Torture - Unsurprisingly, a Senate committee has concluded that torturing detainees is not effective at providing any useful intelligence. This should not be news to anybody who has been awake recently - everybody I have read from who has worked in covert intelligence gathering has been saying the same thing for years, sometimes decades. It leads me to conclude that the focus on torture is a political response rather than an intelligence community response, born of the desperate need to "be seen to be doing something". It's complete bullcrap which is slowly and inexorably reducing the worldwide crebibility of the United States.
NFL Draft - As if you could avoid it, the NFL Draft is under way, and my local team, the Dallas Cowboys, selected Morris Claiborne at number 6 in the first round. The Cowboys traded up to get Claiborne, giving up a second round pick in addition to swapping first round picks. While clearly a very good player, Claiborne is a Wonderlic test dud - he apparently only scored a 4 on the test at the Combine.
The Cowboys have had all sorts of trouble with Dez Bryant, who they also traded up to draft in the first round in 2010, who appears (to use the old phrase) to have million-dollar talent on the field, but a 10 cent head when it comes to off-field decision-making. Bryant actually scored 16 on the Wonderlic. Claiborne has made statements about his poor Wonderlic score, and if he was being advised what to say by his agent, he either ignored the advice, or his agent needs to be reamed out. He uses double negatives, which immediately makes him sound like a hick, and essentially validates all my concerns about academic-athletic balance in college football. The Cowboys had better hope that Claiborne does not dig himself into a hole off the field like Dez Bryant.