Read it.

An 18-year-old girl reportedly kidnapped by her ex-boyfriend has been safely rescued by police after her mother tracked her location using Find My iPhone. CNBC reports that the victim was found more than 150 miles away from home.

…

Police say that the victim was found bound and gagged in a car in a McDonald’s parking lot. They named the kidnapping suspect as 18-year-old Joseph Boller, whose bail has been set at $150,000.

Moral: Use iPhone. It’s for the children.

(Full disclosure: I own Apple stock. Ka-ching!)

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When I told friends I was eating nothing but fast food for a week, most immediately thought of the (in)famous Morgan Spurlock documentary “Super Size Me.”

No, I would respond. I’m eating healthy.

As fast-food chains increasingly try to appeal to health-conscious Americans, supposedly nutritious items are popping up on menus more and more.

Once one gets away from the left-wing poseurs and food-snobs who love every century but this one and every country but their own, one finds that the modern world isn’t so bad after all.

When I told friends I was eating nothing but fast food for a week, most immediately thought of the (in)famous Morgan Spurlock documentary “Super Size Me.”

No, I would respond. I’m eating healthy.

As fast-food chains increasingly try to appeal to health-conscious Americans, supposedly nutritious items are popping up on menus more and more.

Businesses respond to their customers. If people want ‘healthy’ food, they will buy healthy food, and businesses will try to provide it for them.

Read it.

The first set of rules was written by Frank L. Visco and originally published in the June 1986 issue of Writers’ digest.
The second set of rules is derived from William Safire’s Rules for Writers.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Specifically, I keep seeing reports that Apple has unlocked “70 iPhones” for the government. And those reports argue that Apple is now refusing to do for the FBI what it has done many times before. This meme is completely inaccurate at best, and dangerous at worst.

…

The New York case involves an iPhone running iOS 7. On devices running iOS 7 and previous, Apple actually has the capability to extract data, including (at various stages in its encryption march) contacts, photos, calls and iMessages without unlocking the phones. That last bit is key, because in the previous cases where Apple has complied with legitimate government requests for information, this is the method it has used.

It has not unlocked these iPhones — it has extracted data that was accessible while they were still locked. The process for doing this is laid out in its white paper for law enforcement.

…

The California case, in contrast, involves a device running iOS 9. The data that was previously accessible while a phone was locked ceased to be so as of the release of iOS 8, when Apple started securing it with encryption tied to the passcode, rather than the hardware ID of the device. FaceTime, for instance, has been encrypted since 2010, and iMessages since 2011.

So Apple is unable to extract any data including iMessages from the device because all of that data is encrypted. This is the only reason that the FBI now wants Apple to weaken its security so that it can brute-force the passcode. Because the data cannot be read unless the passcode is entered properly.

Read it.

For one thing, Apple appears dedicated to safeguarding my privacy. The government? Not so much….

For another, if Apple doesn’t safeguard my privacy to the extent I want, I can go elsewhere. The government? Not so much….

Read it.

First, the new post-inversion company will typically chose to bring more of their foreign earned income back to the U.S. than they would as an American based company. This is because they are no longer subject to the international taxation system of the U.S. tax code, and as the study notes, this means money invested in the U.S. economy.

In other words, if an American company owns a foreign company, the American company has to pay taxes on its operations and that of the foreign company, even if the foreign company didn’t do any business in the U.S. (Thanks a lot, Congress.) The other way around, the American company and the foreign company only have to pay taxes in the places where they have operations, which is HOW THE REST OF THE WORLD WORKS.

Second, post-inversion company typically pays more in revenue to the US treasury post- inversion, even as their marginal tax rate decreases.  It is important to note that the hysteria that inverted companies are abandoning the U.S., post-inversion companies continues to pay taxes on their U.S. operations.

Lastly, the authors found concerns over earnings stripping – the transferring of assets to low-tax jurisdictions – is overstated and not used to the extent that critics of inversions contend.

Read it.

This is a fascinating story about how fast medical science is advancing and, most especially, about how individuals who just won’t give up can have an unexpected impact on many lives.

Kathy Shaidle is delightfully dyspeptic today.

I’ve never read To Kill a Mockingbird.

I was going to add, “because I’m Canadian, duh,” but while researching this piece, I learned that Lee’s 1960 novel had long been required reading in British schools—and when it was dumped from the curriculum two years ago, there was a massive freak-out. Hey, England, you have a bunch of your own writers, no? Ah, yes, but Mockingbird’s “otherness” was clearly part of its rather twisted allure across the pond:

The South is an incredibly complex place, but there are British-held stereotypes about its attitude to race and class that this novel could reinforce, and even add to its appeal.

Translation: “American rednecks are evil, stupid, and funny!”

Read it.

Hey, it could happen.

First thing is get the bodies out of the way, I should thing. They never tell you about that part.

PowerLine has it right.

The controversy over the Supreme Court vacancy is entirely predictable and playing out in predictable ways, but as of yet I haven’t seen anyone state the common sense of the subject directly.

I am sure when Democrats tanked Robert Bork in 1987 someone among them—probably even Biden—must have known that what goes around comes around.

Republicans have been waiting 30 years for payback for the shameful rejection of Bork; that day has arrived. Time to pay up, Dems. That’s the only sentence you really need to know. Everything else is mere rhetoric.

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Summary: The peak oil hysteria provides rich lessons for us today about learning from activists and the value of listening to our major professional institutions. Easy cynicism led people to believe outlandish forecasts, wasting valuable time and resources. Worse, we have had many such barrages by doomsters — aided by their clickbait-seeking enablers in the media — which have left us almost immune to warnings, no matter how well-founded. We can do better.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, reminds the Low Information Voter of some inconvenient truth.

Knowing how to run a business is not the same thing as knowing economics.  To assume that the two domains of knowledge and expertise are the same is an error equivalent to assuming that a successful NASCAR driver is thereby an expert automotive engineer.  Of course, it’s possible for a successful NASCAR driver to know something about automotive engineering, just as it’s possible for a successful business person to know something about economics.  But success at each of the former tasks (driving a race car and managing a business) is not the same thing as, and requires very little familiarity with, the latter domains of knowledge (automotive engineering and economics).

Unfortunately, a successful business owner will have a good gut-level appreciation of certain economic principles, such as supply and demand, that deludes him into thinking that he knows more about ‘economics’ than he really does.

Read it.

We are being told to eat local and seasonal food, either because other crops have been tranported over long distances, or because they are grown in energy-intensive greenhouses. But it wasn’t always like that. From the sixteenth to the twentieth century, urban farmers grew Mediterranean fruits and vegetables as far north as England and the Netherlands, using only renewable energy.

These crops were grown surrounded by massive “fruit walls”, which stored the heat from the sun and released it at night, creating a microclimate that could increase the temperature by more than 10°C (18°F).

Later, greenhouses built against the fruit walls further improved yields from solar energy alone. It was only at the very end of the nineteenth century that the greenhouse turned into a fully glazed and artificially heated building where heat is lost almost instantaneously — the complete opposite of the technology it evolved from.

Read it.

As a Mexican-American, I can tell you that many Mexican-Americans think that Mexican immigrants who come to the United States illegally are taking advantage—of a porous border, of the social-services safety net, of loopholes in immigration law, and of an insatiable appetite among U.S. employers for cheap and dependable labor. And they’re not wrong about that.

It is one of the most pernicious myths of Identity Politics that Hispanics, especially those of Mexican descent, only have one opinion amongst them. Trump realizes that this is not true, and knows that people of Mexican descent who are in this country legally, either as citizens or legal residents who ran the gauntlet of the current broken immigration ‘process’, don’t have a lot of use for those who crawl across the border.

Read it.

Beautifully produced by New York Review Books in a new translation, by Damion Searls, with an illuminating introduction, Anti-Education consists of five lectures Nietzsche gave at the Basel city museum in 1872. (A sixth lecture was planned, but never delivered; portions of the series were used in his book Untimely Meditations.) Presenting his critique in the form of a series of dialogues between an old philosopher and a student companion, Nietzsche argues that education (he uses the German word Bildung, a term with multiple senses but that broadly means the formation of culture and individual character) has been degraded by being subordinated to other goals. Both the German gymnasium – the secondary school that prepared students for university – and universities themselves had forfeited their true vocation, which was to “inculcate serious and unrelenting critical habits and opinions”. Instruction in independent thinking had been renounced in favour of “the ubiquitous encouragement of everyone’s so-called ‘individual personality’” – a trend Nietzsche viewed as “a mark of barbarity”. As a result, education was dominated by two tendencies, “apparently opposed but equally ruinous in effect and eventually converging in their end results. The first is the drive for the greatest possible expansion and dissemination of education; the other is the drive for the narrowing and weakening of education.” The first extends education too widely and imposes it on a population that may not want or need it, while the second expects education to surrender any claim to autonomy and submit to the imperatives of the state.

And, indeed, we appear to see that happening right before our very eyes.

Read it. And watch the video.

The world has generally viewed Genghis Khan as a barbaric conqueror whose troops raped and murdered hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people and pillaged and often destroyed villages, towns, and cities throughout Asia and Europe. However, several popular writers have recently portrayed him as an advocate of democracy, international law, and women’s rights. Morris Rossabi, Senior Research Scholar, Queens College, Columbia University, offers this illustrated lecture, which seeks to provide a balanced depiction of Genghis Khan and to explain the reasons for the myths that have developed about the man and the Mongolian people who established the largest contiguous land empire in world history.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, looks at the bottom-feeders in his own field.

(5) the idea that government-subsidized health care will lower the cost of health care;

(4) the notion that government must have monopoly control over the money supply in order to ensure sound performance of the economy;

(3) the belief that large differences among people in monetary incomes or monetary wealth reflect some market failure that ought to be ‘addressed’ by the state;

(2) the blind faith that government officials in democratic societies can be trusted to exercise power over people who economists do not trust to make choices for themselves;

(1b) the notion that welfare payments (other than EITC) subsidize employers by pushing workers’ wages lower, and

(1a) the notion that the minimum wage is, or can practically be, a boon to all low-skilled workers.

Read it.

And it’s really, really important to know that.

A new study on the Amboseli baboons of East Africa shows that there is a “sweet spot,” or optimal group size, that is largely a factor of competition for resources and the need for protection from predators.

And that’s just so totally counter-intuitive.

(Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.)

No indication of who paid for all of this, but I suspect that taxpayers footed a large part of the bill.

Read it.

Treason doth never prosper; what’s the reason?
For if it prosper, none dare call it treason.

McAuliffe was referring to a scandal known as Plamegate. The backstory is complicated, but it boils down to this: During the run-up to the Iraq War, a fellow named Joseph Wilson wrote an op-ed in The New York Times undermining a key administration claim about Iraq’s quest for weapons of mass destruction. This made the administration most unhappy. Not long afterward, someone told columnist Robert Novak and a few other members of the media that Wilson was married to one Valerie Plame, a CIA employee.

…

When he was asked if Karl Rove “is guilty of treason,” Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) said, “Yes, I think so.” Rachel Maddow and others agreed. The word got tossed around so much Plamegate was sometimes referred to as “Treasongate.”

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton.

Read it.

The hole is designed to allow the passage of air if someone accidentally swallows it and it blocks their windpipe.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

A hundred people every year in the United States reportedly choke to death on these pen lids.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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A fighter jet took off with a mock version of the nation’s first precision-guided atom bomb. Adapted from an older weapon, it was designed with problems like North Korea in mind: Its computer brain and four maneuverable fins let it zero in on deeply buried targets like testing tunnels and weapon sites. And its yield, the bomb’s explosive force, can be dialed up or down depending on the target, to minimize collateral damage.

As might be expected from the New York Times, the news comes with a healthy dollop of left-wing hand-wringing.

The build-it-smaller approach has set off a philosophical clash among those in Washington who think about the unthinkable.

…

But critics, including a number of former Obama administration officials, look at the same set of facts and see a very different future. The explosive innards of the revitalized weapons may not be entirely new, they argue, but the smaller yields and better targeting can make the arms more tempting to use — even to use first, rather than in retaliation.

I have no problem with First Use of Nuclear Weapons. Look what it did for Japan, not to mention the U.S.

Read it.

Applied to commodities, while essential to economic progress they’re nowhere close to first order goods in economic importance. Oil is a crucial high order input, but per Brookes again “it was the internal combustion engine that gave oil its present value, and not the other way around.” The world would be awful without oil, but it’s first order products like automobiles and planes that gave oil value in the first place.

This is of course why it’s not important that rich countries (think Japan, Switzerland, Singapore, etc.) be resource abundant. Figure commodities are easily importable at the market price, and as plentiful oil exports from economically backward countries like Venezuela, Iran and Equatorial Guinea constantly reveal, commodities in a normal world free of currency distortions would largely be exported by less developed countries to developed ones full of entrepreneurs creating the first order advances that give the prosaic (commodities) life.

Cheap resource inputs mean cheaper resulting products, and that benefits everybody. As the perennial fights over protective tariffs demonstrate, it is very easy to identify those who are harmed by low prices, while those who benefit are more obscure; that’s why lobbyists get rich and politicians convert stupid policies into law.

The beauty of cheap oil is that it will make it more likely that U.S. economic actors import it, and at the same time more and more U.S. investment will migrate toward the Mengerian first order goods that give oil and all manner of other commodities life. Back to Brookes, this is once again what he meant by an economy of the mind. Predicting a broad economic boom amid a “commodity recession” in 1981, Brookes was arguing that falling commodity prices would be brilliant for a country like the U.S. populated by the greatest minds on earth in need of cheap inputs to drive true innovation. From a consumption standpoint, it will surge thanks to cheap oil simply because our production will surge as fewer Americans extract already plentiful oil, and more focus on creating the first order goods that render oil marketable to begin with.

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Until now, the working consensus of the E.U. has been that member states yield part of their sovereignty, pool it in Brussels and through the manifold power of the states, gain back all the more sovereignty. It is now precisely this – committing to delegated power – that appears to the new Polish government to be an infringement of their national pride and Brussels as a world of backrooms in which a few unelected, instead of many elected, make the decisions. So far it has only been angry citizens who have talked like that when they saw themselves being robbed of their self-determination by being forced to adopt energy-saving lamps or through free trade agreements. Now governments are talking that way.

…

What is right-wing and what is left-wing criticism of the E.U.? Hard to say when ultimately both are concerned about the same thing: raising the will of the people above an international architecture that has become irritating and inconvenient. The hatred of an E.U. cartel that imposes either economic or cultural rules is uniting the nationalists and socialists in Europe, occasionally even allowing them join together, as in Greece, where the left-radical Syriza formed a coalition with the national-chauvinistic ANEL party.

The transnational Crust hits a speedbump.

Read it.

What we found startled us. For STEM-related majors, average earnings don’t vary much among the college categories. For example, we find no statistically significant differences in average earnings for science majors between selective schools and either midtier or less-selective schools. Likewise, there’s no significant earnings difference between engineering graduates from selective and less-selective colleges, and only a marginally significant difference between selective and midtier colleges.

What’s going on? For potential employers, the skills students learn in these fields appear to trump prestige—possibly because curriculums are relatively standardized and there’s a commonly accepted body of knowledge students must absorb. So, a student may not need to attend the best possible school to ensure a good salary after graduation. (It’s important to note that we controlled for numerous other factors that might influence postgraduation earnings, such as family income, race/ethnicity, gender, marital status, SAT score, postgraduate degree and age at graduation and more.)

In other words, in fields where questions have right and wrong answers, and can be tested that way, pretty much any college can train you properly, and you can’t bullshit your way to a good grade.

Unstated is the obvious corollary: In fields where ‘right’ is a matter of opinion, it’s important how high the rank is of the Mandarin whose opinion you are successfully parroting.

Read it.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change UN IPCC features and endorses decadal global climate forecasting products. Those in turn feed into numerous downscaled regional climate forecasts. In published representations of forecast skills to date, all within this collective appear to include the poorly disclosed practice of annual boundary condition re-initializations. At one time, such initializations were isolated to obscure attempts to improve forecasts of seasonal climates (lead time 4 months). Now the initializations have become institutionalized, and they direct multi decadal predictions throughout the field of global and regional climate forecasting. The results would be more transparent to peers and the public if the true decadal history matching skills of the models (without initializations) were highlighted.

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No, not the car.

How long will this video stay up before British Leyland files a DMCA takedown for trademark infringement?

Start your timers….

Read it.

A Voice of the Crust actually comes out and says what they all believe.

Ability of a conventional kind, which used to be distributed between the classes more or less at random, has become much more highly concentrated by the engine of education.

A social revolution has been accomplished by harnessing schools and universities to the task of sieving people according to education’s narrow band of values.

With an amazing battery of certificates and degrees at its disposal, education has put its seal of approval on a minority, and its seal of disapproval on the many who fail to shine from the time they are relegated to the bottom streams at the age of seven or before.

The new class has the means at hand, and largely under its control, by which it reproduces itself.

Read it.

President Obama seems to believe in nothing more than he does the defense of Islam. He specializes in pronouncements on what is truly Islamic and what is not. Such pronouncements are always intended to preserve the good name of Islam. Al Qaeda, of course, not Islamic. The Islamic State, not Islamic.

San Bernardino murderers Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, not Islamic.

Who are you going to believe, Obama or your lyin’ eyes?

Really … if Obama actually were a secret Muslim, what would he be doing differently? I can’t think of anything.

Read it.

They used to be called Masters.

I recommend the title that some heads of colleges at Oxford and Cambridge have, and which probably comes under the rubric of ‘more true than you know’: Warden.

Jerry Pournelle runs down the list.

A lot of Americans hate their government. Perhaps that’s too strong a word, but their experiences with government tend to expose them to arrogant incompetence for which their Civil Masters, oops Servants give themselves bonuses when their performance warrants discipline—look at the VA as a fine example—and they are afraid to stand out in a crowd lest they draw the attention of government. Streets aren’t paved, laws aren’t enforced equally, water pipes burst, drinking water has lead in it in Flint, and generally things don’t work so good; while all around us is the Internet of Things, marvels and miracles, yet somehow government gets bigger, pays itself more, and presents us with arrogant incompetence.

Trump has fewer – not many fewer but fewer – government credentials than Obama had when he started toward the Presidency. He was briefly in the Illinois legislature, hardly long enough to learn that job, before he became a Senator, and he hadn’t been there long before he was the candidate of hope and change, and he didn’t need to tell people how he was going to do it. Trump has less government experience; but he has built buildings and golf courses, and he has done things; he hasn’t been a community organizer or an unpublished law professor whose students don’t remember him; but he had made a lot of money, not from government; and he is not beholden to contributors or anyone else. His appeal is that he say he will do things, and although he is not a great public speaker, he has done things he is proud of. He knows how to choose people to get them done; or so far he has.

And that’s as fine a precis of Trump’s attraction as I’ve seen anywhere.

Read it.

In late 2015 Singapore arrested 27 Bangladeshi Moslem construction workers and charged them with planning terrorist acts outside of Singapore. Most (26) of them were deported back to their home country while one as charged with trying to leave the country illegally (and engage in terrorist acts). Singapore can afford to just send these wannabe Islamic terrorists home (to face further investigation and possible prosecution) because it is one of the few industrialized nations to have never experienced an incident of Islamic terrorist violence.

Starting in the 1980s Singapore spent an increasing amount of resources on dealing with the terrorist threat. This increased after 2001 and continues as Islamic terrorist groups like al Qaeda and ISIL (Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant) continue to mention Singapore as a target for attacks. There are several interesting reasons why these Islamic terror groups have never been able to touch Singapore.

Read it.

Which, of course, doesn’t mean that it won’t be on the test.

Read it.

The country’s law enforcement has teamed up with a raptor training company named Guard From Above to see if birds of prey can be used to safely intercept quadcopters.

In the video demonstration above, an eagle is seen easily plucking what looks like a DJI Phantom out of the air. However, it’s not clear how dangerous this is for the bird. Raptors’ talons are incredibly sharp and their grip is strong enough to crush bone, but that doesn’t meant they’re indestructible and carbon fiber props spinning at full speed can easily cut human flesh. In the video, one of the handlers says that the scales on the eagle’s legs and feet keeps them safe, but also mentions the possibility of creating some sort of extra protection for them.

Still, given the amount of animals who seem to instinctively want to take down drones (the list includes kangaroos, gorillas, geese, and dogs), perhaps the eagles will get some animal backup soon.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The lecture given by Friedrich von Hayek upon the occasion of his winning the Nobel Prize in Economics.

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences – an attempt which in our field may lead to outright error. It is an approach which has come to be described as the “scientistic” attitude – an attitude which, as I defined it some thirty years ago, “is decidedly unscientific in the true sense of the word, since it involves a mechanical and uncritical application of habits of thought to fields different from those in which they have been formed.”1 I want today to begin by explaining how some of the gravest errors of recent economic policy are a direct consequence of this scientistic error.

Read it.

All it takes is that little blue pill … isn’t science wonderful?

Read it.

Remembering Roger Gower, an elephant hero who died for his cause.

Ponder the concept of ‘elephant hero’.

‘White man come to my continent, keep us from killing animals we have always killed, keep us from feeding our families. White man can kiss my ass.’

Black Lives Matter, but I guess elephants are more important.

Read it.

This is actually a pretty good idea. Let’s hope it gets some attention.

They already do that for physicians, I believe.

Read it.

Who says Donald Trump doesn’t like Hispanics?

Carson-based Cali-Fame headwear company, is staffed largely by immigrants from Latin America.

At least he’s giving them jobs, which is more than they are getting from Hillary Clinton or Berni Sanders (or Barack Obama, for that matter).

Brian Kennedy, the company’s president, said that when the order asked his business to make the hats, he addressed his workers.

“I said to them, ‘We’re not political. We’re here to work’,” said Mr Kennedy “And I haven’t gotten any negative comments.”

And THAT is what will Make America Great Again — immigrants who are here to work. I’ve seen no evidence that Trump has anything against those people; nor will you, amidst all the whining about what people heard him say in their imaginations.

Lileks limns the travails of our times.

As problems go, this is small. As small problems go, though, this is big. Step one: You’re watching something on Netflix, and the picture pauses every 37 seconds, displaying a circle that seems to represent the passage of time. Is this an arty French movie that addresses the omnipresent sense of mortality by superimposing a clock over the lives of its characters? No, it’s a “Transformers” movie. The circle means your wireless connection is slow. Well, let’s go to the Internet provider’s HELP page. You learn that certain things can block Wi-Fi, including “walls, pipes, paint, air and the lingering aroma of last night’s fish dinner.” Hey! You had cod. Open a window. Doesn’t help.

Freeberg shares his insight.

These are the guys putting Jeb Bush over Donald Trump, because, manners. Oh they say things about Trump being a showboat and a jerk, and they’re completely right. Where they’re wrong, is in thinking that we vote for a President to give us our manners. Silly.

In truth, we’ve been voting for a President to figure out what excuses should be used to suck money away from the industries that give us the things we really need, and where else that money should be diverted among the professions that make things nobody wanted. Republicans and democrats have both been doing it. And so the professions that give us the things we really need, while allowed to stagger on in the background while the loud people make a lot of noise, have been dwindling.

…

Companies that bake your bread, build the bottles for your water, build the cardboard boxes for your Amazon shipments, clean the poop out of your sewer lines. Oh yeah, and put together your “transportation equipment.” Passenger jets. That’s up at the top of the U.S. exports right now, the stuff the other countries want to buy…*choose* to buy. You know what else is on that list? Software is on there…but way down. Probably doesn’t include anything I’ve written, as of yet…

Nothing liberals build, is on that list. Psychological help isn’t on it. Crazy new rules about guns, written by people who’ve sworn not to ever own any guns — those aren’t on the exports list. Come to think of it, I don’t see anybody clamoring for those things inland, either. They’re such great ideas they have to be forced.

Read it.

How has the Internet upended commerce? Here’s a good structural analysis.

The value chain for any given consumer market is divided into three parts: suppliers, distributors, and consumers/users. The best way to make outsize profits in any of these markets is to either gain a horizontal monopoly in one of the three parts or to integrate two of the parts such that you have a competitive advantage in delivering a vertical solution. In the pre-Internet era the latter depended on controlling distribution.

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The fundamental disruption of the Internet has been to turn this dynamic on its head. First, the Internet has made distribution (of digital goods) free, neutralizing the advantage that pre-Internet distributors leveraged to integrate with suppliers. Secondly, the Internet has made transaction costs zero, making it viable for a distributor to integrate forward with end users/consumers at scale.

Read it.

Most Americans think that teaching is a natural talent, not the product of training, and that smart people are the ones with the talent. So some policy makers have concluded that the way to improve schooling is to lure top-scoring graduates into teaching (as Japan does) instead of scraping the bottom of the academic barrel (as America supposedly does). Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, invoked this idea in a speech last year.

But the problem in American education is not dumb teachers. The problem is dumb teacher training.

…

Teachers are smart enough, but you need more than smarts to teach well. You need to know your subject and you need to know how to help children learn it. That’s where research on American teachers raises concerns.

Rezd it.

I guess ‘leftier than thou’ is harder than it looks. Supporters of the crook always have problems with supporters of the fool; ask Nixon.

Pass the popcorn.

Read it.

Even though there are a few minorities shown, the ad leaves the impression of being very white. And Simon and Garfunkel is very white music.

Matthew Yglesias agrees, he complains that the ad is too white.

Well, really, there aren’t many people more white than Bernie. AlGore, maybe.

Read it.

Perhaps Megyn Kelly ought to run for President. In a country where Obama gets two terms and Trump leads in the polls, how hard could it be?

Read it.

It appears based on London but, really, it could apply to every city with a river going through it.