Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

I spent nearly three hours today trying to understand the meaning of the Obamacare legislation. I am a reasonably intelligent individual, I have experience analyzing legislation (in my work), I know generally where to look and despite all that, I found it to be basically incomprehensible. This suggests to me that most people; don't have a clue what has happened, how it will effect them, why it was necessary (0r not), when it will take effect, what it will cost, what the alternatives might have been (or might still be), or in general what they should think about it. I'm going to try again to decipher it and when I do, to write here what my opinion is. Right now I am suspicious of it simply because it's too complicated to understand.

A family member sent me this story recently. I don't know whether it's true or not? I wasn't able to find any evidence that it is true. Somehow I wish it were both true and not true. In Washington , DC , at a Metro Station, on a cold January morning in 2007, this man with a violin played six Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, approximately 2,000 people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. After about 3 minutes, a middle-aged man noticed that there was a musician playing. He slowed his pace and stopped for a few seconds, and then he hurried on to meet his schedule. About 4 minutes later: The violinist received his first dollar. A woman threw money in the hat and, without stopping, continued to walk. At 6 minutes: A young man leaned against the wall to listen to him, then looked at his watch and started to walk again. At 10 minutes: A 3-year old boy stopped, but his mother tugged him along hurriedly. The kid stopped to look at the viol...

This Wall Street Journal article Climate Change and Open Science - WSJ .com made the right basic point about liberal hypocrisy in the Climate Change debate, but disappointingly it failed to cite the best sources of real information from an unbiased scientific point of view. I believe that source is Dr. S. Fred Singer & Dr. Craig D. Idso , from the Science and Environmental Policy Project and Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, who coauthored "Climate Change Reconsidered; The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change" published in 2009. In this book, the petition letter shown here from Dr. Frederick Seitz ( Ph . D. Physics) President Emeritus of Rockefeller University was published. Dr. Seitz circulated this letter: urging fellow academics with qualifications in the physical sciences to sign the petition at http://www.petitionproject.com/ and thereby acknowledge their agreement with this statement in the petition: Accor...

Not only has Susan Boyle's performance on "Britans Got Talent 2009" received 85 million view on YouTube so far, she also stormed onto the top selling artists list with 3.1 million albums sold in 2009. Good for her, she has a wonderful voice. 2009 Top Selling Artists RANK Name Name 1 Michael Jackson 8,286,000 2 Taylor Swift 4,643,000 3 The Beatles 3,282,000 4 Susan Boyle 3,104,000 5 Lady Gaga 2,813,000 6 Andrea Bocelli 2,668,000 7 Michael Buble 2,280,000 8 Eminem 2,166,000 9 Carrie Underwood 1,895,000 10 Black Eyed Peas 1,881,000 Source: The Nielsen Company

When we visited Yellowstone this summer, they told us we were on top of a volcano, but it's a little hard to believe until you see something like this. Yellowstone Association E-Newsletter January 2010 Scientists have confirmed the existence of a magma plume under Yellowstone that fills a magma chamber 20 percent larger than previous estimates. Using a network of 150 seismographs that recorded seismic waves from earthquakes around the world a s they passed over an area extending from Missoula, Montana, to Evanston, Wyoming, a team of scientists was able to create a first-of-its-kind three-dimensional image of the plume. Recent scientific debate has focused on whether volcanoes such as Yellowstone were created by magma plumes-fingers of molten rock rising from deep in the Earth-or from shallow pockets of magma. The research, which involved scientists from Utah, Massachusetts, Michigan, Norway, Taiwan, and Switzerland, not only confirms the existence of a plume, but also indicates it...

I love a cappella singing anyway and so when a friend recommended that I listen to this group called the Voca People I was interested. They are way more than any simple a cappella singing group, they are amazing. They sound like a complete orchestra & chorus combined. They are all over YouTube with 4-5 million views of this video .

I had never heard of the Atticus Circle or it's founder Anne S. Wynne until the other day when a LGBT (Lesbian Gay Bi-sexual Transgender) employee support group in Cisco (my employer) sent me an invitation to join a discussion about... "the value and process of recruiting our straight allies to our LGBT Employee Resource Groups" As a matter of fact, I didn't even know that Cisco had a LGBT employee resources group. I don't know whether the LGBT lifestyle is biological or social, but I know for sure that it isn't for me. I also believe that unfair discrimination against anyone, be they individuals or couples, is wrong. To me the "golden rule" is basically a law of physics. Every person should always be treated with love and respect, no exceptions, ever. So I look for a logical solution to this dilemma. There is a simple solution to non-discrimination with respect to LGBT lifestyles. It's called civil union. Properly designed, civil union gives ...