The New Recission

In today's mail.

We regret to inform you that at the end of this year, Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota will be discontinuing all individual and family insurance plans sold to members in Minnesota directly, through an agent or broker, or on MNsure. As a result you will not be able to renew your current plan or select another Blue Cross plan for coverage in 2017. The last day of coverage in your current Blue Cross plan will be December 31, 2016.

Not sure what we do now. Husband took early retirement with the assurance that we would be able to purchase decent health care coverage until we hop onto Medicare.

Back to the Future, Minnesota Style

I had to go over to a Minneapolis law firm today, located in the historic Young Quinlan Building. I met the last human elevator operator in the state (pictures below). Cool beans.

Recent Reads

To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
A River Runs Through It (Norman Maclean)
The Wind is Not a River (Brian Payton)
The 90-Day Novel (Alan Watt)

Amazon Instant Preview

This is a new feature from Amazon which allows you to preview a book directly from another site. Click on the images below to see how it works.

National Landmark

The sun shines brighter

on hybrid vehicle owners at Country Inn in Madison, Wisconsin. We drove up to this welcome just a few minutes ago. The parking spot, reserved just for our Prius, is as close to the hotel as the handicapped parking.

If you need to feel good about your town

watch this video.

Or, better yet, watch this one from the Regina Saskatchewan tourism board.

Running to the front of the line, aka "budging"

In 2015 Alphabet was created as the holding company for Google and several other companies previously owned by Google. At the time I thought the name would be more appropriate for an online preschool, not a technology-driven corporation.

Perhaps the consultants who chose "Alphabet" were advised about association by Julia Quinn. Julia Quinn is the pen name of a best-selling American historical romance author. She says she chose her name so that her books would sit on bookshelves next to those of the best-selling romance writer Amanda Quick. Using Alphabet as a company name follows this formula for success, as "Al" is close to and comes before "Am" (Amazon) and "Ap" (Apple). So, in lists of highest market cap, most-admired companies, or donors to nonprofit institutions, Alphabet, by playing the alphabet, "front runs" these other heavy weight companies. My kids used to call this kind of behavior "budging in line".

Why the GOP really wants Trump to quit his campaign against Gonzalo Curiel

What they aren't saying when they jump on Trump's criticism of Judge Curiel is that it undermines their argument that the next president should fill the vacant Supreme Court seat. By stalling the Supreme Court hearings, they are effectively saying that they want Trump to install the justice after he is elected. After all, he is now the presumptive candidate. But now Trump says Curiel, due to his hispanic heritage, can't be an impartial adjudicator. Trump's rhetoric (and repeated, after rebuke from leaders of his own party) reveals a desire to use his power to replace an independent judiciary with a judiciary that is subservient to his ends, to benefit his business interests, for example.

There was someone else, a few decades back, who destroyed a nation's independent judiciary to serve his personal agenda: His name was Adolf Hitler.