AT AMAZON: up to 50% off on Men’s Sneakers.

Plus, up to 70% off on Women’s Shoes.

YOU’LL TURN UP SOME UGLY STUFF: Drag a Hundred Dollar Bill through a School of Journalism.

OLYMPIC ATHLETES: Pioneers in online schooling.

TACTICAL ANALYSIS: The Medieval—and Highly Effective—Tactics of the Ukrainian Protests: Military-style methods help Euromaidan overwhelm state forces.

Protesters shot fireworks with makeshift launchers. In combination with throwing stones and using slingshots, they overwhelmed disoriented Berkut special forces units, who were pelted with flying objects as fireworks exploded around them.

Protesters wore military helmets and carried makeshift—or captured—shields. Wooden boards were used to protect their lower legs from shrapnel the police taped to exploding stun grenades.

Among the array of homemade weapons, some were perhaps a little too ambitious. A crude trebuchet—a type of medieval catapult which uses a counterweight to fling objects—was overrun and dismantled.

To shield themselves from the onslaught, the police special forces units known as Berkut adopted distinct tetsudo formations. This packed shield formation was used by the Roman Empire, developed to shield infantry units from arrows. The first line holds its shields forward, with each preceding line holding their shields towards the sky.

The problem with this tactic? It makes you much slower.

I noticed pics of them forming The Turtle. I was ready for them to break out lorica segmentata. Say, I wonder if the protesters tried true slings, as opposed to slingshots? Very effective, but without the PR baggage of guns. I mean, anyone willing to try a trebuchet. . . .

And note this: “But behind the barricades, there were thousands of people working together to support the front lines. It’s an important lesson that logistics is what ultimately wins battles.”

UPDATE: A number of commenters note that this only worked because the government wasn’t willing to shoot enough people. Well, they tried:

As someone who reported from Eastern Europe during the fall of Communist regimes there, I recognized a recurring pattern in the collapse a quarter century later of the regime in Kiev. Regimes can stay in power in an age of mass media only if they have enough murderers willing to gun down people in the street. Snipers were willing to kill their fellow countrymen in the streets around the Maidan last Thursday, but their superiors reached a breaking point when the shots didn’t achieve the desired level of fear. “The shooting stopped when the security chiefs realized the game was over — not because they didn’t have enough Kalashnikovs, but because they proved ineffective: For one person killed, many more came out on the Maidan,” Maria Semykoz, a Ukrainian economist from Lvov, told me by e-mail.

That’s often the dynamic. And security forces are often quite unwilling to fire on masses of unarmed fellow-citizens. Even with Tiananmen, the Chinese government had to try two or three times, finally using Mongolian troops. And, if the protesters were as well-organized as it sounds, they probably knew where the security folks live, and had plans to take the fight to them personally in the event of a slaughter. At any rate, in an era of personalized communications technology, mass slaughter is harder to get away with than it was in the era of the Tiananmen massacre.

WHY OLIVER STONE WON’T MAKE A MOVIE ABOUT OBAMA: “I don’t think he’s that interesting.”

THE LEARNING CURVE: In the Weekly Standard, Jonathan Marks reviews my The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself.

MILT WOLF PHOTOS OF GUNSHOT VICTIMS’ X-RAYS: Scandal, or tempest in a teacup? I note that on twitter the NRSC is clearly hoping it’s enough to knock Wolf out of the race and save incumbent Pat Roberts.

UPDATE: Okay, by NRSC, I really mean the NRSC’s Brad Dayspring. I follow him, and I like his tweets. But he’s been hammering this all day and it’s a dreadful, dreadful mistake. I accept his claim that he’s just interested in making sure the seat goes GOP. But when the NRSC gets out and attacks a Tea Party challenger — and that, make no mistake, is what’s going on — it poisons the well. There’s basically no trust for the GOP establishment among the base. If they stay home in 2014 like they did in 2012 because they feel betrayed by the establishment, what should be a wave election won’t be. Given the importance, in particular, of a GOP Senate in the event of a Supreme Court vacancy, doing anything to foster such a state of events is criminal incompetence.

MORE: Ed Morrissey: “I get that, too, especially on stuff like this. The issue of TARP and Bevin’s position in Kentucky is a real issue of trustworthiness; this Wolf thing isn’t even really germane to policy or politics, and it’s apparently pretty old on top of it. The NRSC should give this kind of thing a wide berth.”

Nothing they do in any particular race is as important as not pissing off the base, which is very unhappy with them and on the verge of staying home/starting a third party. I feel like the GOP establishment doesn’t understand this, though you’d think the 2012 post-mortems would have informed them.

BOTH OF HIS VIEWERS WILL BE DISAPPOINTED: Piers Morgan To Lose CNN Primetime Show. Actually, since his few viewers mostly seemed to be rightie bloggers looking for easy material, they probably will be disappointed.

IRINA MANTA: Intellectual Property And The Presumption Of Innocence. Very interesting argument here, and probably correct.

MICHAEL MANN AND HIS LAWYERS CAUGHT doctoring a quote.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: License Plates, Newsrooms, and Guns: Three Examples of Americans Rising Up Against Government.

AMY PEIKOFF: How Privacy Became Illegal.

PUBLISHER’S WEEKLY: Hugh Howey And The Indie Author Revolt. “The critics of Howey’s data and methodology are missing the point. The thrust of Howey’s conclusions is that indie authors are taking e-book market share from traditional publishers. Whether the indie percentage today is 10% or 50% of the overall e-book market or a particular genre doesn’t matter. It’s not worth arguing. What matters is the directional trend, and the strong social, cultural and economic forces that will propel the trend forward in a direction unfavorable to publishers. The indie author insurrection has become a revolution that will strip publishers of power they once took for granted.”

This seems to me to be part of a larger phenomenon that would be worthy of further study.

ED DRISCOLL: The New York Times’ Eliminationist Rhetoric.

SMART MARKETING: Selling Girl Scout Cookies Outside a Medical Marijuana Dispensary.

THE HIDDEN DANGER OF MOTORCYCLING: Cow Pies.

HOWARD STERN, master of seduction. Well, when you’ve got a “face for radio,” you need tight game.

ITCHING AND SCRATCHING. “The experiment was not for the squirmish. Volunteers were made to itch like crazy on one arm, but not allowed to scratch. Then they were whisked into an M.R.I. scanner to see what parts of their brains lit up when they itched, when researchers scratched them and when they were finally allowed to scratch themselves.”

COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: HuffPo Columnist: I Infringe, So All Broadband Users Must Pay A New Piracy Tax.

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: USPTO issues patent for fraudulent stem cell procedure: Retracted papers, prison sentence apparently didn’t tip patent examiners off.

JIM MEIGS: Wood Stoves Aren’t Sexy, But They Could Save The World.

WELL, PERHAPS ONE FLAVOR THEREOF: Is Tucker Max Living the New American Dream for Men? Interestingly, the majority of his fans are women.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 290.

ED DRISCOLL: Easy Riders, Raging Stasists. “Talk about going Barack to the Future: While Salon is calling for a return to the old Hollywood studio system, Bill Maher wants a return to the old days when cities were served by one or two newspapers.” Whatever temporary ascendancies they may enjoy, sentiments like this are proof that they’re losing, and know it.