HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: SURVEY: Most college grads say campus climate prevents them from expressing beliefs. “A recent study found that 70 percent of students wish for a learning environment open to all speech and viewpoints. A separate Gallup poll shows that two-thirds of recent college graduates do not ‘strongly agree’ with the statement that they were comfortable voicing minority opinions in class.”

Related: Sen. Marsha Blackburn is ‘restoring sanity’ to campus free speech. Faster, please.

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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: AOC Has Some Smart Thoughts on the Holocaust. “Many of AOC’s wet nurses tried to make the distinction between concentration camps and death camps to back up her foolish assertion. Let me tell you the difference. The people who are detained in the U.S. ‘concentration camps’ are there of their own accord, they left their countries willingly and came to request asylum in the U.S. If asylum hopefuls wanted to leave and return to their own country, they could do that.”

You might think something so obvious wouldn’t require so much explaining, but that’s not the age we live in.

YES: Chernobyl was catastrophic, and we need nuclear power more than ever.

As Mazin’s series reveals, the accident at Chernobyl was the result of two things: a cheap and unsafe Soviet-era reactor and an almost unbelievable confluence of human errors that occurred in precisely the order necessary to trigger the reactor explosion.

The Chernobyl reactor type was never built again and never existed outside the Soviet Union. Only 10 remain in use, and all have been modified to prevent a Chernobyl-style event. The Soviet design lacked vital safety features, included on every other commercial power reactor in the world, that would have prevented an accident of this magnitude. And the chain of operator mistakes that led to the Chernobyl explosion would be comical if they had not resulted in tragedy.

So no, we’re not going to experience another Chernobyl. And there has never been another nuclear reactor accident, before or since, that has resulted in human death from acute radiation exposure. Not Three Mile Island in 1979; no one was even injured in the Pennsylvania accident. And not at Fukushima, Japan, in 2011, either. There, the World Health Organization said the radiation exposure levels for those evacuated from the area were below detectable levels, though one plant worker died years later from lung cancer related to the accident.

By contrast, the burning of coal results in about 3,000 deaths in the U.S. alone every year, according to the Clean Air Task Force.

And if you think we need to get serious about reducing carbon emissions, you’d better think we need to get serious (again) about nuclear.

DEMOCRAT HOUSE MEDIA: Fox, CNN, C-SPAN barred from live coverage of South Carolina 2020 convention. “In a first, only one TV outlet — MSNBC — will be allowed to deliver live coverage of Saturday’s South Carolina Democratic Convention where 21 presidential candidates are expected to speak, drawing heated complaints from other networks. C-SPAN, which has never been denied live coverage of a state convention in the network’s 40 years, has reluctantly pulled out of the convention and other weekend events sponsored by the party. CNN has filed a complaint. Fox will also be barred from providing live coverage to its viewers.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “If this was the GOP they would sue. Dammit sue them. Make them spend time and resources defending this position.”

LUCKY MICE: Older Mice Experience Delayed Aging, Longer Lifespans When Given Blood Protein From Younger Mice.

STUDIES IN TOTALITARIANISM: The aims of leftist labeling and censoring of conservative pundits as extremists.

DONALD TRUMP: “No matter what label they give, a vote for any Democrat in 2020 is a vote for the rise of radical socialism & destruction of the American Dream. Don’t ever forget, this election is about you. It’s about your family, your future, & the fate of your country.”

FASTER? PLEASE! Boom Unveils More Details on Supersonic Airliner.

Flying at 60,000 feet, Overture would be capable of traveling between New York and London in 3 hours 15 minutes; Tokyo and San Francisco in 5.5 hours; or Sydney and Los Angeles in 6 hours 45 minutes (with a fuel stop en route). Engine selection has not been announced, but Boom plans to use a derivative of existing turbofan technology.

Five-year-old Boom has 30 aircraft on pre-order from Japan Airlines (JAL) and Virgin Group. In 2017 JAL also invested $10 million in the company. Boom, which recently located to larger facilities, now has more than 130 full-time employees and plans to double that number by next March.

Even with prohibitions on civilian supersonic flight over land, about 500 routes are “economically viable,” Boom founder and CEO Blake Scholl has said, with costs for passengers equivalent to subsonic business class. “A ticket would cost about $5,000 for transoceanic” passage between the U.S. and Europe, according to Scholl. Seat dimension will be comparable to short-haul first-class seating. He believes flight over land will be allowed in the future, opening additional routes to Overture. In the airport environment, the supersonic airliner would be quieter than conventional jet transports, according to Scholl.

While its projected 4,500 nm range isn’t sufficient for transpacific routes, even with a technical stop in Tahiti for fuel, total travel time would be half the current 15 hours between the U.S. and Australia. About 10 percent of the viable routes pass through the Middle East, which is “ideally positioned as a connecting hub between Australia, Asia, and Europe.” The U.S. company sees a need for “1,000 to 2,000 airplanes over the first 10 years” of operation, Scholl said.

I hope they make a real go of this, but that fleet size projections seems a bit optimistic. Would love to be wrong about that though.

NEW REPORT BY THE U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS:  In one of its most bipartisan (but still not all that bipartisan) moments, Commission members agree that there are too many collateral consequences to felony convictions.  (For example, ex-offenders are prohibited from taking too many jobs and excluded from too many aspects of the “social safety net” in ways that may well increase recidivism).  Still, in my statement (with my fellow Commissioner Peter Kirsanow), we had to point out that our colleagues’ approach to collateral consequences was too one-sided.  Not all of such consequences are bad.

Our most important point:  The particular collateral consequence our colleagues are most upset about is the exclusion of ex-offenders from voting.  This just happens to be the least important one when it comes to getting ex-offenders jobs and stable living situations.  Yet they give it more extended treatment (and describe it in more dramatic terms) than any other aspect of the problem.  It’s a curious thing …

Full report here.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s dead are not spared as theft increases in cemeteries.

Thieves have broken into some of the vaults and coffins in El Cuadrado cemetery since late last year, stealing ornaments and sometimes items from corpses as the country sinks to new depths of deprivation.

“Starting eight months ago, they even took the gold teeth of the dead,” said José Antonio Ferrer, who is in charge of the cemetery, where a prominent doctor, a university director and other local luminaries are buried.

Much of Venezuela is in a state of decay and abandonment, brought on by shortages of things that people need the most: cash, food, water, medicine, power, gasoline.

Some of the most acute misery plays out every day on the streets of Maracaibo, Venezuela’s second-largest city and a hub of the once-booming oil industry.

A quick look at Texas will show you that this is a great time to be in an oil industry, but it’s never a great time to implement socialism.

CHANGE: Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim Delivers Remarks for the Antitrust New Frontiers Conference.

Finally, the Antitrust Division does not take a myopic view of competition. Many recent calls for antitrust reform, or more radical change, are premised on the incorrect notion that antitrust policy is only concerned with keeping prices low. It is well-settled, however, that competition has price and non-price dimensions.

Price effects alone do not provide a complete picture of market dynamics, especially in digital markets in which the profit-maximizing price is zero. As the journalist Franklin Foer recently said, “Who can complain about the price that Google is charging you? Or who can complain about Amazon’s prices; they are simply lower than the competition’s.” Harm to innovation is also an important dimension of competition that can have far-reaching effects. Consider, for example, a product that never reaches the market or is withdrawn from the market due to an unlawful acquisition. The antitrust laws should protect the competition that would be lost in that scenario as well.

In addition, diminished quality is also a type of harm to competition. As an example, privacy can be an important dimension of quality. By protecting competition, we can have an impact on privacy and data protection. Moreover, two companies can compete to expand privacy protections for products or services, or for greater openness and free speech on platforms. Where competition pushes companies to develop quality elements that better satisfy consumer preferences, our enforcement can protect that sort of competition too.

Breaking with the Borkian price theory is a big deal.

FACE, MEET PALM: Former Congressman Says Parkland Survivor Kyle Kashuv Fits School Shooter Profile, Perhaps Should Not Be Allowed to Purchase a Gun.

OH WHAT A TANGLED WEB HUMA WEAVED: Huma Abedin, the former Hillary Clinton Deputy Chief of Staff at the Department of State and close personal aide during the 2016 presidential campaign, said during a 2016 deposition that she first learned of her boss’ home-brew unsecured email system by “reading in some news articles about a year, a year-and-a-half ago, when it was—it was being publicly discussed.”

But now along comes another former Clinton aide, Justin Cooper, who previously worked for President Bill Clinton and for the Clinton Foundation, claiming he worked with Abedin to set up Hillary’s private email account in 2009.

Somebody appears to be indulging in a particularly blatant misrepresentation of fact, which could be viewed as perjury or obstruction or … But, as Judicial Watch chief Tom Fitton points out this morning in The Epoch Times, Attorney General William Barr has to take the lead in seeing that justice is done.

DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: The silence about black slavery in the Arab world.

AND WHEN THE BABYLON BEE HAS YOU SAYING “FASTER PLEASE”!  San Francisco Installs Giant Toilet Handle To Periodically Flush Entire City.  Anyone else starting to think of Heinlein’s Puppet Masters and the cities living under the Puppet Master’s tyranny? Including how the aliens couldn’t figure out basic hygiene, until there were all these plagues going around?
Anyone else going “Uh?”  What was it he said about the aliens?  Oh, yeah “too stupid to keep slaves.” This also seems to apply to every communist ever. And our own leftist idiots.

SAY IT LOUDLY:  Worth repeating: 50% of crime happens in 2% of America (and Canada!).

GOOD. IT IS TIME: Straka sues.

NO. WE’RE NOT ALL SOCIALISTS NOW. NO AMOUNT OF SMILING WILL SAVE YOUR FACE IF YOU CALL ME THAT IN MY PRESENCE. SOME OF US KNOW HISTORY:  Who’s a socialist?

DON’T CONFUSE MENDACITY WITH IGNORANCE:  Does Omar Need an English Lesson?

YEAH. THE PROBLEM IS ALWAYS THAT THOSE DANG PEONS GET TO KEEP TOO MUCH OF THEIR OWN MONEY. LISTEN, BUD, THE 20TH CENTURY ALREADY HAD AN “UNCLE JOE”.  WE DON’T NEED A NEW ONE:  At “Moral Economy” Forum Biden Promises Tax Hikes, Status Quo.

HOW TO KILL YOUR UNIVERSITY’S CREDIBILITY:  Harvard Clown College and Kyle Kashuv.

OF COURSE IT IS. BECAUSE SHE WANTS IT TO BE: AOC’s Concentration Camp Narrative.

The fact no one wants to exterminate an ethnicity, we just want to keep foreign invaders out of our country, or that Jews weren’t storming Nazi Germany trying to get in, or that no one is trying kill (or even force to work) apprehended foreign invaders, or that–  None of that matters. Useful idiot Occasional Cortex wants to link us to one of of the 20th century’s greatest evils, in the process cheapening it.