SPENGLER: UKRAINE IS HOPELESS, BUT NOT SERIOUS.

There isn’t going to be a war over Ukraine. There isn’t even going to be a crisis over Ukraine. We will perform our ritual war-dance and excoriate the Evil Emperor, and the result would be the same if we had sung “100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall” on a road trip to Kalamazoo. Worry about something really scary, like Iran.

Ukraine isn’t a country: it’s a Frankenstein monster composed of pieces of dead empires, stitched together by Stalin. It has never had a government in the Western sense of the term after the collapse of the Soviet Union gave it independence, just the equivalent of the family offices for one predatory oligarch after another–including the “Gas Princess,” Yulia Tymoshenko. It has a per capital income of $3,300 per year, about the same as Egypt and Syria, and less than a tenth of the European average. The whole market capitalization of its stock exchange is worth less than the Disney Company. It’s a basket case that claims to need $35 billion to survive the next two years. Money talks and bullshit walks. Who wants to ask the American taxpayer for $35 billion for Ukraine, one of the most corrupt economies on earth? How about $5 billion? Secretary of State Kerry is talking about $1 billion in loan guarantees, and the Europeans are talking a similar amount. That’s not diplomacy. It’s a clown show.

It’s clown shows all the way down.

WHY DO MEN WANT TO BE SMARTER THAN THEIR WOMEN? Well, evolutionary psychology would say that a man’s greatest risk is being stuck raising a kid that isn’t his; thus, you don’t want a woman who’s smarter because she’s more likely to successfully cheat on you.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student Loans Are Ruining Your Life. Now They’re Ruining the Economy, Too: American students are well over $1 trillion in debt, and it’s starting to hurt everyone, economists say

GAIL COLLINS: “The gay rights movement has been having some remarkable success lately. Why do abortion rights keep losing ground?”

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Stem Cells: Billionaire claims he is getting younger.

Bahamas resident Peter Nygard says he is receiving stem cell therapy and that a study from the University of Miami suggests he is getting younger, the Bahamas Tribune reports. “They are looking at me, and my markers have shown exactly that I have been actually reversing my ageing and getting younger,” the 70-year-old says.

He adds: “I am taking perhaps more stem cell treatment than anybody else in the world. I have been doing it for four years now, so I am sort of a testimonial that this stem cell really works.”

Faster, please.

HIGHER EDUCATION LESSONS from Father Guido Sarducci.

If you don’t recognize the name, Father Guido was the “Saturday Night Live” persona of comedian Don Novello — a chain-smoking, wisecracking, ribald priest the real Catholic Church would defrock in a New York minute. One classic routine was the five-minute university, a faux moneymaking scheme in which Father Guido taught in five minutes all that an average college student remembers five years after graduating. All of economics, for instance, is reduced to the phrase “supply and demand.”

I often think of that skit when planning my classes.

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Plus, deals on Bestselling Products, updated every hour.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? Doug McKelway: Is There A Double Standard For Political Gaffes?

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: An inconvenient child: My six-year-old son was suspended as a danger to others. His crime? A disability you could find in any classroom.

Within two hours of the inspector informing the principal that our family was cleared, she abruptly changed tack. Instead of accusing us of abusing our son, she now accused our son of sexually assaulting other children. The principal called me at work shortly after lunch that day and told me to collect my son. . . .

Looking back, the most charitable interpretation I can put on the whole experience is that maybe when large bureaucracies start moving in one direction, they reach a point when they can no longer resist their own momentum. Someone at the school made a bad judgment about our son, the system clanked into motion and from then on there was no stopping it. It certainly felt like we were caught in a machine that had no guilt about telling lies, no inhibitions about destroying children and families. And as far as we could see, there was no reason for any of it other than carelessness and arrogance and, in the end, self-protection. It served no function except, perhaps, to save the district some money on movement therapy. When the judge asked what could possibly justify the open-ended suspension of a first-grader from school, the district declared that our son presented ‘a danger to others’ – including a danger to the adults at the school. By this stage, our son was six years and eight months old.

Is sending your kids to public school parental malpractice?

TRAIN WRECK: Metaphor alert: Minnesota light rail train runs off tracks after Obama lauds it in visit.

SO WHERE IS EVERYBODY? 715 Newly Verified Planets More Than Triples the Number of Confirmed Kepler Planets.

CANNONBALLS MADE OF ICE.

COULDN’T HE MOVE HIS TEE TIME? Obama Skips National Security Meeting on Russian Invasion of Ukraine.

THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE COLLEGE OF LAW came in 34th in this study of placing grads at big law firms, somewhat better than its placement in the U.S. News rankings but perhaps more relevant to many applicants. Honestly, I think we could do better than that, except that so many of our students have no interest in BigLaw. I can’t say they’re wrong about that.

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WHO COULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING? NSA surveillance hurting tech firms’ business.

SPYING: How to turn a phone into a covert bugging device? Infect the printer.

NEWS FROM THE I.P. WARS: Label Threatening Larry Lessig With Insane Infringement Claim Over Fair Use Video Caves In, Pays Up.

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Donald Algeo, Steel City Investigations.

IT’S BECAUSE HOLLYWOOD PEOPLE AND JOURNALISTS AREN’T THE MOST SOCIALLY ADEPT, AND RESENT THAT: Pop Culture’s War On Fraternities.

POPULAR MECHANICS: Everything You Need to Know About LED Light Bulbs: Feeling lost in the lightbulb aisle now that those beloved incandescents are disappearing? We’re here to help.

Or, you could — for a little while longer — stock up on the old bulbs.

DAVE KOPEL, speaking at the Tennessee Law Review symposium, New Frontiers In The Second Amendment.

Also on the panel, Brannon Denning, Jordan Pratt, and Josh Blackman.

UPDATE: Yes, there’ll be video online, later.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 296.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Partitioning California Not As Crazy As It Sounds:

These are legitimate concerns, but we don’t think they’re enough to condemn the idea to the trash heap. For one, autonomy from the Bay Area cash cow might not be quite the disaster for California’s poorer regions that the Economist assumes; it’s primarily in poor regions that vast amounts of shale energy remains untapped. The costs of separation from the Bay Area tax spigot might be offset by the benefits of separation from Bay Area voters who insist that a wealth of brown jobs (as in North Dakota) aren’t worth the environmental threats of fracking.

No doubt water, pension liabilities and Democrats (who would let this happen over their dead bodies) pose seemingly insurmountable obstacles to partition. But this is a reform movement we hope gains steam over time. The competing interests and priorities of California’s unmanageable, schismatic population are bad for democracy and bad for Californians.

Indeed.