Dilution of Doctrine - The New York Times

Dilution of Doctrine - The New York Times:

And how effectively can a church retain the lukewarm or uncertain if it keeps its most controversial teachings while constantly winking to say, “Don’t worry, we don’t actually believe all that?”

This instability makes it unlikely that Pope Francis will be remembered as a great conciliator or unifier. It’s more likely now that his legacy will be either famous or infamous.

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Dilution of Doctrine - The New York Times

Dilution of Doctrine - The New York Times:

And how effectively can a church retain the lukewarm or uncertain if it keeps its most controversial teachings while constantly winking to say, “Don’t worry, we don’t actually believe all that?”

This instability makes it unlikely that Pope Francis will be remembered as a great conciliator or unifier. It’s more likely now that his legacy will be either famous or infamous.

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Dilution of Doctrine - The New York Times

Dilution of Doctrine - The New York Times:

And how effectively can a church retain the lukewarm or uncertain if it keeps its most controversial teachings while constantly winking to say, “Don’t worry, we don’t actually believe all that?”

This instability makes it unlikely that Pope Francis will be remembered as a great conciliator or unifier. It’s more likely now that his legacy will be either famous or infamous.

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Lionel Shriver's full speech: 'I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad' | Opinion | The Guardian

Lionel Shriver's full speech: 'I hope the concept of cultural appropriation is a passing fad' | Opinion | The Guardian: "My most recent novel The Mandibles was taken to task by one reviewer for addressing an America that is “straight and white”. It happens that this is a multigenerational family saga – about a white family. I wasn’t instinctively inclined to insert a transvestite or bisexual, with issues that might distract from my central subject matter of apocalyptic economics. Yet the implication of this criticism is that we novelists need to plug in representatives of a variety of groups in our cast of characters, as if filling out the entering class of freshmen at a university with strict diversity requirements.

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If You Build It . . . | City Journal

If You Build It . . . | City Journal:

The progressive romance with infrastructure spending is based on three beliefs. First is that it supercharges economic growth. As President Obama put it in his 2015 State of the Union address: “Twenty-first century businesses need twenty-first century infrastructure.” Further, by putting people to work building needed things, infrastructure spending is an ideal government tool for fighting unemployment during recessions. Infrastructure should also be a national responsibility, progressives believe, led by Washington and financed by federal tax revenues.

None of this is right. While infrastructure investment is often needed when cities or regions are already expanding, too often it goes to declining areas that don’t require it and winds up having little long-term economic benefit. 

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Albion’s Ashes | commentary

Albion’s Ashes | commentary: "Vance had the good sense to delay college and enlist in the Marine Corps instead. And the Marine Corps is one of the few remaining American institutions that delivers more or less exactly as advertised. Vance entered the boot camp pudgy, disorganized, immature, and lacking in confidence. He left it harder, wiser, and more capable. His account of his time in the Marines is in fact one of the most interesting sections of the book, and the one that points both to the promise and shortcomings of public-policy interventions to counter the dysfunction of the white underclass. As Vance puts it, the Marines take in new recruits under an assumption of maximum ignorance, i.e., that they do not know the basics of anything, from personal hygiene to keeping a schedule."



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The Dangerous Idiocy of Global Leadership - The American Interest

The Dangerous Idiocy of Global Leadership - The American Interest: "In the end—and this is perhaps the most powerful cause of popular resentment—global leaders oversee nobody but themselves because there is no global state, no global citizenry, no global nation. Their abstract constructs built around “global problems” and “global initiatives” sound noble until a more pressing security concern or threat to social order arises—and then they sound empty and arrogant.
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Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets | US news | The Guardian

Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets | US news | The Guardian: "The first part of the inside story of the Senate investigation into torture, the crisis with the CIA it spurred and the man whose life would never be the same
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Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets | US news | The Guardian

Inside the fight to reveal the CIA's torture secrets | US news | The Guardian: "What they found, over a half a year’s work examining just two detainees’ interrogations from the first year of the torture program, shocked them. It was widely known by 2008 that Abu Zubaydah was tortured. But Jones and Starzak did not expect to see internal accounts detailing, by the minute, what the CIA did to him. They didn’t know, for instance, that interrogators had tortured him to the point that he would obey, like a dog, when they would snap their fingers, nor that they left a man suspected of knowing al-Qaida’s secrets alone for 47 days. The cables describe Abu Zubaydah as kept naked, filthy, stinking, shaking with fear, shoved inside a filth-riddled wooden box, defecating on himself. Agency personnel, in the official communications, get emotional and request transfers rather than continue torturing men they come to believe lack relevant information on terrorism. It immediately raised the question of what the CIA was really doing to dozens of other detainees at its black sites.

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Ellie Kemper: The First Time I Bombed on Late Night TV - The New York Times

Ellie Kemper: The First Time I Bombed on Late Night TV - The New York Times:

 received a flood of congratulatory emails after that awkward appearance. Family, friends and co-workers all maintained that I had been very cheerful. A college friend complimented my posture. This is how people who love you let you know that something has not gone well.

And yet, I now see this failure as a necessity. If I hadn’t had the opportunity to sink the S.S. Leno that night, I never would have realized the amount of work that should go into making an entertaining talk show segment. Next time, I vowed to be better prepared.

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‘Being cute just made me miserable’: Mara Wilson on growing up in Hollywood | Film | The Guardian

‘Being cute just made me miserable’: Mara Wilson on growing up in Hollywood | Film | The Guardian:

As the months went on, my mother went from furtively asking, “Are you sure?” to demanding to know why a change was being made.

“Why is she wearing a hair ribbon to bed?” “Well, you know,” he would say. “It’s cute.”

I could sense her disappointment. They were making Susan as cute as possible, and taking away her intelligence and complexity.

All through the last few months of Miracle and our publicity tour, my mother smiled whenever people told her I was cute, but I could sense she was forcing it: she didn’t care for cuteness, and her disapproval was contagious. After that, anytime someone said it, I would wince. Something about it made me feel smaller.

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For Muslims at the Pentagon, a Tough Election Year | Foreign Policy

For Muslims at the Pentagon, a Tough Election Year | Foreign Policy:

Those who did speak to Foreign Policy pointed to an irony: The public discourse in America surrounding Islam has never been more disparaging, but due to concerted efforts by the Defense Department to accommodate a diverse workforce, there’s never been a better time to be a Muslim at the Pentagon.

“I cannot think of a single time at the Pentagon when I felt anything but completely supported by my leadership and peers,” said Jasmine El-Gamal, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council who advised Carter and three previous Obama administration secretaries of defense on Middle East policy.

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R.I.P. Political Journalism (1440-2016) - Shareblue

R.I.P. Political Journalism (1440-2016) - Shareblue:

A candidate who wallows in bigotry, who incites violence, who verbally abuses his critics, who is a self-avowed threat to the free press, who trashes U.S. generals while praising Vladimir Putin, who demeans Gold Star families, gets less negative coverage than his opponent, a lifelong public servant who is one of the most accomplished and admired women on the planet.

It is an unfathomable reality.

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yishan comments on ELI5: What does a CEO of a large company do in a "typical" week, and why is he (usually he) paid so much?

yishan comments on ELI5: What does a CEO of a large company do in a "typical" week, and why is he (usually he) paid so much?: "This leads to an acute supply-and-demand problem, i.e. the "I'm not getting paid enough to deal with this shit" issue, wherein plenty of otherwise talented executives who would be CEO candidates are happy to just stick with not taking that extra step - keep in mind that anyone with the combination of characteristics necessary to be a successful CEO has lots of options - so you end up with a highly illiquid market of candidates, and thus boards and compensation committees have to come up with really unique compensation packages to induce those people to take the job.
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Trump Time Capsule #103: 'Asking Questions' - The Atlantic

Trump Time Capsule #103: 'Asking Questions' - The Atlantic: "I note that with 53 days until the election, and with polls tightening, a nominee continues to defy a norm that his modern predecessors have all respected—and that his campaign has stepped away from his previous rationalized excuse and, out of nothing, invented a new alibi. And his party’s leaders say: That’s fine. People will look back on this time.

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Slowly but surely, Congress will join us in the 21st century | TechCrunch

Slowly but surely, Congress will join us in the 21st century | TechCrunch:

How about a question and answer site that lives through a season of hearings, maintained in the chair’s district by a public university or community college? Moreover, if the committees are falling behind on Capitol Hill, let’s move some of the hearings into the states so local experts and experienced constituents can weigh in. Thoughtful deliberation and learning can happen anywhere, after all.

Across the globe, governance is in crisis. The reputation of democracy is at stake. Not just Americans, but the world needs our democratic institutions to do more than survive the present chaos — we need them to thrive. How the United States moves forward to scale inclusion in the coming years counts more than usual.

If we can meet these changes inside of Congress with a helpful, ready corps of citizens, we have a chance to build a system based on 21st-century power, where reputation, location, information integrity and ethical conduct are stronger than angry voices and endless money.

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Atul Gawande: for the first time in human history, ineptitude is a bigger problem than ignorance - Vox

Atul Gawande: for the first time in human history, ineptitude is a bigger problem than ignorance - Vox: "The third part of this is entering a culture that can be forgiving about mistakes. If we expect perfection from our politicians — if we expect them to take no chances, no risks, and make incredibly complex things happen in the world — we can always find where things go wrong. And the real measure is if things are getting better.

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Atul Gawande: for the first time in human history, ineptitude is a bigger problem than ignorance - Vox

Atul Gawande: for the first time in human history, ineptitude is a bigger problem than ignorance - Vox: "They point out that there are two key reasons people fail at whatever it is they set out to do. One reason is because of ignorance. We just don’t know all the laws that apply to the physical universe, and we don’t have a complete staid description of the universe that those laws apply to, and therefore we have research and discovery.



 The second reason we fail is what they called ineptitude. Meaning, the knowledge exists but an individual or group of individuals fails to apply that knowledge correctly. What’s really interesting to me about living in our time and in our generation is that that is a remarkable change of living now: that ineptitude is as much or a bigger force in our lives than ignorance."



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Sizing Up the Next Commander-in-Chief - WSJ

Sizing Up the Next Commander-in-Chief - WSJ: "At least on national security, I believe Mr. Trump is beyond repair. He is stubbornly uninformed about the world and how to lead our country and government, and temperamentally unsuited to lead our men and women in uniform. He is unqualified and unfit to be commander-in-chief.

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If you leave your kids alone, it’s not predatory strangers who are a risk | Toronto Star

If you leave your kids alone, it’s not predatory strangers who are a risk | Toronto Star:

Only in the past decade or so has “no child left alone” become the social and legal norm in the U.S.

A doctoral student in cognitive science at the University of California at Irvine, Thomas is the lead author of a recently published study designed to understand what’s going on.

After all, under most circumstances, the objective risk to children left by themselves is extremely low.

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