Not quite isolated..

Video footage has emerged of a police officer beating an Iraq war veteran so hard that he suffered a ruptured spleen in an apparently unprovoked incident at a recent Occupy protest in California.
The footage, which has been shared with the Guardian, shows Kayvan Sabehgi standing in front of a police line on the night of Occupy Oakland's general strike on 2 November, when he is set upon by an officer.
He does not appear to be posing any threat, nor does he attempt to resist, yet he is hit numerous times by an officer clad in riot gear who appears determined to beat him to the ground.
Sabehgi, 32, an Oakland resident and former marine who served in Iraq and Afghanistan, has since undergone surgery on his spleen. He says it took hours for him to be taken to hospital, despite complaining of severe pain. Police have told the Guardian they are investigating the incident.
The footage was recorded by artist and photographer Neil Rivas, who said Sabehgi was "completely peaceful" before he was beaten. "It was uncalled for," said Rivas. "There were no curse words. He was telling them he was a war vet, a resident of Oakland, a business owner."
Sabehgi has previously said he was talking to officers in a non-violent manner prior to his arrest, which the footage appears to confirm.
The 32-year-old can be seen standing in front of a line of police officers, all of whom are in riot gear. The officers walk forward, chanting and thrusting their batons, and Sabehgi starts to walk backwards.
Although the video is dark, an officer can clearly be seen beginning to hit Sabehgi around the legs with a baton, then starting to strike him higher up.

Oh, I do not dispute that medical 'science' is just as bad at this if not worse.. But the problem behind that seems to be that 'social' scientists of any stripe are simply not being taught proper methods, and that they lack the statistical/mathematical background necessary to do their own research. This is largely ignored by most of the social sciences (I guess so kids who are no good at math can also do 'science'), but it is a quite important thing to get right. Being capable of pressing buttons in SPSS is not enough, so to speak.
Secondly, please note that I have nothing against observational research. I have something against shoddily set up observational research, and I think that the latter is a rampant issue in the social (and that includes medical) sciences. Ioannidis, IIRC, also mentions somewhere how the more shocking the 'finding', the more likely it is to turn out a misinterpretation of data, or an outright statistical fluke (or worse). This is part of what I mean by "lack of replicability".
Lastly, I am not sure what you're trying to accomplish by straw-manning me, and suggesting I am a 'scientific bigot.' Again, I have already stated in the post you are replying to that I think that anything can be studied scientifically. Observational research is a fine, and a legitimate mode of research, depending on how it is done. What I object to is simply the -- pervasive -- attitude of not taking methodological issues seriously, and the equally wide-spread issues with the lack of statistics education. I can understand that understanding statistics is difficult, and that it is frustrating that the education system is lacking in that respect, but from this it does not follow that those issues can be ignored, or that knowing which button to press without understanding the limits of the tests being used is unproblematic..

While I will admit that my assertion was somewhat flippant, and could've used further elaboration, I don't think it follows from that that I have "no understanding of the literatures". I never suggested (as you seem to read into my post) that social science research is invalid because it isn't done in carefully controlled settings (I do not particularly care for laboratory research); what I was hinting at was simply that the methodological "rigor" you are referring to simply isn't there when it comes to many if not most researchers. And because not enough attention is paid to that, it usually turns out that attempts at replication find different things, without anyone knowing whether this is due to differences implicit in the setup, because of unrecognized differences in the participants, etc.
Compare: when a physicist finds something shocking, he tries in pretty much any way he can to explain it, by doing new tests, etc. When a social scientist finds something exciting he is generally reluctant to go over the data again because he knows the statistics behind it are dubious at best, he will cite money constraints as preventing him from retesting his hypothesis in a different fashion, and he will quickly try to submit his Amazing Finding to Science. Now, while I will admit that I am now slightly type-casting, and probably over-hyping the physical scientist, it seems to me that this difference in basic attitude is quite important.

That's all well and good, but I suspect that the majority of those papers will be shoddy methodologically/statistically; In all of the social sciences there is a widely shared shared tendency to say "let's keep analyzing the data until we find something that gives us a p value smaller than or equal to 0.05. Once we have that, we will write an introduction that fits that 'finding,' and we shall not mention that we did 30 different analyses to find this 'significant' finding (which might just be a statistical fluke, but who knew).." There is a reason why most social science research findings simply are not replicable.
Certainly the subject can potentially be researched scientifically, but from that it does not follow that the actual research being done is actually rigorous.

working link

I suspect you've missed it, but Obama also desires to gut SS/medicare.. This isn't just the republicans being evil; the only reason they rejected his earlier proposal because they want a slightly worse one to be accepted.

Put differently, printing money can lead to inflation if the printed (or whatever) money enters the real economy (or M1, I guess), but so long as it doesn't, it doesn't matter how much money is floating around. (That's why the Fed has given up tracking M3, I guess.)
And that's also why QE1, 2 and 3 didn't impact inflation: the money that was given to the banks was immediately moved to Australia via the carry trade because Oz offers 5.7% interest or so..

Britain is (going to be) in a pretty bad recession (soon), which is going to hit the lower/middle classes pretty hard.. That seems to me to be a pretty good (if, of course, always only a partial) explanation for this phenomenon.

Have you seen Lifting the Veil? It tries to go into and discuss this problem of indistinguishability a bit.

Wrong, there is ample evidence that there are adverse effects. But the reason you believe that is because these contraindications get almost no press, either in the MSM or in US-based journals. Never mind that it is nearly impossible to get funding for research for it, thanks largely to the US government actively funding only that research which does not "threaten" the health of large US companies like Monsanto.
See here

Now, it may well be that the current experiment had nothing to do with Monsanto, but as we all know, once "GM is safe", it's always "safe". So radical action is not irrational if one wants to prevent the legalization of such crops that at the very least do not undergo rigorous testing by independent agencies. Moreover, I don't see what it is Europe loses by not allowing GMO foods.. We're perfectly capable of growing our own crops here, and from what I remember from other articles, the higher crop yields are mostly a myth.

I'm not really trying to troll, but that's the American justice system for you.. To quote Greenwald writing about something Obama said about Bradley Manning:

Obama: "We're a nation of laws. We don't let individuals make their own decisions about how the laws operate. He broke the law."
The impropriety of Obama's public pre-trial declaration of Manning's guilt ("He broke the law") is both gross and manifest. How can Manning possibly expect to receive a fair hearing from military officers when their Commander-in-Chief has already decreed his guilt?

Or this, an equally disturbing (though probably less obviously so because this concerns "foreigners":

When I saw that, I was going to ask how the NYT could possibly know that the people whose lives the U.S. just ended were "militants," but then I read further in the article and it said this: "A government official in North Waziristan told Pakistani reporters that five children and four women were among the 23 who were killed." So at least 9 of the 23 people we killed -- at least -- were presumably not "militants" at all, but rather innocent civilians (contrast how the NYT characterizes Libya’s attacks in its headlines: "Qaddafi Troops Fire Cluster Bombs Into Civilian Areas").

Or, about a guy who hit a bicyclist in NYC causing "spinal cord injuries, bleeding from his brain and damage to his knee and scapula, according to court documents. Over the past six weeks he has suffered “disabling” spinal headaches and faces multiple surgeries for a herniated disc and plastic surgery to fix the scars he suffered in the accident."

This kind of egregious hit-and-run is, obviously, a very serious crime. Milo is incredulous at the suggestion from Erzinger’s attorneys “that Erzinger might have unknowingly suffered from sleep apnea”, and wants Erzinger to be charged with a felony. Justice must be served: the case “has always been about responsibility, not money”, he wrote to DA Mark Hurlbert.
Yet Hurlbert, looking at Erzinger’s wealth, decided that the case really was about the money after all:

“The money has never been a priority for them. It is for us,” Hurlbert said. “Justice in this case includes restitution and the ability to pay it.”
Hurlbert said Erzinger is willing to take responsibility and pay restitution.
“Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger’s profession, and that entered into it,” Hurlbert said. “When you’re talking about restitution, you don’t want to take away his ability to pay.”

In other words, Erzinger has bought his way out of a felony charge, over the strenuous objections of his victim; it’s very unlikely that online petitions will do any good at this point. Just another thing to add to the list of things that money can buy, I suppose. [The story continues here]

Or this about regulators who refused to regulate banks because fining them would hurt them financially. Or this about a state AG being bought by the mortgage lenders he's supposedly investigating/prosecuting. Or this about how Koch Industries is advising its employees how to vote. Or this about Pharmaceutical companies claiming the right to data-mine doctor's prescription histories so that they can know which medicines to advertise to them. (Or BP not being sued or fined or anything over the GoM disaster.)
What Sony is doing and getting away with is pretty much pocket change in comparison.

If you want to know why oil prices are fluctuating so much even though Libya is hardly relevant as an oil producing country, read Chapter 4 of Matt Taibbi's Griftopia. The short answer, however, is that, for some time now, a select number of banks have been allowed to speculate on the commodity markets. This was expressly forbidden before 1991, but after a Goldman Sachs subsidiary whined that this was unfair, this was changed for them, and then for another 16 banks under Clinton (and Bush 2).
Now, the notable thing about the commodities markets is that you can only bet one way: long (Futures). This means that, when more money flows into the market, prices can and will only go up to reflect this; and from 2003 to 2008, the amount of money invested in commodity indices has gone from $13B to $317B. Care to guess what the effect was for oil?

Nonsense. Berlusconi likes Ghadaffi very much, and his son ("Rivers of blood will flow") is pals with lots of British and American nationals. The only reason the US has agreed to it is because the momentum of public opinion has swung against him too far.

Here's a nice summary of Berlusconi's history.