TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 604.

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT: Dave Barry’s Year In Review.

A huge airliner simply vanished, and to this day nobody has any idea what happened to it, despite literally thousands of hours of intensive speculation on CNN.

Millions of Americans suddenly decided to make videos of themselves having ice water poured on their heads. Remember? There were rumors that this had something to do with charity, but for most of us, the connection was never clear. All we knew was that, for a while there, every time we turned on the TV, there was a local newscaster or Gwyneth Paltrow or Kermit the Frog or some random individual soaking wet and shivering. This mysterious phenomenon ended as suddenly as it started, but not before uncounted trillions of American brain cells died of frostbite.

An intruder jumped the White House fence and, inexplicably, managed to run into the White House through the unlocked front door. Most of us had assumed that anybody attempting this would instantly be converted to a bullet-ridden pile of smoking carbon by snipers, lasers, drones, ninjas, etc., but it turned out that, for some mysterious reason, the White House had effectively the same level of anti-penetration security as a Dunkin’ Donuts.

LeBron James deliberately moved to Cleveland.

Of course not everything that happened in 2014 was mysterious. Some developments — ISIS, Ebola, the song “Happy” — were simply bad.

There was even some good news in 2014, mostly in the form of things that did not happen. A number of GM cars — the final total could be as high as four — were not recalled. There were several whole days during which no statements had to be issued by the U.S. Department of Explaining What the Vice President Meant to Say. And for the fifth consecutive year, the Yankees failed to even play in the World Series.

Read the whole thing.

GEORGE WILL: A Strike Against Rent-Seeking.

Mighty oaks from little acorns grow, so last year’s most encouraging development in governance might have occurred in February in a U.S. district court in Frankfort, Ky. There, a judge did something no federal judge has done since 1932. By striking down a “certificate of necessity” (CON) regulation, he struck a blow for liberty and against crony capitalism.

Although Raleigh Bruner’s Wildcat Moving company in Lexington is named in celebration of the local religion — University of Kentucky basketball — this did not immunize him from the opposition of companies with which he wished to compete. In 2012, he formed the company, hoping to operate statewide.

Kentucky, however, like some other states, requires movers to obtain a CON. Kentucky’s statute says such certificates shall be issued if the applicant is “fit, willing and able properly to perform” moving services — and if he can demonstrate that existing moving services are “inadequate,” and that the proposed service “is or will be required by the present or future public convenience and necessity.”

Applicants must notify their prospective competitors, who can and often do file protests. This frequently requires applicants to hire lawyers for the hearings. There they bear the burden of proving current inadequacies and future necessities. And they usually lose. From 2007 to 2012, 39 Kentucky applications for CONs drew 114 protests — none from the general public, all from moving companies. Only three of the 39 persevered through the hearing gantlet; all three were denied CONs.

I view such requirements as unconstitutional. Courts used to agree, and may soon start agreeing again. Dave Kopel and I had an article on this some years ago.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Cook Steak And Influence People.

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ASIAN BUDDHISTS get militant.

Feeling threatened by Hindu India, Communist China and Islam, Buddhists in south and southeast Asia are starting to develop a militancy of their own. Groups like the Buddhist Power Force (Bodu Bala Sena, or BBS) in Sri Lanka and 969 in Myanmar have become increasingly radicalized. They give voice to anti-Muslim sentiment that some think has inspired violence, like the anti-Muslim attacks in Sri Lanka in June that left three dead. According to a recent FT profile, leaders from 969 and the BBS signed a pact in September for “aimed at protecting global Buddhism.” . . .

This won’t be the last of such surges in militancy. The 21st century was supposed to be a post-religious, post-modernist era of peaceful secularism. That now looks less and less like the world we are living in.

Yeah, I’m afraid that’s right.

UPDATE: Related: In Sweden, the Land of the Open Door, Anti-Muslim Sentiment Finds a Foothold. This article doesn’t say why that’s happening. Perhaps the Times will run a followup on that question.

THE NEW YORKER’S ADAM GOPNIK: Yeah, I don’t actually know anything about the law, I’m just making shit up.

AUGUSTA CHRONICLE: Assault On The Truth: Fictionalized rape reports fueling hysteria on college campuses.

It’s a journalistic travesty that Rolling Stone’s discredited and disgraceful University of Virginia rape story ever made it into print.

What’s more shameful is how so many people actually hoped the gory – and phony – tale of the fraternity gang-rape was true.

It’s as if many activists and politicians wanted a freshman named Jackie to have been brutally assaulted in September 2012 by seven men at the Phi Kappa Psi frat house. It’s as if they hoped she had gone through a three-hour ordeal that ended in her fleeing the house party in a blood-stained dress.

Because as horrific as all that would have been, it would have helped their agenda.

It would be convenient fodder for liberals crowing about the rape “epidemic” sweeping American universities, where, according to an oft-cited but thoroughly debunked academic study, “1-in-5” college women are sexually assaulted.

It would have bolstered their canard that colleges can’t properly deal with campus rapes, and are in need of “fixing” through expansive new federal legislation.

And it would have dovetailed nicely with the overall “war on women” theme Democrats will trot out between now and 2016, when Hillary Clinton, or possibly Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., runs for president.

But instead, the implosion of the ginned-up UVA rape tale – much like the yarn Hollywood it-girl Lena Dunham spun about being raped by a “moustached campus Republican” named Barry – only erodes public trust in the veracity of bona fide incidents of rape.

Indeed.

SCOTT OTT: To Head Off Another Republican Speaking Scandal I’m Confessing Now that I Spoke to This Group.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: The National Labor Relations Board issued a ruling in December that could clear the way for much more unionization of faculty members at private colleges and universities. “Last week’s decision was the type of pro-union ruling that many unions have been hoping for since President Obama took office. But during President Obama’s first term, his nominees to the NLRB were blocked. When he made “recess appointments” — which bypass Senate confirmation requirements — the administration was sued and the rulings made by those appointees have been challenged as unconstitutional as a result of the nature of the appointments. But last year a Senate compromise cleared the way for confirmation of NLRB nominees whose rulings — while possible to challenge on their merits — aren’t going to face legal challenges because of the NLRB nomination process.”

This will not benefit the cost-control needed to help higher education survive in its present form. I suppose Kurt Schlichter-style conservative insurgents would get behind this sort of change for that very reason. In fact, people on the right could only dream of doing as much harm to the left as the campus sex wars, and the unionization crusade, are doing. . . .

INDEED THEY DO: In Wake of Rolling Stone Fiasco, UVa Officials Also Have Some Explaining to Do.

THOUGHTS ON the Great Feminist War On Nerds. “I live in a world where feminists throwing weaponized shame at nerds is an obvious and inescapable part of daily life.” Punch back twice as hard. Among other things, point out that the people calling you “gross,” “fat,” and “loser,” are, well. . . .

Plus: “Pick any attempt to shame people into conforming with gender roles, and you’ll find self-identified feminists leading the way. Transgender people? Feminists led the effort to stigmatize them and often still do. Discrimination against sex workers? Led by feminists. Against kinky people? Feminists again. People who have too much sex, or the wrong kind of sex? Feminists are among the jeering crowd, telling them they’re self-objectifying or reinforcing the patriarchy or whatever else they want to say. Male victims of domestic violence? It’s feminists fighting against acknowledging and helping them.”

Well, that’s because they’re horrible, damaged people who want to address their own problems by making other people suffer. When you recognize that, it all makes sense. When you point it out to them, they tend to go elsewhere.

UPDATE: I’ve linked it many times before, but I once again recommend this piece by Eric S. Raymond.

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PREDICTION: 5 Biggest Education Issues Of 2015.

WAIT, THAT’S NOT THE NARRATIVE: Fast food portions haven’t changed since 1996, study finds. “An 18-year government report has found that portions and nutrient content have stayed pretty much the same, though saturated and trans fat in French fries have gone down.”

SPACE: SpaceX Will Try Launch and Re-Land.

PSYCHOLOGY TODAY: Are you now, or have you ever been, a manspreader?

Manspreading is an example of what college intellectuals call a “microaggression”. That simply means you may not know that you are oppressing the person next to you. The effect is to make innocent people even less willing to be friendly and engage others for fear it will turn into a bad scene of the offended party screaming, crying and/or threatening legal action. The 1990s sitcom Seinfeld used to poke fun at such behavior with the perpetually offended character Elaine Benes. Little did the writers know that Elaine would be the voice of a new generation.

The manspreading crisis was the latest outrage in a year of media and government-orchestrated man-bashing. 2014 saw the culmination of the Obama Administration’s three year policy of misusing the United States Department of Education Office for Civil Rights to redefine Title IX to force universities across the nation to submit to ridiculous federal standards and set up campus kangaroo courts that eschewed due process in prosecuting men accused of any variety of real or imagined crimes.

Indeed.

DISEASE: Ebola Still Spreading, W.H.O. Reports.

WELL, GOOD, BECAUSE WOUND-OPENING IS CLEARLY WHAT THIS COUNTRY NEEDS RIGHT NOW: Documentary reopens old wounds from Jim Crow-era killing.

FAVORITE GADGETS OF 2014.

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ROAD AND TRACK: This is an autonomous Mercedes concept coming to CES.

TEST DRIVE: 2015 Dodge Charger Pursuit V-8 AWD.