AT AMAZON, deals galore at the Memorial Day Savings Event.

Plus, save 30% off Outdoor Research clothing.

UPDATE: First link was bad before. Fixed now. Sorry!

PERSONALLY, I BLAME GLOBAL WARMING: 2015 Indianapolis 500: Why Have Cars Suddenly Started Going Airborne?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Expert: U.S. Must End ‘Addiction’ to Bachelor’s Degrees.

ART GARFUNKEL ON PAUL SIMON. You know, Simon was the bigger talent, but — as with John Fogerty post CCR — none of his solo work compared to what he did with Garfunkel.

DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: 3-Year-Old Girl Attacked by Coyote While Walking With Parents in Irvine. “A 3-year-old girl was attacked by a coyote while walking with her parents in Silverado Park in Irvine on Friday evening. The incident occurred around 5:50 p.m. near the intersection of Equinox and Silverado in Irvine, according to Farrah Emami with the Irvine Police Department. Girl suffered superficial wounds, and was treated at a local hospital and released. Officials were still searching the neighborhood for the coyote.”

You know, a Ruger LCP will take care of those coyotes just fine. Ask Rick Perry. It’s a great little gun for pocket carry. I like the Crimson Trace laser sight with that, and I recommend you put a couple hundred rounds through it for break-in.

ROGER KIMBALL: Memorial Day Notes.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 746.

HUH. I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Boeing Unveils Amazing, Slightly Terrifying New Electromagnetic Pulse Weapon.

The weapon in question: Boeing’s “CHAMP,” short for Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project. It’s essentially the old nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon that we used to worry so much about — but without the nuclear part. CHAMP carries a small generator that emits microwaves to fry electronics with pinpoint accuracy. It targets not nations or cities but individual buildings, blacking out their electronics rather than blowing up physical targets (or people).

What makes CHAMP even more interesting is that, unlike a nuclear electromagnetic pulse weapon, which fires once, blacking out entire nation-states, CHAMP can fire multiple times, pinpointing and blacking out only essential targets. This would permit, for example, taking down radar defenses in a hostile state, while saving the electrical grid that supports the civilian population. In a 2012 test flight in Utah, a single CHAMP was reported to have blacked out seven separate targets in succession, in one single mission.

We keep getting better at selective application of force, while our opponents keep getting less selective.

THEY SAID IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, I’D BE VOTING FOR INCREASED RACIAL TENSION, AND THEY WERE RIGHT!: Valdosta State Student Who Stomped on US Flag Wants to Kill All White People:

Eric Sheppard, the Valdosta State University student who was confronted last month by an Air Force veteran after he stomped on the American flag, has issued a violent 4,700-word anti-white rant in which he threatened to “annihilate those who come after me.”

Sheppard is wanted by police after they found a gun in his backpack days after the flag-stomping demonstration. In his lengthy letter, submitted to The Valdosta Daily Times this week, Sheppard said he will not surrender and will use violence if necessary. . . .

Quoting former Nation of Islam leader and New Black Panther Party chairman, Kallid Abdul Muhammad, Sheppard wrote of whites, “we give them 24 hours to get out of town by sundown.”

“I say, if they don’t get out of town, we kill the white men, we kill the white women, we kill the white children, we kill the white babies, we kill the blind whites, we kill the crippled whites, we kill the crazy whites, we kill the faggots, we kill the lesbians, I say god dammit we kill ’em all,” Sheppard continued.

“If they are white kill ‘em all.” . . .

According to The Daily Times, Brian Childress, the Valdosta chief of police, believes that Sheppard’s video is a publicity stunt. Nevertheless, he contacted federal authorities about the threats.

Oh, good — I feel better now — the federal authorities have been alerted.  I’m sure they’re on it, you know, since they’ve been so steadfast in prosecuting lawless acts of intimidation by Black Panthers and so even-handed in their application of civil rights laws to all races and religions.

SPYING: County sheriff has used stingray over 300 times with no warrant.

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BECAUSE IF WE AREN’T GOOD AT IT, WE SHOULD BAN IT FOR EVERYONE!: That’s the “solution” to the “problem” of the gender gap in pay, according to this silly Washington Post oped by a business school professor.  The author asserts:

When it comes to playing hardball, women are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Training them to be tough negotiators won’t overcome the cultural rules rigged against them in the workplace. And it’s galling to think that women might need to employ a “Mad Men”-era strategy of flirtation to get a fair shake. Given that salary negotiations ignite the gender pay gap at the starting gate,a gap fueled by small gender biases over time, negotiation-free workplaces are women’s best option for getting the salaries they deserve.

Maybe so, but favoring women (or protecting them, which is the implication of this oped) isn’t the answer.  There’s a little thing called “liberty,” you see, and it’s really an empowering thing–even for women.  In fact, it’s central to the entire field of contract law, which presupposes that competent adults are, well, competent, to negotiate in their own best interests.  I hardly think the answer is assuming that women are incompetent at negotiating, ergo we should stop salary negotiations altogether.  How insulting, and how horrific for individual liberty. These liberals/progressives really should take a long, hard look at the prejudicial assumptions underlying their inane “solutions” to “problems.”

Talk about a #waronwomen.

ANNALS OF INEQUALITY: Doing Their Fair Share? The Harvards of the world are awash in public funds for low-income students. Why aren’t they doing more to enroll them?

The 10 wealthiest private colleges hold cash and endowments that, combined, total nearly $180 billion. A median 16 percent of their 2012–13 enrollees received Pell Grants, a form of federal aid only available to low-income students, according to an analysis of federal data.

Yale University and the University of Notre Dame have $25.4 billion and $9.5 billion in cash and investments, respectively, but had the lowest portion of Pell recipients among this group, at 12 percent. Columbia University, with cash and investments of $9.9 billion, enrolled the highest number of Pell recipients, at 30 percent. Harvard, with its $43 billion in wealth, trailed behind at 19 percent.

Meanwhile, 36 percent of undergraduates in the U.S. received Pell Grants that year.

The Century Foundation found in 2013 that for every 14 wealthy students at the most elite and selective colleges, there was one low-income student. In short, the wealth gap not only creates inequities among universities, but also among the students they serve.

If you care about inequality, the solution is obvious: Affirmative action for poor students. In fact, now that I think about it, it’s time that schools’ student income distribution should have to match that of the population at large. Because equality!

ROLL CALL: Moderate Democrats Get Leadership’s Ear on 2016 Messaging. “Fundamentally, what we come down to is this: In order to win, you have to get people to vote for you who haven’t voted for you, and the only way to do that is with a message that resonates across a broad swath of voters.” So ixnay on the arxismay for now!

THIS SEEMS LIKE POOR STRATEGY: GOP turns to Tea Party to win trade powers for Obama.

House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) and GOP leaders have turned to some unlikely allies to rally support for a key trade bill: Tea-Party conservatives, including some prominent names from the raucous House Freedom Caucus.

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) recently tapped Rep. Tom McClintock to give the weekly GOP address, in which the conservative Californian declared: “Trade means prosperity.”

At the monthly “Conversations with Conservatives” event, Rep. Tim Huelskamp (R-Kansas) informed his colleagues he’s an unequivocal “yes” on granting President Obama so-called “fast-track” trade powers.

And both McClintock and Rep. Matt Salmon (R-Ariz.) huddled with reporters in a leadership office last week to talk up the virtues of legislation to help pass Obama’s trade agenda.

Salmon, typically a source of heartburn for leadership, denounced some of the conservative “Pat Buchananites” he runs with as “protectionists.” Those who warn Obama can’t be trusted on trade are making a weak argument, he said, because Congress has given Republican presidents the same authority.

Finally, Salmon pointedly challenged critics who’ve complained about the secrecy of the process to head down to a classified briefing room in the Capitol’s basement to read details of a major 12-nation trade deal, known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).

Lots of Tea Party types are free-trade in general. Almost none of them trust Obama or the GOP leadership. Getting Tea Party senators to back the deal will just weaken those senators with their Tea Party supporters.

Related: President Obama’s toughest fight on trade still lies ahead.

The White House and Republican leaders have a lot of work to do to push fast-track trade authority through the House.

The Senate approved a fast-track bill just before leaving for the Memorial Day recess, with supporters beating back Democratic efforts to delay the bill or undercut it through amendments.

But while the Senate managed to work out its procedural knots, the House outcome remains in doubt with proponents and opponents each claiming they can win the toughest legislative battle of the year.

The issue has made surprising allies of the president and GOP leaders, who back trade promotion authority (TPA) against progressives who worry about the effect on jobs and conservatives opposed to ceding more power to Obama.

So far, the best outcome is that it made a mockery of Doonesbury’s Republicans-Block-Everything-Obama-Tries cartoon this weekend. But, given that nobody reads Doonesbury anymore, that’s not much.

And I’ll repeate: The reason why Obama and the GOP leadership are having problems is that nobody trusts them. Perhaps if they tried being more trustworthy. . . .

JOY PULLMANN: The Civil Disobedience Charles Murray Wants Has Already Arrived.

The federal do-gooders who framed No Child Left Behind back in 2001 never envisioned that parents would take exception to their mandate that every child in grades three through eight (and once in high school) face annual math and reading tests. So the law is entirely silent on what happens if, as is happening now for the first time, thousands of parents across the country pull their kids in protest.

It’s hard to convey just how extraordinary this is. So here are a few snippets from just the past week’s news. In Germantown, Wisconsin, 62 percent of public-school students are sitting out tests. The district has been a hotbed of Common Core opposition, with a local school board among one of the handful nationwide to reject Common Core and decide to run with its own, higher-quality, curriculum. In Maine, “Cape Elizabeth saw 32 percent of its eighth-graders, 18 percent of its seventh-graders and 64 percent of its high school juniors opt out. There are many examples of high opt out rates across the state, but a reliable statewide tally isn’t yet available.” A bill to secure parents’ right to excuse their kids from mandatory tests recently passed the Delaware House 36 to 3 after a blaze of opt-outs left local schools scrambling. “A wide-ranging bill that would eliminate [national Common Core] tests in Ohio and limit state achievement tests to three hours per year passed the House 92-1 on Wednesday,” reported the Columbus Dispatch.

This is nowhere near a set of isolated incidents. In Washington state, every single junior at Nathan Hale High School (natch) refused state tests this spring. Somewhere around 200,000 children refused tests this spring in New York and, contrary to race-baiting from U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, substantial numbers of these defiant parents were not white rich people. FairTest, a lefty organization not keen on rigorous data, nevertheless keeps compiling an impressive number of similar news stories each week.

What does this mean? Does it matter? While the opt-out numbers are unprecedented in American history, they still represent a very small proportion of U.S. schoolkids. I think they do matter, and that they signal many Americans are ready for Murray’s civil disobedience project. Here’s why.

So should I buy tar, feathers, and pitchfork futures? Sounds hopeful!

Meanwhile, I had barely paid attention to this story, but it seems relevant: Oath Keepers standing down from Sugar Pine Mine, awaiting appeal decision. “Armed members of the Oath Keepers in Josephine county are standing down from the Sugar Pine Mine in Galice tonight. Last night the Interior Board of Land Appeals announced that they will grant the mine owner’s request to place BLM enforcement on hold. The stay will last until a decision is made whether or not the BLM holds surface rights to the mine, or decides whether those rights were grandfathered-in to the mine’s owners. The Oath Keepers tell NBC 5 News they’re happy the BLM is taking the right steps and they’re in the process of moving their security people away from the mine and down to the staging area.”

The Feds, apparently, really don’t want another Bundy Ranch confrontation, which is understandable since they lost that one.

ED DRISCOLL: Escaping The Shaming Spiral. “The first time one encounters the Internet outrage mob, the pressure can feel overwhelming. But when the virtual mob is perpetual, such tactics begin to lose their force.”