IT’S NOT A TAX INCREASE. IT’S JUST A TAX . . . FACILITATION! Senate advances online sales tax measure.

AND NO APOLOGY FROM THE SPLC: Floyd Corkins may get 45 years in prison for SPLC-inspired shooting.

DO TELL: Donna Brazile: Bush came through on Katrina. Boy, talk about a narrative-buster.

AT AMAZON, markdowns on Big-screen HDTVs.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: “The current debate over the Internet sales tax — the woefully misnamed Marketplace Fairness Act — is not about companies like Apple, but about the next Apple. A giant such as Apple has the resources to calculate, collect, and remit taxes on behalf of each of the country’s 9,600 or so sales-tax authorities, and in fact it does so. But the compliance costs imposes by the Marketplace Fairness Act would place smaller upstarts at a distinct disadvantage, which is, I suspect, one reason that market incumbents such as Amazon support the tax. The real cost of taxes is not the revenue out the door to the taxman; it’s the revenue out to the door to the taxman plus all of the costs involved in complying with the tax code.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Pornification of Campuses.

COINCIDENCE? Jersey City man, Mykyta Panasenko, charged with having explosive devices at home and on train prior to Boston bombings.

GOING OFFLINE: What Happens When You Really Disconnect. This one of the benefits of my dive trips.

Plus this: “If there had been an emergency while I was away, I could have been reached. The humbling truth is that not a single thing demanded my attention. Most everything can wait.” This reminds me of something that a fellow associate told me back when I was practicing law: Most things that constitute an “emergency” if they can find you easily on Friday afternoon miraculously turn into things that can wait until Monday if they can’t.

I CREDIT MY STEADY STREAM OF AMAZON LINKS: Knoxville, TN is America’s second best-read city.

EVEN WHEN THE FUTURE ISN’T ALL THAT DISTANT: Predictions Are Hard, Especially About The Future.

I FEEL LIKE I SHOULD MAKE A THIRD ROCK JOKE: Big Giant Head Found In Hudson Has Marist College Dumbfounded. “The head, cast to look like a stone statue in the style of ancient Greece or Rome, was found bobbing in the river just after sunrise Tuesday. It took about 10 rowers to haul the waterlogged head from the river near the Poughkeepsie college’s boat dock. . . . No one is sure how the mystery head ended up in the Hudson, or even which direction it came from, because the Hudson flows both northward and southward, depending on the tide, with tidal forces sometimes pushing saltwater north from the Atlantic Ocean and freshwater from the river’s source — at Lake Tear of the Clouds in the Adirondacks — flowing south.”

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Putting spark in long-distance relationships with iPhone-controlled vibrating underwear.

THE REVOLUTIONARY EFFECT of the paperback book.

CONSCIOUSNESS AFTER DEATH: Strange Tales From the Frontiers of Resuscitation Medicine.

“The evidence we have so far is that human consciousness does not become annihilated,” said Parnia, a doctor at Stony Brook University Hospital and director of the school’s resuscitation research program. “It continues for a few hours after death, albeit in a hibernated state we cannot see from the outside.”

Resuscitation medicine grew out of the mid-twentieth century discovery of CPR, the medical procedure by which hearts that have stopped beating are revived. Originally effective for a few minutes after cardiac arrest, advances in CPR have pushed that time to a half-hour or more.

New techniques promise to even further extend the boundary between life and death. At the same time, experiences reported by resuscitated people sometimes defy what’s thought to be possible. They claim to have seen and heard things, though activity in their brains appears to have stopped.

Key point: Death is a process, not an event, and it’s reversible for longer than we thought. I’d like to see the technology improve.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Scientists Image Nanoparticles In Action.

A SIMPLE WAY to turn any LCD into a touch screen.

FOUR QUESTIONS about capturing an asteroid.

AT AMAZON, Spring Savings In Patio, Lawn & Garden.

#GREENFAIL: How The Wheels Came Off For Fisker. “It’s a real shame, the car itself was beautiful.”

AT U.C. SAN DIEGO, a conference on building starships.

NO POINT WATCHING HIM — HE WASN’T A TEA PARTIER: Boston bombs showed some expertise: Investigators say the triggering devices used suggest the older brother received guidance on his recent trip to Russia.

ANNALS OF THE .001%: McAuliffe hones China’s crony-capitalism model in U.S.

PSYCHOLOGY: Why We’re So Obsessed With Causation.

GANG VIOLENCE, TERRORISM, AND GUN CONTROL: I suspect, though, that the reason Chicago gangs aren’t targeted is that they’ve got a political accommodation with the Chicago machine. Law enforcement knows how to put a crimp in gang activity when it wants to, without engaging in the extreme measures here. If it doesn’t do that, the presumption is that it doesn’t really want to.

UPDATE: Gangs and Politicians in Chicago: An Unholy Alliance. “Most alarming, both law enforcement and gang sources say, is that some politicians ignore the gangs’ criminal activities. Some go so far as to protect gangs from the police, tipping them off to impending raids or to surveillance activities—in effect, creating safe havens in their political districts. And often they chafe at backing tough measures to stem gang activities, advocating instead for superficial solutions that may garner good press but have little impact.”

SORRY, NO NATIONAL PLAY — DOESN’T FIT THE NARRATIVE: Gun carrying man ends stabbing spree at Salt Lake grocery store.