This is quite a bizarre and compelling story: The internet mystery that has the world baffled

For the past two years, a mysterious online organisation has been setting the world's finest code-breakers a series of seemingly unsolveable problems. But to what end? Welcome to the world of Cicada 3301.

Great moments in compulsory government safety:

General Motors is required under NHTSA rules to initiate a recall of 18,941 vehicles because of a danger created by other NHTSA rules. Perhaps it is regulators who should come with a warning label.

Dennis Prager thinks the left destroys everthing it touches. His list includes Education, Art, Environmental Law, and much more.

While all rational people want to protect the environment, environmentalism has become a destructive leftist religion. Millions of Africans have died of malaria because of the environmentalist-induced bans on DDT. Environmentalist opposition to modifying rice to include Vitamin A has led to the deaths of about 8 million Third World children. Wind turbines have created killing fields for birds and bats. The American prairies are being destroyed by the environmentalists' push for ethanol.

Charles C.W. Cooke points out how Obamacare screws people that play by the rules.

These are the 5 million - and counting - self-reliant types who have not merely suffered the indignity of being forcefully deprived of plans with which they were largely happy, but have also been forced to sit helplessly by while a parade of imperious, preening elites explained to them with barely concealed disdain that their choices could no longer be tolerated by the state.

Obamacare is doomed for a death spiral.

Former Virginia governor candidate Creigh Deeds critically wounded; son dead from gunshot.

Rush is right: it is "Club Gitmo."

Just remember: keep breathing.

Hackberry Nipple Gall Maker insects are swarming in Tarrant County, Texas?

Here's a fascinating article on the top secret NR-1 submarine.

In the Navy's "silent service," every submarine operates in secrecy, but Rickover protected his NR-1 in particular by sharing details of its development and capabilities on a need-to-know basis. The cloak was pulled back by publicity of exploits including a 1976 mission to recover an F-14 fighter with a newly developed missile that had rolled off the deck of an aircraft carrier.

The Angry Left

Over at Forbes, Harry Binswanger on the anger of the left:

The Angry Left can’t be appeased, because its denizens don’t want anything: they are nihilistic. They are not pro-Arab, they are anti-America. They are not pro-poor, they are anti-rich. They are not pro-equality, they are anti-excellence. They are not pro-charity, they are anti-achievement.

Blog of the Week - 6 November 2013

The blog of the week for today is Peggy Noonan's at the Wall Street Journal. In this post she remembers astronaut Scott Carpenter, who blasted off for the last time recently. Typical of her writing, she spans the decades to show us how we have changed as a society:

But what an era of dynamism, of breaking through, of pushing out, of daring. The space program gave us a forward-looking attitude, a sense we could do anything in any area. Especially if you were a kid, as I was, age 11, when Carpenter flew. What a gift it was to be young then-America blasting off, the Yankees or the Dodgers always winning. No one cared about government-what bliss-but to the extent we had one it seemed to work. Respectable people like Dwight Eisenhower were in charge, and then, in '61, the glamour of the Kennedys. People were getting TVs. A whole new way to waste time! But also something else, our culture showing itself to itself, and it didn't look so bad, especially, again, if you were young.

But the point is the era. It was big, expansive, it was pushing against limits, even against gravity. Now we have shutdowns, ceilings, chained CPIs-it's all limits. The head of NASA talks about greenhouse gases.

Our children aren't told by our culture that we can do anything, they're taught to be afraid by people who are afraid-the future can harm you, hunker down, shelter in place. Really, that phrase captures the mood of our time: "Shelter in place." Don't go anywhere interesting, like a planet.

We don't talk greatness now, we talk problems; and we don't solve them, we set up processes to address them down the road.

Here's a question that hadn't occurred to me, but after the revelation that we have tapped Angela Merkel's phone, it seems the answer is obvious. Did Obama Spy on Mitt Romney?