Good Monday morning, everyone. We have some nice, bright sun but it is only in the mid 30s. The weather people are waffling on possible snow but most still have a bit in the forecast. The questions are whether, when and how much which no one is consistently predicting. What had been predicted, as late as yesterday, for Tuesday night into Wednesday is now pushed back to Wednesday into Thursday.

Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars posted this article today. I love the video she links to and wish dearly that more of us would tell politicians that our city, or county, or state and or nation is not for sale. My favorite phrase when a news story features someone who pays some outlandish price for something is "more money than brains." Even purchasers of works of art or antiques elicit that response from me. Needles to say, I am not a passionate collector of anything. But to spend those amounts in a losing bid for office?? Worse, how many spent unfathomable amounts and won? We have a county trustee who did just that and it was her own money. Mom's thoughts were even more cynical than mine. She wonders how much they expect to get from those investments if successful. Worse the past election 'cost' something just north of $4 billion. If this is the best government money can buy we have all been snookered.

This article at Alternet strikes several chords here. Mom's previous doctor had prescribed one of the various osteoporosis drugs some time ago. (Not one mentioned in the article or associated, as yet, with broken bones.) By the time the news stories surfaced about the increased incidents of major bone breakage among women who had been on the drugs for five or more years, she had changed doctors and she went into her last physical with a few questions about the drugs--particularly whether she really needed it and whether it was effective. The first doctor had put her on the drug before she had even had a bone scan to determine whether she had a problem. Given that mom had never had a baseline bone scan, I wondered how the first test could even be used to determine bone loss. That was never explained. She has since had at least one more bone scan which yielded the same readings as the first. So, did the drug prevent bone loss? Or, did it have no effect at all? We have concluded that the first doctor simply, as a matter of course, put Mom on the drug without any clear indication that there was a real need. But it seems that too much of our modern medicine is of dubious necessity. Which is why I am a thoroughly skeptical medical minimalist.