LOMA LINDA, Calif. – A video showing a father singing the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ to his dying newborn son after his wife died in childbirth is being watched around the world.
On Saturday, Nov. 8, Lennon James Picco was delivered by emergency C-section at 24 weeks. Hours later, Lennon’s mother, Ashley Picco, passed away in her sleep. She was 30 years old.
According to the YouTube video, Lennon’s lack of movement and brain activity was a concern for the doctors and nurses at Loma Linda University Hospital.
During Ashley’s pregnancy, she would often feel Lennon moving to music. Lennon’s dad, Chris Picco, asked if he could bring his guitar into the NICU and play for his dying son.
Several hours a day, Chris played music for Lennon during the last days of his life.
Baby Lennon passed away Tuesday, Nov. 11.
Chris wrote this Facebook post after the death of his son:
“Dear friends, family, and supporters; it is with an unbelievably heavy heart that I write this. My little fighter, Lennon James Picco went to sleep in his daddy’s arms late last night. He was surrounded by family, friends, and the best doctors, nurses and hospital staff in the world. He was dressed in an outfit that Ashley bought for him, with little guitars on it, and wrapped in a blanket made by a dear friend. I am so thankful for the four unforgettable days I got to spendwith him. His mommy would have been so beyond joy to see him and to hold him, touch him, bathe him, sing to him – as I have had the privilege of doing. I have been so blessed and honored to love him before he was formed, to cherish him while mommy carried him, meet him face to precious face, and hold his perfect little body while we said “goodbye for now”. There are no words, but I wanted to keep you updated, as your love and support has meant more than anything in the world. All you need is love.”
Author: susie
Source: BestMSWPrograms.com/
Time to invest in lightning rods!
Since we’re going to have a lot more lightning:
New research from the University of California, Berkeley, published on Thursday in the journal Science, found warming conditions would result in 50% more lightning strikes by the end of the century.
“For every two lightning strikes you had at the beginning of the century, we will have three at the end of the century,” said David Romps, a researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.
Researchers have known for some time that climate change was producing more lightning strikes, and fatalities in developing countries have been rising in recent years. But the latest findings put a number on that rate of increase, using data from federal government scientific agencies.
The scientists found lightning strikes would increase by about 12% for every 1C of warming, resulting in about 50% more strikes by 2100.
Will Mark Udall release the CIA torture report?
I sure hope so. And I hope they don’t kill him first:
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. Mark Udall has seven weeks left in office, but the Colorado Democrat isn’t prepared to go quietly — especially when it comes to the twin issues of CIA torture and government snooping.
In his first interview since Election Day, Udall told The Denver Post that he would “keep all options on the table,” including a rarely-used right given to federal lawmakers, to publicize a secret report about the harsh interrogation techniques used by CIA agents in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
He also vowed to make one final push to curb the National Security Agency and its power to gather information on ordinary Americans.
“Trying to run out the clock … is not an option,” Udall said Thursday of the long-hidden CIA report. “The truth will come out.”
Udall’s pledge to make a last stand comes amid a chorus of pleas from media outlets and civil libertarians.
Mere hours after Udall lost his re-election bid to Republican Cory Gardner, one columnist with The Guardian newspaper — the British publication made famous in the U.S. for its coverage of the Edward Snowden-NSA affair — urged Udall to ” go out with a bang” and make public the CIA torture report.
For months, members of the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which includes Udall, have feuded with the administration over the release of the committee’s own review of CIA tactics following al-Qaeda’s strikes on New York City and the Pentagon.
SCOTUS Obamacare case
New York Times SCOTUS reporter Linda Greenhouse explains (in much nicer language) why it’s bullshit:
It takes the votes of four of the nine justices to accept a case. Certainly Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the four who two years ago would have invalidated not only the individual mandate but the entire law — voted to hear King v. Burwell. (Michael A. Carvin, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, predicted as much last month, declaring in an uninhibited interview that the pending rehearing before an appeals court that has recently attained a majority of Democratic-appointed judges would be no deterrent to the justices who wanted to take the case. “I don’t know that four justices, who are needed here, are going to give much of a damn about what a bunch of Obama appointees on the D.C. Circuit think,” he told a reporter from Talking Points Memo.)
An intriguing question is whether there was a fifth vote as well, from the chief justice. I have no idea, although I can’t imagine why he would think that taking this case was either in the court’s interest or in his own; just two months ago, at a public appearance at the University of Nebraska, he expressed concern that the “partisan rancor” of Washington could spill over onto the court.
Here’s another possible scenario, just a theory: that the four, still steaming over what the right wing regards as the chief justice’s betrayal two years ago, voted to hear King v. Burwell not only for its destructive potential, but precisely to put the heat on John Roberts. I hadn’t really focused on this idea until I read a piece that John Yoo posted on National Review Online the day after the court granted the case. Professor Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and now at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote that the new case gave the chief justice “the chance to atone for his error in upholding Obamacare” and that “it will be the mission of his chief justiceship to repair the damage.” John Yoo — yes, the Bush administration lawyer whose “torture memos” attempted to justify that administration’s “enhanced interrogation” policies — is a smart man, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas who remains well connected at the court. His choice of the words “atone” and “mission,” with their religious resonance addressed to the devoutly Catholic chief justice, is no accident.
So this case is rich in almost every possible dimension. Its arrival on the Supreme Court’s docket is also profoundly depressing. In decades of court-watching, I have struggled — sometimes it has seemed against all odds — to maintain the belief that the Supreme Court really is a court and not just a collection of politicians in robes. This past week, I’ve found myself struggling against the impulse to say two words: I surrender.
Single payer now!
Yeah, I’m getting hit with all kinds of out-of-pocket costs now. Anyone else?
Researchers at the Commonwealth Fund found that 21 percent of adults with private health insurance spent five percent or more of their income on out-of-pocket health care costs even before factoring in premiums. In that group, low-income adults had the highest costs, which in some cases surpassed 10 percent of their income.
The report, touted as “Too High A Price: Out-of Pocket Health Care Costs in the United States,” includes survey data from people with employer-sponsored health insurance, Affordable Care Act marketplace plans, individual health insurance, Medicaid, and other forms of coverage.
“In order for health insurance to work for families, and for the U.S. health care system to work well, it will be important to bring down the number of people who are underinsured — people who have coverage that doesn’t provide adequate financial protection,” Commonwealth Fund President David Blumenthal, M.D said in a press release.
Blumenthal added: “Research shows that people who have insurance but have high health care costs relative to their income are as likely to skip getting the care they need as those with no insurance at all.”
We’re flying and spying!
But don’t worry, they promised to let go of your data if you’re not a criminal. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!!!!
The U.S. Department of Justice is putting devices that emulate cellphone towers in Cessna aircraft and flying them around the country to track the locations of cellphones, a practice that targets criminal suspects but may also affect thousands of U.S. citizens, according to a news report Thursday.
The program is run by the DOJ’s U.S. Marshals Service and has been in operation since at least 2007, according to the report in the Wall Street Journal, which cited two unnamed sources. The aircraft are flown out of at least five metropolitan-area airports and can cover most of the U.S. population, it said.
Cellphones are programmed to connect to whichever nearby cell tower has the strongest signal. The fake cell towers trick phones into thinking they have the strongest signal, then read the devices’ unique registration numbers when they connect, the Journal report says.
The goal is to locate cellphones linked to people under investigation for crimes like selling drugs, but in the process the program collects data about people not suspected of any crime, the report says. The fake cell towers determine which phones belong to criminal suspects and “let go” of those that aren’t.
The party abandoned the working class
William Greider lays it all out:
A party truly connected to the people would never have dared to make such a claim. In the real world of voters, human experience trumps macroeconomics and the slowly declining official unemployment rate. An official at the AFL-CIO culled the following insights from what voters said about themselves on Election Day: 54 percent suffered a decline in household income during the past year. Sixty-three percent feel the economy is fundamentally unfair. Fifty-five percent agree strongly (and another 25 percent agree somewhat) that both political parties are too focused on helping Wall Street and not enough on helping ordinary people.
Instead of addressing this reality and proposing remedies, the Democrats ran on a cowardly, uninspiring platform: the Republicans are worse than we are. Undoubtedly, that’s true—but so what? The president and his party have no credible solutions to offer. To get serious about inequality and the deteriorating middle class, Democrats would have to undo a lot of the damage their own party has done to the economy over the past thirty years.
Long ago, the party abandoned its working-class base (of all colors) and steadily distanced itself from the unglamorous conditions that matter most in people’s lives. Traditional party bulwarks like organized labor and racial minorities became second-string players in the hierarchy that influences party policy. But the Dems didn’t just lose touch with the people they claimed to speak for; they betrayed core constituencies and adopted pro-business, pro-finance policies that actively injure working people.
The shift away from the people was embraced most dramatically when Bill Clinton’s New Democrats came to power in the 1990s. Clinton double-crossed labor with NAFTA and subsequent trade agreements, which encouraged the great migration of manufacturing jobs to low-wage economies. Clinton’s bank deregulation shifted the economic rewards to finance and set the stage for the calamity that struck in 2008. Wall Street won; working people lost. Clinton presided over the financialization of the Democratic Party. Obama merely inherited his playbook and has governed accordingly, often with the same policy-makers.
“The people,” of course, are still present in the party, but they’re treated mainly as data for election strategies. The voters themselves resemble the supernumeraries in a grand opera: they appear on stage at election time, always lavishly praised by the pols. But they are given no lines to speak or songs to sing.
Wichita lineman
Glen Campbell:
Little green apples
Roger Miller was one of the greatest Nashville songwriters: