Bob's Blog

Jenny Zhang shares with us at My Modern Met the top fifty photos of 2015.





Go here to see the other 48.

Dave Barry writes a hilarious piece in the Miami Herald remembering 2015 as the worst year on record. He remembers month by month. For example, JANUARY:

In Paris, two million people march in a solidarity rally following the horrific terrorist attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo.

Eyebrows are raised when not a single top U.S. official attends, but several days later, Secretary of State John Kerry arrives in France with James Taylor, who — this really happened — performs the song You’ve Got a Friend. This bold action strikes fear into the hearts of terrorists, who realize that Secretary Kerry is fully capable, if necessary, of unleashing Barry Manilow.

FEBRUARY

… NBC suspends Nightly News anchor Brian Williams after an investigation reveals inaccuracies in his account of being in a military helicopter under fire in Iraq. “Mr. Williams did not actually come under fire,” states the network. “Also technically he wasn’t in a helicopter in Iraq; it was a Volvo station wagon on the New Jersey Turnpike. But there was a lot of traffic.” A contrite Williams blames the lapse on post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from killing Osama bin Laden.

...In business news, troubled retailer RadioShack files for bankruptcy, citing the fact that in the past six years, the chain’s 4,000 stores had made a nationwide total of one sale, that being a home email server purchased by Hillary Clinton.

In the Super Bowl,

The most surprising play comes at the end of the game, when the Seahawks, on second and goal with 26 seconds left and Marshawn Lynch, who is basically a UPS truck only harder to tackle, in the backfield, elect to throw a pass, which is intercepted. After the game Seattle Coach Pete Carroll defends his decision to pass. He is immediately hired as a strategic consultant by the Jeb Bush campaign.

MARCH

Abroad, Russian President Vladimir Putin mysteriously vanishes from public view for 10 days. It is later revealed that he was training customer-service representatives for Comcast.


APRIL

… there is troubling news from Baltimore, where the death of an African-American man in police custody touches off a conversation on race that lasts several days, resulting in 250 arrests and extensive property damage. The Rev. Al Sharpton rushes to the scene but is unable to prevent things from eventually calming down.

Elsewhere on the political front, Hillary Clinton declares her candidacy for president and sets out to demonstrate that she is a regular human by riding to Iowa in a custom van driven by Secret Service agents.

In other journalism news, Rolling Stone apologizes for a discredited story about an alleged rape at a college fraternity and announces that it has disciplined its lead fact-checker, Brian Williams.

...Abroad, Djoomart Otorbaev resigns as the prime minister of Kyrgyzstan, citing an inability to get business cards with everything spelled correctly.

Read much more here.

Thomas Sowell writes in National Review,

More than anything else, 2015 has been the year of the big lie. There have been lies in other years, and some of them pretty big, but even so 2015 has set new highs — or new lows.

This is the year when we learned, from Hillary Clinton’s own e-mails, after three long years of stalling, stone-walling, and evasions, that Secretary of State Clinton lied, and so did President Barack Obama and others under him, when they all told us in 2012 that the terrorist attack in Benghazi that killed the American ambassador and three other Americans was not a terrorist attack, but a protest demonstration that got out of hand.

“What difference, at this point, does it make?” as Mrs. Clinton later melodramatically cried out, at a Congressional committee hearing investigating that episode.

First of all, it made enough of a difference for some of the highest officials of American government to concoct a false story that they knew at the time was false.

It mattered enough that, if the truth had come out, on the eve of a presidential election, it could have destroyed Barack Obama’s happy tale of how he had dealt a crippling blow to terrorists by killing Osama bin Laden (with an assist from the Navy’s SEALS).

Had Obama’s lies about his triumph over terrorism been exposed on the eve of the election, that could have ended his stay in the White House. And that could have spared us and the world many of Obama’s disasters in the Middle East and elsewhere around the world. That is why it matters, and will continue to matter in the future.

Lying, by itself, is obviously not new. What is new is the growing acceptance of lying as “no big deal” by smug sophisticates, so long as these are lies that advance their political causes. Many in the media greeted the exposure of Hillary Clinton’s lies by admiring how well she handled herself.

Lies are a wall between us and reality — and being walled off from reality is the biggest deal of all. Reality does not disappear because we don’t see it. It just hits us like a ton of bricks when we least expect it.

The biggest lie of 2014 — “Hands up, don’t shoot” – had its repercussions in 2015, with the open advocacy of the killing of policemen, in marches across the country. But the ambush killings of policemen that followed aroused no such outrage in the media as any police use of force against thugs.

Nor has there been the same outrage as the murder rate shot up when the police pulled back, as they have in the past, in the wake of being scapegoated by politicians and the media. Most of the people murdered have been black. But apparently these particular black lives don’t matter much to activists and the media.

No one expects that lies will disappear from political rhetoric. If you took all the lies out of politics, how much would be left?

If there is anything that is bipartisan in Washington, it is lying. The most recent budget deal showed that congressional Republicans lied wholesale when they said that they would defund Obamacare, Planned Parenthood, and other pet projects of the Democrats.

As for 2015, good riddance. We can only hope that people who vote in 2016 will have learned something from 2015’s disasters.

Tomorrow is Election Day in many parts of the United States. Seth Godin reminds us that

Every day, people vote.

They vote for brands, for habits, for the people they trust. They vote for where they will place their attention, their money and their time.

The big difference is that you can do just fine in today's election without winning a majority of votes. Most elections aren't winner-take-all.

The people at the edges, the special interest groups and the weird ones matter a lot when you don't need a landslide to make a difference.

The magic is this: As soon as you stop acting like you need every single vote, you can earn the votes of the people you seek to serve.