells you about Apple and the government playing footsie to protect Apple's tax advantage, I hope you won't continue to say it's bullshit.

Same here. Which anti-trust laws? Be specific.

Same here. Now when somebody asks you "Which anti-trust laws is Apple violating?" you'll be able to tell them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

http://www.jstor.org/discover/...

See, the problem is "vertical integration". You can't control both the product, the store that sells the product, the insurance that covers the product, the consumables (media) that plays on the product and on and on down the distribution chain. Even making both the hardware and the software is arguably a violation of anti-trust. But when you start to also own the only store that sells software for the product and have a vested interest in every bit of software that runs on the product you've crossed so many lines that Apple should have been broken up into several companies long ago. Same with Microsoft and many others. They're not just over the line, they're WAY over the line. The technical term is an oligopoly. They are anti-competitive and they destroy entire markets. Oligopolies are what happen in fascist countries.

I hope you appreciate the time and energy I spend disabusing you of your notion that "it's bullshit". And I hope you enjoyed edification as much as I enjoyed providing it.

Another study suggest finns are mostly related to... finns

Just to clarify: " In the initial set of experiments, the scientists added saccharin (the sweetener in the pink packets of Sweet’N Low), sucralose (the yellow packets of Splenda) or aspartame (the blue packets of Equal) to the drinking water of 10-week-old mice. Other mice drank plain water or water supplemented with glucose or with ordinary table sugar. After a week, there was little change in the mice that drank water or sugar water, but the group getting artificial sweeteners developed marked intolerance to glucose."

But might not this problem be addressed with pro-biotics?

The researchers asked that question as well, Intriguingly — “superstriking and interesting to us,” Dr. Segal said — the intestinal bacteria of the people who did experience effects were different from those who did not. This suggests that any effects of artificial sweeteners are not universal. It also suggests probiotics — medicines consisting of live bacteria — could be used to shift gut bacteria to a population that reversed the glucose intolerance.

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/P...

Direct Subsidies:
$41-52 billion / 254 million vehicles = $161 / yr * 13 years = $2,100-$2,500. From the US.

Military Subsidies:
$20-250B in military expenditures to protect oil supplies / 254 million vehicles = ($80-900 /yr) * 13 years = $1,000-11,700

Health:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10...
32% of Fossil fuel burning (aka not coal) is transportation. It's estimated by the National Academy of Sciences that $120B /yr in health costs are absorbed by society due to pollution. $120B * .33 = $40B / 254 million vehicles = $157/yr * 13 years = $2050

So all told we're conservatively looking at:
$2,050 + $6,350 + $2,300 = $10,700

That's before you look at environmental impacts and climate change.

It doesn't. Because large swaths of the city are depopulated the income is pretty much zero, along with the population. The 50 families that are making 65k on average are irrelevant in a neighborhood with another 350 empty homes. The city wants to close down entire sections and relocate the remaining residents to save on city services. Don't know if they will be able to make that happen. Shrinking population is pretty ugly - at least for a while.

But the cheap real estate and massive empty industrial buildings might attract a lot of growth at some point with the right governance. The question is will any of the infrastructure last long enough for the turnaround to happen. I don't think anyone is betting on it right now.

From UT Austin: On the Cusp of an Ebola Vaccine

Bush built that lab (Galveston National Laboratory) as part of the $5 billion Project Bioshield Act of 2004, one of two, the other being at Boston University Medical Center. These are the places where actual research on ebola, dengue, hemorrhagic fever, SARS and others has been happening for years while you perfected your Bush derangement syndrome narrative.

Ass monkey.

US is next?

What do you mean next?

Good. The privatization of the prison system is leading to what the ACLU is labeling massive human rights abuses. Coupled with our using the criminal justice system, ultimately ending up with the prison system, to deal with obvious mental health issues, and we've got incredible injustice being done in the name of the law.

The first Budget in Obama's term put the war spending on budget.

They were off budget during Bush's terms but one of the first acts Obama did with a democrat congress was to put them on budget.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02...

Now, people may think "good, we need to account for that money anyways" but the fact is they were always accounted for in the end. The problem with this is the rules of congress say you have to pay for new spending. With the wars off budget, when congress decided to do something new or increase something, they had to either decrease somewhere else, raise taxes, or assume an influx of revenue with a realistic chance of it happening. Now, when the wars wind down, congress can simply spend the money as new spending without having to at minimum look for it.

Note, I saw some articles saying that we are still using some supplemental appropriates (off budget) for spending on the wars. I am led to believe this is minor compared to the on budget spending for it.

Historically, governments justified the "certification" requirements imposed on people wishing to pursue various professions by the consumers' inability to share the information required to make an informed choice of a service provider.

For example, arriving to a new city, you don't know, what taxi company is decent and which hires serial rapists — the city hall should issue "medallions" to the good drivers and fight attempts by the non-vetted to provide the same services without paying the authorities their due.

Uber is showing, how the consumer feedback, that's easy to provide and is immediately available to anyone with a smart phone, obviates the need for such certifications — along with the associated costs and the abuse-potential.

Unfortunately, somebody will have to be the first person to write the "Woke up in the morning upside down in a ditch with my pants missing. Would not use again." review.

I am happy to use Google for you.

Here's the Forbes article Germanys Green Energy Disaster a Cautionary Tale for World Leaders.

That was 2013. Here it is even worse a year later in the NY times article German Energy Push Runs Into Problems, reporting major troubles such as:

. Electricity prices in Germany are already among the highest in the world.

. The price of industrial electricity has risen about 37 percent since 2005.

. International energy experts say the country cannot meet its future needs solely through renewable sources as planned

. The unexpected drop in global energy prices through the emergence of abundant, low-cost natural gas in the United States, further degrades Germany's green energy economic plan

Historically, governments justified the "certification" requirements imposed on people wishing to pursue various professions by the consumers' inability to share the information required to make an informed choice of a service provider.

For example, arriving to a new city, you don't know, what taxi company is decent and which hires serial rapists — the city hall should issue "medallions" to the good drivers and fight attempts by the non-vetted to provide the same services without paying the authorities their due.

Uber is showing, how the consumer feedback, that's easy to provide and is immediately available to anyone with a smart phone, obviates the need for such certifications — along with the associated costs and the abuse-potential. Taxi-services is not the only market, where things can (and should!) be changed by the pervasive smart-phones. Plumbers and electricians would be next on my list of professions, which should not require certifications (though some may seek approvals from non-governmental authorities like "Angie's List", if they choose to). Then restaurateurs — patrons could report roach-sightings just as well (or better) than a city's health-inspector. Then lawyers and eventually, even veterinarians and human doctors...

slashdot today!? ... difference between North and South

There is a distinction between the two, of course, but it is without difference to the topic of this thread. Both ice-caps were supposed to shrink (with dire consequences for the rest of the world, of course).

One expedition set out to measure the loss of the ice, found itself stuck in it — not that it changed the leading professor's opinion about the global warming...

The Antarctic sea ice extent was not and is not projected to shrink in the near term. It was expected to expand as a result of the influx of fresh water from increasing land ice melt. As the planet continues to warm it will reach a point where the ice extent will start shrinking again (as the 0C starts pushing further south), but that isn't projected to happen until later this century.

POOR.
http://ibnlive.in.com/news/836...
RACIST.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
UNCIVILIZED.
http://www.firstpost.com/livin...
UNTOUCHABLE.
http://india.blogs.nytimes.com...
POLLUTED.
http://www.theatlanticcities.c...

slashdot today!? ... difference between North and South

There is a distinction between the two, of course, but it is without difference to the topic of this thread. Both ice-caps were supposed to shrink (with dire consequences for the rest of the world, of course).

One expedition set out to measure the loss of the ice, found itself stuck in it — not that it changed the leading professor's opinion about the global warming...

The problems I have with it are the government favoring it over a neutral policy and mandates forcing me to use it when it's not yet the least costly.

That raises the question: Least costly to whom?

If, for example, the carbon emissions from your cheap energy today are going to result in my air conditioning bill doubling next year, shouldn't you be held liable to compensate me for the costs you incurred?

Or on a larger scale, if Shell's tar-sands pollution over the next few years causes Miami to have to be evacuated in, say, 2025, should the cost of losing Miami and relocating all of its people not be somehow factored in to our calculations about what is really "cheapest"? Otherwise we're just robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Unfortunately it's usually impossible to prosecute cops for misconduct. The only thing that has some small deterrence is throwing out the evidence (which the cop shouldn't have gotten in the first place).

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09...
Challenges Seen in Prosecuting Police for Use of Deadly Force
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ
SEPT. 3, 2014
MIAMI — For decades, Florida has had a history of deadly, racially tinged police confrontations, many of them involving unarmed men, which have led to riots, protests and a steady undercurrent of rancor between minorities and the police. But in the past 20 years, not a single officer in Florida has been charged for using deadly force.

"Nevertheless, having a targeted treatment is often better than no treatment at all."

Perhaps, but I doubt there is any good evidence for this. Weak effects and noisy data don't mix well, we are probably taught all sorts of incorrect things based on spurious results. I would suggest getting away from these targeted treatments of at most limited benefit and work on figuring out how to turn aneuploidy as a drug target.

FDA approval typically requires randomized controlled trials, so when a treatment is available it has been tested at least against placebo (if that was the best available treatment at the moment of approval). That's why I say "better than no treatment". A drug that is not better than placebo usually does not make it past the approval stage (and if it does, approval can be quickly revoked, for example bevacizumab in breast cancer: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11...)

What sort of evidence would you expect? For example, the study which established the targeted agent trastuzumab is available online: http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1.... Bias and noise are unavoidable, but with my knowledge of statistics the result seems reasonably clear.

Anyway, with respect to your other comment, aneuploidy is not an obvious target but people are working on it and on drugs that interact with the mitotic machinery. Let's hope they will be successful.

I've read the The Bell Curve, and I think it was a fair analysis for it's time, but--unfortunately for Murray--it was written right before the genetics revolution made all his speculation about race seem naive. The assumption at the time was that people of the same race were genetically similar; therefore, you could lump people of the same race together and make assumptions about their genes influencing their intelligence.

Then the Human Genome Project came along, followed by cheap genetic testing, and scientists like Craig Venter found that the genetic similarities between people of the same race are nothing compared to the genetic variations between any two humans.

In other words, The Bell Curve's conclusions were based entirely on phenotypic analysis, which was fair at the time, but the advent of genotypic analysis has rendered the book pretty much irrelevant.

If you want to understand why the new inhalers are so expensive, read this:

The Soaring Cost of a Simple Breath
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/us/the-soaring-cost-of-a-simple-breath.html

It's a product of the USA's captured regulatory system.
Europe doesn't have the same problem, for a variety of reasons.

[mercola.com]

According to recent information and studies there seems to something to the Low Carb High Fat diet, not just for weight loss, but for much better serum cholesterol numbers and lower inflammation markers. But citing Joe Mercola probably isn't convincing anybody of the credibility of what you're saying.

Your link is nothing but stuff the FDA complained about Mercola doing. Frankly, in my book, anyone that the big-pharma paid and Monsanto-protecting corporate-controlled bully that the FDA is today wants to discredit must be someone who is doing something right.

An awful lot of "ifs" in your conclusions regarding the comparative crime rates between Australia & the US. I will note that you still have a lot of room to make up in the murder rate.

Perhaps the declining rate of crime in the US is due to the declining rate of gun ownership - see

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03...

You have a situation where a declining number of ammosexuals are stocking up on guns, driven by fear & paranoia that someone is coming to take them away. The rest of us just shake our heads & back away.

[mercola.com]

According to recent information and studies there seems to something to the Low Carb High Fat diet, not just for weight loss, but for much better serum cholesterol numbers and lower inflammation markers. But citing Joe Mercola probably isn't convincing anybody of the credibility of what you're saying.

Man tries to apply logic of maths to languages! Watch at 11 when we point and laugh.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10...

And yet the US continues to have an absolute murder rate 4 times higher than that of Australia. The only reason its murder rate has dropped more is because it was far higher to begin with! Logic fail indeed.

Of course, if you have a handgun in the house, you're twice as likely to die of homicide, and 11 times more likely to do from suicide. So you're increasing your own risk....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01...

You bring up valid points. I'd actually love to see the report if I could find it (I'm sure it's out there somewhere). The most reliable source I can find is from the NY Times, which itself doesn't list any references either.

http://www.nytimes.com/1981/07...

I guess I chose a bad example to run with. The point I'm trying to make is that some science is worth government funding......like Fermilab for example....where as some isn't. If I were to write a grant application on deconstructing the contents of this Slashdot post, I would hope the government would turn me down.

And yet the melting of ice and sea level rise continue to accelerate as predicted by AGW.

While fracking water can't be reused as drinking water, there is some evidence that it can be recycled for other purposes, and may not be nearly as contaminated as previously thought.

"Eat Sh*t - How can 17 quadrillion flies be wrong?"
In order for something to legitimately call "science" it must make falsifiable predictions. These predictions must be falsifiable in practice, not just in concept.

The number of people who agree with you DOES NOT MATTER in science. Falsifiable predictions that are correct do.

• Plate Tectonics was ridiculed for 30 years after being proposed in 1912 before becoming widely accepted by the 1960s and dogma by the 1970s.
• Quantum mechanics was dismissed even by some of its greatest luminaries, leading the skeptical Einstein to say, "God does not play dice with the universe." Basically, the "old guard" had to die off before a new generation of scientists came to the fore who accepted quantum mechanics and its counter-intuitive nature.
• The K-T extinction event was widely dismissed, even after finding the Chicxulub crater.

The list of "correct but not widely accepted" goes on and on. Oh, and we can do the converse as well: "widely accepted by not correct." Eugenics, anyone? Phrenology?

One doesn't need to be an expert to observe this effect in action. And some of it is painfully, mallet whacking on the head, obvious.

For example, no new nuclear plant has started construction in the US since the late 70s (the little bit of recent construction has all happened at existing nuclear plants).

Then in Japan there's the scuttling of an entire generation of nuclear plants in the decade 1995-2005 which led directly to the pre-earthquake decision (beginning of 2011) to keep the oldest of the Fukushima reactors, reactor 1 operating for another ten years rather than shutting down and decommissioning the reactor at the end of April, 2011.

Lack of options has forced these countries to make unsafe decisions, particularly to extend the lifespan of older less safe reactors.

Tell us something we don't know.

Chinese has minorities, but unlike other countries, they are doing something about it. They recently announced a policy of paying people to intermarry. If an ethnic minority person marries someone in the dominant Han ethnicity, they can receive a payment of 10,000 RMB per year for the first five years of their marriage. If they encourage enough mixed marriages, they may be able to eliminate all their minorities in a few generations. They won't have to worry about Tibetan separatism if there are no more Tibetans.

Why stop there when you could take it to the next level by having the police make the program apply to intermarrying Japanese, Koreans and Chinese, perhaps calling the end result Japkornese, ending the millennial hostilities once and for all.

Engrish motherfucker, do you speak it?.

How's the GP's comment a troll? Everything it says is factual. Now, these facts will no doubt anger the sensitive, politically correct crowd, I'm sure. Regardless, the facts are the facts.

The GP isn't even joking when it comes to the electrocution part. To quote the New York Times,

In life, they were uncelebrated. In death, Zyed Benna, 17, and Bouna Traore, 15, have inspired more than 10 days of riots that have spread from housing projects in the suburbs of Paris to cities and towns across France.

A chance encounter with the police on a walk back from a soccer game on Oct. 27 ended with the two young men dead and a friend seriously injured in what the authorities have called an accidental electrocution.

I wish the GP was trolling. At least that would mean that the world isn't as fucked up as the GP makes it sound. Unfortunately, the GP isn't trolling, and is absolutely correct, I'm afraid to say.

Most Americans did not actually vote for that guy...

Enough voted for him to win, twice, I shall remind you. All the politicians are perfect reflections of the people who constantly reelect them. Like it or not this is the face they present to the world. No "conflation" required.

And you people keep on talking about this "credibility" thing. Maybe you all should just look at the numbers. Amercian weapons sales dominate the world markets more than they ever have. So please, when you want to talk about success and prestige, know where to look.