Wait, so besides the obvious defamation, conspiracy, and direct attack on a large business not to simply comment on their business in earnest, but to negatively affect their stock price by manufactured slander and libel, this attorney general is also guilty of obstruction of justice?

Neonicotines aren't showing any sort of impact on honeybees. In continental areas where they're banned (bees travel like 3 miles; banning them in half the fucking EU means you don't have any neonicotines 10 years later).

We actually think a new parasite evolved somewhere about 2009...

Not necessarily.

We believe now there's a new parasitic fly evolved to prey on honeybees. Honeybees are well-studied; it's unlikely we'd have missed this parasite in the past 5000 years, so it must be relatively new. The parasite is a tiny fly which injects eggs into the back of the bee's neck (roughly), which hatch into 8-12 new parasites. The bees typically fly toward light when infested; however, if one fails to leave the hive in this way, you have a dozen new parasites infecting a dozen bees and, should more than one of those bees stay in the hive, it propagates out at an alarming rate: the damn things reproduce like fruit flies, so in a few short week they infest the entire hive, and all the bees leave and die--which is the pattern behavior of CCD.

The bees that don't die have been swapping genetics around every time their queens die. Suddenly, with 60% of all bees gone, there's a lot of nectar. They fill up their hives and start packing nectar into brood comb; thus they start swarming, sometimes 3-5 swarms or more in the beginning of the year. That means 3-5 new queens per hive, each mating with 8-15 drones from multiple other hives. These are the bees that didn't die.

They trade genetics like crazy. Such extreme selection pressure would lead to rapidly filling queens with genetics to resist the new parasite. With multiple mating, the queen could produce 2/3 of her workers fatally susceptible to parasites, and 1/3 not. If the hive weakens, they'll decide they don't like the queen, kill her, and raise a new one--possibly from one of the 1/3 of eggs immune to parasites, meaning stronger genetics. The queen makes drones as clones of herself, so such a new queen would both produce more immune bees (and likely not get killed by a colony angry at its poor survival rates) and spread such stronger genetics all over the place.

Give it time and they'll proliferate their resistance. They always do. It's really fucking hard to extinct honeybees; you have to get them *all* in one pass.

Monoculture is a dumb theory. Back 150 years ago, the Italians were the bee of choice. Today, people vary between Italians, Russians, Buckfast, Germans, Carnies ... some have MH or VSH genes, and most are wild-mated with local bees to obtain genetic memory of the local climate (that is: bees with instinctive behaviors adapted for local survival are the ones flying around wild mating with your virgin queens).

We have more genetic diversity now than ever. Even with colonies vanishing, the bees swap genetics like crazy--every time a queen dies (every 7 years for a hive, roughly), and rapidly when they swarm due to massive reductions in the bee population (meaning lots of available nectar). It's actually hard to lose genetic traits in the honeybee population.

We've got "survivor" strains which survive CCD. Many of them have MH and VSH genes, although MH dilutes quickly. The gene pool has rapidly improved.

When honey bees die off, there's an excess of available nectar due to fewer pollinators. Hives fill with bees, who start packing brood comb with collected honey; in response, they raise a new queen. The old queen takes 1/3 of the bees and leaves, while the old hive grows a replacement. You now have two hives. A hive can swarm 3-5 times easily if conditions persist to drive swarm behavior.

Bees really don't go extinct very easily. They rapidly replace any lost colonies, rebounding the population in a few short months. It's always the survivors who rebound. In this latest round, we've started to suspect evolution of a new plague of parasitic flies, each of which infects one live bee and produces 8-12 offspring; hives which go unaffected or which resist the parasite will spread, immediately requiring broad mating--the virgin queen goes out to find a bunch of drones (not all from the same hive, either) to get busy with, then comes back laying eggs. Each time a hive collapses, its genetics have already been passed on many times, and its capacity for nectar consumption is left as surplus for another hive to expand and fill in. Even a new plague of parasitic flies can't extinct honey bees, and hardly manages to cut away at their genetic diversity.

Education *is* technology! We learn the best way to teach, and do that! Unfortunately, it's also politics, so we don't actually do that; we just handwave, pat ourselves on the back for having ideas, never implement most ideas, select the least-effective ones to implement so nothing changes, and then talk about how important education is.

It's not. The truth is the whole concept of "learning styles" is basically like the pudding model of the atom: it's cute, but it's not real.

Take me for instance: I'm more of an auditory or kinesthetic learner than a visual learner. Why? Because when I hear things, I turn sounds into images, feelings, colors, movement, ideas--my brain encodes sound in an explosive sensory manner. I process all of these things visually: emotions, movement, and abstract ideas are visual things--some don't have image data, but are still visual (yes I know, that makes no sense). Kinesthetic learning, as well, gives me a huge stream of visual information to work with; I don't remember the feeling, the movements, the actions, but rather what I saw and what I examined at every step.

Our different learning styles are essentially based in how effectively we can attend different information, which can be taught. I can teach you to pay attention to sounds, to visualize things people say, to visualize what you read, and to pay attention to the visual and auditory cues present when carrying out an instructive task. That, in turn, moves the information through the efficient memory model of visual memory, which is really how all humans learn best.

Auditory and kinesthetic learners are really good at accessing the extreme amounts of data in these tasks and converting them to visual data; they are, however, all visual learners. We can easily train all students to learn in these ways, thus reducing the problem to simply maximizing the structure and amount of information provided, which itself is a simple problem narrowing us down to exactly one particular style of learning adjusted for the crude speed of the learner (of course, the speed is based on how much information they have: they may learn new things slowly, but they'll expand on well-learned ideas quickly, so even slow learners can catch up).

Everyone wants simple answers, and everyone wants a romantic dream. In education, this comes down to ignoring the complexities of the human mind--don't think for a minute that the simple explanation above means simple implementation--and instead going with goofy theories that only require a modicum of effort--"show pictures, sound, and then have them do hands-on, and you'll easily teach all types of learners!" You're gonna need more sweat and blood invested than that; you have to teach these kids to learn, first and foremost.

Of course there's more profit in providing cures to billions of people! 30,000 people with ALS and billions of wasted dollars successfullycuring them; or 2 million people with HIV, and the same billions of dollars spent curing HIV? Guess which one's more profitable? Hint: you spent $890 billion and cured 30,000 people in one scenario, and spent $890 billion and cured 2,000,000 people in the other.

People think only in terms of money when considering economics; they don't think about non-monetary return.