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Roger Simon posts on Diane Feinstein’s report.
… LET’S REVIEW: Looking around the world today, Libya (under control somewhat while Khadafy was alive) is an unholy mess; with no real end in site to negotiations, Iran is continuing to develop nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles while expanding its influence into Yemen and maintaining strength in Syria and Lebanon and cementing its alliances with North Korea and Venezuela (among others); putative NATO member Turkey is becoming more Islamist by the day under the rule of Obama’s pal Erdogan; ISIS continues to control large portions Syria and Iraq and may secretly be in cahoots with Turkey; Russia has moved into Ukraine and has everyone from Moldova to Finland nervous; China controls more of the Pacific every day, our Japanese and South Korean friends worried if they can trust us anymore; Europe is a weak sister with an increasing Islamic population they don’t police and that runs rampant in their own ever-growing neighborhoods, the influence of Sharia law expanding over that continent and hardly anyone doing anything about it; and America, under Obama, has turned into the “pitiful, helpless giant” that it was accused of being during Vietnam, but really wasn’t (until now)…. And with all that, my senior senator Dianne Feinstein is worried the CIA has become a little brutal??? What an unbelievable, self-righteous idiot!
Matthew Continetti says “national conversations” are worthless, especially when Al Sharpton is talking.
… National conversations are worse than useless. They are harmful. They presuppose, they live off of, the racial, ethnic, and sexual divisions they intend to mend. Separate the public into competing tribes, and not only will disagreements between them fester. Other tribes will feel unrecognized, excluded, alienated from the proceedings. Differences will become entrenched. Slights and peeves will multiply.
It happened in 1997. The panel was divided between those who wanted to focus on the state of black America and those who wanted to consider the full range of ethnic identities and grievances. The argument was intense, feelings were bitter. No consensus was truly reached, no injustices righted, no problems definitively solved.
So it is today. What the campaign and election of the first black president brought forth was nothing less than an unofficial national conversation on race, now about to enter its seventh year. First Bill Clinton was accused of blowing racial dog-whistles. Jeremiah Wright became a celebrity, and then it was Sarah Palin who was said to be exploiting white anxieties.
Holder called America a cowardly nation, Obama held a White House beer summit after calling a white policeman stupid, the Tea Party was written off as racist, the president said that if he had a son he would look like Trayvon Martin. Democrats accused Republicans of using voter ID laws to return to Jim Crow. Ferguson, Staten Island—these are just the latest topics in an ongoing racial gabfest.
The result? The public says race relations are worse than when Obama took office. Nor has anyone explained how matters might improve by further highlighting cultural antagonisms and historical abuses. Quite the opposite: The most passionate race activists may actually want to incite conflict and distrust and Balkanization. It keeps them in business. And it’s good for ratings. …
QZ posts on why Google doesn’t care about hiring top college grads. Remember! The only 2016 presidential candidate on the horizon, without a college degree is Scott Walker, Governor of Wisconsin. We need government by dropouts and C students. Government by A students from the two left coasts is a disaster.
… Google’s head of people operations, Laszlo Bock, detailed what the company looks for. And increasingly, it’s not about credentials. …
… People that make it without college are often the most exceptional
Talent exists in so many places that hiring managers who rely on a few schools are using it as a crutch and missing out. Bock says:
“When you look at people who don’t go to school and make their way in the world, those are exceptional human beings. And we should do everything we can to find those people.”
Many schools don’t deliver on what they promise, Bock says, but generate a ton of debt in return for not learning what’s most useful. It’s an “extended adolescence,” he says.
Learning ability is more important than IQ
Succeeding in academia isn’t always a sign of being able to do a job. Bock has previously said that college can be an “artificial environment” that conditions for one type of thinking. …
Popular Mechanics has a report on a study attempting to measure effects on human health of many alternative ways to power a car.
… The findings showed a dramatic swing in the positive and negative effects on health based on the type of energy used. Internal combustion vehicles running on corn ethanol and electric vehicles powered by electricity from coal were the real sinners; according the study, their health effects were 80 percent worse compared to gasoline vehicles. However, electric vehicles powered by electricity from natural gas, wind, water, or solar energy might reduce health impacts by at least 50 percent compared to gasoline vehicles.
“We were surprised that many alternative vehicle fuels and technologies that are put forward as better for the environment than conventional gasoline vehicles did not end up causing large decreases in air quality-related health impacts,” Tessum says. “The most important implication is that electric vehicles can cause large public health improvements, but only when paired with clean electricity. Adapting electric vehicles without taking steps to clean up electric generation would be worse for public health than continuing to use conventional gasoline vehicles.”
EV batteries are a problem, too, but a changing one. According to Tessum, previous studies have suggested that emissions from electric car battery production make such vehicles worse for public health than gasoline vehicles, even when the electricity to power them comes from non-polluting sources. “However, battery technology is evolving quickly,” he explains.” Using updated estimates of emissions from battery production, and accounting for the fact that much of the pollutant emissions from the battery production supply chain occurs in remote areas far from people, we found that the health impacts of electric vehicle battery production are much lower than previously estimated.” …
John Tierney, mostly retired now, writes on how not to try too hard.
The advice is as maddening as it is inescapable. It’s the default prescription for any tense situation: a blind date, a speech, a job interview, the first dinner with the potential in-laws. Relax. Act natural. Just be yourself.
But when you’re nervous, how can you be yourself? How you can force yourself to relax? How can you try not to try?
It makes no sense, but the paradox is essential to civilization, according to Edward Slingerland. He has developed, quite deliberately, a theory of spontaneity based on millenniums of Asian philosophy and decades of research by psychologists and neuroscientists.
He calls it the paradox of wu wei, the Chinese term for “effortless action.” Pronounced “ooo-way,” it has similarities to the concept of flow, that state of effortless performance sought by athletes, but it applies to a lot more than sports. Wu wei is integral to romance, religion, politics and commerce. It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal.
Dr. Slingerland, a professor of Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, argues that the quest for wu wei has been going on ever since humans began living in groups larger than hunter-gathering clans. Unable to rely on the bonds of kinship, the first urban settlements survived by developing shared values, typically through religion, that enabled people to trust one another’s virtue and to cooperate for the common good.
But there was always the danger that someone was faking it and would make a perfectly rational decision to put his own interest first if he had a chance to shirk his duty. To be trusted, it wasn’t enough just to be a sensible, law-abiding citizen, and it wasn’t even enough to dutifully strive to be virtuous. You had to demonstrate that your virtue was so intrinsic that it came to you effortlessly. …