America

When news broke of the October 4 ambush and deaths of four elite Green Beret soldiers in Niger, the immediate reaction voiced among congressional leaders and echoed generally in the media was: we have troops in Niger? But the bigger questions of the US military's increasingly sizable footprint in Africa (or what has long been called our 'Shadow War') quickly disappeared from public debate, instead, in usual fashion the media quickly focused on myopic details of phone calls and whether Trump's handling of the aftermath was "presidential" enough. 

Authored by Robert Gore via Straight Line Logic blog,

Empires get stupider and more corrupt as they age..

Authored by Michael Owen,

No amount of statistics or facts will sway either side in the gun control debate, because they are all looking for simple solutions to complex problems.

The facts of those complex problems are uncomfortable and nobody really wants to come to grips with them.

For example, we don’t really have a single America with a moderately high rate of gun deaths.

With much of America clicking furiously all day Thursday on the website of the National Archives, hoping to be among the first to catch the release of thousands of previously unseen JFK Assassination records, the U.S. government was in danger of missing the deadline to release the trove of previously classified records from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, "adding an unexpected twist to a saga already rife with rumors and conspiracies" according to NBC.

While Democrats, old and new, are abandoning the sinking Hillary Clinton ship, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper is still "with her."

As Daily Caller reports, Clapper is shrugging off news that the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee funded the research behind the dossier on Donald Trump (and lied about it non-stop for almost a year). Clapper said the only thing that matters is whether the information is “corroborated.”