BUT THE GOVERNMENT-APPROVED SCIENCE! Emails Show How An Ivy League Prof Tried To Do Damage Control For His Bogus Food Science.

The Smarter Lunchrooms Movement, a $22 million federally funded program that pushes healthy-eating strategies in almost 30,000 schools, is partly based on studies that contained flawed — or even missing — data.

The main scientist behind the work, Cornell University professor Brian Wansink, has made headlines for his research into the psychology of eating. His experiments have found, for example, that women who put cereal on their kitchen counters weigh more than those who don’t, and that people will pour more wine if they’re holding the glass than if it’s sitting on a table. Over the past two decades he’s written two popular books and more than 100 research papers, and enjoyed widespread media coverage (including on BuzzFeed).

Yet over the past year, Wansink and his “Food and Brand Lab” have come under fire from scientists and statisticians who’ve spotted all sorts of red flags — including data inconsistencies, mathematical impossibilities, errors, duplications, exaggerations, eyebrow-raising interpretations, and instances of self-plagiarism — in 50 of his studies.

Read the whole thing — and don’t forget to say, “Thanks, (Michelle) Obama.”

SCIENCE: Cellular messaging system may bring new way to treat disease.

SMEARING FREE THOUGHT in Silicon Valley.

JESSE VENTURA: If Border Wall Goes Up, Statue of Liberty Must Come Down.

DIGITAL TURF WARS: Google pulls YouTube off the Amazon Echo Show.

The Echo Show, if you’re not familiar, is the Alexa-enabled smart speaker that has a screen on it so you can do stuff like… watch video. And YouTube is the internet’s largest source of said video. One of the core use cases of the Echo Show for some people might be watching cooking lessons or music videos — on YouTube.

Amazon’s strident statement makes clear that it doesn’t believe this is a technical mistake, but a conscious choice by Google. Google, however, very much begs to differ on the reason it blocked YouTube on the Echo Show:

We’ve been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time, working towards an agreement that provides great experiences for customers on both platforms. Amazon’s implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience. We hope to be able to reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon.

Reading between the lines, I’d guess Google very much wants features that it thinks are essential for YouTube’s future growth included, stuff like subscriptions, next video recommendations, autoplay, and so on. But who knows! Only the negotiators at the table.

The features Google believes are “essential for YouTube’s future growth” are the annoyances which keep my own use of the platform to a bare minimum.

A RIVER RUNS TO SUE IT: A Denver lawyer and a deep green enviro group are suing Gov. John Hickenlooper and the state of Colorado on behalf of the Colorado River. They’re asking the court to hold them liable for abuses of the river’s “right to exist, flourish, regenerate, be restored, and naturally evolve.”

In strict legal terminology, this is nuts. As Fred Smith said about a similar move for trees back in 1995, “It’s time to stop being silly and start thinking seriously about what we might do to improve the planet on which we live.”

THE PRICE IS NOT RIGHT: Trump fuming over Price’s charter flights.

Trump rebuked Price in sharp terms Wednesday but declined to bat down speculation that the HHS chief could be fired for his lavish spending of taxpayer dollars.

“We’ll see,” the president told reporters when asked whether Price would stay in his job.

“I was looking into it, and I will look into it. And I will tell you personally, I’m not happy about it,” Trump said. “I am not happy about it. I’m going to look at it. I am not happy about it, and I let him know it.”

POLITICO has revealed that Price has flown 26 times on private aircraft since last May at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, a break with the practice of his predecessors, who generally took commercial flights.

Meanwhile, Washington is expected to run a non-recession budget deficit of $674 billion on record tax receipts.

UPDATE: Sorry about the silly typo — fixed.

FUNNY, I’M NOT LAUGHING: This Video About The Navy’s Decaying Shipyards Makes Its 355 Ship Goal Seem Laughable.

According to the Government Accountability Office, the Navy’s fleet dreams far outmatch their investments in the critical but unglamorous infrastructure needed to support them.

Just a few highlights from the short video:

• At one time the Navy had 13 shipyards, but now it has just four.
• None of these facilities were built to sustain a modern Navy.
• There is nearly a $5B maintenance backlog alone and this estimate is likely far less than the actual cost.
• Uses old inadequate equipment on high-tech vessels.
• Drydocks are on average 89 years old and are in poor condition.
• Due to the lack of dry dock capacity, the Navy won’t be able to perform a third of its scheduled aircraft carrier and submarine maintenance projects over the next two decades.
• Rising sea levels pose a threat to old dry docks.
• The Navy says it will take nearly two decades to address these issues, but GAO says it will take longer. By that time the fleet will have ballooned putting more pressure on these tired facilities.
• As of now the Navy is only funding roughly half the cost just to keep up maintenance on their own naval shipyards.

Welcome to the “woke” Navy.

YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Comics Artist Tweets Death to All GOP.

BEND THE KNEE TO THE CFPB: Elizabeth Warren and her ilk are cynically using the Equifax security breach to stop the Senate from disapproving of the CFPB’s arbitration rule, as Reason’s Eric Boehm explains well here. Cui bono?

The CFPB’s arbitration ban doesn’t help consumers and doesn’t help banks, but it would be a major boon to trial lawyers. The arbitration ban is another proxy war in a long-running battle between business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and trial lawyers, as Politico’s Lorraine Woellert reported last month.

There’s a lot of money at stake. The CFPB study that supposedly justified the new rule shows that class action attorneys made more than $424 million in the three-year period examined in the study. Consumers during that time, if you’ll remember, got settlements averaging $32 apiece.(*)

And let’s not forget where a lot of money trial lawyers rake in from these settlements ends up…

More on the role of trial lawyers in this from my colleague John Berlau, and from Ted Frank, genuine champion of the little guy.

* Edited to add: That $32 per consumer figure actually overstates the benefit to consumers from class actions considerably. The average payout across all class members is actually around $1.45, and that assumes the CFPB’s claim rate of 4% is correct. Other evidence suggests it’s lower than 1%, which means that the average class member receives pennies – or simply a worthless coupon.

REMINDER: HE WAS SHOT BY A BERNIE-SANDERS-SUPPORTING DEMOCRAT WHO SET OUT TO MASSACRE REPUBLICANS: Scalise Returns to Capitol for First Vote Since Being Shot: ‘I’m Back.’

I HAD BEEN ASSURED BY THE PREVIOUS ADMINISTRATION THAT IRAN’S NUCLEAR PROGRAM WAS STRICTLY FOR PEACEFUL PURPOSES: Iran Is Building Nuclear Submarines.

The commander of the Iranian navy told the country’s semiofficial news agency, Fars, Tuesday that Iran’s nuclear agency was under orders to start producing nuclear reactors for fueling and propulsion systems that could be used on ships and submarines.

Rear Admiral Habibollah Sayyari said the new destroyer would be more advanced than its two predecessors, Jamaran and Damavand. “I think that we will manage to accomplish this task in the current year,” he added.

You can be almost certain that there’s less to this story than there seems. Because although Newsweek reports Sayyari’s claims with a straight face, the Islamic Republic has a long history of announcing amazing new weapons which somehow never materialize.

PARTY LIKE IT’S 1649: Leftists worry about judicial nominee’s Catholicism, deny it’s a religious test. As Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule says on Twitter, “I guess we have an answer: no, they have no shame.”

STANDING UP TO THE NAZIS AT THE GATE: University president refuses Democrats’ demand to shut down College Republicans.

Kirk Schulz ignored the repeated misspelling of his name in a poorly written letter from censorious state lawmakers and took the high road.

The president of Washington State University rebuffed calls from a dozen House and Senate Democratic members to derecognize its College Republicans chapter because of its controversial former leader and the club’s provocative campus activism

In a letter to House Higher Education Committee Vice-Chair Gerry Pollet published by The Daily Evergreen but not available from his own page, Schulz didn’t even mention the CRs as the target of derecognition until the end, in a section that begins “several facts [that] need to be clarified”:

The WSU College Republicans, both its student leadership and the organization as a whole, have officially stated its then President [sic] did not represent the registered student organization in his appearace in Charlottesville [at the “Unite the Right” rally]. The student has officially stepped down from his leadership role in the WSU College Republicans. No state funds, student funds, or university resources were used to facilitate that student’s appearance.

Most of the letter responded to lawmakers concerns about a “campus culture and climate” that includes the College Republicans.

Wait, I thought Democrats were pro-free-speech this week.

SO NOW THE NEW YORK TIMES NOTICES DEFICITS: With Tax Cuts on the Table, Once-Mighty Deficit Hawks Hardly Chirp.

FLASHBACK:

There’s nothing wrong with debt when Democrats rack it up.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Clemson Student senators sit down during Pledge of Allegiance.

After the past couple of years, it’s going to be hard to take seriously complaints that legislatures are reluctant to fund higher ed.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: American University an ‘unsafe space’ for controversial Title IX event.

AT AMAZON, The All-New Echo.

AT AMAZON, fresh new releases, updated hourly.

Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.

And shop the Digital Deals Of The Day.

PROFESSIONAL HUMOR REGULATORS: This is at least the third time that Facebook’s attempts to filter “fake news” has failed. The first time, they hired a handful of SJW’s with no journalism experience, then they tried an algorithm that over-filtered, and now clearly marked satire sites are being shunted away from appearing on news feeds. Frustrated with Facebook’s administrative opacity, the Italian humor site Lercio published the following:

“All we could do was ask the usual friend whose brother-in-law has a cousin whose sister is the mistress of Zuckerberg’s chauffeur” to tell them unofficially what might have happened. That is when they were told, still unofficially, that they had likely been caught by Facebook’s recently launched anti-fake news filtering measures.”

As the article’s author Francesca Fanucci points out: “Jokes and satire, no matter how disturbing or offensive, are not fake news, especially when they come from websites like Lercio whose entire raison d’être is to serve a massive group of readers who are totally aware of its humor.”

KIM JONG UN IS RATTLED: Insulting a dictator’s “dignity” is a potentially valuable psychological weapon. And Trump uses it. He rattled Crooked Hillary, a banana republic tin pot if there ever was one. Now he’s working on Rocket Man.

VERY RELATED: It appears even the Washington Post acknowledges the rattle. ” Trump “might be irrational — or too smart,” the North Korean Pak Song Il told Osnos. “We don’t know.”

Heh.

INTERVIEW: Title IX and Sexual Assault: Jeannie Suk Gersen.

INQUIRING MINDS WANT TO KNOW: Who Leaked the Fake News Story That Obama Lectured Mark Zuckerberg About Russia: Susan Rice or … Ben Rhodes?

NATIONALIST ASPIRATIONS IN KURDISTAN AND CATALONIA: My latest Creators Syndicate column. It was published yesterday.