United States

It's one thing for the republican establishment to throw up all over the candidacy of Donald Trump: frankly, the GOP has not been relevant as a political power ever since Boehner started folding like a lawn chair to Obama's every demand just around the time of the first US downgrade, and as such what the Republican party - torn apart and very much irrelevant as the best of the "establishment" GOP candidates demonstrate - thinks is largely irrelevant.

Two weeks ago, during the peak of the February market rout, UBS' credit strategist Matthew Mish looked at the latest round in the junk bond selloff and answered a rhetorical question: "Is it time to buy" the bonds that comprise some/any/all of the bonds that make up the USD-denominated $3 trillion speculative grade universe. His answer was hardly pleasant for those who have kept peddling junk credit (including bonds, loans and revolvers) for the past several months:

Authored by Robert Epstein, originally posted at Aeon.co,

The internet has spawned subtle forms of influence that can flip elections and manipulate everything we say, think and do

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

You probably had no idea, but representatives from Silicon Valley, Hollywood and the U.S. government came together earlier this week to privately discuss how they could jointly fight ISIS propaganda online. Never mind the fact that ISIS is the child of reckless and inhumane preemptive wars of aggression perpetrated by the U.S. government. Such introspection naturally never crosses the mind of government bureaucrats ostensibly attempting to understand the epic disasters they created in the first place.

A CIA-backed militia has killed at least one senior Russian military official this week with a U.S. TOW anti-tank missile.  Video footage shows U.S.-armed anti-Assad rebels using U.S.-supplied weapons to target senior Russian military officials in Syria. The video shows the Free Syrian Army using laser-guided BGM-71 TOWs anti-tank to fire a missile at the Russians.