AND ANOTHER ONE: Apple Watch ‘prolonged my life’ by spotting deadly heart illness just days after new ECG feature launched, gadget owner reports.

THE SCIENCE IS SETTLED WHEN WE SAY IT’S SETTLED: States Sue Over School Lunch Changes, Say They’re Not Scientific Like the Obama Rules Based on Retracted Nutrition Studies.

PEGGY NOONAN: Don’t do it, Joe. Don’t run for president. It won’t work, you won’t get the nomination, your loss will cause pain and not only for you.

Good advice:

Democratic operatives do not fear you will win the nomination—they think you’re too old, your time has passed, you’re not where the energy of the base is, or the money. But they do not want you taking up oxygen the next six to 10 months as you sink in the polls. And they don’t want you swooping in to claim the middle lane. Others already have a stake there, or mean to.

In the past you were never really slimed and reviled by your party; you were mostly teased and patronized. But if you get in the race this time, it will be different. They will show none of the old respect for you, your vice presidency or your past fealty to the cause. And you are in the habit of receiving respect. Soon the topic will turn, in depth, to Anita Hill, the Clinton crime bill, your friendliness to big business. You have opposed partial-birth abortion. Also, the old plagiarism video will come back and be dissected. It was more than 30 years ago, and for a lot of reporters and voters it will be a riveting story, and brand new.

Biden probably has too much ego to listen.

RELATED: And then there were 18.*

*Biden not included.

AT AMAZON, save in Money & Investing.

DEADLY VIRTUE SIGNALING: Why is Gillette trying to glamorize obesity?

UPDATE: More here from Kruiser.

CHANGE: Elder abuse on the rise in U.S., especially among men.

MAKE ‘EM EARN IT: No summit with China’s Xi Jinping until a deal to end trade war is final, Donald Trump says.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK: “If Hillary Clinton had won the presidential election in the same way as Donald Trump, the American left would consider the Electoral College a sacrament.”

YES, BUT HE IDENTIFIED AS A VEGAN, THAT’S THE IMPORTANT THING: Tim Shieff, the vegan pin-up with a guilty secret. He was eating eggs and salmon.

I DEFINITELY KNOW THE FEELING ON THIS ONE: My gentleman friend had dinner a little while ago with two faithfully Progressive young schoolteachers. They could recite the Progressive line on just about every issue. But on one issue, they were decidedly conservative as well as quite upset: School discipline. Their classrooms were out of control, they said. And they were outraged that school administrators and education bureaucrats were not supporting teachers. Unruly students get sent to the principal and return shortly thereafter (with candy!).

This sounds like a good example of Robert Conquest’s rule that everyone is conservative about the things they know best. Put differently, Progressives feel they can fix age-old problems with ideas they came up with in the shower last Tuesday. But when it comes to dealing with problems in their own professions, they are much better able to see the nuance and complexity, which allows them to better understand and appreciate the traditions of that profession.

SPACE: SpaceX Starhopper Performs a Tethered Hop With a Raptor Engine Firing.

OLD AND BUSTED: Make America Great.

The New Hotness? Migrant Caravans Given Warning By Senator Harris and Senator Sanders: America is a Bad and Dangerous Place.

Deplorable, you might even say.

HMM: $100 bills in circulation soar to a record, hinting at rise in global criminal activity.

GOOD: Pentagon nixes Turkish offer to address S-400 fears.

Despite the rising tensions, the United States continues to proceed with Turkish training on the F-35 in hopes that Ankara may come around on the S-400. The Pentagon today delivered two more of the jets to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona, where Turkish pilots are training on the jets before they are flown back to Turkey and formally handed over to Ankara.

The Pentagon appears to already have made its best counter-offer to stave off a potential S-400 sale. In January, Pahon told Al-Monitor, the United States “made our strongest possible offer” with the Patriot missile-defense system, offering fresh batteries, advanced air defense missiles and bilateral coordination on industrial and system development aspects of the program.

“We have provided Turkey the opportunity with Patriot to acquire a NATO interoperable system that will advance our collective security,” Pahon reiterated today.

“As Turkey’s ally, we recognize Turkey lives in a tough neighborhood and its acquisition decisions are its sovereign choice,” he added, while adding that the S-400 purchase was “fundamentally incompatible” with the Patriot offer.

Indeed.

YOU CAN’T TRUST GOOGLE: Google To Pull Plug On AI Ethics Council.

Alphabet Inc’s Google said on Thursday it was dissolving a council it had formed a week earlier to consider ethical issues around artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies.

The council had run into controversy over two of its members, according to online news portal Vox, which first reported the dissolution of the council. . . . The Vox report said Google employees had signed a petition calling for the removal of one of the members over comments about transsexual people, and added that the inclusion of a drone company executive had raised debate over use of Google’s AI for military applications.

You can’t have an “ethics council” where people with traditional religious views are excluded and expect anyone to take you seriously. Google figured that out.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE? Six Former Women Associates Sue Jones Day, Say ‘Fraternity Culture’ Led To Pregnancy And Gender Discrimination.

DEBRA HEINE: Why Comey, Clapper, and Brennan Aggressively Pushed RussiaGate Conspiracy Theories. “They doth protest too much.”

So much projection from the Left.

MATT MARGOLIS: The Top 5 Investigations Obstructed by the Obama Administration. “Democrats tolerated unprecedented obstruction for eight years.”

SAUDI ARABIA GOES BIG ON THAAD: Yemen is a ballistic missile war, with proxies firing Iranian-made short range ballistic missiles at targets in Saudi Arabia and on some Arab coalition bases in Yemen. U.S. Patriot PAC-3 has performed well, but Iran has bigger missiles.

Saudi Arabia has made a billion dollar down payment on its $15 billion order for a THAAD (Terminal High Altitude Area Defense) anti-missile system. The down payment is to enable the manufacturer to start production on items that take a long time to produce. The Saudi order is the largest ever for THAAD. The Saudis are buying 44 launchers, 360 missiles and radar and control stations for seven batteries. In addition, this deal will pay for an upgrade of Saudi radar warning and communications infrastructure as well as bases for the THAAD batteries and maintenance facilities.

Read the whole post. Here’s a THAAD test fired from Kodiak, Alaska. No launch site mentioned in this photo but you get a good look at the missile and its mobile launcher.

RELATED: Background on Yemen, its proxy warriors, its multitude of wars and its missile war in Chapter 5, Cocktails from Hell.

UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: NASA wants to go check out the poop the Apollo missions left on the moon.

AS WELL THEY SHOULD: Faculty question Portland State’s claim that it protects free speech in line with Trump’s order.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. Attention, Plebs: New Cars Are Becoming Prohibitively Expensive. “As new vehicle prices continue to climb, many wonder how high MSRPs can go before the public decides to take a pass — assuming they haven’t already. Sales growth is slowing, even in seemingly bulletproof markets like China. Even before this ominous backdrop unfurled, dealers were making noise about new car prices that had grown overly ambitious, claiming they couldn’t endure another period of sustained economic hardship.”

POLL: Americans give social media a clear thumbs-down: A sizable majority say social media does more to divide the country than unite it, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.

BARBARIC: The ‘Trans’ Child as Experimental Guinea Pig.

Last year Jeanette Jennings, as part of the reality-TV show I Am Jazz, threw her 17-year-old child, Jazz, a “farewell-to-penis party.” Guests cheered as the teenager hacked at a phallus-shaped cake with a knife, shouting, “Let’s cut it off.” The party may have been a bit contrived even by reality-show standards, but the subsequent operation was all too real.

In any other context, we might consider the drug-induced stunting of a child’s penis, followed by its surgical removal, to be mutilation. But in an era of culturally and legally enshrined transgenderism, it’s not just permissible; it’s entertainment.

In February, Representatives Jackie Speier (D., Calif.) and Angie Craig (D., Minn.) participated in the “Jazz and Friends National Day of Community and School Readings,” sponsored by the Human Rights Campaign (a well-funded gay and transgender lobby group) and the National Education Association (a teachers’ union). They read aloud celebratory and euphemistic stories of transgender children (such as Jazz, with the amputated penis) on the House floor. But the mainstreaming of youth transgenderism goes way beyond Congress. In schools nationwide, children as young as five are being taught that they may have been born in the wrong body.

Manipulating, chemically neutering, and surgically altering children in pursuit of a political agenda is nothing short of evil. And just when you think it can’t get more vile or damnable, they go on TV to celebrate it.