Get it?

Update 061609
From LA Times:

…The documents show, for instance, that one Blue Cross employee earned a perfect score of “5″ for “exceptional performance” on an evaluation that noted the employee’s role in dropping thousands of policyholders and avoiding nearly $10 million worth of medical care.

WellPoint’s Blue Cross of California subsidiary and two other insurers saved more than $300 million in medical claims by canceling more than 20,000 sick policyholders over a five-year period, the House committee said.

Update 062709
From Rhonda Hackett of Castle Rock, a clinical psychologist. DenverPost.com, Debunking Canadian health care myths

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Alicia Morgan is a musician friend with whom I’ve occasionally had the pleasure of working over the last decade or two. Her blog turned into a book, The Price of Right: How the Conservative Agenda Has Failed America (and Always Will). I’ve just read it and highly recommend it-that is-if you’re in good health and not worried about getting riled up. I come away from it “mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more”, and (after all the business-as-usual cabinet choices) Obama or no, there’s just too much wrong with America to sit on the sidelines and wait for something to happen.

Alicia lays the groundwork with some psychology of types- Farmers vs. Hunters. From there we learn how Marketing Speak has become a major tool in the arsenal of the Conservative agenda. She goes on to trace the evolution of the wealthy, powerful and organized Conservative Right since Newt Gingrich. She documents the co-joining of the Conservative Right with the Christian Right. Following that she applies her insight to the issues of Iraq, the erosion of the Middle Class, Health Care, Worker’s Rights, and Corporate Media. Alicia tells her story with names and dates and quotes-who said what when-then adds her perspective, which for me is so compelling. A few examples, first, of the evidence she’s discovered.

Language: A Key Mechanism of Control
…”I wish I could speak like Newt.”

That takes years of practice. But, we believe that you could have a significant impact on your campaign and the way you communicate if we help a little. that is why we have created this list of words and phrases…(From a pamphlet sent out by Newt Gingrich’s politcal action committee to Republicans across the country.)

The “cruel and unusual punishment” clause of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution has been interpreted by the Supreme Court to require prisoners, as part of their humane treatment during detention, to be guaranteed the right to health care.

Currently prisoners are the only group who are specifically granted the right to health care. It is probable that the founders of our country, if they could have predicted the importance of health care, would have granted that the same standard of humane treatment be extended to every citizen. (Dr. Howard Haft, Executive VP and Chief Medical Officer at Conmed Healthcare Management, Inc., a provider of health care services for correctional institutions.)

In the 1980s, the Reagan administration, during its foaming frenzy of deregulation, raised the number of stations a company could own from seven to twelve. In 1983, most major media was controlled by fifty companies. It then went to twenty-six in 1987 to twenty-three in 1990, to ten in 1966, accelerated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 signed by Bill Clinton. Today almost all of the major media outlets in the U.S. are owned by five corporations.

And here’s an example of how Alicia turns these facts into hard-hitting truths.

It’s important to realize that the corporate media is granted (for free!) leases for their slice of the broadcast spectrum. This amounts to a gift from us-the American taxpayer-of billions and billions of dollars. In other words, we are paying the big corporations to be lied to, manipulated, and stolen from.

Hey Alicia! The last few years I’ve been hiding under a political rock. Your heartfelt perspective on our current situation has rekindled my desire to get back into the fray. Thanks for a great book.

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From Stewart Brand’s Long Now Blog:

That would mean the following. (Here I’m drawing on notes and extrapolations I’ve written up previously from discussion with Griffith):

“Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (That’s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) Two terawatts of solar thermal? If it’s 30 percent efficient all told, we’ll need 50 square meters of highly reflective mirrors every second. (Some 600 square miles a year, times 25.) Half a terawatt of biofuels? Something like one Olympic swimming pools of genetically engineered algae, installed every second. (About 15,250 square miles a year, times 25.) Two terawatts of wind? That’s a 300-foot-diameter wind turbine every 5 minutes. (Install 105,000 turbines a year in good wind locations, times 25.) Two terawatts of geothermal? Build 3 100-megawatt steam turbines every day-1,095 a year, times 25. Three terawatts of new nuclear? That’s a 3-reactor, 3-gigawatt plant every week-52 a year, times 25.”

All of it! Please listen to Saul’s Long Now Lecture to hear how, despite the odds, he remains an optimist.

Calculate and compare your own power consumption at WattzOn.com.

Check out the very cool 100 mpg, charge-overnight-from-a-wall-socket, ready-for-the-carpool-lane, 3-wheeled (California only) Aptera.
(As mentioned in Saul’s talk.)

See also: Google PowerMeter is currently being tested by employees and is not yet available to the public.

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I’m not familiar with prisonplanet.com, but they tell the story of a recording E. Howard Hunt made on his deathbed. The tape was recently made public by Howard Hunt’s son, Saint John Hunt. On the tape Howard Hunt describes a bitter LBJ and his involvement with the murder of JFK. Hunt names others who were involved in the conspiracy. Five minutes of the tape were aired recently on CoastToCoastAM.com
There is a direct link to the mp3 file here.

What’s been bugging me about it is, what if it’s true? I mean – just for a minute – inhabit a world where the Kennedy assassination has been solved- We know who did it, who helped who and why.
Now what?
How is justice served over 40 years later? Who’s going to pay?
What does it mean? What would change?
How do I heal, or why, or who cares?
Is it just miscellaneous information?

louis-farrakhan-black-president.mp3

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From DifficultDebate.com

The 2008 election for President of the United States has nothing to do with who’s wearing a flagpin and lipstick on a pig, but that’s what the media is focusing on.  Sadly, that’s what the campaigns seem to focus on too.

This web site is dedicated to asking the difficult questions of our candidates.  They’re specific.  They can’t be dodged.  And they aren’t based on heresay.

The basis for these questions are the candidates’ own plans.  Not rumors.  I read through the plans on each site and had questions about many of the candidates’ stances and how they specifically plan to accomplish them.

Some of these may be easy to answer, but they certainly aren’t explained well on the candidates’ web sites.

I’m an independent and undecided voter who likes some of what each candidate has to say.  But I’m not getting the answers I need from the mainstream press.

> See Difficult Questions for Barack Obama

> See Difficult Questions for John McCain

This article was written by Micki Krimmel in June 2007. We’re republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.

I first learned about MAPLight.org at the recent NetSquared Conference. As I wrote last week, the conference attendees chose MAPLight as the winner of the first prize NetSquared Innovation Award. In a crowd of extremely well-deserving projects, MAPLight stood out as an organization applying the best of Web 2.0 technology and standards to create a vital tool for transparency in democracy.

MAPLight.org brings together campaign contributions and how legislators vote, providing an unprecedented window into the connections between money and politics. We currently cover the California Legislature and U.S. Congress.

Maplight has been receiving a fair amount of attention lately and the $25k prize will help them take their project to the next level, providing the funds for them to create customized widgets for bloggers and nonprofit organizations to share up to date information on their websites automatically. MAPLight is also working to expand their service to other states, with New York next on the list.

I chatted with Sean Tanner, Maplight’s Research Manager via email to get a little more insight into Maplight’s mission and future particularly as America turns its attention to the next Presidential election. As Research Manager, Sean coordinates the MAPLight.org database and research internship program. He is also the chair of the Young Advocates, a group of young professionals who support the work of Human Rights Watch.

Micki Krimmel: Can you tell me a little bit about the mission of MAPLight and its origins?
Read the rest of the article.

   and today at 5 PM

5:00pm

Short Break

 http://www.ecocityworldsummit.org/program.htm

 See one of Soleri’s earliest Arcologies, Asteromo! One of the first space colonies ever designed, circa 1969?! fromhttp://pruned.blogspot.com/2006/02/asteromo.html