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Lynn University will phase out its learning management system for the next stage of its tablet-centric evolution. Beginning this fall, the university’s daytime undergraduate courses will be managed through Apple’s course management software, iTunes U.

The move makes Lynn one of only a handful of institutions that offer more than a select few courses through iTunes U, and is noteworthy because Lynn will trade a more comprehensive system, Blackboard Learn, for a product lacking key features such as analytics, attendance tracking and gradebooks.

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Bob Dible is an electrical engineer that works on his family farm in Kansas. He describes the productivity strides made in agriculture. “We generate GPS (global positioning system) yield maps using data from the combine as it harvests. That helps us determine what nutrients are needed the next season at various parts of our four-square-mile farm.”

Dible then programs those different nutrient mixes and locations onto the crop sprayer aircraft. As the crop sprayer flies over the field, it dynamically changes the mix of fertilizer based on its location.

The $900,000 Air Tractor model 802 has 1300hp and a payload of 9,249 lbs. In 2013 the plane can change its fertilizer mix every dozen meters. Dible, as an engineer, knows what is coming. “One day we will monitor and grow the corn on a stalk-by-stalk basis. When we plant crops, GPS with RTK (Real Time Kinematics) gives us 1-inch accuracy.” It’s not hard to see Dible’s vision even now. With today’s technology, a small autonomous robot could drive down the rows of corn.

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In late 2011, mice with small-cell lung cancer had their tumors reduced by an anti­depressant called imipramine. The basis of the study was the idea that the cancer switches certain genes on, while imipramine turns them off. A neat trick, but no one would have thought to test it if it hadn’t been for analytics developed by Stanford data scientist Atul Butte.

Butte thinks of diseases not in terms of symptoms but of the genes they activate (or deactivate). In that light, conditions that seem unrelated, like heart attack and muscular dystrophy, are kindred, because they show similar genetic patterns. So would heart attack medicine work on muscular dystrophy? Possibly.

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Laser Power Systems (LPS) from Connecticut, USA, is developing a new method of automotive propulsion with one of the most dense materials known in nature: thorium. Because thorium is so dense it has the potential to produce tremendous amounts of heat. The company has been experimenting with small bits of thorium, creating a laser that heats water, produces steam and powers a mini turbine.

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Although the Sholes & Glidden is generally regarded as the first production typewriter in history, the Hansen writing ball in fact beat the S&G by no less than four years. The reverend Rasmus Hans Malling Johan Hansen (1835-1890) worked as a teacher and as director of an institution for the deaf and dumb in Copenhagen. It was his desire to enable his pupils to ‘speak with their fingers’ that led him to develop his writing ball.

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“Sleep is such a dangerous thing to do, when you’re out in the wild,” Maiken Nedergaard, a Danish biologist who has been leading research into sleep function at the University of Rochester’s medical school, told me. “It has to have a basic evolutional function. Otherwise it would have been eliminated.”

…

MODERN society is increasingly ill equipped to provide our brains with the requisite cleaning time. The figures are stark. Some 80 percent of working adults suffer to some extent from sleep deprivation. According to the National Sleep Foundation, adults should sleep seven to nine hours. On average, we’re getting one to two hours less sleep a night than we did 50 to 100 years ago and 38 minutes less on weeknights than we did as little as 10 years ago. Between 50 and 70 million people in the United States suffer from some form of chronic sleep disorder. When our sleep is disturbed, whatever the cause, our cleaning system breaks down. At the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology, Sigrid Veasey has been focusing on precisely how restless nights disturb the brain’s normal metabolism. What happens to our cognitive function when the trash piles up?

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Some incisive comments by somebody you never heard of.

The first and perhaps most important mistake people make is to confuse money for wealth. … Having money does not make you wealthy, but having the ability to make money, through net income generating assets such as businesses, investments, or even just your own skills, that makes you wealthy. This is perhaps why those with a solid education are never really poor, but merely broke: they have the potential to make money, even if they don’t have money right now.

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What we have right now is four labor markets.

We have a teen/early 20-something labor market where the participation collapsed as people focused more on education and/or can’t find work. In the long run, this group will be fine.

We have an age 55+ labor market which fared much better over the past 10 years than the rest of the workforce, but will begin to stagnate and shrink as retirements accelerate.

We have a peak-age labor market which is tightening very quickly, and should be near full employment before the 2016 election.

And we have a segment of the labor market, probably somewhere between 1-3 million people, of workers who are some combination of older, less educated, immobile due to being underwater on their homes, or not properly trained for the modern economy, who need major help from the government. They can’t find work at wage levels they’ll accept. Fiscal policy for this group would be 100% effective, but monetary policy at this point is of dubious help.

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, in his weekly radio broadcast, turns over a rock.

Race news of the week: Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered American schoolteachers to practice racial profiling.

No kidding. The issue here is discipline in schools. Holder’s Justice Department, jointly with the federal Department of Education, carried out an investigation. Although black students made up 15 percent of students they investigated, they made up over a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.

Nothing very surprising there, if you have a realistic attitude towards race. Blacks commit far more crime than whites: seven times the per capita homicide rate, over thirty times the rate for some types of robbery. Black populations everywhere have high levels of crime and social dysfunction. In the Caribbean nation of Barbados, where Holder’s people come from, the homicide rate is ten per hundred thousand, more than twice the American rate — and Barbados is one of the more orderly black nations.

Behavior issues from personality, and all the dimensions of personality are heritable at around the fifty percent level, suggesting they are under genetic control. So population genetics is probably in play here.

Holder of course is having none of that. It’s not that he denies high levels of black misbehavior: he says it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the numbers for suspensions and other disciplinary measures come out equal.

Here is the relevant passage from the “Dear Colleague” letter sent out by the Justice and Education Departments January 8th. It’s on page 11 of the letter. Quote:

Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.

End quote. Got that? You have a, quote, “facially neutral policy.” You implement it, quote, “evenhandedly.” You have no, quote, “intent to discriminate.” Yet if the numbers still come out wrong, you’ve broken the law! The instruction here is plain: You have to stop implementing that program evenhandedly. You have to practice racial profiling to make the numbers come out right.

You will recognize here the poisonous doctrine of Disparate Impact. If you give a written exam to a mixed-race group of firefighter applicants, and seventy percent of the whites pass the exam but only thirty percent of the blacks do, you have broken a law.

Same thing here. To stay out of trouble with the feds, schools must either go easy on misbehaving blacks or discipline more non-misbehaving whites and Asians. Gotta get the numbers right.

This is federal government policy in the present age. And while Eric Holder is certainly an exceptionally nasty piece of work, it wasn’t he who cooked up the evil and innumerate Disparate Impact doctrine. It’s been with us in one form or another for forty years, and been upheld by innumerable jurists. And one of the highest-profile uses of Disparate Impact against municipal firefighter exams was initiated by Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush’s Attorney General.

It’s a systemic problem, rooted in some simple logic. The logic is: We can’t face the realities of intractable race differences, so we must profile to get the numbers right. All Eric Holder has done is spell it out in print.

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Paul’s post on the efforts of Colorado Democratic Senator Mark Udall behind the scenes to rewrite the history of the damage wrought by Obamacare in Colorado deserves further comment. It is a small story of great interest. Let’s pause over it and take another look.

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Completely unconstitutional, of course. But that’s Obama for you.

Steve Sailer watches his Bullshit Warning Light go on.

 The ruling mindset of white people writing about Africa is that Africans have no agency: Africans are merely robotic vehicles for the malign influence of white people. Thus, if white people pay for a refugee camp for Dinkas and Nuers, this pair of signs can then be held responsible for all future conflicts between the tribes. The alternative is to assume that Africans have some responsibility for the state of Africa, but, considering the state of Africa, that would be racist.

In truth, the Nuer were always been proud of their ability to push around the Dinka and take his cattle. They would consider the conventional wisdom of themselves as pitiful victims being manipulated by white stereotypes into fighting the Dinka as an insult.

Electronic Flyswatter

Video Surveillance Clock

Self-Cleaning Plate

Kolibree smart toothbrush

Smart Crock-Pot

Digital Recording Door Viewer

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An African-American teenager, currently on probation for a robbery conviction, is in custody for assaulting a Rochester woman with a roundhouse punch to the back of her head. The incident is being compared to the “knockout game” attacks that have been rampant throughout cities nationwide.

The attack occurred as the woman exited a convenience store. The event was filmed by an accomplice who was so thrilled by the incident that he shouted, “Smack Cam” five times. The alleged assailant, Devin Alexander, 16, was first identified in a video viewed on a Facebook page titled “True Goon Tocool Sneekey.”

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. Except for white people, of course.

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All together now: Awwwwwww!

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It is a truth universally acknowledged that any genre movie dumped upon us in the barren month of January is likely a dog. When the movie’s producers withhold it from press scrutiny until the night before it opens, that likelihood approaches certainty. And when the movie’s director is revealed to be Renny Harlin, whose past transgressions are several, the case is all but closed.

Freeberg does it again.

Bearing in mind that experience and experiment come from a common Latin root, catechism-science is anything toiling away under the label of “science” that exists entirely outside of that. Its persuasive strength comes from being repeated over and over, verbatim, by people who call themselves “scientists” but who do not do science.

It’s important to separate this out from the real stuff, for a number of reasons. One of the most important of these reasons is that science relies a great deal on deductive reasoning, and while deductive reasoning is most persuasive when it is carried out properly, people lose track of how easy it is to do it improperly. It doesn’t work at all, in fact, unless 1) the range of possible causes has been exhaustively listed, and 2) each item within that list was eliminated conservatively. If the producer of the conclusion succeeds at #1 and fails at #2, the final conclusion is only as strong as the weakest elimination. If he fails at #1 then the whole thing is just a waste of time.

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As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: Get a government job!

Read it.

Of course. You cross the Crust, and they punish you, using all of their Voices.

UNC issued a statement Wednesday night saying it did not believe Willingham’s account of a basketball player who could not read or write.

It went on: “University officials can’t comment on the other statistical claims mentioned in the story because they have not seen that data. University officials have asked for that data, but those requests have not been met.”

As well as questioning UNC many times about the story before publication, CNN has also detailed Willingham’s research.

And purported e-mail exchanges obtained by CNN since August show that Willingham did share her findings at least twice — once with Executive Vice Provost James W. Dean Jr., and once with a member of a university committee on academics and athletics.

In addition, Willingham says her research on the students in the athletics programs that make money for the university was done based on screenings that the university itself paid for. And, she says, she has gotten permission from the university several times since 2008 to access those findings to continue her research.

“It’s already available to them,” Willingham said. “It’s in their system. … They have all the data and more. It belongs to them, and they paid a lot of money for it.”

George Will has some fun with the Usual Suspects.

Americans who exercise consumer sovereignty wherever Barack Obama still tolerates it are constantly disappointing him. For generations they persisted in buying what he calls “substandard” policies from what he calls “bad apple” health insurers. They stopped only when he forced them to stop — when he rescued them from their ignorance by banning their benighted preferences.

Have consumers thanked him for trying to wean them from their desire to drive large, useful, comfortable, safe vehicles that he thinks threaten their habitat, Earth? The 2013 numbers tell the tale of their ingratitude. In 2013, for the 32nd consecutive year, the best-selling vehicle was Ford’s F-Series pickups. This supremacy began, fittingly, in the first year of Ronald Reagan’s deregulatory presidency.

Today’s consumers, who cannot get it through their thick heads that they are supposed to want wee vehicles such as Chevrolet’s Volt, bought 763,402 F-Series trucks. That is 740,308 more than the number of Volts General Motors sold.

…

Today, Little Sisters of the Poor Home for the Aged v. Sebelius may be the second-most serendipitously named court case in U.S. history, second to Loving v. Virginia (wherein Richard Loving, who was white, and his wife Mildred, who was black, in 1967 overturned Virginia’s law against interracial marriages). The Little Sisters are challenging the Obamacare mandate that makes them complicit in providing, through their health insurance, contraception, something that offends their faith.

This mandate illustrates Gesture Liberalism: It is unimportant to the structure of Obamacare. It has nothing to do with real insurance, which protects against unexpected developments — car insurance does not pay for oil changes. The mandate covers a minor expense: Target sells a month of birth control pills for $9 . The mandate is, however, a gesture affirming liberalism’s belief that any institution of civil society can be properly broken to the saddle of the state.

Gavin McInnes understands the dialectic.

All in the Family, Family Ties, and Duck Dynasty were all created by liberal snobs to denigrate American values, and they all backfired. … People loved Archie Bunker and hated Meathead because they knew boomer liberals were full of shit. Even Sammy Davis, Jr. was in the Bunker bunker. He recognized Archie’s vocabulary was that of a hard-working American who grew up in a rough neighborhood. Davis told him as much when he appeared on the show as himself back in 1972.

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A Los Gatos, CA women reportedly is the latest victim of the heinous “knockout game” that is being carried out across the nation’s cities. The woman had just dropped her daughter off at dance class when she was reportedly attacked.

The suspect allegedly “clocked” the woman with a vicious punch to her face, knocked her off her feet, and left her lying on the ground.

Police are looking for the suspect, described as a black man in his early to mid twenties who stands at around 5’9″ to 6′ tall, with short brown hair and a slender frame. CBS reported that he was wearing jeans, a white t-shirt, and a backwards white baseball cap.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. Except for white people, of course.

Read it.

The instruments of popular culture may perhaps be forgiven for continuing to portray the 1960s as a time of infectious idealism, but those of us who were active then have no excuse for abetting this banality. If in some ways it was the best of times, it was also the worst of times, an era of bloodthirsty fantasies as well as spiritual ones. We ourselves experienced both aspects, starting as civil¬rights and antiwar activists and ending as co¬editors of the New Left magazine Ramparts. The magazine post allowed us to write about the rough beast slouching through America and also to urge it on through non¬editorial activities we thought of as clandestine until we later read about them in the FBI and CIA files we both accumulated.

Read it. And watch the video.

Specifically, according to Christensen, here is the recurring dynamic: the new entrants siphon off work from the bottom-end — work that the high-end says it does not want anyway.  The cycle repeats itself a few times until, much to the incumbents’ surprise, the bottom-end becomes more economically relevant and powerful.  Why does top-end let this happen?  Because the incumbents have come to view success as elite status and high margins, which is an unrealistically high long-term bar unless you are continuously innovating.  Eventually, the so-called high-margin niche becomes insufficient to sustain the enterprise, and giants fall — see the automotive industry, steel, computer hardware, televisions, consumer electronics, etc.

Freeberg does some heavy lifting.

To a child, once you head down that road it is all too easy to look at all problems in life like that. The problem isn’t there, it’s the person who’s the problem, therefore bitching about the person is the same as solving the problem. That’s how we get Barack Obama and people like Him: Every day, more bitching about those awful Republicans, while the problems go unsolved. Obviously, we don’t need more of that going on…so I guess I’m stepping out on a treacherous precipice here. But there is danger in the opposite as well, and I guess I’m guilty of practicing that, looking at only the problem and ignoring the people causing the problem. I guess we tend to embrace that in childhood, confident that it will lead to all-good-habits, no-bad-ones in adulthood. That’s not what happens. Some problems have makers, and solving the problems while ignoring the problem-makers is like chopping away at the leafy part of a weed rather than uprooting it. So I’d file this “good” piece of advice for kids, alongside “always clean your plate.” Waist-size-wise, some of my worst habits come from the clean-your-plate rule I was taught in childhood. Maybe my whole generation should have been taught “here’s how you throw that good food away, and forget all about those poor kids in China.” Lately, I’m thinking I’ve been solving problems the same way I’ve been eating what’s on my plate when I’m not really hungry, and with what’s been going on with my waist size during this time, I have no business eating when I’m not hungry.

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Now why didn’t I think of that?

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Early in her career as a learning specialist, Mary Willingham was in her office when a basketball player at the University of North Carolina walked in looking for help with his classwork.

He couldn’t read or write.

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The stories we tell affect the lives we lead. I do not mean to be abstract here. I mean, literally, the stories that are told make up a kind of meta-reality that soaks in us to form a “truth”. This “truth” affects policy, which affects investment, which affects bricks and mortar, pocketbooks, and power. Eventually, the “truth” trickles down into a more real reality that defines the lives of the powerless.

The story du jour in urban policy is one of density. The arc of the story is that cities are places where “ideas come to have sex”. The lovechild is innovation. The mood lighting is creative placemaking.

The Kama Sutra of density reads this way: creative people cluster in cities that are good at lifestyle manufacturing. The more people that are sardined the higher likelihood there will be “serendipitous” encounters. The more serendipity in a city the better chance the next “big thing” will occur. The next “big thing” will lead to a good start-up, which will lead to an agglomeration of start-ups, termed an “Innovation District”. Detroit becomes Detroit 2.0 then.

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If, of course, that’s what you want.

Me, I’d rather my commute were boring and uneventful … but that’s me.

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They have the technology.

You’d think that politicians would learn not to make it profitable to break the law, but they never do.

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“What this has really done is allowed people to understand that this is another place where smoking isn’t allowed, and there is good reason for that,” said Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, who spoke in favor of the ban before the Parks Commission vote Monday.

…

“Secondhand smoke in any concentration is dangerous,” Ferrer said. “There’s no safe level of exposure.”

Which is obvious nonsense, and underscores the fact that she is incompetent to hold public office. Prediction: She’s a Democrat.

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The polar vortex that supposedly was caused by global warming should have been a great opportunity for Amtrak to prove the worth of intercity trains, which advocates often claim are “all-weather transportation.” Instead, Amtrak preemptively cancelled trains in both the Midwest and Northeast Corridor.

…

Admittedly, three trains were stuck in the snow in Illinois in the middle of the night. Fortunately, Amtrak was able to rescue the passengers–with buses.

Left-wing rag Business Insider is distraught.

It’s the bit about ‘Reporters and Correspondents’ that really gets to them.

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The rise of wearable fitness trackers like Fitbit and Basis are training us to pay more attention to our sleeping habits by tracking how often we wake up during the night and how many hours of rest we really get. Now Select Comfort, makers of the popular Sleep Number line of beds, is building its tracker directly into the bed. The x12, which the company is showing off at CES for the first time, automatically measures your breathing rate, movement, and average heart rate. “All you have to do is sleep,” the company says.

Data from your sleep is displayed in companion apps for smartphones, tablets, and desktop computers. The technology, which the company is calling Sleep IQ, scores your rest and offers you suggestions for how to improve it. The company says SleepIQ can be turned off and that your data remains private.

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PulseWallet is a credit card terminal and register with a built-in biometric palm reader. Inside the reader is an infrared Fujitsu camera that photographs your vein pattern and then pairs it with the credit card you’ve swiped. Once you’ve paired you can hold your hand over any PulseWallet terminal to pay with your credit card. If you’re a business owner, you can hook it up to your POS (point of sale) cash register, or to PulseWallet’s bundled register, which includes a Windows tablet. The whole package is being announced today, and goes on sale next month for a yet-unspecified price.

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Seminars on landing tenure-track jobs are common at annual gatherings of academic associations. And the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was no exception, with offerings on interviewing skills and more. But one of the most well-attended sessions here Friday centered on finding a position not in academe but somewhere else: government.

“Finding and Loving a Government Job: Part Deux,” was a follow-up to an unexpectedly popular session of the same name at AHA’s 2012 conference. Presented then as part of a workshop on the “Malleable Ph.D.,” which addressed alternative academic careers in light of the weak academic job market, AHA asked a number of historians with established careers in government to talk about the pros and cons of work in the public sector.

As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: Get a government job!

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A Washington Examiner evaluation of Walmart’s employee healthcare plan rated it superior to and more affordable than Obamacare. Over the years, Walmart has been undermined by unions and liberal activists, who claim that the retail giant is “notorious” for providing “substandard” healthcare plans.

The former president of the Illinois State Association of Health Underwriters, Robert Slayton, said that in Chicago, Obamacare offers a restricted list of hospital participation. Walmart, on the other hand, belongs to a national healthcare network that provides almost twice as many participating hospitals. What’s more, Walmart’s network of doctors dwarfs Obamacare’s. “You will notice there are 9,837 doctors [under Obamacare]. But the larger network is 24,904 doctors. Huge, huge difference,” Slayton said.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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For Obama’s big money backers, however, the Obamacare fiasco has generated massive profits and contracts. In 2008, the healthcare industry contributed an astounding $22,471,562 to Obama–a sum nearly three times greater than it donated to his Republican challenger. Their “investment” paid off in 2013, as the healthcare sector index gained 37.5%, making it the S&P 500’s best-performing sector.

Democrats — party of the 1%….

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Automats are before even my time, but I wish I’d thought to ask my father about the introduction of sliced wrapped bread.

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Food science has often focused on nutrition or industrial-scale food and flavour production. But over the past two decades, a discipline that blends science and cooking has made its way into universities, restaurants and even home kitchens. Collaborations between scientists and chefs have made advances in the study of gastronomy and spurred culinary innovations that are opening up fresh ways of studying something we often take for granted: the enjoyment of a good meal.

This field is often called ‘molecular gastronomy’, although both scientists and chefs have objected to the term (see ‘Name that cuisine’). Hervé This, a chemist at the French National Institute for Agricultural Research in Paris, who coined the term in 1988, wanted to establish a new field that uses science to understand what happens to food when it is cooked.

We have the technology.

Fred blows the whistle.

Pondering the smoking ruins of American racial policy, I wonder whether it isn’t time to say publicly what many, if not most, of both races know: It isn’t working. It isn’t going to work. If it were, it would have. If it were working, we would not need the unending laws to force the races together when they don’t want to be together. If people wanted diversity, it would happen without compulsion.

The hope that black and white would mingle amicably if only segregation were dismantled relied on a peculiarly American inattention to life and history and on a belief that people will behave as we want them to instead of how they observably behave. Human nature remains human nature, no matter how hard one holds one’s breath and turns blue.

Crapitalism strikes again.

The ban is crony capitalism in its most seductive form—when it’s disguised as green.

Major light bulb manufacturers supported the ban from the outset. The profit margin on old-style bulbs was pitifully low, and consumers just weren’t buying the higher-margin efficiency bulbs. New standards were needed, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturing Association told Congress in 2007, “in order to further educate consumers on the benefits of energy-efficient products.”

So Philips Electronics and other manufacturers joined with environmental groups to push for tighter lighting standards. As the New York Times Magazine explained in 2011, “Philips told its environmental allies it was well positioned to capitalize on the transition to new technologies and wanted to get ahead of an efficiency movement that was gaining momentum abroad and in states like California.” After much negotiation, a classic “bootleggers-and-Baptists” coalition was born. Industry and environmental groups agreed to endorse legislation to increase lighting efficiency by 25 to 30 percent.

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American has a “youth” problem or, as sometimes put, a problem with “youfs” or “teens” or even “thugs.” Most people correctly understand this as underclass black teenagers (of both sexes) waging a violent war on whites. In some instances the targets are individuals—the knockout game and polar bear hunting—while other victims are innocent whites caught in black-on-black chaotic “flash mob” brawls at shopping malls, movie theaters, and just about anywhere else young blacks congregate.

…

Leaving aside the possibility of an impending race war, this violence is consequential for its destructive impact on public space, which in turn undermines civilized life. Further add killing off brick-and-mortar businesses and all the associated jobs. Why visit the mall if you are unlucky enough to arrive the day when the newest Air Jordans go on sale? Better to stay home, order online, and avoid human contact altogether. Youf attacks resemble neutron bombs—the people vanish, but the now empty buildings remain untouched.

It is their randomness that makes these attacks so terrifying. Normal prudence is no defense. A purse-snatcher will ignore a little old lady who wisely left her handbag home; not so for a knockout artist—a victim can be anybody who is handy, provided that they are white. Even surveillance cameras cannot deter—perpetrators love the publicity and happily post their exploits on YouTube.

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Since the arrival of Socialist President François Hollande in 2012, income tax and social security contributions in France have skyrocketed. The top tax rate is 75 percent, and a great many pay in excess of 70 percent.

As a result, there has been a frantic bolt for the border by the very people who create economic growth – business leaders, innovators, creative thinkers, and top executives. They are all leaving France to develop their talents elsewhere.

And it’s a tragedy for such a historically rich country. As they say, the problem with the French is they have no word for entrepreneur. Where is the Richard Branson of France? Where is the Bill Gates?

In London. With a cellphone. And a checkbook.

Read it.

Hundreds of armed vigilantes stormed a Mexican town and arrested federal police in the latest bloody battle between residents, criminal gangs, and the police locals say are in league with the gang members.

Around 600 members of local ‘autodefensas’, or self-defence groups, stormed Paracuaro in the troubled Michoacan state yesterday in an attempt to seize control of the town back from the feared Caballeros Templarios (Knights Templar) drug cartel.

The battle was the latest in a long-running war between the drugs gang in Mexico’s south-west and local residents who say state and federal police are not protecting them.

They’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more.

It’s in the New York Times, so it must be true, right?

In recent decades, American workers have suffered one body blow after another: the decline in manufacturing, foreign competition, outsourcing, the Great Recession and smart machines that replace people everywhere you look. Amazon and Google are in a horse race to see how many humans they can put out of work with self-guided delivery drones and driverless cars. You wonder who will be left with incomes to buy what these robots deliver.

What can workers do to mitigate their plight? One useful step would be to lobby to eliminate the corporate income tax.

That might sound like a giveaway to the rich. It’s not. The rich, including Boeing’s stockholders, can take their companies and run — and not just from Washington State to, say, North Carolina. To avoid our federal corporate tax, they can, and often do, move their operations and jobs abroad. Apple’s tax return says it all: The company, according to one calculation, paid only 8.2 percent of its worldwide profits in United States corporate income taxes, thanks to piling up most of its profits and locating far too many of its operations overseas.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Somehow politicians never learn the simple fact that making it profitable to break the law is a losing game.

Instapundit understands the dialectic.

Public schools were designed to be rigid. Back in the 19th century, when Massachusetts Board of Education Secretary Horace Mann toured Europe looking for models of public education to import to America, the one he chose came from Prussia. Inflexibility and uniformity were Prussian specialties, and when Mann brought Prussian-style education to America, those characteristics were seen not as a bug but as a feature.

School was practice for working in the factory. Thus, the traditional public school: like a factory, it runs by the bell. Like machines in a factory, desks and students are lined up in orderly rows. When shifts (classes) change, the bell rings again, and students go on to the next class. And within each class, the subjects are the same, the assignments are the same, and the examinations are the same, regardless of the characteristics of individual students.

As I’ve been saying for years now, Factory Model Schools are outdated. We have the technology to create customized individual educational processes, and need to do so sooner rather than later.

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Thanks to continuing glitches on the federal Obamacare exchange website, over 100,000 Americans who signed up for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) remain uninsured.

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I was at a wedding this weekend and saw someone I’ve known for a long time. She’s not a very political person.

She’s a therapist, and she volunteered to several of us how at this holiday time of year, her patients normally complain about family problems.

But this year, all people wanted to talk about was how anxious and worried they were about losing their health care plans, or relatives and friends who were losing their plans. She said the spontaneous voicing of concerns about loss of insurance really took her aback.