Freethink.

A group of researchers in Spain have synthesized a CRISPR-Cas gene editing system from 2.6 billion years ago, a laboratory feat they describe as a “resurrection.”

The work, published in Nature Microbiology, represents not only a way to better understand how bacteria first evolved this powerful gene editing tool, but could perhaps also lead to better versions.

By studying ancient CRISPR sequences and recreating them in the lab, the team was able to create functional versions of the ancient Cas proteins capable of cutting DNA in the modern day.

”This research signifies an extraordinary advance in knowledge about the origin and evolution of CRISPR-Cas systems,” Francis Mojica, a University of Alicante researcher on the team, said.

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There is a fabulous ancient treasure still buried at Herculaneum in the Bay of Naples. It is an actual ancient library that has been locked under a veritable rock of volcanic ash since 79 A.D. It likely contains thousands of scrolls, comprising hundreds of books. As I’ll explain shortly, a few hundred were recovered in the 19th century. But many are probably still sitting there—waiting to be excavated. The reasons this hasn’t happened yet are complicated, and aren’t just financial, but political (no one can agree on priorities), though there are rumblings of late to try and go back in. What might we find if we do? I have often been asked this in interviews. Today I will spell out my answer.

It is entirely possible that this library contains copies of ancient classics that have been lost for thousands of years. That would be pretty huge.

Narcity Canada.

With a constantly fluctuating U.S. housing market, it makes sense that the most desirable zip code in the States has some pretty affordable home prices, and you can thank Texas real estate for that.

In a 2023 study from HouseFresh, researchers revealed the hottest area for American homebuyers right now, and it is the quiet suburbs of Northeast Dallas.

The researchers combed through Zillow data of the country’s 100 most populous cities to find what locations buyers are most interested in and the North Texas neighborhood came out on top.

Things are even cheaper and nicer outside of Dallas proper, which is a Democrat-run pesthole.

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Police in Canada seized more than 100 3D-printed guns last year, with some jurisdictions seeing big increases in this type of weapon and even busting manufacturing rings for the first time.

In Calgary, for example, police seized 17 3D-printed guns in 2022, compared to just one each in 2021 and 2020.

Wow! Seventeen! It’s a crime wave!

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I suspect Barney Frank.

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The value of Latin is usually set forth in two main ways; first, relating to practical skills, and secondly relating to insight into the human condition, which has been the traditional aim of every Humanities subject. If these be the grounds of success or failure, and if the sample base for evaluating success or failure necessarily consists of those taking the subject, then this lack of consultation with students to see how, or whether, the subject has given them such practical skills and such insight, constitutes a major hole in the argumentation of any defender of the Classics.

Everyone, I grant, was at some point or another a student; but the crucial point is that they are not students now. By listening to current students, Classical academia in general might understand better why students do, or do not, continue to take Latin, and what benefits they derive from that subject.

In this article, I will seek to remedy this hole in the discussion in a very small way, by providing my own perspective as a secondary-school student and highlighting the key benefits that I have drawn from my study of Latin to date.

When I took beginning Greek in college, the teacher went around the class asking why we were wanting to learn classical Greek. When he got to me, I said (being a smartass) ‘To be civilized.’ He said, ‘No, you learn Latin to be civilized; you learn Greek to be educated.’  … which is precisely what a Roman would have said.

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A new Wall Street Journal-NORC poll reveals that a majority of Americans believe a college degree isn’t worth the cost and time. Sliding confidence in the higher education system indicates that the American Dream can be achieved without a college degree. This is an ominous sign for liberal professors teaching meaningless programs, particularly in the humanities.

ScienceNews.

The language we learn growing up seems to leave a lasting, biological imprint on our brains.
German and Arabic native speakers have different connection strengths in specific parts of the brain’s language circuit, researchers report February 19 in NeuroImage, hinting that the cognitive demands of our native languages physically shape the brain. The new study, based on nearly 100 brain scans, is one of the first in which scientists have identified these kinds of structural wiring differences in a large group of monolingual adults.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In the modern age, which in this context means the period following the Second World War to the present, people have been conditioned to ignore the stupid. If you notice them at all, it is to show your compassion. You care about the stupid because you are a good person, not because you want to do something about them. In this regard, we are taught to confuse the stupid with the helpless.

This was not always so. For much of human history, the main task for the people in charge was to limit the number of transactions by the stupid. Every time a stupid person makes a decision, there is a chance for mayhem. Therefore, the way to create a stable society is to reduce the number of transactions made by the stupid. Controlling the stupid population was a priority of government.

In times when the intelligent people were in short supply, bandits would often be used by the intelligent to keep the stupid under control. In wartime, when the intelligent are busy with war fighting, the bandits could be used to make sure the stupid are limited to things that minimize the damage they cause. The bandits profit, but that is a price worth paying to keep the stupid under control.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Trump should have shot someone on Fifth Avenue after all, since we know that Alvin Bragg won’t bring charges against anyone who does that.

Washington Free Beacon.

\Most lawyers probably would not appreciate being compared to a cold-blooded terrorist responsible for thousands of deaths. But for John Banzhaf—an octogenarian litigator who’s been called the “Osama Bin Laden of Torts”—the comparisons are a point of pride.

…

Now, though, this self-proclaimed “legal terrorist” has set his sights on an unlikely target: the Stanford Law School students who shouted down Fifth Circuit appellate judge Kyle Duncan.

Banzhaf told Stanford earlier this month that he will file a character and fitness complaint against the students with the California state bar.

“It appears that you have not taken any steps to discipline or otherwise sanction the student violators,” Banzhaf said in a letter to Jenny Martinez, the law school’s dean, who has since ruled out punishing the hecklers. As such, the complaint “will have links to video recordings of the disruption so that bar officials can judge the students’ conduct for themselves.”

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All life is made up of cells several magnitudes smaller than a grain of salt. Their seemingly simple-looking structures mask the intricate and complex molecular activity that enables them to carry out the functions that sustain life. Researchers are beginning to be able to visualize this activity to a level of detail they haven’t been able to before.

 

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I don’t have any immediate plans to do something destructive, futile, and stupid, but it occurred to me I should still have a manifesto reflecting my (unbalanced?) mental state on hand, just in case. Why should only nutballs and violent sickos get to have manifestos? Here is the first draft of mine:

Everyone ought to have a manifesto handy, just in case. Don’t leave home without it….

Newsweek.

Rep. Clay Higgins claimed “there’s no such thing as gun violence” in America on Wednesday during a House oversight hearing. “The number one cause of death for children in America remains abortion,” Higgins asserted.

TechCrunch.

Concrete is ubiquitous. A mainstay of the construction industry, over 10 billion cubic meters of concrete is used every year. It’s also responsible for up to 8% of CO2 emissions: one ton of ordinary Portland cement creates somewhere between 800 and 900 kilograms of CO2 emissions. Finnish startup Carbonaide has just raised €1.8 million (~$1.9 million at today’s exchange rate) in seed funding to knock down concrete’s carbon emissions, but not the construction industry.

“Our goal at Carbonaide is to create a more sustainable future with cutting-edge tech that doesn’t just reduce the carbon emissions of construction materials like concrete, but that traps more CO2 than they emit throughout their lifetime,” explains Tapio Vehmas, Carbonaide’s CEO. “It is very natural that the constructed environment becomes a CO2 sink, as it is the largest volume of man-made material.”

Carbonaide’s process binds carbon dioxide into precast concrete using an automated system at atmospheric pressure. By reducing the quantity of required cement content and mineralizing CO2 into the concrete itself, Carbonaide believes it can halve the carbon dioxide emissions of traditional Portland cement concrete. If it can introduce industrial waste products, for example, industry slag, green liquor dregs, and bio-ash into the process, it has the potential to produce concrete with a negative carbon footprint.

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North America and South America each only have one continent-draining river–the Mississippi and the Amazon–while Africa has at least three (Nile, Congo, Niger, possibly the Zambezi) and Europe arguably only one (the Danube). Asia is just full of them: The Yellow and Yangtse, the Mekong, the Ganges and Indus, and one might almost be tempted to put the Tigris and Euphrates in that group.

What he said.

The Guardian.

Farming Simulator lets customers test out new trailers, balers and other machinery before buying the real thing.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

There are certain peoples that one has long thought of as solid and common-sensical. Like the Australians and the Scots. But those images have been tarnished badly in recent years. In Australia’s case, it was one of the world’s most maniacal (and futile) covid shutdowns. In Scotland, it is the weird gender virus.

Well, you know, they’ve got that whole kilt thing going for them.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

You seldom look to The New Yorker for support for a conservative cause, but today the storied magazine published a devastating article by Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen on the Harvard affirmative action case now pending at the Supreme Court. The article, “The Secret Joke at the Heart of the Harvard Affirmative-Action Case,” is devastating not only on the merits, but also for the conduct and rulings of District Court Judge Allison Burroughs (an Obama appointee) who ruled in favor of Harvard at the trial phase of this momentous case.

Everyone should read the entire article—The New Yorker gives everyone a couple free articles a month—because it is impossible to summarize the richness of telling detail Prof. Gersen includes in this admirably compact piece.

ZMan jerks back the curtain.

The German philosopher Carl Schmitt observed that politics is about the friend – enemy distinction, played out in public. Everyone has people they call friends and people they think of as adversaries or enemies. This only becomes political when others outside these relations are called upon to pick sides. Politics is about groups of people opposing one another in public and forcing others to pick sides. The winner is the one whose group dominates the others.

The thing is, it is never easy to know your friends in politics, but the only way to survive is to know your enemies. Those would be the groups whose very existence depends upon your demise. Friendships are transactional as they are situational. When your interests align with those of another faction, you are friends while you have some common interest. When conditions change, the friendship ends. Enemies are always enemies because who they are the negation of you.

This is why conservatism has never amounted to much in America. They insist that politics do not exist and instead public policy is decided by factual accuracy and the best ideas to solve problems. While the people we insist on calling the Left run around playing politics, the conservatives spend their days making impressive charts and graphs explaining why they are right. Occasionally they win an election, only to be outclassed by their opponents once in office.

The New Yorker.

A federal official wrote a parody of Harvard’s attitude toward Asian Americans and shared it with the dean of admissions. Why did a judge try to hide that from the public?

New York Post.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Seriously, that’s what this sort of thing is. People who are so self-indulgent that they engage in activities that eventually kill them are Natural Selection’s legitimate prey. Yeah, it’s sad, but this isn’t something that droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven; they did it to themselves.  I feel the same way about drug addicts. Your body, your choice, your death. Time to cull the herd.

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Hollywood has always loved the children of famous people. In 2022, the internet reduced them to two little words.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

For the last 50 years or so, public policy in the U.S. has trended toward the view that everyone, more or less, should go to college. This was a sharp departure from the historical norm, when higher education really was higher, and only a small minority obtained four-year degrees.

It has become increasingly evident that the payoff for sending most kids to college is minimal, both for them and for our society and economy. Hence the current trend away from four-year colleges and toward, among other things, apprenticeships. The Wall Street Journal has a long article headlined “More Students Are Turning Away From College and Toward Apprenticeships,” with the subhead “Some white-collar training programs have become as selective as Ivy League universities.” That can only be a good thing.

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And you know we can’t have that….

The American Mind.

Gentrification is, at core, an economic strategy. It aims at increasing the number of middle- and upper-middle-class people living in urban cores. There always were, and always will be, young adults who want to live in cities. Gentrifiers differ from Patti Smith types, because they’re respectable and promise quantifiable gains to the urban economy such as higher real estate valuations. They moved into housing previously occupied by people with lower incomes.

This strategy made sense. The best argument for gentrification is that no other model seemed to work. It’s one thing to nag former industrial cities to lay off their yuppie-hugging and get to work rebuilding the great American working class. It’s quite another to make that happen. The cookie-cutter aspect of gentrification—micro-breweries, Starbucks, people riding bikes to work for reasons other than a DUI or an inability to afford a car—is precisely its virtue. An urban policy “model” is something that can be implemented anywhere and does not require much in the way of charisma or talent in city hall.

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Well, first they went to Detroit, but, dismayed by what Democrats had done to the city, and unwilling to endure the high crime rate, they eventually moved to Florida.

(Actually, they were wiped out by the ‘eco-friendly’ ‘Native Americans’.)

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

When you see something as facially absurd as San Francisco’s proposal to pay $5 million in reparations to every black person whether they were descendants of slaves or not, which is only a down payment since the proposal also calls for a guaranteed income of $97,000 per year thereafter, one question to ask is: What would Rush Limbaugh say about this? I think he’d say: conservatives should support San Francisco in this endeavor, and hope it spreads to every other liberal Democrat run city in the country.

The logic here is simple. Almost ten years ago, after Ta-Nehisi Coates floated reparartions at The Atlantic, I wrote here that if we are to consider reparations seriously, Democrats should be made to pay them.

The sooner the Blue states go broke and have all of their productive people go someplace else, the sooner they can be re-organized into something more sensible.

The time for cheap virtue signaling is over. It is long past time for Democrats to pay up, and San Francisco voters should learn a harsh lesson about what kind of government they keep voting for. As H.L. Mencken once said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”

Hear, hear.

The Guardian.

Never thought I’d see The Guardian have a good thing to say about ‘medieval days’.

Foreign Affairs.

Over two decades, Americans have stubbornly refused to move on from Iraq. That is partly because the U.S. military is still fighting there and many other places besides. More profoundly, the country cannot “turn the page” without reading and comprehending it—without truly reckoning with the causes of the war. It may be painful to revisit what drove American leaders, on a bipartisan basis, to want to invade a country that had not attacked the United States and had no plans to do so, facts widely appreciated at the time. Yet without looking back, the country will not move forward with confidence and unity.

Watch it.

Fascinating. I want to know what is the mechanical analog of Kirchhoff’s laws.

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The most recent exercise of this quest came in the form of filling up an unmodified MX-5 Miata with a synthetic fossil-free fuel, and testing it across a 1000-mile road trip. Throughout the trip, the MX-5 was also thrashed at various tracks to see how the fuel would deal with the abuse.
Simply put, the synthetic fuel operated much like normal gasoline would have, without the emission drawbacks of the latter.

Well, if you’re burning something for fuel, you will have emissions–the only question is what kind. The article, perhaps significantly, doesn’t say what kind of emissions this synthetic fuel produces, although they do confess that it’s made from agricultural waste and is composed of hydrocarbons. I suspect that this was just a setup to bash it in favor of the Holy Electric Vehicle, which occupies almost half of the article.