LESLIE EASTMAN: Proof that Ideological Capture of Our Scientific Institutions Kills Innovation.

Lysenkoism gets you fame and fortune, but not useful knowledge.

BACK TO BASICS: Virginians grooving on Glenn Youngkin, approval stays above 50%.

BOTTOM ISSUE OF THE DAY: For The Love Of All That Is Holy, Stop Backing Into Parking Spaces.

A response: Car-Reversing Calumny from Mark Hemingway. “Mark’s piece is good-natured hyperbole, but his claim that ‘after years of close study, I have arrived at the conclusion that people who back into parking spaces are history’s greatest monsters’ remains a libelous charge against the hardest-working and most American Americans: the parking-spot backer-uppers. This whole ordeal is especially galling coming from a man whose only stress injuries likely involve carpal tunnel from Apple’s anti-ergonomic membrane keyboards.”

AT AMAZON, New Year Sale. #CommissionEarned

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Hundreds of teachers had sex with students in Chicago alone.

AS PER USUAL: Democrats’ latest attack on Trump is a giant nothingburger.

House Democrats just set a precedent that will surely come back to haunt them. Using the power of the House Ways and Means Committee, they recently obtained and publicly released former President Donald Trump’s tax returns from 2015 to 2020. They did so because Trump refused to release his tax returns, like most presidential candidates do, and in hopes of somehow embarrassing or incriminating him.

It backfired spectacularly. . . .

Basically, the returns revealed that Trump claimed large losses from his various real estate and investment properties and declared this “negative income” to avoid paying much federal income tax over the five-year period, despite his self-declared wealth. In other words, he used perfectly legal deductions and loopholes in the tax code to pay as little in taxes as he could get away with under the law.

Shocking! Who wouldn’t want as little of their money stolen and wasted as possible?

It’s ironic, too, because the members of Congress complaining about Trump using tax loopholes are responsible for the tax code. Many of them have been in office for decades and could have changed these loopholes at any time. They didn’t do so because their donors and allies benefit too, but now they want to pretend it’s outrageous that Trump made use of them.

Yet what’s more important is what Trump’s tax returns did not show: any corrupt connection to Russia. Democrats for years suggested that the real reason Trump wouldn’t release his tax information was because it would show that Putin had something on him.

Just for an example, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said in 2018, “The president has refused to release his tax returns, but these bizarre actions that he has taken, which seem so to indicate that President Putin has something over President Trump, something personal, and it might be financial. We need to see the tax returns.”

Well, now we have them, and Trump’s tax returns show nothing of the sort. It’s not exactly new at this point for Democratic warnings about Trump-Russia collusion to later prove baseless, but it’s still worth revisiting just how far removed from reality their claims were.

Yes, the tax returns did show that while in office, Trump held foreign bank accounts and his businesses conducted business internationally. But that’s not a surprise. The public elected him in part because he was a successful international businessman; what else would you then expect?

Time to finally pass the Hall-Rabushka flat tax. Not because it has anything to do with this, just because it’s time.

DUMB IDEAS COME IN TWOS:  Just as the movement to “defund the police” has backfired, the movement to prevent teachers from enforcing order in the classroom isn’t working out as planned.

OPEN THREAD: Enjoy!

PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Previously hidden sunspot unleashes colossal X-class solar flare as it turns to face Earth.

SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Men’s Interest in Sex Linked to Risk of Early Death, Japanese Study Finds.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: En Banc Fifth Circuit Denies Chevron Deference to ATF in Bump Stock Case.

More here: Bump Stock Ban Regulation Isn’t Authorized by Federal Law, Says Fifth Circuit En Banc.

HMM: UK Leader Calls Crisis Meeting Over Struggling Health System.

Related: Macron to overhaul France’s struggling health care system.

WELL, THE LAW ENFORCEMENT FOLKS HAVE THEIR PRIORITIES:

MY SODIUM IS ALWAYS ON THE LOW END, SO GOOD, I GUESS: A New Study Shows Improved Health and Increased Longevity Come Down to the Rule of 72-104. “People with serum sodium at the higher end of the normal range had worse health outcomes than those at the lower end of normal. People with high levels of serum sodium had a 15 percent higher chance of being biologically older than their chronological age, and a 64 percent higher risk of developing chronic diseases like heart failure, stroke, chronic lung disease, diabetes, and dementia. People with extremely high levels of serum sodium had a 50 percent higher risk of being biologically older and a 21 percent higher risk of dying early.”

ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?

During the hot mixing process, the lime clasts develop a characteristically brittle nanoparticulate architecture, creating an easily fractured and reactive calcium source, which, as the team proposed, could provide a critical self-healing functionality. As soon as tiny cracks start to form within the concrete, they can preferentially travel through the high-surface-area lime clasts. This material can then react with water, creating a calcium-saturated solution, which can recrystallize as calcium carbonate and quickly fill the crack, or react with pozzolanic materials to further strengthen the composite material. These reactions take place spontaneously and therefore automatically heal the cracks before they spread. Previous support for this hypothesis was found through the examination of other Roman concrete samples that exhibited calcite-filled cracks.

To prove that this was indeed the mechanism responsible for the durability of the Roman concrete, the team produced samples of hot-mixed concrete that incorporated both ancient and modern formulations, deliberately cracked them, and then ran water through the cracks. Sure enough: Within two weeks the cracks had completely healed and the water could no longer flow. An identical chunk of concrete made without quicklime never healed, and the water just kept flowing through the sample. As a result of these successful tests, the team is working to commercialize this modified cement material.

“It’s exciting to think about how these more durable concrete formulations could expand not only the service life of these materials, but also how it could improve the durability of 3D-printed concrete formulations,” says Masic.

Well, this is the 21st century you know, to coin an Instaphrase.

4CHAN SCORES AGAIN: There Are Many Questions About George Santos, but Latest Leftist Complaint Is Incredibly Dumb.

There are a ton of valid questions that one might ask about Rep. George Santos (R-NY) who seems to be following in the grand tradition of Joe Biden and lying — a lot — about his background and a variety of aspects of his life.

Given all the things that Democrats could validly attack about him, they lost what was left of their minds to spread a conspiracy theory that he was flashing a “white power” sign during the voting for Rep. Kevin McCarthy for Speaker of the House. I could go through the whole rigamarole that an “okay” signal isn’t necessarily a “white power” sign, that the whole thing was originally made up as a troll on 4chan to see who would fall for it, and some of the people on the left continue to do so. They’ve been told, but they keep spreading this gas periodically throwing this out there at someone.

Here goes the left and the liberal media again.

Funny, that’s not what Snopes told me in 2020: Snopes: Trump Campaign Falsely Suggests Biden Promoted ‘White Power’ Symbol.

In reality, Biden used the hand gesture to illustrate his assertion that massive corporations and U.S. President Donald Trump himself have in the past paid “zero” in taxes.

So evidently, using the “Okay” hand gesture to indicate zero is not racist, but using the “Okay” hand gesture to indicate, err, “Okay” is?

As Glenn noted in December of 2019 when Rolling Stone got the vapors because someone at the Army-Navy game flashed the OK sign, “The 4Chan trollers have scored again. I remember when ’culture jamming’ was a lefty thing, but the lefty culture jammers never scored at this level.”

READER FAVORITE: JLHT Monocular Telescope High Power Monocular for Adults. #CommissionEarned

IN OTHER WORDS, COLD AND FLU SEASON CONTINUES: COVID-19, flu continue to cause misery in U.S., CDC says.

AND THE BEARDS HAVE ALL GROWN LONGER, OVERNIGHT: The New CNN: Watch Commentators Sneer at McCarthy Victory.

A PROPER RESPONSE: After Being Stabbed in Face, 79-Year-Old Man Shoots 22-Year-Old Attacker Dead in Small Wisconsin Town.

DESANTIS’S WAR ON WOKENESS JUST GOT REAL: Gov. DeSantis taps Christopher Rufo, 5 others to transform New College of Florida into ‘classical college.’ “Others appointed Friday are Emory University professor Mark Bauerlein, Claremont-McKenna College professor Charles Kesler, attorney Debra Jenks and Inspiration Academy Co-Founder Jason “Eddie” Speir. Rounding out the list is Matthew Spalding, dean of Hillsdale College D.C. campus’ Graduate School of Government. Hillsdale College is a private conservative liberal arts college that the DeSantis administration is referencing as its model for transforming New College.”

JORDAN PETERSON: I will risk my license to escape social media re-education. Weaponizing the College of Psychologists’ disciplinary process.

SPOILER: IT’S ALL BULLSHIT. The EPA wants more ‘renewable’ fuel. But what does that actually mean? ‘Renewable fuels’ like ethanol and biogas come at an environmental cost.

SOUND AND (WELL, SOMETIMES) VISION: Not everything Bowie did was genius – he was more interesting than that.

For younger generations, including my own children, Bowie has simply become synonymous with genius, an artist who had a preternatural gift for mapping out the future; which is to say, their present. A man who exuded sexual intrigue, effortless cool and impeccable artistic taste.

Anybody who lived through Bowie’s later 1980s and early 1990s – or indeed possesses more than a passing awareness of his 1960s – will find this blanket deification a little hard to countenance. For the record, I am a massive fan, particularly of the remarkable records he made between 1974 and 1980, as well as The Buddha of Suburbia, 1.Outside, Heathen and his masterly final album, Blackstar.

I know my subject. I paid my dues. I fell for Bowie at the age of 11, in 1985, slap bang in the period widely recognised as his doldrums: getting into Bowie in the mid-1980s was akin to discovering Orson Welles during the period he was taping commercials for Paul Masson Wines. I weathered the ignominy of trying desperately to like his 1987 nadir Never Let Me Down, and the blokey ‘call me Dave’ downscaling farrago of Tin Machine. I failed, as did most people.

Because what the myth often fails to print these days is that, around this time, Bowie was close to a laughing stock. The influential weekly music papers begged him to pack it in. He couldn’t buy a good review. He punted his wares on Wogan and TFI Friday like all the other poor ‘pick-me’ pop stars. He was resolutely Earthbound and frequently embarrassing. Remember Bowie kneeling to give the Lord’s Prayer at the Freddie Mercury Tribute concert? Remember the video for the plodding ‘Day In, Day Out’, which depicted him rollerblading through some MTV version of Skid Row, lamenting the drug blight in America? Remember all those awful movies? I do.

Speaking of Bowie movies: Is ‘Moonage Daydream,’ the New David Bowie Documentary, Worth the Roller Coaster Ride?

SPACE: Some details have emerged about Blue Origin’s “Blue Ring” project.