Planting the Disney seed in China

Whoa, so this headline from the Financial Times is pretty weird – "Disney to expand language schools in China" – but the cynical take on it is even weirder:

The growing Chinese middle class means there is no shortage of parents willing to pay $2,200 a year for tuition of two hours a week. But the schools also enable Disney to forge a bond with a new generation of consumers who may be unaware of the company’s characters and stories.

The president of Disney Publishing Worldwide tries, unconvincingly, to downplay that part:

“We wouldn’t enter this business just to use it as a marketing tool to get Disney in front of people,” he said. “But there’s no doubt that a side benefit is broader exposure to Chinese consumers and to build familiarity with the rich heritage of Disney storytelling.”

Government media controls and quotas restricting the number of films shown in cinemas have prevented Disney from establishing its brand in China in the way it has in Europe and the US.

The success of the programme has convinced the company to explore other markets. “The next 12 months will be focused on rapid expansion [in China],” said Mr Hampton. But it was also “a very exciting time to invest in Brazil”.

An investment for Robin Hanson

InTrade.com's got a contract on its own existence that last traded at 94.9, redeemable for 100 if InTrade.com is still "open for business" by the end of 2010. (InTrade pages are hard to link to, but you can find it by going to intrade.com, clicking "InTrade.com" under the "The Prediction Markets" heading in the left-hand column, and then clicking on the one contract listed.) Each contract pays out $10 if it's successful and charges $0.10 as commission for in-the-money predictions, meaning that if InTrade's still in business, you paid $9.49 for something that would be worth $9.90, for an annualized return of 9.11%. And with the bid at 90 and the ask at 94.9, there may be room to negotiate. Does Robin Hanson's portfolio average 9.11%, and if not, why hasn't he invested yet?

Obama aides get no invites to teachers' union conventions

Quoteth the NYT:

For two years as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama addressed educators gathered for the summer conventions of the two national teachers’ unions, and last year both groups rolled out the welcome mat for Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

But in a sign of the Obama administration’s strained relations with two of its most powerful political allies, no federal official was scheduled to speak at either convention this month, partly because union officials feared that administration speakers would face heckling.

Normally I'd take this is a good sign, but unfortunately, from what I understand of Obama's education policy, the teachers are being misled by a PR machine. He's big on bashing unions in public, but has no problem saddling up to them in private. Then again, despite allowing the DC voucher program to die and showering public schools with cash as "stimulus," his $4.3 billion Race to the Top program has been pissing off teachers unions, so maybe he is doing something right?

SVR defector/double agent may be at heart of Russian spy bust

With the recently busted Russian spy ring collecting no information of actual value and having no real access to policymakers, I often asked myself how they got caught in the first place. Stratfor (search for the article title on Google to access for free) thinks it has the answer:

The criminal complaint did not suggest how the U.S. government came to suspect these people of reporting back to the SVR in Russia, although we did notice that the beginning of the investigation coincides with the time that a high-level SVR agent stationed at Russia’s U.N. mission in New York began passing information to the FBI. Sergei Tretyakov (who told his story in the book by Pete Earley called “Comrade J,” an abbreviation of his SVR codename, “Comrade Jean”), passed information to the FBI from the U.N. mission from 1997 to 2000, just before he defected to the United States in October 2000. According to the criminal complaint, seven of the 11 suspects were connected to Russia’s U.N. mission, though evidence of those links did not begin to emerge until 2004 (and some as late as 2010). The timing of Tretyakov’s cooperation with the U.S. government and the timing of the beginning of this investigation resulting in the arrest of the 11 suspects this week suggests that Tretyakov may have been the original source who tipped off the U.S. government. So far, the evidence is circumstantial — the timing and the location match up — but Tretyakov, as the SVR operative at Russia’s U.N. mission, certainly would have been in a position to know about operations involving most of the people arrested June 27.

This poses another question, though: if the Russians knew he defected and knew knew that he knew about the illegal program, why didn't they dismantle it? I can think of a few explanations: they didn't know he knew, they're incompetent, or they're playing a deeper game and did this all on purpose.

Loyalty to the Russian Federation?

While I understand the motives for most of the recent Russian spies – basically, money and power – what I can't understand is Juan Lazaro's insistence that he's still loyal to "the Service" (i.e., the SVR, or the Foreign Intelligence Service):

He allegedly told federal agents that he was not born in Uruguay, that "Juan Lazaro" is not his real name, that his house in Yonkers, New York, had been "paid for by the 'Service' and, although he loved his son, he would not violate his loyalty to the 'Service' even for his son," he said after he waived his Miranda rights, prosecutors say.

What values exactly is he staying loyal to? As heinous and murderous as the Soviet Union was, at least they had nice platitudes that you could pretend they upheld. But the Russian Federation? What, does he just really hate Georgians or something?

My best guess is that it's just a bargaining tactic, but it sure would be odd if he really truly believed in Putin's Russia.

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Al-Qaeda's new video: apparently they read the newspaper!

Al-Qaeda's got a new video out, and this one's in English! Produced by al-Qaeda's media arm and featuring its American spokesman Adam Gadahn, you can find it in three parts on YouTube (1, 2, and 3).

It starts out with the order that "We Do Not Permit Musical Accompaniment With Our Productions," just as a reminder to those slack terrorist-sympathizing Muslims that the revolution will not be remixed. "Barack," Adam Gadahn begins, "I know that as you slither snakelike into the second year of your reign as a purported president of change, you are finding your hands full with running the affairs of a declining and besieged empire and — in the process — proving yourself to be nothing more than another treacherous, bloodthirsty and narrow-minded American war president..."

It goes on like that for a while (that particular sentence wasn't even half over). It's clearly targeted towards an American audience, and sounds sort of like it's come from a drunk Nation writer who hasn't spoken English in a decade; I have a feeling that their Arabic-language videos place a bit more emphasis on killing Americans and Israelis. (Antiwar.com's story is titled "Al-Qaeda Spokesman Gadahn Proposes Peace Conditions With US.")

Gadahn tries to show us he's been keeping up with the news, dissing the Democrats for losing Ted Kennedy's Senate seat and even making an inadvertent plug for the Salahis' new reality show:

And honestly, Barack, as a president who has proven himself to be incapable of keeping intruders out of his own executive mansion, do you really expect anyone to believe that you will be successful in your attempts to keep the Mujahideen away from an entire continent?

The personal attacks against "Barack" abound, including this stinger: "Make no mistake about it Barack, you're no longer the popular man you once were."

His analysis of American politics falls flat when he tries to claim that Obama's falling popularity is due not to healthcare and his domestic policies, but rather to foreign wars. The video then cuts to clips of American veterans criticizing Obama's ongoing wars, thus ensuring that no veteran will ever say anything like that again, out of fear that they'll be coopted by al-Qaeda.

Overall, I think Adam Gadahn could benefit from an editor – that guy just doesn't know when to shut up.

Hugs kill terrorists

This is the best thing I've read in a while, via Bruce Schneier:

In Afghanistan, as in many cultures, a manly embrace is a time-honored tradition for warriors before they go off to face death. Thus, many suicide bombers never even make it out of their training camp or safe house, as the pressure from these group hugs triggers the explosives in suicide vests.

The NYT's shitty drug war coverage

Despite the paper's supposedly liberal slant, the New York Times' drug reporting is oddly deferential to the government's pro-drug war line, and its reporting suffers either as a cause or an effect. Though they line their articles with caveats and doubts, they spend the bulk of their time repeating the claims of the government, and don't seem to look very far to find opposing point of views to include.

Take as an example this article in Saturday's paper about Afghanistan's poppy problem. While opium poppy has been a lucrative crop in Afghanistan for decades, a recent combination of disease and poor weather has stunted this season's yield, shrinking it by as much as half. Rather than a sober discussion of opium's next season (which, let's face it, are good), the Times' C.J. Chivers article starts out by telling us that there's a chance that within months, the shift away from opium is going to begin.

The first paragraph that essentially tells us that Afghan opium farmers have never had it this bad (doubt it). In the second we learn that apparently there's also some program run by the US Marines, and as a result "the start" of a shift away from opium "could be possible" within mere months:

As farmers around Marja, the heart of Afghanistan’s opium industry, confront harsh environmental conditions and new interdiction efforts, they are also receiving offers of aid in exchange for growing different crops. Both they and the military said that the start of a shift to other sources of income could be possible by the end of this year, when poppy planting would resume.

In the third we get a generic affirmation and a rebuttal (opium prices are up because of the shortage). The next few arguments are non-novel and pretty general ones for and against the program's success, and slowly the reader gets the impression that there isn't anything more to learn about the specific programs, and moves on, with the impression that there's a vague government program that might help rid Afghanistan of heroin.

So it's a huge surprise that half way through the second online page we learn that, in fact, an unknown but potentially huge portion of this program that's supposed to transition farmers from opium to legal crops is a huge sham:

Assessing the program’s effect remains difficult. In many cases, according to Marines on patrols who had to verify that poppy fields were destroyed, farmers were paid based on estimates of a field’s size, which Afghans often inflated.

Marines and poppy farmers also agreed that many farmers waited until the end of the season to register for payments. Then they quickly harvested their opium, plowed under the stalks and collected payments nonetheless.

“That was the only bad thing,” said Cpl. David S. Palmer, who led the squad that provided security for the verification team. “A lot of people were double-taking on us, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

The only bad thing indeed. But never fear, because it's the thought that counts – in the next too many paragraphs we learn that it's an important "stepping stone," it might be working because "what began as a trickle of cooperative farmers...became a busy queue," the program's helping them "reseize the moment," it's providing "much-needed assistance to some of the poorest people in the world," and the "ultimate hope" is peace and a drug-free Afghanistan. Oh yeah, and "[t]he Taliban’s murder and intimidation program is still ongoing." But don't worry, because "through the subsidies, groups of farmers have begun to meet and cooperate with the Americans and Afghan troops."

No real background or reference about past efforts at anti-poppy campaigns, and no citation of any critical voices. And obviously the copy editor wasn't paying attention, because the giant gaping hole in the subject of the article isn't even mentioned until three-quarters of the way through a two-page articles. Let's give it up for another drug war hack job from the New York Times.

South Africa's World Cup failure

Large domestic and international sporting events, along with a lot of one-off things like conventions, are usually economic drains, and it's a real shame when the country is poor to begin with. Such it is with South Africa:

The World Cup is set to be a major financial disappointment for the host nation South Africa, after it became clear that international fans have decided to stay away and their tickets are being sold cheaply to South Africans.

Less than three weeks before kick-off on 11 June, South Africa's revamped airports and spruced-up cities are staging an impressive show of readiness for the arrival of international fans – although now it seems there may be half a million fewer than expected.

Does this really surprise anyone? South African cities are notorious for their crime, and in Britain it has the reputation of not being a friendly place to whites (rightly or wrongly deserved), and they are generally the only soccer fans who can afford to travel. Apart from this metaphorical distance, it's also literally really far away from pretty much everywhere, especially rich northern/western hemisphere countries. Even southern hemisphere Australia and New Zealand are a very long way away.