AT AMAZON, it’s the Sunglasses Shop. Summer is coming.

ROCKETS: How NASA brought the monstrous F-1 “moon rocket” engine back to life. Note this: “[T]he power output of the Saturn first stage was 60 gigawatts. This happens to be very similar to the peak electricity demand of the United Kingdom.”

This is an interesting story, and demonstrates what we’ve learned, as well as the knowledge lost, over the past 40 years.

FASTER, PLEASE: Lab-Grown Kidneys Transplanted Into Rats.

APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH: Happy Tax Day. Now Stop Making Interest-Free Loans to the US Government. “Wipe that smile off your face. That big tax refund is bad news.”

THINGS THE PIZZA DELIVERY GUY WON’T TELL YOU.

THE CONSTITUENCY FOR complicated tax laws.

Related: Time for an Alternative Maximum Tax.

NOAM SCHEIBER ON HOW OBAMA AIDES ARE CASHING IN. “It turns out the highest-profile White House grads don’t so much join consulting firms these days; they found them. A boldfaced Obama name can rake in upward of $25,000 per month from a client just by dialing into a conference call and drafting a memo from time to time. Four clients means more than a million dollars a year with virtually no overhead.”

Sounds like another argument for my revolving-door surtax.

ANN ALTHOUSE: What abortion?

The media perceive the Gosnell story as a threat to abortion rights.

By the way, why are we calling what he did “abortion”? Just as a matter of clarity in the language. The grand jury report says that his method of ridding women of their unwanted late-term pregnancies was to induce labor and deliver the child. That’s not abortion. That’s childbirth. We’re not even in the gray area where a strange term like “partial-birth abortion” could be used. It was complete birth, followed by murder. Why don’t abortion rights proponents come down hard on that distinction? He wasn’t an abortionist (in most of these instances), but an obstetrician-murderer. If abortion rights proponents don’t want to talk about that, I’d like to hear exactly why they have a problem.

Good luck with that.

A WOMAN SCORNED: Distraught widower, 77, who set up CCTV after his wife’s grave was vandalised discovers culprit is 79-year-old woman.

ATLANTA FEDERAL RESERVE: Higher Education: A Deflating Bubble? “A stagnant wage premium with rising costs of attendance suggests that, at least on average, the value proposition of going to college is deteriorating.”

WHIPPING UP A BATCH of Satan’s Kimchi. Related fun here.

FEDERALISM: The Cartel Breaks.

MIKE RAPPAPORT ON AFFIRMATIVE ACTION: Originalism And The Colorblind Constitution.

NEWS FROM GEORGE W. BUSH’S FOURTH TERM: Guantanamo Is Killing Me. Remember the fierce moral urgency of change? Me neither.

DAVE KOPEL: The “Pro-Gun” Provisions of Manchin-Toomey are Actually a Bonanza of Gun Control. “The Toomey-Manchin Amendments which may be offered as soon as Tuesday to Senator Reid’s gun control bill are billed as a ‘compromise’ which contain a variety of provisions for gun control, and other provisions to enhance gun rights. Some of the latter, however, are not what they seem. They are badly miswritten, and are in fact major advancements for gun control. In particular . . . The provision which claims to outlaw national gun registration in fact authorizes a national gun registry.”

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: The War Against The Young.

It is popular wisdom that President Obama’s progressive social agenda is predicated on widespread support from the younger, hip generation. Certainly, concerns like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, abortion, the DREAM Act, gun control, women in combat, and blocking gas and oil exploration and pipeline transportation all get a lot of play on campuses and in popular culture. And these wedge issues supposedly represent the future direction of the country — a wise agenda for liberals eager to cement a majority constituency for decades to come.

But aside from the common-sense recognition that people become more conservative as they age and mature — and start paying taxes, and become financially responsible for their own children’s future — there is just as much likelihood that Barack Obama may inadvertently be building a conservative youth movement. Indeed, the new liberalism in all its economic manifestations is reactionary and anti-youth to the core. The administration seems aware of the potential paradoxes in this reverse “What’s the matter with Kansas?” syndrome of young people voting against their economic interests. Thus follows the constant courting of the hip and cool Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Lena Dunham, Occupy Wall Streeters, and others who blend pop culture, sex, youth, energy, and fad — almost anything to avoid the truth that today’s teenagers are starting out each owing a lifetime share of the national debt amounting to more than three-quarters of a million dollars. Those who ran up the debt enjoyed the borrowing, but won’t be around to pay back their proverbial fair share.

Plus: “University tuition has soared well beyond the rate of inflation, increases brought about by an inexcusable surge in administrative staffs, the reduction in teaching loads over the last few decades, the costs of subsidizing overly specialized and esoteric research, all sorts of costly new race/class/gender explorations, and a general expansion of non-teaching support staffs. Justification of such escalating costs was always based on the truism that college degrees represented a wise lifetime investment that ensured increased salary and better job security. That may still be true — in the long run — but bleak immediate employment prospects for those under 25, along with ballooning college loans, will eventually prompt a reexamination of such received wisdom. When academics at traditional universities trash private tech schools and on-line colleges, their criticism is not so much pedagogical as self-interested. . . . Apart from the elite of the Ivy League, most indebted students no longer look back at their professors and administrators as paragons of virtue or avatars of social change; instead, they see them as part of an establishment that sold them a bill of goods, one more interested in getting ever more customers than in finding jobs for those who bought their product on credit.”

SCIENCE: Body of Evidence: UT using donated corpses in mass grave project with international aspirations.

AT AMAZON, Digital Deals.

Also, today only: 50% Off Stuhrling Original Men’s Regatta Dive Watches.

IF YOU MISSED IT OVER THE WEEKEND, MY LIONFISH UPDATE FROM CAYMAN: Yes, You Can Fight Invasive Species by Eating Them.

SALENA ZITO: Gettysburg Part of America’s Soul.

A BAD TIME FOR PRESS FREEDOMS:

So you think that if John McCain or Mitt Romney were the president and doing this, there would be a different response?

We’d be screaming and yelling and the journalists would be going crazy. And that doesn’t speak well of journalists.

No, it doesn’t. But you can’t expect apparatchiks to criticize the apparat.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: London Times: Obama In Thrall To CIA Killing Machine.

UPDATE: Link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

HOW’S THAT HOPEY-CHANGEY STUFF WORKIN’ OUT FOR YA? (CONT’D): The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment. “There are two labor markets nowadays. There’s the market for people who have been out of work for less than six months, and the market for people who have been out of work longer. The former is working pretty normally, and the latter is horribly dysfunctional.”

EMOTIONAL BULLYING IS THEIR MAIN, IF NOT ONLY TACTIC: Jacob Sullum: Obama’s Abuse Of Dead Children: The president’s case for gun control relies on emotional manipulation.