via Journal of Cosmology.

What do we need health insurers for anyway? - Los Angeles Times.

“WellPoint didn’t really want to jack up health premiums on its customers by as much as 39%, she said — it had no choice. “We care deeply about our California customers,” she said.”

Op-Ed Columnist - The Axis of the Obsessed and Deranged - NYTimes.com.

“A co-sponsor of CPAC was the John Birch Society, another far-right organization that has re-emerged after years of hibernation. Its views, which William F. Buckley Jr. decried in the 1960s as an “idiotic” and “irrational” threat to true conservatism, remain unchanged. ”

“I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. ”

then

echo testfile exists

fi

via Determine if file exists in a Bourne/bash shell script | Bourne shell scripting | Tech-Recipes.

“When the Chinese first got rich,” says Mr Lu, “they wanted to go to Thailand and South Korea. Now they want to go skiing.”

via A special report on the new middle classes in emerging markets: Burgeoning bourgeoisie | The Economist.

The threat of 9/11 ignored. The threat of Iraq hyped and manipulated. Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib. Hurricane Katrina. The shredding of civil liberties. The rise of Iran. Global warming. Economic disaster. How did one two-term presidency go so wrong?

Richard Clarke, chief White House counterterrorism adviser: “The contrast with having briefed his father and Clinton and Gore was so marked. And to be told, frankly, early in the administration, by Condi Rice and [her deputy] Steve Hadley, you know, Don’t give the president a lot of long memos, he’s not a big reader—well, shit. I mean, the president of the United States is not a big reader?”

via An Oral History of the Bush White House | Politics | Vanity Fair.

via Former Gitmo Guard Tells All—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine).

After we got off that day it was late. No one really spoke much. I went back to my tent and laid down to go to sleep. I was thinking “those were the worst people the world had to offer? Not what I expected.” I guess I was expecting people who looked like monsters or what-not.

via Testimony of Spc. Brandon Neely — The Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA).

via Experts say U.S. war on terror eroded rights worldwide | Reuters.

Blackwater Changes Its Name to Xe - NYTimes.com.

via The Raw Story | Missing Iraq billions could be ‘greatest fraud in US history’.

Frank Schaeffer: An Open Letter to President Obama About the Republicans (From a Former Republican).

via Rumsfeld Knew His Guys Were Torturing People to Death, Which Is a Serious Crime | Economy | AlterNet.