Wednesday--

Bread baking day and I hope it stays dry long enough for me to get a good look at the gardens. The weather people have predicted hit-and-miss showers with more overnight. I hope their predictions for early next week come true: dry and cooler.

Echidne of the Snakes has a good discussion on the Republican notion that increasing consumer choice would result in lower health care costs. It won't work for the costs that are really driving the increase. She didn't mention another reason their strategy won't work: the cost structures are too opaque and getting accurate information is very difficult. The Republican strategy isn't so much designed to empower consumers as it is to enrich the pharma/medical industry. But that isn't new. After all, the bastardized system we now have simply created a captive population who had to buy insurance (or pay a fine for the privilege of not buying) and then guaranteed the profits of the insurance companies on top of that. Are we, as a society, so sick that providing adequate health care will bust individual and national budgets? Or have we been convinced by the health care industry (or, as some bloggers call it, the sick care industry, that we need more of their services than we really do? Or has that industry followed the same pattern that education has and raised their costs into the stratosphere because they know the ultimate consumer has no way to realistically judge the cost/benefit values of their product and a third party pays anyway. Hummm--maybe a combination of all three.

Thursday--

Oh, well. My plans to do some gardening have run head long into another bout of rain which is coming in earlier than predicted. Update: My plans have been reworked by Mother Nature a bit more. The rain came with very nasty high winds which have battered my bean towers. One is listing at about 30* so I think it prudent to take it down along with sunflowers that are part of the support system. Mom suggested keeping the seed heads and attaching them to some of the stakes for the goldfinches. Sounds like a good idea. Won't happen today and maybe not tomorrow since this same weather is supposed to last through Saturday.

Another good entry in the "how women are erased from history" file.

We laughed all the way through this article but there is nasty flavor underneath. We have noted for some time that Trump is hardly unique in this crazy world of ours. He isn't even unique in American history. But I think the unstated truth is in the title: The Globalization of Trump. What we are seeing is a reaction from those millions who have been left behind and worse off by globalization.

Oh, yes, the costs to the community of having Walmart as a neighbor. This is a cost not mentioned in Cheap: the High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell and Lorna Raver.