Links for March 2021
Thousands of starlings fly together to make an enormous bird. by Gage Li
This amazing photograph (still from a video) was taken by James Crombie in Ireland. It shows a murmuration of thousands of starlings acting like a single giant creature to confuse predators.
The Seven Lady Godivas: The True Facts Concerning History’s Barest Family by Dr. Seuss
35M Americans have health insurance due to Obamacare. 12M directly on ACA plans, 14M due to the Medicaid expansion, a couple million young adults on their parents plans, and 10M covered due to the employer mandate.
Assemblies of putative SARS-CoV2-spike-encoding mRNA sequences for vaccines BNT-162b2 and mRNA-1273
College students are falling in love with white supremacy. Rep. Paul Gosar is helping. by Talia Lavin
Abraham Lincoln (1860-02-27): Cooper Union Address
“The sum of the whole is, that of our thirty-nine fathers who framed the original Constitution, twenty-one—a clear majority of the whole—certainly understood that no proper division of local from federal authority, nor any part of the Constitution, forbade the Federal Government to control slavery in the federal territories; while all the rest probably had the same understanding. Such, unquestionably, was the understanding of our fathers who framed the original Constitution; and the text affirms that they understood the question “better than we.””
“Now, and here, let me guard a little against being misunderstood. I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did. To do so, would be to discard all the lights of current experience—to reject all progress—all improvement. What I do say is, that if we would supplant the opinions and policy of our fathers in any case, we should do so upon evidence so conclusive, and argument so clear, that even their great authority, fairly considered and weighed, cannot stand; and most surely not in a case whereof we ourselves declare they understood the question better than we.”
“If any man at this day sincerely believes that a proper division of local from federal authority, or any part of the Constitution, forbids the Federal Government to control as to slavery in the federal territories, he is right to say so, and to enforce his position by all truthful evidence and fair argument which he can. But he has no right to mislead others, who have less access to history, and less leisure to study it, into the false belief that “our fathers who framed the Government under which we live” were of the same opinion—thus substituting falsehood and deception for truthful evidence and fair argument.”
Time, an XKCD comic, time-lapse video
When the Electric Car Is King, Less Energy Is More by Liam Denning and Elaine He
Strict firearm laws reduce gun deaths: here’s the evidence by Nick Evershed