NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Pentagon Moves More Communications Gear into Cheyenne Mountain: Largely abandoned a decade ago, the iconic Cold War bunker is getting an upgrade.

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GEORGE LEEF: Cheated turns over a rock, fully exposing UNC’s “student-athlete” scandal.

I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: More scientists doubt salt is as bad for you as the government says.

BOSTON: Tsarnaev Found Guilty.

PLANES WITHOUT PILOTS: “Mounting evidence that the co-pilot crashed a Germanwings plane into a French mountain has prompted a global debate about how to better screen crewmembers for mental illness and how to ensure that no one is left alone in the cockpit. But among many aviation experts, the discussion has taken a different turn. How many human pilots, some wonder, are really necessary aboard commercial planes? One? None?” Maybe we should go the other direction, and bring back flight engineers.

HORMESIS: Could Small Amounts of Radiation Be Good For You? It’s Complicated. “Other so-called hormetic effects in humans are well documented. At low levels, and in certain circumstances, physical stressors such as exercise, cold, toxins, and fasting all bring health benefits. These appear to work by slightly over-activating the body’s repair machinery, relative to a small stress, with net positive results.”

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SPACE: ESA and NASA Will Try to Smash an Asteroid Out of Its Orbit in 2022.

GEORGE WILL’S LATEST COLUMN IS ON OVERCRIMINALIZATION, and it references both Michael Cottone’s Rethinking Presumed Knowledge of the Law in the Regulatory Age, and my own Ham Sandwich Nation: Due Process When Everything Is A Crime.

SKYNET IS NOT AMUSED: AI Doomsayer Says His Ideas Are Catching On: Philosopher Nick Bostrom says major tech companies are listening to his warnings about investing in “AI safety” research.

ROGER SIMON: Rand Paul’s Debut.

MICHAEL WALSH: Time to Rein in the Cops: Walter Scott Didn’t Have to Die. “Leave it to the New York Times to instantly racialize the incident; after all, the Narrative must be advanced at every opportunity. But this story is larger than that. Because, in this era of militarized, trigger-happy police, what officer Slager did to poor Walter Scott could happen to any of us. . . . America 2015: where everything you have, including your life, belongs to the state. Who won the Cold War, again?”

MAURICE STUCKE AND ARIEL EZRACHI: Artificial Intelligence & Collusion: When Computers Inhibit Competition.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The War Against Religious Liberty.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 699.

SPYING: U.S. secretly tracked billions of calls for decades. “The U.S. government started keeping secret records of Americans’ international telephone calls nearly a decade before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, harvesting billions of calls in a program that provided a blueprint for the far broader National Security Agency surveillance that followed.” It’s lucky that the U.S. government is so ethical that we don’t have to worry about any of this information being politically abused. Love the picture of Janet Reno and her deputy, Eric Holder.

RICHARD BRADLEY — WHO FIRST SMELLED A RAT IN THAT ROLLING STONE STORY — HAS A POST-MORTEM: In the End, It’s All About Rape Culture—or the Lack Thereof.

Again, in the spirt of full disclosure, there is one thing that bugs me about the reference to me in the report, the acknowledgment of my “early if speculative” blog posting calling Sabrina Rubin Erdely’s article into question. I’ve encountered this theme—that I was “speculating”—repeatedly since I wrote my blog, and it frustrates me. By framing what I wrote as speculation, a number of mainstream publications, such as the Times and the New Yorker, feel free to ignore my blog when detailing how Erdely’s story was dismantled by press critics.

The supposition that I was “speculating” misses the larger point of what I wrote;the foundation of my argument was not “a hunch,” but basic professionalism. Any decent editor who is honest with him or herself would tell you the same: Even if Jackie’s story turned out to be true, it still shouldn’t have been published as it was reported and written. Will Dana should have sent it back to the editor and writer with a note saying: “You don’t have this story. Go back and do your jobs.” It was not “speculative” to say that the story should not have been published without further reporting; it was Journalism 101, the kind of thing that they teach (I assume) in the first couple weeks at Columbia Journalism School. And I didn’t have to have access to all the fact-checker’s notes and interview transcripts to know that; any reader with some small degree of journalism experience could know that—and, frankly, should have.

My suspicion that Jackie’s story was not true was based on the idea that if it were, Rolling Stone would have shown us the reporting to back it up. Since Rolling Stone did not, one had to conclude that the evidence to support Jackie did not exist.

That’s not speculation, that’s observation. Plus:

With a story this sensitive, good libel lawyers—and I assume Rolling Stone has very good lawyers—are, or should be, very much in the mix. On sensitive stories, they become something akin to editors with a law degree. You simply could not publish such an accusatory article without having it very heavily lawyered; there is, or ought to be, a lot of discussion between the editor-in-chief and the magazine’s libel lawyer(s). That Rolling Stone won’t disclose their lawyers’ advice suggests that the magazine did not take it, or did the least amount possible to satisfy legal concerns. After all, if the lawyers argued that the magazine had done excellent work and was on safe ground publishing the story, disclosing that information would likely have discouraged any potential lawsuits—like the one Phi Psi is now pursuing against the magazine.

In other words: It’s highly likely that Rolling Stone had a prepublication warning that this story had significant problems—and published the story anyway. Because they knew it was a sexy story, and they were willing to take the risk.

Oops. That’s “reckless disregard.” Plus, sheer bigotry:

Sabrin Rubin Erdely started with a thesis and went in search of someone—and some place—that fit her thesis. She found Jackie and the University of Virginia. But, she admits, if she had discovered that Jackie was a liar, it wouldn’t have caused her to question her thesis. (To which the only response is, if that doesn’t cause you to question your thesis, what would?) Instead, she’d just go find another person who would better conform to what she already wanted to write.

And if that person proved to be a fraud as well, she’d find another…and another…

I am not a lawyer, so I don’t know if Phi Psi has a strong case against Erdely and Rolling Stone. But if the famed “actual malice” test—you are intending to defame someone—is relevant, it seems to me that Erdely has just given the fraternity some explicit evidence of such malice. Even if her “victim” was a liar, Erdely has no doubt: Frat boys are rapists.

19th Century lynch mobs were equally certain about black men. Also:

I have seen a lot of published fretting—not just in Erdely’s statement—about whether this fiasco will discourage victims of rape from going public. This sentiment, which I have seen far more of than I have seen empathy for the people Erdely falsely accused of rape, strikes me as odd. A horrific story of rape, which, following its publication in a national magazine, had an enormous impact, is discovered to be a fraud. And the response is: Well, we should all worry about the potential impact on rape victims’ ability to come forward to speak the truth.

I have a different take: Let’s agree that if you don’t lie and claim that you were gang-raped as part of a fraternity initation ritual, you’ll be treated with respect. And if people treat you disrespectfully based simply on past frauds, then shame on them.

But in the meantime, let’s remember that the only known victims of this story are members of the Phi Psi fraternity, fraternity members in general and the University of Virginia. These individuals and institutions suffered in tangible ways; you might even say that some of the fraternity members were “traumatized.” The argument that the people we should worry about first are rape victims could actually—if I may borrow a phrase from Sabrina Rubin Erdely—re-traumatize them.

But they don’t count because in Erdely’s world they’re the Evil Other. Like black men in the 19th century South.

And, finally: “Sabrina Rubin Erdely is not just a horrible reporter, she is a deeply dishonest one. According to the Coll report, two sources in the story publicly claimed that they did not say that Erdely attributes to them.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: The Left Gets It Wrong About Social Security.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Americans are underprepared for retirement. And given this sad fact, there’s a growing movement on the left saying we need a government solution, stat: specifically, an expansion of Social Security benefits.

Perhaps you are confused. Weren’t we just talking about entitlement reform so that we could spend less on the program? Why, yes, we were. But since no one, left or right, really wants to take on our vast army of retirees, that chatter has died down. Now that it has, progressives who are ideologically opposed to shrinking the welfare state and are, of course, worried about retirees have decided that the best defense is a good offense, as Jamelle Bouie chronicles in Slate. Instead of reluctantly agreeing to a compromise where Republicans let some taxes rise and Democrats agree to entitlement cuts, they’re demanding bigger tax hikes to fund bigger entitlements.

At the core of their argument is a good point: Americans really do need more money for retirement. Missing, however, is a realistic discussion of where that money might come from.

That’s usually how it goes.

BREAKING NEWS FROM ALL OF HUMAN HISTORY: Rich People Are Great at Spending Money to Make Their Kids Rich, Too.

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AUSTIN BAY: Obama’s Iran Understanding: The Verifiable Facts. “Obama’s “historic understanding” has the sad woof and warp of so many of his administration’s domestic and international policy efforts: glowing, inspirational, dramatic rhetoric disguising episodic, hodge-podge, ill-considered, poorly planned and often hastily organized operations. . . . Obama has an enormous trust problem; the man does not keep his word. But his obedient, word-mongering national media corps consistently fails to call him on this grand malfeasance. So what can be verified regarding Iran? Here is a verifiable fact: Iran already possesses long-range ballistic missiles.”

WELL, THERE’S ALWAYS WOODROW WILSON: Cheney calls Obama ‘worst president’ on foreign policy. But we’ve had the chance to observe most of the fallout from Wilson’s debacles. Obama’s is still unfolding. But Cheney goes on: “I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing.”

Ouch. Also, pretty much true.