THAT’S OKAY, IT’S JUST THERE TO PROVIDE TALKING POINTS: Piketty’s Failure to Account for Tax Law Changes Makes His Wealth Inequality Claims Worthless.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “I have always found it hard and confusing to be both a feminist and happily married. Why?”

SUSAN GOLDBERG: 10 Romantic Comedy Myths About Women. Not so sure these are all myths.

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Israeli Scientists Develop System Using Cell Towers For Super-Accurate Weather Measurement.

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FROM JIM MEIGS, A REMEMBRANCE OF TOMMY RAMONE:

So sad to hear the news about Tommy Ramone. When my band Spuyten Duyvil was starting out about four years ago, we opened for Tommy’s roots/bluegrass duo Uncle Monk at a small folk-music series at a Unitarian church. There were maybe 40 people in the audience, mostly folk aficionados (as opposed to die-hard Ramones fans turning out to see one of their idols, regardless of genre). Tommy played mandolin and his somewhat somber partner, Claudia Tienan, played guitar in a straight-ahead manner that would have would have fit right in with the Carter family. They both huddled around a single condenser microphone, in the style of mid-century Grand Ole Opry performers.

The music was simple and pure, but polished like a piece of hand-made furniture. They played a few traditional tunes, but their original songs also had a timeless feel—like something handed down from an earlier generation. (Mean to Me is one of the tunes they did that night.) Talking with Tommy backstage I was struck by his peaceful humility, but also with his underlying sense of professionalism. Performing with the Ramones in riotous arenas, being inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—or playing quiet, traditional ballads to a sparse crowd in a suburban Unitarian church–apparently it was all the same to him.

In no way did he suggest that his venture into traditional music was a repudiation of his years with the Ramones. He was proud of those years (and it was no accident that he continued to appear under the name Tommy Ramone, rather than his Hungarian birth name of Thomas Erdelyi). To me, the most powerful moment of the night came when they performed the Ramones tune “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend.” Stripped down, slowed down, the simple tune took on the same timeless feel as the traditional folk and bluegrass tunes they’d been playing all night. It reminded my why the punk revolution was so important, coming as it did during a high point in rock grandiosity. A great punk song is just a song–words, melody, emotion–stripped of all pretension. Strip it down still further, to a ringing mandolin and guitar and a single voice, and it’s still a great song, as pure and heartbreaking in its way as an ancient Irish ballad. I watched Tommy singing that song that night and thought about what it must have been like to go from being a rock star playing the world’s biggest stages to being a traditional musician playing tiny halls and coffee houses for polite audiences. He gave no hint that there was anyplace else he’d rather be. He seemed happy.

Punk was an ethos, not just a style of music.

Jim Meigs, by the way, is not only the until-just-recently editor of Popular Mechanics, but also an extremely accomplished musician himself.

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IT’S ALL JUST ONE SEAMLESS POLITICAL MACHINE: First Lady To Fundraise With HBO Exec. “First lady Michelle Obama will headline a fundraiser next week at the Los Angeles home of HBO’s president of programming, Michael Lombardo, according to a report Wednesday in the Hollywood Reporter. Lombardo, a longtime Obama fundraiser, was named by the president to the board of trustees at the Kennedy Center. In 2012, Lombardo hosted a similar event for President Obama’s reelection campaign at his home.”

I’M SIDING WITH JOHN WAYNE’S ESTATE OVER A UNIVERSITY THAT EMBRACES FALSE RAPE CHARGES: Duke And The Duke Duke It Out Over Duke Bourbon.

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REASON TV: Food Fight: Dana Goodyear on Renegade Chefs vs. Regulators.

PUSHBACK: Shut Up: Selfies Are Awesome! “I take a lot of selfies. You know why? Because I’m fucking adorable.”

OUT: PALEO DIETS. In: Paleo Love Diet.

PATENT TROLLS AREN’T AS MUCH OF AN ISSUE, IF YOU’RE RICH ENOUGH: Jury gives full defense verdict to Apple, swats down $511M patent demand.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: Eliminate boring road trips forever with these simple rules.

TAKING A TANK for a test-drive.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 430.

UBER’S SURGE PRICING: A model only economists love:

New York just killed every economist’s favorite thing about Uber: surge pricing. Sure, many economists also love convenient car service at the touch of a button. But black-car services have been around for a long time. Explicit surge pricing — which both creates new supply and rations demand — has not, but it’s long been a core feature of Uber Technologies Inc.’s business model. While it can be annoying at times (during a recent rainstorm, I noticed a sudden epidemic of drivers canceling rides, which I suspect was due to the rapidly rising surge price), it also allows you to be sure that you will be able to get a taxi on New Year’s Eve or during a rainstorm as long as you’re willing to pay extra.

Sadly, no one else loves surge pricing as much as economists do. Instead of getting all excited about the subtle, elegant machinery of price discovery, people get all outraged about “price gouging.” No matter how earnestly economists and their fellow travelers explain that this is irrational madness — that price gouging actually makes everyone better off by ensuring greater supply and allocating the supply to (approximately) those with the greatest demand — the rest of the country continues to view marking up generators after a hurricane, or similar maneuvers, as a pretty serious moral crime.

That’s because humans’ moral sense is a product of the caveman era.

HIGH SPEED RAIL: Some criticisms. The biggest criticism is that government is no longer able to execute such projects competently, as it was in the era before public-employee unions.

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ILLEGAL ALIENS FLOWN TO BOSTON: “We’re all becoming border sheriffs now.” So now you’ve got Massachusetts sheriffs complaining about the feds: “The blame goes all the way up. It’s a travesty and people ought to be upset. This is un-American and has raised the stakes to the public health and public safety threat.”

UPDATE: From the comments:

Secret camps, secret movements of human cargo. Almost Orwellian or Hitleresque.

Just as mysteriously as illegals suddenly appear, makes one wonder when legal citizens may start disappearing.

The bar on paranoia has certainly been raised during this era of Hope and Change.

ED MORRISSEY: WMD in Iraq a rather nuanced issue.

PROF. MARK PERRY BUSTS FAKE “WAR ON WOMEN” STATISTICS:

Bottom Line: The reality is that while women are at a 52% greater risk than men for being the victim of homicide by an intimate partner, men are at a four-time greater risk than women of being murdered overall, and are six-times more likely than women to be murdered by somebody besides an intimate partner. The “War on Women” graphic above undermines the seriousness of domestic violence and compromises the credibility of feminists by presenting incomplete and misleading data. Unfortunately, the “War on Women” rhetoric often becomes a “War on the Truth” by distorting and misrepresenting factual data, and this is a classic example.

And there are so many of those.

YEAH, I’M NOT SO SURE THAT I DO: Roll Call: Congress Trusts DOJ Report on Shooting of Unarmed Woman Outside Capitol. “Carey had been diagnosed with postpartum depression and psychosis, and told police President Barack Obama was monitoring her with cameras in her Stamford, Conn., apartment. In Moran’s view, there is obvious evidence that she was mentally disturbed.” I dunno, that whole “monitoring me with cameras” thing doesn’t sound as paranoid as it used to. . . .