Researchers have now identified five “super ornamental plants” which every workplace should have to clean up indoor air.

They include English ivy, waxy leaved plants and ferns.

According to a World Health Organisation report in 2002, harmful indoor pollutants represent a serious health problem that is responsible for more than 1.6 million deaths each year.

@ Common Dreams

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Ha! bet you thought the story was about legal weed. Nope just another reason to have green ‘things’ around the house, natures little air filters.

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House Leaders Refuse To Reconsider Kucinich’s Single-Payer Amendment

By Mary Susan Littlepage

After Congressman Dennis Kucinich, (D-Ohio), lobbied throughout the past week to get his amendment calling for a single-payer health care system modeled after Medicare back on the table, the House rejected Kucinich’s attempts to reinsert the amendment in the bill.

That’s after a committee stripped the amendment from the House health care bill without giving him any advanced explanation.

In a letter to supporters on Wednesday, Kucinich wrote, “Thank you for all of your efforts on behalf of the Kucinich Amendment for a state single-payer option, which would protect the right of states to pursue a single payer health care system.

“Unfortunately, the House Leadership has rejected the many appeals on behalf of the amendment and will not reverse their decision, which removed the amendment from the bill. Therefore, the Kucinich Amendment for a state single payer option will not be included in the Manager’s Amendment and is not in the bill which will come before the House soon.”

A Manager’s Amendment is a package of numerous individual amendments agreed to by both sides in advance. The managers are the majority and the minority member who manage the debate on a bill for their side.

Kucinich said his amendment “represents the most powerful challenge to the insurance companies’ control of our health care system. Even the possibility of a state single payer system will make the insurance companies think twice before they raise premiums. The higher the insurance premiums, the more vulnerable companies are to citizens’ efforts to create alternatives such as a single payer system. We should never be locked into higher and higher premiums!”

@ Truthout

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Single payer paid for by States? An attempt to crowbar in the last vestige of ‘insurance industry free’ law.

As you can see here the likelihood of anything beneficial for us in this latest political concoction is nil and no possibility of a kiss before we get screwed.

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Beak meets Beard

Picky Penguin Gets Her Man Back

By Josh Ward

It’s a common tale: Man meets penguin, penguin meets man, they fall in love. A German zoo has witnessed a bittersweet love affair between two very unequal partners.

“Old love never dies,” the country song goes, “it just fades away.” Well, maybe so, but occasionally it comes back, too. At least that’s the case when it comes to an animal keeper in the southern German city of Münster and a penguin named Sandy.

This roller-coaster story of love started 13 years ago, when a one-year-old African penguin was transferred from a zoo in Nuremberg to the Allwetterzoo Münster. But rather than integrating herself into the penguin population, Sandy set her sights on her keeper. “At the beginning,” Peter Vollbracht, 47, told SPIEGEL ONLINE, “we found it very funny. Normally you have to wear thick gloves to handle these penguins because they have really sharp beaks and can give you a good whack with their wings. But Sandy” — as Vollbracht named her — “would just sit on my boot or arm and ask to be petted.”

@ Spiegels site

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Lonely hearts rejoice, there is a penguin out there somewhere waiting for you!

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The End We Get

By David Lazarus / Los Angeles Times

Eastman Kodak Co. has said sayonara to about 22,000 workers over the last five years. Verizon Communications Inc. says it will have handed about 16,000 workers their hats by Dec. 31 — and it is already looking ahead to the possibility of more layoffs next year.

So it took more than a little chutzpah for the chief executives of both companies to go before reporters the other day to denounce a government health insurance plan as being bad for America.

Where do they expect all the people they’ve thrown into the unemployment line to get coverage?

And what about the families of all those people?

And what about the millions of other American workers who either can’t get employer-provided health coverage or who have been rejected by private insurers for one reason or another?

It takes your breath away to see corporate leaders so brazenly placing profits before people’s lives.

Moreover, it’s only going to get worse. WellPoint Inc., the nation’s largest for-profit health insurer, said last week that it expects fourth-quarter earnings to decline as more workers are laid off and lose their insurance.

“The number of insured lives is going down as the recession drives layoffs in the commercial group of business,” said Ken Goulet, CEO of WellPoint’s commercial business division.

At least he had the decency to describe those losing coverage as people. Too often, you get the feeling that health insurers see us as little more than profit centers and balance-sheet liabilities.

@ Michael Moores place

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The ugly truth, it’s the money stupid, the root of all evil has produced a tree full of ugliness, lies and deceit to ensnare us all in it’s branches.

Gold Lake

Sierra Meadow

Fall Forest

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Yes the top pic is crooked a bit, I hate my digital camera, the Sunshine washes out the LCD and the pics are tough to get level when you cant see the shot, time for a new one.

250 mile ride in the Sierras yesterday, cool crisp and refreshing. (however my ass is killing me)

A new panoramic image of the full night sky — with the Milky Way as its centerpiece — has been made by piecing together 3,000 individual photographs.

The panorama’s creator, Axel Mellinger of Central Michigan University, spent 22 months and traveled over 26,000 miles to take digital photographs at dark sky locations in South Africa, Texas and Michigan.

“This panorama image shows stars 1,000 times fainter than the human eye can see, as well as hundreds of galaxies, star clusters and nebulae,” Mellinger said.

The Link

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Many suns many sunrises on many planets. Nifty pic.

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It’s January 2011. The GOP is about to assume control of both houses of Congress — having been voted in by a public deeply suspicious of Democrats after President Barack Obama conducted clandestine talks with President Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada.

But two days before the new conservative majority is to be sworn in, Obama announces that this Congress will not be seated, that the United States (a creation of “racists and warmongers”) will be replaced by a North American Union, that the U.S. Constitution will be dissolved and that private ownership of firearms will be outlawed (as part of a United Nations treaty banning firearms globally). In response, millions rise up, and the Revolution begins.

A Glenn Beck movie project? Perhaps. But it’s also the premise for a new online computer game hosted by a Web site called United States of Earth.

In the game’s scenario, 20 million armed American “patriots” begin seizing local and federal government offices. These are the same people whose earlier Tea Party protests had been ignored and dismissed by the mainstream media. Now, they post bounties for government employees. There’s fighting in every state.

Meanwhile, Lou Dobbs has been disappeared, and Glenn Beck has been found dead of an “aspirin overdose.” Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly have been rounded up and Fox News forcibly shut down.

@ Alternet too

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Curious phenomenom that violence. It seems to perform a release function for the pent up teen age redneck mind, only one problem, what does that say about our societies health?

We are a collective and as such are our brothers’ keeper, to destroy our brother is to destroy ourselves.

Senate climate bill?

Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’ timely Solar Technology Roadmap Act has drawn enthusiastic support from the business community and from the U.S. House of Representatives. Could this solar smile be just the ticket to get Senators on board the Kerry-Boxer climate bill?

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