Good morning, everyone. It was a lazy weekend. Cool and at times a bit wet. Not enough to make up for the rain deficit, though. And the temperature roller coaster continues. We woke to 60+ degrees this morning and expect something near 70. It won't stay long though--snow and highs in the high 30s by Thanksgiving. Perhaps we should rename the 'holiday' Black Friday Eve. Or maybe that won't be necessary since at least two major retailers (Sears and Kmart) have announced that they will be open Thanksgiving day. I always got a laugh out of the yearly campaigns by some Christians to 'put Christ back in Christmas.' They lost that battle over a century ago. But then the Church of Commerce has successfully taken a page out of the early Christian playbook--they have co-opted a popular holiday and made it their own as the Church of Commerce has done with all our other holidays. And its only commandment and sacrament is to buy something--a lot of something whether you need it or not.

MSNBC had this story this morning that I find interesting. US authorities have arrested a Malaysian man whose laptop contained a large amount of sensitive information from, among other sites, the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. The author asks what we might expect from governments like China and North Korea if a single individual can hack supposedly secure sites like a Federal Reserve Bank and defense contractors. Actually, I have been reading about some other even more disturbing events in cyberspace lately. For instance, there were at least two periods when data streams from the US was redirected through China thanks to an implanted virus. That data included Federal Government, banking, military and other supposedly secure and encrypted streams. I think it was late last year that one of the Baltic countries experienced a serious cyber attack that shut down their government, banking, and other networks. Though the attack was routed through Russia, no one was ever able to prove who actually was responsible.