Cyreenik Says
This 20 Jan 15 WSJ article, Japan Denounces Islamic State Video Threatening to Kill Two Japanese Video Shows Militant Demanding $200 Million Ransom to Spare Hostages’ Lives by Alexander Martin, talks about the latest beheading threatening saga. Sadly, it shows that news media are still ready, willing and able to promote terrorist causes in the name of news. If we want terrorism to decline, we need to be researching how to report news items such as this without advertising the cause behind the action. (The small piece of good news about this incident is that the ransom demand may signal that ISIS is on hard times moneywise, as I talk about in the next section.)
The Syrian Civil War is as terrible as it is because it is a proxy war -- lots of groups outside Syria are sending in lots of money and people to support their side in the contest. But now that crude prices are crashing, the game is going to change because many of the proxies get a lot of their money from oil. Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia all get most of their wealth from oil.
I'm sure that with the sudden drying up of oil wealth, all these proxy players are looking hard at how much more they want to put into this "hobby" of their's in Syria -- it may be time to take their RPG's and go home.
Here is my prediction: How the war plays out in 2015 should be much more subdued than it was in 2014, and it may get subdued enough to come to some kind of conclusion.
It is one of my insights that the root of terrorism is advertising -- it is about promoting a cause. The aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist incident makes it seem that this is a case of poor advertising because the backlash has been enormous.
Advertising is always an uncertain business. Add to this the uncertainty of getting a terrorist act successfully committed and the uncertainty skyrockets. But for many decades now the perpetrators have found the risk worth it -- terrorist incidents have become chronic, one example being the Achille Lauro hijacking way back in 1985 by PLA terrorists.
In this Charlie Hebdo case the committing side was conducted like clockwork -- terrorists got in, shot people up, got out, killed a cop, zoomed away, and successfully got back into hiding. What more could you ask for? And roughing up a publisher of controversial media is hardly new -- Charlie Hebdo itself had been roughed up just four years earlier in 2011.
But, as I said, advertising is full of surprises. In this case the surprise has been a lot of backlash. The demonstrations against this event have been plentiful and popular. It now seems that this was a case of terrorism done in poor taste. ...Who could have guessed that outcome?
Now we get to see if this backlash makes any difference.
This 2 Jan 15 WSJ article, Endangered Species: Young U.S. Entrepreneurs New Data Underscore Financial Challenges and Low Tolerance for Risk Among Young Americans by Ruth Simon And Caelainn Barr, is a surprise to read about. The number of young US entrepreneurs is declining.
From the article, "The share of people under age 30 who own private businesses has reached a 24-year-low, according to new data, underscoring financial challenges and a low tolerance for risk among young Americans.
Roughly 3.6% of households headed by adults younger than 30 owned stakes in private companies, according to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal of recently released Federal Reserve data from 2013. That compares with 10.6% in 1989—when the central bank began collecting standard data on Americans’ incomes and net worth—and 6.1% in 2010."
The article goes on to point out many reasons this is happening, and the bad consequences of it happening. For me, the most telling reason is the final one, "The decline in business ownership among young graduates also reflects a relatively low appetite for risk. Young people have less confidence, said Donna Kelley, a professor at Babson College. In an annual survey she oversees, more than 41% of 25-to-34-year-old Americans who saw an opportunity to start a business said fear of failure would keep them from doing so, up from 23.9% in 2001. “The fear of failure is the measure we should be most concerned about,” she said."
The moral I take from this is that in spite of all our efforts to puff up "snowflake confidence" as kids are growing up, the result isn't what we want. It isn't producing adults who have confidence in what they can do in the real world, such as run a business. This means we need to carefully reexamine our child raising mores and see if they are really the best we can do for raising the kinds of adults we want inhabiting our communities.
-- The End --