WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Meet “The Reason,” A New Metal 3D Printed Gun.

AN ALMOST DRUDGE-WORTHY JUXTAPOSITION in the NYT science pages.

But, I feel sure, unintentional.

IF THEY’RE ALSO SEXBOTS, WE MAY SEE A WAVE OF EARLY RETIREMENTS: Your Retirement May Include a Robot Helper: As industrial robots become more capable, they could start helping out around the home.

IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? Improving Your Memory With Chocolate.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO LIE! How a False Domestic-Violence Charge Ruined An NBA Career. “If you’re wondering whether authorities will charge this woman with perjury, think again. Forged documents, false allegations, and defamatory lies in police reports or restraining-order petitions are met with a shrug. The county attorney refused to charge Cunningham’s accuser with making a false police report, telling the AP he was reluctant to bring those charges for fear of ‘a chilling effect’ such an action might have on future victims of domestic violence.”

You’d think you’d want to chill people who make false accusations.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Mine An Asteroid.

INCAPABLE OF FUNCTIONING IN A FREE SOCIETY: Berkeley Muslims Prove Bill Maher’s Point. “In his comments on his HBO show, Maher noted that too many Muslims reject the very notion of free thought and free speech, that the problem is not just ‘a few bad apples.'”

WISCONSIN: Scott Walker, in Dead Heat, Faces Third Election in Four Years. The Wisconsin Deep State has pulled out all the stops to defeat Walker by fair means or foul, and I take Obama’s rare campaign appearance for Burke as evidence that they believe the fix is in.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Solve the kidney crisis with a free market in organs.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 537.

ROBERT MCMANUS ON EBOLA: The Trust Deficit: Why the Public Is Twitchy.

Govs. Cuomo of New York and Chris Christie of New Jersey responded as might be expected — politically if not thoughtfully, but for the short run understandably and correctly.

They imposed mandatory quarantines — driving the usual suspects into a dead swoon.

Number the president among the suspects. The White House has been wagging a bony finger at restrictive responses to Ebola in general — and now at Cuomo and Christie, too. They’re not above criticism, to be sure, but for the president to be dishing it out is a little rich.

For the battle against Ebola in America is all about trust.

That is, can New Yorkers worried about dying a loathsome death from a disease now largely confined to three countries 4,500 miles away really trust presidential reassurances?

After President Obama said ISIS is the JV, and then all of a sudden told us it was an existential threat? After “you can keep your doctor” and then, oops, you can’t? After the IRS scandal and Fast & Furious and Benghazi?

With two weeks to go before midterm elections, the president hires a Washington uber-fixer, lobbyist Ron Klain, to manage his Ebola response and people are supposed to assume that health policy is driving the operation?

Alas, neither does Cuomo inspire confidence.

Yes, nothing says our policy is science-driven like putting a political fixer in charge.

THANKS TO ERIC BOEHLERT, WHO BY MAKING A FOOL OF HIMSELF let us know what the lefties are afraid of.

Related: Washington Post: Sharyl Attkisson’s computer intrusions: ‘Worse than anything Nixon ever did.’ Note that both an analyst hired by CBS and another outside expert consulted by Attkisson found evidence of U.S. government tampering, with the latter commenting: ““This … is better evidence of the government being in your computer than the government had when it accused China of hacking into computers in the U.S.” So you can see why this is the kind of story the folks at Media Matters would like to laugh off.

Also related: USA Today’s Susan Page: Obama administration most ‘dangerous’ to media in history.

FORGET KANSAS, WHAT’S THE MATTER WITH LIBERALS? “Liberal icon Thomas Frank, author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, is the latest lefty to compare President Obama to Jimmy Carter—and he doesn’t mean it as a compliment.”

AT AMAZON, new deals on Bestselling Products, updated hourly.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Foods.

NICE POLL KID. DON’T GET COCKY: Poll: Midterm momentum belongs to GOP.

Republicans enter the final week of the midterm campaign holding higher ground than the Democrats, aided by public dissatisfaction with President Obama’s leadership, with the overall direction of the country and with the federal government’s ability to deal with major problems, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll.

Driving attitudes is a pervasive sense of a country in trouble. Overwhelming majorities say the country is badly off-track and give the economy negative ratings. Economic expectations are little better today than they were at this time four years ago.

Six in 10 say they cannot trust the government in Washington to do what is right — the same as a year ago in the aftermath of the government shutdown and the botched rollout of the federal Web site for the Affordable Care Act.

With multiple crises confronting the country — including the spread of Ebola in West Africa and cases here at home, as well as threats from Islamic State militants — a majority now says the government’s ability to deal with big problems has declined in the past few years. Among those who say this, more — by 3 to 1 — blame Obama and the Democrats rather than Republicans in Congress.

Well, that’s who’s been in charge for the past 6 years. And the GOP hasn’t controlled Congress since 2006.

MICKEY KAUS: Do We Need An Ebola Luxury Resort?

Voluntary quarantining has proven incompletely effective. At the same time, we don’t want to discourage volunteer health care workers from traveling to West Africa, where the main fight against the disease is being waged. They’re not exactly encouraged to make the trip if they know they’ll have to spend 21 days in a tent with a portable toilet on their return.

What to do? Protect the public here or incentivize workers to go there? This is a false choice! What’s needed is a quarantine so luxurious that health care workers will look forward to their 21 day quarantine, or at least not dread it. What if the federal government took over an isolated resort, say on the Gulf Coast. Stocked it with finest foods and wines in the land, and the best films and recreation and wireless Internet access and volunteer musical acts — a French widow in every room, as a friend of mine used to say, equivalent to a very expensive vacation, available for free to any returning volunteer. The only catch is they couldn’t leave for 21 days. (They could bring their spouses and partners, if they wanted –but then the spouses couldn’t leave either.)

This makes a lot of sense, and hence won’t be adopted by the authorities so long as any other alternatives exist. . . .

CNN MEDIA REPORTER: Carol Costello Deserves All The Criticism She’s Getting. I’m glad to see CNN drag this out, as it makes extra-clear what one-sided hypocrisy all the “war on women” stuff has been.

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: President of Macalester College Calls for University of North Carolina to Lose its Accreditation Over Academic Fraud Scandal.

Related: Did Wainstein Report Whitewash High-Level Culprits In UNC Cheating Scandal? It kinda looks that way.

ASHE SCHOW: ‘Yes means yes’ opposition: It’s about due process, not misogyny.

It’s easy enough for women writers to attack men who write against “yes means yes” laws as crude misogynists. But it’s a simple and lazy response that ignores all the women who oppose them as well based on concerns about due process rights.

Many big-name journalists have been writing about the “yes means yes” laws recently — Ezra Klein, Jonah Goldberg, Jonathan Chait — you may notice a pattern there. Salon’s Katie McDonough insinuated that Chait — who has written in opposition to the law — dismisses women’s opinions on the law in order to respond to a man – Klein.

I, too, received criticism when I interviewed four due process advocates with intimate knowledge of what a lack of such rights can cause. I was chastised for only interviewing men (naturally, I get no credit for being a woman).

But in fact, due process is important, and due-process advocacy is by no means exclusive to men.

Elizabeth Bartholet, one of 28 current and former Harvard Law professors who recently wrote in opposition to the university’s new sexual assault policy, told the Washington Examiner that while she had no “silver bullet” to creating a perfect policy, she did believe such a policy should take into account the rights of the accuser and the accused. . . .

“The government’s push is to suppress sexual activity to the max,” Bartholet wrote. “Many women, including many women’s rights advocates and many feminists, think this is a very wrong approach to the complex issues involved.”

Kimberly Lau, an attorney who is currently representing several young men suing their university for denying them due process, expanded on the idea that the new policy from the Obama administration, as well as California’s law, are degrading to women.

“For the last hundred years or so, I believe that a large part of the feminist movement was built on women striving for the equality of treatment between the genders,” Lau told the Examiner. “That said, with equality comes accountability and because of that, I find it offensive that there are presumptions being made about who should be in control of the sexual encounter even where both male and female students have been drinking.”

Credentialed-but-not-educated nitwits like Young Ezra won’t appreciate due process until they’re charged with something.

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: Tax Revolving Door Enriches Former IRS Officials Who Cash in by Navigating Inversions Through Rules They Wrote.

Yet another argument for my revolving-door surtax.

MUCH OF TODAY’S “MAINSTREAM JOURNALISM” IS ACTUALLY FUNDED BY leftist foundations.

TIM CAVANAUGH: The Only Ebola Panic Is Being Caused by Doctors and Nurses. “Last week American Airlines reported the first actual evidence that the American people are reacting to the largest Ebola outbreak in history: a one-day hiccup in ticket sales, which appears to have been inspired not by the deadly hemorrhagic fever itself but by the government’s own self-soiling response to it. . . . That there has not been an Ebola panic suggests that common sense and independent-mindedness are still alive in America, despite the horrendous stupidity on display by nearly all of officialdom.”

STEVEN PINKER: Three Reasons To Affirm Free Speech.

There’s a systematic reason why dictators brook no dissent. The immiserated subjects of a tyrannical regime are not deluded that they are happy. And if tens of millions of disaffected citizens act together, no regime has the brute force to resist them. The reason that citizens don’t resist their overlords en masse is that they lack what logicians call common knowledge—the knowledge that everyone else shares their knowledge. Common knowledge is a prerequisite to coordinating behavior for mutual benefit: two friends will show up at the same café at a given time only if each knows that the other knows that both know about the appointment. In the case of civil resistance, people will expose themselves to the risk of reprisal by a despotic regime only if they know that others are exposing themselves to that risk at the same time.

Common knowledge is created by public information, such as a broadcasted statement. The story of the Emperor’s New Clothes illustrates the logic. When the little boy shouted that the emperor was naked, he was not telling them anything they didn’t already know, anything they could not see with their own eyes. But he was changing the state of their knowledge nonetheless, because now everyone knew that everyone else knew that the emperor was naked. And that common knowledge emboldened them to challenge the emperor’s authority with their laughter.

In his computer simulations of artificial societies, the sociologist Michael Macy has shown that open channels of communication are essential in preventing unpopular beliefs—those that no one believes but no one dares deny—from becoming entrenched. If true believers can punish skeptics, then a minority view can take over. But if skeptics can sample the beliefs of their compatriots, the collective delusions can unravel.

It may seem outlandish to link American campus freedom—which by historical and global standards is still admirably high—to the world’s brutal regimes. But I’m here to tell you that the connection is not that far-fetched.

To some, that’s not a bug, but a feature.

CORRECTION of the week.