Politics

After yesterday's chaotic Spanish event rollercoaster, when the Catalan leader Carles Puidgement was going to press ahead with independence only to change his mind, and propose elections, before reversing again and punting the independence decision to parliament, we hoped to get some further clarity on how he’s planning to proceed. Today, the chaos continues.

First, Bloomberg reported that Catalonia would seek approval for elections from Madrid:

Authored by Brian Cloughley via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Sweden’s most recent military cooperation with the US-NATO military alliance involved hosting armed forces of the many countries which participated in Exercise Aurora in September.

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..

Earlier this week, we speculated that a shift in Russia-related Democratic talking points could be a sign that Congressional investigators, and possibly even special counsel Robert Mueller, might soon confirm what many have long suspected: that there is no evidence of collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign.