The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis My rating: 4 of 5 stars I thought this book was very well written. Like any good story, I found it difficult to put down. It was very frustrating to see yet another venerable institution, the CDC, laid bare. If you a fan of big government (though some elements of the private for-profit sector do not fare well in this story either) you're going to be saddened to see how dysfunctional so many layers of government, not just federal, can be. "Political cover" is often more important than public health. Political appointees are selected for reason other than competence, and these appointees cannot be made to look bad, even though they are useless and not contributing to the solution. The sheer cowardice of our political class is depressing. Fortunately, there are some very smart people in the world who can get the right things done View all my reviews
The stink bugs are back this year. We had hardly any last year and today they have appeared in fairly large numbers on the screen porch, so far only on the outside thank goodness. Besides being ugly they are really bad for the crops around us (corn and soybeans mostly). I was hoping some bird took a liking to them, or maybe something else drove them away. Looks like that was just wishful thinking.