To begin on a happy note, the world didn’t end this year. Dec. 21 came and went without a sign of the Four Horsemen, leaving the Mayans (or rather their ancestors) with egg all over their faces.

It just goes to show the perils of prediction — but why would we let that deter us? Nobody is keeping score. So, instead of the usual trek through the events of the past year, why don’t we use this yearender to examine the entrails of recent events for portents of the future?

Like, for example, the vicissitudes of the Arab revolutions over the past 12 months. On one hand, there were the first truly free elections in modern Egyptian history. On the other hand, judges inherited from the old regime dismissed the lower house of Parliament on a flimsy pretext, and then the Islamist president retaliated by ramming through a new constitution that entrenched conservative “Islamic” values against the will of more than a third of the population. Is this glass half full or half empty?

Read Here – Japan Times