Tag Archives: zakaria

The Body Builders – Adam Piore

by Myrna Posted on January 7, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

The Body Builders

Inside the Science of the Engineered Human

Adam Piore

Genre: Life Sciences

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: March 14, 2017

Publisher: Ecco

Seller: HARPERCOLLINS PUBLISHERS


Fareed Zakaria GPS Book of the Week Weaving together vivid storytelling and groundbreaking science, The Body Builders explores the current revolution in human augmentation, which is helping us to triumph over the limitations and constraints we have long accepted as an inevitable part of being human For millennia, humans have tried—and often failed—to master nature and transcend our limits. But this has started to change. The new scientific frontier is the human body: the greatest engineers of our generation have turned their sights inward, and their work is beginning to revolutionize mankind. In The Body Builders, Adam Piore takes us on a fascinating journey into the field of bioengineering—which can be used to reverse engineer, rebuild, and augment human beings—and paints a vivid portrait of the people at its center. Chronicling the ways new technology has retooled our physical expectations and mental processes, Piore visits people who have regrown parts of their fingers and legs in the wake of terrible traumas, tries on a muscle suit that allows him to lift ninety pounds with his fingertips, dips into the race to create “Viagra for the brain,” and shadows the doctors trying to give mute patients the ability to communicate telepathically. As science continues to lay bare the mysteries of human performance, it is helping us to see—and exist—above our expectations. The Body Builders will take readers beyond the headlines and the hype to introduce them to the inner workings and the outer reaches of our bodies and minds, and explore how new developments are changing, and will forever change, what is possible for humankind.

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The Body Builders – Adam Piore

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Now Wall Street Is Calling for Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen.

by ElkeAldrich Posted on June 30, 2014

Mother Jones

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Knowing that conservatives will never listen to liberals—or to President Obama—on climate change, many well meaning, science-minded people have sought to identify other messengers who might possibly sway the right.

Accordingly, they’ve tried tapping evangelical Christians, former EPA administrators who served under Republican presidents, and celebrity politicians like the moderate Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s an astute, psychologically sound theory (“trusted messengers” and all that) and yet, it never seems to work. Why does it never work?

We’ll get to that, but first, witness the latest attempt, which is aimed at swaying the business community. This weekend on CNN’s Fareed Zakaria GPS, two former treasury secretaries, Henry Paulson (a Republican) and Robert Rubin (a Democrat) went on the air to discuss climate change and, in particular, the new “Risky Business” report with which they’re closely affiliated. The report, emerging from a partnership that also includes Michael Bloomberg and the environmentalist billionaire Tom Steyer, makes the case that climate change will have dire economic costs. On the air, Paulson said point blank that climate inaction entails “radical risk taking.” Rubin added that the risk is “catastrophic.” Watch:

All of this is true and eminently sane. It is also striking to find Paulson, a man who observed economic collapse up close, drawing analogies between how economies go belly up, and how civilizations do. And we should certainly commend CNN’s Zakaria for convening this discussion.

But here’s the problem: Is Paulson, a Wall Street Republican who says he wants a carbon tax, a “trusted messenger” on the right? The truth is that today’s conservatives aren’t the same pro-big business boosters that they used to be. Commenting on the latest industry oriented climate push, American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein remarked that among tea party conservatives these days, “big business is seen as a part of the problem more than it is a part of the solution. Companies just don’t have the clout that they used to have.”

Remember, Wall Street has never been in favor of another key tea party maneuver: Debt ceiling brinksmanship, which seasoned economic stewards of yesteryear tend to abhor. So why would the tea party listen to to big business on climate?

Which brings us back to the why “it never works” question. Why do trusted messengers never seem to reach the right on climate change? The answer is that the right is not its old self, and once trusted messengers aren’t trusted any longer.

If this was the United States of 30 years ago, we’d already have a bipartisan consensus on climate change.

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Now Wall Street Is Calling for Climate Sanity. Don’t Expect the Right to Listen.

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If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

by turystycznypbs700 Posted on March 14, 2014

Mother Jones

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Fareed Zakaria has a piece in the Washington Post about Ukraine. Here’s the headline:

Why (this time) Obama must lead

So I clicked. Plenty of sensible stuff. The EU dithered. Ukraine blew up. Putin responded stupidly. “Let’s not persist in believing that Moscow’s moves have been strategically brilliant,” Zakaria says. His invasion of Crimea has turned the rest of Ukraine irretrievably pro-Western; triggered lots of anti-Russian sentiment on his borders; soured relations with Poland and Hungary; and sparked Western sanctions that are going to hurt.

And Zakaria says this is important stuff. “The crisis in Ukraine is the most significant geopolitical problem since the Cold War….And it involves a great global principle: whether national boundaries can be changed by brute force. If it becomes acceptable to do so, what will happen in Asia, where there are dozens of contested boundaries — and several great powers that want to remake them?”

OK, fine. So what should Obama do? Here it is:

Obama must rally the world, push the Europeans and negotiate with the Russians.

Go ahead and click the link if you don’t believe me. This is, literally, the sum total of Zakaria’s advice. So what’s the point? Obviously Obama is already doing this. Is he doing it badly? Is he pressing for the wrong sanctions? Is he working too much behind the scenes and not enough publicly? Should he be threatening a military response? Should he ask Zach Galifianakis to tape an episode of “Between Two Ferns” with Vladimir Putin? Or what?

Maybe I’m more frustrated than usual with this because I tend to like Zakaria. Sure, he’s sometimes a little bit too weather-vaney for my taste, but he’s smart and practical and tends to understand the big picture pretty well. So why not tell us what he thinks the US response should be? We could use some judicious advice to make up for the tsunami of idiocy emanating from the crackpot wing of the foreign policy community right now.

Excerpt from – 

If Crimea Really is Important, Tell Us What Obama Ought to Do About It

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