The current economic situation is explained and corrections are made to the recent “QE2 Explained” viral video.
By Zachary Shahan
Ecolocalizer
It seems this has become pretty big news. And beyond the mass fish and bird deaths in Arkansas, a large number of sudden bird deaths have occurred in Louisiana, Sweden, Kentucky, and other places, and a large number of sudden fish deaths have occurred in other states and countries.
A lot of people have been visiting my articles on the mass bird deaths in Arkansas and Louisiana over on our sister site Planetsave, as well as an article on a number of possible explanations. From my own research as well as the many comments on those articles, I must have seen a dozen possible answers. Unfortunately, none make it completely clear yet what the cause of these deaths are.
Of course, when one such news story pops up, as one expert on the matter pointed out early on, many more similar but not so astounding stories are likely to get media attention they wouldn’t anyway. That has surely been the case. It should be noted that a ton of birds and fish die every year from a variety of causes, even in large groups. Nonetheless, some of these recent occurrences really are out of the ordinary and it makes it that much more difficult to identify the cause when they are happening in different places around the world.
To comprehensively summarize many of the possible explanations I’ve run across by now, I’m going to split the explanations into three categories: 1) possible causes of various bird deaths (only), 2) possible causes of various fish deaths (only), 3) possible causes of both.
While some are quick to think that the almost simultaneous fish and bird deaths are just coincidences and there is no relationship, others are quick to think the opposite. Here are some theories proposed that may explain them both:
Note that some combination of several of these possibilities could explain what has happened in recent days.
To be quite honest, I am still quite unsure what I think the most likely cause(s) of the deaths is or are.
Any more ideas?
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By Lila Shapiro
HUFFINGTON POST
New York — This week, the economy flashed multiple signs of improvement, from encouragingly brisk expansion on the factory floor to a slowdown in layoffs. Yet for the 15 million Americans still officially without work, these indicators did little to displace a gnawing anxiety that they may never reclaim their previous lives.
“There’s this large group of unemployed people who have, despite their efforts to get another job, been unsuccessful,” said Carl E. Van Horn, a labor economist at Rutgers University and one of the authors of a recent report, “The Shattered American Dream: Unemployed Workers Lose Ground, Hope, and Faith in their Futures.” “Some people never will recover.”
Most Americans think the United States should raise taxes for the rich to balance the budget, according to a 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll released on Monday.
President Barack Obama last month signed into law a two-year extension of Bush-era tax cuts for millions of Americans, including the wealthiest, in a compromise with Republicans.
Republicans, who this week take control of the House of Representatives, want to extend all Bush-era tax cuts “permanently” for the middle class and wealthier Americans. They are also demanding spending cuts to curb the $1.3 trillion deficit.
Sixty-one percent of Americans polled would rather see taxes for the wealthy increased as a first step to tackling the deficit, the poll showed.
The next most popular way — chosen by 20 percent — was to cut defense spending.
Four percent would cut the Medicare government health insurance program for the elderly, and 3 percent would cut the Social Security retirement program, the poll showed.
Asked which part of the world they would fix first, the largest proportion of respondents — 36 percent — chose Washington, compared with 23 percent who picked the Middle East and 14 percent who chose Haiti.
The poll included a random sample of 1,067 adults across the United States from November 29 to December 2. The margin of error may be plus or minus 3 percentage points, 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair said.
(Reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Daniel Trotta and Peter Cooney)
KAPLAN TARNISHES WASHINGTON POST LEGACY
By Peter S. Goodman
The Huffington Post
Nearly four decades ago, the Washington Post found itself faced with the sort of agonizing decision that can define a reputation. The New York Times had begun printing classified federal documents known as the Pentagon Papers, laying bare the terrible miscalculations and deceptions that had produced the Vietnam War. A federal judge had barred the Times from continuing its series. The Post had gotten hold of the documents and was mulling whether to publish them.
The company’s lawyers implored the paper’s publisher, Katharine Graham, not to do it, warning that crossing the court would imperil the company’s business interests. The journalists countered that not publishing risked the paper’s credibility. As one editor intoned, “the soul of the newspaper was at stake,” Mrs. Graham later recalled in her Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir.
She published, making a forthright choice that secured her and her newspaper an enduring reputation as a champion of the public good.
These days, recalling that history feels sad and even painful, given the contemporary choices being made at the Washington Post Co., now run by the late, great publisher’s son, Donald E. Graham, himself a legitimate icon of journalistic values. Inside the corporation today, the newspaper is vastly overshadowed by a fast-growing business known as Kaplan Higher Education — a sprawling empire of for-profit college campuses and sundry online course offerings alongside the test preparation business that first made the brand famous.
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At Kaplan University ‘Guerilla Registration’ Leaves Students Deep In Debt
By Chris Kirkham
HUFFINGTON POST
Arlen Castillo had just begun an online associate’s degree program at Kaplan University when a family emergency forced a change of plans. Her mother in Florida learned she needed extensive surgery that entailed months of recuperation. Only two weeks into her first term, Castillo promptly withdrew to lend her mother support.
As Castillo recalls, a Kaplan academic advisor told her she could simply fill out a withdrawal form and incur no additional expenses beyond the registration fees she had already paid. But a year and a half later, in 2006, collections agents began hounding her, she says, demanding that she pay some $10,000 in supposedly overdue tuition charges. Despite having attended only two online sessions, Castillo had remained officially enrolled at Kaplan for nearly a year after her withdrawal.
Far from an aberration, Castillo’s experience typifies the results of a practice known informally inside Kaplan as “guerilla registration”: academic advisors have long enrolled students in classes they never take, without their consent and sometimes even after they have sought to withdraw from the university, in order to maximize the company’s revenues, according to interviews with former employees.
Managers at Kaplan–the highly profitable educational arm of the Washington Post Co.– have for years pressured academic advisors to use this method to boost enrollment numbers, the former employees said, offering accounts consistent with dozens of complaints filed by former students with the Florida Attorney General’s Office and reviewed by The Huffington Post.
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