HOW BACTERIA IN YOUR GUT affect your mental health.

WELL, THAT’S FAIRLY BADASS: Man prevents bear from killing him by grabbing its tongue.

IT’S COME TO THIS: Ezra Klein calls the ObamaCare launch a “failure.” And there are more failures hiding behind today’s failure:

In the weeks leading up to the launch I heard some very ugly things about how the system was performing when transferring data to insurers — a necessary step if people are actually going to get insurance. I tried hard to pin the rumors down, but I could never quite nail the story, and there was a wall of official denials from the Obama administration. It was just testing, they said. They were fixing the bugs day by day.

According to Bob Laszlewski, those problems aren’t resolved. They’re just not getting much attention because the health-care law’s Web sites aren’t working well enough for people to get that far in the process.

The country’s in the very best of hands.

WELL, PEOPLE CAN CERTAINLY BE BULLIED BY THE “FLAUNTING” of white heterosexual male privilege. Golf pants alone can be traumatic.

BART HINKLE: Why College Costs Will Soon Plunge.

THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, PRUDES WOULD BE CENSORING THINGS ALL OVER. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Self-Published Erotica is Being Singled Out For Sweeping Deletions From Major eBookstores.

TALENT-HUNTING: A shortage of cyber-warriors.

SPYING: DoJ: If we can track one American, we can track all Americans. “Notably, the government is also arguing that no one other than the company that provided the information—including the defendant in this case—has the right to challenge this disclosure in court.”

HIRE SOME 14-YEAR-OLD GIRLS: North Korea Still Sucks At Photoshop.

AT AMAZON, Kindle Daily Deals. One is by Iain Banks.

POPULAR MECHANICS: 10 Breakthrough Products of 2013.

CHANGE: 12-Year-Old Boy Becomes Youngest African-American Eagle Scout Ever.

OBAMACARE ENTHUSIAST slams rollout debacle. “Don’t be fooled by the rhetoric about our nation’s health portal: From a technical standpoint, there’s no excuse for its failures.”

NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME: After Two Weeks CNN Reporter Still Hasn’t Been Able To Sign Up For ObamaCare.

RICHARD EPSTEIN: The ObamaCare Trainwreck.

WE’RE SEEING MORE AND MORE MARCHES ON WASHINGTON AGAINST GOVERNMENT OVERREACH. I THINK THIS IS A GOOD THING. October 26th, 2013 in Washington, D.C.: A Rally Against Mass Surveillance. Sponsored by FreedomWorks, the ACLU, CEI, the EFF and more — a very broad and diverse coalition.

JOHN FUND: Graham Joins Vitter in Fight over Hill’s Carve-Out. “Polls show that 92 percent of voters dislike the idea of a special Obamacare privilege for anyone on Capitol Hill.”

LAUGHING AT CANDY CROWLEY IS USUALLY A GOOD IDEA: Sen. Rand Paul (R., Ky.) laughed at State of the Union host Candy Crowley Sunday when she asked if he would consider becoming a Democrat. “Paul said he was proud of the Republican Party’s history, particularly for its fight against Jim Crow in his home state of Kentucky, and couldn’t imagine changing sides.”

Paul’s comment: “I’m really proud of the fact that the ones who overturned Jim Crow in Kentucky were Republicans fighting against an entirely unified Democratic Party, so I am proud to be Republican. I can’t imagine being anything else.”

UPDATE: From the comments: “Yep, that’s why you never see documentaries on Jim Crow, it was run by Democrats and even the Northern Democrats supported it indirectly by supporting their Southern Democrat brothers.”

Maybe someone should make such a documentary. Say, have I ever mentioned that Bull Connor was a member of the Democratic National Committee?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 158.

WHEN MOOCHERS BECOME LOOTERS: Walmart shelves in Springhill, Mansfield, cleared in EBT glitch.

UPDATE: More here.

MASSIVE RACE RIOT IN MOSCOW. “The riot broke out at a protest after a local resident was allegedly murdered by a foreigner. Tensions between ethnic Russians and Muslim migrants have risen sharply in recent years.”

POTEMKIN VILLAGES ALL THE WAY DOWN: Neighbors: Newark Mayor Cory Booker never lived in Newark. “Multiple residents of Newark told The Daily Caller that the longtime mayor doesn’t live at any of the addresses he has claimed as home. The mayor is believed to live in New York even though he is registered to run for New Jersey’s special senate election.”

HAPPY COLUMBUS DAY: Many in the West will demonstrate their fierce originality and intellectual independence today by condemning Christopher Columbus using the same shopworn cliches they used last year. For those of a different bent, I recommend Samuel Eliot Morison’s Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus, which takes a somewhat different position. Here’s an excerpt:

At the end of 1492 most men in Western Europe felt exceedingly gloomy about the future. Christian civilization appeared to be shrinking in area and dividing into hostile units as its sphere contracted. For over a century there had been no important advance in natural science and registration in the universities dwindled as the instruction they offered became increasingly jejune and lifeless. Institutions were decaying, well-meaning people were growing cynical or desperate, and many intelligent men, for want of something better to do, were endeavoring to escape the present through studying the pagan past. . . .

Yet, even as the chroniclers of Nuremberg were correcting their proofs from Koberger’s press, a Spanish caravel named Nina scudded before a winter gale into Lisbon with news of a discovery that was to give old Europe another chance. In a few years we find the mental picture completely changed. Strong monarchs are stamping out privy conspiracy and rebellion; the Church, purged and chastened by the Protestant Reformation, puts her house in order; new ideas flare up throughout Italy, France, Germany and the northern nations; faith in God revives and the human spirit is renewed. The change is complete and startling: “A new envisagement of the world has begun, and men are no longer sighing after the imaginary golden age that lay in the distant past, but speculating as to the golden age that might possibly lie in the oncoming future.”

Christopher Columbus belonged to an age that was past, yet he became the sign and symbol of this new age of hope, glory and accomplishment. His medieval faith impelled him to a modern solution: Expansion.

Morison’s book is superb, and I recommend it highly as an antidote to the simplistic anti-occidental prejudice of today — which, as Jim Bennett has noted, has roots that might surprise its proponents:

This is primarily an effect of the Calvinist Puritan roots of American progressivism. Just as Calvinists believed in the centrality of the depravity of man, with the exception of a minuscule contingent of the Elect of God, their secularized descendants believe in the depravity and cursedness of Western civilization, with their own enlightened selves in the role of the Elect.

Indeed. Nonetheless, Bennett thinks that a different Italian deserves the real credit. (Reposted from 2005, but it still fits.) [Doesn’t this leave you vulnerable to charges of recycling too? –ed. I prefer to think of it as “They came at us in the same old way, and, you know, we beat them in the same old way.”]

I post this every year, as it’s evergreen. The original link to Bennett’s column seems to have succumbed to link-rot, but I believe this is it.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Will We See A Successful Third Party in Our Lifetimes?

Gallup reports that support for a third party is at a new high. . . .

Third parties regularly fail in American life, but the hunger for an alternative to the two existing parties points to one of our core beliefs here at VM: the profound transformation reshaping America demands new ideas and new approaches that go well beyond the alternatives being offered by either party today. The Democrats are trapped by their nostalgia for a blue social model that cannot thrive under current conditions, and the GOP seems more eager to bash bad Democratic ideas than to develop serious proposals that would meet the needs of our times.

In the meantime, voter dissatisfaction with both parties grows. Third party or no, the Democrats and Republicans are going to have to significantly adapt to changing economic, cultural, and political realities in the coming years.

I’ll be interested to see if we’ll have an anti-corporate, populist strain of primary challengers appear in the Democratic Party, as it has in the Republican Party.