ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Would Superman be a DACA recipient?

YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER LIST: 6 Dumbest Celebrity Reactions to Las Vegas Massacre.

I’D RATHER NOT: Meet the hominin species that gave us genital herpes.

Somewhere between 3 and 1.4 million years ago, HSV2 jumped the species barrier from African apes back into human ancestors – probably through an intermediate hominin species unrelated to humans. Hominin is the zoological ‘tribe’ to which our species belongs.

Now, a team of scientists from Cambridge and Oxford Brookes universities believe they may have identified the culprit: Paranthropus boisei, a heavyset bipedal hominin with a smallish brain and dish-like face.

In a study published today in the journal Virus Evolution, they suggest that P. boisei most likely contracted HSV2 through scavenging ancestral chimp meat where savannah met forest – the infection seeping in via bites or open sores.

Hominins with HSV1 may have been initially protected from HSV2, which also occupied the mouth. That is until HSV2 “adapted to a different mucosal niche” say the scientists. A niche located in the genitals.

Close contact between P. boisei and our ancestor Homo erectus would have been fairly common around sources of water, such as Kenya’s Lake Turkana. This provided the opportunity for HSV2 to boomerang into our bloodline.

Thanks for nothin’.

PSYCHIATRIST: ‘CNN’s Gonna Have to Answer’ for Their Twisted Priorities on Mass Shootings.

UNTOLD GREAT WAR HISTORY: When Major George Marshall Met General John Pershing.

“General Pershing,” the major said, “there’s something to be said here and I think I should say it because I’ve been here the longest.”

Pershing turned back and gave the impertinent young officer a cold, appraising glance. “What have you got to say?”

A torrent of facts poured forth: the promised platoon manuals that never arrived and had set back training; the inadequate supplies that left men walking around with gunnysacks on their feet; the inadequate quarters that left troops scattered throughout the countryside, sleeping in barns for a penny a night; the lack of motor transport that forced troops to walk miles to the training grounds. Finally, the deluge subsided.

Pershing looked at the major and calmly said: “You must appreciate the troubles we have.”

The major replied, “Yes, I know you do, General, I know you do. But ours are immediate and every day and have to be solved before night.”

General Pershing eyed the major narrowly and then turned to leave, the 1st Division staff looking nervously at the ground in stunned silence. After a while, Sibert gratefully told Major George C. Marshall that he should not have stuck his neck out on his account, and the rest of the staff predicted that Marshall’s military career was finished. Marshall shrugged off his friends’ condolences, saying: “All I can see is that I may get troop duty instead of staff duty, and certainly that would be a great success.”

Yet no retribution for the incident ever came. Instead, whenever the AEF commander visited 1st Division from Chaumont, he would find a moment to pull Marshall aside to ask how things were really going. Pershing had finally found an officer who would tell him the unvarnished truth rather than gloss over inadequacies. Marshall eventually received orders transferring him to the AEF General Staff to work under Colonel Fox Conner, the head of the AEF’s Operations section. Together, they would form the core of the group that planned the two great U.S. offensives of the war — Saint Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. Pershing was impressed, and after the Armistice asked Marshall to become his aide.

Highly recommended reading for history buffs, or anyone who enjoys a good tale, well told.

THEY JUST AREN’T VERY GOOD AT THIS STUFF: After Las Vegas shooting, Facebook and Google get the news wrong again.

“Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries,” Google said in a statement. “Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”

So, in other words, this is yet another case of “don’t blame us, blame our algorithm.” That’s not exactly what anyone wants to hear, especially when hundreds of millions of people get their news from Facebook and Google. They both need to know that dealing with these kind of issues “within hours,” as the search giant said, simply isn’t enough. Stories can go viral in a matter of minutes. Not only that, but if Facebook can’t keep something like its Crisis Response page clean, then what hope is there for the rest of its platform? And the same goes for Google’s Top Stories, which is often the first thing people see in their search results.

And that’s just the stuff they get wrong on accident, instead of by design.

VIDEO: CNN’s Jeff Zeleny Stereotypes Country Music Fans as ‘Trump Supporters.’

MAKE ARMS SALES GREAT AGAIN: US clears $815M sale of F-35 weapons for Australia.

HOT TAKE: Las Vegas shooting suspect enjoying white privilege, even in death.

ANDREA RUTH: Diagnosed Or Not, The Vegas Shooting Is About Mental Illness.

While the media is focusing on the guns the Las Vegas murderer used, and how to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding Americans in an attempt to rid the country of murder, we ought to be discussing how someone like him was able to do what he did.

So, why don’t we? The answer is simple.

Mental health care is expensive. Gun control talk is cheap.

Make no mistake, taking away guns while at the same time ignoring the tragedy mental illness is on loved ones and society — whether it’s diagnosed or not — is folly. Acting like we will never experience such tragedy again if 2nd Amendment rights were voided is simple foolishness.

With freedom comes risks and responsibilities. The 2nd Amendment honors the right for individuals to defend themselves. Even a mentally ill person, until he’s alerted to authorities for certain behavior.

But, again, the mental state that caused the Las Vegas murderer to act is being overlooked in favor of the hot topic of gun control. As long as this continues, we all lose.

An honest conversation about mental illness would also require revisiting one of the Left’s long-held convictions, which hardly seems likely.

DON’T BE EVIL: YouTube and Twitter STILL Haven’t Removed Vile Ad Showing Decapitated Pig-Cops.

WASHINGTON POST: Why the debate over gun suppressors isn’t really relevant to what happened in Las Vegas.

The effect of having a silencer probably would have been negligible. Clinton and others appear to be assuming that silencers — or “suppressors,” as they’re known in the industry — work the way that they do in the movies. Screw a little barrel on the end of your pistol, and you can run through enemy headquarters picking off bad guys with no more audio footprint than a little zip.

In reality, trying to suppress an automatic weapon sounds like this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAjCrKYZcps

The gunfire is clearly audible, as our Washington Post fact-checkers noted in March.

The video above features a weapon from Asymmetric Solutions, a firearm training firm based in Missouri. Thomas Satterly, the company’s director of development, spoke by phone with The Post to explain why a suppressor wouldn’t have silenced the noise of the gunfire in the way Clinton assumed. Satterly is a veteran who served in Somalia in 1993. When we spoke, he was with several friends who served in law enforcement and who contributed their thoughts, as well.

“A suppressor wouldn’t have stopped anyone from doing what they did” in Las Vegas, Satterly said, “and definitely wouldn’t have hidden the noise of the gunfire.”

Indeed. What’s most interesting about this report is that even WaPo staffers felt the need to correct Hillary Clinton twice in one day.

EVERYTHING THE VEGAS SHOOTER IS BELIEVED TO HAVE USED WAS ALREADY ILLEGAL: Jimmy Kimmel Seizes on Las Vegas Shooting to Champion Gun Laws in Emotional Monologue.

SAN JUAN MAYOR: Puerto Rican Statehood Like ‘A Slave Becoming a Slave Owner.’

ROGUE NATION: Assessment of North Korea’s Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, Chemical Weapons, and Small Arms.

HMM: As fight enters second month, FBI still withholding dossier documents.

It has now been more than a month since a House Intelligence Committee subpoena set a September 1 deadline for the FBI and the Justice Department to turn over documents related to the Trump dossier.

Not a single document has been produced. The first deadline was extended once, then again, then again, and is now on some sort of hold. But no documents have been handed over.

Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein met with committee chairman Devin Nunes last Thursday — the committee can perhaps take comfort in the fact that it is being put off by progressively higher-ranking officials — but it is not clear if the committee is any closer to receiving the documents than when it first issued its subpoena on August 24.

Read the whole thing.

I still have the small plaque from Dad’s office wall which reads, “When you’re up to you ass in alligators, it’s difficult to remember your initial objective was to drain the swamp.”

LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Day Two of the Las Vegas Massacre and Much, Much More.

SMALL GOAL MISSED BY A WIDE MARGIN: Tesla Misses Model 3 Production Goals.

The Silicon Valley electric-car maker built 260 of the Model 3s between July and September, the company said Monday in a statement. In August, the auto maker predicted it would build more than 1,500 Model 3s before cranking up production to 5,000 a week by the end of the fourth quarter.

The Model 3, which starts at about $35,000, represents Chief Executive Elon Musk’s bet that he can transform the luxury auto maker into a more mainstream player around the world. Tesla blamed “production bottlenecks” for the weaker production.

“It is important to emphasize that there are no fundamental issues with the Model 3 production or supply chain,” Tesla said in a statement. “We understand what needs to be fixed and we are confident of addressing the manufacturing bottleneck issues in the near-term.”

Elon Musk’s ramp-up goal for the Model 3 always seemed optimistic, verging on wildly so. And setbacks like today’s on an entirely new vehicle are to be expected even from an old-school automaker with a century of experience.

But you still have to wonder if, after producing the 500,000th Model 3 and filling all the pre-orders, just how much mass market there really is at this early stage for electric vehicles.

YOU CAN’T QUIT — YOU’RE FIRED: Baghdad suspends Kurdistan Regional Government MPs from Iraqi parliament.

That’s the whole story for now. More to come.

STEVE SCALISE: ‘Our Whole Nation Must Respond with Countless Acts of Kindness’ to Vegas Massacre.

TWITCHY: WTAF?! Brother says Las Vegas shooter was multi-millionaire real estate investor.

Just a reminder that much of what we know so far is probably wrong.

OH NO: Tom Petty Found Unconscious in Full Cardiac Arrest, Reportedly Pulled Off Life Support and Allowed to Die.

Such an amazing body of work, but for me it’s hard to top the essential weirdness of pairing Petty with producer/Eurythmics cofounder Dave Stewart for an uncharacteristically slinky little tune, reputedly about a 5am run-in with a possibly coked-up Stevie Nicks trying on Victorian clothes in the bedroom where Stewart had gone to pass out a couple hours before.

RIP, Tom, and thanks for so many great songs, albums, and performances.

UPDATE: This is from TMZ. “Sources tell us at 10:30 Monday morning a chaplain was called to Tom’s hospital room. We’re told the family has a do not resuscitate order on Tom. The singer is not expected to live throughout the day, but he’s still clinging to life. A report that the LAPD confirmed the singer’s death is inaccurate — the L.A. County Sheriff’s Dept. handled the emergency.”

HMM: ISIS Persists in Vegas Claim, Dubs Shooter ‘Abu Abdul Bar al-Amriki.’

FLASHBACK: The 8 Worst Mass Murderers in American History.

Of course, when it comes to really running up the totals, nobody can beat a socialist. Mao, Stalin, and Hitler are still the Big Three of history’s mass murderers. We can count their victims, not merely in the tens, but in the tens of millions.

SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Facebook Blocks Chinese Billionaire Who Tells Tales of Corruption.