United States

Authored by Dave Barry, originally posted at The Miami Herald,

Sometimes we are accused - believe it or not - of being overly negative in our annual Year in Review. Critics say we ignore the many positive events in a given year and focus instead on the stupid, the tragic, the evil, the disgusting, the Kardashians.

OK, critics: We have heard you. This year, instead of dwelling on the negatives, we’re going to start our annual review with a List of the Top 10 Good Things That Happened in 2015. Ready? Here we go:

Submitted by David Stockman via Contra Corner blog,

After the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989 and the death of the Soviet Union was confirmed two years later when Boris Yeltsin courageously stood down the red army tanks in front of Moscow’s White House, a dark era in human history came to an end.

Although ISIS releases nearly 40 pieces of propaganda each and every day via the group’s sprawling network of production units located in at least a dozen countries, one person you don’t hear from very often is TIME magazine’s runner-up for “person of the year”, Bakr al-Baghdadi. 

One month ago, after a farcial year-long campaign to "destroy" ISIS, which achieved absolutely nothing but made the Islamic State grow bigger and stronger, culminating with the numerous terrorist attacks in the month of November, former CIA deputy director Michael Morell told Charlie Rose on PBS that the reason the US had never actually gone after the lifeblood of the ISIS regime, its oil supply chain, infrastructure and products, was because "we didn’t want to do environmental damage, and we didn’t want to destroy that infrastructure."

Back in 2012, the bullish thesis for US housing (the one everyone was hoping for, instead of the fake housing "recovery" driven by the parking of dirty foreign oligarch money in NYC triplexes aka the new Swiss bank account, the private equity distressed rental property bid, and bank subsidies courtesy of the delay in the foreclosure pipeline) was that all those millions of young Americans aged 18-34 would finally move out of their parents' houses and start households of their own.