Blessed Are the Gadgets, For They Shall Inherit the Earth

Gotta love those Anglicans!

(P.S., There are nine slides in the series.)
 

A Song for the New Year - "Stand by Me"

This cover of Stand By Me was recorded by completely unknown artists all around the world. It all started with a base track—vocals and guitar—recorded on the streets of Santa Monica, California, by a street musician called Roger Ridley. The base track was then taken to New Orleans, Louisiana, where Grandpa Elliott—a blind singer from the French Quarter—added vocals and harmonica while listening to Ridley's base track on headphones. In the same city, Washboard Chaz's added some metal percussion to it.

The producers took the resulting mix all through Europe, Africa, and South America, adding new tracks with multiple instruments and vocals that were assembled in the final version you are seeing in this video. I don't know about you, but it blew me away.

The video was among the first in a series of musical videos made by Playing for Change, a movement to promote international understanding through music (no endorsement intended).

(You may want to click on through to You Tube or Playing for Change and watch the High Quality version.)

Please Pass the Mayo

Joseph Ashby writes in The American Thinker about this latest consequence of the coming disaster if government succeeds in taking the larger role in health care that is mandated in the House and Senate bills. These bills have yet to be reconciled and approved in their final form. In other words, there is still time to stop this train wreck. Write and call your Representatives and Senators.

The train wreck that is Obamacare just added another stop on its route. Bloomberg is reporting on a Mayo Clinic announcement that the medical care provider will drop thousands of Medicare patients from its Glendale Arizona clinic.

More than 3,000 patients eligible for Medicare, the government’s largest health-insurance program, will be forced to pay cash if they want to continue seeing their doctors at a Mayo family clinic in Glendale, northwest of Phoenix, said Michael Yardley, a Mayo spokesman. The decision, which Yardley called a two-year pilot project, won’t affect other Mayo facilities in Arizona, Florida and Minnesota.

Obama in June cited the nonprofit Rochester, Minnesota-based Mayo Clinic and the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio for offering “the highest quality care at costs well below the national norm.”

The article goes on to explain that the Mayo’s nationwide operation lost $840 million in 2008 treating Medicare patients. All this before Obamacare takes hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare funding.

The point is not that Medicare is underfunded per se, but rather that government intervention into the insurance and medical care markets has been disastrous. As each year passes, the magnitude of that disaster increases. Obama’s health care overhaul will accelerate the process exponentially.

Read it all.