Year in View/Review

Madame M and Readers:

Good video.  The world needs considerable counterweight to the movement by corporations to gain control of the new precious resource:  clean drinking water.

At this year end, I thought a look back would be interesting.  While woefully incomplete and entirely random, here’s a list of 2014 dimly noted “importantes.”

40 million people came close to running out of water in Brazil.  (our insular-focused media probable barely or never told you).

The Islamic State group ran into all sorts of problems, as it was fated to.  When it started falling down on delivering electricity, repaired roads, and the like, the people started to get turned off by its repression.  Funny, someone might have mentioned that previously. :)

Scotland held a referendum that determined whether it remained part of the United Kingdom or became completely independent.  Voting was around 90%.  It stayed part of, by the way.

Voting in the US 2014 November elections averaged 37% of eligible voters, the lowest since WW2—when many voters were away because of the war.

Conservative George Will said these words:  “The 2003 invasion of Iraq, the worst foreign policy decision in U.S. history, coincided with mission creep (“nation building”) in Afghanistan.”

29 year old Brittany Maynard was successful in her quest to show, in retired professor John Hardwig’s words, “that the best death is not necessarily the one that can be postponed the longest.”

Conservative commentator Glenn Beck said this about the Eric Garner case: “How this cop did not go to jail, was not held responsible, is beyond me.  It’s obscene.  It’s grotesque.”

Somebody actually said it: Congress should randomize all its chamber seating so that people sit with those not like them.  Now, according to standard molasses in winter time response in DC, it will be 10 years before this good idea MIGHT be acted on. Lol.

The Republican-led House Intelligence Committee finished its Benghazi investigation, and concluded, like all the other investigations before it, that…there was nothing significant to report.

Those working the hardest, dirtiest, most dangerous, and most dead-end jobs that nobody wants, in the places nobody wants to be, got a reprieve from threat of deportation.

A U.N. mandatory periodic review of U.S. compliance with the 156 nation, 1984 Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment, cited the high incidence of US police brutality and shootings, the harsh conditions of imprisonment, and the severe interrogation methods used on detainees.  The review is ongoing.  Would seem the rest of the world has grown up, and we have regressed.  At the same time, neuroscientists released a report that says torture, even in the instances of no lasting physical harm, mentally damages the tortured person for life (sympathy for John McCain).  It also often leaves a mark on the torturer, as the documentary “The Act of Killing,” demonstrated.

In a body camera experiment in California, the use of force plummeted by 60 percent, and the number of complaints by 88 percent, because police and suspects “both knew that their actions would be observed by outsiders to the situation.”

How bitterly, tragically ironic that those policemen killed by the crazy murderer in New York were an Asian-American and Latino-American.

Net neutrality, Trans Pacific Partnership, and Ocean Acidification: Some of the most important, yet under-reported, issues this year.

ECONOMIST Roger Bezdek, a highly paid consultant to energy companies, was carted out by them as a “scientist,” to say that more CO2 in the atmosphere is actually a good thing because “trees will grow faster.”

Some failing, violent Philadelphia schools were turned around, not by adding even more security, but by stripping most of it away.  There is so much that can be said about that…

Even while many other indicators may not have been good, the worldwide rate of violence and mortality continued to go down.

Wanted to end my 2014 posts on an upbeat note. :)