Time magazine named The Protester its 2011 "Person of the Year" because, for decades till recently, most protests "seemed ineffectual and irrelevant." That's just silly. You can always find resistance and, depending on how you judge, it's often relevant. The spirit of protest is indomitable and inspiring. Eruptions happen constantly, exactly when you don't expect them. That defines resistance: it shouldn't exist but it resists anyway. Often it's crushed but it didn't fail to happen because Time failed to deem it cover-worthy.

Add Kim Jong-Il to the year's already substantial fallen dictator list. Take your news from Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of Canada, or from Mayan temple walls. Look at the Arab Spring and the Occupy movement or the demise of Durban and Kyoto. These all point to a similar outlook for the year ahead: we are at the end of an era.

But, hey, whether we like it or not, it's at the end of things that what comes next is birthed. But first the hard labour.

Choosing Bank of Canada language, this is "the end of the 'debt super-cycle.'"

When the U.S. invaded Iraq, riding a pack of lies and monstrous manipulation of the entire U.S. elite, major news services, academics, and politicians from both "sides" of the spectrum lined up in a shameful cheerleading line and off they went to war. It was one of the most shameful chapters in the long history of shameful acts of U.S. imperial foreign policy.

It actually didn't take too long for dissenting voices to come out of the woodwork. The lies were exposed, the liars identified, the manipulation denounced.

But watching the sorry spectacle of media coverage of the tragic farce unfolding around Libya, one has to wonder if anyone will ever expose the lies and hubris that have run throughout this faux Arab spring.