Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
, - Reader Supported News
Stephan: This business of beggaring students and then hounding them forever is, as this article describes, a short term rain of money for a few special interest corporations. For the country as a whole, however, it is a disaster. Making it harder and harder and more and more expensive to get a college education is not in the national interest.
You cannot have a modern competitive national economy when you discourage students from seeking to improve themselves through education. Each year we have been falling further and further behind, and it is increasingly difficult to be upwardly mobile in the U.S.. These developments suggest this downward trend is going to continue.
There is a secondary issue, foreign nations are sending -- and paying to send -- their children to American universities which are still world class. Then these young graduates, unburdened by debt, take their education and go home to increase the national wellness of their native countries with their newly learned skills.
Most US college students hope to land a good job with a high salary after graduation. But for some the reality is very different. Many find themselves faced with insurmountable debt – and a loan industry that’s happy to cash in on their misfortune.
ÂAs the number of people taking out government-backed student loans has soared, so has the number of borrowers who have fallen behind in making payments.
Around 5.9 million people nationwide have fallen at least 12 months behind in their payments. This number has grown by a third in the last five years, according to a State Higher Education Finance survey.
Many who can’t repay their loans feel they have no choice but to default. It’s a decision that can be disastrous – ruining a borrower’s credit and increasing the amount they owe. It can also result in penalties of up to 25 per cent of the balance.
Despite the scary consequences, young adults across America have chosen to default on their loans. And that decision has resulted in a cat-and-mouse game with the government.
‘I keep changing my phone number. In a year, this is probably my fourth phone number,’ former student Amanda Cordeiro told the New York Times.
Cordeiro receives up […]
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Tuesday, September 11th, 2012
TIM DICKINSON, - Rolling Stone
Stephan: Today I listened to the Romney-Ryan ticket, in the person of Ryan, come out for states to decide marijuana prohibition issues then, 18 hours later, this was reversed. That left me thinking that between the lying and the flip-flopping a very important trend is emerging -- one independent of any particular politician's political philosophy.
Politicians have always and often, to a certain degree, lied. But what we are seeing now is a campaign whose hallmark is lying. I find it very bizarre, quite apart from the politics, that a candidate for the most powerful position in the country, arguably the most powerful man in the world, cannot tell the truth. Not just occasionally but consistently.
How can it be that the dominant nation on the planet permits behavior in its Presidential candidates that a family would find unacceptable in its little children? If you had a son who constantly lied how would you deal with that? Would you and your spouse be o.k. with it? I certainly wouldn't have been tolerant of it if my daughters had acted out with such behavior. How can it be alright for a Presidential candidate? What does that say about the health of our government and social order?
Click through to see the actual records supporting this story.
On the eve of his speech at the Republican convention, Romney and his campaign have launched a new site touting Mitt’s private-sector experience: SterlingBusinessCareer.com.
Under a section called ‘Fixing Businesses,’ the campaign lays out the legend of Romney’s 1990 return to the consulting firm Bain & Company, describing his turnaround effort there as an ‘incredible success’ that returned the firm to profitability ‘in just a year.’
That is a lie.
Federal records obtained by Rolling Stone through a Freedom of Information Act request reveal that Bain & Company lost money in both 1991 and 1992 – with Romney at the helm.
This December 22, 1992 analysis for the FDIC lays out the truth about Bain & Company’s mounting losses (both ‘operating’ and ‘net’) in a section called ‘Historical Operating Performance.’ (FDIC was owed more than $30 million by Bain & Company after the 1991 failure of the Bank of New England.)
Here’s the hard truth: Romney’s turnaround effort at the consulting firm was a fiasco. In fact, Bain & Company was only rescued from the brink of collapse by the federal government. In 1993, the FDIC agreed to wipe away more than $10 million it was owed by Romney’s firm because it believed that ‘the […]
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Monday, September 10th, 2012
STEVE CONNOR, - The Independent (UK)
Stephan: The other day I had to go in to the little hospital we have on the island -- 25 beds -- for an echocardiogram, a kind of sonogram for the heart. While I was lying on the gurney I noticed the treadmill they use for stress tests. On the machine there was pasted a little sign that read, 'Not for use with patients over 350 pounds.' I asked the technician if that was a problem, 'do you have a lot of patients over 350?'
'Three or four a week,' she replied, adding, 'but that's nothing. At the place where I used to work in Tennessee, a bigger hospital, we had that many a day sometimes. Finally we had to to order a special machine to be made that went up to 1,000 pounds. They didn't have to make it special though as it turned out,' she said, as she was taking the electrodes off my chest. 'They already had them in stock, because the call for them was that large.'
A significant part of the population, particularly in the South, where morbid obesity is much higher than it is in the Northwest, are literally killing themselves with food -- both the wrong kind, and in quantities too great.
Fatty foods may damage the region of the brain responsible for regulating a person’s appetite, which could account for why overweight people often find it difficult to stick to a diet, scientists said.
A study has found that a diet rich in saturated fats leads to the sort of damage to the brain’s hypothalamus that would normally be seen during ischaemic stroke, when the nerves are starved of oxygen.
The hypothalamus is a key region of the brain involved in controlling appetite so the findings suggests that saturated fats may be having a direct affect on the ability of the body to stick to a diet, said Lynda Williams of the Rowett Institute for Nutrition and Health at Aberdeen University.
‘The hypothalamus is a small area at the base of the brain containing neurones that control the amount of food we eat and the energy we expend. However, this control breaks down in obesity – the system appears not to work – and we don’t really know why this happens,
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Monday, September 10th, 2012
STEPHAN A. SCHWARTZ, Columnist - Explore - The Journal of Science and Healing
Stephan:
You are a clinician. A dear friend who lives back in your home town calls you. They have just been told they have fourth-stage colo-rectal cancer. But, they insist, they feel fine, just some low back pain. You explain how this could be possible, but you urge your friend to get a second opinion. That evening you take several hours and search out the best person in their area, and the next day you call your friend and give them this specialist’s name. Two weeks later not having heard anything, you call your friend. What happened you ask? He also said I had fourth-stage colo-rectal cancer, your friend responds, but I still feel OK. A little tired, but I think that’s just the anxiety. So what did you do, you ask? I went to a third person, and he told me it is just bowel impaction. So I’m going to start with that. Four months later, your friend is dead.
Keep this little thought experiment in mind as you read this.
In early June 2012, a group of scientists who had each spent years studying the earth’s biosphere from many different aspects felt compelled to come forward with a very clear warning: […]
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Monday, September 10th, 2012
Stephan: Even in the popular version this is not easy going. But it is of immense importance because it is the next step in understanding how our universe is put together. Two things struck me: Tesla argued for scalar waves a century ago. And, as in classical and quantum physics the role of scale is particularly important.
A pair of mathematicians — one from Indiana University and the other from Sichuan University in China — have proposed a unified theory of dark matter and dark energy that alters Einstein’s equations describing the fundamentals of gravity.
Shouhong Wang, a professor in the IU College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Mathematics, and Tian Ma, a professor at Sichuan University, suggest the law of energy and momentum conservation in spacetime is valid only when normal matter, dark matter and dark energy are all taken into account. For normal matter alone, energy and momentum are no longer conserved, they argue.
While still employing the metric of curved spacetime that Einstein used in his field equations, the researchers argue the presence of dark matter and dark energy — which scientists believe accounts for at least 95 percent of the universe — requires a new set of gravitational field equations that take into account a new type of energy caused by the non-uniform distribution of matter in the universe. This new energy can be both positive and negative, and the total over spacetime is conserved, Wang said.
It is curved spacetime, along with a new scalar potential field representing the new energy density, and the […]
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