Maxim Marketing Corp. of Los Angeles business writes in a 24-page Los Angeles Superior Court lawsuit that Trader Joe’s peanut butter filled pretzels are a monopolistic effort by ConAgra and Trader Joe’s and claim breach of contract, intentional interference with contractual relations and violation of California antitrust law.

“ConAgra and Trader Joe’s have engaged in an unlawful conspiracy to eliminate competition in, and ultimately to monopolize, the peanut butter filled pocket pretzel market,” Maxim wrote in the court filing.

H/T Morning Cup. Thanks, Bob!

The administration has never gotten tired of the idea that money is just something they print and so the solution to the student debt problem - which government created decades ago by declaring a college education a 'right' and making student loans unlimited - is to start forgiving student loans.

This is the wrong approach. Writing in The Atlantic, Jordan Weissmann notes Department of Education data showing that undergraduate tuition at public colleges for the entire United States was under $63 billion.

PETA has decided to show it's support for animal rights by giving human animals hypothermia.

But only female human animals. They seem to hate female humans. No idea why, but hatred is the only explanation for why they would send mostly-naked women onto the streets of Minneapolis wearing nothing but lettuce.

Temperature: 0 degrees. At that temperature frostbite can occur on exposed skin within 30 minutes if the winds reach speeds of 15 miles per hour.

Holidays are a big season for anti-science groups. Greenpeace gave us a mopey, dirty Santa saying the North Pole was going to melt and now an anti-GMO group in Russia comes right out and says what most groups won't come right out and say - that GMOs should be banned.

Most anti-science types at least establish a pretense of 'we distrust corporations' or 'this needs to be studied until we find someone to say GMOs are evil'. Not Russia.  Irina Ermakova, vice president of Russia’s National Association for Genetic Safety says “it is necessary to ban GMO, to impose moratorium [on it] for 10 years. While GMO will be prohibited, we can plan experiments, tests, or maybe even new methods of research could be developed.”

The eco-terrorism that made Greenpeace famous is no longer in vogue and a large part of their traditionally liberal base has been turned off by their irrational anti-science crusades against food, energy and medicine - basically, the only science they accept is climate science and only then as long as the IPCC continues to estimate our doom.

They are dutifully trying to train the next generation of people scared about science - and they are willing to stoop to Santa to do it. 

Researchers recently decided to see how many Lego bricks end up stuck together after they've all been spun, naturally. To see what "complexes arise" when you tumble those bricks they created "a primitive analog Monte Carlo agent."

Monte Carlo procedures are ways of using algorithms to map everything that might happen in a complex event, then determine from that which events are most likely to happen. Spin enough bricks and you could chart the probability of which bricks get stuck together. 

So they put a whole bucket of old Lego bricks (from the late 1960's and the early 1970's) into a Miele(TM) washing machine. The bricks were treated for 70 minutes, at 40 degree Celsius, without speed spinning at the end, without washing powder.

Imagine if there were a simple single statistical measure everybody could use with any set of data and it would reliably separate true from false. Oh, the things we would know!

That is unrealistic, of course.

Yet statistical significance is commonly treated as though it were a magic wand. Take a null hypothesis or look for any association between factors in a data set and abracadabra! Get a “p value” over or under 0.05 and you can be 95% certain it’s either a fluke or it isn’t. You can eliminate chance! You can separate the signal from the noise! You can declare that Republicans are anti-science and Democrats have prettier daughters!

There's no question that if someone asks me what is the best way to make coffee, I am going to tell them with my Chemex. All of the expensive machines in the world can't match this elegant feat of simple engineering.

But I am not a coffee snob. Well, sort of not. When Keurig was still just a leased restaurant machine, they had no home version for their single-cup pods, I bought one from a restaurant sale. It was pretty expensive then but today you can get a home machine for around $150. So I was being a little coffee snobbish avant-garde in buying the machine in the first place but now I am the anti-snob, because single cup machines are gauche and a single cup brew from a pod is what I drink in the morning.

Modern science is comprised of cold, objective, Spock-like, reason-based, data-driven searchers in a quest for the truths about natural laws.

Ha ha ha.

In reality, science overall is much like it has always been. It is composed of some charlatans chasing the latest popular tripe, some who are in it for the money, some who are terrible and some who are great. Just like any other job. But a modern mythology has been carefully crafted and if you are competing for taxpayer money, it helps to promote the belief that your way is more ethical, noble and pure than science done by the private sector.

It makes for a tidy narrative. And a completely fake one.