An activist website called Negotiation Is Over is urging its followers to attack scientists.  

Left-wing kooks are no different than the right wing kind, just their issues are different.   Instead of global warming, they are anti-vaccine, instead of human embryonic stem cells, they are anti-agriculture.  

One way fringe kooks on the left outdo their counterparts on the right is calls to violence.   They're even willing to pay students if they will target biomedical students who use animals in research.  Check this out:

In the criticisms of American education, it is often noted that Asian children perform better on standardized tests that seek to measure knowledge across cultures so American schools last decade ago were required to begin teaching the same way, with funding contingent on success rates in education for the first time.

Atlanta Public Schools shone during that period - scores rose so dramatically they brought national acclaim to superintendent Beverly Hall  and the district, according to an investigative report released Tuesday by Gov. Nathan Deal.    

Check out this ice cream manufacturer in Aberdeenshire which is entirely carbon neutral - it produces 10 million quarts of ice cream per year andthe factory is completely powered by the wind.

Mackie's of Scotland makes more than ice cream and says its ice cream isn't selling you short by going carbon neutral, it's still 'extra posh', though it's hard to say what makes it expensive, the poshness or the wind power.    Of course, this state-of-the-art equipment was not manufactured using wind, nor is the transportation that takes it to stores, but if you need to feel good about your ice cream, this is the way to go.

The downside to kooks diluting real conditions like Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) is that, over time, the public will regard the quackery as the real thing.   PTSD has now gone from being a rare condition suffered by soldiers in battle to being a blanket diagnosis for anyone who feels traumatized by anything.    

Now, we are supposed to believe a person who hears about stories of people who suffer PTSD will somehow catch it.    

Mac McClelland, a civil rights 'reporter' obsessed with sexual violence, was working for Mother Jones when she accompanied a Haitian victim of sexual violence to a hospital and the woman saw her attackers and went into shock.

Maybe fantasy baseball scouting will start to list eye color along with which side players bat from and how their home park is configured - lighter-colored eyes, it seems, don't absorb light the way darker eyes do, and in a precisely game like baseball where milliseconds matter, the impact can be substantial.

The clarity of a player's vision, called visual acuity, is not the only important quality to track for baseball players. So is contrast sensitivity.  Dr. Keith Smithson, the team optometrist for the Washington Wizards, Washington Nationals and D.C. United, measures this in order to interpret "a ball player's ability to pick out a white target, a baseball, against different backgrounds."

Twice as many people have recently died in Europe from eating organic food than died in the Gulf of Mexico oil rig explosion and the nuclear power plant meltdown in Fukushima, Japan - combined. 

If this were Monsanto doing the killing, there would be Enron levels of Congressional hearings but instead it's organic food and, gosh, it just must be better because it's, you know, organic, so few people are stating the obvious.

Namely that it's time to regulate that stuff.

Does a police officer really need a four-year degree?   Or a plumber or a journalist or a musician?  The 'college is a right' experiment in America is now two decades old and it has led to ballooning costs, a result of unlimited money being thrown at a finite number of colleges.   Has it led to a better life?

To be sure, college educated people have higher lifetime earnings, though no evidence shows it is a result of college - if a police officer retires after 25 years on the job, did the degree make them successful?  

Why do nations rise and fall?   Historians and anthropologists can usually make an educated hypothesis but some instances are nothing more than guesses.   Here are 10 that disappeared and maybe it was due to global warming or global cooling or famine or flood, but no one knows, including the Minoans, the Anasazi, the Indus, the Nabateans and six more.

Top 10 Civilizations That Mysteriously Disappeared 

Writing in Media Psychology, Markus Appel discusses a study where 63 Austrian college students who read a short about someone stupid then did worse on a test than a control group - they became more stupid - but the effect did not occur when the readers had to outline how they differed from the stupid character.    The stupid character was in "Slow on the Uptake," about a hooligan named Meier, and students either summarized the story or underlined passages where Meier differed from them.  A control group of 18 read a story with a protagonist who didn't do something stupid like go to a football match, get drunk, get into a fight and miss the actual game he attended.