Monday--

Warmer this morning than yesterday but still cold. The weather people say the temperatures should rise into the 50s by Thanksgiving Day when we should also see rain.  Should be warm enough to start melting some of the snow we got but not much. I hope for a bit of sun.

Can anyone else spell "bogus trumped up accusations designed to get the guy into U.S. hands and Guantanamo?"

Is this a real trade agreement and not a stealth take over of governments by the global financial/commercial interests? And how would such an agreement interact with the TPP, if The TPP ever gets implemented? Interesting how the TPP excludes China and this Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership excludes the U.S. Perhaps the countries involved in each should get together and come up with a deal that excludes both the U.S. and China.

Mother Jones dissects Hillary Clinton's definition of "middle class." And, yeah, she seems to have set a very high ceiling (a cathedral ceiling, actually) for her cut-off point--$250K.

Huge and pleasant surprise today: we filled up our gas tank for less than $2/gal. Haven't seen prices that low in ages.

Tuesday--

The warming continues today and a large part of the snow is melting. Hopefully enough will melt so I can get the bird bath cleaned up and refilled. I didn't have to shovel off the salt-pitted ice yesterday because it melted. I think it got a bit warmer than the weather people thought.

The more  stories I read like this one the more I am convinced that we have a culture of corruption in our large national and global companies. Unfortunately, if they manage to get the TTP and TTIP in place they may get a free pass to continue their bad behavior.

Ah, someone else is asking the kind of questions I have asked on the proposal (nebulous as it is) to keep temperature rise at or below 2C: is it too little, too late. A decade ago, when I first began reading on the subject, I looked up when we passed the 350ppm threshold so often cited. Back in the mid 1980s, for any who are curious. The question now is how do we adapt to the world we are creating because I doubt we have either the political will or the technology to reverse the process or the time.

This was likely to happen.  It was simply a question of who would be involved and when. Now the question is: where will it go from here.

Rebecca Gordon posting at Tomdispatch has an utterly depressing piece aptly titled Home, Sweet Kleptocracy: Kabul in America.