Good sunny and cool Wednesday to you all.  Hope your day is going as well as mine is so far.  I want to cut and dry some mints today but I am waiting for a bit till the temperature hits 60 degrees.  Then I need to look at all my plants and water where needed.  The winds have been high even if the temps have been a bit cooler.  That dries things out almost as much as heat does.  I saw a fully open tomato blossom--my mouth is watering in anticipation.

So Gary (Indiana) may shrink in geographical size.  Or rather the inhabited portion will shrink while the rest goes "back to nature."  It can join a list of cities doing the same thing.  The city has lost about 25+% of its population over the last 40 or so years.

The AMA has decided to "recognize" obesity as a "disease" which I am sure will be a great boon for the medical/drug industry.  Think of how much more money they will get from pushing pills and surgery.  Think of the pass the food/agribusiness gets because the focus will be firmly on obese individuals not on the environmental/economic/social factors that contribute to the problem and which the drugs and surgery won't cure.  I think Ives, on whose blog I found the link, was right on target in her comment:

Yes, I know this is really about Big Pharma, but…obesity wasn’t common 40 years ago, we’ve had bad changes in diet, stress levels, and lots of weird stuff in the water in microdoses that interact in not well understood ways (and more hormones in food) but we are gonna pathologize it so doctors treat individuals rather than have us look at root causes?

Has anyone else noticed a bit of "inflation" in the stories on the NSA spying?  I seem to remember when this all started we were told that the spying prevented one "major" terrorist attack.  Then the count rose to twenty and now it is "more than fifty" world wide.  But of course none of this will be openly documented in unambiguous and reliable ways.

The Contrary Farmer has an amusing and somewhat whimsical little post this morning.  But an interesting and more serious aspect is his observation that in the midst of an explosion of obesity we have never had so many marketing outlets for food.  And so many occasions for us to pig out.

The latest search for Jimmy Hoffa has ended.  He is still missing.