DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University of Kansas eliminates two degrees, one department.

MARK JUDGE: Morning Bombhole: Joe Scarborough and Our Broken Media.

Bombholing is the practice of splashing wild and unsubstantiated stories all over the media. Then sending those same stories down the memory hole when they don’t pan out. Finally, media immediately distract viewers and readers with a new “bombshell,” which makes people forget the old “bombshell.” Viewers are lead “from mania to mania.” Goaded into focusing on today’s outrage, people quickly forget the previous “bombshell,” which was a dud.

Stricter libel laws would help.

SHE’S THE BEST: Dolly Parton Gives America a Whole New Reason to Love Her.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Stanford prof: ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ is racist.

BIDEN’S RETURN TO NORMALCY: U.S. Capitol Police Suggest Leaving Razor Wire Fences Up Until Fall.

GRIFTING PREDATORS ARE SAD: The Lincoln Project’s Implosion Has Derailed Its Founders’ Plan for a Media Empire.

LEADERSHIP: Tom Cotton’s Bold Strategy to Fight the New ‘Cold War’ Against China’s ‘Evil Empire.’

ACTUALLY, SO DO I: USC Prof: I Like Teaching On Zoom.

I didn’t like it at first, but once I set up my multicamera studio it was much better.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Media’s censorious gatekeepers are mad — because they’re losing power.

UPDATE: Related: Trust in Media Hits New Low. If you want to be trusted, be trustworthy. But that’s a heavy lift for people who are more concerned with power and posturing.

Prediction: Getting CEOs to “visibly embrace the news media” isn’t the way to do it. It’s hilarious how this piece completely ignores the possibility that people don’t trust the press because they’ve noticed a lot of lies, or that strictly factual reporting without political bias might help.

TEXAS VS. CALIFORNIA.

HERE’S FEDERALISM IN ACTION: HT to Thom McKee and The Daily Gouge:

RECOUPLING: How Oracle Sells Repression in China. “Oracle representatives have marketed the company’s data analytics for use by police and security industry contractors across China, according to dozens of company documents hosted on its website. In at least two cases, the documents imply that provincial departments used the software in their operations. One is the slideshow story about Liaoning province. The other is an Oracle document describing police in Shanxi province as a “client” in need of an intelligence platform. Oracle also boasted that its data security services were used by other Chinese police entities, according to the documents — including police in Xinjiang, the site of a genocide against Muslim Uyghurs and other ethnic groups.”

MICHAEL BARONE: Will Biden’s payoff to teacher unions repel suburban parents?

KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Derangement Syndrome Hits Pathetic New Low. “Now that the Democrats have failed to keep Trump from running for president again they’re living in abject terror of him returning in 2024 and ruining their long term ugly designs on the United States. Couple that with the fact that they can’t really sing Biden’s praises and it’s easy to see that we’re in for a few more years of this snot bubble toddler fit of theirs.”

NEWS FROM GRIFTERLAND: Lincoln Project Founder Paid Off Mortgage Days After NYT Reported on Weaver Scandal: Rick Wilson dogged by history of unpaid taxes prior to founding profitable Super PAC.

GOODER AND HARDER: Minnesota Nasty.

If there is one thing Minnesota Democrats can count on, it’s this: You ain’t never woke enough. Somebody can always out-woke you. Running for reelection, Hodges finished third in a field of five in 2017 and was replaced by Jacob Frey, the doorknob currently serving as mayor, a white-shoe radical lawyer who was buffaloed into letting rioters run amok and burn down his city. He tried to finesse his way to a third-way solution in the face of demands to defund the police but in the end signed a budget imposing millions of dollars of cuts on the police department in order to appease the Left.

The department now has hundreds fewer officers than it says it needs to do its job. With violent crime soaring, the city council unanimously voted to approve funding to hire more officers — but three of its members are working on a plan to abolish the police department entirely, replacing it with a new “public safety” agency that would provide social services in addition to law enforcement with progressive characteristics. A left-wing coalition comprising groups ranging from the Sex-Workers Outreach Project of Minneapolis to the Minnesota Youth Collective (“founded by young, queer, female-identifying people who practice intersectionality in organizing”) is working on a ballot initiative to the same end.

A  great deal is going to depend on the upcoming trial of Derek Chauvin. In February, the New York Times reported that Chauvin had offered to plead guilty to third-degree murder in the death of George Floyd but Attorney General William Barr had scuttled the deal, believing that that agreement was too lenient. (Federal sign-off was required because the deal would have included an assurance that Chauvin would not be brought up on civil-rights or other federal charges in the future.) The trial is imminent, and the outcome is uncertain.

Thirty-Eighth and Chicago, the intersection at which Chauvin pinned down Floyd with his knee, remains closed to traffic. It won’t reopen until after the trial, if it ever does. Office workers downtown already are being told not to come to work during the trial. The state already has budgeted millions of dollars for security and anti-riot measures, and the National Guard will be called out to protect the courthouse precincts.

If there is yet another round of riots, Minneapolis may take a long time to recover. Or it may never recover. Cities such as Detroit and Newark never really recovered from the riots of the 1960s, and probably never will. Even in Minneapolis itself, the once-thriving commercial corridor along Plymouth Avenue was utterly destroyed by the 1967 riots, and it never came back. The shopping and dining district around Nicollet Mall, recently spruced up with a $50 million revitalization project, is boarded up. The number of Minneapolis establishments that were torched in the riots is shocking: the ice-cream shop on Cedar Avenue, the chiropractor on East Lake Street, travel agencies, mobile-phone shops, grocery stores, an advertising agency, a dentist’s office, a barbershop, gas stations. Retailers from Kmart to jewelry shops were looted. The list goes on and on. A city doesn’t just bounce back from that.

Or to flowchart the progression:

OH: Facebook knew for years ad reach estimates were based on ‘wrong data’ but blocked fixes over revenue impact, per court filing.

Some more internal emails Facebook really doesn’t want you to see: Turns out in 2017 COO Sheryl Sandberg had already known for years there were problems with a free ad planning tool the company offers to marketeers to display estimates of how many people campaigns running on its platform may reach, per newly unsealed court documents.

The filing also reveals that a Facebook product manager for the “potential reach” tool warned the company was making revenue it “should never have” off of “wrong data”.

The unsealed documents pertain to a U.S. class action lawsuit, filed in 2018, which alleges that Facebook deceived advertisers by knowingly including fake and duplicate accounts in a “potential reach” metric.

Facebook denies the claim but has acknowledged accuracy issues with the “potential reach” metric as far back as 2016 — and also changed how it worked in 2019.

Read the whole, ugly thing.

CONSUMER PROTECTION: Legislation Would Force Kansas Colleges To Give Students 50% Tuition Refunds For Classes Shifted Online Due To COVID-19.

INCENTIVES: Wuhan Lab Eligible to Receive US Taxpayer Funding Through 2024, NIH Confirms. “The Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) is authorized to receive taxpayer funding for animal research until January 2024, the National Institute of Health told the Daily Caller News Foundation. The WIV is at the center of widespread speculation that COVID-19 could have entered the human population in China due to an accidental lab leak. Researchers at the lab were studying bat-based coronaviruses prior to the outbreak, a project partially backed by $600,000 in U.S. taxpayer funds routed to the lab through the nonprofit group EcoHealth Alliance.”

UNITY! Democrats Introduce a Bill to Punish Trump When He Dies.

QUESTION ASKED: At What Point Do We Realize Bill Gates Is Dangerously Insane? “What this comes down to, though, is that Bill Gates has been so rich for so long that he’s spent the bulk of his adult life without anyone telling him he’s wrong. That has the same corrosive effect on character and sanity that you see in the case of kings and dictators. People want some of Bill Gates’ money, so they constantly suck up to him and tell him his ideas are great even when they’re atrocious, and the guardrails normal people live between don’t exist in his case. So he throws money around at insane things. That he isn’t outwardly off his rocker like Howard Hughes was is small comfort; Hughes mostly kept to himself in that hotel suite in Las Vegas as he descended into madness. Gates is everywhere. . . . Perhaps it’s time to start taxing charitable foundations which engage in public policy-related activities. That could easily devolve into a mess, but the alternative could be that we increasingly have to live under the cracked worldview of out-of-touch billionaires like Bill Gates.”

Related: Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Behind ‘Anti-Racist’ Math Push.

BEFORE I INTRO THE BOOK BY MARGARET BALL: About 3 (?) years ago, during a rambling post about women writers I liked, I hapened to mention one written by Margaret Ball. Keep in mind, I knew she was older than I, because I was reading her when the kids (now grown up) were tiny.  This doesn’t always hold true, of course, some people just get published younger. But since I had read her years and years ago, and she didn’t have anything new out, I assumed she had died perhaps suddenly.
By some miracle, she was searching for her name on the net that day, and came onto my blog to see why she was being mentioned. More surprisingly (or not, considering the industry had side lined her) our political beliefs are simpatico.  After hanging out on my blog a while, and hearing about indie she thought she’d try it.

The thing is, she’s worse at publicity than I am (but as good a writer as she ever was.)  So:

FROM MARGARET BALL:  A Pocketful of Stars (Applied Topology Book 1).

Thalia Kostis will be the first to tell you it’s not magic, it’s theoretical math when she walks a Möbius strip through walls to her office at the Institute for Applied Topology. CIA Case Officer Bradislav Lensky doesn’t care what it is, as long as she can help track down a smuggling ring and the terrorists in their safe house in Austin. The other magicians nearby don’t agree, and don’t care for new rivals either!

Now Thalia and the rest of her misfit crew are in a race against time, terrorists, common sense, grackles, and their graduate advisor to save the day!

EVERYTHING THEY TOLD YOU ABOUT JANUARY 6 WAS FALSE: Between liberal journo Glenn Greenwald’s nuking of the New York Times’ “beaten to death with a fire extinguisher” fairy tale and this damning editorial from Issues & Insights, how can anybody ever again believe what they read in the mainstream media?

OKAY. IT’S A BIT RANTY:  Strong Women.

EVERY DAY, IN EVERY WAY, THEY’RE COMING FOR US:  Today’s blacklisted American: The sci-fi publishing company Baen Books.