Global Thoughts — 22 January 2013

We got this construction set by Mobilo, a nice German toy. Jeremy keeps showing me and everyone else how to put together anything. He is a very good engineer in the making. Elizabeth and I spent this past weekend in Miami visiting the grandparents and her cousins, some of whom were visiting from LA. She is a very good traveling companion; our kids travel better than many cranky adults.

It’s a good thing we don’t allow iPads at home — the kids love it for long airplane flights but they won’t go to sleep if they are playing games, so we use it mainly for long daytime flights such as NY to LA.

On our second night home from our return in early January from Sydney via Honolulu, our 5 year old Jeremy was climbing the walls up until almost 1am and barely getting out of bed at 10am. At midnight he was asking us if it was lunchtime in Australia. Make a note not to return from somewhere out west on a Monday — better to arrive on a Friday.

Here is a very good tip that I haven’t read in any child-rearing books, and it really works. Kids want to eat carbohydrates and skip the fruit, veges and protein. Of course, we don’t want that and it is really frustrating to cook a dinner and have it get trashed. So at dinner we only put the main course and veges on the table — once that stuff is eaten the carbs can come out. And I’ve taken every possible thing that is considered a snack and not food and put them into a garbage bag that lives way up high on top of a cabinet. It comes out in the morning to help fill up lunch boxes but otherwise we’ve eliminated snacking of anything you wouldn’t want to be eating in lieu of a meal.

Some interesting things I read over the past month that I want to take note of:

In the US, the Black unmarried birth rate is 73%; was 23.6% in 1965 when Pat Moynihan declared a “national emergency to aid in the establishment of a stable Negro family infrastructure.”

Right now 37% of American universities require foreign language instruction as part of their curriculum, down from 51% in 2001.

Last year I said that there would ups and downs with Arab countries testing democracy after the Arab Spring. An interesting Foreign Affairs article by Sheri Berman recounts the history of democracies arising and then being replaced by authoritarian regimes for a generation and then becoming democracies again — witness Germany, Italy and France after its 18th century revolution — don’t get upset about the Arab Spring developments in places such as Egypt, Libya and Syria. There will be tough times ahead and it may take a generation till things settle down, but I think that 20 years from now people around the world will see an Arab world that looks different than it does now, and I think it will be for the better. Right now to people who value stability it looks like a mess, but consider that it was a stable curtain of dictatorship filled with people who hated the US for keeping them there. I think Obama has it right — speak softly, carry a small stick, cheer from the sidelines but stay outside the box. Let them fight each other from inside the box until they get tired of beating each other up and work things out. Eventually things will get better.

Theater of the Absurd: Karen is taking the US citizenship test this year since she is applying for citizenship. The test preparation book is very specific about what you have to know for the test. For the writing portion of the test, they give you a list of every word that could possibly be on the test. For months of the year, they chose 7 out of the 12. Which means that you don’t have to know about January or December for the test, but you do have to know about February and November.

Looking ahead in the Middle East, Jordan is becoming more unstable in 2013. Syria is effectively lost to Assad even though he is nominally in charge and no one else is set to take over, and I find it noteworthy that Stratfor doesn’t even mention Israel, the Palestinians or an Israeli strike against Iran in its 2013 forecast. The Israeli elections will probably lead to a coalition involving either the religious Shas party or the new Yair Lapid led party which favors the secular. Shas with its 12 seats has always tried to stay within the government because that is the only way they can milk the government for money. But Yair Lapid has more seats (19) and will not want to sit with Shas since its platform is anathema to Shas. There is this new right-wing party that got a lot of seats and it will be interesting to see who wants to sit with them and what they have to say and do in order to be in the ballpark, and whether Tzipi Livni’s 7 seats will be part of a coalition or whether she will make the same mistake and sit in political oblivion for another 4 years. Netanyahu is probably very comfortable with the head of that new party who served in the same kind of elite army unit that he served in. Birds of a feather. It will probably take a month before we find out who goes where. Bibi has some opportunities here to choose sides and it will be fair to say that as he chooses his coalition partners it will become clear in which direction he intends to govern. It is hard to predict because Bibi has no real constitution except for expediency (meaning he has no scruples or dedication to anything, for those of you who didn’t quite get the more diplomatic language).

In the US, I am rather optimistic that the economy will improve this year regardless of what the Congress does. I just see all kinds of indicators moving in the right direction. I think China is on an upswing, shipping looks good, our company that deals with employment looks like it is going to have a banner year, European bond markets are stable as are volatility indexes in world stock markets, and stocks look good.

During the end of the year holiday, our family went to Disney’s Grand Californian Adventure and stayed at the Grand Californian hotel, visited Sydney Australia and made a stopover at Hawaii’s Big Island on the way back. You can read my travel notes posted separately.

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