MY POPULAR MECHANICS COLUMN: How License-Plate Scanners Are Eroding Our Privacy.

THE DANGERS OF FREEDIVING: A Diver’s Rise, and Swift Death, at the Limits of a Growing Sport. Freediving isn’t exceptionally dangerous, but what’s amazing is that the human body can survive at such depths — reached from the surface on a single breath of air — at all.

IN RESPONSE TO SURVEILLANCE, planning a fully-encrypted Internet.

NOVEMBER TORNADOES are more common than you think.

J.D. TUCCILLE: Even Arne Duncan’s “Apology” for Insulting Common Core Opponents Is Condescending.

MAP: Cougars Spreading East.

I would say “David Baron, call your office,” but I saw this on his Facebook page, so . . . .

BOB ZUBRIN: Relaunch The Space Race.

MEAN GIRLS: A Cold War Fought By Women.

This woman had been chosen by the researchers, Tracy Vaillancourt and Aanchal Sharma, because she “embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” meaning a “low waist-to-hip ratio, clear skin, large breasts.” Sometimes, she wore a T-shirt and jeans, other times a tightfitting, low-cut blouse and short skirt.

In jeans, she attracted little notice and no negative comments from the students, whose reactions were being secretly recorded during the encounter and after the woman left the room. But when she wore the other outfit, virtually all the students reacted with hostility.

They stared at her, looked her up and down, rolled their eyes and sometimes showed outright anger. One asked her in disgust, “What the [expletive] is that?”

Most of the aggression, though, happened after she left the room. . . . “Women are indeed very capable of aggressing against others, especially women they perceive as rivals,” said Dr. Vaillancourt, now a psychologist at the University of Ottawa. “The research also shows that suppression of female sexuality is by women, not necessarily by men.”

Stigmatizing female promiscuity — a.k.a. slut-shaming — has often been blamed on men, who have a Darwinian incentive to discourage their spouses from straying. But they also have a Darwinian incentive to encourage other women to be promiscuous. Dr. Vaillancourt said the experiment and other research suggest the stigma is enforced mainly by women.

Read the whole thing.

THAT GREAT INTERVIEW WITH CLARENCE THOMAS, now on YouTube.

HMM: US safety watchdog probes Tesla after car fires.

IF YOU REALLY REGARD GLOBAL WARMING AS A CATASTROPHE, YOU CAN’T BE ANTI-NUCLEAR. Japan Exposing Green Hypocrisy on Nuclear.

OBAMACARE’S DISPROPORTIONATE IMPACT on successful freelancers.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: ObamaCare’s Death Spiral.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 194.

JOBS GO WHERE THEY’RE WANTED: Remington And Kimber To Relocate?

WASHINGTON POST: President Romney? Yes, if the election were held today. “The poll of registered voters shows Romney at 49 percent and Obama at 45 percent in the rematch, a mirror image of Romney’s four-point (51-47) popular-vote loss in 2012.”

ED DRISCOLL: Payback: It’s A Rutherford.

TRANSPARENCY: ObamaCare’s New Metrics Clear As Mud.

All the vagueness probably helps the administration. When your project is having difficulties, the ideal performance measurement is a relatively easy metric that sounds like something much more stringent. I once did work for a client whose previous consultant had insisted that his promises of “less than 1 percent server down time” had been accurate because the server was on, even if it was refusing to let any users access its files. Amazingly, the client went along with this for almost two months before firing him. In its defense, the company was run by English majors.*

Ultimately, there’s only one metric that really matters: enrollment. Are a lot of people signing up? And does that number contain a good percentage of young, healthy people, or is it mostly the old and the sick? Is their information being correctly transmitted to insurers?

We’ll have a better idea about this when the next round of enrollment figures is released in December — well, unless the administration also chooses weirdly vague metrics for enrollment.

But even if we get hard numbers, early December is leaving it awfully late; folks who are losing their current policies need to buy new ones by Dec. 15. If the system is really and truly broken, there’s a real risk that we’ll only know that for certain long past the point where it’s too late to do anything about it.

Repeal, and pass a new bill featuring interstate insurance sales and HSAs.

RACISM AT THE TOP: National Journal: DHS Still Hasn’t Fired Black Supremacist Who Called for Mass Murder of Whites.

EMILY ESFAHANI SMITH: As Babies, We Knew Morality. Hmm.

AT AMAZON, Lightning Deals on Clothes & Fashion. Get ’em while they’re hot!

Also, Countdown To Black Friday Deals in Electronics.

And today only: Up to 40% Off Select DIY PC Components.

And, also today only:Up to 80% Off Select Software Titles. From AutoDesk, Corel, Dragon, and more.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: The America That Works And The America That Doesn’t: Obamacare flopped, but at least fracking succeeded.

NATIONAL JOURNAL: Mary Landrieu “a goner” because of ObamaCare?

DAVID HARSANYI: No, Arne Duncan, ‘White Suburban Moms’ Aren’t The Problem. (But you might be).