FINALISTS IN THE POPULAR MECHANICS wood-stove design competition.

HELPFUL ADVICE: Don’t Fire An Employee And Leave Them In Charge Of The Corporate Twitter Account.

SO I HEAR: “Sometimes it’s easier coming out gay to Republicans than it is coming out Republican to gays.”

EVE TUSHNET: The End of Premarital Sex? Hey, you can’t be premarital unless there’s going to be a “marital” someday.

CHARLIE MARTIN: Thirteen Weeks: Week 13 — in Which We Speculate.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: National Greatness Democrats In Silicon Valley.

Google’s Eric Schmidt has a new book coming out (co-authored by former State Department whiz-kid Jared Cohen), and it looks like it will be quite provocative. . . .

Others have pointed out how over time, Silicon Valley has rediscovered the state. Companies that once tried to fly below the radar are now much more aware of the importance of government policy for their industry. This runs very much counter to the popular idea that in the modern world, multinational corporations will lose a sense of connection to their ‘home country’. Google, for one, seems to be getting more patriotic lately.

This has implications for the politics of American defense policy, and foreign policy generally. Silicon Valley is a major donor to Democrats, and it seems to be moving toward an understanding of the importance of a strong and outward looking America. Historically, cutting edge corporations have supported the rise of American power partly as a way of assuring that U.S. foreign policy and power would support their corporate agendas and help them get fair treatment in a world where foreign corporations enjoyed clear backing from their governments. It’s beginning to look as if Silicon Valley is heading down this well-trodden trail. This suggests a revival of a strong national defense and national greatness lobby in the Democratic Party, especially if we reflect on the degree to which defense spending in the future is likely to intersect with the kinds of products Silicon Valley makes.

Interesting times ahead.

Indeed.

ED DRISCOLL: Navy SEAL who wrote American Sniper Murdered at Charity Event in Texas.

SELECTION AND MARKDOWNS AT the Amazon Shoe Store.

Also, today only: LifeSpan Fitness TR3000i Folding Treadmill, $1199.99 (40% off).

And, for about the next 4 hours or so, Cuisinart Chef’s Classic Stainless 17-Piece Cookware Set, $169.99 (75% off). It’s a “lightning deal,” so jump on it or miss it.

GIVEN THEIR SUPERIOR PERFORMANCE, GETTING OUT OF THESE STOCKS FOR POLITICAL REASONS LOOKS LIKE A BREACH OF FIDUCIARY DUTY: Rahm Emanuel and Grandstanding over Guns.

Emulating New York and California, two deep-blue states with mammoth unfunded pension liabilities, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) has hectored a $5 billion pension fund into divesting its holdings in companies that manufacture firearms. . . .

Chicago’s current and retired public employees might wish the city had invested more in both companies. Barack Obama, for whom Emanuel was chief of staff, has become a potent gun salesman because of suspicions that he wants to make gun ownership more difficult. Since he was inaugurated four years ago, there have been 65 million requests for background checks of gun purchasers. Four years ago, the price of Smith & Wesson stock was $2.45. Last week it was $8.76, up 258 percent. Four years ago, the price of Sturm Ruger stock was $6.46. Last week it was $51.09, up 691 percent. The Wall Street Journal reports that even before “a $1.2 billion balloon payment for pensions comes due” in 2015, “Chicago’s pension funds, which are projected to run dry by the end of the decade, are scraping the bottoms of their barrels.”

I mean, seriously.

I’M BEGINNING TO THINK THAT PUTTING YOUR KIDS IN PUBLIC SCHOOL IS PARENTAL MALPRACTICE: High-school freshman suspended for having a picture of a gun. Thoughtcrime! But wait, there’s more:

This incident is the latest in a growing line of extraordinarily strong reactions by school officials to things students have brought to school — or talked about bringing to school — that are not anything like real guns.

At D. Newlin Fell School in Philadelphia, school officials reportedly yelled at a student and then searched her in front of her class after she was found with a paper gun her grandfather had made for her. (RELATED: Paper gun causes panic)

In rural Pennsylvania, a kindergarten girl was suspended for making a “terroristic threat” after she told another girl that she planned to shoot her with a pink Hello Kitty toy gun that bombards targets with soapy bubbles.

At Roscoe R. Nix Elementary School in Maryland, a six-year-old boy was suspended for making the universal kid sign for a gun, pointing at another student and saying “pow.” That boy’s suspension was later lifted and his name cleared. (RELATED: Pow! You’re suspended, kid)

In Sumter, South Carolina, a six-year-old girl was expelled for bringing a clear plastic Airsoft gun that shoots plastic pellet to class for show-and-tell. The expulsion was later revoked.

Remember, these are the people who claim that they teach critical thinking.

MATT YGLESIAS MAKES A SHOCKING DISCOVERY: Starting a Business Is a Huge Pain: I’ve been to three offices, filed five forms, spent $200, lost a day of work—and I’m not even close to getting the simple license I need.

As reader Darrin Moore emails, “America’s economy isn’t failing because there are too many people trying hard to make a profit, it’s failing because the government makes it too hard for people to make a profit.”

UPDATE: IowaHawk: “Perhaps instead of starting a small business, young Matt should have taken the time-honored liberal approach and started a BIG business. Those rules are simpler: (1) come up with idiotic idea, (2) give large wads of cash to a politician, (3) reap ginormormous government contract. Bob Menendez is waiting to take your call, Matt.”

MORE THOUGHTS ON prosecutorial power and limits thereon. We do seem to have gotten a conversation started.

“THIS CANNOT POSSIBLY BE A GOOD SIGN FOR HHS:” Administration Extends Obamacare Deadline Yet Again.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Pick A Wife If You Want To Have Kids.

Related: A review of Suzanne Venker’s How To Choose A Husband.

SPIN: White House blames Sandy, spending cuts as economy shrinks. It’s always somebody else’s fault.

WELL, GOOD: Forbes: NRA Winning The Influence Battle Over Gun Control. It’s always nice to see a civil rights organization having some success in protecting constitutional liberties.

HIGHER EDUCATION UPDATE: Harvard Cheating Scandal Ends In Dozens Of Forced Withdrawals.

TYING IT ALL TOGETHER: Aaron Swartz Died For Piers Morgan’s Sins.

WHERE HAS ALL THE AMMO GONE? Stacked in basements everywhere.

You might try my former students’ online ammo dealership, LuckyGunner.com. The good news is, you always know exactly what they’ve got in stock.

UPDATE: Say, perhaps all this gun-control sabre-rattling is really just a cleverly underhanded effort to get Americans as armed-up as possible before the alien invasion. If so, it’s succeeding brilliantly! Much more than actual government encouragement to buy guns would, I suspect. . . .

OPPOSING GUN CONTROL EFFORTS WITH A Day Of Resistance. Scheduled for February 23.

THOUGHTS ON THE DOWNSIZING OF LEGAL EDUCATION. “In my view, 52,000 is far too many law students and even 40,000 is too many. The ‘right’ number of law students must surely be related to the job market.”

Well, this whole branching out into dealing Meth approach to the legal job market isn’t working out. But high level legal education does still seem effective at breeding hubris: “What emerges from accounts of his fellow drug dealers, his customers and his own words, is of a drug dealer who believed that because of his intellectual ability, he was able to outwit law enforcement and avoid detection.”

UPDATE: From the comments to the first link:

I think law schools do themselves a disservice by continuing to pay undue attention to U.S. News, when it is obvious that other sources of information weigh at least as heavily in the minds of prospective law students – AutoAdmit, Top-Law-Schools.com, Above the Law, etc., etc. Those sources are telling them to focus on two things: the amount of indebtedness that they are likely to incur, and the rate at which graduates have recently found full-time, JD-required employment from those schools.

The University of Minnesota is a law school traditionally well-regarded by U.S. News, landing in their top 25. In terms of employment outcomes for the class of 2011, it falls below Samford University and South Texas School of Law and just barely above Touro, all of these allegedly “third-tier” institutions. Maybe we can start by jettisoning the notion that rankings mean anything, if they don’t convey what chance a graduate has of practicing law upon graduation.

Good point!

AT AMAZON, markdowns and recommendations on Valentine’s Day gifts.

Also, up to 70% off on Valentine’s Day jewelry.

MICHAEL WALSH: A Hill To Fight On — Not a Desk to Die Under. “That’s why the battle over firearms — which as far as the Left is concerned has only one true objective, which is the complete abolition and confiscation of guns in civilian hands — is so important, because it’s a fight conservatives can actually win. And, in winning, can make many new friends among hitherto reflexive Democrat voters. . . . Just look at the disgraceful video from the DHS above.”

WELL, TO BE FAIR, WHAT HAS THE LAW DONE FOR THEM, LATELY? Mexico’s Masked Vigilantes Defy Drug Gangs—And the Law.

A dozen villages in the area have risen up in armed revolt against local drug traffickers that have terrorized the region and a government that residents say is incapable of protecting them from organized crime.

The villages in the hilly southern Mexican state of Guerrero now forbid the Mexican army and state and federal police from entering. Ragtag militias carrying a motley arsenal of machetes, old hunting rifles and the occasional AR-15 semiautomatic rifle control the towns. Strangers aren’t allowed entry. There is a 10 p.m. curfew. More than 50 prisoners, accused of being in drug gangs, sit in makeshift jails. Their fates hinge on public trials that began Thursday when the accused were arraigned before villagers, who will act as judge and jury.

Crime is way down—for the moment, at least. Residents say kidnapping ceased when the militias took charge, as did the extortions that had become the scourge of businessmen and farmers alike. The leader of one militia group, who uses the code name G-1 but was identified by his compatriots as Gonzalo Torres, puts it this way: “We brought order back to a place where there had been chaos. We were able to do in 15 days what the government was not able to do in years.”

It’s not as pretty as the orderly function of a bourgeois liberal society. But that wasn’t among the options. . . .

UPDATE: A reader emails: “A miltia providing for the security of a free state? In the 21st century? But I was told that was crazy NRA talk.”