AT AMAZON, New Year, New You.

Plus, today only at Amazon: Up to 72% Off Classic Detective TV Series.

ONE IS THE LONELIEST NUMBER THAT YOU’LL EVER DO: LOL: O’Malley Can’t Convince Only Person at His Iowa Event to Vote for Him.

TEST DRIVE: 2016 Mercedes-Benz C450 AMG.

YOU WILL BE MADE TO CARE: Oregon Bakery Pays $135K for Refusing to Make Cake for Gay Wedding.

HE ONLY WANTS WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU: Facebook’s Zuckerberg: If You Oppose Our International Power Grab, You’re An Enemy Of The Poor.

THE 21ST CENTURY HASN’T TURNED OUT AS I EXPECTED: British health experts warn of unstoppable gonorrhea.

VIDEO: Watch the Picture-Perfect Implosion of a Century-Old Pittsburgh Bridge.

THE YEAR CAMPUS FREE SPEECH STOLE THE SPOTLIGHT: As 2015 comes to a close, we at FIRE are taking the time to look back on a year in which free speech issues on campus exploded on the national scene:

Protests roiled more than 75 college campuses, congressional leaders debated students’ civil liberties on multiple occasions, and newsmakers ranging from Jerry Seinfeld to President Obama felt compelled to chime in on the state of free speech at America’s colleges and universities.

You can read more about these events (and many others) in FIRE’s “2015 Year in Review for Student and Faculty Rights on Campus” over at The Torch.

SAN FRANCISCO TO JUSTIN BIEBER: STOP SPRAY-PAINTING GRAFFITI ON OUR SIDEWALKS. “While the exact source of the graffiti remains unclear, City Attorney Dennis Herrera wants Bieber and his label to help make it stop:”

“This prohibited marketing practice illegally exploits our City’s walkable neighborhoods and robust tourism; intentionally creates visual distractions that pose risks to pedestrians on busy rights of way,” Herrera wrote in his letter.

He added the graffiti “irresponsibly tells our youth that likeminded lawlessness and contempt for public property are condoned and encouraged by its beneficiaries — including Mr. Bieber and the record labels that produce and promote him.”

I agree with the message — graffiti is vandalism, after all, but I’m not at all sure if a representative of the city of San Francisco is the best person to be attacking someone over his contempt for public property, given the city’s well-deserved Calcutta meets Caligula reputation.

LOSERS: Union Posts Names of Non-Members, Urges Shunning. “Local 412 of the United Auto Workers has placed a spotlight on employees who have chosen to exercise their right to not support the union financially under Michigan’s right-to-work law. In a recent newsletter, the local urges co-workers not to share ‘tools, knowledge or support’ with individuals who chose not to pay union dues. It then lists the names of the employees to be shunned.”

Sounds like a conspiracy to deprive people of their civil rights to me.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Top 10 Best “Top 10 Best Lists of 2015” of 2015.

BEEN THERE, SEEN THAT. Terry Teachout has a brief and brutal review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, which concludes thusly:

To all this I need only add that the American film industry has now, it would seem, attained the perigee of decadence: it has given us, courtesy of J.J. Abrams, a totally derivative hommage to a totally derivative hommage.

Here endeth the lesson.

Heh. To how understand just how badly self-lobotomized Hollywood has become, despite SW: TFA‘s undeniably derivative nature and plot holes you could drive a Star Destroyer through, it’s likely the most watchable movie in film theaters right now.

Related: “But we now live in the age of the fake nerd and I think that’s where Star Wars fits best. The people that ‘f***ing love science!’ and watch Big Bang Theory can’t shut up about Star Wars. It’s another method to signal their membership in the cult of pseudo-scientism. They may never have made it past geometry in school, but they swear they grew up on comic books and were always a nerd.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 964.

BERNIENOMICS 101.

The day after Christmas, Bernie Sanders asked a question on Twitter: “You have families out there paying 6, 8, 10 percent on student debt but you can refinance your homes at 3 percent. What sense is that?”

Finance types may snicker. But I’ve seen this question asked fairly often, and it seems worth answering, respectfully, for people whose expertise and interest lie outside the realm of economics.

The short answer is: “Loans are not priced in real life the way they are in Sunday School stories.” In a Sunday School story, the cheapest loans would go to the nicest people with the noblest use for the money: single mothers who need money to buy their kids a Christmas present, say.

That’s splendid for the recipient. But what about the lender? Let’s say you had $150 that you really needed to have at the end of the month, say to pay your rent. Would you want to lend it to the single mother whose income is stretched so tight that she needs to borrow money for Christmas presents, or would you want to lend it to some heartless leech of a securities litigator with an 800 credit rating who happens to have left his wallet at home? C’mon. You know the answer; you just don’t want to say it. If you really need the money — if you cannot afford to turn your loan into a gift — then you lend it to the better credit risk with the higher income, not the person who may find themselves too short to pay you when the loan comes due.

In aggregate, most of the money in your savings account is loaned out using this cold calculus, and unless you could afford to have that contents of that account suddenly vanish, you want it to be. That’s why poor people, on top of all the other unfairness heaped upon them, pay higher interest rates. And that is why secured loans, like mortgages, get lower interest rates than unsecured loans, like credit card balances and student loans.

You’d think Bernie would have learned something about this in his 74 years on the planet.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Who Can Be President of the United States?: Candidate Hillary Clinton and the Problem of Statutory Qualifications.

COULD THIS BE WHY IRS ILLEGALLY HARASSED 292 RIGHT GROUPS IN 2010 AND 2012? Kathryn Watson says analysis of campaign contributions made by IRS workers between 1990 and 2014 found twice as many of them contributed to Democrats as did to GOP candidates and causes. The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s analysis was based on FEC data compiled by OpenSecrets.org.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: An Interview With The Founder of Brown University’s Underground Free-Speech Group.

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TWO HUFFINGTON POSTS IN ONE!

● “HuffPo’: Netflix Binge Watching Is ‘Killing the Planet.’”

—Headline, PJ Media’s Stephen Kruiser, summarizing a HuffPo article from yesterday.

● “What to Watch on Netflix.”

—Regularly recurring section at the Huffington Post, including at least one article headlined, “What To Binge-Watch Over The Long Weekend.”

Also from yesterday: Huffington Post: Unplug Those Christmas Lights, You Energy-Guzzling Americans!

Well, the time-out during the 1960s and ‘70s when the left didn’t act like puritanical scolds was fun while it lasted — the “ban all the thingz!!!!” modern day Comstocks at the HuffPo are merely returning “Progressivism” to its form around this same time a century ago.

SO IF MICROAGGRESSIONS ARE AS BAD AS SEXUAL ASSAULT, IS SEXUAL ASSAULT NO WORSE THAN MICROAGGRESSIONS? Harvard Law dean compares microaggressions to violence, sexual assault.

In a move that should surprise no one who has been watching the utter meltdown of privileged college students this year, a Harvard Law School dean has compared “microaggressions” to sexual assault and violence.

Dean Martha L. Minow, during her winter commencement speech on injustice, asked her students to keep fighting even after they graduate. She made references to apartheid and segregated schools before making the bizarre analogy.

“Taking even seemingly small acts in one’s own school can build the culture that prevents violence, bullying, sexual assault and racial microaggressions,” she said.

Get that? Violence, bullying, sexual assault — they’re all in the same category as microaggressions. Microaggressions, for those who have been lucky enough to miss the outcries of the past year, are words and phrases that offend someone with delicate sensitivities, even when the speaker meant no harm.

For example, several schools provided lists to students of phrases that are considered microaggressions. At the University of California, the list included such debilitating and hateful phrases as “everyone can succeed in this society, if they work hard enough” and “America is the land of opportunity.”

You’d think a legal scholar of her renown would be more careful about her language.

RON RADOSH ON DIPLOMACY AD ABSURDUM — RECOGNIZING ISIS:

[The London Independent’s Vadim Nikitim] believes that only by accepting and recognizing ISIS as a legitimate state entity will “the West hope to gain a credible means to moderate and constrain its further advance.” Hence, he concludes, “it is time to forge a long peace with militant Islam.”

Perhaps Mr. Nikitim might first inquire as to whether ISIS wants a “long peace” with the West. For a starter, I suggest he travel to ISIS territory to make an inquiry. Somehow, I don’t think he’d be returning soon to Britain.

Of course, to paraphrase Trotsky*, you may not be interested in visiting ISIS, but ISIS is interested in visiting you.

* Yes, I know.

HMM: Scott Adams: Hillary is hiding a major health problem. Theory: It’s all a setup — they know she isn’t well enough to be President, so Hillary will wage a phony campaign against Trump, get “sick” at last minute, usher him in.

Hey, it’s no weirder than lots of conspiracy theories I see these days.

THE YEAR REHEATED, in which David Thompson marvels at the mental entanglements of our self-imagined betters:

In July, the militant eco-collective Deep Green Resistance told us of their plans to “abolish masculinity,” “abolish whiteness” and bring about “complete economic collapse.” Thereby saving the world from people like thee and me. While the Guardian’s Aisha Mirza bemoaned the “psychic burden” of living among white people, which is worse than being mugged.

The politics of ostentatiously non-conformist hair was explained to us in August, thanks to Annah Anti-Palindrome, a woman who channels her hatred of “everyone around me” into her feminism. The same month also introduced us to the comically neurotic Melissa Fabello, whose interracial dating advice entails regular confessions of “white supremacy,” which “has to be acknowledged – and dealt with – constantly.” Especially before any sex can commence. Oh, and Guardian columnist George Monbiot revealed his hitherto secret passion for scavenging roadkill – and waving dead, twitching squirrels at bewildered children.

September was enlivened by another collection of agonised tweets from our leftist betters, while Guardian contributor Amy Roe indulged in a spot of recreational outrage and shared her harrowing experience as a “sweat-shame” survivor.

The eternally downhearted Michelle Hanson was inconsolable in October, on discovering that the superhero dolls bought by small children are not in fact geared to the ideological preferences of a self-described “single older woman” who writes for the Guardian. Thanks to the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Inclusive Excellence Centre, we learned that questioning the premises of “microaggressions” is itself now deemed a “microaggression” and therefore impermissible. And thanks to the left-leaning Independent, we learned of the alleged social benefits of paedophilia. The Independent also introduced us to the child-rearing skills of “non-binary” parent Dorian Stripe, who delights in buying dresses and tights for their infant son, and only grudgingly uses the pronoun ‘he’, supposedly because of the “one in one hundred chance my son will be transgender.”

Read the whole thing. And then check out Thomas Sowell, who dubs 2015 “The Year Of The Big Lie,” and bids it “good riddance. We can only hope that people who vote in 2016 will have learned something from 2015’s disasters.”

I wish I could be more optimistic about that prospect — how about you?

BERNIE SANDERS: The Economics of a Toddler and the Ethics of a Thug: Nonsensical authoritarianism on full display.