2014 Year End Review

2014 was the year of the polar vortex, ISIS, Ebola, planes in Asia vanishing, do-it-yourself immigration reform, plunging oil prices,  a roaring stock market and an economy that finally seemed to get its legs back after a six year swoon.  As I do every year, I will write a year end review of a year that started in the deep freeze (both weather wise and economically speaking) and ended up quite nicely.

Photograph of the Year.
This year, I decided to add a new category, limiting it to photos I actually take myself with my own camera or cell phone.  I loved this one that I took one morning on the way to work because it captured the headaches caused by the severe winter.   It was an interesting photo because it was taken in the morning and so it is not likely that alcohol was involved in this little mishap.  No one was hurt and I couldn't help but smirk a little as I imagined the conversation that would inevitably take place with her husband later in the day as she explained exactly how this happened.

Book of the Year (Fiction)
I am going to run against the crowd on this one.  Many "Best of" lists picked All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, the story of the intersecting lives of a young German soldier and a blind French girl during the closing days of WWII.  It certainly was worthy of its accolades, but my pick for the most enjoyable read of 2014 was The Unwitting by Ellen Feldman.   Set during the Cold War, it explores the separate lives we lead and secrets we keep even from our spouses.  The most overhyped and disappointing book of the year was The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell which I thought to be hard to follow, dull, and just plain weird.

Book of the Year (Nonfiction)
I may be criticized for picking a "chick book" but I liked This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett.  The title is a bit misleading because it is only partially about her marriage (and her failed one), but in large part a her memoir of her writing career and her struggles and the indignities she suffered with dignity:

And I kept on doing the impossible.  I moved home and became a waitress at a T.G.I. Friday's, where I received a special pin for being the first person at that particular branch of the restaurant to receive a perfect score on her waitress exam.  I was told I would be a shift leader in no time.  I was required to wear a funny hat.  I served fajitas to people I had gone to high school with, and I smiled. 
I did not die.

Ms.  Patchett throughout was mostly able to look at her own predilections and idiosyncrasies and accept them at a level most of us struggle with.

The other nonfiction work I liked was The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison.  This is a collection of essays written by a medical actor that assists students in their diagnosis in medical school.  It explores how we are able to (or should) feel another person's pain and asks interesting questions around that and the limits to it.

Film of the Year
You can wholly discount my choice in this category since my filmgoing this year was grossly inadequate, but I liked Wild.  But as a devotee of Thoreau, I have an affinity for films or books in which people turn to nature and a basic survivalist lifestyle to gather themselves after the civilized world has overwhelmed them.  Conversely, I thought Interstellar was highly overrated, implausible, overintellectualized.....and way too long.   It badly needed the editing crew to go after it with shears.

Band of the Year
This category was the hardest to pick.  While I thought the film industry gave us slim pickings, the music business gave us a number of fresh new sounds and I don't remember a year with more good music to choose from.   The Black Keys, the Arctic Monkeys, Florence + the Machine, Arcade Fire, and Hozier all came out with some great innovative sounds.

But the group that I liked the most this year was Fitz and the Tantrums.  Their album More Than Just a Dream is one of the best albums I've heard in several years.  Out of My League and The Walker are great songs and the style borrows some from the 60's, 70's and 80's.  And the best song on the album is Moneygrabber (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3WRXYYBwRA&list=RDO3WRXYYBwRA#t=0).  It is hard to listen to that song and not hear the echo of the snappy beat of the old Jackson 5, especially if you listen to the background singers.

Concert of the Year
I didn't go to a lot of concerts this year, and missed quite a few that I would have liked, but I got at least two checked off my bucket list---Moody Blues and Earth, Wind & Fire.   But the one that I enjoyed the most was Jackson Browne.   Like the Bob Seger concert I attended last year, I found that Jackson Browne hasn't slipped at all since I first saw him in 1977,   He performed for nearly three hours and while he played some of his newer stuff, his versions of Running on Empty, The Pretender, and Doctor My Eyes resonated as much or more we me as those tunes did then.

Biggest Myth Buster of the Year
Fracking.   Predictions about peak oil, like Paul Ehrlich's predictions of the 70's that the planet would experience mass starvation because of overpopulation, the Chicken Little prognosticators have whiffed again with their predictions, vastly underestimating the power of markets and innovation to improve human existence.   While certainly the slowdown in demand for China accounted for some of the price slide, the advent of fracking and vertical drilling has had real impact on both making the US less energy dependent and the huge drop in energy prices.  Of course, these are developments that occurred without a Big Government department organized around them.  

All in all, 2014 was a good year for literature, a weak year for films, and a great year for music.  And it is a year I learned to be a little grateful for the positives---a strengthening economy and a fall in oil prices.  Moreover, I learned to be grateful for the things that DIDN'T happen.  Again, there was no terrorist attack on US soil.  There was no Ebola outbreak.   And despite the polar vortex, hell did not freeze over, although there were days it felt like it might.

Here's to a healthy, happy, prosperous 2015.

A Coherent Foreign Policy

Now that the Obama administration has, without precondition, opened diplomatic relationships with the brutal Castro dictatorship in Cuba, wouldn't the next logical step be to do the same with the DPRK?

Within days of the warm hug extended to Raul and Fidel, UN Ambassador Samantha Power called North Korea a "living nightmare," that it holds 120,000 people prisoners.  The Assistant Secretary General for Human Rights at the UN stated that North Korea is "a totalitarian system that is  brutally enforced denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association." 

totalitarian system that is characterized by brutally enforced denial of the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, as well as the rights to freedom of opinion, expression, information and association."

Hmmmmmm.  Maybe I'm missing something.   Can't much the same be said for Cuba?  It still holds 57,000 political prisoners, and denies all of the same rights, yet the United States is ready to roll out the red carpet, welcome the Castro boys to the family of nations and extend trade credits.

Maybe I just don't understand the nuances of modern diplomacy.  Is it just a matter of degree?  Is it a Western hemisphere thing?  An immigration policy thing?  An Asian thing?  A nuclear weapons thing?

It sure isn't a liberty thing.  I see no discernible difference between these two regimes on that score.  
If we follow the Obama logic for its unilateral movement on Cuba, then we should be opening up an embassy in Pyongyang  and loosening up trade restrictions because surely our policy toward North Korea "wasn't working."  This is the 3rd generation of North Korean dictators retaining their brutal grip on the north end of the Korean peninsula and nothing has changed, except North Korea now has nuclear weapons and it is still threatening, still proliferating, still brutalizing its own people.

I wish somebody would explain this all to me.

The Beat Goes On

I confess that I have never quite seen a foreign policy grand strategy like this one.   In keeping with our posture of turn our backs on our friends and offer unilateral concessions to our foes, the Obama administration once again, without consulting Congress, grants the Cuban tyranny legitimacy by re-establishing diplomatic relations.

This follows the "reset" button with Russia in which we threw our allies Poland and the Czech Republic under the bus by suddenly scrapping missile defense in Europe and then promising Medvdev "flexibility" after the elections.    After those warming gestures, we were treated to Russian tanks in the Crimea.  

Then we loosened up sanctions against Iran, hoping that gesture would show that we are acting in good faith and that showing them warmth would coax them into giving up their nuclear program.  Of course, the Iranians pocketed the concession, and now the NEW deadline is July 1, 2015.  Don't hold your breath, fellas.

Yet, we continue to harangue Israel on the settlements and have even considered sanctions against them.  No such remonstrations against Cuba for its human rights violations.  Hmmmm.

Now, without any concessions on elections, a free press, or human rights or any of the things we at least used to care about, the Obama administration is restoring diplomatic relations, reasoning that "what we have been doing for 50 years wasn't working."  It actually did work.  Cuba was isolated and largely contained.  With the mortality tables telling us that the Cuban government is about to transition the octogenarian Castro brothers out of office, the Obama administration shrewdly deemed it a wise policy to open up the economic floodgates to ensure that the pesky island stays in Communist hands for another 50 years.  Indeed, less than 24 hours after Obama's announcement, Raul was affirming his country's commitment to Communism.

But, I've been accused of taking an unduly harsh view of Team Obama's acumen with respect to foreign policy matters.   So let's look at the bright side and the possible benefits of this new relationship with Cuba.  In particular, I thought of a few reasons why Obama and some others might welcome this development.

• Having gotten the hang of ruling by fiat, Obama might want some ideas on how to keep a regime going for 50 years.
• Cuba does have universal health care, so he might be eager to learn how they got their website to work.
• Jerry Reinsdorf will no longer have to pay money under the table to get quality ballplayers on his roster.
• Another nice, warm place to golf.
• Ideas for best practices for state owned enterprises.
• Maybe another Mariel boatlift to dovetail with the administrations's immigration policies.
• And, of course, the cigars.

It is a sad reflection that on the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, this administration's policies have gone a long way toward rescuing expansionist Russia and Communism  out of the dustbin of history.