Battening down the hatches. That's what America and much of the rest of the world seem to be doing today, in an eerie re-enactment, though to much less of a degree, of what America and the world did in the 1930s. The result then wasn't very pretty. The result now is unknown.
The New Year's execution by Saudi Arabia of the Shiite cleric Sheikh Nimr Baqir al-Nimr was a deliberate provocation.
Engineers who design computerized products and services seem to have an almost fanatical determination to avoid using plain English.
It is understandable when complicated processes require complicated operations. But when the very simplest things are designed with needless complications or murky instructions, that is something else.
One thing that's striking about the presidential race, which, finally, officially begins soon, is how much the race has been shaped by Barack Obama. The course of the contests for both the Republican and Democratic nominations would be inconceivable absent the course of the Obama presidency.
Each year, "The McLaughlin Group," the longest-running panel show on national TV, which began in 1982, announces its awards for the winners and losers and the best and the worst of the year.
Rereading my list of 39 awardees suggests something about how our world is changing.
Remember 5-year-old Sophie Cruz?
He has been her meal ticket into national politics. He has been the sex predator in the White House whom she ruthlessly covered for. He has been her own personal dog in heat.
How shall we remember 2015? Or shall we try to forget it?
On Jan. 1, 2002, the day that euro coins and banknotes entered into circulation, my column, "Say Goodbye to the Mother Continent," contained this pessimistic prognosis:
Fifty-one years ago the Supreme Court handed down its one-person-one-vote decision, requiring that within each state congressional and legislative districts must have equal populations.
Simple maps can teach a lot. Presidential election maps show at a glance where the nation was at four-year intervals beginning in 1824, when popular voting (of a very restricted sort) became established. John Quincy Adams lost that vote but won the White House anyway in the House of Representatives.
Historians and archivists call our times the "digital dark ages." The name evokes the medieval period that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire, which led to a radical decline in the recorded history of the West for 1000 years. But don't blame the Visigoths or the Vandals. The culprit is the ephemeral nature of digital recording devices. Remember all the stuff you stored on floppy discs, now lost forever? Over the last 25 years, we've seen big 8-inch floppies replaced by 5.25-inch medium replaced by little 3.5-inch floppies, Zip discs and CD-ROMs, external hard drives and now the Cloud -- and let's not forget memory sticks and also-rans like the DAT and Minidisc.
Biography is one way -- often the most vivid way -- in which people understand history. The beautifully written biographies of Franklin Roosevelt that rolled off the presses and rose in the bestseller lists in the 1950s and 1960s created a template in which the New Deal was central to American history. It was the culmination of what happened before the 1930s and the model for what should and would happen next.
If you think “The Art of the Deal” was a yuuuuuuuuuuge success — and it was — just wait until Donald Trump comes out with his latest masterpiece, “The Art of the Schlong.”
In “The Art of the Deal,” the real estate mogul tutors budding young mogul wannabes on how to make deals so that they, too, can build giant glass skyscrapers emblazoned with their names in gold.
When driving on treacherous roads, guardrails are useful. If you fall asleep or maybe you're just a bad driver, guardrails may prevent you from going off a cliff.
Some observations on the 2016 presidential race as we head into the dark period, i.e., the two weeks of Christmas and New Year's holidays in which no one has ever dared, at least in the past, to conduct any polls. Those of us who pick over poll results will have to fly blind until the week starting Jan. 4.
"I worry greatly that the rhetoric coming from the Republicans, particularly Donald Trump, is sending a message to Muslims here ... and ... around the world, that there is a 'clash of civilizations.'"
The political left has been trying to run other people's lives for centuries. So we should not be surprised to see the Obama administration now trying to force neighborhoods across America to have the mix of people the government wants them to have.
Donald Trump likes to call people "stupid." And/or "loser."
