The Puritans (the ones who were "escaping persecution") only founded the New England colonies. They immediately set up their own theocratic governments and began their own vicious persecution, most famously the Salem Witch Trials. Religious persecution caused BY the Puritans was one of the main reasons for the Religious Test clause of the Constitution and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

The Continental Congress, the Revolution, and the eventual establishment of the Constitution was a completely different event than the Puritans founding a colony and happened around a hundred years after. Historically speaking, this is about as big a miss as confusing the Revolution and the Civil War.

In the ancient Chinese nation of Chu, during the reign of King Li, a man named Bian He discovered an incomparable piece of jade encased in a stone. When he presented the stone to King Li, the king did not believe it actually contained a piece of jade and ordered that Bian He have one of his legs cut off. When King Li died, and King Wu succeeded him, Bian He again presented the jade to the royal court; he was disbelieved a second time, and the King ordered his other leg cut off. When King Wu died, he was succeeded by King Wen; it was King Wen who finally believed Bian He and ordered that the stone be cut. Ultimately the stone was fashioned into a great jade disc, called the "jade disc of He" to honor its discoverer.

The jade was later stolen from Chu and sold to the state of Zhao. The King of Qin offered fifteen cities for the jade, giving rise to the Chinese idiom, "valued at multiple cities." Eventually the jade was surrendered to King Shi Huang of Qin, who became the first Emperor of China. Qin Shi Huang ordered the jade be cut down to create his imperial seal. The seal was lost about 1300 years later, but a thousand more years of imperial rule still followed.

The moral is that a) human beings with money make really stupid decisions b) even if you make a great discovery and serve loyally the king might still chop off your fucking legs.

A good analogy for this case would be Safford Unified School District v. Savanna Redding, when a 13-year-old girl was strip-searched after another student accused her of possessing prescription-strength Advil. The SCOTUS ruled the search was unconstitutional, yet still held the school officials had no liability because they did not violate "clearly established law."

The rule, basically, is that the government can wantonly violate your rights and you can only sue if both a) the people violating your rights KNEW their actions were illegal, and b) the government has waived its sovereign immunity.

The Emperor has tutored many people in set theory and seen that exact error many times. You made the mistake because the idea of computing the union of sets of sets (as opposed to sets of "objects" (ur-elements)) is very non-intuitive, and requires a significant leap of abstract thinking.

It also contains an error: Peano defined 2 as { {}, {{}} } = {0,1}. 3 is 2 U {2} = { 2, 1, 0 }. Larger numbers are defined inductively as (n+1) := n U {n}.

You can tell it was supposed to be the Peano construction (and not something else) because the GP defined zero as the empty set and 2 as {0,1}. The error was to also define 2 as {{{}}}, which is clearly not equivalent to {0,1} (since the former set has cardinality 1 and the latter has cardinality 2).

This is an incredibly common mistake even for math undergrads and good evidence that set theory really isn't very intuitive. There's a reason New Math failed.

It is not illegal to feed cow parts to chickens and then feed the chicken parts back to cows.

We did not anticipate such a reasonable and eager reaction, but We appreciate it anyway.

The Emperor accepts your praise with humility.

Also, small correction, telomerase is apparently a ribonuceloprotein, not a ribozyme - it contains both RNA and a regular protein.

The study was about somatic cells, eg "body cells" that make up the specialized tissues of your body. Your offspring are formed from germ cells, found in your gonads, and consequently your offspring can only inherit DNA from your germ cells, but never your somatic cells (except in the case of cloning or other artificial techniques).

Telomeres are the "endcaps" of chromosomal DNA. Every time a chromosome is copied, a small portion at the ends of the chromosome get "left off" of the copy, which limits the number of time a cell can divide before the telomeres are consumed and functional DNA segments begin to be deleted. This (usually) prevents cells from reproducing in an uncontrolled fashion, and it's one of your body's main defenses against cancer. That's how it works in somatic cells.

Germ cells, on the other hand, can express a ribozyme called "telomerase," which can bind to the ends of a chromosome and extend the telomeres. This is why animals can reproduce indefinitely even though 99% of their cells are "mortal." (As others have pointed out, when a somatic cell begins to express telomerase it's usually cancer.)

The upshot of all of this is that shortened telomeres in your somatic cells will have no direct effect on your offspring. This particular study in no way supports the idea that environmental factors are responsible for genetic changes in offspring. Your post is therefore ill-informed even if your thesis is correct ("almost everything they teach in American public school is either wrong or simplified to the point of uselessness?").

To rectify your error, your homework assignment for tonight is to study the enzymes called "telomerase" and "reverse transcriptase," followed by learning the "central dogma of biology."

Dismissed.

Would you pay someone to build a house and then not have it inspected? You inspect a building to make sure it meets a specification, and if sustainability is part of the specification, you should hire someone to make sure of that, as well.

There is also an (informal?) mandate for all future government buildings to be more environmentally friendly. LEED certification provides a standard of proof that this goal is being met. In some cases, there may even be funding grants or other incentives to "green" builders who can provide third-party validation. And of course, paying for LEED certification helps the LEED program itself continue, which is arguably in itself a worthy goal for the government and NASA.

You don't even know how much the certification cost, or else you would have included it in your post. You're also probably not an expert on construction, commercial development, or NASA's building needs. And yet, from a position supported by no factual basis, you feel comfortable taking stabs at NASA. Shame on you and your ignorance.

But this is blatantly counterfactual and indefensible:

At most a few hundred million dollars have been spent this campaign seasons. This is an absurd amount of money, but it's not even a fraction of NASA's $18.5 billion 2011 budget. NASA spending represents only a fraction of US science investment.

He places the blame right where it belongs, on those corporations and government agencies that are too incompetent to design secure computer systems or hire those who can:

You're right: Obama has maintained way too many Bush-era policies, he has expanded others, and the remainder he has not challenged vigorously enough.

But bigotry, incompetence, criminality and right-wing authoritarianism bordering on fascism are nothing new at the FBI. It was a problem before Obama, and it will probably continue to be a problem after Obama.

The FBI is part of the executive branch. He IS their boss and that IS separation of powers.