IN A SINGLE WORD: DECADENCE. Why Don’t Kids Walk To School Anymore?

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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Last Week’s Little-Noticed Space Triumph.

A LOOK AT who’s never been married.

IN CLASSICAL THEORY, THE MAN IS THE ACTOR, THE WOMAN IS ACTED UPON. FEMINISTS APPARENTLY BELIEVE THIS IMPLICITLY. And they’re not the only ones.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Obama Administration May Be Most Remembered For Its Private Space Triumphs.

ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE: Icy Worlds Might Be Alive on the Inside: Many small, frozen worlds seem to have warm underground oceans, making the search for alien life more exciting — and more confusing.

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ANOTHER REASON WHY I DON’T TRUST THE “INTERNET OF THINGS:” Your Samsung SmartTV Is Spying on You, Basically. “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.”

SO THIS OUTBREAK IS JUST MORE OF OBAMA’S “MAKE THE U.S. MORE LIKE EUROPE” CAMPAIGN: Think the U.S. Has a Measles Problem? Just Look at Europe. Plus: “New measles cases in the U.S. are always fueled by an imported case, either an unvaccinated American traveler, such as Amish volunteers who brought measles with them from the Philippines, or visitors from countries with high measles rates.”

RICHARD BRADLEY: The Problematic Story of the Woman with the Mattress. Bradley, readers may recall, is the one who first raised questions about Sabrina Rubin Erdeley’s UVA Rape Hoax story.

NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Mixing two types of nanoparticle triggers structure change.

USING AUGMENTED REALITY GLASSES to build fighter jets.

NO MORE BENADRYL FOR ME: Cumulative Use of Strong Anticholinergics and Incident Dementia.

BECAUSE FEMINISM: Canadian State Broadcaster Disappointed By ‘Distressingly Low’ Campus Rape Numbers.

ASHE SCHOW DEBUNKS: Obama now claiming 1 in 5 women in America have experienced rape or attempted rape.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 641.

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Problem With Military Pensions:

I think there’s another problem with rejiggering the Army’s pension schedule, and that’s the way it interacts with the “up or out” system that the military uses for officers’ careers. Basically, officers who don’t get selected for promotion get fired.

The military is not the only institution that uses this method. It’s also popular with consultancies, law firms and investment banks. In my humble opinion, that system is archaic and barbaric, and whatever it gains you in reduced payroll costs, it loses you in accumulated human capital, and it also earns you a backstabbing corporate culture.

Of course, no one asked me, and I expect that those sorts of firms will continue to use up-or-out pyramids for the foreseeable future. However, what do all these firms have in common with each other, and not with the military?

They pay really well. The senior people who survived the tournament get paid even better, of course. But even the entry-level jobs pay better than most of the alternatives.

The opposite is true in the military. It pays badly in the beginning and it pays badly at the end, relative to what those folks could have been making if they’d been steadily moving up through the ranks in a normal industry. There are all sorts of ancillary benefits, of course, but also all sorts of ancillary costs, such as the fact that your employer expects you to pick up and move your whole family somewhere else every few years … which is not just inconvenient but, in this modern day, plays hell with the career prospects of your spouse.

Military pensions are extremely generous compared to those in the private sector, but without them, we might have to pay more, or watch the quality of the mid-career officer corps decline. Note that the biggest industry that uses the up-or-out system without paying big salaries — academia — makes up for it by giving the winners a paycheck for life, which is even more extreme than a military pension.

Though I wonder how long that will persist.

JOHN FUND: Is Texas ‘Crazy’ or Is It the Real America? Its undeniable economic success will be an issue in 2016. I’m sure there are folks in the bureaucracy tasked with undermining that success as much as possible between now and then. . . .

Plus: “One could even say that the high-tax, high-cost model of California and other states is a form of class warfare against their poorest residents.”

AFTER SIX YEARS OF OBAMA RUNNING ROUGHSHOD OVER AMERICAN POLITICAL CULTURE UNDER THE FLAG OF “I WON,” AND “FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION,” James Fallows is now tugging his chin over Republican departures from interbranch comity. After the nuclear option, the ObamaCare “reconciliation” ram-through, and the executive order sprees, this deserves to be ignored, and it will be.

Plus: “What is not normal is for one country’s governments openly to meddle or take sides in another (friendly) country’s internal politics.” Really? Because Obama’s doing that with Israel’s elections right now. Fallows’ entire piece seems an exercise in special pleading. And chutzpah. You want civility and tradition? Try practicing it.

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WELL, EXCEPT THAT SHE’D PROBABLY HAVE THEM KILLED OR SOMETHING: Byron York: 11 Democrats who could help themselves by challenging Hillary.

PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Tort Notices Filed by Students Cleared of WPU Gang Rape. “Two of the five William Paterson University students who were accused of an on-campus gang rape last fall, but were cleared of the charges when a grand jury refused to indict them, have filed notices indicating their intent to sue the school, which is public, as well as its president, director of public safety and others.” They violated their duty of fairness toward students in favor of sexism and gender prejudice. Make ’em pay.

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR: How Police Can Get It Right, Post-Ferguson. You know, for a little while it looked like we had a national consensus forming, but Al Sharpton, Eric Holder, et al. made sure to wreck that via self-promotional racism.