This whole article is alarming. A number of new (ish) "investment vehicles" have been created around the education industry, including one similar to those which were used to hide the amount and (low) quality of loans during the housing bubble. Unlike then, however:
The income stream is nearly guaranteed to pay off because the loans are next to impossible to discharge in bankruptcy.
As mentioned yesterday, there's a controversial new law in Indiana, which has prompted quite the backlash, including from businesses within the state.
It's hard to make sense of the yelling from both sides, but I've found a few articles to be particularly illuminating (and well worth reading in full):
PolitiFact dives in and tries to answer the question that's been raised from the right, Did Barack Obama vote for Religious Freedom Restoration Act with 'very same' wording as Indiana's?
Under Indiana’s post-Hobby Lobby law, a "person" is extended to mean "a partnership, a limited liability company, a corporation, a company, a firm, a society, a joint-stock company, an unincorporated association" or another entity driven by religious belief that can sue and be sued.
...
The American Civil Liberties Union, meanwhile, is concerned about another difference in the wording of the two laws. Indiana’s law includes language that allows people to claim a religious freedom exemption "regardless of whether the state or any other governmental entity is a party to the proceeding."
That language is absent from the Illinois law.
...Now that gay marriage is increasingly popular, this RFRA has become a signals contest in the culture war. Obviously nobody is obligated to engage in any form of discrimination in Indiana, and I would wager that 99.9 percent of Indiana's businesses will not turn away a single person for being gay. But it's all about positioning yourself within this moment we're having. Pence has to pretend the law doesn't protect bigotry against gays because that doesn't poll so well anymore, but can't seem to argue that protecting civil liberties often requires defending bigots or it's not really a civil liberty. The CEO of Apple has to write a big commentary about how discrimination is wrong and bad, and how you should also know that Apple, the company that he works for that sells many, many expensive things to customers, would never do such a thing...
And the IndyStar asks the real questions at issue (and includes a useful overview of the debate so far):
Which really matters most: What the religious freedom law will actually legally enable; what people think it means; or what the intent is behind the law?
... Will the political maneuvering on both sides continue to obscure people's understanding of the practical effects of the law?
Because then it begins to matter less what the law actually does, than what people "think" it allows them to do — whether that is to openly discriminate against gay people or unfairly cast all Christians as intolerant.
For my money, the truth is likely in the middle of the debate: considering only the law as written, it isn't likely to lead to religious abuse (since there's ample precedent from other states' similar laws), though it may incentivize such behavior for those few who see it as allowing discrimination.
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.
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.
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.
...
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.
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.
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.
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.”