SCIENCE: Ancient Egyptian Kitten Skeletons Hint at Earlier Cat Domestication.

I KNOW HIM THROUGH THE FORESIGHT INSTITUTE. HE’S A COOL GUY. A Conversation With Steve Jurvetson, Space Investor and Rocket Maker.

SCIENCE: Study Questions Fat and Heart Disease Link. “Many of us have long been told that saturated fat, the type found in meat, butter and cheese, causes heart disease. But a large and exhaustive new analysis by a team of international scientists found no evidence that eating saturated fat increased heart attacks and other cardiac events. . . . The smaller, more artery-clogging particles are increased not by saturated fat, but by sugary foods and an excess of carbohydrates.”

Gary Taubes, call your office!

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HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Eight Senior SUNY-Buffalo Law Profs Accept Buyout.

SO I’VE BLURBED Bill Quick’s new novel, Lightning Fall. It’s a great read, though it doesn’t inspire confidence in a Hillary presidency.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Former NSA Official Thinks A Blog Containing Nothing But His Own Tweets Is ‘Defamatory.’

ONE SMALL STEP FOR A MAN, one giant leap for Dronekind.

Last week, Major League Baseball fined the Boston Red Sox for not putting enough of its regular roster on the field for a spring training game. The Washington Nationals now face a fine of a different sort, for using a different sort of player during spring training—the team may face a penalty from the Federal Aviation Administration for using an unmanned aircraft to take promotional photos during a team practice.

When contacted by an Associated Press reporter regarding whether the team got FAA approval for use of the small drone, a team spokesperson said, “No, we didn’t get it cleared, but we don’t get our pop flies cleared either, and those go higher than this thing did.” But the team stopped flying the drone the next day—and team officials wouldn’t comment further.

Ars attempted to reach Kyle Brostowitz, the Nationals’ coordinator for baseball communications, but he did not reply to our requests for comment. A spokesperson for the FAA did not respond to inquiries regarding the Nationals or whether the FAA had contacted the team. But the FAA will soon be facing many more of these cases in the wake of a recent administrative court decision, in part thanks to the agency’s failure to issue a new set of rules on commercial drone use.

Stay tuned.

LUKE SKYWALKER, your landspeeder is ready. Actually, I think this original is prettier.

TEN REAL-LIFE Mad Scientists.

ER, COVERING FOR THEM AS USUAL? J. Christian Adams: Pennsylvania Democrats Took Bribes To Oppose Voter ID — Where Is Eric Holder?

HOW TIMES HAVE CHANGED: Death of Former IRS Commissioner Randolph Thrower; Was Fired for Refusing President’s Request to Audit His Enemies.

AUSTIN BAY ON CRIMEA: Options for Confronting Putin’s Three Cold Facts.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 314.

K.C. JOHNSON: ‘Rape Culture’ Fraud–Unmasking a Delusion. It’s less a “delusion” than a manipulative/propaganda technique.

DAVID GOLDMAN: Progressive Politics: The Rise Of Secular Religion.

Today’s American liberalism, it is often remarked, amounts to a secular religion: it has its own sacred texts and taboos, Crusades and Inquisitions. The political correctness that undergirds it, meanwhile, can be traced back to the past century’s liberal Protestantism. Conservatives, of course, routinely scoff that liberals’ ersatz religion is inferior to the genuine article.

Joseph Bottum, by contrast, examines post-Protestant secular religion with empathy, and contends that it gained force and staying power by recasting the old Mainline Protestantism in the form of catechistic worldly categories: anti-racism, anti-gender discrimination, anti-inequality, and so forth. What sustains the heirs of the now-defunct Protestant consensus, he concludes, is a sense of the sacred, but one that seeks the security of personal salvation through assuming the right stance on social and political issues. Precisely because the new secular religion permeates into the pores of everyday life, it sustains the certitude of salvation and a self-perpetuating spiritual aura. Secularism has succeeded on religious terms. That is an uncommon way of understanding the issue, and a powerful one.

Read the whole thing.

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JAMES TARANTO: Take The Senate, Please: Rationalization Season Begins.

Of late the Washington Post’s liberal blogger Greg Sargent has been working overtime to reassure Democrats that their political straits are nowhere near as dire as everyone has been saying. Thanks to President Obama, he’s no doubt been earning time and a half. But now he’s brought in a guest blogger, Paul Waldman, to offer a different kind of reassurance, in a post titled “Why Taking Over the Senate May Not Do Republicans Much Good.”

That’s right, the election is still 7½ months away, and Waldman is ready to concede (notwithstanding a disclaimer that “we should acknowledge that a Republican takeover of the upper house is anything but a sure thing”). He’s past denial and anger and into the bargaining stage. . . .

It seems to us that Waldman has set up a false dilemma. True, it’s probably safe to assume that full repeal of ObamaCare has next to no chance of becoming law while Obama is president. But given Republican majorities in both chambers, there would be nothing preventing the House and Senate from considering both types of bills, or from sending both types of bills to the president’s desk.

The House has passed dozens of full-repeal bills since Republicans took over in 2011, but it has also passed more modest bills, including one to delay the individual mandate tax and one to delay the employer insurance mandate. The president threatened to veto these measures–even though he had already decreed the delay in the employer mandate–and they died in the Senate anyway.

Suppose a Republican Congress sent two bills to the president’s desk–one repealing ObamaCare outright, and one repealing just the mandate tax. If he vetoed both, Republicans could portray him as the stubborn extremist, defender not only of an unpopular law but of its most unpopular provision.

It’s also possible that Waldman overstates the political unpopularity of repeal.

Especially looking ahead a year, as ObamaCare train wrecks proliferate.

PUTIN SMILES: Greens pressure Obama to reject expansion of natural gas exports. Right on cue.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: At the University of Chicago, Learn Economics From a Convicted Insider-Trading Maven. Well, it’s okay to be a felon if you’ve got the right pedigree.

SPYING: Judge rebukes Feds for overbroad search warrant applications for e-mail.

JOHN FUND: Hate-Crime Laws and the Expansion of Federal Power: How does the Thirteenth Amendment justify making certain kinds of violence a federal crime?

Like all federal criminal statutes, this one gives federal authorities the power to prosecute a defendant who has already been prosecuted by state authorities. They can even prosecute a defendant who has been acquitted. Double-jeopardy protections do not apply.

But can such far-reaching federal authority to try a defendant twice be justified under the Constitution, especially given how emotionally charged these prosecutions often are? In the absence of evidence that states are “falling down on the job,” shouldn’t such prosecutions be state-controlled? On Friday, the Supreme Court will decide if it will hear a case directly challenging part of the federal government’s claim of authority in this area.

The Obama Justice Department has argued that the part of the 2009 Hate Crimes Prevention Act that governs race is constitutional under the 13th Amendment, which reads that: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

It’s a stretch.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Public housing tenants have a right to bear arms, even in common areas.

So holds Tuesday’s Delaware Supreme Court decision in Doe v. Wilmington Housing Authority (Del. Mar. 18, 2014). The court applied the Delaware Constitution’s right to bear arms provision — “A person has the right to keep and bear arms for the defense of self, family, home and State, and for hunting and recreational use” — and the court noted that this language may justify broader protection than that given by the Second Amendment. Still, the precedent is likely to prove influential in other states as well, since the case deals with having guns for self-defense, which D.C. v. Heller has held is covered by the Second Amendment.

Interesting.