I SUSPECT THE ANSWER IS THAT THE RESPONSIBLE AUTHORITIES WERE AFRAID OF BEING CALLED “RACIST.” Australia vows to unearth why ‘sick’ extremist was at large.

TRANSPARENCY: Obama issues “executive orders by another name:” By issuing his directives as “memoranda” rather than executive orders, Obama has downplayed the extent of his executive actions.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college graduates. “Google has spent years analyzing who succeeds at the company, which has moved away from a focus on GPAs, brand name schools, and interview brain teasers. . . . Many schools don’t deliver on what they promise, Bock says, but generate a ton of debt in return for not learning what’s most useful. It’s an ‘extended adolescence,’ he says.”

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

JONATHAN TURLEY: After Ferguson, come the apologies for nothing:

College campuses last week seemed more like centers of political reeducation rather than real learning as various academics have been forced into public apologies over references to the recent controversial decisions of grand juries in Missouri and New York.

Consider the bizarre case of University of California at Los Angeles law professor Robert Goldstein who based an essay question on his final on Michael Brown’s stepfather, Louis Head, chanting, “Burn this b—- down!” after the grand jury decision. The angry mob proceeded to loot and burn various businesses in the town. With some calling for Head to be prosecuted, this was a ready-made question for exploring the limits of the First Amendment in a real-life situation. However, Goldstein was immediately attacked by commentators like Elie Mystal of the blog Above the Law for being “racially insensitive and divisive.” Mystal falsely stated that Goldstein’s question asked students to “advocate in favor of extremist racists in Ferguson.”

Goldstein actually apologized and told his students that he “clearly underestimated and misjudged the impact of this question.” He proceeded to throw out the question in what seemed a cringing compliance with a new taboo subject.

Related: The Trouble With Teaching Rape Law. “Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood. What should his instructors do? Criminal-law teachers face a similar question with law students who are afraid to study rape law.”

Higher education today: A race to the bottom, between the vicious and the trivial.

UPDATE: A bright spot from Oberlin, of all places.

HOW LENA DUNHAM AND OTHER CELEBRITIES ARE GLAMORIZING RAPE: “If rape culture exists it’s not on college campuses. This is a developing and startling trend with Hollywood and feminist entertainment culture. The glamorization of rape as a means of fitting into a social clique. It’s not about demanding truth. It’s about demanding obedience. Not getting young women to bond with shared experiences of a sexual assault to find healing, but that it’s simply becoming a fad and cool to do so. This is a dangerous bandwagon that corporate pop culture is all too happy to attempt to exploit. . . . This is feminist driven media attempting to gleefully create a culture of Rape Glam and at the forefront is the hipster queen of millennial drama, Lena Dunham.”

Well, women used to bond in their twenties by talking about their children, but a whole class of women don’t have those to talk about anymore.

Plus, the piece reminds us that Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) herself made a Dunhamesque non-specific accusation about Senatorial fat-shaming.

SORRY, BUT I’M UNENTHUSED: Jeb Bush Fires 2016 Starting Pistol. Jeb’s a nice guy, and would certainly be a better President than Obama — but, then, my cat would be a better President than Obama, and I don’t own a cat.

I don’t want any more Bushes or Clintons. It’s embarrassing to see this kind of dynasticism in America. My concern is that the GOP’s donor class can only get interested in candidates that the GOP’s base finds unappealing, and vice versa.

FASTER, PLEASE: On-Off Switch for Critical Stem Cell Gene Discovered.

WELL, 2050 IS A LONG WAY OFF: The Coming Cost of Superbugs: 10 Million Deaths Per Year. But this is bad enough: “Antibiotic resistance currently accounts for an estimated 50,000 deaths in the US and Europe, which have surveillance to support those numbers. (The CDC puts the number for the US at 23,000.) But the project estimates that the actual current death toll is 700,000 worldwide.”

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WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A Step Toward Artificial Cells, Built from Silicon.

SPYING: Verizon Offers Encrypted Calling With NSA Backdoor At No Additional Charge.

HMM: First District Court Ruling On Obama Executive Amnesty Finds It Unconstitutional. “According to the opinion by Judge Arthur Schwab, the president’s policy goes ‘beyond prosecutorial discretion’ in that it provides a relatively rigid framework for considering applications for deferred action, thus obviating any meaningful case-by-case determination as prosecutorial discretion requires, and provides substantive rights to applicable individuals. As a consequence, Schwab concluded, the action exceeds the scope of executive authority.”

DANA LOESCH: The Terrorist Guild.

IT’S POTEMKIN VEHICLES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Why Your Electric Vehicle Might Not Be as Green as You Think.

IF THE CAMERA IS “ACCIDENTALLY” TURNED OFF, YOU SHOULDN’T GET PAID: Oakland cops disciplined 24 times for failing to turn on body-worn cameras.

K.C. JOHNSON: UVA’s Stalinist Rules For Convicting Males. “The collapse of the Rolling Stone rape story had an important byproduct—it showed the stunning unfairness of UVA’s proposed new sexual assault policies. UVA’s proposed guidelines, like those of many colleges, are heavily pitched toward accusers, minimize due process and all but ensure that key evidence will not come before the university, especially if that evidence might contradict the accuser’s version of events.”

Really, why pay six figures to send your kids to places that are prone to hysteria and a police-state mentality?

JUST BE YOURSELF: John Tierney on the Paradox of “Effortless Action.” “It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 586.

HOW SOCIAL COUNTERREVOLUTIONS BEGIN: ‘No’ Is a Woman’s Most Powerful Word.

Whether or not “no means no” might have been adequate to prevent the problems of date rapes behind the sock hop, it was not adequate to all the difficulties we faced. My generation drank more than our mothers had, so that women were more frequently incapable of saying no, or much of anything else. There were no parietal rules to keep us out of each other’s rooms, or force us to come home at an early hour. Nor could we fall back on “nice girls don’t”; we had to refuse this specific man each time, not on the grounds that some external force was stopping us, but because we simply didn’t want to have sex with him. That’s an uncomfortable conversation, and modern though we may be, most of us still hated uncomfortable conversations, especially if we’d had a few and just wanted to go to sleep.

I’m not calling for a return to single-sex dorms, curfew rules, and the presumption that “nice girls don’t.” I’m just pointing out that these things gave our mothers an easy way to say “no” that didn’t have to be explained or defended, and wouldn’t be taken as a specific rejection of this person right in front of you. We were chanting a slogan designed for a world that no longer existed. In the world where we lived, it required an assertiveness and a confident self-knowledge that a lot of 19-year-old girls found hard to muster. It required actions we weren’t always willing to take, like loudly saying “no,” and leaving if he persisted. In other words, it left us vulnerable, though not in the same way that our mothers had been. . . .

It is not the word “no” that women are struggling with; it is the concept of utter refusal. That is what has to change, not the words to describe it. It is perhaps unfair that this burden should be placed on women, especially when we are socialized to be accommodating and “nice” (especially to men). Unfortunately, no one else can bear the burden of deciding who we want to have sex with, and then articulating it forcefully.

Nor should feminists be eager to help women avoid the burden of deciding, and then stating their opinion in the strongest possible terms. “No” and “I don’t want to” are great tools for women to master. For centuries, society protected nice middle-class women from having to use them by deciding what we wanted, and punishing anyone who wanted anything else. Now that those rules are gone, some feminists are essentially advocating handing the burden of deciding what we want over to … men, who are supposed to guess whether we are offering “affirmative consent,” and be punished if they guess wrong.

We’ve reached the point that yes doesn’t even mean yes. Meanwhile, as Don Surber notes, under modern feminism even women bosses in the workplace want men to spare them the pain of definite statements.

The point of her piece was that men have to understand the rules of women in the workplace, and not that women have to understand the rules of business. She uses a wifely logic:

I’ve been at countless meetings at various news organizations where a male editor, suggesting a story idea, loudly declares something like: “We need a piece on the drop in gas prices!” A woman, making the same point, might ask hesitantly: “Has anyone noticed that gas prices are falling? Do we know why?”

Both are saying exactly the same thing: Get me the damn story on gas prices, and get it now.

It’s the old if-you-really-love-me-you’d-know-what-I-mean routine.

But actually they are not saying the same thing. One is giving an order (“We need a piece on the drop in gas prices!”), the other is asking pointless questions (“Has anyone noticed that gas prices are falling? Do we know why?”). The problem is the second speaker is not saying what she means, which means she is a poor communicator, which makes her a bad boss. The whole piece is that kind of passive-aggressive nonsense.

This is what a feminist looks like, at the end of 2014. Women used to be made of sterner stuff. No wonder so few women self-identify as feminist now.

IT’S NOT LIKE HE SAID “MACACA” OR SOMETHING: WashPost Buries Story of Virginia Democrat Convicted of Sex With 17-Year-Old Receptionist. “How is this a story for page C-7?” Because he’s a Democrat.

I WONDER HOW THIS POLLS: Democrats in Congress Fight to Allow Gay Men to Donate Blood.

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CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS: Here’s why Rolling Stone’s UVA rape story went viral.

OUCH: Dem Congressman: ‘Obama needs to listen to others’ because ‘he really doesn’t understand’ politics.