SPEAKING OF RED FLAGS, BOY THEY DO WAVE:  Sol Pais, the FBI and Columbine.

NOT MUCH DETAIL ON THIS “NEW JERSEY MAN:” Man with gas cans arrested at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York.

AT AMAZON, save on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.

Plus, deals on Air Tools.

LAURENCE JARVIK ON the burning of Notre Dame.

SAD: Storm Clouds Over Tulsa: Inside the academic destruction of a proud private university.

A Harvard Business School professor recently predicted that up to half of all American colleges and universities will go bankrupt in the next ten to 15 years. While this may be a worst-case scenario, universities have for years been offering an increasingly inferior product at unsustainably high prices to an ever-more skeptical group of prospective students. Many institutions below the top tier are scrambling to respond to the collapse of the higher-education bubble by jettisoning the liberal arts and pumping up the practical ones: health care, computer science, business, and other technical fields that promise to yield jobs immediately after graduation. This approach has been employed in a particularly crude and short-sighted manner at the University of Tulsa, where a new administration has turned a once-vibrant academic institution with a $1.1 billion endowment and a national reputation in core liberal arts subjects into a glorified trade school with a social-justice agenda. Our story is worth telling, because we have been hit by a perfect storm of trends currently tearing through the American academy: the confident ignorance of administrators, the infantilization of students, the policing of faculty, the replacement of thinking with ideological jargon, and the corporatization of education.

There’s a lot of that going around. But if you’re going to be a trade school be a real one, without a social justice agenda.

TO BE FAIR, POWERPOINT IS AN INVENTION OF SATAN: Death By Powerpoint: The Slide That Killed Seven People.

VENEZUELA’S MADURO STARVES HIS OWN PEOPLE: It’s socialism, all the way down.

OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.

UH HUH: Facebook says it ‘unintentionally uploaded’ 1.5 million people’s email contacts without their consent.

HMM: The Black Series Is the Coolest Mercedes SL You Can Buy.

RON COLEMAN SHOOTS DOWN the Democrats’ Mueller pre-spin.

SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL: Judith Clark, radical leftist and getaway driver in deadly Brink’s heist, granted parole. “Gov. Andrew Cuomo initially granted Clark clemency in 2016, citing her ‘exceptional strides in self-development’ at Bedford Hills prison, making her eligible for parole.”

ANOTHER MEN’S COLLEGE DECIDES TO ACCEPT “TRANSGENDER MEN”: But it says that it expects all its students to identify as male throughout their stay. Transgender women are evidently not eligible for admissions.

Here’s an odd angle:  It is ordinarily thought that there are more biological males who identify as women than there are biological females who identify as men. Hence by accepting transgender men, but not transgender women, a men’s college may actually minimize the likelihood that it will have transgender students.

HEY, YOU GOT COMET IN MY METEORITE! HEY, YOU GOT METEORITE IN MY COMET! UMM, TASTES GOOD, THOUGH. Scientists Find Tiny Speck of Comet Inside A Meteorite. “The little fragment found in Antarctica was protected from the elements and preserves the chemical signature of the early solar system.”

HE’S NOT WRONG.

WHY DO DEMOCRATS WANT CHILDREN TO DIE? Robert F Kennedy Invents a New Vaccine Conspiracy Theory, And It Could Kill Someone.

I SUSPECT BIAS. I ALSO SUSPECT I’LL EAT MORE BRISKET, JUST TO BE SAFE. Texas Research Scientist Says Brisket Might be Good for You.

RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Seth Moulton tapes 2020 launch video.

MIDDLEBURY CANCELS POLISH POLITICIAN’S SPEECH: 55 grand in tuition apparently doesn’t leave enough for Middlebury to keep you safe if you’re a student who wants to hear from a speaker with the “wrong” views. I’d say Middlebury admins should be embarrassed to have this happen after the violence over Charles Murray in 2017, but I see no evidence that they’re capable of embarrassment. (Assuming they’re not just using a fake safety rationale to cancel the speech, of course.)

THE DEMOCRAT-MEDIA-BUREAUCRACY COMPLEX IS NOT AMUSED: Trump Calls Out ‘Dirty Cops’ at FBI Who Made 11 Payments to Christopher Steele. “The Witch Hunt has been a total fraud on your President and the American people!”

TAMARA KEEL: Retro 2,000-Round Challenge: Smith & Wesson Model 5906.

SNOPES STILL “FACT CHECKING” SATIRIC WEBSITE BABYLON BEE: Did U.S. Rep. Ocasio-Cortez Repeatedly Guess ‘Free’ on TV Show ‘The Price is Right?’

NewsBusters asks, “For Love or Clicks? Snopes Leaps to Correct Silly Ocasio-Cortez Items.”

Embrace the healing power of “and.”

NOW THAT’S A DEEP TROLL: McConnell Campaign Site’s 404 Error Page Features Image of Merrick Garland.

Cocaine Mitch don’t give a damn.

NORMAN PODHORETZ ON BILL KRISTOL’S DRIFT TO THE LEFT:

CRB: The Never Trumpers agree with you that Trump is an “unworthy vessel” but see nothing whatsoever to redeem his vices.

NP: Mainly they think he’s unfit to be president for all the obvious reasons—that he disgraces the office. I mean, I would say Bill Clinton disgraced the office. I was in England at Cambridge University when Harry Truman was president, and there were Americans there who were ashamed of the fact that somebody like Harry Truman was president.

CRB: A haberdasher.

NP: Right, and no college degree. And, of course, Andrew Jackson encountered some of that animosity. There’s snobbery in it and there’s genuine, you might say, aesthetic revulsion. It’s more than disagreements about policy, because the fact of the matter is they have few grounds for disagreement about policy. I mean, I’ve known Bill Kristol all his life, and I like him. But I must say I’m shocked by his saying that if it comes to the deep state versus Trump, he’ll take the deep state. You know, I was raised to believe that the last thing in the world you defend is your own, and I am proud to have overcome that education. I think the first thing in the world you defend is your own, especially when it’s under siege both from without and within. So the conservative elite has allowed its worst features—its sense of superiority—to overcome its intellectual powers, let’s put it that way. I don’t know how else to explain this.

CRB: Like Donald Trump, you don’t mind being politically incorrect, or what some would call populist.

NP: I often quote and I have always believed in Bill Buckley’s notorious declaration that he would rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book than by the faculty of Harvard University. That’s what I call intelligent populism. And Trump is Exhibit A of the truth of that proposition.

Plus some thoughts on who the left’s nominee in 2020 could be. Read the whole thing.

FACE, MEET PALM: Snopes is fact-checking the Babylon Bee again.

And a possible explanation from a Twitter user: “They’re intentionally pretending that these memes are meant to mislead the public so they can claim censorship is necessary to deal with misinformation on social media.”