RICHARD FERNANDEZ: You Are The ‘World.’

The Military Times calls it a puzzle. A survey shows that president Obama has the approval of only 15 percent of military personnel yet a majority now accept the reality of gays in the military and women in combat roles. But there’s no contradiction. Acceptance has always been different from approval. Most of us accept we are going to die of some day, even though not many approve approve. The US military, like civilians, may have little fondness for their Pointy Haired Bosses yet still go to work each day and boast: “I never missed a day of work in my life.”

One of the most salient characteristic of American culture is “can do” — its ability to find a way around obstacles placed in its path. Reuters recently reported that ice-cream shops in Venezuela are closing due to the unavailability of milk. In America the outcome may have been the invention of a source of artificial milk. Instead of closing the shops they might have reopened as artificial ice cream parlors.

American oil and gas companies reacted precisely in this way to government discouragement. The industry simply invented new technologies which made America the biggest oil producer in the world.

In the United States failure appears to be a profit opportunity. Several American friends have unaccountably offered me exactly the same piece of sage advice. ”Richard, never trust anyone who hasn’t failed.” In their view anyone who hasn’t been flat broke at least once in his life has some kind of character defect. One acquaintance wistfully recalled the time he lost his fortune and had to live out of his car, and how that motivated him to even greater wealth. Maybe his last conscious thoughts when the time comes to cross the river will not be of the yacht anchored off the Riviera, or of starlit nights and steel guitars in Rio, but fond memories of a shower and shave at the CITGO rest room.

The downside to this laudable impulse to self-help is that very few American politicians are ever punished for their blunders. The population apparently finds it easier to adapt. It is easier to invent a new industry than start a political movement.

Indeed.

TINKER, TAILOR, STALKER, SPY: In violations not just of NSA policy but of the law, agents spy on their romantic interests.

Thanks to a Christmas Eve document dump, we learn that agents of the National Security Agency, the spookiest spooks in all our vast spookocracy, are a bunch of stalkers, using the effectively boundless surveillance powers of their organization to spy on husbands and wives, overseas girlfriends, and sundry romantic partners. And that’s our government at work: While the guys who are supposed to be keeping an eye on Gordon Gekko are keeping their eyes on marathon porn sessions instead, the guys who are supposed to be putting a hurt on Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad are trying to figure out whether their girlfriends are browsing Tinder. One curious analyst targeted the numbers in her husband’s telephone directory. Another spied on his wife, who was stationed overseas.

As usual, basically nothing happened to the wrongdoers — working for the government means facing no real consequences for real crimes. Yes, crimes: These actions do not represent mere violations of NSA policies — there were plenty of those, too; more on that in a bit — but willful violations of the law. One offender retired before the investigation of his crimes was complete; others were merely reprimanded; the fellow caught spying on his wife abroad was docked a month’s pay. Who these offenders are remains unknown, as the reports are heavily redacted. Funny thing, that: These criminals, some of them still employed by the NSA, intentionally used the awesome power of a federal spy agency to violate American citizens’ privacy, but the NSA is all discretion when it comes to the privacy of the criminals on its payroll.

Think of the state as a band of thieves, and you will not be far wrong.

JOEL KOTKIN: Our Father, Who Art In The Apple Store: The Decline Of Christmas And The Looming Tech Nightmare.

MICKEY KAUS: The Excitable Chuck Todd. “Unlike his predecessor as host of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd is an approachable, un-phony presence. He knows politics and clearly enjoys politics. But, boy, is he excitable, especially on the subject of immigration, where he often lets the drama of the moment cloud his judgment.”

ACHIEVER OF THE YEAR: Sarah Palin?

For all her detractors’ cries of “irrelevance” and “she’s just a reality show entertainer” (those two being among the nicer epithets), Palin goes on, election cycle after election cycle, populating Congress with her endorsed candidates in a cost-effective manner, and in such numbers that the likes of Karl Rove with his 1% success rate can surely view only with hidden admiration, if not downright envy.

In what is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Palin’s year of achievement, in instance after instance where Palin was ridiculed for a straightforward statement (e.g., “death panels” or the true history of Paul Revere), her most strident critics have agreed, in whole or in part, with her views. But 2014 saw the most impressive of this historical revisionism.

After Russian president Putin invaded the Ukraine and annexed the Crimea, video surfaced of Governor Palin’s 2008 speech where she predicted exactly that occurrence should then presidential candidate Barack Obama be elected. Palin sounded a deserved note of triumphalism in March:

“Yes, I could see this one from Alaska,” Palin posted on Facebook, saying she said “told-ya-so” in the case of her “accurate prediction being derided as ‘an extremely far-fetched scenario’ by the ‘high-brow’ Foreign Policy magazine.”

“Here’s what this ‘stupid’ ‘insipid woman’ predicted back in 2008,” Palin said. “After the Russian Army invaded the nation of Georgia, Senator Obama’s reaction was one of indecision and moral equivalence, the kind of response that would only encourage Russia’s Putin to invade Ukraine next.”

Palin’s post has been shared by more than 16,000 Facebook users and “liked” by more than 70,000.

The Democrats saw the danger immediately, and moved to neutralize her as a candidate at all costs.. She has responded with an oblique approach.

WELL, WE KNOW WHAT’LL BE ON CNN FOR THE NEXT FEW WEEKS: AirAsia plane loses contact with traffic control in Indonesia.

ANOTHER FAKE HATE CRIME: Fresno Mosque Christmas Day Attack Turns Out Not as Police, Media, ‘Islamophobia’ Grievance Industry Expect. “Police announced today that the suspect arrested in the attack is 28-year-old Asif Mohammad Khan, who, according to news reports, is a Muslim who used to attend the mosque and did the attack in response to bullying by some in the mosque.”

ED DRISCOLL: Ride The Social-Justice-Warrior Mobius Loop! “I miss the days when football was merely football, and the end of World War II was merely the end of World War II.”

THOUGHTS ON PROFESSOR-STUDENT DATING. The interesting discussion is in the comments.

UPDATE: What do I think? Honestly, I’m not sure. Having grown up as a faculty brat, my view of faculty-student relationships is fairly negative. But on the other hand, some of those relationships have been grand — Charles and Barbara Black, for example. The sex-for-an-A kind of conflict-of-interest is, I think, not so common as is popularly supposed — but, especially in small humanities departments, when one prof is dating a grad student, it naturally colors that student’s relationships with everyone. And just because the rules against faculty-student dating are being pushed by a lot of prim, humorless scolds doesn’t actually mean they’re wrong. I certainly never dated law students when I was single, but, then, I wasn’t big on dating law students even when I was one. But I have a strong sense that the rules wind up being applied unevenly, and with a political cast, as such rules tend to be.

When I was visiting at Virginia, pre-InstaPundit, the campus was debating a ban on professor-student dating (it failed, mostly due to student pressure). I remember telling Saul Levmore that I thought that student-faculty relationships were a bad idea. His response: Most relationships turn out to be a bad idea. . . .

YOU SPELLED “ABSURDLY OVERSENSITIVE” WRONG: More on Teaching (and Examining) Today’s Sensitive Law Students. I’m happy to say that I’ve seen none of this behavior from my own law students, and I would view it quite critically if I did.

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SCIENCE: Best predictor of divorce? Age when couples cohabit, study says.

For years, social scientists have tried to explain why living together before marriage seemed to increase the likelihood of a couple divorcing. Now, new research released by the nonpartisan Council on Contemporary Families gives an answer:

It doesn’t. And it probably never has.

This is despite two decades of warnings from academics and social commentators who pointed to studies that claimed a correlation between “shacking up” and splitting up – warnings that increased as the number of couples living together before marriage skyrocketed.

As it turns out, those studies that linked premarital cohabitation and divorce were measuring the wrong variable, says Arielle Kuperburg, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, who produced much of the research released Monday. The biggest predictor of divorce, she says, is actually the age at which a couple begins living together, whether before the wedding vows or after. . . .

Couples who begin living together without being married tend to be younger than those who move in after the wedding ceremony – that’s why cohabitation seemed to predict divorce, Professor Kuperburg explains. But once researchers control for that age variable, it turns out that premarital cohabitation by itself has little impact on a relationship’s longevity. Those who began living together, unmarried or married, before the age of 23 were the most likely to later split.

Interesting. Even more interesting is that it took this long for anyone to notice. Plus a suggestion that modern marriage is designed to fail without considerable effort:

“Marriages require much more maturity than they once did,” she says. In the 1950s, husband and wives stepped into well-defined gender rolls. “Nowadays, people come to marriage with independent aspirations and much greater ideas of equality. Maturity is so important, and negotiating skills are so much more important.”

Hmm.

AN INTERVIEW WITH BUZZ ALDRIN. The thing is, I’ve known Buzz since the 1980s — we were on the NSS board together for years — and he’s not stuck on the Moon landing. That’s everyone else. Buzz, after a rough period in the 1970s, has always been looking forward. And he’s a lot deeper and more thoughtful than this profile suggests. I didn’t know Lois as well, but I always liked her. I’m sorry they broke up.

WHEN CHILD PROTECTIVE SERVICES BECOMES child abductive services.

PETER BERKOWITZ: The Demise Of Due Process On Campus.

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THE BIGGEST MATH STORY OF THE YEAR.

21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: “I certainly felt like a pioneer posting about my divorce on Facebook.”

DISSENT IS THE HIGHEST FORM OF PATRIOTISM: Cops Turn Backs On DeBlasio As He Takes Stage At Murdered Officers’ Funeral.

SCIENCE: Scientists discover just IMAGINING exercising can make you stronger, tone your muscles, and delay or stop muscle atrophy. Well, it’s no substitute for actually working out, but I do remember Arnold Schwarzenegger saying that he spent a lot of time mentally visualizing his muscles growing and that he thought his superior efforts at this helped his performance. So maybe there’s something to it.

SO SHOULD WE DESTROY THE IRS BECAUSE IT’S A POLITICAL THUG AGENCY? OR BECAUSE IT’S FATALLY INCOMPETENT? IRS Says it ‘Mistakenly’ Penalized GOP Candidate Christine O’Donnell For a Second Time. “Although IRS officials removed the levy, they first withdrew all the funds from her account. They said that, too, was in error and the funds would be returned to her. The funds have not been replaced, Ms. O’Donnell said.”

Note, meanwhile, that Al Sharpton faces no similar “mistakes.”

Flashback: Kevin Williamson: The Emerging Junta.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: LSU Offers Buyouts (1 Year’s Salary) to Seven Tenured Profs Over 65; Dean Hopes They Will ‘Retire With Dignity.’ As opposed, I guess, to being kicked to the curb.

ASHE SCHOW: The Year Of Campus Sexual Assault That Wasn’t:

The story did not turn out to be as advertised. Jackie, who told Rolling Stone she had a date the night she was allegedly gang raped, made up the story about the man who supposedly took her to the frat party — even creating fake cellphone numbers and sending her friends pictures of an old high school classmate, according to three friends who said they rushed to her aid the night of the alleged attack. That night, her friends recalled, Jackie said she had been forced to perform oral sex on a group of five men. By the time the story made it into Rolling Stone, she claimed she had been gang-raped by seven men.

Activists quickly tried to shift the narrative, claiming that the accuracy of Jackie’s story didn’t matter and that sexual assault really was as big a problem as they insisted. Anyone who disagreed was called a “rape apologist.”

Then came another blow: The Bureau of Justice Statistics released a report showing that one in 41 women were raped or sexually assaulted while attending college, not one in five. Everyone agrees that one is too many, but some also believe that one false accusation is too many as well. Others do not, claiming that false accusations are rare (based on decades old studies or anecdotes that don’t take into account what is now being considered sexual assault). The implication being that the falsely accused don’t matter.

So, what does this mean for 2015? Next year the focus probably will continue to be on due process rights for the accused, especially given the growing number of lawsuits against universities by accused students that could move forward or be settled. And with more people realizing just how damaging the responses have been to the mythical statistic that 20 percent of women will be raped during their college years, policies may change.

Money for lawyers. Yay!

THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Is Overeating the Primary Cause of Obesity? Or does a new study with mice suggest early exposure to antibiotics can precondition people to become overweight?