Local Gov Accountability on State Level

One of the many blessing we enjoy in the United States is perhaps the one most unacknowledged. That is that for the most part, our local governments work.

By that I mean local governments effectively and efficiently operate for the benefit of their citizens.

Certainly, for me that is true because I am lucky to live in a Michigan township, Grosse Ile, with honest, dedicated, capable, flexible and forward thinking elected leaders and public servants.

From my years of experience working with cities, counties and regional governments in Michigan and Ohio, I can also extend my praise to a host of other communities, too.

By the way, on the local government level, for the most part, my experience tells me that party affiliation makes no difference. When the rubber meets the road, what really matters is what is in the hearts of the leaders – are they dedicated to working for the community’s best interests or are they more interested in leveraging their position of public trust for personal advancement and/or pocketbook.

Another and equally important measure of leadership is the ability to face tough issues head on and create a grounded, sustainable solution and then go to us - the people, face-to-face - answer our questions with facts and convince us that the plan is a wise solution for all of us.

The local government leaders I've had the honor of working with usually confront and solve local issues, while state and federal leaders are usually not accountable to the same standard… perhaps we no longer expect equally high standards from them or they’re using a totally different playbook.

Anyway, for us in Michigan, the gods of government may be ready to grant us a reprieve since our recently elected Governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is now facing one of her first tests of leadership with her plan to fix our “damn roads”.

Her plan calls for a $.45 tax increase per gallon of gas in order to raise the revenue needed to maintain and repair our roads.

After years of "kick-the-can-down-the-road state house and senate leadership", it appears that we now have a leader who is willing to solve our roads challenge by facing the fact that it costs money to do the job right.

So, maybe our roads will finally be repaired and maintained under some rational plan.

It’s obvious that each of us will pay the price of fixing our roads - either in vehicle repairs, loss of home property value, lost sales/profits - or at the pump.

My choice is at the pump.

I hope Gov. Whitmer does a good job convincing us with the facts that her plan is best for all of us.

Bruce Springsteen - We Take Care of Our Own - 2012 

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC)... Stateswoman in Action

Photo credit: Screen capture from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
questions Michael Cohen (C-SPAN) See video clip below.

It's been so long. A few of us have forgotten, but most of us are too young to have seen what it looks like when an Representative actually does his/her job for the people of his/her district and for the people of the United States.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) recently gave us a clear example of an American stateswoman in action.

Here's the story...

At the End of a Long, Tedious Cohen Hearing, AOC Was Sharp and Crisp, Ed Kilgore, nymag.com, 27 Feb 2019.

"Until today, I had been skeptical about the hype over new congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She is, after all, a backbencher from a safe Democratic district in a heavily Democratic state. She won an impressive upset primary victory last year, but is still south of 30 years old and belongs to the small if interesting tribe of self-identified democratic socialists (to which I do not happen to belong). Maybe I don’t spend enough time on social media to understand her mastery of latter-day communications. But I figured she had become a self-perpetuating legend probably resented by her colleagues who spent years toiling for a tiny fraction of the attention she’s attracted."

"But at the end of a long, tedious day in the House Oversight Committee marked by clumsy questioning of Michael Cohen by Democrats, and shrieking hostility to the witness from Trump-loving Republicans, AOC (as she is universally known in the political universe — you know, like FDR and JFK) put in perhaps the single most impressive appearance of the hearing."

"She was crisp, succinct, and very focused on raising some previously undiscussed potential criminal liability issues for Trump that Cohen’s testimony suggested (e.g, insurance fraud), including several where the hot-button issue of Trump’s missing tax returns might be germane. I wasn’t the only viewer who was impressed; so was the fact-checker from the Washington Post, another person unlikely to be excessively biased toward AOC:"

Please go here for the rest of the story.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez questions Michael Cohen (C-SPAN)

Surviving Your Hospital Stay

Please go here for the whole story.

I know. You didn't ask. But, since many of our friends are facing serious issues as their parents and loved ones age, I feel compelled to express to you the benefit of our experience with the U.S. medical system.

Here are 11 tips for surviving your U.S. hospital stay, with number 12 and perhaps the most important thrown in for good measure:

“Stay away from the hospital unless you have no other option and you absolutely must go.” Why, because medical errors are still the 3rd leading cause of death in the U.S.

I am not joking.

If you value your life and the life of your loved one, do these things:

1. Empower someone you trust and who loves you to be your patient advocate.
2. Each day, especially Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays, at the beginning of every shift, your patient advocate must meet and be confident in your assigned nurse. Follow this practice until you leave the hospital.
3. Move to a room, as close to the nurses’ station as you can be. If the room is semi-private, ask for the bed closest to the entry door.
4. Make sure your patient advocate understands which medications your doctor has ordered for you as well as how much of each medication you are to receive.
5. Make absolutely certain that your patient advocate ensures that your nurse correctly administers your medications as your doctor has ordered.
6. Do not submit to any procedure unless you understand that your doctor has ordered it for you and you have agreed to have it done.
7. Closely observe the nursing team and make certain that they wash their hands and use clean gloves; do not use suction tubes which have fallen onto the floor or onto your bed; and maintain sterile technique when required, e.g. when changing a PICC line (peripherally inserted central catheter) dressing.
8. Question everything and ask your questions in three different ways.
9. Ask what are the known side effects of every medication and procedure.
10. Research everything until you feel comfortable that you understand.
11. Just never give up, no matter who says you can’t make it, because you can!

Please go here for the whole story.

I Will Survive - Gloria Gaynor - 1978

Retail Solar Panel Reaches Record 29% Yield

Credit: Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

Here's another reason to consider solar for your home...

"Studies have shown that the average yield on commercial solar panels has increased by just 3.5 percentage points since the 2000s and seemed to be reaching a plateau. But Insolight's three founders – Mathieu Ackermann, Laurent Coulot and Florian Gerlich – wanted to push yields further and decided to try something radically different: build residential solar panels that employ the same kinds of cells used in satellites, which are very efficient but also very expensive."

"To keep costs down for the retail market, they developed a protective glass on which optical lenses can be placed that concentrate sunlight by some 100x and direct it to the tiny surface of the high-performance cells. That means the cells need to take up less than 0.5 percent of the solar panel surface. The founders also designed a mechanism that can move the cells horizontally by a few millimeters each way in order to follow sunlight throughout the day."

"Insolight boast an impressive 29 percent yield – a record."

Please go here for the rest of  the story...

New residential solar panels deliver record-breaking efficiency, Cécilia Carron, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, 19 Feb 2019.

New residential solar panels deliver record-breaking efficiency

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)
Published on Feb 18, 2019

The solar panels developed by startup Insolight boast an impressive 29% yield – a record for the retail market. These systems, which have now been standardized for mass production, contain lenses that focus sunlight on tiny high-yield photovoltaic cells, employing what is a pioneering approach for the solar-power industry

Young People Leading Us to the Light

Sunrise Movement members ask, "Mitch, Look Us In The Eyes".
Photo credit: Anthony Adragna.

(Washington, D.C.) Breaking News... I'll bet 10 cat's eye marbles that you didn't know this:

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office was occupied for a few minutes yesterday by a group of young people - The Sunrise Movement - demanding, “Mitch, Look Us In The Eyes.”

These young heroes "delivered a petition containing 100,000 signatures to McConnell’s office calling on him to co-sponsor the “Green New Deal” resolution."

McConnell plans to allow a vote... but his plan calls for a vote to somehow "...highlight disarray within the Democratic Party over the progressive-backed climate initiative." I guess we'll find out what that means in the days ahead.

Please click through to the link below to see the videos.

Here's the story:

Dozens of climate protesters storm McConnell’s office over Green New Deal, Miranda Green and Owen Daugherty, thehill.com, 25 Feb 2019.

More than 100 youth climate protesters entered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) office Monday to advocate for the “Green New Deal" and challenge McConnell's plan to fast-track a vote on the resolution in the Senate.

The youth climate advocates, members of the national climate group The Sunrise Movement, were seen overflowing from McConnell’s office into the stairwell in the Russell Senate Office Building on Monday morning.

Protesters inside his office held up a sign that read, “Mitch, Look Us In The Eyes.”

“I am here because people in my community don’t have jobs, are starving and turning to opiods [sic] and dying. Mitch McConnell refuses to do anything about,” said 15-year-old Kentucky high school student Lily Gardner, according to a press release from Sunrise Movement.

Within hours of the protests taking place, several members of the group could be seen being escorted out of the office in handcuffs by Capitol Police.

"As with all Kentuckians visiting D.C., we welcomed them to the office today. It's worth noting that two weeks before, Senator McConnell had already announced that he will be bringing the Green New Deal up for a vote in the U.S. Senate," McConnell spokesperson Stephanie Penn told The Hill.

The protesters delivered a petition containing 100,000 signatures to McConnell’s office calling on him to co-sponsor the “Green New Deal” resolution that was introduced in both the Senate and the House in early February by freshman lawmaker Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.).

The nonbinding resolution is a sweeping environment and energy reform plan meant to set up the United States to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

It lays out, in part, a pathway for the country to transition to 100 percent renewable energy use by 2030.

McConnell announced two weeks ago that he would soon bring a vote on the resolution to the Senate floor — a move Republicans hoped would highlight disarray within the Democratic Party over the progressive-backed climate initiative.

Initially championed by Ocasio-Cortez to be the focus of a select committee in the House, the Green New Deal has met resistance by some Democrats who questioned the significance of the measure.

While Senate Democrats in recent weeks have pushed back on McConnell's clear effort to divide the party, the vote will highlight disagreements among Democrats over just how to approach the issue of a warming globe.

McConnell did not say when the vote would take place, but the bill has little chance of passing the Senate.

The Sunrise Movement played a part in helping Ocasio-Cortez's office draft the Green New Deal resolution.

The youth protesters have held multiple rallies to support the initiative at the Capitol this year, including staging their first sit-in at Speaker Nancy Pelosi's (D-Calif.) office in the fall with Ocasio-Cortez present.

The group held a similar protest outside McConnell's Kentucky-based office last week.

Go here for the Whole Story.

Todd Rundgren - I Saw The Light - 1972

Wisdom and Health

There is little to no place for wisdom in our society.

We worship money, wealth and celebrity and disdain knowledge and experience - wisdom.

Most U.S. corporations care next to nothing about their "senior" employees, those who have spent years working for them. Most often the corporate people who populate our business today are all about getting rid of the old in favor of youthful, "fresh" minds.

What they end up doing is tossing out years of accumulated wisdom and irreplaceable experience with lower-wage, tabula rasa, eager-to-please-the-boss, replacements. Sure, the manager saves a few shekels today, but by doing so he is snuffing out the company's future by condemning it to repeat the errors of the past because he's wiped out the "experience" feed-back system. That is, the people who actually know something and might tell him he's going down the wrong path.

This stupidity is not confined to the corporate world, of course.

Consider health and wellness. Western medicine, under the control of predatory capitalists, I suspect, has long-condemned proven, homeopathic remedies and ancient, traditional medicine, such as acupuncture, to the "no profit", "witchy" woman trash pile.

Every day I learn more. Here's some very important knowledge... stuff our ancestors learned ages ago. Stuff like: we are composed of a bunch of electric circuits.

Here's the story...

Dr. Jerry Tennant: Healing the Body's Electrical Circuitry | Electricity of Life

ThunderboltsProject
Published on Feb 23, 2019

Today, various electromagnetic therapies have gained unprecedented acceptance and use, and scientific studies continue to affirm the influence of electromagnetic fields on life. One of the leading pioneers in this rapidly growing field has been Dr. Jerry Tennant, an ophthalmologist whose book series Healing is Voltage describes his groundbreaking research into the electrical circuitry of the human body. Today, in part one of this two-part presentation, Dr. Tennant begins by sharing his own remarkable challenges which catalyzed his scientific journey.

Dr. Jerry Tennant is board certified in ophthalmology and ophthalmic plastic surgery (residency,
Harvard Medical School and Southwestern Medical School.) He was the director of ophthalmic plastic surgery clinic at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and practiced from 1965 to 1995. He did much of the FDA study for the VISX Excimer laser and performed approximately 1000 surgeries in the United States and Europe. In addition, Dr. Tennant was the founder/director of the Dallas Eye Institute and one of the first surgeons in the US to place intraocular lenses in eyes after cataract surgery and taught these techniques around the world. He holds patents for medical devices including intraocular lenses and several surgical instruments. While licensed in Arizona by the Board of Homeopathic and Alternative Medicine, Dr. Tennant is currently the Director of the Tennant Institute for Integrative Medicine.  https://www.tennantinstitute.us

Dr. Tennant's presentation at EU2017: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm-Ia...

To view EU2017 conference presentations for $29USD, go to www.electricuniverse.live

Witchy Woman - The Eagles - 1972

Ponder This for a Second

Here's something to ponder for a second or two:

It is time to "...stop using technology to optimize human beings for the market and start optimizing technology for the human future."

How to be "Team Human" in the digital future | Douglas Rushkoff

Published on Jan 14, 2019
Humans are no longer valued for our creativity, says media theorist Douglas Rushkoff -- in a world dominated by digital technology, we're now just valued for our data. In a passionate talk, Rushkoff urges us to stop using technology to optimize people for the market and start using it to build a future centered on our pre-digital values of connection, creativity and respect. "Join 'Team Human.' Find the others," he says. "Together let's make the future that we always wanted."