WHY I STILL HAVE FAITH IN THE NEXT GENERATION: That’s got to hurt! Student designs £85 machine gun that fires 14 RUBBER BANDS a second.

REASON: Lights Out For America’s Favorite Light Bulb. The hotel room I’m staying in actually has incandescent bulbs in the lamps. I regard that as an upscale feature, these days . . .

But there’s still (barely) time to stock up!

I SAY, DECLARE VICTORY AND GET OUT: Robert Rector: How The War On Poverty Was Lost.

On Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson used his State of the Union address to announce an ambitious government undertaking. “This administration today, here and now,” he thundered, “declares unconditional war on poverty in America.”

Fifty years later, we’re losing that war. Fifteen percent of Americans still live in poverty, according to the official census poverty report for 2012, unchanged since the mid-1960s. Liberals argue that we aren’t spending enough money on poverty-fighting programs, but that’s not the problem. In reality, we’re losing the war on poverty because we have forgotten the original goal, as LBJ stated it half a century ago: “to give our fellow citizens a fair chance to develop their own capacities.”

The federal government currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs that provide cash, food, housing, medical care and targeted social services to poor and low-income Americans. . . . If converted to cash, current means-tested spending is five times the amount needed to eliminate all official poverty in the U.S.

They aren’t programs to help the needy. They’re Democratic vote farms.

FORBES: More College Does Not Beget More Economic Prosperity. “People who have high intelligence and ambition often earn college and advanced degrees. Sometimes that formal education is important in their later success, but many say that their education had very little to do with it. Conversely, some extremely successful people dropped out of college or never attended at all. And as those ridiculous Occupy Wall Street protests taught us, huge numbers of college graduates are unemployed or employed only in jobs that don’t call for anything more than basic trainability.”

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THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW: Sex Offenders Can Be Prohibited from Bar Association, Rules Kentucky Supreme Court.

JAMES TARANTO: What Mike Bloomberg Has In Common With Guns & Ammo.

The denial of gun rights to felons and mental patients, by contrast, can be described as a regulation, and the Supreme Court more or less affirmed its constitutionality in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008). But imagine an equivalent rule applied to First Amendment rights. A blanket ban on speech, worship or public assembly by felons or mental patients would be plainly unconstitutional. Contrary to Metcalf, the Second Amendment right is unique, not typical, in the degree to which it is subject to regulation.

Further, this column generally agrees with Venola’s give-no-ground position, though on pragmatic grounds rather than principled ones. If we thought the antigun side of the debate were interested in good-faith compromise, we’d be all for it. The dishonesty of their debating tactics, their ghoulish and opportunistic use of horrific crimes like the Newtown massacre to advance their agenda, and the onerous (and likely unconstitutional) regulations that exist in places where they hold political sway–such as New York City, where we live–persuade us otherwise.

Anyway, why should gun magazines give voice to “moderate voices that might broaden the discussion from within”? Has the Times editorial page, a leading voice on the other side, done the same?

But you’ll have to click through for the Bloomberg angle.

MICKEY KAUS: The GOP’s Grandfather Weapon:

I don’t quite understand the new, near-unanimous Dem line on Obamacare–which is that because it has signed up a few million people, many previously uninsured, it is now somehow invulnerable to repeal. . . .

It wouldn’t be hard for Republican repealers to write a law that got rid of Obamacare while somehow keeping those few million who’ve signed up on some form of similar insurance. “If you like your Obamacare you can keep your Obamacare.” Exchange policies could be converted to non-exchange policies in a special, no-new-enrollments program, for example. Over time, attrition would whittle this grandfathered class down to trivial size–a process with which you’d think Obamacare’s architects would be familiar.

You’d think.

WHAT IS BEST IN LIFE? At Democrats’ Request, Even Mike Bloomberg Is Giving up on Gun Control.

UPDATE: From the comments:

Just a few months ago, the “progressives” in Congress and in the press were calling Republicans dangerous extremists who are out-of-touch with America, claiming that 90% of the population supported Bloomberg’s call for expanded background checks.

If that were even remotely true, the Democrats would be thanking Bloomberg for his tireless efforts in pushing his much needed and VERY popular policy proposals.

They have to lie to win, and they know it.

Indeed. And people who recognize this and won’t be bulldozed beat ’em.

THE DANGERS OF NO-DRINK JANUARY: “It’s kind of like starving yourself for a month to lose weight, instead of cutting down on your five-ramen-burgers-a-week habit. It also carries the risk of subbing one bad habit for another: Last January, The Hairpin blog editor Edith Zimmerman wrote that Drynuary ‘helped me make my brilliant decision to become a smoker.'”

BATTLESPACE PREPARATION: Left Tries To Silence Conservatives Ahead of 2014 Midterms.

IN RESPONSE TO MY EARLIER POST ON OBAMA’S WAR ON SINGLE MOTHERS, Tom Maguire emails to note that there’s an even bigger war on married mothers.

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Illusions of Control in the Omnicompetent French State.

YEAH, WE’VE GOT THAT PROBLEM HERE, TOO: In Australia, a warning on “Academic Extremism.” “Academic extremism risks damaging the standing of Australia’s universities, the country’s education minister, Christopher Pyne, warned last week. His comments come in the wake of the controversy over the support for the anti-Israel boycott, divestment and sanctions movement by the University of Sydney’s Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies and The Australian’s revelations this week that a Sydney senior lecturer was part of a WikiLeaks Party delegation granted an audience with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, where they affirmed ‘the solidarity of the Australian people.'”

I wonder if there’s an Australian version of Prof. Jacobson? Cornell Law Prof Challenges American Studies Association’s 501(c)(3) Status Over Boycott of Israeli Universities. If so, the problem should be cleaned up shortly.

SHOCKER: Law Profs Oppose ABA Proposal to Eliminate Tenure as Accreditation Requirement.

KEVIN WILLIAMSON: The Ignorant Left: An Ongoing Series.

I’ve long argued that one of the problems with our political discourse is that the Left and (to the extent that they can be considered a separate entity) the media do not really know very much about what conservatives think or why. Exhibit 1,526: Yahoo News’s Dylan Stableford is surprised that National Review has reiterated an editorial position that the magazine has held for decades. It’s not a big deal when somebody on, say, the sports desk doesn’t know much about what conservatives think, but here is a guy writing a piece about National Review and marijuana policy who does not (or did not; he’s corrected the piece) know what the magazine has had to say about the issue for years upon years.

You find this a lot. Most people who haven’t taken the time to learn about the issue (which is to say, most people) believe that conservatism is either a largely Christian fundamentalist movement or principally informed by Ayn Rand or, if you listen to the geniuses at places like Salon or MSNBC, both.

Likewise, there are those who apparently are surprised that in the case of homosexuals vs. Russians who wish to put them into ovens, Glenn Beck has taken the side of the homosexuals. If that is surprising to you, you really need to get out more.

But knowing more would interfere with the demonization. And the demonization is the point.

I’LL BE ON FOX & FRIENDS JUST AFTER 6:30, talking about . . . guess what!

MEGAN MCARDLE: Tweeting My Way Out Of Amtrak Hell.

MEET THE PRESS HAS LOST ITS AUDIENCE, which is no surprise since state-controlled TV isn’t very interesting.

LATEST ANTI-SEMITISM NEWS: Modern Language Association Blocks Jewish News Service from Covering Convention. Why are colleges and universities funding attendance at this convention?

FREE SPEECH NEWS from the folks at FIRE. “On December 27, a federal judge in Tennessee refused to throw out a First Amendment claim against a public school district that punished students for out-of-school social media posts. With many colleges striving to expand their jurisdiction over offenses committed off-campus, this ruling is a helpful affirmation that even K–12 schools—which may legally restrict student speech in a way that public colleges cannot—may not punish speech without actual evidence that such speech had an impact on the school’s activities or environment.”

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TOM MAGUIRE: Obama Quit In Afghanistan. “So Obama was sending our young men and women off to a meat grinder with no real confidence in the likelihood of success. How like Lyndon Johnson.”

Plus: “Wow, Hillary’s opposition to the surge was political? Just like her support of the AUMF in 2002 was political. Which makes this genius wrong twice.”

DEEP FREEZE: A Photo Gallery.

THE KILLING FIELDS OF CARACAS: An eerily prescient editorial from Investor’s Business Daily.