GOOD: Schools in the US Are Beginning to Push Back Their Start Times. “The changes are bolstered by a mountain of sleep science research that says pre-teens and teenagers are some of society’s most sleep-deprived people and would actually do better in school with more rest. . . . A new study involving 30,000 high-school students across 29 schools in seven states found that graduation rates and attendance rates both went up in the two years after schools pushed start times to at least 8:30am.”

FLYING SOLO: Drone Flying Cars Will Soar Over Dubai This Summer.

The craft can carry a passenger weighing up to 100 kilograms (220 pounds) and a small suitcase. After buckling into its race-car-style seat, the craft’s sole passenger selects a destination on a touch-screen pad in front of the seat and the drone flies there automatically.

The drone, which has a battery allowing for a half-hour flight time and a range of up to 50 kilometers (31 miles), will be monitored remotely by a control room on the ground. It has a top speed of 160 kph (100 mph), but authorities say it will be operated typically at 100 kph (62 mph).

Al-Tayer said the drone would begin regular operations in July. He did not elaborate.

The Road and Transportation Agency later issued a statement saying the drone had been examined by the Dubai Civil Aviation Authority and was controlled through 4G mobile internet. The agency did not immediately respond to further questions from The Associated Press.

Just how secure is 4G mobile internet?

PROJECT VERITAS: Two More Anarchists Arrested in #DisruptJ20 Plot.

I’M NOT SAYING THAT IT’S ALIENS. BUT IT’S ALIENS. The X-37 spaceplane has spent more than six hundred days in orbit. What it’s doing up there is still a mystery.

STANDING UP AGAINST FAKE NEWS:

SANCTUARY CHURCHES? Colorado Church Offers Immigrant Sanctuary From Deportation.

[Jeanette] Vizguerra pleaded guilty to using a fake ID in order to work in 2009. ICE officials say they’ve already granted her six stays of removal, and declined to issue another. That’s when Vizguerra sought refuge in the church rather than face deportation to Mexico.

“It is our position as a people of faith that this is sacred, and faithful work,” said the Rev. Mike Morran during the news conference at his church. “We know Jeanette. We know her to be an honorable human being.”

But critics say the church is violating law.

“It is illegal for anyone to deliberately and knowingly shield an illegal alien from detection by federal authorities,” says Jessica Vaughan, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies, a nonprofit organization that favors less immigration.

“Potentially these church leaders could be placing their parish at risk for prosecution and fines,” Vaughan says. “I hope it won’t come to that.”

Some people are hoping it comes to exactly that for propaganda purposes.

OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH HILLARY CLINTON: “See Hillary Clinton Get A Standing Ovation Before ‘Sunset Boulevard’ On Broadway,“ the Huffington Post breathlessly reports:

At a showing of Broadway’s “Sunset Boulevard” Wednesday night, the former Democratic presidential candidate prompted applause and cheers from audience members as she took her seat among them.

Several Twitter users and reporters in the theater took note of the enthusiastic response.

She’s finally ready for her close-up. You young citizens of Oceania may not believe me, but honest, I swear, I can remember vague flashbacks to that hazy year called 2008, when the Huffington Post trashed Hillary’s Democrat supporters (concurrent with Obama’s infamous Bitter Clingers slur against them) and Obama-supporting video makers created Hillary as Norma Desmond parodies. Like Norma herself, all down the Memory Hole:

MISSED IT BY THAT MUCH: The tale of how the USSR almost invented the internet.

Many of today’s digital utopians draw inspiration from a real world attempt to implement electronic socialism: Salvador Allende’s abortive 1970s programme that sought to rationalise and democratise the planning of the Chilean economy through a nationwide network of telex machines. “Project Cybersyn” was cut short by Pinochet’s coup, but, helped by the surviving images of its iconic retro-futurist central operations room, the episode continues to symbolise radical aspirations to harness technology to break through to an alternative economic system.

Cybersyn was conceived during the same era as a still more ambitious but less well documented project: a well-resourced programme to digitise the planning of the Soviet Union’s vast command economy. The labyrinthine story of the “Soviet internet” is told in detail in a new book by Tulsa University professor Benjamin Peters, who, venturing into Moscow archives “lit by a single flickering light bulb”, pieces together the tale of plans to supercharge the USSR’s stuttering economy through the installation and networking of a constellation of mainframe computers at major production points from Leningrad to Siberia. The project was one of the most spectacular manifestations of the restless Soviet ambition to lever technology to create the material conditions for “full communism”.

This is like arguing that another socialistic utopian, Gene Roddenberry, almost invented the teleporter.

REPORT: Alexander Acosta to be Labor Secretary nominee. For InstaPundit readers, he’s currently dean at the law school where InstaPundit co-blogger Elizabeth Price Foley teaches. He was previously an NLRB member, and held several important Justice Department posts.

UPDATE: More here.

CHARLIE MARTIN: General Flynn and Colonel Mustard: Let’s Piece Together Clues About the Leak.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Adjunct Serfs: Trump Should Target Worker Exploitation at American Universities.

RASMUSSEN: Trump Approval Pops Up To 55%. That’s got to be wrong, because I’ve been following the news, which assures me that no one likes him.

RICHARD POLLOCK: How The Nation’s Spooks Played The Game ‘Kill Mike Flynn’

The talk within the tight-knit community of retired intelligence officers was that Flynn’s sacking was a result of intelligence insiders at the CIA, NSA and National Security Council using a sophisticated “disinformation campaign” to create a crisis atmosphere. The former intel officers say the tactics hurled against Flynn over the last few months were the type of high profile hard-ball accusations previously reserved for top figures in enemy states, not for White House officials.

“This was a hit job,” charged retired Col. James Williamson, a 32-year Special Forces veteran who coordinated his operations with the intelligence community.

Noting the Obama administration first tried to silence Flynn in 2014 when the former president fired him as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Williamson called Monday’s resignation, “stage Two of ‘Kill Mike Flynn.”

Former intelligence officials who understand spy craft say Flynn’s resignation had everything to do with a “disinformation campaign” and little to do with the December phone conversation he had with the Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak.

They charge officials from America’s top spy counsels leaked classified government intercepts of Flynn and President Trump’s conversations with world leaders and had “cutouts” — friendly civilians not associated with the agency — to distribute them to reporters in a coordinated fashion.

Read the whole thing.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Adjunct Serfs: Trump Should Target Worker Exploitation at American Universities. “Today universities have a two-tier class system: Tenured professors and administrators on top, with generous pay and benefits and job security, while many (in some places most) required courses are being taught by the equivalent of serfs, with low pay, no job security, and little in the way of status. This is happening even as tuitions are skyrocketing and the numbers of (much better paid) university administrators are mushrooming.”

BECAUSE IT’S EASIER THAN FACING REJECTION: Why More Democrats Are Now Embracing Conspiracy Theories.

Saved you a click.

PATRICK POOLE: Media’s Flynn-Russia Narrative Quickly Collapsing as FBI Reportedly Clears Former National Security Adviser.

WHERE’S MILO?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: State Legislators Go After Tenure:

The anti-tenure crusaders have some of the right impulses, but they seem to be approaching the problem with a meat ax rather than a scalpel. Here are some thoughts on a more productive way to proceed.

First, the best place to trim higher education budgets is administration. Administrative bloat, much of it driven by federal regulations, represents a loss to both taxpayers and students; this is an area where savings could be procured with less political backlash. For example, the average state university today is an unwieldy mix of institutions and activities that maybe don’t all need to be under one roof. Legislators should think about ways to disaggregate them and promote competition. Do colleges need to run dormitory systems? Health clinics? Dining halls?

Second, policymakers should develop a comprehensive vision for higher education reform, rather than conducting piecemeal attacks on this or that activity. While there is a lot wrong with the modern American state university, they are complicated systems, and strong ones are an important economic asset for states and cities. The goal of reform shouldn’t be to punish professors perceived as radical or lazy. The goal of reform should be to build a stronger, smarter, more productive higher education system that does a better job for kids at a sustainable cost both to students and taxpayers.

Third, policymakers could draw sharper distinctions between disciplines and between teaching and research. Not all disciplines are equal, though many would like to pretend that they are. ‘Research’ is a much more important component of the natural sciences than in the humanities. It is not clear that the best teachers of the humanities are engaged in cutting edge research, nor is it clear that taxpayers are well served by funding ‘research’ into various postmodern critical theories (if you doubt this, see the Twitter account New Real Peer Review for real-life examples of the type of humanities work that is supported by public funds).

In the social sciences and the humanities, there may need to be a change in the expectation (which already in reality is being left behind) that every professor ultimately achieves tenure and that research plays a major role in getting there. Universities should improve the status of career teaching professors so that the current class of hyper-exploited adjuncts becomes a thing of the past.

If it weren’t for tenure, I probably wouldn’t have a job, and the same goes for pretty much any other non-leftist professor. And administration is, in fact, both the biggest source of expense bloat and the biggest source of lefty activism on campuses.

Related: Universities, Facing Budget Cuts, Target Tenure. If tenure were important to the apparatchiks who run the higher education complex, they wouldn’t be targeting it. It was useful when it provided an excuse for not firing communists, but now it’s a barrier to complete control. Plus: “In 1975, 45% of faculty at public and private schools was tenured or tenure-track; the 2014 figure is 29%. The balance of the jobs are now filled by part-time adjunct professors who make, on average, less than half the salary of tenured professors, enjoying few of their benefits, and are excused from much of the administrative work. While the average salary of a full professor is $142,141, according to the American Association of University Professors, adjuncts are typically paid between $1,500 and $5,000 a course.”

AS STIMULUS CHIEF JOE BIDEN SAID, “CORRUPTION IS JUST ANOTHER FORM OF TYRANNY.” Obama Stimulus Funds Went to California Dam in ‘Good Shape,’ But Not Oroville.

Despite more than a decade of warnings about Oroville, there is no public record of the country’s tallest dam receiving any of the more than $34 billion from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act sent to California for infrastructure projects.

Over $22 million in stimulus funds did go toward safety improvements to the Folsom Dam, which was described as in “good shape” at the time the grant was awarded in 2009.

“The dam is in good shape but is starting to show its age,” a Bureau of Reclamation spokesperson said of the Folsom Dam at the time.

The stimulus was intended to “shore up the nation’s aging infrastructure,” said former representative Mike Thompson, a Democrat who served California’s 1st District where the Oroville dam is located before being redistricted to the 5th.

Thompson lauded numerous stimulus projects, which included $2.2 million for “more attractive” sidewalks and $2.5 million for a 205-acre “zero net energy” community on the University of California Davis campus to put a greater “emphasis on walking” and bicycling.

We have far more government than we need, but a hell of a lot less than we pay for.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO ASSASSINATE: AFP reports North Korea prefers female assassins.

North Korean female assassins, armed with good looks and poison tools, are now the weapon of choice for a ruthless regime stalking its opponents, a high-profile defector told AFP on Thursday, after the latest apparent assassination.

Hardy male agents wielding guns or knives have been ditched in favour of their female counterparts, who strike fear into the hearts of enemies, said An Chan-Il, a North Korean defector and renowned critic of Pyongyang’s one-man rule.

“We are always mindful of young women accosting us for possible revenge killings,” An said.

MORE:

South Korean intelligence chiefs believe Kim Jong-Nam had toxins sprayed in his face as he walked through Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Two women have been arrested over the murder.

EVEN MORE:

“They can easily hide mini poison injectors made of plastic, either in lipsticks, cosmetics or under their clothes,” he said, adding that such plastic tools go undetected by airport security.

…”Good looks are essential but this is different from any beauty contest. A girl with a curvy body is not considered ideal to become an assassin who has to engage in physical contact with targets”, he said.

Wow. Sexism, lookism and Communism!

HER WRITING CAREER IS LIKE HER TV CAREER, THEN: Nobody is Talking about Chelsea Clinton’s New Book, Including Chelsea Clinton.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Adjunct Serfs: Trump Should Target Worker Exploitation at American Universities. “Academics seem to think that the business world is a feudal environment characterized by huge status differentials and abusive treatment of underlings. They think that because, to be honest, that’s a pretty good characterization of . . . the modern university, where serfs in the form of adjunct professors toil in the vineyards.”

TNR EDITOR: Trump ‘Turned the GOP Into the Party of Eugenics,’ Which It Always Was.

In case you are not yet convinced that Trump is eager to push a program of government-sponsored genetic improvement, [TNR social media editor, Sarah] Jones adds that anonymous sources interviewed by The New York Times said Steve Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, “occasionally talked about the genetic superiority of some people and once mused about the desirability of limiting the vote to property owners.” Jeff Sessions, the new attorney general, “praised the Immigration Act of 1924 in a 2015 interview with Bannon,” and Trump adviser Michael Anton has written (under a pseudonym) that Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee was “unfairly maligned.”

That’s pretty much it, which is why Jones ends up switching her focus from Trump to the Republican Party and from eugenics to “the party’s agenda,” which “in many ways channels the spirit of eugenics, even if it does not accept the theory in a literal sense.” Hence the article’s subhead, which contradicts the headline by suggesting that eugenics was not introduced to the GOP by Trump but has “always been embedded in the Republican platform.”

How so? Republicans oppose Obamacare, like capitalism, talk about welfare reform, and support school choice, which according to Jones makes them eugenicists in spirit.

Jones should familiarize herself with the works of Democrat icon Margaret Sanger.