IS THE END OF MANDATORY RETIREMENT BAD FOR ACADEMIA? Seems as if it’s proceeding just as Richard Epstein predicted twenty years ago, which is to say, badly. Ending mandatory retirement — which happened elsewhere years before the law applied to academia — is just another part of the ongoing process of transferring wealth from younger people to older people.

I’m amused, though, to imagine the author of this piece extending her reasoning to, say, Hillary Clinton. . . .

UPDATE: Roger Simon emails: “Hey, what’s all this aging bullshit from the mega-tedious Chronicle of Higher Ed? Sophocles wrote Oedipus at Colonus near his death at age 90. No one has done anything of that level since Shakespeare. (Well,maybe Tolstoy, but he was no spring chicken.)”

NEWS FROM THE PARTY OF SCIENCE: “It doesn’t matter that Beyoncé’s songs are written by a team of male collaborators, what matters is that she looks fierce. It doesn’t matter that a rocket scientist just landed a robot on a comet 3000,000,000 miles from our Earth. As long as he does not look fierce.”

MARS AIN’T THE KIND OF PLACE TO RAISE YOUR KIDS: Stuck On Mars With Nothing But Disco.

UM: Justice Department Defends US Marshals’ Airborne Cell Tower Spoofers; Refuses To Acknowledge Program Exists.

SPYING: U.S. Gov Insists It Doesn’t Stockpile Zero-Day Exploits to Hack Enemies.

NEW WHITE HOUSE SPIN: Those Gruber Videos About How We Were Lying To You In 2009? They’re From Way Back In 2009!

GET READY FOR “BAD LUCK” AT THE Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season.

HEY, DON’T LAUGH — BY DARWINIAN STANDARDS, HE’S A BIG WINNER: Memphis Man Reportedly Fathered 26 Children But Reportedly Remains At Large With Child Support Violations In Multiple States.

YES, BECAUSE OF GLOBAL WARMING. Are We Doomed To Arctic Winters In America?

NOT REALLY SHOCKING, BUT STILL COOL: Rosetta Probe Discovers Organic Molecules on Comet.

I WONDER WHAT CARROLL SHELBY WOULD THINK? Ford Mustang Shelby GT350 Debuts.

STUPID REPUBLICAN WOMAN-HATERS! OH, WAIT. . . Democrats Fume in Caucus as Duckworth Denied Vote. “House Democrats are continuing to pick at Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s refusal to allow Rep. Tammy Duckworth — a double amputee Iraq War veteran whose pregnancy has made her unable to travel — to vote by proxy in leadership elections this week. . . . Members and aides are privately seething over what they see as Pelosi’s latest attempt to stack the deck against Rep. Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., who is running for ranking member on the Energy and Commerce Committee against Pelosi’s closest friend and fellow Californian, Rep. Anna G. Eshoo.”

MY CONFIDENCE IS AT LESS THAN 100 PERCENT: Is The U.S. Pursuing The Best Strategy Against Ebola?

YEAH, THAT’S PRETTY MUCH BY DESIGN. Alan Dershowitz: Campus sexual assault rules ‘preclude a defense’ for the accused. “Harvard’s policy was written by people who think sexual assault is so heinous a crime that even innocence is not a defense.”

A FISHEYE LENS that can see behind itself.

IT’S COME TO THIS: The Democratic Party Has Become So Useless It’s Making Young Liberals Look Longingly at Rand Paul.

THE HILL: Why is Obama ignoring the experts on illegal immigration? What, Jonathan Gruber wasn’t available to provide “objective analysis” in favor of his policy?

I AM, AS MOST READERS KNOW, GENERALLY A TECHNO-OPTIMIST. But mocking Elon Musk for his fears about Artificial Intelligence is silly.

The article might have interviewed James Miller for more on what Musk is talking about. Here’s my interview with Miller. Says Miller about strong AIs: “I think the default path is that they treat us horribly.” Also, “gray goo” isn’t a AI-gone-bad scenario, it’s a nanotechnology-gone-bad scenario, and a somewhat exaggerated one.

INDIA’S FIRST EBOLA PATIENT has been quarantined.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: Hands Off The Web. “The AT&T decision to hold back on its investment is the canary down the coal mine. Preemptive rate regulation will not do anything other than retard the huge expansion of the Internet that has taken place under current legal regimes. Government regulation of the Internet can, and should, wait until some specific abuse materializes down the road, as might well be the case. Right now, the President and the FCC could do the public great service by sitting quietly on the sidelines.” Insufficient opportunities for graft in sideline-sitting.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 558.

DAVID BERNSTEIN: Three questions about the legality of the Obama Administration’s anti-sexual assault on campus policies.

ACCOUNTING RULES ARE FOR THE REGULATED, NOT THE REGULATORS! GAO says CFPB’s spending accounting flaws are serious, require prompt fixes. “The CFPB was created by Congress and President Obama four years ago to help consumers better understand and use sometimes complicated financial resources, but a new Government Accountability Office review has found for a second straight year serious deficiencies in the bureau’s stewardship of its own budget.”

STEPHEN L. CARTER: How Kabuki Theater Explains The Keystone Vote.

Consider: Kabuki is designed around actors — not the setting or the direction or even really the story, but the actors. Earle Ernst, in his influential study of Kabuki, notes that “the most spectacular stage effects are those which are created to show the actor to best advantage.” The few props that are used “appear only when needed and are removed immediately when they are not required.”

Isn’t this the perfect description of the Senate’s Keystone vote? The purpose of the performance is entirely to show Landrieu to best advantage, and the vote itself is a prop that will most certainly vanish immediately.

Kabuki costumes, moreover, are designed to be removed with ease, right up on stage. Underneath, the actor is always wearing another costume, different in color and pattern. The effect can be dazzling, as the performer transforms suddenly into someone new: the reliable party functionary can, when necessary, become the rebel, and the rebel can then revert to form as reliable party functionary.

Well, that covers Mary Landrieu pretty well.