I happen to be one of those who hates winter with a passion and suffers from SAD (seasonal affective disorder). So, November is always far from a happy time of year for me. But November 2016 was an especially bleak month and the misery lingered on and has now reached a climax.

AT COP22, the UN Climate Change organisation, it was reported that the last 5 years have been the hottest on record, the polar ice-caps are shrinking further and sea-levels are rising. In that same month Trump was elected US President and was bound to pull the USA out of any climate change agreements. Trump, a lying, boasting, arrogant, sexist racist was now in supreme power over the Republican Party, Congress and able to stuff the Supreme Court with reactionaries.

Noam Chomsky, the world’s leading public intellectual, has described the American Republican Party as “the most dangerous organisation in world history” and he is surely right. The Nazis killed millions, ISIS can kill thousands, but Trump’s Republican Party, with the President’s finger on the nuclear button, and in full denial of climate change, has the power to bring our fragile world to an end.

Now we have Putin boasting of having the ultimate weapon, an intercontinental ballistic missile which can dance around any anti-missile system. Trump will be constitutionally incapable of dodging the challenge of beating that.  He must already be tweeting NASA to demand a bigger and better weapon than Putin’s. So now we have two boasting, power-hungry maniacs who make little Kim Jong Il look very small fry, indeed.

 

This is my 80th winter and the bleakest of them all.