The minimum wage tosses the most vulnerable members of society out onto the street, as Jeff Tucker makes clear in his latest post at FEE.

Director of National Intelligence James Clapper weighs releasing an estimate on the number of Americans spied on through the NSA’s Prism surveillance program, which acts as a massive internet dragnet that surveils users of Facebook, Google, Apple, Microsoft products, etc.  He also admits that Snowden’s leaks accelerated the development of readily-available strong encryption. Reuters

Kelley Vlahos on “How Wartime Washington Lives in Luxury”

Relevant chunks: “Consider this: From 2009 to 2015, Virginia received $295 billion in federal contracting dollars. That’s more than the annual budgets of entire countries, including Saudi Arabia, Belgium, and Sweden. This has resulted in not only an exploding real estate market, but the wealthiest counties in the country, year over year.

Meanwhile, the spirit of competition has created a lifestyle of high-end consumption, helicopter parenting, over-achieving and stressed out kids, and a pampered millennial class pushing the poor out of entire neighborhoods in the DMV.”

Brits tell the likes of Hillary, Obama, et al., to butt out. The Guardian

By judge who first ruled them unconstitutional in 2013.  Tens of thousands of NSL’s are issued every year by Federal investigators to banks, doctors, car dealers, ISPs, etc., demanding personal information.  And it’s illegal to mention having received an NSL. Ars Technica

A veritable consensus has been formed regarding the Libya intervention: it went very, very badly.  The civilized of that country fled long ago, running from the chaos that followed US-led airstrikes.  Hillary, along with Obama, is rightly being blamed for her hand in instigating the entire debacle, yet some are giving her a pass for at least trying.  Daniel Larison of The American Conservative discusses one such writer who thinks everyone is just coming down too hard on poor Hillary because, god, she at least tried to do something!  Larison rightly exposes the illogic of such a sentiment:

“As far as the U.S. and its allies are concerned, there are almost always more risks in taking “action” (i.e., using force, arming rebels, etc.) than there is choosing not to do so. In almost every case, it is the smarter and safer play not to start an unnecessary war and not to send more weapons into a conflict, and one should be willing to court the dangers that come with those decisions very rarely. There usually aren’t “risks in both directions” for the U.S., and so the relevant questions are: is the risk worth taking, and if so why? The “get caught trying” mentality takes for granted that the greater danger is in avoiding unnecessary conflicts, and for that reason someone like Clinton always sees an excuse to intervene.”

But the chance to spend billions, ram through new legislation, and look good doing it in the eyes of the world (at least for awhile), prove to be far too great a temptation for the Hillarys of the world.  And, of course, the take-away for Obama was that he didn’t intervene enough.  Convenient, but an all-too-common moral learned from interventions, either abroad in the form of war, or domestically in the form of regulation, bail-outs, or “stimulus”.  The problem is the intervention that paves the way for greater intervention.  That initial intervention that creates the chaos that makes it far too easy to get the ball rolling for round two.  Iraq is a perfect example.  9/11 created a climate of opinion that paved the way for the 2003 invasion.  The ensuing chaos ensured the excuse would be there to grease the skids for an endless stream of weapons, soldiers, and trillions of dollars pouring into an interventionist black hole.

Interventionism begets chaos begets interventionism begets…

Deadly, unrefrigerated vaccines distributed across two-thirds of China since 2010.  Now parents are furious.  The great Jon Rappaport has the story.

Contrary to what the gullible LA Times claimed.  Guardian

The Pentagon says only 20 civilian deaths have occurred due to their strikes against ISIS since September, after initially claiming no civilian deaths.  Rights groups are calling BS on that number, claiming instead that over 500 innocent have died from the Pentagon’s air war against the terrorist group. Antiwar

Legalize the former, and perhaps ban the latter, according to him. Reason