We began our look at predictions for 2013 on Monday by admitting an ugly truth: that if you want to bat 1.000 on these, you just need to pick a bunch of horrible stuff. Famine? That's a lock. War? You bet.

I don't make New Year's resolutions. I surrender to every lazy, venial backsliding tendency lurking in my insufficient character. But they make sense for a lot of people. Not just in that that Dale Carnegie "winning friends and influencing people" way, but in the sense that they act as a bulwark against every inexorable, cruddy force surrounding us.