IN EGYPT, suffering from post-revolutionary malaise.

CHANGE: With high gas prices, compact vehicles flying off dealer lots. “Gasoline prices may have slipped a bit from the May 8th national average of $4 a gallon, but nobody is declaring the price hike over. In fact, data from Edmunds shows that compact vehicles are flying off dealer lots at a clip not seen since the gas price hike during the summer of 2008.”

UPDATE: Reader Charlie Hallinan writes: “For one brief but happy moment I thought that fuel costs and market forces were at last delivering our long-awaited flying cars. And of course the news would appear first at instapundit.com. Then I realized it was a only figure of speech. Bummer.” No one’s sorrier about that than me, dude.

OBAMA’S LIMO GASES UP — At a BP Station.

Well, they did give him record campaign contributions, so I guess he’s just maintaining the relationship.

SELF-ORGANIZED DISASTER RELIEF VIA THE INTERNET: St. Louis Facebook Group Organizes & Sends 4 Truckloads of Supplies to Joplin, Missouri. Somebody should write a book on this phenomenon.

SPACE: 50 Years After JFK’s Moon Declaration.

UNEXPECTEDLY! Durable goods orders drop 3.6% in April. “The decrease in capital goods was even more dramatic, at 7.3% in the non-defense market. That points to a significant decrease in business investment, which would indicate that the private sector has turned bearish on the weak recovery from the Great Recession. If so, the tax break given to businesses as part of the deal made between the White House and Congress in December that allowed businesses to take a 100% write-off on FY2011 capital investment appears to have already run its course. That’s bad news for the Obama administration, which had hoped to ride a rising economic wave to a second term in office for Barack Obama.”

BOB ZUBRIN: Treating Space Like The American West.

PAUL RYAN STRIKES BACK: “Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) hasn’t gotten a lot of help from his GOP colleagues in defending against scurrilous attacks on his Medicare reform plan. So today he’s unveiling his own campaign (not for the presidency), with a video to explain what he’s up to and why Medicare ‘as we know it’ is going by the wayside, no matter what. . . . The debate is just beginning. Ryan will mount his offensive in the days ahead. And his belief that voters will listen to reasoned arguments on the merits will be put to the test.”

UPDATE: Advice to Republicans: Avoid a circular firing squad, please.

IN THE MAIL: From Rory Miller, Facing Violence: Preparing for the Unexpected.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Finding Good Drugs Is Harder Than It Sounds.

DISASTER PREP AND THE 3G KINDLE: Reader Robert Woodard emails:

Surprised you missed a chance to mention the 3G Kindle in your link to the story on Joplin. One of the reasons I bought the new 3G Kindle is the fact that the Whispernet works in places and at times where/when other forms of communication may not be available. Certainly it’s not the optimal email platform, but in an emergency being able to get in touch with your loved ones through a Kindle when all other forms of communication are unavailable is a huge advantage (I worked in NYC during 9/11 and the blackout two years later, and currently commute to the East Coast from the Midwest during the week (thanks Obama!) so communication capability means a lot to me).

Yes, I recall some people managed to get email through after the Japanese earthquakes by using a 3G Kindle when nothing else was working.

UPDATE: Reader Donald Gately emails:

A month or so ago, you linked to a page that had a bunch of pdf versions of emergency first aid books (“Where There is No Doctor” and “Medical Aid at Sea” were two of them). I downloaded them and put them on my Kindle.

While it would be ideal to also have hard copies, having a selection of emergency first aid books and other disaster/survival manuals on a device that has a multi-week battery life (if the wifi is off), could come in pretty handy. Especially if a disaster strikes when you aren’t at home, or if you have to leave in a hurry.

Maybe Amazon should start working on a ruggedized Kindle with an even longer battery life – or the ability to take AAs.

Or a solar charger.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader Steve Bohn writes:

Glenn, regarding your emergency charging options for Kindle post, thanks to a link from you I bought an Emergency hand-cranked powered radio on Amazon and it included a USB charging cable.

Yes, a lot of those devices support USB charging now.

CHANGE: WaPo: Democrats Join Republicans In Questioning Obama’s Policy On Israel. “Now Obama — whom critics often accuse of employing a play-it-safe governing style in which he waits for others to take the lead — is largely isolated politically in raising the issue of boundaries.”

REWRITING THE TEXTBOOKS: When Science Gets It Wrong.

PAYING STUDENTS NOT TO GO TO COLLEGE: “The winners were announced today for a new fellowship that has sparked heated debate in academic circles for questioning the value of higher education and suggesting that some entrepreneurial students may be better off leaving college. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, will pay each of the 24 winners of his Thiel Fellowship $100,000 not to attend college for two years and to develop business ideas instead.”

A ONE-DAY-ONLY SALE on the Black & Decker cordless electric lawncare center.

RAND SIMBERG: IT’S HIGH TIME FOR A NEW SPACE POLICY. “Apollo was a spectacular success, both in terms of winning the Cold-War battle and (a secondary goal, vigorously pursued by Texan Vice President Lyndon Johnson) in creating a ‘Marshall Plan’ for the industrialization of the American South, with new high-tech activities in Houston, northern Alabama, and central Florida, among other places. But in terms of actually opening up the space frontier, it was nothing short of catastrophic. We have spent hundreds of billions on it over the years, to send a few hundred government employees into space, at a cost of over a billion dollars a flight. And in July, with the last flight of the Shuttle, we won’t even be able to continue to do that.”

THADDEUS MCCOTTER weighing White House bid. I hope he runs. At the very least he’d brighten up debates: He’s hilarious.

HMM: Gallup: Republican candidate with highest “positive intensity” score is Herman Cain.

WAPO: Poll: More Americans Fear Higher Debt Than Default.

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: California: Where Dreams Die.

You see, here is the situation in California. Tens of thousands of prisoners are scheduled by a U.S. Supreme Court order to be released. But why this inability to house our criminals when we pay among the highest sales, income, and gas taxes in the nation? Too many criminals? Too few new prisons? Too high costs per prisoner? Too many non-violent crimes that warrant incarceration? God help us when they are released. We know what crime is like now; what will it be like if thousands are let go? I doubt they will end up in the yards of the justices who let them out.

I think I have a clue to what’s ahead.

Nothing pretty. Plus this: “Our schools rate just below Mississippi in math and science. Tell me why, given our high taxes and highest paid teachers in the nation.”

SHELBY STEELE: Obama’s Unspoken Re-Election Edge: This presidency flatters America to a degree that no white Republican can hope to match. “There have really always been two Barack Obamas: the mortal man and the cultural icon. If the actual man is distinctly ordinary, even a little flat and humorless, the cultural icon is quite extraordinary. The problem for Republicans is that they must run against both the man and the myth. In 2008, few knew the man and Republicans were walloped by the myth. Today the man is much clearer, and yet the myth remains compelling.” See, I think that effect is much weaker the second time around. Much, much weaker. On the other hand, Shelby Steele is a lot smarter than me.

UPDATE: Reader George Lukes emails: “What Mr. Steele is missing is the ‘Been there, done that, got the T-shirt’ attitude of modern Americans. They’ve already proved they’re not racists by voting for a black man in 2008. Why do they need to do it again?”

Yes, I think that’s how it plays now.

A REPORT FROM inside the Higher Education Bubble. “Perhaps most troubling to me, as an adjunct history instructor at a community college, is the situation faced by college students who are like the housing speculators of 2005 and 2006.”

UPDATE: A reader emails:

I’ve been following your Higher Education Bubble posts with some interest. I happen to work for a Midwest based company that specializes in outsourcing plant maintenance. It’s a growth industry because so many of current manufacturing maintenance employees are in the late 50’s, and there is a great dearth of qualified folks to replace them. We recruit heavily from the military because it’s one of the last best places that produce motivated, experienced, and qualified technicians. That kid with a French Lit. degree flipping burgers would have done better to have gone to tech school, community college or the Big Green Machine and learned how to maintain electrical or hydraulic equipment. They’d be earning 40-50K within a year or two and they most certainly wouldn’t have a problem finding a job.

I’m not overly worried… the Market will provide. I just know that when my son comes of age, unless he’s going into IT or engineering, it’s the local community college or the military for his education.

Not a bad idea.

MARKET PROS: Taxpayers Were Fleeced By AIG Bailouts.

WALTER OLSON ON FEDERALISM AND MED-MAL REFORM: “Thanks to star libertarian lawprof and Cato senior fellow Randy Barnett for pointing out something that has needed saying for a while: most proposals in the U.S. Congress to address medical malpractice law run into serious federalism problems.”

SMART DIPLOMACY: ROYAL FLUSH! 5 ways Obama has flunked diplomatic protocol in the UK.