I took a trip to Namibia, and here’s what I saw

Ok, so not a real, physical trip. While I’d absolutely love the chance to fly to the Southern end of Africa and explore Namibia’s canyons, its sprawling desert coast, and its majestic rivers and waterfalls, due to financial limitations such a trip is currently out of the question. (Maybe one day?)

For now, I’ve settled with traveling there through the wonders of technology, particularly via Google Earth. I’ve soared over the dunes of the Kalahari desert and strolled through the streets of Windhoek, the capital of Namibia. I’ve trawled through Wikipedia’s copious articles on the indigenous tribes found in this part of Africa, like the mysterious desert-dwellers known as the San, renowned for their ability to draw water from the ground using only blades of grass and empty ostrich eggs.

I of course realize that many have found the premise of the FLEE series farfetched, and rightly so. The notion that we’d somehow be corralled into a single location for salvation during Armageddon is highly unlikely (some might even say impossible, though I'm wary of calling anything impossible). But if a mass evacuation were to happen, my bet is that we’d be headed here, to Africa, where the land is almost endlessly vast and largely uninhabited.

There is something uniquely alluring about this part of the world. Perhaps it is the fact that our first ancestors were likely given life in a land not so far away, so that much of our early history unfolded in a region similar to this, where many of the same plants and animals existed. Perhaps it is the presence of so many indigenous tribes down to this day that makes the land feel, in some ways, pure and untouched, so unlike our developed, technology-dependent cities.

Maybe it’s the raw beauty of the land: golden desert sands stretching for hundreds of miles before abruptly ending in the crystal blue waters of the Atlantic; natural rivers winding like arteries through otherwise barren scenery; stunning night panoramas that bring to mind Jehovah’s promise to Abraham about his seed becoming as numerous as the stars. In developed countries, that metaphor doesn’t evoke much, but here, where cities, billboards, and highways don’t exist to reflect so much light into the atmosphere, you can see with the naked eye more stars than you could count in a hundred lifetimes.

Of course, there’s another possibility for why I find myself so drawn to this part of the world. Perhaps there is something elegantly poetic about restarting civilization here, right where it all began so many millennia ago.
There is something irresistibly beautiful about such symmetry.

It’s tax season, and boy do I have things to say about it

Today I’m not blogging about the books or about writing, but about the dreaded annual American pastime of tax preparation. (If you’re not American, chances are that tax preparation for you is a much simpler, and possibly even automatic, process.)

If you’re like most Americans though, you probably get anxious just thinking about tax season and the necessary paperwork involved. Chances are you’ve probably also used paid software like H&R Block or Intuit’s TurboTax. After all, these services provide convenient tools to expedite the tax process… right?

Living abroad, tax filing for me is an especially arduous process. I’m required by the US government to report foreign earnings as well as any money made in the US. Of course, this includes Amazon book sales and PayPal donations. For years, TurboTax seemed like the best option to handle all of these details. After all, it was only about $40 per year to purchase the software.

Well, this year I ran into major problems. For whatever reason, the 2018 software was incredibly buggy and slow, and update downloads sometimes took hours to complete. I actually had to shut the software down multiple times since it completely froze my computer. It was so frustrating that I decided that next year I’d try some other option and abandon TurboTax altogether. So, while waiting for the program to perform one of its many hours-long updates, I did some digging online.

And this is when I found out the ugly truth behind TurboTax: It’s parent company, Intuit, actively lobbies in congress to make the tax filing process as complicated as possible. In 2016, for example, they spent $2 million on lobbying. This money was primarily spent to fight a bill that would pave the way for a free, automatic tax-filing service. The reason for all the lobbying? Simple. Easier tax filing would rob these companies of their customers. (According to their own fiscal reports, Intuit made $5.2 billion in 2017 alone.)

Of course, this isn’t the only example of big companies throwing money at government entities to protect their interests. Cigarette companies, big pharma, and weapons manufacturers all play the same games.

This blog post isn’t meant to be political in any way, or to suggest any kind of reform or boycott. After all, we all know the only solution to these problems is a completely clean slate, where corrupt governments, lobbyists, and greedy corporations don’t exist. Still, I find it especially frustrating to know that even a simple thing like a piece of software is really just another cog in the greed machine.

Can’t wait for the end!

(If you’d like to read up more on the subject, check out these articles: Vox & NBC)