PUT YOUR TELESCOPES THERE, AS GOD AND ROBERT HEINLEIN INTENDED: Far side: the moon’s use as a new astronomical site.

THE KEY FOR CIVILIZATION WAS SOMETHING THAT COULD BE STOLEN, STORED, AND TAXED: Researchers Have a Controversial New Hypothesis For How Civilization First Started. “The relative ease of confiscating stored cereals, their high energy density, and their durability enhances their appropriability, thereby facilitating the emergence of tax-levying elites. . . . Farming was obviously a necessary step to improve food production, but researchers suspect only those crops that could be easily confiscated led to the rise of an elite class.”

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Three Chinese astronauts return to Earth after six months in space.

COLLEGES WILL OPPOSE THIS SINCE GOING FROM 4 YEARS TO 3 CUTS THEIR REVENUE BY 25%: Momentum builds behind a way to lower the cost of college: A degree in three years. “What’s missing when people are talking to high school students about college is the reality of it — the financial aspect.”

Plus: “The pandemic, the shift to online, was such a radical experience that it’s made everybody rethink time and the value proposition.”

THIS SOUNDS DELICIOUS, IF NOT DIETETIC: A Sandwich Straight from Heaven.

WELL, YES: Costs of occupational licensing fall heaviest on vulnerable Tennesseans.

An archival search of newspapers could not locate a single instance of consumer harm from unlicensed barbers before the first major attempts to license the profession in Nashville in 1903. In fact, the Tennessean asked at that time, “Is there sound reason for the enactment of a barbers’ licensing law?”

Licensing laws are almost always at the behest of the occupation being licensed, not of consumers.

Here’s the longer study being reported.

PEOPLE ARENT’ THAT DUMB: After Brooklyn Subway Shooting, Rasmussen Finds Americans Aren’t Buying Biden’s Focus on Gun Control to Stop Violent Crime.

BE PREPARED: American Made Buffalo Leather Work Gloves. #CommissionEarned

WHY ELON MUSK HAS RATTLED THEM:

The Washington Post’s Max Boot was swift out of the blocks. ‘I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter’, Boot tweeted. ‘He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.’

On an even more demented note, Robert Reich, veteran of the Clinton and Obama administrations, essentially argued that Musk buying Twitter would put us on a fast track to fascism; that Musk’s vision for an ‘uncontrolled’ internet was ‘​​the dream of every dictator, strongman, demagogue and modern-day robber baron’.

Reich wasn’t the only one gripped by this interesting idea that dictators love free speech and that more of it online will bring the Third Reich back. New York University journalism professor ​​Jeff Jarvis had this poetic response to Musk’s bid: ‘Today on Twitter feels like the last evening in a Berlin nightclub at the twilight of Weimar Germany.’

* * * * * * * *

Elon Musk will not save free speech online. Even if his intentions really are good ones, the scale of the problem goes beyond one platform. And free speech online is too important to rely on the benevolence of billionaires. But his attempted takeover of Twitter has already done us a great service, in revealing how important censorship now is to America’s permanently hysterical elites.

There’s only one thing for the panicked socialists to do: Time for leftists to build their own Twitter.

HILLARY ISN’T THAT IMPORTANT: Revising the lifecycle of an important human parasite.

THE BANNINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES ELON MUSK BUYS TWITTER: Libs of TikTok has been suspended from Twitter again. Here’s the notice and a message from LOTT.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: California public school enrollment spirals, dropping by 110,000 students this year.

California public school enrollment has dropped for the fifth year in a row — a decline of more than 110,000 students — as K-12 campuses struggle against pandemic disruptions and a shrinking population of school-age kids amid wide concerns that the decrease is so large that educators can’t account for the missing children. . . .

While public school enrollment has experienced a downward trend since 2014-15, state education officials largely blamed the pandemic for the plummeting numbers over the last two years. This year’s decline, which includes charter schools, follows a huge enrollment hit during the 2020-21 school year, when the state experienced the largest drop in 20 years, with 160,000 students. In March 2020 the pandemic closed campuses in California and across the country, forcing schools into distance learning, many for nearly a year.

“One of the questions that we just have to come back to is, just where are those kids?” said Heather J. Hough, executive director of the Policy Analysis for California Education. “We don’t have satisfying data to answer that question.”

There was some expectation that enrollment would continue to fall, as the state faces declining residential population and birth rates, and out-of-state migration, said Julien Lafortune, research fellow at Public Policy Institute of California. But there was also hope in the education community that enrollment would show signs of rebounding from last school year’s massive loss.

Maybe the grooming stuff is bad for business.

Related: Homeschool surge continues despite schools reopening, widely available vaccines. “The coronavirus pandemic ushered in what may be the most rapid rise in homeschooling the U.S. has ever seen. Two years later, even after schools reopened and vaccines became widely available, many parents have chosen to continue directing their children’s educations themselves.”

Also: Homeschooling surge across the U.S. continues despite schools reopening: The rising numbers have cut into public school enrollment in ways that affect future funding and renewed debates over how closely homeschooling should be regulated.

Plus: City schools bracing for budget realities of 120K enrollment drop-off.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen. Including the effort to limit homeschooling when it starts to threaten the graft.

THE ROMAN EMPIRE’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Roman Soldier Assigned To Guard Tomb Of Some Jewish Carpenter Looking Forward To Uneventful Weekend.

FEAR: Gatekeepers Very Afraid That Elon Musk Will Remove the Gates From Twitter.

“I am frightened by the impact on society and politics if Elon Musk acquires Twitter,” wrote Max Boot, columnist for The (Jeff Bezos–owned) Washington Post, on Twitter. “He seems to believe that on social media anything goes. For democracy to survive, we need more content moderation, not less.”

Boot is a longtime apocalyptic troll—past lowlights include declaring that “I would sooner vote for Josef Stalin than I would vote for Donald Trump,” and advocating the Federal Communications Commission go after Fox News to forestall “the plot against America.” But his anxiety about allegedly unfettered free speech is revealingly common in media, academia, Silicon Valley, and the government. . . .

Musk, love him or hate him, makes for an odd authoritarian. An immigrant who built a fortune on clean-energy companies, an entrepreneur who (along with competitors) showed what nongovernmental industry can accomplish in space, the pot-smoking former Saturday Night Live host has shown zero interest in running for public office or recruiting jack-booted thugs to enforce his preferences. And yet it’s not just silly lefties like Robert Reich comparing the guy to actual evildoers.

It’s silly people in general.

PUTIN’S PUPPET: Lee Smith: Biden and Putin Are in Business Together, Thanks to the Iran Deal.

HMM: Adults with liver disorder may be at higher risk for heart disease.

THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’VE NEVER BEEN ON A FARM: Survey: Kids think farm animals deserve same treatment as pets. And they’re exposed to a lot of anthromorphic tales.

UPDATE: Longtime reader Bill Rudersdorf writes:

I’ve been closely monitoring the Texas Department of Health and Human Services, a reliable data source, during the pandemic.

On the 14th, they quietly noted that they would stop posting daily COVID-19 data. It’s a reasonable choice. In the past two weeks, the (confirmed) death data fell from low, to extremely low, to difficult to detect – in Harris County (~Houston, 3+ million) way fewer than one COVID death out of 80 or so expected deaths per day.

Likewise Texas overall. The last “wave” from the most recent variant maybe killed a dozen of so in Houston, maybe.

We’re past done. Nothing to clean up but the politics. And Texas is doing better than most on that.

Indeed.