TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Women-Only Spaces Aren’t Necessarily Safe Spaces.

When “Helen” (not her real name) was 19, she woke from a deep sleep to find her friend “Jane” (who was staying in a second bed in Helen’s bedroom) on top of her, saying that she wanted to “experiment.” Helen tried to push Jane away, clearly told her “no” and “get off”—but after it became clear the other girl wouldn’t take no for an answer, Helen gradually stopped resisting and waited for it to be over. “If a guy had done that to me, I probably would have screamed. I would have got my parents, who were in the next room. I don’t know why I didn’t call my parents,” Helen told me.

“I think she felt entitled to [rape] me because I was interested in women, and because she thought that because she was a woman, she was incapable of hurting me. I guess I would just want other women or girls in my situation to know that that was rape and that it was wrong,” she added. Back when the assault happened, Helen didn’t tell anyone about it. Only many years later did she begin to ask close friends to help her find the right language to describe it.

Helen is far from alone. I’ve heard other stories like it, directly from friends and second-hand from acquaintances. I’ve also been raped, by a much older woman, during a mercifully short-lived relationship that was characterized by abuse, manipulation, and intimidation.

Plus, the top comment: “I’d like to add men-only spaces aren’t necessarily dangerous either. Almost all of my jobs have been in male-dominated fields where I am the only woman around – at least where I do the bulk of my job. I even worked a second shift job with nothing but blue-collar guys doing the warehouse grunt work all night. I’ve never had a moment where I even kind of felt in danger.”

NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: How To Use Family In An RPG: Some Practical Thoughts, from Moe Lane at the PJ Lifestyle section.

FREEDOM AND HYPOCRISY: A must-read post by Eugene Volokh.

TMI AND THE CRISIS OF LEGITIMACY: My latest Bloomberg View column looks at Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. Gurri argues, convincingly in my view, that ideologically diverse political movements that are usually treated as separate, or at the very least attributed to economic unrest, are actually manifestations of a crisis of legitimacy brought on when abundant information meets excessive expectations.

“Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust,” Gurri writes. Someone somewhere will expose every error, every falsehood, every biased assessment, every overstated certainty, every prejudice, every omission—and likely offer a contrary and equally refutable version of their own…

As information becomes abundant, he writes, “the regime accumulates pain points.” By this he means that problems like police brutality, economic mismanagement, foreign policy failures and botched responses to disasters “can no longer be concealed or explained away.” Instead, “they are seized on by the newly empowered public, and placed front and center in open discussions. In essence, government failure now sets the agenda.”

Yet the public’s expectations for government are at least as great as before. And those high expectations—not merely for justice or prosperity but for happiness and meaning—engender even greater anger.

“The public now takes it for granted that government could solve any problem, change any undesirable condition, if only it tried,” he writes. “The late modernist urge to intervene, with its aimless meandering, has been interpreted by the public as either tyranny or corruption — never, somehow, as the ineffectual pose of a kindly uncle.” In short, “The public has judged government on government’s own terms, but added bad intentions.” The result is a crisis of legitimacy.

Read the whole column here. I also recommend the book, which is complex and wide-ranging but fairly short and only $2.99 (ebook only).

AL SHARPTON ON RAHM EMANUEL: ‘I DON’T SEE HOW HE CAN CONTINUE GOVERNING.’ “Because this is the perfect Obama-era scandal, Emanuel is currently vacationing in Cuba.”

Fredo, Michael Corleone and Hyman Roth, call your office!

FREE STUFF! OBAMACARE EDITION: Despite subsidies, the poor are spending big on Obamacare.  A new study by the Urban Institute–quietly released just prior to Christmas–reveals that lower income Americans are paying about 10-20 percent of their income on Obamacare premiums.

The Urban Institute study would normally be an interesting, albeit dry, topic of discussion in a class on health economics or the limits of tackling huge challenges through public policy. The findings, though, should signal a serious warning alarm for the future of ObamaCare.

The fundamental vulnerability of ObamaCare is that relatively healthy individuals would decide that the costs of even subsidized coverage exceeded its benefits. According to the Urban Institute study, even relatively healthy individuals are paying over 15 percent of their income for ObamaCare health insurance plans.

The costs for insuring those with even modest health care needs are in effect subsidized by these healthier individuals. If these healthier Americans decide that even the subsidized costs are too high, they will likely opt out of the program entirely. This will push the costs of those with more health care needs even higher, creating what economists warn could be a “death spiral,” where both premium and out-of-pocket costs skyrocket.

Gosh, who could ever have predicted that Obamacare would raise premiums, cause a death spiral and ultimately, the demise of private health insurance?

WELL, WHY WOULD THEY? Male Feminists Get No Respect: Even Planned Parenthood is on their case.

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REPORT: OBAMA TO START “SPEAKING OUT” AGAINST TRUMP IN 2016: “Some of that is pure tribalism at work — Democrats are bad, therefore things they dislike must be good — and some of it is ‘they’ll tell you who they fear’ reasoning at work. The problem is, sometimes they’re not telling you who they fear when they attack. Sometimes they’re telling you who they don’t fear and hoping you’ll fall for it.”

Read the whole thing.

Related: Neo-Neocon adds that for Obama and Hillary’s surrogates in the DNC-MSM, “covering Trump is win/win. They get ratings. And although they’re not trying to destroy him—not for now—they dearly want him to be the nominee, and they’re confident they can destroy him later, or that he will self-destruct with the majority of Americans.”

THE SCIENCE MYTHS that will not die. “One such myth is that individuals learn best when they are taught in the way they prefer to learn. A verbal learner, for example, supposedly learns best through oral instructions, whereas a visual learner absorbs information most effectively through graphics and other diagrams.”

MORE FROM DAN MITCHELL on the war against cash.

I wrote yesterday that governments want to eliminate cash in order to make it easier to squeeze more money from taxpayers.

But that’s not the only reason why politicians are interested in banning paper money and coins.

They also are worried that paper money inhibits the government’s ability to “stimulate” the economy with artificially low interest rates. Simply stated, they’ve already pushed interest rates close to zero and haven’t gotten the desired effect of more growth, so the thinking in official circles is that if you could implement negative interest rates, people could be pushed to be good little Keynesians because any money they have in their accounts would be losing value.

I’m not joking.

Tar. Feathers.

2015: THE INTERNATIONAL YEAR OF THE SCREAMING CAMPUS GARBAGE BABIES, as defined by Tim Blair, with an assist from Iowahawk.

Of course, the screaming campus garbage babies didn’t get that way by accident:

THE PERFECT MULTITOOL? Roy Berendsohn loves the Leatherman Leap.

MY ZAEVION DOBSON PIECE is in today’s USA Today print edition.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The 2-Year J.D. Fails To Take Off. I believe, however, that all the 2-year J.D. programs cost as much as a 3-year J.D. program, which somewhat vitiates their appeal; you save a year of living expenses, but not tuition. And you save a year of your life, but my experience is that people in their twenties don’t fully appreciate that they have only so many years in their twenties.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Washington State to Introduce Student and Faculty Rights Bill. I think a number of states will be doing this next year, as part of a more general trend of increased adult-supervision for colleges and universities.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 963.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: China Steps Up the Pressure on Japan.

Among the world’s top powers, the Japan-China rivalry has the most potential to launch a major war. But until this incident, there was relative quiet in this dispute. China had been calming the waters, smoothing over tensions in its relationship with Japan. If Beijing is now going to raise the stakes in the standoff over small islands, 2016 could see Asian tensions hit new highs. More aggressive Chinese policy in the East China Sea would be an ominous sign for the new year, indeed.

No worries, we’ve got Smart Diplomacy^TM on the job!

JOHN FUND: Jim Webb’s Searing Criticism of Hillary Signals Third-Party Run.

TRUMP TO HILLARY: You Can’t Run As An Advocate For Women And Also Campaign With Sex-Assaulter Bill Clinton.

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Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

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THE MIDDLE EAST EXCEPTED, ANALYSIS TRUE: Feminist Icon Camille Paglia Says ‘Rape Culture’ Is A Ridiculous Term.

JOEL KOTKIN: SEEING THE WEST AS WORSE.

As the great 15th century Arab historian Ibn Khaldun observed, societies that get rich also tend to get soft, both in the physical sense and in the head. Over the past two centuries, Western societies, propelled by the twin forces of technology and capitalist “animal spirits,” have created a diffusion of wealth unprecedented in world history. A massive middle class emerged, and the working class received valuable protections, not only in Europe and America, but throughout parts of the world, notably East Asia, which adopted at least some of the Western ethos.

The current massive movement of people from the Middle East, Africa and Asia to Western countries suggests the enduring appeal of this model. After all, people from developing countries aren’t risking their lives to move to North Korea, Russia or China. The West remains a powerful beacon in the “clash of civilizations.”

Yet a portion of these newcomers ultimately reject our culture and, in some cases, seek to liquidate it. They do this in countries where multiculturalism urges immigrants to register as “victims,” and not indulge in Western culture, as did most previous immigrant waves. After all, why assimilate into a culture that much of the cultural elite believes to be evil?

Perhaps the biggest disconnect may involve young immigrants and their offspring, particularly students. Rather than be integrated in some ways into society, they are able, and even encouraged, not to learn about “Western civilization,” which is all but gone from campuses, with barely 2 percent retaining this requirement.

The dominant ideology on college campus – “cultural relativism” – leaves little room for anything other than a nasty take on Western history and culture. Many students, whether of immigrant parentage or descendants of the Mayflower, have only vague appreciation or knowledge of Western civilization, making them highly vulnerable to such pleading. They often go through college now with only the vaguest notion of our history, the writings of the American founders, the philosophy of the Enlightenment, our vast cultural heritage or the fundamental principles of Christianity or, if you will, Judeo-Christianity.

This extends beyond religion to the very basics – like respect for the First Amendment – that underpin our social order. . . . In virtually every part of the West, more traditional values, from the primacy of the family to religion and belief in the efficacy of market capitalism, are being undermined, with increasingly disastrous results.

Forecast: “Bad luck” ahead.

TIM CARNEY: At Christmas 2015, causes for conservative joy:

President Obama is trying to force nuns to pay for birth control and the new Republican speaker just approved a trillion-dollar spending bill laden with earmarks and an inexplicable boost in the number of low-skilled foreign guest workers.

Donald Trump — campaigning on the ethanol mandate, more eminent domain, a Supreme Court appointment for his radical pro-abortion sister and standard misogyny — is leading the national polls.

It’s easy for a conservative to despair at all this. But Christmas is a season of hope, and if one looks back at 2015, it’s not hard to find glimmers of cheer for conservatives.

For 157 days of 2015, the Export-Import Bank of the United States — a corporate-welfare agency created by Franklin Roosevelt and wielded by Obama as a tool of environmental and industrial policy — was in liquidation. Ex-Im was forbidden in those months from approving new subsidies to the foreign customers of U.S. goods.

The economic gains from pausing Ex-Im’s distortions were small, because Ex-Im is small. And ultimately, free enterprise lost this year’s battle to big business — Congress revived Ex-Im in December. But the progress was unmistakable.

In the Bush era, only a couple of dozen House Republicans would typically vote against Ex-Im, and the Senate would reauthorize the agency by voice vote. In 2015, Senate Republicans opposed Ex-Im 31-24, and nearly half of the House Republicans voted against it as well. Both chambers’ committee chairmen, the new House speaker and both chambers’ majority leaders opposed Ex-Im. Eventually, every serious Republican presidential candidate came to oppose Ex-Im, too. . . .

More broadly, the rising tide against Ex-Im exemplified a nascent Republican move away from corporate welfare. Marco Rubio led the fight to block an insurer bailout through Obamacare. Ted Cruz is leading in Iowa polls while unambiguously pledging to kill the ethanol mandate. Jeb Bush, Carly Fiorina and most of the rest of the field also feel compelled to inveigh against corporate welfare, even if they don’t oppose it in every specific instance. There’s a long way for the party to go, but they’re at least marching in the right direction, because they’re no longer always marching to K Street’s tune. . . .

A final note: If you’re a conservative who’s feeling oppressed — by the Republican establishment, by Obama’s power grabs or by the prevailing liberal media bias — I encourage you to take a step back and look at the state of the Republican Party.

Almost any analysis of the early primaries or the national polls will note that “establishment support” is split between Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Marco Rubio and John Kasich.

Think about that. Six and a half years ago, Marco Rubio was considered the insurgent enemy of the Republican establishment. The National Republican Senatorial Committee was funding his moderate primary opponent Charlie Crist. Former Majority Leader Bob Dole, the GOP standard-bearer in 1996, actually donated to Crist after Crist quit the party.

Now Rubio is the highest-polling “establishment” candidate. Has he become more establishment? Only slightly. Mostly, the establishment has been forced to cede more governance of the party to the Tea Party base.

Read the whole thing.