TWITTER BATTLE: Donald Trump versus George Conway — Kellyanne’s husband.

NEW RECORD: America arms itself, ‘necessary steps to defend selves’. “The spurt in terror attacks, including the recent two in England, are pushing gun sales into record territory just months after predictions that the election of a pro-gun president would end the rush.”

SO AFTER TALKING ABOUT DRILLS A WHILE BACK, I took a reader’s recommendation and ordered this Makita impact driver. Did some deck repairs this weekend and it was great, driving screws in like they were going through butter. (And they were big GRK deck screws). Thanks for the recommendation!

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UC Defunds Regent Parties After Report Exposes Extravagance.

COCKY OR CONFIDENT? Democrat Jon Ossoff declines a 6th District debate on CNN.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “She has had relationships she describes as purely sapiosexual, in which there was no sex, just intense conversation.” They very likely wanted actual sex. She was using them for “sapiosex.” So, really, when you think about it, they were raped. It’s “Time Rape.”

CLAUDIA ROSETT: Keeping Faith With Tiananmen.

I was there, reporting in Beijing for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, and in a story I filed for the May 22 Asian edition, on “The Creed at Tiananmen Square,” the message on that poster figured in the lead. One of my editors, Seth Lipsky — who now runs The New York Sun — added a line that comes to mind today: “What’s happening in China right now is something the world will remember.”

We must remember. It is a matter not only of keeping faith with the heroes of Tiananmen, but with our own creed that liberty is an unalienable right. It is a matter of understanding something vital about the undercurrents in China, something that Beijing’s rulers would prefer we forget.

In the 28 years since June 4, 1989, China’s ruling Communist Party has done everything in its power to obliterate inside China the memory of the Tiananmen uprising. As far as China’s government alludes to it at all, Tiananmen’s haunting cry for freedom is recast as a “disturbance,” caused by a rabble. The lone man who on June 5 stopped a column of tanks has become an inspiring symbol abroad, but in China he has literally disappeared. It is by now routine to find in the news, on each anniversary of the June 4 slaughter in Beijing, articles such as today’s dispatch in the Financial Times, headlined “Support grows in China for 1989 Tiananmen crackdown.”

Read the whole thing.

WHY ARE DEEP-BLUE CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Flint official Phil Stair resigns after using N-word to describe residents.

MATTIS ON LONDON: ‘We don’t scare.’

THIS MEANS WAR: After three jihadist attacks in as many months, the United Kingdom is facing a protracted insurgency—not mere terrorism.

Britons trying to remain optimistic note that they survived and eventually defeated Irish nationalist terrorism not all that long ago. But this is a flawed analogy. In the first place, at any given time during the Troubles, the number of active Provisional Irish Republican Army terrorists seldom exceeded a hundred. Moreover, the PIRA was a “normal” terrorist group with rational political motives, not a religiously-motivated death cult, and it generally eschewed killing civilians for its own sake. Indeed, atrocities like the 1987 Enniskillen attack, which murdered 10 innocents, proved a black mark for the group, even among staunch republicans. Therefore, comparing the PIRA to ISIS and its murderous Western wannabes isn’t much help to practical counterterrorism.

That said, if Britain doesn’t soon devise tough countermeasures to its vast domestic jihadism problem, many of its cities may come to resemble Northern Ireland a generation ago, with armed soldiers in battle gear patrolling the streets as “aid to civil power” while enforcing frequent security checks on average citizens with the aim of stopping terrorists.

Even then, Britain didn’t win against the IRA until much of its foreign funding dried up after 9/11.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Clinton’s charity confirms Qatar’s $1 million gift while she was at State Dept.

Related: Arab Powers Sever Ties with Qatar, Citing Support for Terror. “The Arab world’s strongest powers cut ties with Qatar on Monday over alleged support for Islamists and Iran, re-opening a festering wound just two weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump’s demand for Muslim states to fight terrorism. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain cut relations with Qatar in a coordinated move. Yemen, Libya’s eastern-based government and the Maldives joined in later.”

YOU SPELLED “BROWNSHIRTS” WRONG: A New Wave of Left-Wing Militants Is Ready to Rumble in Portland—and Beyond. This will not end well.

RECYCLING: Space station welcomes 1st returning vehicle since shuttle.

The Dragon supply ship pulled up Monday, two days after launching from Florida. This same capsule dropped off a shipment in 2014. SpaceX recycled it for an unprecedented second trip.

Until their 2011 retirement, NASA’s shuttles made multiple flights to the space station. But it’s the first time a private company has achieved such a feat. The Americans on the space station — Jack Fischer and Peggy Whitson — used a robot arm to capture the Dragon as the craft soared above the South Atlantic.

Well done.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: To fight climate change, start with Leonardo DiCaprio’s private jet lifestyle: Even though President Trump withdrew from the Paris climate agreement, there’s plenty Congress can do.

MICHAEL WALSH: Memo to the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave.

That would make a great title for a campy 60s office-horror movie starring Vincent Price.

ENOUGH: After London Bridge, The World Is Sick Of Politicians Downplaying Terrorism.

The sad truth, and getting sadder with every attack, is that the political class has little interest in doing what would really be necessary to combat Islamist terrorism, let alone talk about it. They don’t want to talk about how Britain’s lax immigration policies over decades led to hundreds of thousands of immigrants entering the country with varying degrees of willingness to assimilate and adopt Western values. They don’t want to openly criticize the blatant problems with the multiculturalism the UK has pursued for years and the obvious impact it has had on the immigrant population.

Oh no. This would cost them too much. It would shatter the façade of political correctness that’s been constructed over our “civilized” western world, and destroy the illusion, so vital to the political class, that Western values are universal.

The politicians are only willing to give speeches about how united we are and how terrorists cannot tear us apart. But the truth—so clear and obvious—is that with every attack the West becomes more and more divided. We are not united, not by a long shot. Before the bodies of the poor souls who were killed Saturday by radical Islamists were even identified, the Left and Right were at one another’s throats. On that score, the terrorists emerge victorious every time.

Despite what our elites insist, terrorists do not seek to divide us; they seek to murder us.

STEPHEN CARTER: The Second Time I Learned To Read:

Mrs. Dickey taught me to read. Not to read. To read.

I arrived in Ithaca reasonably well educated in every field but literature. Oh, I had read a bit of Shakespeare and Dickens, but only because my 8th and 9th grade English courses required it. Over the years I had gorged myself on comic books (my maternal grandparents owned a candy store and saved copies of our favorites for our summer visits) and science fiction (Bradbury and Asimov and Heinlein, yes, but also a lot of schlock — I am embarrassed to admit that in those days I could quote Tom Swift by the yard). I read voraciously, but my choices were filling my head with junk. My mind was agile but not disciplined; quick but not reflective; I was much better at snappy answers than thoughtful ones.

Mrs. Dickey changed all that. She took me aside one day after class and asked me why I read such junk. (She used the very word.) I replied, a bit stupidly, that I liked what I read and I read what I liked (or something equally unclever.) I grew defensive. I refused to concede that there was anything wrong with my tastes. I was, in short, a fool.

And so she offered me a deal. She would read any three books I gave her if I would read any three books she gave me. Then we would get together after school to talk. I agreed.

Best deal I ever made.

I do not remember what books she gave me, except that they were thick hardcovers. I believe one might have been a Thomas Hardy. It makes no difference. My English teacher was right, and I was wrong. Some books are better than others. And as a teen I had no way of judging for myself.

Without that bet, I would still have read serious literature when I had to, but I’m not sure how much I would have read because I chose to. Mrs. Dickey had taught me that there are things one ought to read. I put away the books of sports records and pulpy sci-fi. By the time I finished high school, I had read all of Shakespeare, the sonnets included.

When I started college, although I began as a physics major, with lots of work in math and computer science — you can’t entirely ungeek the geek — I was drawn increasingly to literature. In those days you could still find a jampacked course on Western Civilization and read the great books.

In those days. Meanwhile, I had a similar experience. My 9th-grade English teacher, Mrs. Gass, encouraged my creativity in writing. But my 10th and 11th grade teachers, Mrs. Miller and Mrs. Ferguson, forced me to read critically and to write clearly.

A-10 OVER AN UNDISCLOSED LOCATION: Well, it’s supporting Operation Inherent Resolve, so the ground below might be Iraq. The plane has just refueled, so it could be over Turkey. I’m sure an Instapundit reader can identify it.

SPACE: SpaceX Launches first recycled cargo ship.

RECYCLING COAST GUARD CUTTERS: The Philippines now operates three former Coast Guard cutters. They’ve been upgraded and reclassified as frigates. This quickly puts more Filipino hulls in the South China Sea.

RELATED: The U.S. Navy’s frigate controversy.

EGYPT’S FIGHT OVER AL AHZAR: The university is a battleground in the war with militant Islamism.

From the Carnegie Middle East Center’s analysis:

…there are signs that the effort to restructure Al-Azhar, though tabled, had real effects. Egypt’s religious leadership has been treading more carefully and the political leadership has been more successful in exploiting some divisions in the religious sector.

This is a thoughtful report with lots of historical background.

LIES, DAMN LIES, AND STATISTICS: 93% Of All Jobs “Created” Since 2008 Were Added Through The Birth/Death Model.

According to prevailing narrative, job growth in the US, where GDP over the past decade has been on par with that in the 1930s, is one of the otherwise brighter economic indicators in a time when much of the economic data such as capital spending, productivity and especially wage growth (so critical for the Fed’s future plans) has been a chronic disappointment. Today, for example, headlines blast that the US has enjoyed 80 months of continuous jobs growth with unemployment hitting 4.3% – the lowest since 2001. However, there is more to this “strong” number than meets the untrained eye.

As our freiends at Morningside Hill calculate, a full 93% of the new jobs reported since 2008 – 6.3 million out of 6.7 million – and 40% of the jobs in 2016 alone were added through the business birth and death model – a highly controversial model which is not supported by the data. On the contrary, all data on establishment births and deaths point to an ongoing decrease in entrepreneurship.

This may be the single biggest reason why the long-running “recovery” has felt like anything but.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law School Entry-Level Faculty Hiring Down 25% (63% From 2008).

IT DOES SEEM THAT WAY: The Left Won’t Rest Until Somebody Gets Killed. “I’m old enough to remember when ‘violent rhetoric’ was the root of all our problems, and crosshairs on a website no one ever saw was the reason for mass murder. Of course, those were different times, times in which the president had a (D) after his name, not an evil (R). . . . But if liberals believed what they were saying back then, what does it tell us about what they’re hoping for now? There’s really only one conclusion to draw: They want blood, literal blood.”

Related: Leaked Screenshots Reveal BuzzFeed Director Wishing for Trump Assassination.

Plus: The Return of Assassination Fascination.

Also: Assassination Threats Against Trump Flood Twitter.

And: “Question for NBC, do you condone your producers justifying an attempted assassination on Donald Trump?”

Finally: Scott Adams: The Media Are Trying To Get Donald Trump Killed.