There have been recent news reports about the $5 billon dollar fine levied by the Justice Department on Goldman Sachs for deliberately misleading mortgage bond investors during the period leading up to the 2008 housing bubble crash.
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Tomorrow (Saturday), a student group at CWRU will be hosting an inter-religious program at the Tinkham Veale University Center Ballroom, followed by a panel discussion. The first part from 5:00-6:00 pm consists of some kind of inter-religious celebration led by people from Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and Hindu traditions and includes a dinner. From 6:00-7:00 pm, the campus Catholic chaplain and I will join those four for the panel discussion
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I did not watch last night’s debate between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton that according to news reports was quite contentious. Philip Weiss looked closely at what Jake Tapper said was a ‘historic moment’ in American politics. For once a leading candidate deviated from the stance of uncritical support for whatever Israel does and instead balanced support with criticisms of its disproportionate response to attacks that had especially left Gaza devastated and caused an immense amount of suffering for the Palestinian people.
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Actor Stephen Fry has been quite open about his history of depression and bipolar disorder that at one time even led him to seriously consider suicide. He is now the president of the British mental health charity Mind and is credited with raising awareness and changing attitudes on those issues.
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There has been quite a lot of attention recently to the 1994 crime bill that Bill Clinton signed into law that led to the widespread imprisonment of large numbers of young black men with devastating consequences for the community. The Clintons and their supporters have gone into damage control mode and it has followed the usual pattern of suggesting that ‘everyone’ agreed on that policy at that time and that it is now Monday morning quarterbacks who are complaining with the benefit of hindsight.
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As the talking heads go into overdrive about what would happen in a contested Republican convention and the party establishment despairs at having to choose between two candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz that they hate, here is someone who offered to be a compromise candidate in the past and could serve that role now. He couldn’t be worse.
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I recommend to new teachers that jokes are very tricky things in a classroom and should be used with caution. Jokes based on stereotypes of race and ethnicity and nationality are especially problematic to pull off without causing offense and should be avoided in the classroom, especially if the stereotype is a negative one. One informal rule is that in other settings, one can often get away with telling such jokes against one’s own group but not against that of other groups.
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I have just finished doing our taxes for this year. I do our own taxes and do not use a tax professional because I am not intimidated by numbers, can follow instructions fairly well, and think that I can do a more careful job. Being a kind of detail-oriented person, carefully checking the work of someone else would be as much work as doing it myself.
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Recall the post from a few days ago about the questions to be addressed at an interfaith panel that I will be on tomorrow (Thursday). I just received an email from the event organizer saying that they had slightly changed the questions for discussion. The old six questions and details of the event can be seen here and the new questions are: