In The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, it is expressed thusly:
Now the New Year reviving old Desires.
The thoughtful Soul to Solitude retires,
Where the White Hand Of Moses on the Bough
Puts out, and Jesus from the Ground suspires.
Omar Khayyam could not even imagine the prosaic challenges confronting his 21st century Persian descendants, in a controversial agreement with a powerful nation in a part of the world unknown until four centuries after his death, along with nations of his world, but quite remote from his era. Iran has suspended its nuclear program, pending finalization of the agreement.
President Obama's plodding efforts of cooperative allied air support and U.S. ground assistance is eliciting success with the Iraqi army, to the point where...
Al Baghdadi has surfaced to ensure his prospective and actual minions that, despite it all, the nihilistic bloodletting of savagery and butchery will prevail.
Paul Ryan the new, young Republican Leader of the House of Representatives, has begun a practice that will continue to draw fire from his own party: The seeking of bipartisan cooperation to pass legislation that is beneficial to the nation at large.
Donald Trump continues his unimagined success in utilizing the underside of the U.S. psyche to feed his insatiable ego, thereby contributing to the deserved destruction of the Republican Party.
Hillary Clinton, after a tour-de-force, defensive appearance before a congressional committee intending to destroy her, skillfully is being guided through the dark alleys of manipulation toward the Democratic nomination for the presidency by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the single-minded Chair of the Democratic National Committee.
Meanwhile Bernie Sanders continues his dark horse campaign.
ISIS, stuck in the sands of the Middle East, sans air force, navy or proper army, has convinced the vulnerable ("politically" or otherwise) amongst us that ISIS is as powerful as Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, combined!
Local civilian policing organizations, concomitant with their correspondent judiciaries, in many parts of the country, have been exposed as practitioners of carryover sentiments from our sordid past of disequilibrium.
Europe is learning that the superfice of erasing borders and comingling coin do not resolve the centuries of exploitation of lesser-evolved cultures throughout the world.
China apparently is not noticing that, while it is attempting to manufacture yet more territory in mid-ocean, on the huge, dry chunk of the planet it already controls, unoccupied skyscrapers are all socked in by a contaminated air environment.
Vladimir Putin, after overplaying his hand and strong arm in Ukraine, is attempting to salvage Russia's holdings in Syria by further confusing the impossible complexity of that besieged country.
The whole world is learning that all of the intricate safeguards developed over the centuries to protect national secrets have all been undone in this cyber age. Since we are now learning everything about each other, might this presage a new era of international peace? Nah! For one brief moment of transition, we can at least pretend to have a,
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!
***** ***** *****
As hooded Old Year shuts the door,
The new, diapered babe takes the floor.
"I'll see ya, old man,
"Catch me, if you can!"
"Yeah, right; just don't slip on the gore!"
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