An Indiana law that could make it easier for religious conservatives to refuse service to gay couples touched off storms of protest on Friday from the worlds of arts, business and college athletics and opened an emotional new debate in the emerging campaign for president.
Passage of the Republican-led measure, described by advocates as protecting basic religious freedom, drew fierce denunciations from technology companies, threats of a boycott from actors and expressions of dismay from the N.C.A.A., which is based in Indianapolis and will hold its men’s basketball Final Four games there beginning next weekend.
Why Reconstruction Matters →
THE surrender of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Court House, 150 years ago next month, effectively ended the Civil War. Preoccupied with the challenges of our own time, Americans will probably devote little attention to the sesquicentennial of Reconstruction, the turbulent era that followed the conflict. This is unfortunate, for if any historical period deserves the label “relevant,” it is Reconstruction.
Issues that agitate American politics today — access to citizenship and voting rights, the relative powers of the national and state governments, the relationship between political and economic democracy, the proper response to terrorism — all of these are Reconstruction questions. But that era has long been misunderstood.
Reconstruction refers to the period, generally dated from 1865 to 1877, during which the nation’s laws and Constitution were rewritten to guarantee the basic rights of the former slaves, and biracial governments came to power throughout the defeated Confederacy.
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Citizenship, rights, democracy — as long as these remain contested, so will the necessity of an accurate understanding of Reconstruction. More than most historical subjects, how we think about this era truly matters, for it forces us to think about what kind of society we wish America to be.
John Kasich's Passion for the Poor Is Rankling Conservative Christians →
Ohio’s governor John Kasich certainly won't be president, nor even receive the Republican party’s nomination in 2016. But if Kasich does throw his hat into the increasingly packed Republican primary ring (as some sources suggest he intends to do), the long-term outcome for American politics could be even better than a hypothetical win. This is because, unlike his Republican competitors, Kasich takes Christian politics very seriously.
Within the lore of conservative Christian politics, there is a line of questionable thinking regarding state-funded welfare that is far more recent than its proliferators make it seem. The story goes like this. While Jesus Christ undoubtedly promoted (if not commanded) charity and generosity toward the less-fortunate, He never said that the state should be the vehicle of these virtues. Further, the tale continues, because taxes are involuntary and welfare is funded with tax revenue, welfare doesn’t count as morally meaningful charity, which is what Jesus intended to inspire with His preaching on the poor. Thus, we are led to conclude, support for poor and vulnerable people should be transmitted voluntarily through the community, thanks to the good graces of generous individuals. Echoes of this reasoning resound in the anti-welfare rhetoric of Republican frontrunners from Rand Paul to Rick Perry.
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For Kasich, the fact that the state has an obligation to care for the vulnerable is nothing more than an outgrowth of this Christian message. So far, that position has been tough for fellow right-wingers to contravene.
Perhaps this is because Kasich’s reading of the Gospel is natural and intuitive. He derives a powerful ethical interest in caring for the poor from passages that inarguably display as much. For Christian conservatives who value Biblical literalism, such seemingly unmediated reading of the Bible should offer an obvious political guide. But caring for the poor and ordering society to support all members to a level of basic dignity are not free-market measures, and thus Kasich’s simple-hearted reading of Matthew 25 appears to have won him few friends among Republican elites. For this reason, his chances of pulling off any national wins are slim-to-none.
Kasich should still run. His sturdy brand of Christian politics belongs in a nation that has, for the greater part of the last century, drowned in rhetoric that paints Christianity and capitalism as natural allies, despite all evidence to the contrary. If Kasich runs in the primaries, his opponents will have to reckon with his Christianity in debates and campaign speeches to compete for the coveted religious right. The more that free-market apologists nursing Christian side interests try to explain the illusive continuity between their economics and their faith, the more, I suspect, that tenuous linkage will unravel. If nothing else, Kasich stands poised to puncture longstanding assumptions that connect anti-welfare capitalist interests to the votes of well-meaning Christians. Exposing the gap between free market economics and straightforward Christian politics may serve genuine Christian politics better than a Kasich presidency itself.
Nigerian Elections Hit by Technical Glitches and Violence →
It was a rough start to an election with so much at stake: Nigeria needs to show it can make it through this vote fairly and peacefully to get its big economy humming and to press forward with tackling the Boko Haram Islamist militants.
But the technology that was supposed to make the election process easier is threatening to undermine it. Election officials said some polling stations would extend voting into Sunday after problems with hand-held devices used to verify voter identity.
Hypercritical →
The point is, ladies and gentleman, that criticism, for lack of a better word, is good. Criticism is right. Criticism works. Criticism clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit…
Okay, let me try that again. Actually, I'm on the same page as Gordon Gekko in one important respect. Like greed, criticism gets a bad rap, especially when it's presented in large doses. It's impolite. It's unnecessarily obsessive. It's just a bummer. But the truth is, precious little in life gets fixed in the absence of a good understanding of what's wrong with it to begin with.
This character flaw, this curse, this seemingly most useless of skills is actually the yin to the more widely recognized yang of creative talent. Is a preternatural ability to find fault enough on its own to make something great? Probably not, but it can help amplify mundane competencies and produce results well beyond what you could have achieved with your creative skills alone.
No, we can't all be Steve Jobs, but there's room in life for both the grand and the prosaic. Every day is a new chance to do something a little bit better ("I am the Steve Jobs of this sandwich!"), to find something wrong with what you're doing and understand it well enough to know how to fix it. If this is not your natural proclivity, you may have to work at it a bit. I think you'll be pleased with the results…but not completely, I hope.
Earth's Untallied Biological Bounty, from L.A. Suburbs to Deep Seabed Sediments →
The extent and diversity of Earth’s sheath of living things continues to surprise scientists, making Howard Ensign Evans’s classic 1966 book “Life on a Little-Known Planet” ever more germane. Here is fresh evidence from some Los Angeles back yards and the “deadest” depths of deep-sea sediments:
Recent chats with Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University drew me this week to remarkable new discoveries of traces of life in sediment layers up to 200 feet beneath the South Pacific Ocean seabed that were long presumed to be sterile.
The findings, from analysis led by Steven D’Hondt of the University of Rhode Island, were described earlier this month in a news release with this remarkable title: “No Limit to Life in Sediment of Ocean’s Deadest Region.”
Australia: one of the worst housing bubbles ever →
By all accounts, Australia is experiencing what is one of the greatest credit-fuelled real estate bubbles in modern times. On the back of a collapsing mining sector, we can thank the RBA, APRA, ASIC and the political elite in Canberra for creating a flawed household wealth-creation strategy that shares all the hallmarks of a predictable economic disaster.
In plain English, since the mid-1990s, Australia’s strategy is for home buyers and investors to borrow heavily from lenders and flip houses to the next buyer who has taken out even more debt to speculate.
Today, all this country has to show for it is a $1.9 trillion mountain of household debt that will make the US credit-fuelled housing bubble of the last decade look like a walk in the park when our housing bubble bursts.
The unfortunate victims of today’s “wealth-creation” strategy are young home buyers and middle-income earners who are either completely priced out of the market or leveraged through the roof.
Egypt Says It May Send Troops to Yemen to Fight Houthis →
Egypt said Thursday that it was prepared to send troops into Yemen as part of a Saudi-led campaign to drive back the Iranian-backed Houthi advance, signaling the growing likelihood of a protracted ground war on the tip of the Arabian Peninsula.
A day after Saudi Arabia and a coalition of nine other states began hammering the Houthis with airstrikes and blockading the Yemeni coast, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt said in a statement that the country’s navy and air force had joined the campaign and that its army was ready to send ground troops “if necessary.”