Thursday Miscellany!

[maxomai]

• Despite his lackluser performance in two debates, Donald Trump still leads the rest of the Republican field. In related news, did you catch last night's South Park?


• Let's assume you rent your apartment or house. Someone comes along, buys it, and tells you that you have thirty days to vacate so they can renovate and charge 50% more rent. Could you find a new place to live in 30 days? More here.


• Russia is apparently prepared to launch unilateral air strikes against the Islamic State, with or without the Americans joining in. Q: Why? A: To protect their ally Assad, not to mention their military presence in the Middle East and the Mediterranean.


• The US Army is kicking out a Green Beret for beating the crap out of an Afghan local who was raping a boy. It is an outrage --- an outrage! --- that the United States should go out of its way to support those forces that sodomize boys on "Man-Love Thursday," but as Justin Raimondo reminds us, this has been US policy in Afghanistan since the 1990s.


• Could the fifty-year civil war in Columbia finally be coming to a close?


• As if the Ebola vaccine wasn't a huge win for humanity, a 16-year-old girl invented a cheap, fast Ebola test that can find the disease before it's infectious. In other words, by sheer ingenuity, just a year after Ebola raged out of control in West Africa, we're →thisclose← to beating one of the scariest diseases in the modern imagination. That's pretty fucking cool.