monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

You supply the lies and name calling, as you have done for years.

I supply the facts and evidence, as I have done for year

You have repeatedly demonstrated hyou have selective amnesia. Your alleged "facts" are merely opinion, yours or someone else's, and twisted illogic.

Iran's Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) claim to have shot down a US spy drone over Iranian airspace.

State media reported the military hit a drone, which they named as a RQ-4 Global Hawk, near Kuhmobarak in Iran's southern Hormozgan province.

The US military has not confirmed if a drone was hit, but a spokesman denied its aircraft were in Iranian airspace.

It comes days after the Pentagon said it was deploying 1,000 extra troops to the region amid tension.

Washington has accused Iran of attacking oil tankers with mines in the Gulf of Oman.

Tensions were further fuelled on Monday when Iran said its stockpile of low-enriched uranium would next week exceed limits it agreed with international powers in 2015.

Iran stepped up its production in response to tightening economic sanctions from the US, who left the landmark nuclear deal last year.

Kuhmobarak, where Iran says it shot down the drone on Thursday, is close to the Strait of Hormuz - a key route for global oil supplies.

Navy Captain Bill Urban, a spokesman for the US military Central Command told the Reuters news agency that "no US aircraft were operating in Iranian airspace today" but declined to comment further.

A US military drone has been shot down by an Iranian surface-to-air missile while in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz, US officials say.

One official told Reuters news agency the drone was a US Navy MQ-4C Triton.

A US Navy Seal testifying at the war crimes trial of Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher has said he was behind the death of an Iraqi teenager.

Special Operator 1st Class Corey Scott stunned the San Diego courtroom when he said he asphyxiated the wounded Islamic State (IS) militant.

Chief Gallagher is accused of stabbing to death the injured captive as well as randomly shooting Iraqi civilians.

He has pleaded not guilty and denied all the allegations against him.

Mr Scott, a combat medic, was given immunity in exchange for his testimony.

The Navy Seal said that he witnessed Mr Gallagher unexpectedly begin stabbing the teenaged fighter after the two men had stabilised his injuries following an airstrike, but that the stab wounds did not appear to be life-threatening.

When the chief walked away, Mr Scott said he plugged the youth's air tube as an act of mercy.

Mr Scott said the injured victim may have survived the stabbing, but he decided to plug his air tube with his thumb in the belief that he would be tortured by Iraqi forces if he survived.

"I knew he was going to die anyway," Mr Scott told the courtroom. "I wanted to save him from waking up to whatever would have happened to him."

He said it is his belief that Mr Gallagher is not responsible for killing the young militant.

The bombshell claim came on cross-examination, after he already testified to seeing Mr Gallagher stab the teenager below the collarbone then walk away.

The US Senate has voted to block the sale of billions of dollars' worth of weapons to Saudi Arabia, striking a blow to President Donald Trump.

Mr Trump bypassed Congress last month in an attempt to push through the $8bn (£6bn) deal, citing threats to Saudi Arabia from its bitter rival Iran.

But on Thursday - in a rare bipartisan act - the Republican-led Senate passed three resolutions to prevent the sale.

The president has promised to veto the action, leaving the deal in limbo.

While the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives is also likely to vote to block the sale, analysts say it is almost certain Congress will not have the necessary votes to override a veto from Mr Trump.

The first and second resolutions of disapproval passed by a margin of 53-45 and a third vote, which covered a number of other resolutions relating to the arms sale, passed by 51-45 votes.

As well as Saudi Arabia, weapons would also reportedly be sold to the United Arab Emirates and Jordan under the deal.

Mr Trump bypassed Congress last month by invoking a rarely used aspect of federal law. He declared that ongoing tensions with Iran amounted to a national emergency, meaning the sale of weapons - including precision-guided bombs - was a matter of urgency.

But the move sparked fierce opposition on Capitol Hill from those who feared the weapons may be used against civilians in Yemen by Saudi-led forces.

President Donald Trump approved retaliatory military strikes against Iran on Thursday before changing his mind, US media report.

The New York Times, citing senior White House officials, says strikes were planned against a "handful" of targets.

They say the operation was allegedly under way "in its early stages" when Mr Trump stood the US military down. The White House has so far made no comment.

This comes after Iran shot down a US spy drone.

Tehran says the unmanned US aircraft entered Iranian airspace early on Thursday morning. The US maintains it was shot down in international airspace.

Tensions have been escalating between the two countries, with the US recently blaming Iran for attacks on oil tankers operating in the region. Iran has announced it will soon exceed international agreed limits on its nuclear programme.

Last year, the US unilaterally pulled out of a 2015 nuclear deal aimed at curbing Iran's nuclear activities.

The New York Times first published details of the apparent planned strikes late on Thursday night in Washington.

As late as 19:00 local time (23:00 GMT), it said, US military and diplomatic officials still expected the strikes on agreed targets, including Iranian radar and missile batteries, to take place.

"Planes were in the air and ships were in position, but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down," the newspaper reported, citing an unnamed senior administration official.

From 30,000 feet, Britain’s coastline has a familiar sweep and shape. Zoom closer in – to, say, the cliffs of Dover – and it becomes less easy to comprehend. All you can see is a confusing series of jagged edges; down on the beach, peering at rocks with a magnifying glass, the coastline refuses to resolve itself into a regular pattern. The closer you look, the more that comprehension eludes you.

Reality is annoying like that: at every level of examination, it raises more questions than answers. There are always details that don’t fit, exceptions to rules, consequences that can’t be predicted. That’s why humans, who famously cannot bear too much reality, have evolved a method of coping with all this complexity: we lie to ourselves about how much we understand.

In 2002, the psychologists Frank Keil and Leonid Rozenblit asked people to rate their own understanding of how zips work. The respondents answered very confidently – after all, they used zips all the time. But when asked to explain how a zip works, they failed dismally. Similar results have been obtained with respect to flush toilets, piano keys, helicopters and bicycles. It doesn’t just apply to physical objects: people have been found to overestimate their understanding of climate change, the tax system and foreign policy.

We know a lot less than we think we do about the world around us. Cognitive scientists call this “the illusion of explanatory depth”, and sometimes just “the knowledge illusion”. Collectively, we know an awful lot, but each individual’s knowledge of the world is much sketchier and more superficial than he or she imagines. Only when pushed to explain what we think we know in detail do we briefly apprehend the epistemological abyss gaping beneath our beliefs.

I think this tells us something about what’s gone wrong with our politics. A consistent feature of those experiments is that after trying and failing to explain something, people accept that they don’t understand it as well as they thought they did. Humility sets in. But in our current political culture, that doesn’t happen. Among our political leaders it is almost unheard of to concede ignorance or even to accept that reality is complicated. They have no idea how zippers work, but they have very strong views on how to make them.

The disease of politics today is not populism, so much, as simplism: the oversimplification of complex problems. Politicians have always distilled intricate issues into soundbites and slogans – that’s part of the job. But Brexit has revealed something new: a refusal even to accept that there is a more complex reality behind the slogans.

Brexit is by far the most complicated, technical, multilayered policy problem this country has encountered. If you are not either bewildered or seized by apathy whenever any aspect of it is discussed in detail, you’re either misunderstanding what’s being said or you’re a member of a think tank. But most of the Tory leadership contenders, including and especially the one most likely to win, have made seemingly no effort before or since the referendum to advance their meagre knowledge of how the EU works, of the Irish border question, of international trade. They don’t even seem interested. Details are dismissed as unimportant, expertise as irrelevant. People who complicate things – which might be a good definition of an expert – are viewed with suspicion. Even as they fail and fail again, the politicians chant incantations to keep complexity at bay: Leave means Leave, no deal is better than a bad deal, believe in Britain. The slogans are eating us alive.

It is not a coincidence that politicians have developed this ardently simplist sensibility at a time when complexity is growing. Voters are simplists too. We live in an increasingly globalised, diverse, interdependent, technology-led society, but most of us don’t like to think about it. We take for granted enormously complex achievements, such as the presence of milk in your supermarket, or the phone in your pocket.

Similarly, the number of voters who truly understand the immigration system, or how schools are funded, is tiny (it’s almost an axiom: any issue worthy of public debate is too complicated for most voters to understand). But that doesn’t stop us from having strong opinions on them. Simplist solutions are seized upon because we don’t like to feel that we don’t understand things. When you don’t understand something, you feel less sense of agency over it, and as the 2016 Leave campaign realised, people get scared and angry when they don’t feel in control.

Simplism is changing the way we feel about each other, too. Dan Kahan, a Yale professor, is one of America’s leading experts on political polarisation, and one of his findings is that partisanship results from incuriosity. If you have a very different opinion to me on immigration, that might be because you have a very different experience of it from me. But to contemplate your different life experience requires an expense of brainpower to which most of us are unwilling to commit. It’s more efficient to dismiss others as bigoted or gullible.

Simplisms vary. The right likes to explain as much as possible with reference to the perfidy of foreigners. The left’s preferred strain of simplism is conspiracy: every social ill can be explained by the existence of a self-serving elite. Liberals assume everyone else is less intelligent.

A zip, by the way, consists of two tracks with dozens of teeth, each of which has a hook and a hollow; the trick is to latch every hook one on side into a hollow on the other. For that to happen, each tooth must be exactly the same size and shape and perfectly positioned on the track. Everything depends on everything else. Details matter. It’s a pity nobody in politics believes in them. Simplism is driving us into the sea.

The Democrats actively helped the Soviets try to conquer the world during the Cold War.

Oh really?

I hope this is just an example of your ignorance and not a futile attempt to rewrite recent history.

Democrats created NATO. Democrats sent troops to Korea and Vietnam specifically to prevent Soviet proxies from taking over those countries. Democrats supported the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Democratic Senator Scoop Jackson would call you, correctly, a liar.

The Democrats actively helped the Soviets try to conquer the world during the Cold War.