The Definition of Insanity and Writing Into a Vacuum; Time for a Reboot

Psychologists say the definition of insanity is to attempt to do the same thing over and over again, but expect different results. I like to think I am not insane.

Friends said one cannot start in 2015 a general news and opinion blog based on rationality and hope to find an audience. I thought I could prove them wrong by attempting to write fairly high-quality pieces that I hoped would find readers and followers. Well, I was wrong and they were right. The numbers I am generating for this site is pitiful. General news and opinion (though with binary biases and slant) can be found on myriad other websites that readers already regularly peruse or subscribe. Niche is really the only way to go. With that in mind, I will be starting this blog and website over from scratch with a narrow theme that will focus like a laser beam. This niche topic is derived from the posts that have received the most views and likes, so it makes sense to serve this audience that is evidently not finding this content elsewhere.

See you here again in a couple weeks with the niche reboot. Thanks.

Fake Schools, Real Babies and the American Dream

The Feds busted a few “schools” that enrolled students, mostly from Asia, giving them I-20 student visas, but didn’t require the students to attend classes. In essence, the students were paying tuition for a visa to visit and then live in the US:

Feds: 3 collected millions in fraudulent school scheme

The silliest part of the article is when the Feds accuse the schools of being a national security threat because terrorists could be using these student visas as cover. Puhleazee. First, the students were mostly from China and Korea, which are hardly terrorist hotbeds. Second, any student issued an I-20 student visa has already gone through a vetting process by the US government and its law enforcement apparatus. If there were any suspected terrorists among the “student” applicants, then they would have been flagged and denied well before entry. This accusation is just another federal government smokescreen to make this fraud into something it’s not really about, and play security theater (which they love).

So what is it really about? It’s about money and people from overcrowded countries wanting to come chase this thing called the American Dream. These people feel it’s a human right to live where they want to live. For most of human history, people picked up and went wherever they wanted to start new lives. It’s only in the past century that nation-states have established strict rules and regulations at the borders to keep people out. And it doesn’t work very well still. Why? Because people don’t want to live on top of each other in super crowded conditions. South Korea is an advanced country with modern amenities, but it’s also really packed with people. And that includes even the countryside (I’ve been there). Koreans come to the US not because they’re fleeing any terrible conditions in Korea, except the lack of breathing room (physically and socially). This is even doubly so for Chinese, who live in a packed country where most people live on the eastern seaboard. Even though China has made great economic strides, many Chinese want to come to the US for the space, and the opportunity to one day own a house that is not physically attached to anyone else. That’s the real American Dream in 2015: some breathing room, as economically China and South Korea are on parity with the US these days.

Some Chinese are so driven to realize this dream that pregnant mothers arrange to come to the US to give birth so the child gets US citizenship. Recently some entrepreneurs offered services that arranged for a fee to bring Chinese women to the US to give birth but they were busted by the Feds who claimed this was fraud. How is it fraud? As far as I can see, the women and the entrepreneurs played by the rules. They came to the US and gave birth, and by US law, the baby gets citizenship. That’s the rules of the game, and they played it fair and square. If the Feds don’t like it, then change the law so not all babies born in the US are citizens, instead tie citizenship to the birth of the mother as many countries do. The companies offering these services should not be shut down and arrested, the fault is not in their business plan, the fault is in the structure of citizenship law itself. Change the law and don’t punish the entrepreneurs.

Studying Chinese (or pretty much any language) Will Not Get You a Job

If English is your native (or near native) language, then studying another language will not do anything to help you get a job. Unfortunately many students believed the mirage of learning a language as a false gateway to riches in a distant land, and thought spending a year or two (which is really isn’t enough to learn Chinese or most languages anyway) upping their language skills would make them more marketable. In fact, it doesn’t.

U.S. students losing interest in China as dream jobs prove elusive

You will spend a year learning basic Chinese and then realize there are quite literally millions of Chinese people who not only are native speakers of Chinese, but also know English way better than your Chinese will ever hope to be (remember most of them have been studying English diligently since kindergarten). The logic of most corporations is to hire locals in China and other countries, and not import American or British expatriates who will cost more anyway. In addition, local employees in China and other countries count as diversity hires, which ticks off another box on the corporate social responsibility factoid sheets.

Don’t study a foreign language because you think it will get you a job. In fact, it won’t help you at all. And I can attest to that from personal experience as well. If you want to study a foreign language because you dream of reading Dostoyevsky in the original Russian or understand Latin American cinema without subtitles, then that’s wonderful for your personal intellectualism. But don’t study a language under the delusion that it will help you get a leg up in the job market as you’ll only be disappointed.

Daylight Saving Times Should End (and the problem of political inertia)

Daylight saving time arrived this past weekend and 70 countries around the world sprang one hour forward for spring. John Oliver on Last Week Tonight did a nice, short piece on the history of daylight savings time and why it should “no longer be a thing”:

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver: Daylight Saving Time – How Is This Still A Thing? (HBO)

Besides debunking the myth of it starting to benefit farmers, the piece also illustrates why a social policy put into place 100 years ago is oftentimes not relevant today due to tectonic technological and societal change. Yet, it’s still with us due to political inertia. Once a law or policy is put on the books, it is very difficult for politicians to muster any will to remove these laws when they are no longer necessary or wanted. The Republicans talk the talk about freedom, but they use their power only to deregulate for corporations and businesses. Some of that is necessary (particularly for small businesses), but why don’t they deregulate the policies that restrict individuals? Instead they go along with more laws regulating individuals, taking away the freedom to make choices, face consequences, and solve one’s own problems/issues (for example, Republicans have been major proponents for so-called “revenge porn” laws).

As for daylight savings time, why not just spring forward forever? Does anyone really enjoy sudden early darkness when we fall backward? Reset the time zones so sunrise is 6:30 or 7:00 AM, and let darkness fall later in the day. It’s self-evident that this change should be made, but political inertia won’t allow it. Every time a law gets passed, it’s hard to get rid of, so lawmakers should think hard before doing anything, and perhaps  spend their time undoing the damage to individual freedom that previous lawmakers have done. That would be progress, but instead we stand still in time’s past.

Same Old Story: Lack of Agency and Narrative Drives Young Men to the Extreme

A young immigrant man in New York was arrested at JFK Airport on his way to Syria to join ISIS:

In Brooklyn, Eager to Join ISIS, if Only His Mother Would Return His Passport

Aside from the comical implication of a mother taking away her son’s passport so he couldn’t join the world’s most notorious terrorist organization, the larger issue is what drives young men around the world to seek out and join ISIS (women also join but I believe their motivations are different from the men). The New York Times story sets up the subject as a kind of a “loser” relegated to a job chopping onions and tomatoes in a basement, while quietly seething about the permissive moral culture around him. The article posits that this combination led him to want to join ISIS, but I believe there is something else driving these men because not all of them were “losers and misfits.” The story broke yesterday that the so-called “Jihadi John” who ostensibly beheads captives for ISIS is a Kuwaiti who used to live in London with a middle class lifestyle. The NYT ran a video story a month ago of a Malaysian imam who enjoyed a good, stable life with the respect of his community, who left it all behind to join ISIS (and eventually died in the fighting):

The Jihadist In Our Family

They all came from different backgrounds but ended up in the same place fighting for an organization that most of us consider heinous and troglodyte. This is actually nothing new, but has happened throughout human history where men of fighting age (and some too young or old) go off and join an outfit fighting for a cause. And that’s the key here, it’s for a cause that has established a grand narrative at odds with the prevailing one (democratic capitalism in today’s world). All these men felt their life had little or no cause, and that their agency was limited to effect change. From a young age, we are taught that we can be anything we want but then when reaching adulthood, we realize that many of us will not be able to reach that rarefied air  where agency, wealth and power reside. Instead we can only reach a middling level for not everyone can reach the highest rung, even if we try our mightiest and best (not everyone can be above average). ISIS gives a sense of purpose to these men that they cannot or can no longer find in their home cultures/countries. There is no grand narrative for them to live out, no sense of higher purpose to achieve or strive for. Instead ISIS preys on this insecurity and provides a disturbingly twisted but attractive and romantic narrative. Young men in other countries rushed to join the Communist revolutions in Russia and China in the 20th century, even though it proved disastrous. ISIS does the same, and when ISIS fails (which it will), there will be some other grand narrative to take its place for young men to “escape” lives that they perceive to be without or with little meaning, agency or value.

Jeb Bush and the Failed Neo-Con Worldview

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, who is almost certainly running for President next year, made a self-styled major foreign policy speech outlining his vision. As the Washington Post pointed out in an insightful Venn diagram, most of his foreign policy team comes from the same circle that his father and brother ran in:

Jeb Bush’s Foreign Policy Team is Eerily Similar

There were practically no specifics in the speech except he would increase war spending, which is the last thing the US needs. The US war budget is already incredibly bloated and can easily be slashed, but that’s a subject for another column. Bush said he would be tougher and stronger than Obama in projecting US power, but what does that really mean? If one looks at his team of advisors, some names such as Paul Wolfowitz stand out. Wolfowitz is one of the prime architects and proponents of the 2003 Iraq invasion, which 12 years later can clearly be seen by any honest-minded observer as a complete disaster. That war wasted countless lives, from American soldiers to over 100,000 Iraqis. That war wasted well over $1 trillion from US taxpayers, which could have been used in so many other useful ways, or just given back to the people. That war took a relatively stable country with a dictator that posed no threat to anyone except its own people, and completely destabilized the region, helping give birth to ISIS today. How could anyone in his/her right mind want to give a team that blundered so badly another chance at the reins of foreign policy? Why is Wolfowitz given any media slots as a talking head except if it’s as a lesson of abject failure? The Neo-Cons are/were a bunch of idealists who believed in their own pie-in-the-sky fantasy world, but they’ve been proven wrong. It is unconscionable that Bush would want to make the same mistakes that his brother made, especially when he claims to want to be his own man.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150219_Jeb-Bush-and-Failed-Neo-Con-Worldview-Foreign-Policy.htm

Will We Enter a Digital Dark Age?

One of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Internet, Vint Cerf (co-inventor of the TCP/IP protocols), warns that most of the data being saved today in the cloud, USB drives, hard drives, discs, etc. will be inaccessible in 100 years due to advanced technology of the 22nd century making today’s technology obsolete. The 21st century will become a dark age due to all the data being lost.

Vint Cerf Warns of Digital Dark Age

Certainly a lot of data was lost during the transition from 3.5 inch floppies to CD-ROMs, and, yes, I know this from personal experience. But many of us learned that lesson and have become better stewards of our digital files, regularly backing them up and transitioning them from one new technology to the next. Surely some data will be lost along the way like a crumbling cookie, but it will be mostly the careless and ill-planned who will lose their digital past. Yes, technology available 100 years from now will be completely unusable with today’s ports and drives, but most of us who are responsible will make the necessary transfers along the way.

As for public data on the web, the Way Back Machine at Archive.org already copies and stores most well-known websites today. Researchers in the 22nd century will be able to see how Yahoo! looked in 1996 until its inevitable demise this century. On the marco level, so much is being archived that little will be lost. On the micro level, many individuals will lose their digital history but that will be their own fault for not preserving their past. And, in a sense, this is no different as it has ever been with failure to store film photographs and/or paintings in cool places and out of direct sunlight. The method of preservation changes, but ultimately it’s the human will and foresight that determines whether it will be saved for posterity.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150218_Vint-Cerf-Warns-of-Digital-Dark-Age.htm

Record Number of US Citizens Giving Up Citizenship

And the numbers of US citizens renouncing citizenship reached over 3,000 last year, even though the fees to do so went well over $2,000:

Americans Ditch Their Passports

Whenever you read the message boards to this type of story, the common reaction of US-based Americans is “good riddance” and “don’t let the door hit you on the way out.” This is a churlish, childish and counter-productive reaction. These Americans are not traitors, they are simply tired of double-taxation (yes, ironic, considering that is why the original colonists fought for independence). Americans are some of the only citizens in the world (though China is starting to do this as well) that pay taxes in their country of residence, and to the US government as well. Now, they do not have pay US taxes if their income is under about $95,000 but they still have to file and, for many, that is an expensive proposition. Many US expats are not bankers or financiers; instead many are teachers, middle managers for global companies or small business owners. They make well under the threshold but requiring them to hire an accountant (usually back in the US because there are few licensed CPAs overseas) means paying anywhere from $400 to $1000. That’s just unfair, and there should be a simpler way for these Americans such as a simple one-page waiver form to file.

In principle, when living overseas you are not using the services of the government so you should not be subject to taxation to one’s home country. Europeans are astounded to learn that Americans have to pay tax on their overseas salary. Then again, Europeans get national health insurance if they pay home taxes, while Americans get nothing except an order to pay and register for Obamacare.

It used to be $400 to renounce citizenship, and now it’s $2,400. There’s no reason for it to be that high except to fleece an about-to-be former citizen one last time. It should cost $40 to renounce citizenship, or even be free. It’s petty and tacky to charge so much for trying to leave a club. It bespeaks more about the crassness and coarseness of the US government than of the citizens trying to leave US behind for greener pastures elsewhere. Just let them go with minimum fuss, and let go of the currently vindictive system.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150213.htm

US Colleges Giving More Money to Foreign Students

American colleges are looking to provide more scholarship and grant money to foreign students, particularly from China, in order to economically diversify their international student population:

US Colleges Seek Economic Diversity Internationally

In the Associated Press article, there is only one reader comment at the bottom but it tells the other side of story, “what about the poor American students?” It probably sounds great in principle to give more money to poor students in other countries to study in the US, but considering how huge the student debt load is for American college students, one would think there would be some kind of uproar from US students to get a larger piece of the financial assistance pie. Instead, it doesn’t seem like any students are complaining perhaps because they figure they will be able to pay back all those loans one day after they find a well-paying job (good luck). American students at most US colleges and universities are a pretty cowed bunch when it comes to challenging their administrations on boondoggles and runaway spending on useless administrative and staff positions. It’s still a bit shocking that even money does not motivate them to speak out and question administrative decision-making. Perhaps because they see themselves as such transient populations that they will be gone soon enough before any substantive changes would be made. That is a pity. It may be noble to give more money (and precious seats at prestigious institutions like Harvard, Yale, Stanford, etc.) to foreign students, but American students could use more help as well. In essence, US college financial magnaminity should not come at the cost to US students who foot an ever-increasing tuition bill.

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150209.htm

Much Ado About Cumberpatch

British actor Benedict Cumberpatch had to utter a batch of mea culpas after saying Hollywood had a problem not casting enough “colored actors” in its movies:

Cumberpatch Apologizes for ‘Colored Actors’ Remark

If aliens from another planet deciphered our language they would wonder why it would make any difference where the adjectival modifier is placed: “people of color” or “colored people.” It’s a ridiculous semantic difference but the weight of connotation from historical usage hangs heavily over the latter but not the former. But, as someone from Britain, we cannot expect Cumberpatch to know every nuance and underlying connotative meaning behind a phrase that would seem innocuous to him. The incident says more about the people who are self-righteously lambasting Cumberpatch than it says anything about him (and the poor guy felt obliged to apologize profusely afterwards). Ironically the Americans calling him out for supposed insensitivity and racism actually revealed themselves to be culturally and globally ignorant. Do they really expect and believe that the connotative meaning of every English language phrase is the same around the world? They are the ethnocentric ones, not Cumberpatch. Their ignorance of language and its nuances is embarrassing (for them). These ignorants need to get a clue and buy a book like this:

English to English: The A to Z of British-American Translations

Cheers…

Originally posted: http://www.mccarthyism.com/2015/20150130.htm