THE LATEST LIFE-SAVING MEDICAL ROBOT: “It’s really weird. And I’m not sure I like it much.”

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MASS TRANSIT KILLS! Infected commuter could have exposed thousands to measles. If all those people had been safely cocooned in individual automobiles, they’d have no worries now.

MACHINE LEARNING: Fitness Apps vs. Personal Trainers.

FASTER, PLEASE: Experiments Start on a Meltdown-Proof Nuclear Reactor: Transatomic Power has begun tests on a very cheap and compact molten-salt reactor. “Transatomic Power, a startup that’s developing a novel type of nuclear reactor, has begun a series of experiments that will either verify its design or send it back to the drawing board. The experiments were made possible by $2.5 million in new investments from Founders Fund, the venture capital firm cofounded by Peter Thiel, and two family funds. The reactor would be smaller and safer than a conventional nuclear unit, potentially making it far cheaper. It would use molten salt as its coolant, making it meltdown-proof and thus requiring fewer costly safety systems. Transatomic’s design could also consume nuclear waste, and it could use nuclear material that couldn’t easily be used to make a weapon.”

ILL-CONCEIVED LAWSUITS: Actress Seeking $1 Million From IMDb For Publishing Her Real Age Was Pulling In Less Than $2000 A Year.

SPYING: NSA wins key ruling in years-old phone and Internet spying lawsuit.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: ANOTHER WIN FOR ALAN GURA, as a federal district court declares the ban on interstate transfers of firearms unconstitutional under the Second Amendment.

Here’s the opinion in PDF.

COMING IN HOT: Why the SpaceX Platform Rocket Landing Is So Damn Hard.

TO CELEBRATE, I HAD AN OMELET FOR LUNCH: The return of the egg? New dietary guidelines may downplay cholesterol risks. With bacon, of course.

AUSTIN BAY: Je Suis Charles Martel: Obama’s Crusade Talk Benefits Islamic State.

ATTENTION WHITE HOUSE STAFF: Your boss could have stigmatized Christian killers and provided a history lesson relevant to the challenge presented by Islamist terrorists. During The Thirty Years War, Protestants hacked Catholics and Catholics hacked back. In the process, they devastated Europe. The war ended with the Treaties of Westphalia. The “Westphalian system” separated political and ecclesiastical power. Twenty-first-century culturally Islamic nations need this, desperately — the separation of mosque and state.

Though invoking The (singular) Inquisition invites debate, Obama might be able to defend an Inquisition analogy. As Dark Age centuries became Medieval then, the Renaissance re-birthed, inquisitors with various inquiring courts waxed and waned. They were fundamentally intra-European affairs, and harsh theologies justified “terrible deeds.” Islamic terrorists murder Muslim “apostates” by the tens of thousands. That’s intra-Islamic murder. The president may have something here.

But our Provocateur in Chief went guilt trip, equating the Crusades with IS depredations. In so doing, he handed every Middle Eastern Islamo-fascist terrorist organization on the planet a propaganda weapon.

Plus, Ross Douthat on Obama’s historical illiteracy. Well, Obama is a historical illiterate.

ROGER SIMON: #JEWISHLIVESMATTER:

Thought experiment: What if a white racist with a submachine gun broke into a convenience store in South Central Los Angeles, grabbed seven or eight African Americans who were shopping (maybe there was one Korean) as hostages for the release of some other white racists and then, when attacked, started spewing the N-word while shooting up the place, killing three or four of the African Americans and wounding three or four others, one or two critically.

How would President Obama react?

Do you think he would say there was something racial about the obscene incident? Damn right he would — and he should. In fact, he would do it forcefully and immediately. After all, when Trayvon Martin died in far more ambiguous circumstances, he was quick to jump in, identifying with the 17 year old who would resemble, Obama said, his own son if he had one.

Now consider what our president said about the events at the Hyper Cacher market in Paris on January 9 in a new interview with Vox.com: “It is entirely legitimate for the American people to be deeply concerned when you’ve got a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris.”

“[V]icious zealots… randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli”? That’s the way the way the president of the United States describes a dedicated jihadist murdering four Jews in a kosher market in one of the oldest and largest Jewish neighborhoods in Paris, the day after other jihadists shot up the Charlie Hebdo offices, killing even more people? No Jews, no jihadist, just more “random” violence, as if Ahmedy Coulibaly, the man who murdered the four Jews and had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State, just stumbled into a kosher deli by accident with a submachine gun while on the way to Cafe de Flore for a cognac.

Well, this is entirely consistent with Obama’s worldview. As Roger notes: “Barack Obama — despite a claque of Jewish advisers (Axelrod, Lew, Emanuel, etc. I wonder how they felt when they heard this latest round) — appears to have a very complicated, almost bizarre reaction to Jews. Maybe it’s a weird competition between oppressed groups — blacks and Jews — or more of his not-so-masked appreciation of (and defensiveness about) all things Islamic.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 643.

MEGAN MCARDLE ON MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY’S WITCH HUNT:

The university seems not to have read through to the last line. It is trying to fire McAdams precisely because he exercised his academic and personal freedoms of thought, discourse, advocacy and action. I may not entirely approve of the way he exercised them, but that’s beside the point — no, actually, it’s exactly the point. We don’t need protections for speech that everyone approves of.

Let’s recall again what we’re talking about: a blog post. That got 53 comments. On his personal blog. Which Marquette has bundled into the same category as sleeping with your students or embezzling department funds. The letter from the university stresses that this is not the first time he has published the name of a student who he disagrees with, but “publishes the names of students he disagrees with” seems a bit of a stretch as a firing offense. Both of the previous cases cited — a student at the campus newspaper who declined to accept an ad discussing the purported risks of the “morning-after pill” and one who was organizing a campus performance of “The Vagina Monologues” — hardly seem like confidential information.

I’m on the record as thinking that tenure should be abolished. But it hasn’t been, and as long as it exists, McAdams has rights under that system, which Marquette seems to be violating. Moreover, it’s hard to believe that if the offense had been coming from the other side — if a liberal tenured professor had called out a conservative graduate student because he thought she was giving short shrift to social-justice perspectives — that professor would now be fighting for his job. It seems more likely that he’d get, well, a stern talking-to.

As the American Interest recently noted, the academy is already under fire from politicians who are beset by budget worries and convinced that America’s universities have become propaganda mills where conservative ideas are belittled and ignored. And I can’t put it any better than it did: “The future of the academy is already precarious. The least administrators could do is stop making it so easy for people to wave goodbye.” Marquette should respect McAdams’ rights because it’s the right thing to do. But failing that, they should respect his rights because it’s the best way to protect their own.

Yeah, well, too many schools seem to want to live up to the “propaganda mills” image. And if they do, they should pay the price.

IF HE WERE A TEA PARTIER, THIS WOULD BE THE #1 STORY NATIONALLY: Killer of 3 UNC-Chapel Hill Muslim Students Was Hardcore Anti-Religion Atheist Progressive. “Included in his many Facebook ‘likes’ are the Huffington Post, Rachel Maddow, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Freedom from Religion Foundation, Bill Nye ‘The Science Guy,’ Neil deGrasse Tyson, Gay Marriage groups, and a host of anti-conservative/Tea Party pages.” The ABC story shockingly omits that information.

I’m placing the SPLC on my list of “groups associated with hate killings” now. After all, this isn’t the first such incident. . . .

YAWN. I HAVE TWO. Vladimir Putin Has AK-47, Will Travel.

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YEAH, WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE ENDING SEXUAL ASSAULT ISN’T ACTUALLY THE GOAL: Columbia University Introduces New “Sexual Respect” Requirement, Activists Say It Won’t Prevent Sexual Assault. Frankly, given their inability to focus on adult issues like real-world sexuality and due process, a bunch of “eighth-grade homework” sounds appropriate. But only if the administrators have to do it too. . . .

THE DEMOCRATS’ WAR ON WOMEN: Ashe Schow: The Ernst-truthers of the Huffington Post.

Reinbach admits that under the military’s definition, Ernst is a combat veteran, “because she served in a combat zone.” But Reinbach goes to great lengths to make sure readers know he doesn’t consider her a combat veteran because she “was never in a firefight, or for that matter attacked at all; [her unit] delivered supplies, and later, guarded the front gate and ran perimeter patrol at their home base outside Kuwait City, Camp Arifjan.”

Seriously, every sentence of his hit piece drips with disdain for the senator. “Real combat veterans I spoke to,” Reinbach wrote, before quoting a single Vietnam veteran to back up his claim. That veteran, Larry Hanft, earned the Combat Infantryman’s Badge during his service and does not think Ernst is a combat veteran. Hanft, an Iowa resident and registered Democrat, had already said as much in a letter to the editor during Ernst’s campaign.

Have you no decency, Huffington Post? No decency at all? Well, no:

“Senator Joni Ernst is a combat veteran. Period,” Conway wrote. “Andrew Reinbach manipulated my words, and I am angry and embarrassed that a so-called journalist would deliberately take out of context a small portion of our 15-minute discussion.”

She added: “I never questioned Sen. Ernst’s service, or that of my brothers and sisters in arms; to allow the Huffington Post’s readers to think otherwise is not only a disservice to Sen. Ernst, but to all those who wear the uniform of the United States. In a cheap attempt to besmirch the military service of Sen. Ernst, the Huffington Post instead has insulted all the men and women of the Armed Forces who have deployed in service to their nation.”

Forget it, Jake. It’s HuffPo. Meanwhile, here’s a less delicate take than Ashe’s:

First of all, the stank-ass hippies at the Huffington Post aren’t the arbiters of who is a combat veteran and who isn’t. This sounds like something I’d read at VoteVets or in an IAVA scorecard. I think that Jessica Lynch might take exception with the Huffington Post that truckdrivers aren’t allowed to call themselves “combat soldiers”.

Several people who thought that I’d agree with them have sent me links to the various stories about Ernst complaining that she’s stealing valor. I disagree, not because she’s a Republican, but because she’s a veteran who served in an area that earned her “imminent danger pay”. If she was claiming honors that she didn’t earn, I’d agree, but she hasn’t.

We go on and on about telling the truth, that all military service is honorable without embellishment. Ernst hasn’t said that she was kicking doors or interrogating prisoners or anything else. She has said that it was the luck of the draw that her unit didn’t encounter enemy soldiers or improvised explosives. That’s true, not everyone spends their 20 years in the service in constant danger and in contact with our enemies. She was in Iraq and she led the troops in her command in a way that they were able to complete their mission without any injuries and that is an accomplishment in itself.

Honestly, I wonder if the Dems and their operatives-with-bylines would be launching these attacks if Joni Ernst were a man.

And I wonder why they gave passes to those out-and-out military frauds Tom Harkin, Richard Blumenthal, etc.? Oh, who am I kidding? I don’t wonder at all.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Graduate Overproduction and Lawyers Per Capita by State.

THOSE PRE-LEWINSKY SEX SCANDALS SEEM SO QUAINT NOW: Former Sen. Bob Packwood Returns to Talk Taxes, Not Scandal.

The Finance Committee was in a mood to reminisce Tuesday morning about the good old days, when Sen. Bob Packwood played a key role in negotiating a bipartisan overhaul of the tax code.

The Oregon Republican was back Tuesday at the committee he once chaired to testify about that bipartisan success, where lawmakers in both parties worked with President Ronald Reagan on the 1986 tax deal. Packwood’s successor, Oregon Democrat Ron Wyden, was on the dais as the ranking member of the Finance panel, having held the gavel last Congress with Democrats in charge.

But no one really wanted to talk about the circumstances that led to Wyden’s arrival in the Senate: Packwood abruptly surrendered his gavel and resigned from the chamber amid a sexual harassment scandal that roiled the chamber. For all his legislative skill — and he had plenty — at the end of the day, Packwood was a disgrace.

Wyden distanced himself from the invitation of Packwood, who left the Senate in 1995 after the chamber spent 33 months investigating his unwanted sexual advances toward women.

I would like to see a 1986-style tax deal, but it’s hard to see Obama going along with anything like that.

UNEXPECTEDLY! NYT: Insured, But Not Covered.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE, HALFHEARTED WAR-AUTHORIZATION EDITION: Obama’s ISIS war powers request to ban ‘enduring’ troops.

The White House will ask Congress to approve military action against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) that bans “enduring offensive ground operations.”

Administration officials briefed lawmakers on Tuesday about the emerging language, which is intended to win over Republicans.

GOP lawmakers had balked at earlier language considered by a Senate panel in December that banned ground troops in combat operations with some exceptions, such as self-defense and rescue missions.

What is unclear is whether Democrats wary of voting for a new war will withhold their support for the updated language, which even some Republicans acknowledge is vague.

“It’d be interesting to know exactly what that ‘enduring’ means, but I have to see it,” said Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has called for language that would allow ground troops in order to give the military maximum flexibility to go after ISIS.

How about “the total destruction of our enemies and all who support them?” If you don’t want a war to drag on, that’s probably the best way to do it.

ED DRISCOLL: Brian Williams Debacle Yet Another Reminder: Elite Media Despises Its Customers.