MARK RIPPETOE: Forget What You’ve Heard: 4 Reasons Why Full Squats Save Your Knees.

GAMIFICATION: How to effectively use Civ IV in higher education.

NO MARS FOR MUSLIMS: Fatwa against Mars trips.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Ways To Organize Your Garage. I have the Gladiator workbench, wall hooks, and storage cabinets. They work pretty well, although I’m due for a spring cleaning.

RICK MORAN: Breaking: Ukrainian Parliament Votes Out Yanukovich.

UPDATE: Walter Russell Mead: Springtime in Kiev, or Just Another Winter Storm?

THE ICE-COVERED GREAT LAKES, seen from space.

THAT’S BECAUSE THEY’RE AFRAID THEY’LL BE NEXT: Response From Latin American Leaders on Venezuelan Unrest Is Muted. Regardless of ideology, no ruling class is all that happy to see the bums thrown out. Because they’re bums, too.

SARAH HOYT: 20 Things You Might Not Know About Robert Heinlein, Part 1.

DEAN BURNETT: Time Travellers: Please Don’t Kill Hitler.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 289.

MEGAN MCARDLE: Venezuela and Chavez’s Deadly Endgame.

As the economy has deteriorated, the government has resorted to dubious stopgaps such as price controls. The price controls have produced more shortages, leading to more stopgaps . . . and more political repression to control complaints about the shortages and stopgaps. People made much of the fact that Chavez won elections — but less of the fact that he won them in the context of government policies that required television stations to broadcast hours of his speeches every week. And that he silenced stations that opposed him.

This has only continued to get worse under President Nicolas Maduro. Having shrunk the space for legitimate opposition so far, its only outlet seems to be the streets.

They should be dragging him through those streets, soon.

PUTIN’S ACHILLES’ HEEL:

Give Putin some credit: He has put together an impressive spectacle in Sochi. But while the world’s attention is focused on Kiev and the billion-dollar show in the Caucasus, Russia’s economy as a whole is slowly falling apart. Capital flight is accelerating, and the ruble has fallen by 8.1 percent this year and 1.7 percent in the past week alone. Only the Argentinian peso is doing worse.

Russia was also forced to cancel three debt auctions in four weeks due to weak demand and high yields. The markets have cast a skeptical eye on Putin’s policies, particularly his decision to pledge $15 billion in aid to Ukraine so soon after dropping nearly three times that amount on Sochi.

If the Euros want to rein him in, they should start fracking to undercut his natural-gas leverage, and income.

IN ROME, MARCHING IN SYMPATHY WITH VENEZUELANS: Reader Eric Cowperthwaite emails: “I’m in Rome right now. And I’m sitting at a cafe in front of the Pantheon, watching a huge protest of several hundred people for liberty and democracy in Venezuela. Too bad American people and media are ignoring Venezuela.”

GOODBYE: The Go-To Congresswoman on Gun Control Packs It In. Even the New York Times’ editorial page can’t make her career sound like a success. Which is a good thing for freedom.

SPENGLER: Ukraine Should Vote On Partition.

IRS SCANDAL UPDATE: The Hill: House Targets IRS With Taxpayer Protection Bills.

Related: Echoes Of The IRS In The FCC Snooping Scandal.

HOWARD NEMEROV: E.J. Dionne’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Fantasies; Junk science and hyperbole from the Washington Post writer. It doesn’t even matter to folks like Dionne if “Stand Your Ground” doesn’t mean what they think it does, or if it doesn’t actually play a role in controversial trials they follow — it’s just a symbol for stuff they fear and dislike.

JAMES TARANTO: What’s on Second? The Ninth. Gun rights advance in California.

Before concluding that the “good cause” policy impermissibly burdened Peruta’s Second Amendment right, the judges undertook an extensive historical inquiry to determine that the Second Amendment does indeed protect the right to carry guns outside the home. Other appeals courts, notably the Seventh Circuit, have reached the same conclusion, but the Supreme Court hasn’t yet decided the question. Its two recent Second Amendment landmarks, District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), both dealt with the right to keep arms in one’s own home. It’s likely that a case involving the right to bear arms will eventually reach the high court.

Peruta would make a good test case, because it would allow the justices to establish that right without getting into the weeds of what restrictions on it would be reasonable. The plaintiffs do not challenge the requirements of a training course and “good moral character.” The former is unobjectionable and is required by many states with permissive “shall issue” carry policies. The latter could be applied in questionable ways–would California deny a carry permit to Bill Clinton?–but it doesn’t seem unreasonable on its face.

By contrast, the requirement for “good cause,” at least as interpreted by San Diego County, is flagrantly unreasonable. By stipulating that an applicant must “distinguish” himself “from the mainstream”–that ordinary people need not apply–the county transmutes a right into a privilege or dispensation.

Indeed.

POLITICO: Efforts To Drum Up A Scott Walker Scandal Yield A Yawn. But reader Jeffrey Kirshner notes the guess-the-party Politico stylebook:

Anthony Weiner: “The former congressman”
Rep. Chris Lee: “married New York Republican”
Mark Sanford: “The Republican”

He comments: “You can’t make this stuff up.” Sadly, you don’t have to.

UPDATE: Politico has edited the piece.

PETER BERKOWITZ: How to Improve Our Colleges and Universities.

Liberal education is in decline. And professors and administrators at our best liberal arts colleges are hastening its demise.

Much has been written about liberal education’s skyrocketing costs, its failure to provide students with the knowledge and intellectual skills they need to succeed in a competitive globalized economy, and its burdening of students with massive debt. But these big problems are only part of the story. . . .

Given several recent studies, there is reason to believe America is being short-changed by its colleges and universities.

Last year the National Association of Scholars published “What Does Bowdoin Teach? How a Contemporary Liberal Arts College Shapes Students”; Harvard University issued “The Teaching of the Arts and Humanities at Harvard College: Mapping the Future”; and, acting on a request from Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences produced “The Heart of the Matter.”

Together they paint a disquieting picture of general curricula without focus or form; humanities disciplines suffering plunging enrollments; a self-perpetuating left-liberal campus orthodoxy entrenched by courses offered and not offered, visiting speakers chosen and not chosen, and written and unwritten speech codes; along with disciplinary procedures that treat due process as a crude impediment to justice.

Gathering and synthesizing pertinent data from publicly available sources including academic catalogues, institutional websites, and media accounts, a cogent new report from the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, “Education or Reputation: A Look at America’s Top-Ranked Liberal Arts Colleges,” confirms the dire findings. The report focuses on the “Top 25” small residential liberal arts colleges as determined by U.S. News & World Report (several ties brought the total number of colleges counted in the Top 25 to 29).

Our top-ranked liberal arts colleges have eviscerated the core curriculum. Of the Top 25, ACTA reports, “only two require an economics course. Only three require a survey in U.S. history. Only five require a survey course in literature.” Amherst College, Grinnell College, Hamilton College, Middlebury College, and Vassar College have open curricula with no requirements. Bates College, Bowdoin College, Haverford College, Oberlin College, Smith College, Swarthmore College, Wesleyan University, and Williams College do not require undergraduates to study literature, American history, the principles of American politics, or economics.

Our top-ranked liberal arts colleges, while aggressively promoting multiculturism, have incongruously demoted language study. The majority of them do not require students to achieve even intermediate-level proficiency—the equivalent of three college semesters of study—in a foreign language.

Our top-ranked liberal arts colleges have discouraged the free exchange of ideas and free inquiry. According to a study by the redoubtable Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, incorporated by ACTA into its report, all of the top liberal arts colleges seriously impair freedom of speech.

It’s like they’re more about fleecing and indoctrinating students than about educating them.

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: ObamaCare Is Unfixable. Don’t Try To “Mend” It, Just End It.

STEPHEN GREEN: Wargaming Control Of The Senate.

RICHARD VEDDER ON HIGHER EDUCATION’S WEALTH INEQUALITY:

The eight Ivy League schools have less than 1 percent of U.S. college students but almost 17 percent of all endowment money. The top 3 percent of schools ranked by endowment size have more than half the funds. Five schools (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford University and one public institution, the University of Texas) had endowment increases last year of more than $1 billion, exceeding the total endowment of more than 90 percent of the schools (including virtually all the larger ones) publicly disclosing information.

Do rich schools use their wealth to promote upward economic mobility by disproportionately accepting low-income students? No — just the opposite. I took the 10 highest-endowed schools and looked at the percentage of students receiving Pell Grants, then compared that with the 10 lowest-endowed schools in a survey by the National Association of College and University Business Officers.

Most Pell Grant students come from below-average-income households. In the highly endowed schools, a median of 16 percent of students received Pells, compared with 59 percent at the lowest-endowed institutions.

A student graduating from Yale or Princeton, with their roughly $2 million endowments per student, has a ticket to a well-paying job, while one graduating from the College of St. Joseph in Vermont, with its $29,000 endowment per student, does not. Only 12 percent of the Yale and Princeton students have Pells, compared with 71 percent at St. Joseph.

Redistribute the wealth!

FROM SARAH HOYT AND CHARLIE MARTIN: Book Plug Friday!