Colin Kaepernick has been abstaining from standing for the national anthem. Self-styled patriots have been losing their minds over it. That is because they are true believers in a cult. The cult is the State.

All states are cults: religions. And like all religions, states have sacraments, including holy rituals. The national anthem is one of the holy ritual sacraments of the cult of the American State. Those fully initiated and indoctrinated in that cult have been programmed to go into attack mode when divergent cult members (heretics) fail to observe such sacraments, like the national anthem or the pledge of allegiance to the holy pole cloth. Such peer pressure is how cults maintain their numbers.

Voting is another one of those sacramental rituals. As with the national anthem and pledge of allegiance, true believers are aghast when you advocate abstention from voting. School, which is our chief initiation into the State cult, thoroughly and universally indoctrinates its initiates into the sacrament of voting and democracy. We've all been brainwashed from the time we were tiny children into the holy myth of democracy: that democracy is what makes us special, what makes America exceptional; that patriots suffered and died for democracy, from the Suffragettes to the Civil Rights movement, from the Revolution to the Civil War to World War II to the War on Terror; that through voting we are empowered to fight for what's right, to make our country, our very lives, better. You can see how important this sacrament is to the State cult from all of the voting propaganda pushed by the government and the establishment media.

Since 2011, prosecutors in New Jersey requested that 1,251 minors be tried for crimes as adults. Of that amount, 87.6 percent of the juveniles were black or Hispanic, according to a new report.

Of the total 1,251 requests for a minor to be tried as an adult in New Jersey from July 1, 2011 to May 19, 2016, 692 of those requests were granted by judges. Those minors were 87.4 percent black or Hispanic, WNYC reported in a new series, 'Kids in Prison.'

"There are obvious disparities and gross disparities in the exercise of discretion to seek a waiver," Laura Cohen, director of the Criminal and Youth Justice Clinic at Rutgers Law School, told WNYC.

According to a 2011 report by the US Department of Justice National Institute for Corrections, black youth constitute about two-thirds of minors in the adult criminal justice system and are about nine times more likely than white youth to receive adult prison sentences.

Islamic State's online media output has dropped drastically as advertising a viable caliphate becomes harder amid military defeats, US scholars found. Another reason for it is that many propagandists were killed in airstrikes, becoming "media martyrs."

Once notorious for inspiring thousands of foreign fighters to wage jihad in Syria and Iraq, Islamic State's (IS, formerly ISIS/ISIL) online propaganda coverage is now shrinking, according to a study released by Combating Terrorism Center at the US Military Academy West Point.

Last August, the terrorist group produced over 700 media items in its "official" outlets in Syria and other countries, the research says. In August this year, there were only 200.

"It's not just the numeric decline," Daniel Milton, who authored the report, told the New York Times. "The caliphate was their big selling point. Now there's an inability to say we're doing the things that make us a state. And that was behind their broad appeal."

A man rammed his pickup truck through a group of activists protesting Columbus Day in Reno, Nevada. The driver hit five people, sending an elderly woman to the hospital.

The incident was captured on video and shows a rally held by 40 people protesting the observance of Columbus Day - also in solidarity with the fight against the controversial Dakota Access pipeline.

Police are investigating a possible lead relating to a 2009 missing person case after a disturbing video featuring a screaming tied up teenager introduced as the author's "new girlfriend" went viral seven years after it was first posted on YouTube.

The video was originally posted in 2009, but has only recently gained popularity and many believe it is connected to missing Wisconsin teenager Kayla Berg. Titled "Hi Walter! I got a new GF!" the video was uploaded in October 2009, two months after Berg disappeared.

In it, a man talks about his new girlfriend before leading the camera to a basement bathroom. "I know she hates cameras, Walter, but I'm going to show you her anyway. You ready?" he asks, before opening the door to reveal a girl tied up on the floor, screaming.

Muslims were a polarizing subject in the United States long before the 2016 presidential race.

In a 1963 interview at the University of California, Berkeley, Malcolm X discussed the nature of Islam and African-American rights with sociology graduate student Herman Blake and professor John Leggett. The civil rights leader explained why he did not believe in racial integration and condoned violence for African-Americans in the name of self-defense.

In a race to corner the artificial intelligence market, the world's largest tech companies are in a frenzy to buy out smaller AI companies at an alarming rate, heading toward what could potentially be the most dangerous monopoly in history. According to a report by CB Insights updated on October 7, close to 140 private artificial intelligence companies have been consolidated in the last five years.

Google, a subsidiary of Alphabet, is in first place with 11 acquisitions, the most notable being DeepMind Technologies, which Google purchased for $600 million in 2014. The British startup was just four years old at the time of the acquisition and has been used to create free apps with the National Health Service and conserve energy by controlling the air conditioning units at Google's data centers. Deepmind made headlines in March 2016 when AlAlphaGo became the first computer program in history to beat a top-level Go player.

European prisons have become 'breeding grounds' for extremist movements, a report by a UK think tank said, adding that in jails, jihadists are able to find plenty of "angry young men" who are "ripe" for radicalization.

The report titled "Criminal Pasts, Terrorist Futures: European Jihadists and the New Crime-Terror Nexus" by London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR) was released on Tuesday.

The authors of the report said they made a database containing the profiles of "79 recent European jihadists with criminal pasts."

"Fifty-seven percent of the individuals in our database (45 out of 79 profiles) had been incarcerated prior to their radicalisation, with sentences ranging from one month to over ten years, for various offenses from petty to violent crime."

Germany invented the gasoline engine and diesel engine. Now, Germany's Bundesrat wants the internal combustion engine banned starting in 2030. The resolution by one of Germany's two legislative bodies (analogous to the US Senate or British House of Lords) isn't binding, but it had bipartisan support. It suggests the days of the internal combustion engine car are finite.

Other code phrases in the resolution, once deciphered, suggest Germany wants to roll back tax credits favoring diesel engine cars, and push for further incentives to ramp up the sales of electric vehicles.

Bob Schieffer was not a fan of Sunday night's presidential debate.

The CBS News contributor and former "Face the Nation" host called the debate between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump "disgraceful."

"How have we come to this? This is supposed to be a campaign for the most powerful office of the land. Here we're marching in women into the hall who supposed to have some relationship with one of the candidate's spouses. What's that supposed to prove?" Schieffer said, citing women who claim former President Bill Clinton of sexual assault sitting in Trump's box at the debate. "I mean this is what they do in a Banana Republic. This is the United States of America.

"I just hope to God I don't see another campaign like this one. America can do better than what we have seen here tonight. This was just disgraceful," Schieffer said.