TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 689.

DINNER, WITH A SIDE OF SELF-RIGHTEOUSNESS:

As Bovy notes, asking people to “eat local” who live in northern climes where “local” means “nothing green” for six or seven months out of the year, and do not get to spend a few months each winter in Sicily teaching a cooking class, is pretty rich. A food writer who is telling other people how they could eat, if they wanted to, is doing a great public service. A food writer who is telling other people how they should eat (just like me, except without my access to ingredients) is just obnoxious. You can’t possibly know how they should eat, unless you have spent some time living their lives.

It is well to remember that people who spend time professionally writing about food have quite a bit more time in their day for acquiring and cooking food than most people. They also have more resources and recipes at their disposal. And you know, they can move to California to enjoy the produce.

Nor is it just the tyranny of localism; it is the list of ingredients that you ought to like, and the list of ingredients that you shouldn’t, and what the hell is wrong with you troglodytes and your Twinkies?

It’s about status competition, and setting yourself apart from the proles. And, to some degree, it’s a substitute for religion.

THE BIG QUESTION IS, HOW GOOD ARE HER MOB CONNECTIONS? Meet the Woman Harry Reid Wants to Replace Him in the Senate.

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LIFE IN THESE UNITED STATES: The Two Minutes Hate At Lincoln Center. It’s all about the Gleichschaltung.

ASHE SCHOW: Harry Reid’s War On Women.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is retiring. Although he was a faithful steward of the “war on women” political theme his party has used against Republicans, the Nevada senator wasn’t exactly a feminist warrior.

In 2014, he spent months blocking the Debbie Smith Act, which would have helped speed up the rape-kit processing and reduce the current backlog. Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, tried to pass it as a stand-alone bill rather than let it get bogged down along with a larger and more controversial Justice authorization package. Reid blocked the bill, hoping to use it as leverage for passing the other measure, but relented about five months later.

Reid also pays women in his office less than men, despite his self-righteous rhetoric on the issue. Women in Reid’s office made an average of $13,500 less than men, according to Fiscal Year 2013 data compiled by the Capitol City Project. Based on the same (misleading) metric he frequently used to condemn all other employers, Reid actually carried a wage gap in his own office roughly the same as the national average. Men in senior-level positions earned more on average than women, and Reid was also more likely to promote them. Reid’s chief of staff, legislative director and communications director are all men.

Finally, there’s Reid’s treatment of women politicians in his own party.

Read the whole thing.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students told they cannot lampoon U.S. presidents because campus forbids ‘mocking.’ To be fair, if I were as dumb as the administrators at Dixie State, I’d want to ban mockery, too.

THE HILL: RNC on Clinton: ‘Even Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes.’ Nixon didn’t have the press on his side.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: NYU Asks Employees For Donations To Help Students Pay Crippling Cost Of Attending NYU.

AN AMERICAN TALE: How my great-grandmother fled the 1905 massacres in Odessa and ended up as the Statue of Wisdom on the Capitol Dome of Augusta, Maine.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE ABOUT RAPE: Girl who cried rape after threesome with two soldiers has been jailed.

A girl who falsely accused two army soldiers of trying to rape her because she felt ashamed about sleeping with them both has been jailed.

Nicole Richess, 20, had a drunken threesome with the two servicemen at a friend’s house and then her own home at the end of a night out.

The following day her boyfriend, Alex Ganter, heard rumours she had been unfaithful and confronted her.

Richess ‘panicked’ and made up the false claim that the two innocent men, aged 23 and 24, had forced themselves on her because she was too ashamed to tell Mr Ganter she had cheated on him.

Mr Ganter, her partner of three years, made her go to the police to report the ‘attack’.

Richess even gave a ‘tearful’ account of the co-called crime to officers and ‘illicitly gained their empathy.’

Her ‘deceitful web of lies’ resulted in the arrest of the two soldiers, leaving them ‘distraught and petrified.’

However, officers began to realise Richess was lying when they gathered the accounts of the soldiers and her friends and she was charged with perverting the course of justice.

Funny, I’m constantly being told that women never lie about rape. And I like this:

Judge Jonathan Fuller QC said: “You made a determined and prolonged attempt to weave a picture of deceit to further your ends and you were prepared to make wholly false allegations of attempted rape against these innocent young men.

“The impact on these victims cannot be understated and false allegations of rape and attempted rape can have dreadful consequences.

“Every occasion of a proved false allegation has an insidious effect on public confidence, sometimes allowing doubts to creep into when one shouldn’t exist.

“Your offence has a corrosive effect on criminal justice.”

Lying about rape is a very serious offense, one that deserves serious punishment. But note that it’s still a man’s fault somehow:

In mitigation, Tony Ventham said Richess – who is seven-and-a-half months pregnant by her current partner – said she felt pressured in to reporting the false claims because her former boyfriend was ‘violent’ and ‘controlling’.

Richess had also taken cocaine for the first time that night.

Mr Ventham said: “She called the police because she was in a panic and because she’s stupid and immature.”

He added: “In December the following month she tried to commit suicide and had been struggling with depression ever since.”

Richess was told she would start her sentence in a young offenders’ institute.

Still, at least there’s some accountability.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Finally: An Anonymous, Online, Geo-Tagged System to Report Microaggressions at College!

I realize that simply by saying that you’ve probably heard of microaggressions, I’m likely committing one.

For the uninitiated, microaggressions are “are statements by a person from a privileged group that belittles or isolates a member of an unprivileged group, as it relates to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ability and more.” The really innovative thing about microaggressions is that they are often meant in a spirit of inclusion by the speaker. For instance, depending on who’s speaking and who’s listening, complimeting someone on their hair, clothing, or whatever might count as a covert way of putting him in his place. “That’s a really fancy jacket” may really be code for WTF are you doing in clothes that are above your station?

But I’ll risk microaggressing you to note that the student government at Ithaca College in upstate New York has just passed a mind-blowing bill that will allow students to anonymously report offensive statements such as “Where are you really from?” and “You don’t look disabled.” The system will include “demographics” about the aggressor and the aggressee and tag location info too, according to one of the sponsors of the bill. . . .

So remember, kids, you don’t go to college to learn new things and feed your head. You go to college to be subjected to an anonymous system of collecting information about the bad thoughts you have and the misstatements you make, some of which you might not even have intended to be hurtful.

But rest easy, because if you are in fact accused of microaggressing, your accuser “would likely have to reveal their identity” if any charges are pressed (emphasis added). Because we know how well colleges do at handling legal-style proceedings. . . .

Unless your goal is to chill or control speech and thought, this sort of program is a complete anathema to everything that higher education is supposed to promote and cherish. But there you are, another year older and deeper in debt.

Alan Charles Kors, the University of Pennsylvania historian and co-founder of The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), has long argued that colleges systematically engage in false advertising. That is, they tell parents and prospective students that they offer wide-open educational experiences while in fact harshly limiting and circumscribing all sorts of expression and inquiry.

I’d like to think that if Ithaca College actually implements its microaggression reporting system that it will trumpet that fact in all promotional materials so that new and continuing students will understand that they are not entering a space in which free thought and expression are encouraged but one in which they will be subject to surveillance and secret accusations ripped straight out of mid-century anti-totalitarian novels.

If they don’t, I encourage disappointed students to sue them.

JOHN HINDERAKER: What Really Happened to Harry Reid? Part 2. “When a guy shows up at a Las Vegas emergency room on New Year’s Day with severe facial injuries and broken ribs, and gives as an explanation the functional equivalent of ‘I walked into a doorknob,’ it isn’t hard to guess that he ran afoul of mobsters. Yet the national press has studiously averted its eyes from Reid’s condition, and has refused to investigate the cause of his injuries. To my knowledge, every Washington reporter has at least pretended to believe Reid’s story, and none, as far as I can tell, has inquired further. . . . What happened to Reid is not just a matter of curiosity. Everyone knows that the Reid family has gotten rich, even though Reid has spent his entire career as a public employee. It is known that a considerable part of his fortune came from being cut in on sweetheart Las Vegas land deals that included at least one person associated with organized crime as a principal. Was the Senate Majority Leader in the pocket of the Mafia? That seems like a question worth exploring, and yet, to my knowledge, not a single investigative reporter has chosen to look into the matter, even with the obvious clue of Reid’s face in front of them.”

Has Reid denied rumors that he was beaten and forced to resign by the father of one of his child-victims? If so, I must have missed it.

WEEKLY STANDARD: The Germanwings Co-pilot’s Non-Existent ‘Muslim Conversion.’ “Given the orientation of the site and reports that Germanwings 9525 was intentionally crashed by the co-pilot, it is hardly surprising that commentators on Politically Incorrect would speculate about whether Lubitz was a Muslim. Reference was made in particular to a blog post by a site regular named Michael Mannheimer. Mannheimer’s post contains no evidence that Lubitz was a Muslim convert, but just more speculation. Mannheimer’s conjecture is based on such apparently suspicious details as the fact that Lubitz did flight training in Bremen and Bremen is also home to a mosque known for its radicalism. In fairness to Politically Incorrect, it should be noted that several commentators on the site have themselves rejected the speculations in Mannheimer’s post as unfounded.”

NO WONDER THE SECRET SERVICE AND DEA DRIVE THOSE HUGE SUV’S: CA Dem Congresswoman Claims Climate Change Will Turn Women Into Prostitutes.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Big 4 Gunning for Big Law. “Can’t say we didn’t warn you about the Walmart thing. Be afraid law firms; be very afraid.”

All is proceeding as Ben Barton has foreseen.

IT’S MORE FUN TO WIELD MOB JUSTICE THAN TO EXPERIENCE IT: After Berating Innocent Chick-Fil-A Worker, Many Say He’s Now Getting Exactly What He Deserves. “Former Vante CFO and treasurer, Adam Mark Smith, went from being relatively unknown to an unemployed, virally-hated man with a video he thought was taking a stand against discrimination of gays. In a YouTube video, Smith berated Chick-fil-A employee Rachel Elizabeth at the drive-thru window when she gave him, a protester, a free cup of water. . . . According to Boston News, Smith went from earning $200,000 a year, with cushy stock options valued at $1 million, to losing everything. His family even had to move into an RV.”

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HOW WE ROLL IN KNOXVEGAS:

A crowd gathered as Knoxville Police Department Lt. Gordon Gwathney struggled with the screaming black woman in the public housing development.

Gwathney already had shot his stun gun at the 5-foot-2-inch tall woman, but her crack cocaine high made her impervious to the electric jolt designed to freeze the muscles of large men. She ripped the metal wires from her body and continued to fight.

As he tussled with the 110-pound woman, the crowd of onlookers in Walter P. Taylor Homes swelled. Gwathney’s radio was ripped from his uniform as he forced the woman to the ground, so calling for help as the crowd closed in around him was not an option.

As he fought to get handcuffs on the squirming woman, two people from the crowd jumped into the fray.

“I saw something I thought I’d never see — people come to the aid of an officer,” Dewey Roberts, former president of Knoxville NAACP, told a community group last week. “They were telling her to calm down and they got his radio that had been knocked loose.”

Roberts witnessed the event through a window at the Dr. Lee Williams Complex, a senior citizens center he oversees in Walter P. Taylor Homes. Roberts had seen the confrontation develop despite Gwathney “trying to de-escalate the situation” and worried as he saw the crowd of black onlookers encircle the lone officer.

“With my experiences with police over the years, I was just amazed,” said the 69-year-old Roberts who led Knoxville’s black community through the racial tinderbox in the late 1990s when several black men died during confrontations with Knoxville officers.

“And it wasn’t just a few people, it was the whole crowd. I was shaking my head in disbelief, but it was a good feeling.”

Well, good.

SPACE: Soon, Humans Will Follow Robots Into Deep Space.

LAME: The Apps You Can’t Kill: Why Apple forces its software on your iPhone and won’t let you delete it.

CHANGE: Four Visions Of The Future From DARPA’s Latest Report Card.

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And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season. Just remember, when winter storms are over, spring and summer storms are on the way.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UNC Charlotte quietly adopts new transgender bathroom policy. “The current policy states that any student, faculty or staff member may use the restroom that corresponds to the individual’s gender identity.”