SO, I WON TWITTER YESTERDAY.

SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: Columbia biologists “deeply regret” Nature retraction, after postdoc faked 74 panels in 3 papers.

LEGAL INTELLIGENCER: Repeal The “Dear Colleague” Letter On Sexual Assault.

In the name of the wholly laudable goal of combating sexual assaults, the DOE placed schools in the precarious position of adjudicating allegedly criminal acts in their discipline systems, with the threat of potentially ruinous sanctions, should the schools’ efforts fall short. Recognizing that at least some accusers have historically been mistreated, the department insisted on changes in how the system was to run, but those changes have gone too far and now undercut fundamental rights of those accused of wrongdoing. For instance, the DOE demanded that colleges apply a “preponderance of the evidence” standard in determining whether a sexual assault complaint has merit, and prohibited both the “clear and convincing” and “beyond a reasonable doubt” thresholds. Further, the department dictated that schools should prohibit the accused from cross-examining the accuser, warning that doing so could create a hostile environment—effectively taking the position that everyone accused is guilty, and that having the temerity to question the accuser would compound the trauma.

We can all agree that people who commit crimes should be brought to justice. At the same time, most of us share a profound commitment to affording those accused of a crime with certain rights—to know the accusation, to confront the accuser, to cross-examine witnesses and to due process. We know that each of these rights means that an accusation is less likely to result in a conviction. Yet no serious person proposes doing away with those basic rights, solely for the sake of increasing the conviction rate. If a mere accusation is sufficient to mete out punishment, we know how this story ends.

The damage is not confined to those who are falsely accused, nor to those whose valid complaints have been called into question by others crying “wolf.” Even open discussion of the topic has become unacceptable to the zealots driving this initiative.

Yes. Though if some Evil Right Winger were trying to cause higher education to destroy itself, he could hardly have done better than this rule.

DO THEY TEACH LAW AT HARVARD ANYMORE? Not as much as they teach “Fundamental Transformation.”

ED DRISCOLL: All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

LIFE IN THE OBAMA ERA: Military clearance OPM data breach ‘absolute calamity.’

IT’S LIES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Documents challenge Clinton claim no classified intel on personal emails.

YEAH: Forget Trump! We dare you to watch this video from the House hearing on the OPM hack and not grab a pitchfork.

Might I suggest this model?

NOTICE HOW LEFTIES ALWAYS WANT TO MAKE IT ILLEGAL TO DISAGREE WITH THEM? Boris Johnson ‘could be breaching sex discrimination laws’ for defending Sir Tim Hunt over sexism row. If true, that’s a reason to get rid of “sex discrimination laws,” and those who promote them in this fashion.

CHARLIE MARTIN: The TSA is a failure, yet there haven’t been any successful attacks on U.S. planes since 9/11. How to explain this?

ALONE IN FIRST PLACE: Scott Walker Leads GOP In New National Poll. It’s not as sexy when you apply margin of error, but still.

THE BLINDNESS OF THE IDEOLOGICALLY BOUND. “Truth is determined in relation to reality. If a fact is objectively true, if it can be verified according to evidence, or tested in a laboratory, or otherwise shown to be actually (rather than merely claimed to be) the case, then it’s true. It’s no good saying that something is ‘true for me’ if it’s not actually true at all. That means you’re living a lie. . . . They focus on the narrative, not on the facts, because the facts don’t support their views.”

If someone’s sneering at the notion of “objective truth,” it usually means they’re planning to lie.

AT LEAST THE STORY SAYS HE’S A DEMOCRAT RIGHT UP FRONT, WHICH IS UNUSUAL: Federal grand jury indicts State Rep. Joe Armstrong.

Armstrong was last seen strong-arming the UT bookstore into not carrying the Barak Obama Disappoint-mints. For this, he was memorialized.

GET THEE BEHIND ME, AMAZON: So Amazon keeps recommending these pricey binoculars. I have no use for them, and certainly not at this price. I mean, these are a lot cheaper, and I’m not buying them. And yet, they look cool….

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Killing your $1000 Grocery Bill. “When you look it up, the average food cost for a family of four in the US is actually quite high, at $944 per month. But to call it ‘food cost’ makes it sound like it’s out of your control. I would call this the average food spending. Just like the average family’s transportation cost is not some fixed punishment that the cruel world imposes on them.. it’s a measure of the amount of driving that they have designed into their lives, multiplied by the level of inefficiency of the vehicles they have chosen for themselves.”

I guess this is a good time for another plug for that Strategic Shopping piece, too.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in Exercise & Fitness.

Also, Father’s Day Deals in Electronics.

THOUGHTS ON CYBER-WARFARE: “Our apparent incompetence at defending against cyber warfare is extremely worrisome. I can offer only one modest suggestion: perhaps the Obama administration should spend less time waging cyber and social media warfare against Republicans and identifying Democratic voters, and more time figuring out how to defend ourselves against hostile hackers.”

THE OBAMACARE MONEY PIT: An HHS Office of Inspector General audit reveals that almost $3 billion worth of Obamacare taxpayer subsidies (to help people buy the required health insurance) for a 4-month period between Jan.-April 2014 cannot be verified.  This is auditor-speak for “the money was wasted,” given to individuals who were not eligible to receive them under the law.

“[The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] CMS’s internal controls did not effectively ensure the accuracy of nearly $2.8 billion in aggregate financial assistance payments made to insurance companies under the Affordable Care Act during the first four months that these payments were made,” the OIG said. 

“CMS’s system of internal controls could not ensure that CMS made correct financial assistance payments,” they said.

The OIG reviewed subsidies paid to insurance companies between January and April 2014. The audit found that CMS did not have a process to “prevent or detect any possible substantial errors” in subsidy payments.

The OIG said the agency did not have a system to “ensure that financial assistance payments were made on behalf of confirmed enrollees and in the correct amounts.”

This is only the tip of the iceberg, as it only involves a snapshot of four months. But who cares about a few billion wasted tax dollars? After all, Obamacare is working–even for people who aren’t entitled to it!

IF APPLE BLOCKS ADS, WHO WOULD NOTICE? “Consumers will like this feature, and it won’t cost Apple anything; the company makes its money off of its outstanding hardware, not ads. Meanwhile, it will hurt one of their main rivals in the primordial battle for dominance between Silicon Valley’s tech giants: Google. Which does make money off of ads. For Apple, what’s not to like about this development?”

HOW TO BE HACKED — HAVE A GOVERNMENT RUN BY HACKS:

Some of the contractors that have helped OPM with managing internal data have had security issues of their own—including potentially giving foreign governments direct access to data long before the recent reported breaches. A consultant who did some work with a company contracted by OPM to manage personnel records for a number of agencies told Ars that he found the Unix systems administrator for the project “was in Argentina and his co-worker was physically located in the [People’s Republic of China]. Both had direct access to every row of data in every database: they were root. Another team that worked with these databases had at its head two team members with PRC passports. I know that because I challenged them personally and revoked their privileges. From my perspective, OPM compromised this information more than three years ago and my take on the current breach is ‘so what’s new?'”

They were in China, and had root access. In China. With root access.

WELL, KIND OF, ANYWAY: Science Invents The Neural Lace.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Conference Video: Bionanotechnology.

AT AMAZON, featured deals in Outdoor Recreation.

Plus, Warehouse Deals in Lawn & Garden.

SO EITHER OIL CAN BE FORMED VIA GEOLOGICAL PROCESSES, OR TITAN HAS UNDISCOVERED LIFE: Titan Has More Oil Than Earth. “Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today. The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.”

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: USA and Russia are integrating more multi-use non-nuclear EMP weapons and China is trying to catch up.