THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: NSA Chief Bet Money on AT&T as It Spied on You.

YOU CAN VOTE FOR LARRY CORREIA in the GoodReads Choice Awards. The nominee is his Monster Hunter Nemesis.

RICHARD FERNANDEZ: “One of problems with the theory of multiculturalism is that it really ignores transmission loss.”

WITH NEW DRUNKBLOGGING TECHNOLOGY, Stephen Green is drunkblogging the midterm results. Easy wins for McConnell & Tim Scott.

FOR THE LATEST ELECTION NEWS, check out PJ Media’s The Grid.

TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Accused Female Child Sexual Predator Indicted. “Christine Yoder, 32, of Philadelphia, PA, was charged today by indictment in a case of child exploitation that involved the alleged sexual abuse of two minors, who were 6 years old and 16 months old at the time of the abuse, announced United States Attorney Zane David Memeger.”

THEY’RE WATCHING YOU: Verizon, AT&T tracking their users with ‘supercookies.’ “Consumers cannot erase these supercookies or evade them by using browser settings, such as the ‘private’ or ‘incognito’ modes that are popular among users wary of corporate or government surveillance. Verizon and AT&T say they have taken steps to alert their customers to the tracking and to protect customer privacy as the companies develop programs intended to help advertisers hone their pitches based on individual Internet behavior. But as word has spread about the supercookies in recent days, privacy advocates have reacted with alarm, saying the tracking could expose user Internet behavior to a wide range of outsiders — including intelligence services — and may also violate federal telecommunications and wiretapping laws.”

TEST DRIVE: 2014 Ford Fusion 2.0L EcoBoost AWD.

THEY NEED TO BE PUT UNDER AN INJUNCTION: New York City Arrests, Prosecutes, Eventually Settles With Legal Knife Owner. “This latest example of the systemic persecution of knife owners in the most populous city in the U.S. boggles the mind. . . . Not content with just a dismissal, Jonathan (with the help of Knife Rights and attorney Richard Holzberg) sued the city for false arrest and malicious prosecution. After stretching out the litigation for more than six months, the city eventually settled with Jonathan for $7,500 taxpayer dollars. The DA could have saved everyone a lot of money, and over a year of Jonathan’s time, had they used their head and not prosecuted a man they knew to be innocent from the get go.”

If the DA really prosecuted someone known to be innocent, that’s a breach of legal ethics. Someone should notify the bar disciplinary office.

CHANGE: Ikea Gives Us an Adjustable Standing Desk We Can Actually Afford.

WHAT’S NEXT for Virgin Galactic?

AT AMAZON, the Jabra Sports Pulse earbuds with built-in heart rate monitor.

Also, up to 15% off on JET Tools.

AFTER THE ELECTION, THEY’LL HAVE MORE FLEXIBILITY: Congress Wants To Push Dangerous Cybersecurity Bill After The Election, Says US Economy Depends On It.

You know what defeats “flexibility?” Tar and feathers.

FROM LENA DUNHAM, a non-denial denial.

DAVID FRENCH: Jihadists Psychologically Dominate The Battlefield.

You know, I’m beginning to think that Josh Marshall’s Iraq-war-era worries that we didn’t kill enough Iraqis to ensure a stable peace were right. Related thoughts here.

FASTER, PLEASE: Will ultrasound-on-a-chip make medical imaging so cheap that anyone can do it? What I want is a Larry Niven style autodoc.

SPYING: Critics chafe as Macs send sensitive docs to iCloud without warning.

GEEK FACTOR: MAXIMUM. Joss Whedon and Nathan Fillion Actually Dueled with Lightsabers.

SHIPPING TODAY: Sharyl Attkisson’s new book, Stonewalled.

I WOULD HAVE EXPECTED NOTHING LESS: Former CBS News Reporter Sharyl Attkisson Claims Existence of Obama Enemies’ List.

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 544.

FROM SARA LUCKEY AT FEMINSPIRE: White Feminists Are Fucking Up By Ignoring Lena Dunham’s Abuse. “Fellow white feminists, we cannot do this shit anymore. It should never have been happening. We have to hold white feminists within the movement accountable for the things we say and do. We cannot continue to overlook truly horrific or damaging things that some of us do at the expense of other women because we really like somebody’s book or movie or tv show or whatever it is that we want to hold onto so so tightly that we would cast other women, their pain, suffering, and abuse aside, demean it and diminish it by placing our escapism above it. . . . Lena Dunham has handled this messed up shit by trying to classify this as a ‘right wing news story’ rather than just ‘news story’, which is what it is. She has tried to say that direct quotes of passages from her book are misconstrued words, which they are not. She has taken to twitter and effectively adopted the language of abusers in saying ‘my victim isn’t mad, why should you be?’. Call this what it is as it is: Lena Dunham wrote a memoir. In the memoir she detailed grooming her sister for increasing sexual abuse. She compared herself to a predator. Truth Revolt documented that Lena Dunham had written this and she is now threatening to sue them and trying to paint the telling as a ‘right wing news story’.”

UPDATE: Check Your Sexual Privilege, Lena Dunham. “It’s a lot easier to narrate your own experiences when wealth and status insulate you from the consequences of your actions. The Dunham family and the rest of the urban creative class have some really, really messed-up ideas about sexual behavior because they can afford to. These people don’t have to wait a month to get treatment for an STD because they can’t find a doctor who takes Medicaid. Guilt is a relative concept, because those killjoy Levitical injunctions against bad behavior don’t apply to people that can easily afford to lawyer up should they hurt someone or run afoul of the law.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: Perez Hilton not buying the “right wing story” spin either. “Unfortunately for Lena, many have seen the other side of this story and agree that what she did with her sister does constitute child molestation, whether Lena was herself a child or not.”

I AGREE: Space Tourism Will Survive Virgin Galactic Crash.

Climbing Mt. Everest is fantastically dangerous, and people continue to do it, often paying tens of thousands of dollars for the privilege of risking their lives. True, heading into space via an explosive exothermic reaction seems to be even more dangerous than climbing Everest — perhaps twice as dangerous, for the relevant age group. On the other hand, you don’t have to spend months or years training to get on a Virgin Galactic tour, and when you finally reach your “summit,” you will be comfortably strapped into a seat to enjoy the view, rather than a frost-bitten, hypoxia-addled mess. Your end, if it comes, will be in a few seconds or minutes rather than long hours of freezing cold. When you consider all the costs, which journey seems more expensive?

The question for me is not “will people be willing to take the risk,” but “Will Virgin Galactic have enough paying customers to cover the cost?” Not that many people have so much money that $250,000 dollars sounds affordable. Risk-taking propensity is strongest among young men — and unfortunately, wealth is highest among the old.

I dunno, I think most Everest-climbers are middle-aged.

WELL, YES. THEY’RE FASCIST BULLIES. The Atlantic: Protesting Bill Maher At Berkeley: It’s About Power. They should be stood up to, mocked, and punished for their bullying.