Read it.

A small Texas county is weighing whether to shut down its public library system after a federal judge ruled the commissioners violated the constitution by banning a dozen mostly children’s books and ordered that they be put back in circulation.

No bleats about ‘threat to our democracy’ from the Narrative media here, you’ll notice.

The books that Llano County officials removed from the library shelves include Isabel Wilkerson’s “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents”; “They Called Themselves the K.K.K.: The Birth of an American Terrorist Group” by Susan Campbell Bartoletti; the graphic novel “Spinning” by Tillie Walden; and three books from Dawn McMillan’s “I Need a New Butt!” series.

Yeah, kids desperately need to have access to ‘I Need a New Butt’.

Also removed from the library were Maurice Sendak’s “In the Night Kitchen”; Robie H. Harris’ “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health”; and four other children’s picture books with “silly themes and rhymes,” like “Larry the Farting Leprechaun,” “Gary the Goose and His Gas on the Loose”; “Freddie the Farting Snowman” and “Harvey the Heart Has Too Many Farts,” according to the complaint.

The Guardian.

Harvard University will rename its graduate school of arts and sciences after billionaire hedge fund executive and Republican megadonor Kenneth Griffin, the institution announced on Tuesday, after a new $300m contribution brought Griffin’s total support of his alma mater to more than half a billion dollars.

sGriffin, 54, is the founder and chief executive of Citadel, a $59bn hedge fund, and Citadel Securities, which trades securities. He is the 35th richest person in the world, with a net worth of $34.9bn, according to the Bloomberg billionaires index.

Griffin will be just the fourth individual to have a school at Harvard named after him in exchange for a donation, according to the Harvard Crimson student newspaper. His name will carry controversy thanks to Griffin’s stature as a major political donor to rightwing politicians and his company’s investments in firearm and ammunition manufacturers.

Money talks. Even Harvard can be bought.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Lately, Democrats have tried to posture as free speech advocates by denouncing “bans” of various books. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz went on a tirade at a press conference, claiming that Florida–the Left’s bete noire these days–has “banned” various books like, for example, Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies. It turned out that Walz just made it up, as usual.

More broadly, the whole “book ban” controversy is stupid. No one is banning books. The issue, when it comes up, is which books, an infinitesimal number out of the millions that are available, should be selected for placement in school libraries, and thus recommended to our young people. And in fact, decisions made by public school librarians are often highly questionable.

As part of his attack on Florida, Governor Walz established a “lending library” in his office where people can drop off and borrow books. It was intended as a stunt, but Bill Walsh, Communications Director at Center of the American Experiment, took the governor’s offer seriously. He placed a number of books that are grossly inappropriate–featuring, for example, graphic depictions of gay sex–in the governor’s library. This short video is entertaining, but is also a sad reminder of the depravity to be found in many public schools.

Read it.

Europeans who are unhappy with the European Union find themselves at a disadvantage. The expression ‘Europe’ has a positive allure which Eurosceptics have not been able to puncture. This is why the EU’s supporters exploit it as a synonym for the organisation. Yet the confusion is decidedly unjust, not only because, as is well known, Europe is bigger and older than the EU but also for a more substantial and concrete reason. The process of European integration has historically not been a European project but rather an American one.

Read it.

The first step has to be a recognition that neither philosophy is “in charge.” Enough people will simply not bow to a different philosophy to let that be so.

The second step is to accept that the philosophies are incompatible, that there is no “middle way” to maintain one society under some form of blended governance.

The third step is to be open to accommodation and trade. And the answer here was given to us with the “sanctuary movement” in Blue cities/states. Sanctuary places simply ignored the law applicable elsewhere. No discussion, no debate, no federal plebiscite. They simply directed their law enforcement personnel to not enforce certain laws, to not cooperate in the enforcement of others of those laws, penalized cooperation, and publicized their position. And the other side did not arrest politicians in those places as lawbreakers and conspirators. And those places continued to trade with the rest of the country and the economy outside of those places was not overly affected by local decisions.

The Other McCain.

One of the things that liberals love to do is to discuss trends without examining the relevant context. Suppose we’re talking about childhood poverty, and the liberal wishes you to be concerned about an increase in this problem. Would it be helpful to know how the data are different between, say, single-parent households and married-parent households? Or how would the data look if we broke it down by race, or by immigration status of the parents? Isn’t it likely that some significant part of the trend in childhood poverty is caused by an enormous influx of impoverished Latin American immigrants, many of them here illegally? Yet even among immigrants, aren’t children less likely to grow up in poverty if they’re living in a two-parent married family household?

On this issue, as on so many other issues, you cannot understand what’s happening and why it’s happening if you do not disaggregate the data, breaking it down by demographic categories.

Steve Sailer.

One of my anti-conspiracy theories is that remarkably little money is spent to influence American electoral politics relative to the stakes of controlling government power.

For example, billionaire George Soros has helped drive murder and traffic fatalities way up in the U.S. in recent years by investing a rather limited (for him) amount of money in electing soft-on-crime district attorneys in big cities.

These aren’t huge sums of money by 2023 standards that Soros gives, but who else makes campaign contributions to District Attorney races? Not all billionaires want to sow chaos in the big city — demographically similar Michael Bloomberg spent 12-years as a successful crime-fighting mayor of New York — but nobody else of comparable wealth seems terribly motivated to counter Soros’s insight that prosecutor races offer a cheap chokepoint.

Read it.

A team of researchers in Greece and Ireland, led by Nikolaos Vakirlis at the Alexander Fleming Biomedical Sciences Research Center in Athens, argues that a key to understanding human evolution lies with short sequences of DNA named “open reading frames” (ORFs). These structures are small sections of the genome that encode tiny protein molecules — microproteins — which can perform a diverse range of crucial biological tasks, from regulating muscle performance to alerting cells to damaging stresses.

Due to their minuscule sizes, ORFs are notoriously difficult to study. Because of this, their full relevance has gone under the radar in mainstream genomics research until recently, and even today, they still aren’t considered to be proper genes in themselves. For Vakirlis’ team, this potential oversight masks the fact that the microproteins encoded by ORFs can develop their own de novo sequences over generations, which may eventually develop into new genes

Cybernaut.

Digital minimalists are using simple talk-and-text devices to spend
less time online, curb distraction, and navigate internet addiction.

Not to mention increased privacy.

Quillette.

The recent tumult surrounding the Supreme Court’s ruling on abortion reminds us that the American body politic is closely and intensively divided on many contentious political, social, religious, cultural, and economic issues. One of those issues is the question of whether affirmative action, particularly in college admissions, passes constitutional muster.

WIRED.

But how far into the depths of coffee connoisseurship have you really dived? There are 124 coffee species out there and just two of them—arabica and robusta—account for around 99 percent of global coffee production. Even the most adventurous coffee fans rarely stray beyond these two headliners. But relying so heavily on just two coffee species is starting to look foolhardy. In our warming world, coffee plantations are coming under increased pressure from diseases, drought, and poor growing conditions. Coffee prices have almost doubled in the past two years, largely due to droughts and frosts in Brazil, the world’s largest coffee producer.

Enter liberica. It’s the hipster bean that some coffee aficionados hope will herald a more resilient—and delicious—future of coffee. “It’s surprising a lot of people,” says Aaron Davis, a coffee specialist at Kew Gardens in London and author of a new paper in the journal Nature arguing that liberica’s time has come. Coffee importers and sellers are starting to pay attention to liberica, he says, thanks to its distinctive taste and because it can grow in conditions other species can’t. It could be time for this previously much-maligned bean to come back to the big leagues.

So it’s not so much about the coffee as it is about your image of yourself as being on the cutting edge of fashion. I see. (There’s a lot of money in narcissism these days.)

Read it.

In response to Creationist lists of “scientists who doubt evolution”, the National Center for Science Education put together their own list of scientists who support it. All of the signatories are named Steve, or some variation thereof.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

An indication that Christianity has declined over the last decades is the fact that Easter has slowly faded from the public space. It used to be that stores would have sales for the things that go along with holiday. The grocery stores would have an aisle dedicated to candy and treats popular with Easter. You would see ads for children’s clothes, as Easter was typically a time to get the little ones new gear.

The main reason for the decline in Easter, of course, is the decline in the number of people attending Christian churches. In some parts of the country, like New England, church attendance has collapsed. In those states, about half the people never attend services, while only about a quarter attend regularly. Only a few states have a majority of people attending church regularly.

Of course, the churches have succumbed to the rot. The Episcopal church is mostly about sodomy now. Drive around the east coast and it seems like every rainbow ends at an Episcopal church. The Catholic church is in steep decline due to the homosexual priest scandals. Even the Baptists have decided that it is better to please the lunatics than tend to the faithful. The result is a lot of empty pews.

Steve Sailer.

Three decades ago, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) sobered up enough to make his final contribution to American social science, Moynihan’s Law of Proximity to the Canadian Border: school test scores went up the closer a state was to the Canadian border.

In this map of average age of death, we can see a fascinating addendum: life expectancy goes up close to the Mexican border. This is because Mexicans are remarkably long-lived for their socio-economic status. Wikipedia has a long article review the theories attempting to explain the Hispanic Life Expectancy Paradox.

Vox.

For many Americans, doing your taxes isn’t all that complicated. It’s just data entry.

The actual work of doing your taxes mostly involves rifling through various Internal Revenue Service forms you get in the mail. There are W-2s listing your wages, 1099s showing miscellaneous income like from one-off gigs, 1098s showing mortgage interest or tuition payments, etc.

But here’s the thing about those forms: The IRS has them, too. For many people, the IRS has all the information it needs to calculate their taxes, send taxpayers a filled-out return, and have them sign it and send it right back to the IRS if everything looks in order.

It’s even worse than that. Once you send in your tax return, the IRS plugs it into their machines and recalculates your return, comparing it to the information it has already received, to make sure you are being honest.

But of course tax return preparation is a huge industry, both for the Big Boy tax preparation services like Intuit and H&RBlock and TurboTax, and for individual accounting practices. And those guys have a lot of money to spread around to politicians to make sure that their rice bowl isn’t disturbed. You can tell where this is headed.

I have yet to file a tax return that the IRS didn’t send me a nastygram about how I Done Them Wrong and informing me of what they did to fix it. In fact, my wife and I had taken to filling out the return and signing it, leaving the tax calculation blank, and letting the IRS figure the tax and send us a bill. (They will charge you interest, which is trivial these days, but no penalty if you pay up before the grace period ends.) My life would be substantially easier if I had a rough IRS-generated draft to start with. But NOOOOOOOOOO…

CNBC.

All are cities run by Democrats, even Dallas (12) and Houston (13) in Texas and St. Louis (15) in Missouri, otherwise red states.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Twitter has designated National Public Radio  as “state-affiliated media.”

Twitter has labeled National Public Radio as “state-affiliated media” on the social media site, a move some worried Wednesday could undermine public confidence in the news organization.

We can only hope so.

NPR said it was disturbed to see the description added to all of the tweets that it sends out, with John Lansing, its president and CEO, calling it “unacceptable for Twitter to label us this way.”

It was unclear why Twitter made the move. Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, quoted a definition of state-affiliated media in the company’s guidelines as “outlets where the state exercises control over editorial content through financial resources, direct or indirect political pressures, and/or control over production and distribution.”

“Seems accurate,” Musk tweeted in a reply to NPR.

These days, NPR gets only a minor percentage of its funding from the federal government. But it gets much more from its state affiliates, which themselves are largely financed by the federal and state governments.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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!

Read it.

I suspect Barney Frank.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

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.”

Read it.

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.

 

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.