AT AMAZON, Warehouse Deals on Videogames.

THE PERILS OF A SOCIETY THAT’S based on “making women nod.”

THE FACE OF GENOCIDAL ECO-FASCISM: “I am not exaggerating. This is Finnish writer Pentti Linkola — a man who demands that the human population reduce its size to around 500 million and abandon modern technology and the pursuit of economic growth — in his own words.”

As Bob Zubrin has pointed out, such sentiments, if usually a bit less bluntly stated, are driving environmental policy nowadays. It’s Himmler in a green shirt. These are not nice people who want good things for everyone. These are evil people who hanker after mass death.

Still, it’s educational to hear things like this: “The United States symbolises the worst ideologies in the world: growth and freedom.”

If you like growth and freedom, these people are your enemies. Remember that and treat them accordingly.

U.S. WORKERS: UNPREPARED FOR THE NANOTECH REVOLUTION.

MEH. CHICKS DIG THE BAD BOYS. What do you say to the woman who consciously loathes Scott Walker, but has sexual dreams about him? In her measly little world, he’s the ultimate bad boy.

UPDATE: Yes, that was a Jimi Hendrix reference. InstaPundit readers miss nothing.

CHINA: Elderly “Rambo” Blocks Developers.

A hard-headed pensioner is standing in the way of a £350million development – by refusing to move out of his one-bed flat.

Zou Mingcan, 70 – from Kunming, Yunnan province, southern China – has declared war on the builders and has rigged his sixth floor flat with a series of home-made weapons and booby traps.

Sporting a military camouflage uniform, Zou stands guard on the roof with a terrifying array of Molotov cocktails, bricks and rocks which he pelts the developers with.

Sensible property laws save a lot of trouble.

BOB OWENS: The Crucial Trayvon Martin Evidence the Media Won’t Repeat: Provocative eyewitness testimony reveals “MMA style” attack on Zimmerman.

AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Kitchen & Dining.

Also, today only: Over 50% off on Adobe Elements software.

JIM TREACHER: We’re spoiling their fun on Twitter, you guys.

UPDATE: #FunnierThanCordova.

“IS THIS SOME KIND OF NORTH KOREA THING?” Dems Disenfranchise Voters After Polls Show Obama in Close Primary Race. “After a poll released this week showed President Barack Obama only beating his Democratic primary opponent John Wolfe Jr. by seven points, 45 percent to 38 percent, in Arkansas’s Fourth Congressional District, state Democrats moved to practically disenfranchise Arkansas voters.”

Well, the party rules are for the benefit of the party, not the electorate.

CHANGE: Divorce Lawyers Say More Women Paying Child Support.

AT AMAZON, Digital Deals.

EXTENDING THE Helium Sales Deadline.

Scientists describe helium as a nonrenewable gas, lighter than air and often found in natural gas fields after being formed by decaying radioactive elements. It was first extracted in Texas from Clay County during World War I, when the military began seeking it as a safer choice than hydrogen for some aircraft. An extraction plant was built in the Amarillo area in the late 1920s, and the government established its Federal Helium Reserve there.

In 1996, Congress passed a law to privatize the Amarillo helium by requiring the federal government to sell nearly all of its reserves. But the law expires at the end of 2014, years before the sell-off will be complete. Last week a Senate committee heard testimony about the bipartisan Helium Stewardship Act, which would extend the time period for the sales. Walter Nelson, an official with Air Products and Chemicals, a Pennsylvania-based helium refiner, warned that without such a move, chaos would ensue, with significant disruptions to industries like semiconductors and fiber optics.

“Imagine the impact on global markets if 30 percent of the world’s oil reserves were off limits,” he testified.

Don’t treat this lightly.

FROM PJTV’S POLIWOOD (with an assist from the Rotten Tomatoes film site): ‘The Avengers’ — Has Hollywood Rediscovered Patriotism?

NASA JUST GAVE YOU A TELESCOPE: What Will You Look At First?

TEN SCIENCE-FICTIONAL Faster-Than-Light Drives. My favorite was always the Mannschenn drive. With that one, you travel at sublight velocities, but you’re pushed steadily back in time so that you have a faster-than-light pseudovelocity. That was a creation of A. Bertram Chandler, mentioned here.

ROGER KIMBALL EMAILS TO PLUG HIS FORTHCOMING BOOK: The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia. He writes:

As Bloom recognized, the fruits of egalitarianism are ignorance, the habit of intellectual conformity, and the systematic subjection of cultural achievement to political criteria. In the university, this means classes devoted to pop novels, rock videos, and third-rate works chosen simply because their authors are members of the requisite sex, ethnic group, or social minority. It involves an attack on permanent things for the sake of the trendy and ephemeral. It means students who are graduated not having read Milton or Dante or Shakespeare—or, what is in some ways even worse, who have been taught to regard the works of such authors chiefly as hunting grounds for examples of patriarchy, homophobia, imperialism, or some other politically correct vice. It means faculty and students who regard education as an exercise in disillusionment and who look to the past only to corroborate their sense of superiority and self-satisfaction. The Fortunes of Permanence aims to disturb that complacency and reaffirm the tradition that made both the experience of and the striving for greatness possible.

It’s from Roger, so it’s likely to be first-rate.

NEWS FLASH: Getting shot hurts.

HYBRIDS: Lexus Kills Off Slow-Selling HS250h. I’m not surprised. I test-drove the CT200h and it was a very nice car; the 250h seemed clunky by comparison.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Time To Cut Government Funding For Political Science Research?

As we’ve had occasion to note here at Via Meadia, the US currently produces far too much “academic research,” and much of it is worthless. Some of the worthless research is directly subsidized by government grants; some of it is indirectly subsidized by academics in taxpayer supported universities whose job descriptions divide their responsibilities between teaching and research; some of it is paid in the form of tuition by students and parents on the same basis. And finally, some of the worthless research is produced on their own time by academics trying to beef up their prospects for promotion and tenure.

There is a real baby and bathwater problem here. While much academic research is so worthless that not even other academics in the same field bother to read it, some of this research represents high triumphs of the human spirit, opens the door to new medical treatments, or otherwise deepens our understanding of the world around us and increases our ability to live richer, better lives.

The reconstruction of the American university is going to take some time, and nobody knows now exactly how the new system should look. In general, Via Meadia thinks that the “research model” works less well in the humanities and in most social sciences than it does in the natural sciences. In many cases, undergraduate teaching could be separated from scholarly research with no loss to the quality of undergraduate education — and perhaps a substantial gain.

If he keeps this up, Mead may be burned as a heretic.

WISCONSIN: DCCC Involved In Gubernatorial Recall. “The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is investing in Wisconsin’s June 5 gubernatorial recall election. The DCCC confirmed to Roll Call today that the committee has shifted its Badger State operation, in place to aid Democratic Congressional candidates in the fall elections, to boost the party’s effort to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R) and replace him with Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett. Today, the DCCC today sent an email fundraising appeal asking its supporters to help underwrite its participation in the recall campaign.”

If I were a Democratic congressional candidate, I’d wonder why resources that were supposed to help my campaign were instead going to a gubernatorial recall.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What We Don’t Know About Student Loan Debt. “The lack of readily accessible, accurate information about borrowing at specific colleges means that prospective students can’t use the information in their decisions about whether or not to apply. It also makes it more difficult for colleges to compare their own students’ indebtedness with that of students at other institutions — a process that some say might lead to changes in financial aid policy at colleges where students carry an abnormally high debt load.” Or, dare I say it, lowered tuition?

THE HILL: Fury over birth-control mandate trails HHS Sec. Sebelius to Georgetown.

INSTAVISION: My interview with Arthur Brooks about his new book, The Road To Freedom, is now on YouTube.