Resilience
BBC reports that scientists are shocked! shocked! shocked! to find some plants, long frozen in permafrost, have awakened and grown in the current Arctic warm phase. The only halfway unusual part of the report is that the scientists failed to use the canary-in-coal-mine metaphor.

As usual there shouldn't be any surprise. If plants were not resilient to all sorts of changes,


The only thing MORE resilient and everlasting than plant life is the abysmal STUPIDITY of scientists. A scientist, exposed to FACTS for an entire lifetime, will never abandon even one myth or delusion.

Unrelated example in recent AP story:

Research in teens adds fresh evidence that the 1980s "crack baby" scare was overblown, finding little proof of any major long-term ill effects in children whose mothers used cocaine during pregnancy.

Some studies have linked pregnant women's cocaine use with children's behavior difficulties, attention problems, anxiety and worse school performance. But the effects were mostly small and may have resulted from other factors including family problems or violence, parents' continued drug use and poverty, the researchers said.

They reviewed 27 studies involving more than 5,000 11- to 17-year-olds whose mothers had used cocaine while pregnant. The studies all involved low-income, mostly black and urban families.

AP, perhaps showing its new independent spirit after Obama's wiretapping, manages to give the correct picture. Clearly these scientists haven't picked up the correct picture; otherwise they wouldn't still be wasting money and effort on a subject that didn't fucking exist to begin with. I speak from direct experience on this one... around 1992 I was helping with the software end of an academic study that reached the same conclusion. The difference between cocaine-using mothers and non-users was not correlated with the cocaine, but it was correlated with race. The researchers decided not to publish their incorrect result. Since no scientist can ever admit that

the completely useless studies will continue forever. All differences MUST be attributed to EXTERNAL THINGS because people are identical passive lifeless grains of sand. We must continue studying and studying and studying, over and over and over, until we find some little .000000001% aspect that can be attributed to EXTERNAL THINGS.

Absolutely invincible ignorance, adamantine and immovable through centuries of exposure to facts. Myths and idiotic notions regrow every time.
  ¶ 3:28 AM