Yikes.  AP

The Guardian

The Intercept.  Two Palestinians attacked Israeli soldiers at a check-point, where one soldier was stabbed non-fatally.  The first attacker was shot immediately, and the second was killed as he lay on the ground, minutes after the attack.  Occurred deep in Israeli-occupied West Bank territory.

Market Watch.  High costs, high deductibles, lost doctors, lost insurance plans, low enrollment numbers, millions of uninsured…

NATO should’ve been tossed in the same grave as the Soviet Union, but for some reason, it hung around.  Russia is no longer a threat to anyone, it spends in an entire year what the U.S. spends on defense in a few weeks.

NATO is expensive, but the greatest danger of NATO lies in the war guarantees each member has from every other member.  If a NATO country is attacked, it’s up to every other NATO country to come to their aid.  It is just as insane as it sounds.  Is the defense of all those 28 NATO member states worth the lives of American soldiers?

The question with Trump should be: would he, in fact, dump NATO?  Probably not.

Obama: ISIS not an existential threat to US

Congress tells NSA to stop sharing data with domestic law enforcement

Should the public school system be shielded from competition?

Job growth doesn’t mean we’re getting richer

Learning Nothing From War: Iraq Edition

Using chaos to build power

Libya: Regime change gone wrong

The internet turns Microsoft chatbot into a foul-mouthed Nazi

USA Today

Which is why I don’t engage in it.  And excessive social media use also leads to depression, as The Independent makes clear:

“Of the 19 to 32-year-olds who took part in the research, those who checked social media most frequently throughout the week were 2.7 times more likely to develop depression than those who checked least often.

The 1,787 US participants used social media for an average 61 minutes every day, visiting accounts 30 times per week. Of them a quarter were found to have high indicators of depression.

Bloomberg View.  Police States don’t reduce terrorism, they transform the government and the police into terrorists themselves.  State-sanctioned domestic terrorism in the form of harassment, surveillance, warrantless searches and seizures, arrests, kangaroo courts, and yes, the killing and persecution of people based on their ethnicity or beliefs.  This is how you radicalize, how you inflame violent thoughts in those who are under the spotlight of the Police State.  It’s how governments create terrorism.

The Guardian.  More troops and more taxpayer billions are being are being sent to Iraq to fix the problems that arose only after the 2003 invasion.  Intervention always begets more intervention, either at home or abroad.