Last December 2015 while some waited for the holidays to bring them “good cheer” and were consumed with the media hype in regards to Trump, or just waited for the year to end, many African Americans and Civil Rights Activists were more concerned with the outcomes of grand jury indictment decisions and jury trials held in December concerning African Americans who lost their lives in 2014 and 2015 at the “alleged” hands of police officers.
  Twenty-Five year old Freddie C. Gray Jr., was arrested on April 12, 2015 in Baltimore and while being transported by a police van to jail fell into a coma and died April 19, 2015 from “injuries to his spinal cord.”  On December 21, 2015 a hung jury left the Gray family as well as Officer William Porter and the other five officers awaiting trial, in limbo until a retrial this June 2016.

It has been argued that nonviolent struggles to liberate occupied countries – such as West Papua, Tibet, Palestine, Kanaky and Western Sahara – have failed far more often than they have succeeded but that secessionist struggles (that have sought to separate territory from an existing state in order to establish a new one) conducted by nonviolent means have always failed. See 'Why Civil Resistance Works: The strategic logic of nonviolent conflict'. http://cup.columbia.edu/book/why-civil-resistance-works/9780231156820

Many years ago I dated a man who made lists for virtually everything. He even had the five- and ten-year plans all the business books of the era were touting. I jokingly called him List Man, and thought it was kind of quaint. Now in 2016 he’s well off and I’m not, and I’m beginning to think there was something to all his list making after all!

What we learn from Lists of Note is that people have been making lists for eons. The extremely varied lists show us that human beings have long tried to make sense of and order in the world and their lives. Most psychologists and psychiatrists agree that list making, unless it is compulsive, has a number of positive benefits.  Lists can clarify goals, organize time, tame chaos, and provide a road map for where we need to go. The act of making lists represents hope and possibility, and there is great satisfaction checking items off our lists.

The Saudi mass beheadings on January 2 proved nothing new to a world that well knows Saudi Arabia is still a tribal police state with a moral code of medieval barbarity. Saudi Arabia is a Sunni-Muslim country that executes people for witchcraft, adultery, apostasy, and homosexuality (among other things). And the Saudi regime is perfectly willing to torture and kill a Shi’a-Muslim cleric for the crime of speaking truth to power, knowing that that judicial murder will inflame his followers and drive the region toward wider war. The Saudi provocation is as transparent as it is despicable, and yet the Saudis are held to no account, as usual. 

What if the very worst result of George W. Bush's war lies is that people stop taking seriously the danger of actual nuclear weapons actually falling into the hands of actual lunatics? Arguably the very worst result of Woodrow Wilson's lies about German atrocities in World War I was excessive skepticism about reports of Nazi atrocities leading up to and during World War II. The fact is that nuclear weapons are being recklessly maintained, built, developed, tested, and proliferated. The fact is that governments make mistakes, fail, collapse, and engage in evil actions.