A good week for uniforms in Nevada! It’s the Friday Slashback!

Author’s note: Due to the fact that I was unexpectedly called to Carson City last week to witness the Legislature write one of those huge novelty checks to Tesla Motors, adding “with love!” in the memo field, there was no Friday Slashback last week. I regret the omission.

You know what you almost never see? A study that disproves the point that the people who paid for the study want to make.

Whether it’s stadiums, tax initiatives or monorail ridership, we see the numbers that make the rosiest, best case for whatever project or idea is being promoted at any given point: Everybody will come to sports events, even outdoors in the worst Las Vegas summer heat! The entire community will ride the monorail, which will never go bankrupt! The Education Initiative will cause Ebola!

We never see, for example, a group supporting a tax that says, “Well, we commissioned this study of our tax, but it totally shows the economy crashing if it passes. Bummer.”

Part of this phenomenon is the fact that the clients often take honest studies and exaggerate the hell out of certain findings, while ignoring the parts that don’t prove the case. There’s not much number-crunchers can do when that happens.

But I often wonder if, in the various consultant houses around town, there’s a file cabinet with a bunch of never-seen studies, research commissioned by various groups and businesses that just didn’t come out the right way, and were forever buried. I’d like to believe that cabinet exists, and that the people in the business of studying numbers don’t simply give their clients whatever those clients want. But I’ve seen enough studies in the last few years to make me wonder.

For example, this new study I commissioned by The Applied Economic Study Council of Las Vegas that finds 92.3 percent of all Las Vegans read this website with a 98.4 percent satisfaction rate. That’s totally a real thing.

And now, on with the Slashback!

• It’s the economics, stupid. So, if you limit supply, but demand continues apace, prices will rise? This relatively unsurprising economic theory was obvious even to the Clark County Commission, which will encourage the state not to use it’s discretionary powers to limit to overall cultivation of medical marijuana in Nevada. It turns out the central planners in Nevada think the state needs 650,000 to 1 million square feet of cultivation, but the state has received applications for two or three times that number.

“Let the free market decide!”, the county commission declared, perhaps for the very first time. Then they went back to banning privately owned newsracks and glass bottles on the Strip.

• Speaking of government regulation… Henderson rejected a medical marijuana dispensary application in part because the proposed facility was located too close to a business providing services to children, in this case, a dentist. Because I know when I get done with my twice-annual cleanings, the very first thing I want to do is smoke a bowl! (Or so I’ve heard; I’ve actually never smoked or ingested marijuana or any illegal drug in any form. But I’ve heard things. From the young people.)

Full disclosure: Trevor Hayes, the attorney for the applicant, is a friend of mine and a former colleague here at the Review-Journal. Oh, and also he’s right on the issue.

• Do you think the anti-smart meter people are sitting around thinking, “Wow, all these years, we thought they were reading our minds with microwave transceivers, but the real danger from smart meters was that they’ll burn your house down!!! Did not see that coming”?

Full disclosure: NV Energy says its smart meters have never been identified as the actual cause of a house fire. I say this because I have a smart meter, and I don’t want the company to send the “burn, baby, burn!” code to it before I finish this week’s Slashback…

• Steve Wynn elected mayor of Boston! Well, technically, his company was selected to build a beautiful new $1.6 billion casino in Everett, Mass., by the Massachusetts Gaming Commission. But it won’t be long until he’s in charge.

Full disclosure: Massachusetts voters may reject all gambling in a November referendum. So there’s that.

• So, the percentage of adults who are afflicted with abdominal obesity has grown from 46 percent in 1999 to 54 percent this year. So, I’m not so much “fat” as I am a “trendsetter.”

• Adam Laxalt faced an important choice in his recent TV bio ad: Whites or blues. As a former Navy officer who served in the Judge Advocate General corps, Laxalt no doubt has photos of himself in the Navy’s white and blue dress uniform. It’s a tough decision. They’re both distinguished, and they both have a place in popular culture.

On his website, and in his ad, Laxalt decided to go with his service dress whites (think Tom Cruise in the graduation scene near the end of Top Gun) instead of service dress blue (think Tom Cruise cross-examining Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men).

Now, personally, I agree with Kevin Pollak, who said in the aforementioned A Few Good Men that “everybody hates the whites,” although he was referring to the short-sleeved “working whites,” and not the dress whites that Laxalt is pictured wearing. Same principle.

But Laxalt — who’s also pictured wearing desert digital camo BDUs while on duty in Iraq — is a braver man than I, and not just because I’d be worried I’d spill something on myself within five minutes of donning the whites, working or dress.

• Speaking of uniforms, Rep, Joe Heck’s Army Reserve uniforms will need an upgrade soon: He’s trading the silver eagle-holding-an-arrow insignia of a colonel for the single star of a brigadier general. Heck’s promotion to the O-7 grade was recommended last year, but got tangled in Pentagon bureaucracy for a few months.

• Ranting racist rancher Cliven Bundy is back in the news! It seems that some of the cows over which Bundy was willing to go to war with the federal government wandered onto the freeway a couple days after the infamous April standoff, where one ended up getting hit by a car and injuring two people, one of whom is now suing him. (The cow was killed.) This being Bundy, he first insisted it was the state’s fault (there was a hole in the fence), an allegation the state denies. Then, being a sensitive and kind soul, he said he could actually sue the driver for killing one of his cows. Then, perhaps realizing he’d made an admission that could be used against him in court he suddenly said, wait, did I say my cow? You can’t prove it was my cow!

Nothing like the personal responsibility that comes with freedom, huh?

• God help us. So, thanks to an Air Force technical sergeant based at Creech Air Force Base right here in Nevada, it appears that no U.S. service member will have to swear in his enlistment or appointment oath to support and defend the Constitution and obey the orders of the president and the officers appointed over him “…so help me God.”

After the anonymous sergeant scratched out those last four words on his reenlistment form, he was threatened with expulsion from the Air Force. But his lawyer successfully argued — and the Pentagon’s general counsel ultimately agreed — that the language of the oath could violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment, as well as the ban on religious tests contained in Article 6 of the Constitution.

At a time where the U.S. military represents America, perhaps more than any other institution, having been desegregated, seeing women gaining access to more military occupations than ever before, allowing gays and lesbians to serve openly, why not also welcome those who would object to pledging fealty to a deity? They’re not serving in the Lord’s army, after all, but the armed services of the United States. It’s only right they pledge an oath to the Constitution. And as Americans, we should be grateful for every person who is willing to serve, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation or religious belief.

• And finally this week, UNLV President Don Snyder gave the annual State of the University speech, in which he said the school’s academic reputation and a new medical school are his top goals.

I couldn’t agree more! But a recent incident in which a report on The Education Initiative from the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research prompted disdain and distancing from Snyder didn’t do much to help UNLV’s reputation. (For that matter, neither did an “updated” version of the report released later that walked back some of the original conclusions.)

But apparently Snyder wasn’t referring to “academic freedom” when he said “reputation.” Instead, he meant “economic success”! Here’s how the Review-Journal’s Francis McCabe reported the story:

“What we know about tier one universities is that they can double or even triple the economic impact of a region: When UNLV becomes tier one, we expect that our economic impact will go from $1.5 billion to as much as $4.5 billion. That will affect all of us — not just here on campus, not just in Las Vegas, but throughout Nevada and beyond,” Snyder said.

Snyder added that tier one universities have grants and contracts totaling at least $100 million, twice that at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and award more than 200 doctorate degrees per year.

Now, I’m no academic, economist, university president or anything else of note. But I do know enough to know that studies that say we should tax the business community more probably tend to result in less support from that community, not more. I bet there are plenty of people in Las Vegas’s business community who wish UNLV’s margins tax study had ended up in a dusty filing cabinet somewhere. And surely UNLV’s faculty is now on notice to that fact.

See you next week!