CheetahhhhhhhBlog Mark III

The story is out in the Emerati media and in the Chronicle of Higher Education. GMU-RAK is shutting down June 1st. The Cheetahhhhhhh may or may not have a job any more. I wrote in Daves:

George Mason Fairfax pulled the plug because they couldn’t lower standards and still meet their accreditation standards. At least that was, I think, the big factor in them pulling the plug. I don’t have inside information actually but this seems clear. Also EDRAK decided they wanted to stop losing money and so wanted to boost enrollment.

Though I am technically under a bond of secrecy, the story is out in the press and there will be an official announcement tomorrow, Mar 1st, about the new university which will take GMU-RAKs place.

There has been a lot of negative talk about GMURAK in Dave’s and maybe it’s deserved, maybe not, it’s hard for me to say because I haven’t worked there long and now maybe don’t have a job (I’m awaiting news of the new university like everybody else). However as an RIP epitaph I’d just like to point out that after 10 years in this sometimes thankless racket, I found teaching at GMURAK was a surprising pleasure, with high quality students and high standards. I actually felt I was accomplishing something there, which is a novel feeling for me at least. I personally regret the passing of GMURAK and I think it’s unfortunate that what we were trying to accomplish has gone unappreciated.

Tomorrow, March 1st, I should be finding out whether I will be employed at the new university will be taking GMURAK’s place. Apparently it will be the American University of Ras Al Khaimah.

The US government is taking about a 40% share in Citibank. The good news here is they have prevented the stock from collapsing and potentially they have prevented further collapse of the financial system, given how big C is. The bad news here is that I can’t think of any ongoing for-profit enterprise that has been well-run by a government.

Obama has made a budget that sets to fix the wrongs of “an era of profound irresponsibility”, making an investment in education, moving away from fossil fuels, and funding it by taxing corporations and the rich. This is precisely what I would do and what should be done.

I also like the way he politely refers to the Knucklehead’s administration as  “an era of profound irresponsibility”. I couldn’t have (politely) phrased it better myself.

I might note, this is the first time in almost a decade that I’ve been proud of my country. Well actually not the first–the closing on Guantanamo was the first.

I also find I’m starting to read the news again. I had actually abandoned all news for many years. I just found it too depressing. Now I seem to be getting interested again. As such I find the political slant of the Wall Street Journal (which is now my daily newspaper) is not to my taste. The WSJ is not blatantly republican but the bias is obvious. I might start reading the New York Times business section instead, and it’s free on the web anyway.

I don’t know why being pro-business is perceived as a republican activity. Good business helps the middle class, which is my social class after all, and a social class that has been getting severely hammered for the last several decades. Good business means that the middle class can get a college degree and move on to professional jobs that enable them to lead a middle-class lifestyle. I suppose you could say I’m pro-middle class, if that’s a form of populism, and I have absolutely no problem with taxing the rich. My reason being they can afford it, whereas the middle class would have to make difficult sacrifices. Now, most investors dream of being rich and I suppose I am no different. And the argument is that the rich stimulate the economy far more than their percentage of the population would suggest. I haven’t actually studied the statistics behind this argument, but I have to say that intuitively I don’t buy it. And actually the blunt fact is that the truly rich don’t pay taxes. Their money is manipulated by Harvard-graduate accountants and squirreled away in the Cayman Islands and Liechtenstein. (Which is exactly what I will do if, by some completely improbable miracle, I myself become rich.)

Well there’s a lot going on, however it is some big corporate secret (I don’t see the need personally) and I can’t publicly discuss what’s happening at work. We have gotten several emails about the need for secrecy. We are also not to discuss the situation with reporters or to allow any new media on campus. So anyway something’s going on, but it’s a secret.

I’m playing ball with the whole secrecy thing, because I’d like to remain in RAK and have a paycheck and don’t particularly feel like looking for a new job. We like it here, actually, and I like my job. I have previously described it as “the ultimate expat job” and it was nice for the 6 months it lasted. Hopefully nothing much will change. For me personally, this seems the likely outcome, though I have no official news.

Apparently everything should be made public on March 1st.

I’ve remarked several times that I think long-term investing is patently foolish. Today in the Wall Street Journal, they crunched the numbers. Anybody who invested in the market from 1995-onward using a long-term strategy would have lost money.

Regarding this ludicrous idea of nationalizing banks, the Wall Street Journal reports, “White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said the Obama administration continues to “strongly believe that a privately held banking system is the correct way to go,” and thank God for that. I would have been sorely tempted to lose faith in Obama otherwise.

I read the Lord of the Rings several years ago, when the movie series came out. I read the version commonly for sale now in American bookstores. It turns out that’s an abridged version. I have an ebook I’m reading on my Kindle. It’s a text document and it has no date on it, unfortunately, so I can’t precisely tell you what version I’m reading. However it’s much longer than the version commonly available, with far greater detail and plot and character development. It also has a long, interesting preface by JRR Tolkien.

You know I was trained in English literature. One of my skills from a decade in various departments of literature is the ability to read a book and remember it almost verbatim. It still surprises me occasionally. I read the Lord of the Rings perhaps 6 years ago and it was recreational reading; I didn’t study it carefully. Yet I know precisely where passages are different.

So I have a little “super-power.” Unfortunately it’s not a marketable skill.

Anyway if anyone is interested, I can email you the text documents I’m reading.

I have been looking at the new Amazon Kindle incidentally. As a technophile I want it. It seems an improvement over the original Kindle which I have. I like my Kindle a lot, but it is a little bit quirky. Unfortunately in this grim economic climate I simply can’t justify spending $350 plus another $100 or so in overseas shipping to get the new Kindle when I have a perfecly good older version.

So on Friday Bug said to me, “let’s go look at the boats.” So I took him to the RAK port. Like most ports, it’s dirty and smelly, lots of fishing boats and a few big container ships, lots of Indian and Pakastanis fishing in the harbor, lots of cast-off junk from the boats, nets drying, etc. In other worlds, the port was a toddler boy’s paradise with lots to explore. He was most interested in an area where we found dried starfish. He was quite popular with the Pakistani fishermen. He went right up to them to watch them. You could tell a lot of them missed their children at home, they were just delighted to see a little guy. When we went home, Bug was dirty and had scratches on his legs. Van was upset. Filipino mothers seem to have some kind of paranoia about dirt. I always say to Vanessa, “he’s a boy, boys get dirty,” but she doesn’t think so. So she was all upset about our port adventure and said Bug has to wear pants from now on. Which will be unpleasant for Bug as it’s starting to get hot.

We went to Dubai on Saturday. First of all, the growth in my stomach is not cancerous. The doctor thinks it’s most likely caused by irritation from the nicotine tablets I suck on.

Vanessa saw an OBGYN. The baby is fine. We were actually very stressed because of the knuckleheads at RAK Hospital. The doctor said the baby’s legs were too short. This had us really freaked out for the last 2 weeks. We promptly decided to switch her prenatal care to Dubai because the doctors at RAK Hospital don’t impress us much. They don’t seem to care, for one thing. Anyway we asked the doctor very specifically about the baby’s legs and the Dubai doctor said there was nothing to be concerned about. So that’s a load off my mind. I’m rather pissed at that knucklehead OBGYN in RAK, she had us really stressed and sad. The only reason she didn’t make us really freak out is because we both had the impression from the very beginning that she wasn’t competent.

I get the impression that doctors who can’t get a job in Dubai for whatever reason, incompetence or whatever, end up in the sticks like RAK.

So in DUbai after the doctor’s appointments, first we went to Dubai Mall to go to the aquarium again for Bug. He loved it again, of course. We met Aunty Nene at the mall. Bug got some new shirts and pants from Oshkosh B’Gosh. Most of the stores are in sales mode right now. I also made a pit stop at Taco Bell.

Now, I really like Taco Bell. I know a lot of people refuse to eat there, like my dad, but I ate there a lot when I was in college, simply because it’s cheap. Indeed for a long period of time in the 1990s, I ate at Taco Bell almost every day. Anyway there’s no Taco Bell in the Philippines, or Saudi, or RAK. And when I was in the States last year, I had better things to do than hit the Bell, so actually I haven’t been to the Bell in many years. Anyway I was quite excited to get a chicken fiesta burrito, which used to be my staple food. It was still pretty good actually. I might note, however, that in Dubai, 3 chicken fiesta burritos cost AED45, or about $14. I believe in the States they would be less than $3.

We went to Dragon Mart, which is a huge warehouse of Chinese goods. The warehouse is beyond huge. I think it’s several miles long. There are hundreds of vendors. I bet you can find anything under the sun there. The prices are not fixed. Vanessa actually ran into a friend from Manila who is now working in Qatar, and apparently he goes to Dubai to shop at Dragon Mart. The place got Vanessa all excited about bargains. She loooooves bargain shopping. She brags about how she’ll spend all day canvassing to find goods under P100 ($2) in Manila. Now for me, Dragon Mart was pretty close to hell on earth. I told Van I will never go there again, but I’ll give her money and drop her off when she wants to go.

We had dinner with Aunty Nene at TGI Fridays. Bug is on some kind of liquid kick. He isn’t really interested in eating anything if it’s not in liquid form. At TGI Fridays, you know they serve fancy frozen drinks for something like AED20 each. Bug didn’t eat any of the food but did drink my entire strawberry daiqueri.

So it’s Friday and so the weekend in the Emirates. Thank God. It was a tiring week. Given the post about my job, below, you can probably imagine that my morale has been low and we were under a lot of stress. Thank God that is resolved. We actually have a few other things stressing us. It’s been a high-stress year so far.

The financial media in the USA really doesn’t like Obama. I don’t want to come off that way in my posts about these financial rescue schemes. I don’t actually know anything about Obama, to be perfectly frank. He ran under my party’s ticket so I supported him. I was actually a Hillary supporter. Anyway when I say I don’t support things like the bank bailout, etc., that’s because they don’t make good business sense to me. For example, by “stabilizing” the housing market, the government is interrupting the natural business cycle, and furthermore, I think real estate is still grossly overpriced, so the government is forcing us to continue buying real estate at inflated prices. I can’t agree with this and I think no good will come of it. But please don’t put me in league with the financial press, which seems to loathe Obama and anything whatsoever he does. As I said, I don’t actually know anything about him. I do, however, give him the benefit of the doubt. He’s from Illinois so he can’t be all bad, for one thing. And for another he’s a Democrat, so I’m quite certain he was a better choice. Whatever else may occur in the next four years, I have a give-him-the-benefit-of-the-doubt-until-proven-otherwise policy.

This having been said, I will also note, yeah, the 800 billion “porkulus” bill is really a monstrocity in my mind. Very ill-advised. This talk of nationalizing banks is even more alarming. It’s downright anti-capitalist and, if I may be so bold, un-American. If you’d care read up on this perspective, I’d suggest you read the “State of Capitalism” series in the Wall Street Journal, or Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. What alarms me most is, #1, the government is buying significant interest in corporations under the guise of aid, and so amassing even more power to itself. The Federal government is already far too powerful and intrusive in a way the founding fathers certainly did not envision. And #2, this interrupts the natural business cycle, which I won’t go into more, but is ill-advised.

Everybody in CHeetopia has had a cold for the last few days. Vanessa is suffering the most. I’m not actually too bad.

We’re going to get the Bug a little bike for playing outside. He wants to ride around with his friends. I think we’re also going to get him a little TV for his room, because Van and I can never watch TV in the living room. Bug insists on watching Dora or Thomas. You can say what you want, like “Be the boss,” etc., and sure that’s good in principle, but you try watching TV with a toddler yapping and crying. It’s impossible. Can’t hear a thing.

Bug has discovered the gerund (an -ing word), though he doesn’t quite know how to use it properly. For example while eating pancakes this morning, he remarked about “cakeing”. Creative English, anyway.

Aside from this, we don’t have much going on at the moment.

So I’ve ranted a couple times about massive government intervention in the stock markets and the economy. I suppose I reflect the general sentiment of investors. Now there’s this:

Now, I hope this cover is disturbing to a lot of Americans. I imagine it is, that must be why it’s on the cover. What’s really ironic is that these policies were originally implemented by a Republican, that knucklehead who used to sit in the Oval Office. I imagine Obama will get the blame for implementing these bankrupt commie ideas. From a political position, I don’t know how he could have backed down actually. If I were Obama, I’d say, “I’m implementing the knucklehead’s policies because it’s too late to turn back now.”

Anyway once again, all I can ask is what the hell has happened to America in the 10 years I’ve been gone??? Frankly I’d have been annoyed enough about the no-short-selling rules they implemented last year when the market was dropping. (Though of course, just sell a future, that’s what I did.) But splashing around 800 billion dollars like a centralized economy? Giving money to failing businesses like GM and BOA and Citibank? For God’s sake, let them fail. The blunt fact is that America’s riches and amazing innovation and vitality are because of free market capitalism. That’s not something you want to jack around with.