MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ABOUT KNOXVILLE’S OWN ZAEVION DOBSON: Where Do Heroes Come From?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 959.

WHEN THE TIMES ADMITS WHAT EVERYBODY KNOWS, THAT’S PROGRESS! Gray Lady Sings The Blues:

In this story, NYT is facing what everybody knows: The retirement systems of the 20th century won’t work in the 21st. U.S. retirees will see declining social security payments after 2035, according to the story, and the private retirement system isn’t working for many people. Additionally, citizens of developed countries continue to do two things that make it hard for retirement systems to work effectively: live longer and have fewer kids. The problem is worse in Europe than it is in the U.S. But even here, without substantial changes in the way we handle old age, the current retirement system will not give millennials and even many Gen Xers the security they need.

It is a good sign that even a deep blue news source like the NYT acknowledges the retirement problem. The shift from the old way of organizing basic social institutions to something that can work in the emerging new world of the information age will only happen as partisan blues gradually and painfully face up to the reality that change is inevitable.

They’re on the wrong side of history.

JOURNALISM: How The New York Times Uses Rhetorical Ploys To Defend Its Shoddy Nail Salon Series: When cornered on facts, claim bias. The left is always trying to stop talking about the facts they’ve got wrong and start talking about others’ alleged motivations for pointing that out.

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ABOUT KNOXVILLE’S OWN ZAEVION DOBSON: Where Do Heroes Come From?

PFFF! JUST LIKE THAT, PUERTO RICAN OFFICIALS DISAPPEAR A $10 MILLION FEDERAL GRANT: Awarded in 2007, the grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development was intended to pay for building a bus station, a four-story building and a cemetery. Comes now 2015 and nothing – as in nada, zero – has been built. Puerto Rican officials claim they have no paperwork on the project because the contractor is holding the documents as “ransom” for not being paid. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has a simple question – Who got the $10 million????

WHY IS BERNIE SANDERS ANTI-CHOICE? Bernie Sanders can’t close the gender wage gap, because it’s due to choice.

At Saturday night’s Democratic presidential debate, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said he would fix the economy in part by closing the gender wage gap. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton also brought up “equal pay for equal work,” implying that is not currently the case and that there is some unspoken rule in business that women can be paid less.

The problem with this statement is that the gender wage gap is due to the choices women make and is therefore not fixable unless those choices are controlled — which is a ludicrous suggestion.

And it’s not even properly called a “wage gap,” it is more appropriately called an “earnings gap,” because that is the claim that women earn 77 or 78 cents on the dollar compared to men.

Women as a whole earn less than men as a whole because women are more likely to stop working to take care of a baby, to work fewer hours and to go into lower-paying fields. The 77-cent claim doesn’t actually compare apples to apples, it compares apples to oranges.

Well, that’s the whole line, right? Orchard unfair to oranges!

MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: The 10 Stupidest Things About The Post’s Cartoon Portraying Cruz’s Children As Monkeys. Here’s #3: “As if going after children weren’t enough, Telnaes thought it would be a grand idea to portray the daughters of the first Hispanic senator from Texas as monkeys. I’m not sure if the dehumanization was done because of that, because of their father’s politics or some other reason, but it compounds the error in ways that make you wonder how in the heck the cartoon received editorial approval from The Washington Post.” Plus: “If your cartoon doesn’t work on its own, scrap the idea. Also if it’s racist, scrap it.”

Related: “The media has two wings: The Pious Concern Troll wing, and the Nasty Attack Dog wing. Why no, they’re never asked to reconcile these wings.”

MILO YIANNOPOULOS: The Twelve Days Of Feminist Christmas. “You might think Christmas would be considered by feminists to be a terribly problematic holiday, full of toxic masculinity and patriarchy — they think this about every holiday — but actually they love Christmas, because it’s a day dedicated to receiving gifts. And what does third-wave radical feminism stand for, if not material greed?”

IF SHELDON ADELSON WANTS TO EXPAND HIS MEDIA HOLDINGS — OR IF SOME OTHER WEALTHY GOP DONOR WANTS TO DO SOMETHING BESIDES THROW MONEY DOWN A CAMPAIGN-DONATION RATHOLE — THIS MIGHT BE A GOOD OPPORTUNITY: Disney is looking to unload its interest in cable channel Fusion. “A few years ago, Fusion, a cable network aimed at millennials and young Latinos who make up a growing portion of the U.S. population, seemed like a good idea to the Walt Disney Co. Now — in an age of cable-cord cutting, ‘cord-nevers’ who don’t sign up for cable and the emergence of streaming online video services — not so much. Disney is looking to unload its 50% stake in the channel and digital content provider it co-owns with Spanish-language broadcaster Univision.”

At least, this is the kind of property people should be looking at.

WELL, I CERTAINLY DON’T. Nobody Cares If You Feel “Unsafe.”

G.E.: HEY, WE DIDN’T THINK OUR INCESSANT CRIES FOR BIGGER GOVERNMENT AND MORE REGULATION WOULD EVER IMPACT US! Will Connecticut’s High-Tax, Union-Friendly Policies Turn Out GE’s Lights?

You may remember a 2014 Gallup poll that had Connecticut as the new Dodge City, the place that half the residents wanted to get out of. Well, many are leaving, eroding the tax base. And the next may be Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of General Electric.

Headquartered in Connecticut since 1974, GE is evaluating whether to stay or leave after being hit with a big tax increase. A decision is expected next month.

Companies and people are leaving the state because taxes have been jacked up steeply in recent years under the one-party rule of Democrats. Further hikes are inevitable, given looming budget deficits, driven primarily by escalating annual contributions to the state’s overgenerous and seriously underfunded public-sector employee pension fund and unfunded health care obligations.

The Yankee Institute, a policy think tank in Hartford, just published “$60 a Second,” a study documenting a $3.8 billion erosion in the individual income tax base from 2011 to 2013 as emigrants took more out of the state than immigrants brought in.

Throughout its history, GE has been tireless champion of bigger and bigger government. As Jonah Goldberg wrote in 2008’s Liberal Fascism:

A year before FDR took office, [Gerard Swope, then-president of GE] published his modestly titled The Swope Plan. His idea was that the government would agree to suspend antitrust laws so that industries could collude in order to adjust “production to consumption.” Industry would “no longer operate in independent units, but as a whole, according to rules laid out by a trade association…the whole supervised by some federal agency like the Federal Trade Commission.” Under Swopism, as many in and out of government called it, the state would remove the uncertainty for the big-business man so that he could “go forward decisively instead of fearsomely.”

The aforementioned Jeffrey Immelt served as Obama’s “Jobs” “Czar” during his first term. Until GE divested itself of NBC in 2013, it owned MSNBC, which served as a megaphone to espouse this corporatist worldview every day; in recent years, CNBC has also championed the Gleichschaltung, hence the surprise by some when the seemingly pro-business channel attacked small-government-espousing GOP presidential candidates with hammer and tongs during its infamous recent Republican primary debate.

Funny though, when it’s time to pay for bigger and bigger government, GE takes Conquest’s First Law of Politics — “Everyone is conservative about what he knows best” — rather seriously.

As for GE being surprised at having to pay more taxes and suffer more business-unfriendly regulation, well, that’s usually how it works out, as GE is discovering the hard way. Or as the Libertarian Party noted at the height of MSNBC-approved Occupy Wall Street:

“YOU’RE REALLY ON A ROLL THIS WEEK, WAPO:” Washington Post makes article on six US soldiers’ deaths in Afghanistan all about Obama.

As Ace writes, to understand the Narrative the MSM has been pitching since oh, mid-2007 or so, “Don’t think about these minor characters,” dying in the Middle East.

“Think only of this Hero, the Star of Our Movie, in a difficult moment on his Hero’s Journey. The deaths of these walk-ons with no lines aren’t important, except to the extent they cause him to reflect, or feel a moment of triumph in…. golf.”

YOUR TAX DOLLARS AT WORK: Inside the Obamas’ luxurious $3,500 a night holiday home boasting five bedrooms, six bathrooms, and an Asian koi pond.

ANOTHER BATCH OF SETTLED SCIENCE THAT HAS UNRAVELED: The Growing Food Fight over the Government’s Nutrition Guidelines.

For decades, the government has advised Americans on what they should eat. The advice isn’t just advisory; it drives everything from school lunches and agricultural subsidies to marketing for those bowls of candy we call breakfast cereal. But the science behind this enterprise has always been shaky. . . .

In 1988, the surgeon general issued a report declaring ice cream to be a “comparable” public health threat to cigarettes. The science was settled. Except it wasn’t. If you’ve been paying any attention, you’ve seen the stories about how fat isn’t necessarily bad for you, while carbs are the real enemy. Studies have found that more milk fat in your diet correlates with less heart disease. Who’s right? I lost nearly 50 pounds in part by cutting out carbs. That’s clear enough for me, but it’s also clear there’s a lot we don’t yet understand. . . .

“There’s a lot of stuff in the guidelines that was right 40 years ago but that science has disproved. . . . Sometimes the scientific community doesn’t like to backtrack,” David McCarron, the incoming chairman of the Medical Nutrition Council at the American Society of Nutrition, told the Washington Post. There’s no shortage of lessons here, well beyond this food fight. Even when everyone’s intentions are good, politics can get in the way of science. Scientists are not immune to fads and groupthink just because they claim to speak for science. Special interests work the refs, but the refs often have an agenda as well. Winners of policy fights hate to lose — or admit they’re wrong. And people who shout about a settled consensus are often only shouting to drown out those who might disagree.

Maybe the government shouldn’t be telling us what to eat.

A GIFT TO MY FANS: The Camels of Christmas, set in my Shifter’s series.  (And yeah, the cover sucks.  We had cat emergencies which ate my time, so I just threw something together. It’s also not proofed because it’s on my blog and free.  At some point it will be proofed and sold.)