Yeah you know what's _really_ outmoded?

Control groups as a means of teasing causation out of correlation.

I mean, just think what would happen if *shudder* there were 50 different governments each controlling their own borders, testing out different social theories?

People with bad social theories might leave you and those that agree with your good social theory to benefit only yourselves, while they would go off and form another experimental group providing additional human ecology data for the social sciences.

They might figure out that you are the slimy parasite you are and that would be bad .

Is sleep deprivation an early stage symptom?

A clear example of why the a strong Federal government is necessary is the case of Louisiana's attorney general telling Texas authorities not to bring Ebola victim waste to a disposal site in Louisiana.

Of course, State sovereignty is the moral equivalent of slavery so it is essential that the racists in Louisiana be taught a lesson by Obama commandeering the Louisiana National Guard to air drop waste from Texas Ebola victims on racist Louisiana with its badges of slavery -- especially the waste of Ebola victims that died for your racism -- sorta like Jesus or something. And if you think that's insane or horrifying or something, it just means you're in need of a "teachable moment" yourself before you start bull-whip crackin' that black man whose been comin' roun' to see hair-of-golden-brown, Lilly Belle you Southern Man you.

So Mr. Anonymous doesn't like the fact that I started with the earliest example of scientific misconduct of the authorities. Most likely he dislikes it because it is so damning of his theocracy. I could provide a list of peer reviewed papers, none of which have had even the slightest criticism raised against them in any specific way -- just the blanket condemnation of the rioting mob calling itself the APS.

However, it's probably better to have Los Alamos nuclear chemist Ed Storms's peer reviewed paper published in the German counterpart of the British "Nature" (since, as we have already seen "Nature" is corrupt):

Status of Cold-Fusion (2010)

Good grief. Absence of assertion isn't assertion of absence. More importantly, if you aren't allowed to publish experiments that falsify theory -- in this case the theory that excess heat in nuclear quantities cannot be produced in the absence of so-called "nuclear manifestations" -- then what's the point of pretending to have a scientific method?

The earliest example (other than F&P's own work on calorimetry which was not, despite loud protestations about their admittedly flawed work on other nuclear products, ever "discredited" -- although it was erroneously criticized to high heaven) was Richard Oriani's replication "CALORIMETRIC MEASUREMENTS OF EXCESS POWER OUTPUT DURING THE CATHODIC CHARGING OF DEUTERIUM INTO PALLADIUM"" which was approved by Nature's own peer reviewers for publication in late 1989. Nature didn't publish it because -- and you'll have to forgive my invocation of Popper's notion of falsifiability here -- the American editor of Nature (the British editor considered it too hot to handle so he passed the buck to the US editor) the experimental results violated physical theory -- and yes, he actually told Oriani that. Theocracy rules.

Once Nature had violated the most basic principles of science in its editorial posture toward so-called "cold fusion" it could never again accept such a paper for review as it would risk, once again, approval from their own peer reviewers.

Its really too bad that APS et al are doubling down on their crime even after decades of experiments that meet Ramsey's criterion. Indeed, I'm virtually certain that when -- I said when not if some sort of new form of heat production is demonstrated in D-Pd systems to the satisfaction of even the Secretary of Energy and President of the APS, that they will still claim, as do you, that "Koonin is on the right side of history" by pointing to some error that F&P made somewhere.

They will then be so dismayed and puzzled at why a Western version of Pol Pot starts hauling them off to reeducation in the Western version of the rice paddies.

The controversy over Rossi is a tempest in a teapot. If you want to know when the real crime was committed, it was by the American Physical Society at this moment in its Baltimore, MD meeting of May 1, 1989. Agreed, it was more like a riot with looting than any kind of criminal conspiracy to commit fraud, but it was vastly more damaging.

As you watch Steven E. Koonin in that video and listen to the obscene applause of is "colleagues" with the APS, keep in mind that the original announcement had been at the end of March -- a mere 5 weeks earlier -- and that the experimental protocol hadn't even been published yet. When it was published it stated that it took 2 months of electrolytic loading before the effect might occur.

The sole act of scientific integrity among the establishment figures was as follows:

"Ordinarily, new scientific discoveries are claimed to be consistent and reproducible; as a result, if the experiments are not complicated, the discovery can usually be confirmed or disproved in a few months. The claims of cold fusion, however, are unusual in that even the strongest proponents of cold fusion assert that the experiments, for unknown reasons, are not consistent and reproducible at the present time. However, even a single short but valid cold fusion period would be revolutionary." --Norman Ramsey

Dr. Norman Ramsey Jr., Nobel laureate and professor of physics at Harvard University was the only person on the the 1989 Department of Energy cold fusion review panel to voice a dissenting opinion. Ramsey insisted on the inclusion of this preamble as an alternative to his resignation from the panel. The committee acquiesed because he was its co-chair and the only Nobel laureate on the committee.

Dr. Ramsey's condition has been fulfilled hundreds of times over the last quarter century and there has been absolutely no acknowledgement by the APS of its crime.

Killing healthcare workers prevents Ebola and I'll just betcha that injecting hemorrhaged blood from an Ebola victim in his family will vaccinate against Ebola.

In fact, let's get rid of public sanitation. What a regressive idea.

While plausibly ameliorating the absurdity, your argument is exaggerated. He not only was symptomatic hence shedding virus while at home with his family for days with them totally unprotected and untrained, he was vomiting and probably hemorrhaging when they finally called the ambulance.

What's all this about protective gear? Duncan's family wasn't wearing protective gear for crying out loud and they didn't come down with the disease. Something doesn't add up here.

So imagine you're an ISIS terrorist train to be a suicide bomber and somehow, I can't imagine how but bear with me, somehow you manage to get to Washington D.C.

Now imagine that you see all this brouhaha about Ebola on the tube -- you know, people panicking for no reason and all that -- and you get this crazy idea that maybe rather than splattering your body all over one Metro subway station you'd kill a lot more infidels by catching Ebola, waiting for the first symptoms to show up which look like the flu, and then spend the day making like Divine in Pink Flamingos and leaving your bodily fluids on surfaces in all of the subway cars.

And so it starts exactly as I predicted here: He went to the emergency room with flu like symptoms and they ... wait for it .... SENT HIM HOME.

Early symptoms of Ebola are "flu-like" and it is contagious during these "flu-like" symptoms. Now ... consider the fact that flu season is upon us. But you know what's _really_ frightening about this? Not one of the goddamn idiot "authorities" has even mentioned, let alone assessed, this confounding situation's impact on public health containment measures.

Now THAT'S frightening!

Read the CDC's guidelines on monitoring and movement of persons with "exposure" and tell me their guidelines work for a country in the throes of massive incidence of "flu-like symptoms".

While reading this wisdom from on high, imagine there is, in this multi-"culture"al heaven that is the US nowadays, a "community" somewhere with strong identity, Hollywood-fired resentment of the US's white-supremacist history of slavery and colonial exploitation with corresponding suspicion of its public health measures (just look at the murders of public health workers in West Africa -- and many of those health workers weren't even "white-devils"), strong relations in West Africa and -- to top it all off -- a flu season that has a good percentage of its community exhibiting the early stage symptoms of Ebola...

The New York Times Opines:

The ideal of contamination has few exponents more eloquent than Salman Rushdie, who has insisted that the novel that occasioned his fatwa "celebrates hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, cultures, ideas, politics, movies, songs. It rejoices in mongrelisation and fears the absolutism of the Pure. Mélange, hotch-potch, a bit of this and a bit of that is how newness enters the world." No doubt there can be an easy and spurious utopianism of "mixture," as there is of "purity" or "authenticity." And yet the larger human truth is on the side of contamination - that endless process of imitation and revision.

A tenable global ethics has to temper a respect for difference with a respect for the freedom of actual human beings to make their own choices. That's why cosmopolitans don't insist that everyone become cosmopolitan. They know they don't have all the answers. They're humble enough to think that they might learn from strangers; not too humble to think that strangers can't learn from them. Few remember what Chremes says after his "I am human" line, but it is equally suggestive: "If you're right, I'll do what you do. If you're wrong, I'll set you straight."

Kwame Anthony Appiah, a philosopher, teaches at Princeton University. This essay is adapted from "Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers," to be published later this month by W.W. Norton.