It’s the end of another annus horribilis. Not for Anon, personally, though I will admit to a certain amount of melancholy. But, the rest of the world didn’t fare as well as even I did. There’s really no need to tick off the list; we all know where the problems are and continue to be. From Iraq to Afghanistan, from Dafur to Somalia, from Ukraine to the rest of the ‘Stans; the list just goes on and on.

At home, there’s the loss of habeus corpus and the general mucking about with the first 10 amendments to the Consitution, aka: the Bill o’ Rights. Evidently, Rights must be abrogated in order to preserve them (this goes along with the military philosophy used in Vietnam: you have to burn the village in order to save the village). As we search for the enemy, we can now look in the mirror to find him. For our fragile experiment of representational democracy it is ‘the darkest part of the longest night,’ and it’s time for clear-eyed honesty when looking into our souls for answers. (more…)

Well, I’ve been sitting on the sidelines for a while: watching and thinking about the world and the sentient creatures who occupy it. It’s funny what will set one off. It doesn’t have to be a huge occurrence. Sometimes it’s a trivial thing. For me it happened while the HB and I were channel surfing. We happened on to the Time “Person of the Year” show. It’s not something we’d ordinarily watch, but we were too lazy to click on.

The show revolved around the process that the Pooh-Bahs at Time magazine go through to pick their so-called person of year cover story. Now this ‘honor’ of dubious distinction has, in the past, been awarded to Hitler, Stalin and Wallace Simpson. So, it isn’t as if the ‘person’ has to be a good one. The criteria seem to revolve around who affected world the most in the year just ending and the year to come. (more…)