REVOLVING DOOR: Ex-Google lawyer nominated as patent office director.

MORE ON benzodiazepines and dementia.

The study participants were individuals over 66 years of age. Those who took low-dose benzodiazepines, or who took only occasional high dosages, did not have their Alzheimer’s risk increase for the five years they were studied after having been initiated on these agents. In contrast, those who frequently took long-acting benzodiazepines, who frequently took high doses, or who took any such drugs regularly over several months, suffered a more disturbing fate: Specifically, those who took the cumulative equivalent of daily doses for three to six months over a five-year period were roughly 32% more likely than those who took no benzodiazepines to develop Alzheimer’s. And those who took the cumulative equivalent of a full daily dose for more than six months were 84% more likely to do so.

It is already acknowledged by the thought leaders in the medical community that benzodiazepines are not meant for long-term use, and should not be taken steadily for more than three months. But a glance at the refill patterns of most patients reveals that these drugs are used on a chronic basis, for years and years.

Yes, they’re for acute, not chronic anxiety. But the meds for chronic anxiety aren’t nearly as good.

ARE THEY OVERREACTING? Why The Airlines Are Overreacting To Ebola.

RON FOURNIER: The Ebola Czar Has No Clothes. “We shouldn’t need an Ebola czar. The president needs to do his job better.”

DAMON LINKER: Ebola and America’s epic institutional fail. When you have the worst political class in your history — and we do — your institutions don’t fare especially well.

Related: Aid group leader: Africa’s Ebola standards higher than CDC’s. “U.S. standards for protecting healthcare workers from Ebola are weaker than those widely used in West Africa, according to the leader of a group treating victims of the virus in Liberia.”

SHOCKER: Obama Disappointed (Again) By Clunky Big Government Fail (Again).

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 527.

WELL, THAT’S BEEN THE HISTORY OF EVERY SIMILAR PROGRAM, AS NOTED HERE: How Much Will Obamacare Cost? Bet on ‘More Than Expected.’ “In 1967, Congress estimated that the nation’s single-payer system for the elderly, Medicare, would cost $12 billion in 1990. The actual price tag was $110 billion, for an error ratio on 9.17:1.”

SAUDIS PLAY CHICKEN WITH AMERICAN OIL SHALE:

The benchmark for American crude, called the West Texas Intermediate (WTI), fell below $80 per barrel for the first time in more than two years in trading today before staging a small rally. Similarly, Brent crude, Europe’s benchmark, traded below $83 per barrel, a four-year low, before seeing a slight rebound on what Reuters explains to be “technical buying ahead of options expiry for U.S. crude oil and contract expiry for Brent crude.”

But temporary rebound notwithstanding, there’s no denying that this is a bear market for crude oil. Brent prices have dropped by more than 28 percent since June, while WTI has tumbled nearly 25 percent in that same time period. Weak demand has collided with an oversupplied market, partly due to Libyan supplies coming back online after protracted disruptions, and, of course, in part due to booming supplies out of the suddenly shale-rich America.

The question on everyone’s minds is, where is OPEC? The cartel of petrostates has colluded in the past to cut production to keep prices artificially high, yet the organization’s largest producer and, historically, the one most likely to take the lead on these cuts—Saudi Arabia—has cut prices, not production, in recent weeks. . . .

There has been some speculation that the Saudis may be looking to abdicate their role as OPEC’s (and therefore the world’s) de facto swing supplier, banking on the fact that U.S. shale producers, the new kids on the block, will soon have to cut production because fracking will cease to be profitable. America’s unconventional oil drilling tends to be more expensive; the IEA recently announced that at $80 per barrel, 96 percent of shale drilling would still be profitable, but if WTI prices were to dip much lower, the shale boom would hit a considerable hurdle.

We’re not there yet, and in fact the price of oil today exists in a kind of sweet spot: high enough to continue to incentivize U.S. fracking, but low enough to benefit American consumers (average gas prices in the U.S. are at their lowest level since 2011) and stymie some of America’s geopolitical opponents. Russia, for example, needs oil to trade above $100 per barrel to balance its budget.

The Saudi strategy isn’t unlike a game of chicken. The Saudi breakeven price hovers around $93 per barrel, and while it can afford to operate in the red to gain market share for now, it may not be able to do so in the long term. Banking on American shale production cuts may be a bigger gamble than the Saudis expect, too: it will take some time for the market to shift and fracking to draw down, even if prices continue to plunge.

And U.S. shale has a final trump card: innovation. Though fracked wells have steep decline rates, drillers continue to optimize rigs and maximize output while minimizing costs.

Under a Reynolds Administration, I’d respond to this “chicken” game by opening up federal lands to exploration and drilling.

UPDATE: Some support for a Reynolds 2016 campaign in the comments. Hmm. What would my slogan be? How about An Inexperienced Law-Professor President Got Us Into This Mess, And It’ll Take An Inexperienced Law-Professor President To Get Us Out!

YEAH, BUT WILL WHAT WORKED FOR THEM WORK FOR OUR OWN, LESS-COMPETENT GOVERNMENT? Here’s What We Should Learn From Nigeria’s Incredible Effort To Shut Down Ebola.

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TWEET OF THE WEEK.

Be honest — which guy do you really feel would do a better job protecting us from a viral epidemic? pic.twitter.com/lesxAkxs8a

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) October 17, 2014

MICHAEL WALSH: Ten Things the Ebola Crisis Tells Us About the Obama Administration.

The announcement of Ron Klain as the new Ebola “czar” checks all the boxes: Harvard Law, longtime Democrat party op, veteran of the Clinton, Al Gore and John Kerry campaigns. The problem is, it checks all the wrong boxes. The Progressive myth is that we ought to have a government of experts — top men! — to handle the nation’s problems in a calm, deliberative manner. The reality is that we have a nation of unscrupulous lawyers, amoral apparatchiks and political hacks whose only area of expertise is manipulating the electoral and governmental systems and getting rich by doing so.

Yeah, pretty much.

SEX IN THE TIME OF EBOLA:

When the only way to get an often fatal disease is through contact with body fluids, it makes good sense to be very careful about sexual partners and practices. But since Ebola victims can infect others only when they are showing symptoms — high fever, vomiting, diarrhea, weakness and aches — physical intimacy probably isn’t a common way of transmitting the disease.

However, the Ebola virus can survive in semen for months after a man recovers from the infection, posing an ongoing threat to sexual partners long after he is well. At a time when a man’s bloodstream is swimming with antibodies, and he is immune to the disease, he still may be able to infect others. . . .

The magnitude of the threat is not entirely clear, however. After past Ebola outbreaks, follow-up studies of people who have recovered from Ebola found no evidence that the virus was transmitted from a recovered patient to close contacts, according to Bruce Ribner, medical director of Emory University’s Infectious Disease Unit, who led the team that successfully treated American missionaries Kent Brantly and Nancy Writebol.

Yeah, I’d err on the side of safety.

MICKEY KAUS: New York Times Cocoon, Verified!

A man named Tyler Pearson had posted a list of the 1000 Twittter accounts most commonly followed by the 677 New York Times staffers on the paper’s public list. It is, as you would expect, embarrassingly cocooned: Times staffers follow people who share the liberalish/leftish viewpoint of the Times itself, meaning these staffers are less likely to even find out discordant information. Which may be why they are so often surprised, or late to a story.

Actually, it’s not as bad as expected. It’s worse! Jack Shafer takes the Liebling-Optimality** award (in that he’s the first non-liberal on the list, and with 235 NYT followers well above anyone more conservative) but as far as I can see you have to go a long ways down, past acceptably self-critical conservative David Frum, and the NYT‘s own Ross Douthat to get to a genuine partisan ‘winger Tweeter –@Karl Rove, who’s followed by 67 Timesers that person is merely talking head Ari Fleischer, followed by 6.9% of Timesers. [Correction: I’d missed Rove. Thanks to alert reader NM for pointing him out] …

Of the 1000, you could count those who oppose comprehensive immigration reform on the fingers of one hand, and you wouldn’t need the thumb (and maybe not the pinkie). …

Coming soon: The memo from @deanbaquet telling reporters gee, maybe they should branch out a bit and include some Republicans on their feeds! Whoever gets that Times affirmative action traffic will have some MSM-influencing power. …

Not on the list: Byron York, Instapundit, Rich Lowry, Ann Coulter, Laura Ingraham., Jonah Goldberg, Conn Carroll. No Powerliners, no Red Staters. certainly no Ace of Spades.

To be fair, there’s one NYT editor who pitches links to me. I assume that means he follows. But maybe not!

ED DRISCOLL looks at low-information journalist Katy Conrad, who wonders when Sen. Rand Paul became a doctor.

UPDATE: From the comments: “The sad part of it all is that Dr. Paul is more qualified to talk about ebola than the administration’s ebola czar.”

ED DRISCOLL: Buzzfeed Accidentally Gives The MSM Game Away. “They’ve been pivoting ever since; watch next year for the same leftists who accused Hillary of the most virulent racism in 2008 to tell you she’s the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being they’ve ever known in their life.”

PEJMAN YOUSEFZADEH: What Academic Intolerance Looks Like.

SO DOES EVERYTHING ELSE IT DOES: Peggy Noonan: The administration’s Ebola evasions reveal its disdain for the American people.

The administration’s handling of the Ebola crisis continues to be marked by double talk, runaround and gobbledygook. And its logic is worse than its language. In many of its actions, especially its public pronouncements, the government is functioning not as a soother of public anxiety but the cause of it. . . .

Does the government think if America is made to feel safer, she will forget the needs of the Ebola nations? But Americans, more than anyone else, are the volunteers, altruists and in a few cases saints who go to the Ebola nations to help. And they were doing it long before the Western media was talking about the disease, and long before America was experiencing it.

At the Ebola hearings Thursday, Rep. Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) said, I guess to the American people: “Don’t panic.” No one’s panicking—except perhaps the administration, which might explain its decisions.

Is it always the most frightened people who run around telling others to calm down?

This week the president canceled a fundraiser and returned to the White House to deal with the crisis. He made a statement and came across as about three days behind the story—“rapid response teams” and so forth. It reminded some people of the statement in July, during another crisis, of the president’s communications director, who said that when a president rushes back to Washington, it “can have the unintended consequence of unduly alarming the American people.” Yes, we’re such sissies. Actually, when Mr. Obama eschews a fundraiser to go to his office to deal with a public problem we are not scared, only surprised.

But again, who do they think we are? You gather they see us as poor, panic-stricken people who want a travel ban because we’re beside ourselves with fear and loathing. Instead of practical, realistic people who are way ahead of our government.

If we were practical, realistic, and way ahead of our government, there would be politicians hanging from lampposts right now.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: ‘Ebola Czar’ Absent from White House Ebola Strategy Meeting.

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OOPS: “The officials said that while the federal investigation was continuing, the evidence so far did not support civil rights charges against Officer Wilson.” Plus: “The officials briefed on the case said the forensic evidence gathered in the car lent credence to Officer Wilson’s version of events.”

FASTER, PLEASE: T-Cell Therapy Puts Leukemia Patients in Extended Remission.

KNIFE UPDATE: Following SayUncle’s recommendation from a few weeks ago, I’ve been carrying this Spyderco Endura. It’s unobtrusive, and it’s really easy to get it to flip open upon removing it from your pocket.

Perhaps one day I’ll strap on a Bowie just to see how it plays — it’s legal in Tennessee now, I believe — but today is not that day.