Yesterday i was grateful for coffee with Donna and successful local store Christmas shopping for Holly afterwards.
Today i am looking forward to working with my colleagues at the cemetery and my yoga practice this evening.
My new phone case makes it super easy to accidentally make an image. Or is there a ghost in the machine?
A few from this morning…
Yesterday i was grateful for time spent with Holly baking Christmas cookies and listening to Christmas music.
Today i am looking forward to coffee with Donna.
Yesterday I was grateful for the little girl joyously running around the health club.
Today i am looking forward to being cozy in my warm dry home while it rains buckets outside, and, finally?, baking Christmas cookies.
Yesterday i was grateful for my yoga practice with Ann.
Today i am looking forward to the photography salon i co-moderate.
Absolutely love this dress… makes me wish i had a curvaceous womanly body that could show it off to beautiful effect:
From this morning’s walk…
Yesterday i was grateful for Christmas shopping with my wife and good outcomes from my board meeting.
Today i am looking forward to baking Christmas cookies with my wife and watching football with my brother.
This may be an important point to bear in mind in the coming months and years…
This work will only matter if it’s sustained. To sustain it, people have to believe that the myriad small, incremental actions matter. That they matter even when the consequences aren’t immediate or obvious. They must remember that often when you fail at your immediate objective—to block a nominee or a pipeline or to pass a bill—that, even then, you may have changed the whole framework in ways that make broader change more possible. (Rebecca Solnit, Call Them by Their True Names)
Yesterday i was grateful for seeing the movie Wicked at our local independent theater with my wife.
Today i am looking forward to being done with a board meeting that is making me anxious.
Ugh! Took the dogs for their annual checkup. $1200 later, we have reason to believe the dogs are and will stay healthy. My how the price of routine care has escalated! Healthy doggies, priceless!
A few from this morning…
December 5, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
Yesterday a gunman assassinated the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, as he arrived at a meeting of investors in New York City. While authorities are still investigating, officials have released the information that the casings of the bullets that killed Thompson bore the words “deny,” “defend,” “depose,” all words associated with companies’ denial of health insurance, taken from the longer phrases “deny the claim,” “defend the lawsuit,” “depose the patient.”
December 5, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
The lawsuit alleges that UnitedHealthcare uses artificial intelligence to deny claims from Medicare Advantage policyholders. The lawsuit claims that the company knowingly uses an algorithm that makes errors 90% of the time because it also knows that only about 0.2% of policy holders will appeal the decision to deny their claims. Last month the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations hammered UnitedHealth for dramatic increases in their denial rates for post-acute care between 2019 and 2022 as it switched to AI authorizations.
December 5, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
Thompson’s murder seems to be a cultural moment in which popular fury over the power big business has over ordinary Americans’ lives exploded. Maureen Tkacik of The American Prospect noted, “Only about 50 million customers of America’s reigning medical monopoly might have a motive to exact revenge upon the UnitedHealthcare CEO.” The shooter, whose actual motive remains unknown, is fast becoming a folk hero.
December 5, 2024 - by Heather Cox Richardson
The RBG PAC flew under regulatory radar at end of election and funded advertising claiming 45 would never support a national abortion ban…
Bridget Bowman, Ben Kamisar, and Scott Bland of NBC News reported tonight that Musk spent at least $250 million to get Trump elected. In addition to the $20.5 million to the RBG PAC, he put $238 million into the America PAC. Musk also supported Trump through free advertising and commentary on his social media platform X.
Ecologist David Pimentel has estimated that “if all of the world ate the way the United States eats, humanity would exhaust all known global fossil-fuel reserves in just over seven years.” (Jeff Golden, Reclaiming the Sacred)
Every corporation channels the powerful material desires of the people who work there and the people who invest in it, and it focuses them on the exclusive purpose of maximizing profit, regardless of whether the corporation contributes to the public good in some way, or whether it actually undermines the public good, or if it even causes tremendous destruction and suffering. (Jeff Golden, Reclaiming the Sacred)
Why should we consider literal truth superior to, rather than just different from, metaphoric truth? We need both and they have different proper applications. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
Yesterday i was grateful for the Wynotte Sisters annual Christmas concert and all the friends i got to see, including D&S.
Today i am looking forward to a quiet evening at home with H and the fur family.
Yesterday i was grateful for my wife and our fur family. Nothing beats their love and companionship.
Today i am looking forward to the Whynot Sisters annual Christmas concert with our friends D&S.
from this morning’s walk…
i think this is very important relative to the global realignment that is going on…
There exists an international subculture composed of people with Western-type higher education … that is indeed secularized beyond measure. This subculture is the principal ‘carrier’ of progressive, Enlightenment beliefs and values. While its members are relatively thin on the ground, they are very influential, as they control the institutions that provide the ‘official’ definitions of reality, notably the educational system, the media of mass communication, and the higher reaches of the legal system … (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)
beauty is not enough… we are in a moment where goodness and truth are threatened with being overwhelmed…
For it seems that beauty alone, though it addresses itself to the soul like little else, is not enough to sustain the soul, which requires also goodness and truth. (Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things)