I’D RATHER HAVE A PHASED PLASMA RIFLE IN THE 40KW RANGE: Here’s Your Chance to Own Han Solo’s Blaster — For $300K.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Abolish The TSA.

U.N.C. SCANDAL UPDATE: Professor Indicted for No-Show Class Offered To Athletes. “Julius Nyang’oro, the former chair and former professor of African studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, was indicted Monday on a felony charge of accepting $12,000 for a course he did not teach, The News & Observer reported. The charge is a lower level felony, authorities said, and unlikely even upon a conviction to lead to jail time. But the indictment is another milestone in a scandal about no-show courses — many of them taken by athletes.”

CHANGE: Circumcision for AIDS prevention on the rise in Africa. “Unaids, the United Nations agency fighting the disease, said about 3.2 million African men had been voluntarily circumcised since word began spreading in 2007 of studies showing that it lowered the risk of infection by about 60 percent. . . . Circumcision is currently recommended for uninfected heterosexual men in countries where more than 1 percent of the population has H.I.V. It does not protect gay men engaged in receptive anal sex, believed to cause most infections in the United States.”

THAT METRO NORTH TRAIN CRASH: What Went Wrong?

SCIENCE: Who Is Most Likely To Be Unfaithful, And Why?

READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Jacob Bender, Her Eyes Were In The Stars.

NEWS YOU CAN USE: That Armpit Odor Says a Lot About Who You Are. Especially if it reeks of AXE Body Spray.

COMPETENCE: Expert: Healthcare.gov Security Risks Even Worse After ‘Fix.’

Related: Iowahawk scores with perfect name for the Obamacare website queue.

UPDATE: The phrase has reached the Washington Post: PotemkinCare. “The Obama administration has not created a functioning Web site. Rather, it has erected a Potemkin village online — a façade that temporarily conceals the lack of architecture behind it. . . . The Web site provides the illusion of a working health-care exchange, but while it takes your information, there’s no telling what it will do with it. . . . Ironically, the president was the one to point it out: Obamacare is more than a Web site. The Web site is a portal. Now that you can enter it, you expect to get the insurance you paid for? Silly you.”

CAVEAT EMPTOR: Winter Sleeping Bag Temperature Ratings: Words of Warning.

YES, BUT IT WILL SEEM LONGER: Could Sexual Frustration Lead To A Shorter Life?

RICHARD EPSTEIN ON HIS FORTHCOMING BOOK, The Classical Liberal Constitution: The Uncertain Quest for Limited Government.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: As Change Comes To Eurasia, U.S. Is Asleep At The Switch. I think that’s what we’re supposed to call “Smart Diplomacy.”

THE CARNIVAL OF SPACE IS UP!

MICHAEL TOTTEN: The Once-Great City Of Havana. If you like his reporting, make a donation. I did.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 208.

HOW BAD IS IT? SO BAD THAT THIS IS THE POSITIVE SPIN FROM TIME: HealthCare.gov No Longer a Complete Fail. Close enough for government work!

OBAMACARE’S NEW GOAL: Stay Alive Until 2015.

Here are a few things I think we can say: It’s working better now than it was two months ago; we don’t know whether that’s good enough; and the fact that the administration is choosing odd metrics, such as comparing the performance of the site to October rather than how you’d actually like it to perform, is probably not a happy omen. (As I believe Scott Adams once noted, irrelevant comparisons are a great favorite of salesmen with mediocre products. “Sure, 37 mph isn’t great for a sports car, but you have to compare that to hopping!”)

And I do think this tells us something else important: The administration has given up on success, as it might once have defined it. The object is no longer 7 million people signed up through the exchanges, with 2.7 million of them young and healthy, and the health-care cost curve bending back toward the earth. It is to keep the program alive until 2015. The administration’s priorities are, first, to keep Democrats from undoing the individual mandate or otherwise crippling the law; second, to keep insurers from raising premiums or exiting the marketplace; third, to tamp down loose talk about the failures on the exchanges; and, only fourth, to get to the place where it used to think it would be this year, with lots of people signed up for affordable insurance. It is now measuring the program’s success not by whether it meets its goals, but by whether it survives at all. And all of its choices are oriented toward this new priority.

Sounds like a recipe for success!

VIRGINIA POSTREL: Are You Better Off Than You Were Ten Years Ago?

AT AMAZON, Deals Galore in Cyber Monday Deals Week. Browse and enjoy!

Also, up to 70% off on select New Balance clothing.

Plus, today only: DEWALT 18-Volt NiCad 4-Tool Combo Kit, $189.00 (46% off).

And also today only: Up to 50% Off Assassin’s Creed IV and Rocksmith 2014 Edition.

MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Abolish The TSA.

SEEN ON FACEBOOK:

OUT: WIFE-SWAPPING. In: Nationality-Swapping. “Experts cite frustrations over the US’s complex and draconian tax system – which taxes citizens’ income no matter where in the world they are residing and requires US taxpayers to disclose information about their foreign bank accounts and assets – as one of the primary causes of this mass migration.”

TALKING ABOUT RACE DANGEROUS FOR PROFESSORS, EVEN BLACK WOMEN PROFESSORS? Hey, you guys decided to create a world where making people “uncomfortable” was the ultimate crime. Now you live in it, too. Goose, gander, etc. I expect we’ll see more white male students complaining about being vilified in the classroom, given how often it happens. Lack of sympathy, as demonstrated in this article, is just proof of the problem, of course.