Category Archives: Current Affairs

Disney is in the teaching English biz in China

Americana, China, Current Affairs

Disney-china

According to the Economist, in an article titled Middle Kingdom meets Magic Kingdom, Disney has ten English schools in Shanghai and five in Beijing. At first, I found that pretty surprising because it is such small small potatoes for Disney.Teaching English is like a classic cottage industry.

But I was reminded that we live in a time when nothing is considered too small if it makes money for the Mother Corporation. Maximizing profit is now considered the highest ideal. Banks charge fees for any service they can; including parking. The avowed goal of any company is to make as much money as possible. In 2007, before everything fell apart, General Electric made one and half times more profit in lending than any other GE division.

My childish fantasy is that – when I was young – General Electric made stuff, banks made loans, and Disney made cartoons and had Disneyland. Sure, they all made money, but that was a byproduct of their raison d'etre which was the service they provided. I think that this same childish fantasy was held by Obama, Geithner, et al when they bailed out the banks.

If they just got the banks – who were in trouble over their greed – some money, they would lend it to needy borrowers to get the economy going again. Of course, that is not what happened. The banks took the money and loaned it back to the government – in the form of safe government bonds – and started making even more money. This new, safe, profit was then used to pay themselves nice big bonuses. 


I am stunned, this is so far out of my age group

Americana, Current Affairs, Food and Drink, Travel

Shots 

A couple of years ago, Michele and I were in Greenville Mississippi drinking and listening to blues in a local bar when a wedding rehearsal party sort of wandered in. Soon they started drinking vodka-Jello shots and – of course – offered us a couple. I was underwhelmed. Probably because I was about fifty years past the optimum age for any sweet alcoholic drink, let alone a very, very sweet shot of Vodka.

Now I read that a former Wall Street analyst has started a company that provides the modern equivalent of the old time bargirl. These women sell weak vodka-Jello shots and flirt in bars in New York. I was not a bargirl kind of guy the first time around – even in Korea – and this seems even less appealing, but – it seems – there is something for everybody.

As an aside. In Greenville, they served not only the vodka-Jello shots in teeny-tiny plastic cups; but our "bourbon, straight" the same way. When I asked the bartender why they didn't use glasses, he looked at me like I had just asked him to vote for a black guy for president. A sort of What planet are you from. look. Now it seems that the teeny-tiny plastic cups are catching on in the Big Apple. End aside.  

If you still find this improbable, check out the slide show at The Wall Street Journal. To directly quote from Gawker, you could look at photo number three in the accompanying slideshow, and then maybe turn your computer off and think quietly for a while.

When is torture, torture?

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics, Psychological Musings

There are times when I read the The New York Times – or, atleast, look at the front page – when I think that newspapers, and especially the New York Times, are all that is standing between us and politicians running wild. That a free press is critical to democracy. Then there are times when I think the papers will do anything, print anything, the politicians want.

For as long as I can remember, waterboarding has been torture.  Everybody called it torture. When we learned about the Spanish Inquisition _ and it is interesting that, in a burst of PC religious tolerance, it was called the Spanish Inquisition not the Catholic Inquisition – waterboarding and burning at the stake were highlights. It was defined as torture by the Geneva Convention that we signed. I was taught we didn’t do stuff like that – Nazis did stuff like that, North Koreans – it was one of the main reason we were better than them.

Then we start torturing and the New York Times – as well as the Los Angeles Times – started referring to waterboarding as enhanced interrogation. The NYT defend the new terminology by saying it is somewhat misleading and tendentious to focus on whether we have embraced the politically correct term in our news stories. There seemed and still seems to be no recognition that what the paper called torture for fifty or sixty or seventy years – and has now been changed – is more than just a politically correct nicety.

Waterboarding-comic

When the wars started and the military said that it would embed journalists, there was a short dust-up about whether they could still be objective. But journalists are already embedded: they are embedded with the Washington establishment and they are not objective. Hell, they are part of the Washington establishment. Actually and even worse, they may be objective but are afraid to say anything negative.

As an aside, for some strange reason – unknown to me – the only thing that seems to break loose from the black hole of sympathetic and sycophantic news coverage of Washington elites by other Washington elites, are sex scandals or racist remarks. A politician – especially a powerful politician like the president – lies about, say, WMD’s; the papers go along. End aside.

When, Stephen Colbert, speaking at the White House Correspondents Dinner, attacked the stupid things George Bush was doing, the assembled journalists were shocked. It was rude. As if unnecessarily going to war isn’t rude. No wonder torture has become enhanced interrogation.