CORRECTION OF THE DAY: I did not have “friendly relations” with that man, Sidney Blumenthal.

SPYING: NSA Takes Huge Amounts of Data from Google and Yahoo: America’s spy agency has been tapping links between global data centers of the Internet giants. “The project involved, known as MUSCULAR, is operated jointly with the British intelligence agency known as GCHQ, and engages in copying data from an undisclosed interception point outside of the United States from fiber-optic cables that carry information between the companies’ data centers. Circumventing a court-approved process that allows intelligence agencies to make requests directly from companies, the NSA inhales data as it moves between data centers around the world. Data is shuttled around this as part of regular backup processes at the companies, and to enable you to quickly access your data from anywhere in the world. Google and Yahoo run their own private networks, often passing data between countries and making it vulnerable to NSA taps.”

Kinda funny, isn’t it, that the Brits are prosecuting Rupert Murdoch’s people for guessing voicemail passwords, while they’ve been hoovering up conversations by the billions all along?

HAS IT COME TO THIS? The NSA’s Bay Of Pigs. “If the NSA is running amok in this realm of diplomacy, what kind of mischief is it up to domestically? . . . But what is peculiar about this turn of events is the appearance that the president and his top aides don’t quite appreciate the significance of it all.”

WELL, THANKS. I manage that occasionally.

TRAINWRECK UPDATE: Kathleen Sebelius’ Top Ten Testimony Fails.

Related: Barack Obama: ObamaCare? I didn’t build that. Mitt Romney built that.

THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: Obamacare ‘tech surge’ experts are White House fellows. Basically, a step or two above interns, a few hundred steps below the Zuckerberg/Bezos level.

WHY ARE WE DOING A LOT OF THE THINGS WE’RE DOING THESE DAYS? Why Is the U.S. Helping China Militarize Space?

DO WE HAVE TO? REALLY? Let’s Talk About “Feminist Weddings.”

POINTS AND FIGURES: The Secret No One is Talking About Buried In Obamacare.

Obamacare is a total fail. It’s too clunky. They didn’t exactly use Lean Startup principles when they wrote the bill.

One of the goals of Obamacare which I agree with in principle is to separate employment from health insurance. Tying them together creates all kinds of poor economic incentives. But, the ACA law is littered with even worse economic incentives. One of them is mobility.

Obamacare will cause people to freeze in geographic location.

Insurance companies cannot compete across state lines, so your policy is only portable within your state. That’s bad for economic development. A person now has to deal with 50 sets of rules, 50 exchanges. Obamacare didn’t solve the problem.

There will be people that stay in place because of insurance costs from one state to the next. I have looked, and personally for me my costs of insurance go up exponentially when I move out of state.

In our old broken healthcare system, employers would pick up the difference. As our society transitions to an independent worker society, and insurance isn’t tied to job, individuals will be forced to pick up the cost.

Instead of opening up competition, Obamacare shuts it down. One of the great facets of the United States is that each state competes with the other. If one state passes bad laws, and restricts freedom, people can pick up and leave to go to another state. If an industry shuts down, people can leave and pursue opportunity somewhere else.

Obamacare makes that highly difficult.

So many layers of disaster here. It’s like peeling an onion of fail.

I’M SKEPTICAL THAT THIS CAN BE DONE IN A USEFUL WAY: Using Chaos Theory to Predict and Prevent Catastrophic ‘Dragon King’ Events.

REVIEW: Tesla Motors’ all-electric Model S is fast—but is it a good car? “But the thing that I most wanted to experience is how the car feels to drive, at speed, on the open road. Well, I’ll tell you: it feels awesome. . . . The motor can immediately deliver 443 lb-ft of torque (600 Newton-meters) to the drive wheels, and it can do so without the interruption of a down-shift and the noise and delay of an engine revving up into its power band. It can punch you back into your seat from a dead stop, or it can punch you back into your seat at 80 miles per hour. And the only sound the car makes as it yanks your eyeballs back into your head is a faint electric whine. . . . Subjectively, the car feels extremely flat when hurled through corners. No small amount of this stability is provided by the fact that a significant amount of the car’s mass—its battery pack—is only inches above the road surface.”

WANT MORE POWER FOR ELECTRIC CARS? Build Them Out Of Batteries!

AT AMAZON, deals on Bestselling Blu-Ray Players.

Also, Tablet Computers.

Plus, coupons galore in Household Supplies.

And: Last Chance: 25% off new Fall Boots. For men, women, and kids.

HEH: Princeton Mom 1, College Feminists 0.

MAN BITES DOG: College President Defends Free Speech.

WHAT HAPPENS when you crack your neck.

10 WEAPONS SYSTEMS that never made it. The flying rifle platform is cool, but talk about a sitting duck.

YOU DON’T NEED A WEATHERMAN TO SEE WHICH WAY THE WIND BLOWS: Landrieu to propose halting vanishing health plans. Why not just cosponsor Ron Johnson’s “If you like your health insurance you can keep it Act?”

RETAIL: Two Numbers That Show How The Internet Is Ripping The Traditional Department Store To Shreds.

BRYAN PRESTON: Five Things We Learned from Today’s Obamacare Hearing. Here’s one: “Sebelius doesn’t seem to know anything about the law she is implementing.”

READER BOOK RECOMMENDATION: From June Volk, The God Who Answers By Fire. Recommended by reader Chad Bergstrom.

WE KEEP HEARING THAT MEN ARE PIGS, BUT NOW SCIENCE HAS DEMONSTRATED THAT WOMEN ARE PIGS, TOO:

After monitoring how the gazes of 29 women and 36 men from a large Midwestern university reacted to images of the same group of female models with various body shapes, scientists concluded that participants focused more on the female’s chests and figure when asked to evaluate their appearance than they did on the women’s facial features.

Unsurprisingly, women with narrow waists, full breasts and larger hips – the classic hourglass figure – were rated more favorably than their less voluptuous counterparts, even when men were asked to assess a woman’s personality (rather than attractiveness) based on her appearance in the photos.

But perhaps what’s most interesting is that women also tended to objectify other females in the same way that men did. They, too, spent more time focusing on figure than face.

Hmm. Men are wired to size up women as sex partners. Women are wired to size up women as competitors for men.

SCIENCE: Chemists find biological complexes that beat chance. “They found that when components of the molecular machines that exist in living cells today are mixed with membrane material, functional complexes form more often than you’d expect from chance. As of now, we don’t know how this form of self-organization takes place. Figuring it out may help us understand life’s origins on Earth and perhaps how it might form on other planets.”

THEY’RE JUST TRYING TO SEE HOW MUCH THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH NOW: Sebelius makes shocking claim on HealthCare.gov: ‘The website has never crashed.’

Meanwhile, reader Jeff Bliss sends the splitscreen of the day.

HEATHER MACDONALD: The Blissfully Unaware Hecklers At Brown. The Ivy League continues its self-marginalization.