CHANGE? Fiat Chrysler and Renault pursue $35 billion merger to combat car industry upheaval.

Fiat Chrysler pitched a finely balanced merger of equals to Renault on Monday to tackle the costs of far-reaching technological and regulatory changes by creating the world’s third-biggest automaker.

If it goes ahead, the $35 billion-plus tie-up would alter the landscape for rivals including General Motors and Peugeot maker PSA Group, which recently held inconclusive talks with Fiat Chrysler (FCA), and could spur more deals.

Renault said it was studying the proposal from Italian-American FCA with interest, and considered it friendly.

I’m surprised by the “merger of equals” language. As Daimler-Benz and Chrysler merged more than 20 years ago, it was sold as a “marriage of equals,” but in reality Stuttgart ran the show.

ANALYSIS: TRUE. A ‘Digital Geneva Convention’ Won’t Stop Cyber-Terrorism.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The Corruption of the College Board: How Bill Gates Destroyed The SAT. “After nearly a century of trying to measure intelligence, instead of class, the SAT will collude in a college admission system where class overwhelms merit to a degree unseen since 18th century Harvard. . . . The downfall of the College Board began when it picked David Coleman, a Gates alumnus who had played a significant role in writing Common Core standards, as its new president. Coleman, a Rhodes Scholar, the son of a Bennington College president and New School dean, had degrees from Yale, Cambridge and Oxford. By the age of 25, he was working at McKinsey as an educational consultant. The rest of the story was an escalator ride through the consulting industry that destroyed education.”

NOW DO IT HERE: Millennials ‘Make Farming Sexy’ in Africa, Where Tilling the Soil Once Meant Shame. Actually, waiting to board my flight from O’Hare to Knoxville I chatted with a just-graduated Nebraska student from Pawnee City. Her boyfriend is a farmer, and she seemed to think he was pretty sexy.

TORONTO CITY HALL WORRIES ABOUT THE “EPIDEMIC” OF MILLENNIALS WITH COFFEE CUPS:

Have you heard about the latest epidemic that the City of Toronto has to deal with?

No, it’s not a measles outbreak or a strange new infectious disease, it is worse than that.

People — specifically millennials — walking up and down the streets with coffee cups.

If you haven’t noticed the “epidemic,” Ward 8 Councillor Mike Colle certainly has.

“You know, I think it’s really an epidemic of these people wandering our streets with these coffee cups,” Colle told the city’s Infrastructure and Environment Committee.

As with San Francisco, New York, and London, it’s awesome to see a city solve all of the really big problems — crime, disease, terrorism, the homeless, drugs — to, at long last, arrive at the fine-tuning phase of creating utopia.

(Via Small Dead Animals.)

BUT OF COURSE: A Professor Who Argues Against Multicultural Ideology and for Western Exceptionalism Now Fears for His Job.

WHAT AMERICAN “SOCIAL DEMOCRATS” LEAVE OUT WHEN THEY TALK ABOUT DENMARK: “The Danish Social Democratic Party has adopted a new and more restrictive immigration policy. It has already gained much attention in international media and it has been the basis of several meetings among social-democratic parties across Europe.”

JOEL KOTKIN: Making Life Worse: The Flaws of Green Mandates.

“Saving the planet” should be an unbeatable political slogan. Yet consistently the imagined “green wave” mindlessly embraced by most of the media continues to fall short, as evidenced by recent elections in Canada and Australia, as well as across much of Europe.

These results reflect climate scientist Roger Pielke’s 2010 notion of “the iron law of climate policy.” Pielke noted that support for reducing greenhouse emissions is limited by the amount of sacrifice demanded. “People will pay some amount for climate goals,” he noted, “but only so much.” At $80 a year per household, he suggested, polls found most people would support climate measures but raise it to $770 annually and support drops below ten percent. . . .

Greens can only succeed only if they abandon their dystopian scenario for humanity. This trend was epitomized by the 1970s predictions of Paul Ehrlich about an impending “population bomb,” that would lead to mass starvation on a planetary scale. Needless to say this didn’t occur. Over the last thirty years some have predicted the North Pole ice would all but disappear but this apocalypse has not remotely occurred.

Sadly, such gross errors have not led a moment’s hesitation about making ever more far out assertions. It seems that every decade the planet has five or ten years left if draconian measures are not taken. Just this year a writer for the New Yorker predicted the familiar scenario of a “famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us,” adding suggestions that to meet this challenge may require displacing our democracy with an enlightened rule from above.

The predicted apocalypses change, but the solutions are always the same. Meanwhile, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

THE INESCAPABLE LAW OF UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES:  Intention and Incentive.

IF LIMITED EXPOSURE MEANS LESS HAIR SNIFFING AND FEWER LITTLE GIRLS FELT UP, I’M FOR IT:  Where’s Joe?.

THEM ASIANS AND THEIR…. SPINS THE WHEEL… WHITE PRIVILEGE:  Asians as Beneficiaries of White Privilege.

WHEN CROCODILES CRY:  Tears of the Times.

THERE IS MY SHOCKED FACE AGAIN:  Progressives collude to prevent investigation of attempted coup.

WELL, WHAT CAN YOU EXPECT FROM THE WAY THEY’RE TRAINED:  NYC teachers allegedly told to treat black students as ‘victims’, ‘punish’ whites.

FOR ZOMBIES:  Slurring Pelosi Is Now A “Fashion Icon”.

ALWAYS:  Remember Them and Salute Them This Memorial Day.

THIS IS MY SHOCKED FACE:  D-Day History Not Well Known To Students.

AS IS THIS:  The Lieutenant Wouldn’t Like It.

THIS IS STILL TRUE:  Something to Live And Die For.

SPACE: Everything you need to know about Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket.

A-HA: Coooool: Korean Cafe Designed To Look Like A 2-D Black And White Pen Drawing. Seems familiar, somehow.

COMING OUT TOMORROW AND IT’S ALREADY A #1 BESTSELLER!

It is, in fact, designed to be short enough to read on an average airline flight. And it’s in pretty good company on the media and politics list, at #7 with Victor Davis Hanson just below.

ROSS DOUTHAT: How Liberalism Loses: An inflexible agenda and a global retreat.

In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.

The global fade of liberalism, in other words, appears to be continuing. Right-wing populism struggles to govern effectively, but it clearly has a durable political appeal — which, as Tyler Cowen points out in a Bloomberg column, has not yet been counteracted by the new socialism, the new new left.

The global context is useful for thinking about how American liberals understand their own situation. Since the shock of Donald Trump’s election, many liberals have decided that their own coalition is the real American majority, victimized by un-democratic institutions and an anti-democratic G.O.P. . . .

If you want to put climate change at the center of liberal politics, for instance, then you’ll keep losing voters in the Rust Belt, just as liberal parties have lost similar voters in Europe and Australia. In which case you would need to reassure some other group, be it suburban evangelicals or libertarians, that you’re willing to compromise on the issues that keep them from voting Democratic.

Alternatively, if you want to make crushing religious conservatives your mission, then you need to woo secular populists on guns or immigration, or peel off more of the tax-sensitive upper middle class by not going full socialist.

But the liberal impulse at the moment, Buttigiegian as well as Ocasio-Cortezan, is to insist that liberalism is a seamless garment, an indivisible agenda that need not be compromised on any front. And instead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.

They’d rather feel like heroes than win people over. That’s because . . . well, it’s because they’re children.

Related:

DON’T GET COCKY, KID: 3 forecast modelers predict Trump will win in 2020.