BLOWBACK: Anti-Israel academic boycott group’s tax-exempt status challenged: Academic boycott not in furtherance of American Studies Association’s exempt purpose and violates public policy. They’d have been better off not bringing themselves to Prof. Jacobson’s attention.

IT’S COMFY IN THEIR BUBBLE: MLA Criticized for Denying Press Pass to ‘Daily Caller.’

WAR ON MEN: Campus Rape Tribunals Are Out of Control.

AT AMAZON, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Also, in Beauty Supplies & Tools.

Plus, Warehouse Deals in Sporting Goods.

ELIOT SPITZER IS BACK: “Mom there’s an old guy in the Jacuzzi with this girl and she’s topless and she’s got her legs wrapped around him.”

52 THINGS, 52 WEEKS: The Polar Bear Plunge. You won’t find me doing that.

I THINK THIS IS RIGHT: Rush to Accept Melissa Harris-Perry Apology Misses Chance to Confront Left on Race-Baiting. It’s nice that Romney was gracious, but he should have made it a teachable moment. That he failed to do so is a symptom of why he lost.

JOHN HINDERAKER: Rachel Maddow Is Crazy, Too. “So Rachel Maddow’s entire segment was one big lie. Her central premise, that the Florida welfare statute was an initiative of the Koch brothers, was false, and she knew it. She made the whole thing up to fool the low-IQ viewers who form MSNBC’s base. But the story gets even worse.”

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Chicago Ban on Gun Sales Within City Struck Down by Judge.

UPDATE: More here.

SARAH HOYT DRAWS LESSONS from the life of Henry VIII.

THIS IS CUTE: A Mom And Her Son Blow Bubbles In The Freezing Cold. They Never Expected It To Look So Amazing.

DON’T WANT YOUR LAPTOP TAMPERED WITH? Use Glitter Nail Polish.

Short of keeping a machine with you 24/7, there is little you can do to be absolutely sure these things don’t happen, the researchers said. If there is a serious question, they advise against traveling with sensitive data and wiping or simply discarding potentially compromised devices upon returning home. But those extreme measures don’t help you while you’re actually on the road, making it critical to know if your machine has been compromised.

Some travelers affix tamper-proof seals over ports or chassis screws. But these seals can in fact be replicated or opened cleanly in minutes by anyone with even minimal training, Michaud and Lackey said. They instead advise borrowing a technique from astronomers called blink comparison. Here’s where the glitter comes in.

The idea is to create a seal that is impossible to copy. Glitter nail polish, once applied, has what effectively is a random pattern. Once painted over screws or onto stickers placed over ports, it is difficult to replicate once broken. However, reapplication of a similar-looking blob (or paint stripe, or crappy sticker) might be enough to fool the human eye. To be sure, the experts recommend taking a picture of the laptop with the seals applied before leaving it alone, taking another photo upon returning and using a software program to shift rapidly between the two images to compare them. Even very small differences – a screw that is in a very slightly different position, or glitter nail polish that has a very slightly different pattern of sparkle – will be evident. Astronomers use this technique to detect small changes in the night sky.

Me, I have a hidden partition full of heavily encrypted cat gifs, just to waste their time.

SCIENCE:

A study published in the latest issue of the academic journal Applied Economics Letters took on many of the claims made regularly by advocates of stricter gun laws. The study determined that nearly every claim made in support of stronger restrictions on gun ownership is not supported by an exhaustive analysis of crime statistics.

But don’t expect the science-deniers to shut up.

JIM HOFT IS IN SURGERY. Get well soon, Jim.

WELL, THAT WAS ALWAYS THE PLAN: “Under Obamacare, I went from being a successful, self-sustaining small businessman,” Zack told me, disdainfully, “to now signing my kids up as dependents of the state.”

NEWS YOU CAN USE: What College Presidents Do While Students Are Away on Winter Break.

AT AMAZON, Deals Galore in Men’s Sweaters.

Also, up to 70% off on headphones and earphones.

Plus, Boston Legal Seasons 1-5 Complete Collection.

VIDEO: I talk about my new book on WSJ TV.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Consider Alternative Schooling.

SO OBAMA RAN ON KEEPING YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE, NET SPENDING CUTS, AND FIXING IRAQ. HOW’S THAT GOING? How Al Qaeda Terrorized Its Way Back in Iraq: As the country edges closer to civil war, much of the blame goes to Prime Minister Maliki—and the White House.

The climactic battles of the American War in Iraq were fought in Anbar Province, with U.S. forces at great cost retaking the city of Fallujah at the end of 2004 and Ramadi, the provincial capital, in 2006-07. The latter success was sparked by an unlikely alliance with tribal fighters that turned around what had been a losing war effort and made possible the success of what became known as “the surge.” By 2009, violence had fallen more than 90%, creating an unexpected opportunity to build a stable, democratic and prosperous country in the heart of the Middle East.

It is now obvious that this opportunity has been squandered, with tragic consequences for the entire region. In recent days the Iraqi army appears to have been pushed, at least temporarily, out of Fallujah and Ramadi by al Qaeda in Iraq militants. A battle is raging for control of Anbar Province with some tribal fighters supporting the government and others AQI. Mosul, the major city of northern Iraq and a longtime hotbed of AQI activity, could be next to fall. If it does, AQI would gain effective control of the Sunni Triangle, an area north and west of Baghdad the size of New England.

AQI’s control would stretch beyond the Sunni Triangle because its offshoot, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, dominates a significant portion of Syrian territory across the border. This creates the potential for a new nightmare: an al Qaeda state incorporating northern Syria and western Iraq.

How’s that Smart Diplomacy^TM working out?

IN A STAY ISSUED BY UNANIMOUS VOTE, Supreme Court Blocks Gay Marriage In Utah. Is Justice Sotomayor going to be named America’s second “white Hispanic?”

HOW FAR WE HAVE COME: Tech Time Warp of the Week: The World’s First Hard Drive, 1956. “IBM unleashed the world’s first computer hard disk drive in 1956. It was bigger than a refrigerator. It weighed more than a ton. And it looked kinda like one of those massive cylindrical air conditioning units that used to sit outside your grade school cafeteria. . . . The RAMAC hard drive could hold roughly 5 MB of data, the equivalent of an MP3 music file. That may seem puny, but in the 50s, it was enormous.”

READER BOOK PLUG: Lauren Camp’s Nkosi’s Little Warriors, a novel about child soldiers in Africa.

CONTACT LENSES that project images on your eyeballs.

FROM NICK GILLESPIE, some thoughts on The New School.

Which can be purchased here, in either hardcover or Kindle versions.

Also, thoughts from Mark Tapscott. And here’s a blog review from an English professor.