Saturday.

Oh, it is CHI-I-I-I-I-LY this morning.  Only 20F.  We expect snow--a bit more than the flurries we had every now and then over the last week.

I have become very skeptical of medicine as practiced today.  I am always amused by stories like this AARP piece on the "10 medical tests you should avoid."  I laughed at the last entry: the yearly physical.

So Russia might blame the U.S. for its drug abuse problem.  Russia is unhappy because our troop withdrawal is also cutting funds to "fight" the opium production in Afghanistan and they are the nearest market for the product.  In truth the multi-billion dollar effort was marginally effective and were efforts to shift farmers to other crops.  Those other crops never provided the income opium poppies did and, being good capitalists, the farmers followed the money. Hitting the production of the arrangement hasn't worked in Afghanistan.  On this side of the world, South and Central American countries are unhappy because the U.S. is the market for the drugs produced in their territories and they feel that the U.S. should address the demand side of the equation instead of demanding they disrupt their societies/economies by crushing the production side.  Perhaps we need some out-of-the-box thinking.

This little piece on education "reform" raises an interesting point.  We keep hearing from our politicians and pundits how important education and yet teachers, overwhelmingly women, get very little respect and very much blame for whatever ills those politicians and pundits.

I have been reading about the drought in Brazil for some time now.  Evidently it is getting somewhere beyond serious.  However, I remember a Scientific American piece I read about 30 years ago each time I read another installment in the continuing Brazilian drought saga.  The Amazon rain forest is connected to the Northwest cold climate rainforest in this country.  Moisture streams between the two carried by the wind currents and they feed off each other.  The drought in the west this year extended over Washington and Oregon as well as California.

Amazing how religious freedom for some means religious repression for others.