BUMMER: Weight loss won’t ensure diabetes remission over long term, study indicates.

THAT’S DISCOURAGING: Chance of recovery from lower back pain falls over time.

DON SURBER: Look who protects free speech: Billionaires now are doing the job that journalists quit.

And a lot of journalists are unhappy about it.

IT’S TOTALITARIAN INDOCTRINATION, OF COURSE, AND IT’S MEANT TO BE: Wisconsin Law School’s Mandatory DEI Trainings And Academic Freedom.

This sort of thing also creates a pervasively hostile educational environment on account of race, as courts are starting to notice.

GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Woolworths’ decision to shun Australia Day inflames culture war. “Australia Day, a public holiday marking the arrival of the first ships carrying British convicts in Sydney in 1788, is traditionally celebrated on January 26 with family parties and barbecues. More recently, it has become a point of contention for Australians who believe the date should be changed because of its colonial origin. The debate over the national holiday escalated this month after the country’s largest retailer Woolworths announced it would not stock Australia Day paraphernalia — including caps, temporary tattoos and plastic flags — due to a “gradual decline in demand” for merchandise.”

Related: Woolworths to fly First Nation flags outside key offices.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: These new synthetic opioids could make fentanyl crisis look like ‘the good old days.’

CORRUPTION AT THE TOP: Harvard: Gay’s Plagiarism More Problematic Than We Thought.

Related: The Claudine Gay story isn’t Roots, it’s Shattered Glass.

COMMUNISTS ALWAYS RUN OUT OF OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: AOC-affiliated Democratic Socialists of America in ‘financial crisis.’ “The seven-figure deficit comes after the DSA, which leads anti-Israel protests across the country, did not publicly condemn the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attacks.”

K12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: School Choice Is Popular and Increasingly Common: Kids have disappeared from public schools, with most opting for a range of alternatives.

Related: The ‘Expert’ Delusion in Education.

OPEN THREAD: Why? Because I like you.

UPDATE: Oops, this was supposed to be scheduled for tomorrow night. Well, now you’ve got two.

OPEN THREAD: Monday, Monday.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Blue Origin and SpaceX start work on cargo versions of crewed lunar landers.

HMM: Supreme Court allows Biden administration to cut Texas border wire. “The decision on Monday isn’t the final word on the contentious dispute, which has hit a fever pitch in recent weeks as Texas and the federal government stand at odds over how to mitigate the immigration crisis that has seen record levels of illegal immigrants over the border since President Joe Biden took office. . . .The state argues that the federal government does not have the right to destroy Texas’s property and claims ‘eyewitness observers’ reported Border Patrol agents ‘facilitat[ing] the surge of migrants’ into Eagle Pass, Texas.”

WELL, GOOD: Bacteria Responsible For Acne Were Genetically Modified to Treat It Instead.

LOL, ANOTHER HIPSTER NOSTRUM FAILS: Green Menace? Study Finds Food From Urban Agriculture Has 6x Larger Carbon Footprint.

Anyway, I think it’s better if urban areas are dependent on rural areas.

TRUE: Quality Matters, But You Also Need Luck.

LOL, BUSINESS INSIDER: Business Insider: Very Dangerous to ‘Indoctrinate’ Young Americans That They Can Lawfully Possess a Firearm.

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Leave The Pews: “For many liberal Jews, it was hard to ignore that it wasn’t the boogeyman white supremacists that they had been warned about their entire lives. No, it was their professors, their co-workers at the nonprofit, friends of their college-aged kids calling for an end to Israel and celebrating the murder of Jews. And these hateful marches were not happening in rural Alabama, in the places they were taught to fear, but mainly in the bluest of blue cities. . . . By Oct. 8, their ‘allies’ had already taken to the streets, some in grotesque glee over the slaughter of Jews in their homes, others tearing down posters of kidnapped children, to say Israel should just sit down and take it.”

Plus: “To those who sat in the pews for years as their congregation became a shameless political operation, the time has now come to depart. Your synagogue must be a place of worship, not of political activity, and, unfortunately for you, who paid your dues and hoped to align with a community of your peers, the political movement your shul promotes is the one that hates you.”

BUILD MORE NUKES: Sam Altman: Age of AI will require an ‘energy breakthrough.’

I THINK THEY WOULD HAVE BEEN FULLSIZE A COUPLE OF DECADES AGO: Best midsize trucks for 2024.

I HOPE IT STOPS: What happens when you trigger a car’s automated emergency stopping?

RISE OF THE MACHINES: Study shows a computerized decision support system reduces high-risk drug combinations in ICU patients.

WELL, GOOD: Survival rate for pancreatic cancer improves.

SCIENCE MARCHES ON: Harvard Teaching Hospital Seeks Retraction of Six Papers by Top Researchers: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is reviewing more than 50 papers, including work of the hospital’s CEO.

The Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, a Harvard Medical School affiliate, is seeking to retract six studies and correct 31 other papers as part of a probe involving four of its senior cancer researchers and administrators.

More than 50 papers, including four co-authored by Chief Executive and President Dr. Laurie Glimcher, are part of a continuing review, according to Dr. Barrett Rollins, the cancer institute’s research-integrity officer. Some requests for retractions and corrections have already been sent to journals, he said. Others are being prepared. The institute has yet to determine whether misconduct occurred.

Also under investigation are papers co-authored by Chief Operating Officer Dr. William Hahn; Director of the Clinical Investigator Research Program Dr. Irene Ghobrial; and Dr. Kenneth Anderson, program director of the Jerome Lipper Multiple Myeloma Center.

All four researchers have faculty appointments at Harvard Medical School, making it the latest tranche of misconduct allegations leveled at Harvard researchers. Claudine Gay resigned as Harvard University president early this year, facing allegations of plagiarism. Last year, Harvard Business School placed Prof. Francesca Gino on administrative leave after accusations that her work contained falsified data.

Glimcher and the other researchers didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Dana-Farber’s disclosure about its probe arrived after a data sleuth pointed to irregularities in the researchers’ papers.

In early January, molecular biologist Sholto David published a blog post describing what he said were signs of image manipulation in papers by the Dana-Farber researchers. David contacted Dana-Farber and Harvard Medical School with his concerns, submitting a list of papers he said contained problems.

The most serious, he said, had to do with images of experimental results that had signs of copy-and-pasting by software such as Adobe Photoshop. “Those are pixel-perfect matches for the same area, but it’s supposed to be a different sample,” he said.

It’s a bad year for Harvard’s brand.

THEY FEAR THE TRUTH:

I've been on social media in its current incarnations and its precursors (like dial-up AOL chat rooms) on-and-off since the mid-'90s.

I have learned one consistent lesson over and over and over, and it has never not happened. Here it is:

Anywhere online that conservatives are…

— Cynical Publius (@CynicalPublius) January 21, 2024

And evil hates to be mocked.