BUT DON’T PANIC: Newly discovered ‘radiation clouds’ could pose extra risks to frequent flyers.

DEWEY DEFEATS THE BOSTON GLOBE! Howie Carr: Globe prints fake news in Super Bowl blunder: “Today’s early edition Boston Globe made a historic blunder with its Super Bowl coverage, running the headline: A BITTER END. Above it is ‘Super Bowl LI.’ LI meaning ‘51’ in Roman numerals, but now it has another meaning, wouldn’t you say? You can’t have a LIE without LI.”

Read the whole thing, and don’t miss the photo of the Globe beclowning itself atop Carr’s article.

TURNING THE TIDE AGAINST CHOLERA: “A treatment protocol so effective that it saves 99.9 percent of all victims was pioneered here. The World Health Organization estimates that it has saved about 50 million lives in the past four decades. Just as important, after 35 years of work, researchers in Bangladesh and elsewhere have developed an effective cholera vaccine. It has been accepted by the W.H.O. and stockpiled for epidemics like the one that struck Haiti in 2010. Soon, there may be enough to begin routine vaccination in countries where the disease has a permanent foothold.”

TONIGHT WE’RE GONNA PARTY LIKE IT’S 2001: Nancy Pelosi Says She Can’t Work With ‘President Bush’

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why Your Next Job-Training Course May Be A MOOC.

BREAKING: Mike Pence just became the first Vice President to cast a tie-breaking Senate vote to approve a President’s cabinet nominee.

But Betsy DeVos is in at Education.

FULL STORY: Here.

[BUMPED]

“NOT ALL HATE CRIMES ARE FAKE”: Florida man sets mosque on fire, lectures Muslims at his sentencing.

The problem with hate crime legislation is that it gives legal recognition, even if punitive, to those who would use violence to make a political point. Better just to throw an arsonist in prison for arson than to give him an opportunity to grandstand — and inspire others.

BRENDAN O’NEILL: The Political Class’s Anti-Trump Hysteria Is Actually A Means Of Self-Whitewashing.

Let’s leave to one side how implicitly anti-democratic is this haughty refusal to confer legitimacy on Trump. How it demeans, not only Trump (which is fine — demean away), but also the 62 million people who voted for him. After all, what is their desire to have Trump run their republic in comparison with the insistence of the more switched-on that he isn’t fit for that job? More importantly is what this de-normalisation drive does for other politicians. It absolves them. It flatters them. It tells them that what they have done — the destabilisation of nations, the destruction of lives — was normal, at least in comparison to this. The left’s arrogant, aristocratic withholding of legitimacy from Trump by extension legitimises his predecessors, including those who did far worse things than Trump has even countenanced.

This is why some pretty unpleasant politicians have been able to rehabilitate themselves via the anti-Trump hysteria. Consider Madeleine Albright. She won heaps of Twitter praise last week when she said she might register as a Muslim in protest against Trump’s travel order. This is the same Madeleine Albright who in 1996, as Bill Clinton’s ambassador to the UN, was asked if the surplus deaths of Iraqi children following America’s imposition of sanctions was a price worth paying for weakening Saddam’s rule. Her reply? ‘I think this is a very hard choice, but the price — we think the price is worth it.’

Just think about this. Let it sink into your head. A woman who apologised for, and who was in an administration that was responsible for, great suffering among Muslims can now get brownie points for saying she will register as a Muslim. In what sort of moral universe is it considered worse to restrict the freedom of movement of the citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries than it is to participate in the near-destruction of a Muslim country? In the warped moral universe of anti-Trump hysteria. In the historically illiterate world that has been fashioned by the protesters against him, who tell us he is abnormal and therefore the rest of them are normal; that Trump is evil and therefore others, Albright, were good, or at least better.

Then there’s Hillary Clinton, who was retweeted tens of thousands of times for saying of Trump’s order: ‘This is not who we are.’ But it is who she is. This is the woman who spearheaded the bombing of Libya, helping to plunge that nation into mayhem and creating hundreds of thousands of refugees in the process.

Indeed.

CULTURE OF IMPUNITY: Why UC police let anarchists run wild in Berkeley. I feel sure that they’d be more vigorous if right-leaning protesters were similarly violent. It’s time for that double standard to change.

I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Huge Fireball Meteor Lights Up Sky Over Illinois; The space rock created a sonic boom, and pieces of it crashed into Lake Michigan.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION:

I’m wondering if there’s a special reason why “now is a good time to start law school.” Something Trump-related? I’m thinking:

1. During the Obama administration, people were lulled into feeling that law was a bunch of boring, phony blabber trumped up to obstruct the flow of governmental goodness. Now that Trump’s in power, the law suddenly feels like a repository of timeless truths, a glorious bulwark against governmental abuse. It’s not only worth studying, you can feel good about being one of the lawyer-warriors who fight off hell.

2. Government employees are looking for a career change.

Well, and also law schools are desperate for warm, tuition-paying bodies.

MOTHER JONES: Keith Ellison Is Everything Republicans Thought Obama Was. Maybe He’s Just What Democrats Need.

The role of the DNC chairman is to run a political machine that helps to elect Democrats throughout the country, not to dictate the party’s policy priorities. But Ellison’s blueprint for defeating Trumpism is nonetheless rooted in the anti-establishment politics of Sanders. The DNC has become the “Democratic Presidential Committee,” he argues; short-sighted focus on big-dollar fundraising and swing states has weakened the party on a county-by-county level. Change starts with shifting the party apparatus toward assembling a multicultural army of organizers, focused on the communities likely to bear the full brunt of the new president’s policies. Ellison says the proof that this can work is in his district. Emphasizing door-to-door engagement over TV advertising, Ellison boasts he’s juiced turnout in his safe Democratic seat to some of the highest levels in the country. Even as the Upper Midwest goes red, Minnesota Democrats have scored victories at the state level, bolstered by Ellison’s Minneapolis machine.

Republicans are eager to take him on, because in many ways, the story of Keith Ellison is the story conservatives wanted to believe about another cerebral African American community organizer from the Midwest—Barack Obama. Raised Catholic in Detroit, Ellison converted to Islam, dabbled in black nationalism, and marched with the Nation of Islam’s Louis Farrakhan—all before his first bid for Congress in 2006. His past dogged him in that run, and it has continued to be an issue in the DNC race: Billionaire Haim Saban, one of the Democrats’ biggest donors, has trashed him as an “anti-Semite.”

As a young activist in Minneapolis, Ellison learned to build coalitions outside the scope of party politics. He also learned the limits of what such activism could achieve without political power. For Ellison, it was a time of experimentation, education, and sometimes radical dalliances that ultimately imbued in his politics a hard-edged pragmatism.

Don’t discount Ellison’s considerable organizational abilities on the basis of his radical politics.

MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Neil Gorsuch: Eloquent Intellectual.

TO BE HONEST, YOU’RE DOING WELL IF YOU SIMPLY INDUCE COGNITION IN MOST CELEBRITIES: Sam Harris Induces Cognitive Dissonance in Ben Affleck. “Look for the outsized emotional reaction. You see lots of people arguing the same side that Ben argues, but rarely do you see that level of anger except in street protests where the average energy is higher. The exaggerated emotional outburst in the wrong context is a clear tell. When you see that reaction in your debate opponent, you won the debate – hard – but you didn’t change anyone’s mind. Cognitive dissonance swooped in to to derail any actual mind-changing. This is one of the best examples you will ever find.”

WOMEN’S HEALTH: Former Planned Parenthood Employee Says Facilities Had Abortion Quotas.

ROBERT SPENCER: Winston Churchill, Anti-German Hate Group Leader.

BECAUSE OF WHAT THE LEFT HAS GOTTEN AWAY WITH? Why so many conservative intellectuals became Trumpists. And how ineffectual the response from the “respectable” GOP was.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Twitter unveils new features to curb harassment.

Instead of just suspending abusive accounts, Twitter will now identify the individuals behind those accounts and prevent them from simply creating new ones.

Twitter’s new safer search feature, and efforts to hide abusive replies, are meant to help users targeted by abuse by making harassing content harder to find. Now, when users search for content on Twitter, tweets that have been flagged or are from accounts that are frequently blocked or muted won’t show up as easily.

Similarly, when users click the dropdown under a tweet to see replies, potentially abusive and low-quality tweets will be collapsed.

Twitter says abusive content will still be accessible for anyone looking to find it, but it won’t be as easy to stumble onto.

This new system seems ripe for abuse. I’ve been blocked by an unknown number of lefties — most I’ve never interacted with — apparently on the basis of some kind of shared, mass lists of conservatives or libertarians. Seemingly then, although I’ve done nothing to abuse or harass any of these people, my tweets “won’t be as easy to stumble onto.” In other words, invisibly blacklisted because of a leftwing social media campaign to silence voices (that’s what muting is) they don’t like.

I haven’t been on Twitter very much for almost a year; now I’ll be on there even less.

I’M SO OLD, I CAN REMEMBER WHEN THEY MOCKED MITT ROMNEY ON RUSSIA: Roger Simon on the Mainstream Media’s Pointless Fixation on Trump and Putin.

OK THEN: California Democrats Have Shrugged Off Trump’s Threat to Withhold Federal Funding.

PAUL MIRENGOFF ON The Next Supreme Court Nominee.

IMPARTIALITY: Ruth Bader Ginsburg says Electoral College needs to be changed.

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg lamented partisanship in Congress during a talk at Stanford University on Monday and said she hoped it would return to an era when “it was working for the good of the country and not just along party lines.”

Ginsburg did not address the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court seat vacated by the late Justice Antonin Scalia or President Trump’s travel ban, which could end up before the high court. But she did say she would like to change the Electoral College, a comment that drew applause from the packed, 1,200-seat Stanford Memorial Church. She did not elaborate.

I’m not sure she could elaborate, without then having to recuse herself from any cases involving the Trump Administration.

CULTURE: Pope Francis’ Super Bowl Message and Our Elite-Populist Wars.

This is, unfortunately, something lost on all too many in elite circles, particularly in Washington, D.C. Anyone who has spent two minutes in policy circles has met the kind of person who flaunts their ignorance of and disdain for football, or “sportball” in general, as a badge of honor. Bragging about your disdain for something in which the great majority of your fellow men find deep meaning in is a sign of spiritual impoverishment.

Pope Francis and Prof. Mandelbaum are but two of a legion of intellectuals, stretching back to time immemorial, who have gotten the vital symbolic and emotional needs sports play in society. If you need to be convinced academically, you can get this from Aristotle, or Dante, or C.S. Lewis. But it might be more fun to turn on the TV, grab a beer, and get into the spirit of the day.

Sounds dreadfully proletarian. Can you imagine Niles and Frasier Crane doing that?

SEATTLE TIMES: Fact check: No arrests from 7 nations in travel ban? Judge in Seattle was wrong.