WINTER GAMES: Linguistic divide poses problem to Korea hockey team.

The Canadian coach of the joint women’s hockey team said Monday her squad has made a three-page dictionary that translates key hockey terms from English into South Korean and then into North Korean for better communication among the players and herself.

“In North Korean, there are no English words so everything is totally different. So we actually made like a dictionary, English to Korean to North Korean. So we can communicate and hopefully learn how to speak each other’s languages,” Sarah Murray told reporters following her team’s first practice after arriving at the Gangneung athletes’ village earlier Monday.

Murray’s Team Korea was formed only 11 days ago as a result of the Koreas’ abrupt decision to cooperate in the Olympics, which start Friday.

South Korea has incorporated many English words and phrases into its language, while North Korea has eliminated words with foreign origins and created homegrown substitutes, which many South Koreans feel sound funny. Experts say about a third of the everyday words used in the two countries are different.

North and South Korea are divided by much more than just a demilitarized zone and different governments.

BATTLESWARM BLOG: After The Memo: What Next? “I have a distinct sense that the worst of this abuse of power scandal hasn’t been uncovered yet.”

With the Clintons it never is, and this time they were abetted by the Obama Administration’s Chicagoland tactics.

THEY STAB IT WITH THEIR STEELY KNIVES BUT THEY JUST CAN’T KILL THE BEAST: Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built.

MICHAEL VAN DER GALIEN: Colts Linebacker Edwin Jackson Killed by Drunk Driver With Deportation Order.

THESE 5 FBI SCANDAL PLAYERS MAY NEVER GET OUT OF THE FISA WOODS: When former FBI Director James Comey and four Department of Justice/FBI colleagues signed off on FISA surveillance warrant applications based on the infamous Steele dossier, they may have violated a procedural rule for the secret judicial panel known as the Woods Rule. Here’s my H/T to former CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkinsson, who appears to be the first journalist to point this out.

Texas Republican Rep. Louis Gohmert has an solution for clearing up all the major questions surrounding the FISA applications – release the transcripts of each application’s handling in the court. With those in hand, Gohmert told LifeZette, “we can determine, among other things, if there was a fraud perpetrated upon the court, whether the court failed to properly elicit sufficient information to justify the secret surveillance of an American citizen, and why the FISA court appears to have taken no action against any attorney if such attorney misled the court.”

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Second Amendment law lessons: Look beyond the courts for freedom.

SHOCKED, TOO: German Politicians ‘Alarmed’ at Scale of Anti-Christian Hate Attacks.

Maybe they ought to try not importing so many violence-prone Christian-haters.

IGNITION! The funniest, most accessible book on rocket science is being reissued.

CHANGE: Tillerson says U.S. still considering Venezuela oil sale restrictions.

I wouldn’t bother. Why provide Maduro another with another foreign scapegoat when Venezuelan oil production is already cratering (unexpectedly!) under socialism?

WE’VE DONE QUITE BADLY ON WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT AND PROCUREMENT LATELY: US dropped ball on Navy railgun development—now China is picking it up.

BRUCE BAWER: Taking on the MSM in Norway. “Challengers to the Leftist, state-funded media arise.”

WELL, WELL: Byron York: Dossier author Steele wrote another anti-Trump memo; was fed info by Clinton-connected contact, Obama State Department.

THE CRAZY YEARS: Not just boy and girl; more teens identify as transgender.

HUH, WHAT COULD HAVE CAUSED THAT? Super Bowl Ratings Slip To 8-Year Low As Eagles Score Historic Win.

TOO LATE: How Washington Power Might Corrupt Google. You can’t corrupt what’s already corrupted.

GORDON CHANG: China Will ‘Pull the Trigger’ in the South China Sea.

“An antagonist who stumbles into the arena of combat is different from one who strides into the arena,” writes Holmes, the first holder of the J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College. In this regard, Jim, whom I greatly admire and respect, is certainly correct.

China, however, is more than stumbling into the South China Sea. It is using its power to push out others, namely, the United States, which has no South China Sea sovereignty claims, and rival claimants. Beijing may want to “win without fighting” as Holmes suggests, but it cannot win without confronting.

Confrontation, unfortunately, is “inevitable,” as Yu Maochun of the U.S. Naval Academy points out. Beijing is trying to push out its borders and expand control of peripheral waters. “China’s geopolitical and geostrategic priority is to revise or change the existing international order that has been based upon a complex system of rules, laws, and customs that govern various global commons including the South China Sea,” he told The National Interest. “Revisionism brings unavoidable confrontation.”

Moreover, Anders Corr, also in comments to this publication, notes a crucial asymmetry.

“The key point is that China accepts the risk of escalation to a greater extent than does the U.S., because China uses confrontation to alter the status quo in its favor,” Corr, editor of the just-released Great Powers, Grand Strategies: The New Game in the South China Sea, writes.

I can’t think of a rising power in any era of world history which cemented its position without a war.

JOE PAPPALARDO ON SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy Launch.

COVERING THE IMPORTANT STORIES: Regarding the Em Dash.

YES. NEXT QUESTION? On the dossier, did FBI have lower standards than the media?

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Would A Federal Student Loan Overhaul Bring Down Law School Tuition?

WHAT DO THEY HOPE TO LEARN? In an unusual move, the UK Parliament (which has like many EU nations been flirting with “anti-fake news” laws), will be holding hearings in Washington DC on  Thursday, 8th February 2018.

This is the first ever live broadcast, public hearing of a House of Commons select committee outside of the United Kingdom. It will be a formal proceeding of the UK Parliament. A transcript of the proceedings will be available later via the Official Report/Hansard.

I won’t be attending, though I hope to be able to catch the webcast. I’d encourage any reporters who cover media or lawyers or educators with an interest in the subject to attend and report back.

UGH: Holocaust Denier Running in IL 3 GOP Primary Unopposed. “Arthur Jones says the murder of 6 million Jews is ‘the biggest blackest lie in history’.”

I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Landmines left behind by the Obama administration and the Clinton campaign might soon start detonating—on Democrats.

Obama concealed his sharp-edged, Chicago-style machine politics under the rhetorical cover of progressivism. He was protected by a press corps that first enlisted in his administration and then fought to stop Donald Trump. But now that Obama is out of office, his ability to intimidate is much diminished. This past week, a 2005 picture of a beaming Obama next to a bright-eyed Louis Farrakhan surfaced, after having been held back for more than a decade at the behest of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who had been tried for corruption by Obama’s Justice Department after he refused to toe the party line about the “peace-loving” mullahs of Iran, has now seen the charges against him dropped. Z Street, a hawkish nonprofit supporter of Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in Israel, had been tied up with IRS matters since 2009; it has just been released from its legal chains. Democrats are holding to the line that the prophet of hope and change ran a pure administration, virtually free of scandal. But the memo is probably just the beginning; we’re likely to see many more revelations come out.

Obama isn’t directly mentioned in the memo. But he’s nonetheless implicated through his appointees’ apparent efforts to clear Hillary Clinton in her State Department email scandal while undermining her opponent, Trump, through the veneer of legality provided by FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Security Act) warrants, justified solely by the so-called Steele Dossier. The dossier was paid for by Clinton’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee; it was created by former MI6 agent Christopher Steele, who despised Trump, and the “research” firm Fusion GPS. The FISA Court, supervised by Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, was never told about the unverified dossier’s origins.

I had been assured by the highest authorities that the Obama Administration was amazingly scandal-free.