One lesson we could learn from the killing of Philando Castile is that, in some kinds of traffic stop situations, the thug should stay in the car and avoid risk to the driver and to the thug.

When thugs kill a dog, that's not as grave as killing a person. But the frequency of killing dogs highlights bad values in training, and they endanger humans too.

Al Qa'ida is slowly growing by seeking support locally and being less bloody.

Perhaps it will morph into something we could make peace with.

Any Islamist group advocates oppressive Shari'a law, and thus aims to violate people's human rights. But it's not usually necessary or legitimate to respondto every such regime with war. The US has not started drone attacks in Poland and Hungary, let alone Belarus, Thailand, and Malaysia, nor even in Bahrain, Egypt, and Salafi Arabia, for their violations of human rights.

The security of "smart meters" is very stupid. Crackers can find out what devices you own, in many cases take control of them, bankrupt you with a false electric bill, and even make them explode.

The crackers can learn an awful lot by watching out how much electricity you use from second to second.

Even worse, the electric utility can learn it, too -- and tell big brother.

The obvious "solution" to this problem would be "better security in the smart meter". That way, only the electric utility and big brother could snoop on you, invade your other devices, etc.

The real solution is to design smart meters so that they can't do this, at all, for anyone.

Naveed Baloch, who was temporarly suspected of being responsible for the terrorist attack in Berlin, reports that the thugs brutalized him while he was in jail.