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The irony of all being that Silicon Valley innovations, making phones and tablets just that much more addictive, are one of the big drivers in the poor quality of sleep these days.

To show that this is not new, look back at the first reporting of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case by NBC. Who was caught editing audio to make George appear to be racist instead of answering a dispatcher's question, they lightened his photos to make him appear to be white instead of Hispanic, and instead of displaying current pictures of Trayvon Martin pulled pictures of him as an elementary school kid instead of a 17 year old 6'1" young man who enjoyed MMA.

Oh my, you can go back further than that. Like with OJ Simpson, and at least you'll have an older example. Or even further.

Besides, Zimmerman? He is a racist. There's a reason he lost his suit. Seriously, that idiot could have avoided being a killer of another human being if all he'd done was gone to the pharmacy instead.

Cherry picking and editing are common tactics for media propagandists in the US. If you were fooled, shame on you.

You forgot law enforcement. And other forms of Planting evidence and corruption.

I'm sure you meant nothing by the oversight.

Plenty of lawsuits have been won against these media outlets for various civil reasons. Off the top of my head, ABC and CNN have both had to issue public apologies and retractions in the last month and a half for doing this, or would have faced even more civil suits.

Oh, you should learn about Fox.. So bad, the White House had to apologize to a foreign country for believing Fox News. Editing video since 1984.

You know, a company that hired a PR firm to slut shame people critical of one of their hosts. Looks like that is getting out.

So are you happy yet?

When it costs $2.5 billion to get FDA approval for a drug, and your potential market is a few thousand or tens of thousands of people, you have to price it that high just to recoup your costs.

The real problem is that we have buyers (insurance and government) who will pay that price regardless of whether the drug actually provides that much value to the patients. It's a noble sentiment to believe that every life is worth saving. But practically, when you try to do that you just end up burdening society with costs which give you a negative return on investment (you're throwing away money - people's productivity that they've sent in good faith to government and to insurance companies).

So instead of standing up and trying to lead the way, your plan is to just say fuck it lets race to the bottom and see who loses first? That sounds great!

I'm responsible for my own actions and can influence my Government accordingly. I do not have any false hope of doing the same with China, India, Russia, or any other country. The US similarly has no authority over those same Governments. Having realistic views of "what" I can do does not mean I want a race to the bottom. Having realistic expectations means I don't have false hope of false solutions, like Carbon Tax/Credits having any impact. I also have an understanding that those false solutions do have an impact on me and the society I live in. I'm not sure you have the same amount of realism.

Also, China is already working on environmental regulations. They're well aware of what the past few decades have done to their country but now that their growth is plateauing, they're also looking at ways to clean up the mess they've made. The Chinese aren't any happier about breathing thick smog and drinking heavy metal laden water than we are. They (well, "they") have just accepted it as a cost that will have to be paid in the future and realize that the future is starting to bear down on them.

If you rely on Chinese media to get your information they are of course doing great. In fact, according to them they are an open Democracy where all citizens have a voice. Then we look at reality. So far you are 0 for 2.

They're definitely not anywhere close to Western regulations at this point of course, but the wheels are turning at least. In particular, of the three biggest polluters signed onto the Paris Agreement (China, India, US,) only one is threatening to pull out at this point, and its not China or India.

Heck, I'll even give you a link for once! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-takes-the-climate-spotlight-as-u-s-heads-for-exit/.

Well, you started good but then link to articles which consider and evaluate what China says, not what levels of pollution show. Actions speak much louder than words. China has continued to have increases in air pollution, increased days where you are warned not to be out in public breathing without protection, and of course the same massive amounts of corruption and pollution. But hey, they say it's better so it must be true right? I believe you just struck out.

Why not

So instead of standing up and trying to lead the way, your plan is to just say fuck it lets race to the bottom and see who loses first? That sounds great!

Also, China is already working on environmental regulations. They're well aware of what the past few decades have done to their country but now that their growth is plateauing, they're also looking at ways to clean up the mess they've made. The Chinese aren't any happier about breathing thick smog and drinking heavy metal laden water than we are. They (well, "they") have just accepted it as a cost that will have to be paid in the future and realize that the future is starting to bear down on them.

They're definitely not anywhere close to Western regulations at this point of course, but the wheels are turning at least. In particular, of the three biggest polluters signed onto the Paris Agreement (China, India, US,) only one is threatening to pull out at this point, and its not China or India.

Heck, I'll even give you a link for once! https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/china-takes-the-climate-spotlight-as-u-s-heads-for-exit/.

While they do have some influence on the climate (as documented by the experts), they aren't nearly as big as the warming caused by CO2. And actually the Sun has been cooling a little bit since the 1980's.

Sorry. That can't be true. All those articles which use sources, and are the basis of AGW talking points say that your view is untrue. Hate to be the bearer of bad news and tell you that you're still a climate denier.

The real problem is:

3) Places where freshwater flows into the ocean are brackish, and the organisms there are adapted to a low-salinity environment. Increasing the salinity there can disrupt the ecosystem just the same as it would further out in the ocean.

There is really no good place to dump the excess salt. We can't just dump massive amounts of salt anywhere there is life. Maybe it could be prepared for human consumption---sea salt is often treated as a premium grocery item. I have no idea what volume to expect from a desalination plant, so it is possible the salt production could exceed our dietary needs.

As always, there are other technical solutions, but the economic viability depends on the price and availability of other inputs.

Don't worry. These days, also pesticides help with that.

That's what I thought.

Now HERE is a robotic (star)fish killer!!!

The USA, as a group of citizens, is dunber than a box of rocks.

Recall that they had Waxahachie and lost the opportunity to be the Cern and find the Higgs first.

Texas would have been a major center for the world's greatest talents and would have gained all the logistical support business that comes with it.

Instead, we will get the Young Earth theory, climate change denial, and increasing poverty, crime, and drug overdoses.

I'm not worried at all about the decline of American science.

America is off the rails, driven insane by greed.

Like you said, scientists don't need no steenkin' country.

Income inequality in the US is much worse than you think.

If poor people knew how rich rich people are, there would be riots in the streets.

http://www.lcurve.org/

The "outstanding" climate scientist who has been vindicated again and again? Seems you're the one with the selective memory.

this project helping a woman locked in by ALS.

They didn't use mesenchymal, they used indued pluripotent stem cells derived from fat cells.. There's different ways cells can be induced to pluripotency (the Yamanaka method is the favorite) but the one of the biggest trouble with iPSCs is their epigenetic profiles [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3760008/]. Basically just because you activate the genes you need for iPSCs to form doesn't mean their epigenetic profiles are the same as naturually occuring pluripotent cells, so unexpected growth and differentiation can occur. Also, iPSCs have a tendency to become cancerous, so even if you run the same treatment there's still a risk of tumor formation.

Democrats are just as anti science.

Read the article...

30-50% of the warming is due to natural, not man made, effects.

Or, as scientists have been saying for decades, the majority of the warming (50 - 70%) is due to man made effects.

This includes scientists at shell oil and Exxon-Mobil. I remember debate class in high school, fall of 1979, our team was 'pro' nuclear power. We used research from oil companies about the dangers of global warming as one one the arguments in favor of expanding nuclear power use. We won the debate, despite the fact that the 3 mile island accident happened in spring of '79. That made it a very tough debate to win the pro nuclear side of the argument.

Good Enough Engineering

Do your research, don't simply tell other people that I am wrong without CHECKING. You want proof? Here:

1) Sex criminals less likely (do a simple google search):
http://www.freerepublic.com/fo...
https://www.scientificamerican...
And many others.

2) If you do any of the following, it is a sex crime and most people will not consider you a 'pervert'.
a) Get caught peeing in public (arrested for exposure)
b) Being 21 and have sex with a woman that SAID she was 18, but was 15, (we all know how women never lie about their age).,
c) Get drunk and have sex with a woman that is asleep. Congratulations, you are now a date rapist. But almost no one I know would consider you a pervert. If you are one, so is half the college students.

3) Sex crimes are INCREDIBALY subjectively prosecuted. Much more so than regular crime. Mainly because sex crimes are all about motive and mentality. It's a crime that occures in the mind, where everything is subjective.

Have naked pictures of your 5 year old child a bath tub? If you convince the prosecutor they are 'innocent' you have no trouble. If the prosecutor believes the pictures are 'lascivious', you go to jail.

We should ask VP Pence if it was a mistake. https://www.scientificamerican... I seriously doubt it's saving anything.

But if parts of Hawaii need baseload power over what their rooftops can provide, they might consider ocean thermal:

You mean something like this, only bigger?

They could try, but I'm sure some native somewhere will sue because it's heating up the bodies of their ancestors...

The agency appears to have failed to accurately assess the risk of not disclosing vulnerabilities to responsible vendors and failed to follow even the limited Vulnerabilities Equities Process.

This is the same group of idiots that are largely responsible for polio still being around (citation below). Failing to accurately assess risk and shortsighted thinking are nothing new to these folks.

Citation:

https://www.scientificamerican...

Actually salt doesn't contribute to high blood pressure: https://academic.oup.com/ajh/article/28/3/362/2743418/Relationship-Between-Nutrition-and-Blood-Pressure. This is something that's been shown multiple times in research for a quite a while, but can't seem to overcome this myth that's been propagated for years that it's become one of those things that everyone just "knows" and no one questions or thinks about.

Sure, salt can make your blood pressure go up, but it would be weird if it didn't. Increase the amount of sodium intake and some of that is absorbed by you cells which then take on more water to maintain a balance in concentration. This makes them swell (which is why if someone is severely dehydrated you can kill them if you give them water too rapidly) and naturally add pressure against blood vessels and increase blood pressure.

It does. It also illustrates your rather disappointing lack of humor.

It could just be that you aren't as funny as you think you are.

Do you just skim posts, finding something to take umbrage at? Didn't read what I wrote after that? Allow me to explain.

You didn't have to find it funny. A person would look at that, and say "that's ridiculous" some might find it funny, some not. And that's okay. But even so, a display of non-insulting humor where a poster pokes fun at themselves, indicates an extension of friendly notion, that even if if the recipient does not find it amusing, at least they can make some judgements.

And your response tells me much about you, taken with your other posts like:

Only if your definition of race comes from the 19th century, which in itself is a little racist.

Just because the stupid end of society can't deal with grey doesn't mean the rest of us can't.

Nice.

And it's where left wing, reshuffle everything idealists end up turning simple concepts into meaningless messes. And where you don't understand why when a decent majority of people believe in most of your concepts, you are adamant about derailing the train for the least important matters.

And herein lies the point of your babble. A little rant about the left, or the democrats, or whoever it is you hate.

I have to chuckle, when there are others here who label me as a liberal or socialist. No, actually I tend to analyze a situation, and put it to a test of whether it makes sense, and if it is likely to work, or it it is just screwed up ideology. I've torn conservatives to shreds when they try to trump science with politics and declare the energy retention characteristics of different gases, or when they express such a faulty concept of human nature as to believe in trainwreck economics like the trickle down effect or Laissez-faire.

But the left comes into a well deserved beatdown when they require 88 genders, which means that a simple term once based upon what parts you were born with, has completely changed to mean sexual preference. And so fluid that there is somehow a difference between the aforementioned Transsexual man, and Transsexual male.

For the record I have no political leaning, both sides are as crazy as each other, so anyone attacking one, is clearly on the other and therefore to me just as crazy.

Racist, stupid, and now crazy. What a bundle of joy you are. handing out the pejoratives like candy at Easter.

Your idea of labeling anyone who criticizes one political affiliation as automatically belonging to the other political affiliation is simply wrong, especially when you seem to demand fluidity in other matters, yet are in a big hurry to label me as something that I'm not.

If you want the science, you can start here: https://www.scientificamerican...

Race as a social construct is very nice for psychologists, but tell me, is it bad to know that people originating from a certain area and subject to certain diseases by their genetics now forbidden knowledge? Is the very researching of this sort of thing racist? From the article:

"What the study of complete genomes from different parts of the world has shown is that even between Africa and Europe, for example, there is not a single absolute genetic difference, meaning no single variant where all Africans have one variant and all Europeans another one, even when recent migration is disregarded," Pääbo told Live Science. "It is all a question of differences in how frequent different variants are on different continents and in different regions."

Wordsmithing, and basically completely abandoning race altogether for some regional approach that will soon become race again.

It does. It also illustrates your rather disappointing lack of humor.

It could just be that you aren't as funny as you think you are.

And it's where left wing, reshuffle everything idealists end up turning simple concepts into meaningless messes. And where you don't understand why when a decent majority of people believe in most of your concepts, you are adament about derailing the train for the least important matters.

And herein lies the point of your babble. A little rant about the left, or the democrats, or whoever it is you hate.
For the record I have no political leaning, both sides are as crazy as each other, so anyone attacking one, is clearly on the other and therefore to me just as crazy.
If you want the science, you can start here: https://www.scientificamerican...

Race is most certainly not a "social construct"

Scientific American disagrees with you. You'd better submit your disproof paper to them immediately.

Of course, you aren't — Blacks are given a pass by all your news-sources, when they discriminate or even murder based on race.

Probably because being based in a country on the other side of the world, my local media don't care about your local news, just as I'm sure yours don't report ours. Conspiracy averted, but your response says a lot about your ability to engage in a rational discussion.

FTA: A 2015 study suggested that this happens in almost all pregnant women, at least temporarily. The researchers tested tissue samples from the kidneys, livers, spleens, lungs, hearts, and brains of 26 women who tragically died while pregnant or within one month of giving birth. The study found that the women had fetal cells in all of these tissues. The researchers knew that the cells were from the fetus, and not from the mother, because the cells contained a Y chromosome (found only in males) and the women had all been carrying sons. In some cases, fetal cells may stay in a woman's body for years. In a 2012 study, researchers analyzed the brains of 59 women ages 32 to 101, after they had died. They found 63 percent of these women had traces of male DNA from fetal cells in their brains. The oldest woman to have fetal cells in her brain was 94 years old, suggesting that these cells can sometimes stay in the body for a lifetime.

Climate change predicts a lot of things such as more extreme weather events becoming more common.
The California drought is the worst that's happened in the state in the last 1000 years.
If anything, many of the predictions were overly conservative.
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that sea level would rise 2mm/year. It's actually rising 3.3mm/year. They predicted that the arctic ice sheet would melt in 50-70 years in 2006. It's now predicted to melt by 2052.

Here are some predictions that came true:

1. The sea level is rising in most places, though at the high end (or higher) than original predictions (3.2mm/year vs 2mm).
2. The sea level fell near Greenland as predicted due to the loss of mass and the gravitational pull of that mass.
3. Extreme weather events were predicted to become more common with climate change. This is happening as "about 25% of moderate daily hot extremes can be attributed to warming.".
4. The predicted radiative forcing effect from CO2 has been observationally confirmed.

Climate change predicts a lot of things such as more extreme weather events becoming more common.
The California drought is the worst that's happened in the state in the last 1000 years.
If anything, many of the predictions were overly conservative.
In 2001 the IPCC predicted that sea level would rise 2mm/year. It's actually rising 3.3mm/year. They predicted that the arctic ice sheet would melt in 50-70 years in 2006. It's now predicted to melt by 2052.

Here are some predictions that came true:

1. The sea level is rising in most places, though at the high end (or higher) than original predictions (3.2mm/year vs 2mm).
2. The sea level fell near Greenland as predicted due to the loss of mass and the gravitational pull of that mass.
3. Extreme weather events were predicted to become more common with climate change. This is happening as "about 25% of moderate daily hot extremes can be attributed to warming.".
4. The predicted radiative forcing effect from CO2 has been observationally confirmed.

So busy declaring their unwavering support for the idea of Global Warming — and its contribution to drought , none of these guys would raise an alarm over the possibility of a flood.

Both have happened before — early settlers in California have died due to drought-induced famine, and 1863 has seen a spectacular flooding, for example.

The science is settled my tail.

The actual quote is

"Some high bandwidth interface to the brain will be something that helps achieve a symbiosis between human and machine intelligence and maybe solves the control problem and the usefulness problem," Musk explained.

Beware of anything in a news article without quotation marks, or is attributed with "according to..." as paraphrasing, which is fair-warning, for good or ill, that the writer is putting his own spin on things.

and "high bandwidth interface to the brain"? Many examples already happening in the field of medicine.

Drinking absolutely pure water can hurt or kill you. In the same way, pure information, stripped of context, is as likely to mislead or confuse as help. For example, if I pick a specific range of years, I can "prove" that the climate change is making the earth hotter, colder, or is completely false. A bit of context (a graph showing a wider range of years) is far more accurate.

I use the name as part of the context of information. It's not the whole of the context; even mostly-truthful sources can be mistaken, and even mostly-false sources sometimes post truths. But it's a useful shorthand, because nobody has time to verify every fact. My experience is that those who claim they verify every fact are the least accurate, actually...

Also, if you can't be bothered to sign up for a mostly-anonymous account and have your current statement interpreted in light of your previous statements, then I don't see why I should take to time to read your opinion. Most people who don't want their statements connected are trolls, and I've got better things to do than deal with them.

Fission reactors convert slightly harmful raw material into extremely dangerous products which will remain like this for hundreds/thousands of years.

White noise propaganda, i.e. the entire premise is constructed for people who've never thought critically about anything. Do you know how long toxic mercury compounds released from coal remain toxic before they degrade? If they degrade? And do you care? Toxic mercury compounds from coal burning and gold mining is lowering the IQs of hundreds of millions of children around the globe right this very second. I'd much, much rather us deal with the possibility of very slightly higher cancer rates (maybe) than live with that.

Meanwhile, the entire Earth is one giant fission reactor, orbiting a fusion reactor that puts out dangerous amounts of UV radiation. Baby Jesus doesn't weep just because we made one corner of our fission reactor spaceship a little hotter, and there are countless economical ways to deal with this waste (one of the most sensible and economical being to keep it on site. If this isn't possible with current designs, they are doing it wrong.)

Bear in mind that our great, great, great, great, etc. grandsons will have still to maintain and fix the containers storing some of the products which our plants are currently generating.

1. Spoken like someone who doesn't understand what the time value of money is. Even if that chain of custody goes on for a literally infinite amount of time and the isotopes remain permanently dangerous, you are still describing a finite sum of money (and probably a much smaller one than you're imagining) unless you assume an average of zero interest / zero economic growth.

2. If you're still not satisfied, drop it in an ocean trench and stop whining about it. It's not that bad. It really, really isn't. The world is awash with radionuclides and almost every person alive (except for the exceptionally melanistic and the arctic-dwellers) has suffered a radiation burn and laughed it off, even though some of us will go on to die from it (malignant melanoma.) Send a sub down there first to make sure there aren't any interesting tubeworms we might accidentally kill, then chuck it in. What the hell do you think is going to happen? Do you honestly believe a nuclear reactor could poison a significant portion of the ocean, let alone poison it by slowly decaying in darkness a few miles down? I mean, *strangely enough* we didn't kill off all the fish in the Pacific even though we detonated several very large bombs near the surface...

For the security objection, anyone with the tech to retrieve a very heavy thing from those depths could obtain radioactive materials some other way far more easily.

https://www.scientificamerican...

12 cents a kwh before transmission ?

You have to admit... what army/navy/etc. would sink a nuclear ship in their own waters during war? You'd have to think twice about that - it could be a good deterrent to being attacked. If sunk, it could be a major issue in your region for generations to come.

It's astonishing that anyone (let alone 6 digit slashdotters) still thinks of radioactive contamination like this.

It might be an issue for the fishing industry due to bioaccumulation, but there would be no other significantly worrisome effects. Water absorbs radiation very effectively and unlike fallout on land, currents would eventually disperse any radionuclides that didn't immediately settle on the sea floor.

We're constantly surrounded by radiation. The entire Earth is, in fact, a nuclear reactor orbiting another nuclear reactor that can give you a radiation burn and possibly even cancer if you expose your uncovered skin to it for just an hour or two...

Looks like the Hanford site has had quite a few problems:
Hanford Nuclear Waste Cleanup Plant May Be Too Dangerous
https://www.scientificamerican...

Report finds serious defects at Hanford nuclear waste treatment plant
http://www.latimes.com/nation/...

I can't comment on H1-Bs but I know that the medical industry is already highly reliant upon immigrant doctors and nurses, and yes, the EO has lead to some problems, causing doctors shortages in some areas of the US.

Because the discussion of the EO has centered around terrorism (something it's unlikely to have any affect on, given the lack of terrorist incidents in the US committed by people from the affected countries so far), and the tech industry (because it's tech that's been most high profile in attacking the ban), the affect on other industries has been largely ignored. But yeah, doctors are being turned away and doctors living in the US are having their visas canceled, and you can draw your own conclusions as to what the effect of that will be.

I also seem to recall reading that when you sleep (properly), your brain also gets flooded with cerebrospinal fluid, which cleans a type of "plaque" from between pathways in the brain. This plaque has been seen as possibly contributing to various mental/cognitive degenerative conditions

I can't find the exact thing I read previously, but here appears to be an article on it.

It seems to me that those particular mathematicians missed out on encountering one of the more-profound things, related to mathematics. Anyone who combines Gödel's Proof with Cantor's analysis of "transfinity", can thereafter realize that even if you know an infinity of stuff, that only allows devising questions that can lead to learning an even greater infinity of stuff. Endlessly. It is therefore impossible for anyone to know everything (includes God), but it also means that you can live for an eternity and never get bored, from running out of things to learn.

Worth keeping in mind it costs on average 2.5 billion to bring a new drug to the market, and most drug candidates fail. If this were a non-essential industry, it would have folded a long long time ago. We can't allow it to fail to exist, thus we have to allow some stuff.

See :

https://www.scientificamerican...

Quote :

Five experts told Natureâ(TM)s news team that they do not yet believe the claim, and need more evidence. âoeI donâ(TM)t think the paper is convincing at all,â says Paul Loubeyre, a physicist at Franceâ(TM)s Atomic Energy Commission in BruyÃres-le-ChÃtel.

The study doesn't mention 'exercise' as a factor in changing your personality after birth: the brain you are born with affects the personality you exhibit in life, and that's it.

That's reading too much into this study. The idea that brain you have is what you're stuck with was the state of neuroscience when I went to college in the late 70s, but remember this was before researchers could image a brain in a living subject. Extrapolating from the lack of recovery of people with spinal cord injuries the belief was that nerve cells just didn't grow or multiply in an adult -- and they certainly didn't change function. Now we know from imaging studies and from clinical histories of brain damage patients that the brain absolutely does change itself, and parts even grow in size in response to effort, like a weightlifter's muscles. There have also been people who received hemisphectomies who regained vision and motor function that was handled by the half of the brain that was removed. This necessarily entails a massive remodeling of the remaining brain.

So the good news is that even if you are your brain, you can still grow because parts of your brain can literally grow.

Here's a Scientific America article with neuroscientists who researched it. I don't have any decent journal access, but those names might be a good starting point.

Even if it didn't have medical effects, I still like the visual effect. When I wake up in the middle of the night and pick up my phone to check the time, the normal daytime colors sear my retinas while the orange hues don't. Any potential health benefit is just a bonus.

Ahh, so a nebulous expenditure that is hard to quantify, hard to categorize, and impossible to rationalize. We're not "taxing them enough" is your answer? Should we also include the costs of wind power in terms of its affect on the local climate and temperature? Or the change to the climate that comes from solar farms?

A battery powered load leveler or "peaker"! From the Sith lord Musk, the most hated man on Slashdot.

As it turns out, "normal" power plants are not perfect as we might think, and they have big problems dealing with shifting demands. Wanna see a turbine operator blanch? suddenly drop the load. But rapid increases in load are an issue as well, as turbines just don't spin up and slow down immediately. So we need load leveling services. Typically, this might be a natural gas turbine plant. Hydro power ponds and lakes where water is pumped off peak, then re-released during times of heavy demand.

Altogether too many people (as in approaching 100 percent) think that the coal plant or nuc reactor sits there by itself, mighty and alone, to meet all demands perfectly and in stride, never breaking a sweat.

Nope, there has to be levelers. And Los Angeles needed another leveler, so had looked at a NatGas version, but instead has made the move of installing a 100 MegaWatt peaking leveler source, of batteries. It can run this level for 4 hours. Peak demand being what it is, this is plenty for LA.

But y'all keep moving the goalposts, and we keep getting to them. That must get tiring for y'all.

(Dec 2007) This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

Here's how 2012 ended up. Looks like he was not too far off!

You mean like how Obama's courageous announcement to close the Arctic to drilling means (somehow) didn't open it for drilling in the first place? Or how Hillary lied about being lied to about Saddam's WMD's, so she didn't vote for the Iraq war. Because reasons.

" In 99.9999% of cases it has nothing to do with medicine or treating any illness. "

Oh come on! That's an exaggeration and you know it. It's "medical marijuana" because it requires a prescription.

The f***ing FDA doesn't give a damn about The People. It is owned by the big pharmaceutical corporations! A majority of Congress is likewise owned based on their recent bi-partisan vote to keep the ban on importing drugs from Canada. Note that these same corporations are funding anti-decriminalization efforts all over the country. They obviously think "medical marijuana" is effective in treating some conditions. Even if they have a treatment of their own, it's likely that medical marijuana would be able to undercut their ridiculous prices.

That aside, there are definitely cases where medical pot has proven effective where conventional medicine has failed:

https://www.scientificamerican...

Note that if you saw someone with epilepsy walk into a medical marijuana clinic, they would most likely look like a normal, healthy person.

Epilepsy can be notoriously difficult to treat. Prescription medication is a crap shoot. The neurologists throw drug after drug at the patient *hoping* that something will work. The drugs can have serious side effects however, so the treatment can be almost as bad as the disease. People with "generalized seizures"(which affect the entire brain) are not candidates for surgery either because you can't point to any particular spot for an operation.

Epilepsy sucks! If "medical marijuana" can restore the quality of life for people with severe seizures, I don't care how many people use the loophole to get their jollies.

Prove it.

There is a misunderstanding here. They aren't talking about antibiotics used to treat animals for infection. Your knowledge is out-of-date here. Let me explain:

Commercial farms buy feed with antibiotics *in the feed itself*. They aren't doing it to treat disease, they are doing it because the antibiotics make the animals grow fatter, faster. I don't think it is entirely understood why. These people aren't "farmers" in the way that you describe farmers. These are heavily mechanised factories.

There's tons of articles on this topic. Try Scientific American for a start, since they cover the whole history of it. Searches for "antibiotics chicken feed" should yield some good results.

When did you check and how did you check? It took me seconds to find a recent article from Scientific American entitled "Delaying Vaccines Increases Risks--with No Added Benefits."

I want people to get vaccinated based off the CDC's recommended timing because their schedule is based on science (epidemiology, virology, immunology, bacteriology, etc.) and not the evidence-free opinion of some random person who has zero training in any relevant field.

And they'll remove the mercury warnings for seafood, which is also caused by burning coal.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/tunas-declining-mercury-contamination-linked-to-u-s-shift-away-from-coal/