OPEN THREAD: Hang on baby, Friday’s coming.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Don’t Rest In Peace, Karl Marx.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Surprise Chinese lunar mission hit by launch anomaly.

WHERE COULD THESE CASES BE COMING FROM? Experts Warn Leprosy Isn’t Ancient History as Cases Surge in The US.

All sorts of ancient evils are returning.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Wholesale inflation rose 0.6% in February, much more than expected.

IN CASE YOU MISSED THIS MORNING’S POST: SpaceX hits distance, speed milestones in third Starship test; rocket lost in re-entry.

IF THE DOORS WROTE ENTER SANDMAN.

THIS SHOULD BE A HOLIDAY:

HMM: Cockpit Mishap Might Have Caused Plunge on Latam Boeing 787. “A Latam Airlines flight attendant hit a switch on the pilot’s seat while serving a meal, leading a motorized feature to push the pilot into the controls and push down the plane’s nose, these officials said. The switch has a cover and isn’t supposed to be used when a pilot is in the seat. Around 50 passengers on the flight from Sydney to Auckland required medical attention, and some passengers were pinned to the ceiling as the airplane suddenly declined. Latam, a Chile-based airline, has said the Dreamliner suffered a ‘technical event during the flight which caused strong movement.'”

Not sure if this is Boeing’s fault or not, but they don’t need the bad publicity.

EV DEMAND IS FALLING, demand for hybrids is still strong.

OLD SKOOL: Five Great 1911s for Concealed Carry.

WELL, GOOD: Early clinical trial results show ‘dramatic and rapid’ regression of glioblastoma after next generation CAR-T therapy.

EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Rampant text recycling at the world’s largest independent research organization [PART 1]: Battelle Memorial Institute has an annual budget of $11B and oversees 7+ national labs. Yet, beneath the surface of this non-profit giant’s success, lies a troubling pattern of academic dishonesty.

WELL, GOOD: Blood test shows 83% accuracy for detecting colorectal cancer in trial.

JONATHAN HAIDT: The Terrible Costs of a Phone-Based Childhood: For a little over a decade, we have been raising children in an environment that is hostile to human development. We need to change that now.

suddenly and horribly wrong for adolescents in the early 2010s. By now you’ve likely seen the statistics: Rates of depression and anxiety in the United States—fairly stable in the 2000s—rose by more than 50 percent in many studies from 2010 to 2019. The suicide rate rose 48 percent for adolescents ages 10 to 19. For girls ages 10 to 14, it rose 131 percent.

The problem was not limited to the U.S.: Similar patterns emerged around the same time in Canada, the U.K., Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic countries, and beyond. By a variety of measures and in a variety of countries, the members of Generation Z (born in and after 1996) are suffering from anxiety, depression, self-harm, and related disorders at levels higher than any other generation for which we have data.

The decline in mental health is just one of many signs that something went awry. Loneliness and friendlessness among American teens began to surge around 2012. Academic achievement went down, too. According to “The Nation’s Report Card,” scores in reading and math began to decline for U.S. students after 2012, reversing decades of slow but generally steady increase. PISA, the major international measure of educational trends, shows that declines in math, reading, and science happened globally, also beginning in the early 2010s.
Read: It sure looks like phones are making students dumber

As the oldest members of Gen Z reach their late 20s, their troubles are carrying over into adulthood. Young adults are dating less, having less sex, and showing less interest in ever having children than prior generations. They are more likely to live with their parents. They were less likely to get jobs as teens, and managers say they are harder to work with. Many of these trends began with earlier generations, but most of them accelerated with Gen Z. . . .

I think the answer can be stated simply, although the underlying psychology is complex: Those were the years when adolescents in rich countries traded in their flip phones for smartphones and moved much more of their social lives online—particularly onto social-media platforms designed for virality and addiction. Once young people began carrying the entire internet in their pockets, available to them day and night, it altered their daily experiences and developmental pathways across the board. Friendship, dating, sexuality, exercise, sleep, academics, politics, family dynamics, identity—all were affected. Life changed rapidly for younger children, too, as they began to get access to their parents’ smartphones and, later, got their own iPads, laptops, and even smartphones during elementary school.

Read the whole thing.

FLASHBACK: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.

I HAVE A CHAPTER IN THIS BOOK EDITED BY MICHAEL WALSH: Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You.

CHANGE: UT Austin Brings Back the SAT: The college is the latest in a spate of schools reinstating SAT and ACT test requirements.

DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Study Finds Law Professor Contributions to Political Campaigns Skew Overwhelmingly Democratic. “The overall result here is far from surprising. Lots of previous studies find that law professors are skew towards the political left. Still, the extent of the imbalance is notable. Exclusively Democratic contributors outnumber exclusively Republican ones by over 35 to 1. That’s a larger disproportion than in previous studies. In addition, Democratic contributors outnumber Republican ones at every single school included in the study, usually by large margins.”

SPACEX STARSHIP TEST LAUNCH LOOKING GOOD! Hot staging worked perfectly.

UPDATE: Still going great. First stage return failed to light all motors and was lost, but everything else has gone perfectly. They’re playing elevator music during the telemetry blackout windows, which got this from the comments: “This is the future I was promised. And the easy listening music really gives the whole thing that 70s feel. Which is when this should’a been happening.” Indeed it should have.

THE BIDEN DEBACLE: White House Report Card: Angry-old-man campaign begins.

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

ED MORRISSEY: Bitter Harvest: The True Roots of Rural ‘Rage.’

The Protection Racket Media has spent the last few weeks running with a new narrative of panic pornography: “white rural rage.” Along with “Christian nationalism,” these media explanations of the current dysfunction in American politics start and end with Donald Trump and his alleged “threat to democracy.”

The general gist of these narratives is that Trump spent 2015-16 blowing dog whistles to bigots and transformed them through misinformation into angry conservo-populists. Trump and his cult have essentially hoodwinked voters, especially in the rural South and Midwest, by feeding them on xenophobia and anger over true progress in America. Trump and his “white rural rage-ists” will undermine the institutions of the republic — not to mention the institutions of the cultural elite.

To put it mildly, this overlooks a very long stretch of political, cultural, and economic history. The collapse of confidence in these American systems began long before Trump — decades before, in fact, and had nothing to do with race. The signs of this betrayal began in the rural and industrial Midwest not long after the launch of the Great Society and the Vietnam War warped American fiscal policy, destroyed agricultural markets, forced farmers and small bankers into retreat, and left massive destruction in our once-dominant manufacturing base.

Salena Zito has written about these issues for years, but she’s not alone. . . .

The issue driving populists on both sides of the political aisle isn’t “rage,” either inchoate or focused. It’s the betrayal of the ethos that governed rural America: Take care of the land, and the land will take care of you. Its origins go back to the massive redistribution of capital to the urban centers in the 1960s, the deficit spending that forced the US off the gold standard and triggered ruinous inflation rates for a decade, and the abandonment of American manufacturing to the enticements of deregulation and free trade — which may have produced benefits for the US overall, but laid waste to the rural and industrial heartlands.

The experts thought they knew better. The elites wanted “progress.” Is it any wonder that their failures and the damage they caused have alienated the people who paid the price of those failures — especially when the experts and elites kept failing, right through the pandemic and the changes they imposed to deal with it, which turned out to be largely unnecessary?

And prospered, and smugly congratulated themselves, right through those failures. Plus:

Just recall why the Protection Racket Media needs to gin up slanderous narratives like “Christian nationalism” and “white rural rage.” The US establishment media now entirely come from the elite institutions that created this massive destruction and betrayal and want to desperately distract from it now by pretending the anger just materialized out of Trump’s wizardry. They want to rewrite history as well as the present and sneer at tens of millions of Americans who have waited decades for someone to address their decline and despair.

Flashback: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.

RISE OF THE MACHINES: “A ‘fully autonomous’ ‘male’ humanoid robot named ‘Muhammad’ groped the behind of a female reporter during a televised interview now available for viewing on the Internet, but it was only engaging in his ‘expected behavior’ according to his creators.”

JOSH BLACKMAN: The Judicial Conference’s New “Policy” Demonstrates Why Judges Should Not Make Policy: The way to depoliticize the courts is to depoliticize the courts.

WHEN GOVERNMENT FAILS:

Residents of Hartford, Connecticut form an armed community watch group to protect their town from the rise in violence.

As leftist leaders continue to defund the police, expect more of these groups to form to defend themselves. pic.twitter.com/v6ChdxMrcP

— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 13, 2024

Flashback: Oregon Residents Arm Against Criminals, Form ‘Glock Blocks.’