Image via Wikipedia

Congressional bean counters are unhappy at the State Department’s budget for Iraq. (Look at the Washington Post’s story on State’s budget request here.) As troops draw down to 50,000, the State Department civilian advisers and police trainers are going to lose the security of having quick reaction forces on call and military helicopters and humvees available for getting around the country. The State Department’s solution? Triple the current number of security contractors.

We’re seven years into Iraq and nine years into the Long War, and State Department planners are still treating this new threat environment as a temporary condition. Security contractors are useful if you have to quickly enlarge and then draw down your security force. Contractors are an expensive, but scalable solution in the short term but outrageously expensive in the long term. The State Department has not developed a comprehensive plan to increase its own internal capability to protect its diplomats and advisers.

The threats aren’t going away. Nor is our need to have a civilian presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. And these places aren’t getting safer in the near term.

Obama, in a 2008 campaign speech in Colorado Springs called for the creation of a civilian work force abroad that is as robust and well-funded as the military. The State Department is asking Congress for the money, but doesn’t have a plan to permanently increase its own ability to do the work and protect its workers.

The reality is, even when at some point our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan draw to a close, there are other places (Yemen? Sudan? Somalia?) in which our diplomats and aid workers will find themselves ordered to work. The State Department can’t keep relying on temporary fixes.

True/Slant was a great venue, and though it is closing after its purchase by Forbes, I still feel the impulse toward almost daily posting and analysis, so I won’t hang up my spurs yet. After all, there is all that buzz lately about the 2010’s being the decade of Latin America, and Latin America ruling the world. Well, I doubt it, but there is enough going on to make for very interesting times.

Please look for updates on where I will be blogging next, and doings meanwhile, at my personal webpage. In September, I’ll be a Lemann Fellow at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs studying Brazil’s economy. Around that time I will definitely take my online writing elsewhere, so do stay in touch. My email is ballve[at]gmail …

¡Arriba!

Marcelo

Image via Wikipedia

Image via Wikipedia

I write my last post for True/Slant a bit worn out from a full day of kayaking yesterday. It was easy river kayaking, mainly, with just one madly technical section of Class 2 stuff, but a full day of paddling and some porting in the sun saps you a bit.

The sights and experiences were very nice: Osprey and kingfishers working the water. The boughs of huge sycamores whispering in the breeze. A shore nap of 15 minutes that felt like an hour full of dreams. A dash of adrenaline while being spun in the rapids.

Thanks for reading the Beaufinn blog. It was fun. If you would like to continue along, this blog will migrate to www.beaufinn.com/blog (or some iteration of that; Google the name) by mid-August. Web designers really slow down in the heat, don’t they?

What’s next for me? Working two contract writing jobs (corporate stuff), teaching at The College of New Jersey this fall, and staying on the ever-present quest, along with my agent, to sell one or all of the novels. Beyond that, I’d like to finally put some serious effort into the kind of mountain climbing/trekking I’d like to do. I might start in the Shawangunks, in the Catskills. I should, however, set some summiting goals for the next decade.

I have two requests of you, Beaufinn reader:

1. (Re)Read Deliverance: Yeah, yeah — macho white guys in canoes, etc. etc. Having studied with the man who write this magnificently original American narrative, I was always galled by the fact that in popular memory the story boiled down to Ned Beatty and some banjo playing (popular memory = didn’t read the novel and can’t remember much about the film).

This story is powerfully sublime; what lurks under the obvious physical action is moving and troubling, and stays in the mind for weeks after reading. Dickey wrote a very straight story in a time of postmodern literary experimentation, but the story is anything but easy. It is one of those novels you must read to understand a bit about America, particularly at a certain time (the early 1970s).

Also, read it for the wonderful owl scene, which occurs early in the action. This scene is not in the film version, but it is the strongest symbolic connector to Dickey’s poetry in the whole novel.

After that, if you can tackle the novel Dickey wrote after Deliverance, a tome called Alnilam, you’re ready for your PhD.

2. Once a week, disappear for half an hour: That’s a tough one for parents and people with demanding jobs. Maybe cut that to 15 minutes, but for that 15 minutes, belong to your own country — a one-person country located in a wholly unspecified place. Maybe you already do this, and can swing it for an hour. That’s good — now try for two hours.

Get free of the beeps, bings, pings, bongs, shouts, and the “Hey, where are you?” Leave the cell phone or PDA in the car or under a rock, give away your GPS unit, and go someplace that only you know, and only you know where you are.

Go off the grid, just for a short time. Clear your mind of the digital flotsam. You’ll be back “in network” soon enough.

You won’t need a map. Good luck.

# # #

A debate has been raging here, in the comments section, as well on the blog of Mark Adomanis about what is a Russophobe and what is Russia’s trajectory and do one’s thoughts about the other make one a Russophobe or a Russophile? Addressing the question before my hop to another platform seemed especially fitting.

To kick off the discussion, I wanted to offer commenter yalensis’s taxonomy of a “Russophobe”:

To my mind, the term “Russophobe” mostly involves a constellation of assumptions (stereotypes?) about that person’s political views, i.e., they believe that: (1) Russia was on the right course towards democracy under Yeltsin, but then Putin came along. (2) Khodorkovsky was shafted, he should be released from prison and given his oil company back (3) hopefully during the upcoming Kasparov administration, but (4) none of this matters anyway because Russia is doomed due to low birth rate, alcoholism, and Islamic insurgencies. (5) The thought of Russia’s demise makes the Russophobe feel happy, because Russia has been so mean to the Gruzians and Chechens; however (6) Russians will not go gently into that good night because they suffer from “neo-imperialist” ambitions and want to restore their lost empire, so (7) it is up to the noble West to confront them and keep them inside their shrunken borders…. etc etc
I could rattle off a lot more cliches, but I think everybody gets the point.

I would say it’s a helpful one, except it isn’t. First, there is the fact that yalensis outlines what is basically an alternative political view. How having a different vision of Russia qualifies for hating Russia is unclear except it does reinforce the stereotype — since yalensis went that way — of the Kremlin brute who knows no truth but his truth and sees any alternative view through the sight of a rifle. It also is uncannily reminiscent of the thought process we saw in our mercifully unseated president, George W. Bush, as well as his spiritual heir, Ms. Mama Grizzly.

Furthermore, yalensis offers for our consideration a man made mostly of straw, a collection, by his own admission, of cliches. Because who really believes in the virgin peachiness of the Yeltsin era? Who really thinks Kasparov or his cohort are a realistic choice to lead Russia? And really — and this is a question for all the commenters who accuse me of subterfuge and of preparing the ground for an imminent American invasion of Russia — really who is rooting for Russia’s demise? Who? To be brutally honest: no one in the world give that much of a shit about Russia to actively want America to take over. Maybe you’ve heard about how insular and navel-gazing Americans are? And maybe apathy is a more apt definition of a “Russophobe,” but then it isn’t much of the toothy ogre you’re looking to beat your chest about and make you feel once again to be the fulcrum of world history, is it?

A gallery of agitprop from Seliger, the summer camp for pro-Kremlin youth, really snapped a lot of the comments I’ve seen into focus.

Especially this one:

This is a caricature of Viktor Suvorov, a KGB spy who defected to the West and wrote books about Soviet history as well as its security aparatus. Here’s what the poster says about him:

Way back when he left the USSR and nursed a grudge. Works on the orders of international intelligence agencies. In his books, turns Russian history on its head, calls into question the results of the Great Fatherland War.

It sounds so familiar, doesn’t it? Because I’ve seen it here, under so many blog posts I’ve written and in the comments section of Inosmi when they pick up one of my pieces — except without the virulent anti-Semitism.

Julia Ioffe emigrated and has made a career of hating and defaming Russia in order to justify her decision to leave and betray her homeland.

Right?

Or, better yet:

Julia Ioffe wants to see Russia fail, collapse, become the 52nd American state so that she really, really feels justified.

A Western colleague last night asked me about my “line” and accused me of hating Russia. (That’s right, the Western media in Russia is not monolithically Russophibic, whatever that means.) It was a stupid question. I don’t have a “line.” I have the news and my sources on the ground in Moscow and when something happens I talk to them and then call it as I see it. If it’s in the format of a blog, I get cheeky and pick only the funny things. The hard work I leave for my published pieces. I don’t hate Russia, given all the friends and family I have living here. And I’ve never had an editor enforce “a line,” have never had them turn down a paid assignment because they didn’t agree with “my line” or wanted something more anti-Putin. I don’t get orders for articles except as vague “Can you write about Phenomenon X?”

It’s just stupid, simplistic, and it brings me to Mark’s very apt question about what one believes is Russia’s trajectory. And despite the nuance of his question, it still boils down to this: if you are optimistic about Russia, you are not a Russophobe. But what are you if you — if you had to venture a guess — were to predict that Russia would continue, like any other country, along a sinusoidal path of ebbs and flows, ups and downs. Does anybody really still believe in linear, Hegelian trajectories? Russia’s path, given its history and its present, is likely to have more height in those highs and more depth in those lows. Steps forward, steps back while time passes and Russia changes in ways we cannot predict, not all of them good. You know, like any country, but more pronounced — and, like any other country, with its aggregate of tiny, hilarious, absurd details I’ve tried to chronicle here. That may not be optimistic, but it sure is realistic. Does that make me a Russophobe?

In November 2008, this so-called Jet-Set Hobo was in Buenos Aires when he filed his first story for True/Slant. It was called ‘From Argentina with Love’, and was in some way concerned with what was the new James Bond movie, ‘A Portion of Condolence’.  If there was any actual film reviewing going on, I think it would have betrayed some disappointment. But greater disappointments were to come.

There could still be ‘A Scintilla of Comfort’. But you’ll have to read/scroll until the end of the piece for that.

For one thing, troubles at MGM indicate that after ‘A Quantum of Solace’ the James Bond series of movies has been suspended …indefinitely! As assiduous followers of this blog can tell you, one of my great, unfulfilled ambitions was to play a villain in a James Bond movie. Any villain. Naturally I would have preferred to be the doomed evil mastermind, but anyone of his windswept and interesting henchman would have sufficed.

This has been true ever since I used to go to the cinema as a toddler back in the 1960s with my rather glamorous mother, who I somehow sensed – even back then – wouldn’t have minded a certain former Edinburgh milkman slipping his JB monogrammed velvet slippers under her bed one fateful night.

It must have been jealousy on my part, but I wanted to turn the tables on Bond, or more literally, feed him to a shark tank, or slice him in two with a laser beam, or pull the levers on him in a remote controlled helicopter on a collision course with a mashing machine – anything to get rid of that infernal Queen & Country prat.

With the combined ages of Messers Connery and Moore now at 163, more recently I’d set my heart on little Daniel Craig. But now even that seems to be in doubt.

Ah, but back in those far-off, heady days of 2008, and at the tender age of just 42, I had other, equally romantic ideas about blogging, and what it might do for what I sometimes laughingly refer to as my career. That is, when I’m absolutely determined to burst the seams of trousers.  These ideas were about the “vision of a contributor and community driven news and opinion websites that would forever change the face of journalism”. And I misquote. Because actually, these weren’t so much ideas as warm, mushy feelings engendered by reading online interviews with our CEO, COO, CTO and all the other chiefs. The guys in the backroom who stop the frurckendeiser from being mixmitized, as I like to put it. I like to put it that way because I can’t be arsed getting to grips with the jargonology. Anyhoo, it all sounded so gee whiz this is straight out of the lab, let’s see what it does, it might change everything.

Like Kim Jong Il, who may not understand precisely how all this nuclear technology works, but sure-as-hell knows he’d like to use it, well, that for me was the blogosphere. I wasn’t quite sure how blogging for True/Slant was going to finally catapult my diabolical alter ego ‘The Jet-Set Hobo’ to literary fame, but I felt it had some part to play.

So, for nearly two years, in fits and starts but fairly regular great bursts of activity, I’ve thrown a lot of stuff at the wall here to see if it would stick. Travel stories straight and twisted, from the high and low end of the social scale; from Florentine restaurant reviews and Budapest’s little Hollywood all the way to gangsters in Belgrade and an assassination in Beirut.

I have regularly cast a rueful eye over the English Channel to comment on the degrading spectacle that British public life seems to have become in the last 15 or 20 years. I’m not a Republican, out to eviscerate the Royal Family, neither am I a toadying colonial.

From time to time, I’ve held forth on what might be called modern manners; such as what to wear when you’re abroad or how to conduct a foreign affair.  Perhaps I should have done a bit more of this sort of material, after all, no offence intended, but take a look around at some of the baseball cap and sweatpants wearing, Cheeto eating contributors and I assume consumers of this site who could certainly use an overhaul, please -nobody-say-makeover.

There’s been my Fiction, which I started to publish late in the game here, just after we all knew the end was nigh. Some of which it must be owed, such as Krakow Nights, is fairly dark matter. They’re all stories that have been told to me, I swear! Your correspondent has always lived a life of blameless domesticity which is why he is also able to turn out work such as his as-if-Jean Cocteau-wrote-a-children’s-book over-a-couple-of-afternoons minor masterpiece, The Wild Cats of Piran.

You see, now we really are getting to the crux of the matter. The Jet-Set Hobo has both literally and figuratively been all over the map since this blog began. Not enough focus, and I suppose if I do return in some shape or form it will be with a tighter focus. But can you blame me, entirely? Since I began this blog in November 08 I’ve lived in and filed reports from Buenos Aires, Auckland, Beirut, London and Budapest.

But wait, there’s more.

From time to time, I’ve even posted some of my weird little movies online, which must really throw readers who come to True/Slant looking for either, broadly speaking, policy wonks discussing health care reform or otherwise smart people discussing articles with headlines like “Can sex with Dakota Fanning make Bela Lugosi hot again?” (Okay, I’m mixing it up a little there, but a headline like that would be more fun.)

Which brings us neatly to my final ‘beat’. When I’ve had enough of it, I’ve also vented against the mind-dumbing fatuity of celebrity culture. Yet some of my most popular posts have been about celebrities, so I can’t help but think I have failed in some way. I don’t just mean as a writer, but as a person. Because I can’t help watching and commenting on the tawdry parade of low life distraction that it is. For the record, I’m Team Oksana, all the way. So what if she is manipulative and a gold digger, (which I suppose she must be), you can see a train when it’s coming, can’t you? Besides, I never cared much for Mel Gibson and that was cemented for me by his revisionist historical movies. For example, painting the Brits of the War of Revolution as if they were the Gestapo. Plus I used to cringe whenever you’d see his co-stars talking with forced smiles about what a pranky prankster the Gibster was on set. But I digress as I am so wont to do. I’ve said that before too.

Perhaps it’s time for the Rogue Bond movie. Remember the Australian Bond, George Lazenby? Well, imagine him enjoying his sunset years at Strangways health farm, puttering about in a wheelchair, trying to get it on with the nurses. Along I come at the wheel of lawn tractor and crash straight into bank of rhododendrons. Later while recuperating, my character strikes up an unlikely friendship with the octogenarian secret agent, finally getting close enough to strangle him with a stethoscope, or his tie-your-0wn bow-tie. That’d truly be a happy end, for this fantasist at least. But I jest, I’m just jealous.

So anyway, a happy ending for my real future in the virtual sphere? I don’t know. I’ve migrated most of the stuff filed here over to another site, and I’ll be sure to post there when I have the energy and stamina for it. Like about once every five years.

I’m thinking of cancelling my facebook account too incidentally. All these people, putting all their junk out in public, affairs going toxic, surrendering all their personal data to a 26 year old fratboy. Hmm. When did we ever think that was a good idea? Privacy. It’s the new luxury. Besides, it’s occured to me many times how much like high school Facebook is, and I never particularly cared for that either.

So, we’re going to wrap this up, because it’s already 1200 words or so, and I think a good blog post is seldom no more than a thousand, just like eight hours is as long as you ever really can enjoy sitting in a plane, no matter how good the service. This isn’t quite goodbye however. It’s my understanding some of the True/Slant team are going to be asked to stay on in some new, transmogrified version of this site, and I’d quite like to be one of them …so you never know. Hmmm.

Besides, it’s not midnight EST on July 31st just yet, so we’ve time for a few more laughs and some goodbyes.

Stay tuned.

My college Spanish professors never went here.

Reports this evening that a hijacking has been stopped at Domodedovo airport in Moscow. Yesterday afternoon.

Apparently, a passenger on a Moscow-bound flight from Mineralnye Vody “made demands” of the crew and held up the plane for two hours. One report says this passenger turned to the plane’s captain saying he had “valuable information for the security forces.” The pilot reported the incident to air traffic control who diverted the plane to a special lot. In the meantime, the demander changed his demand: now he wanted to see the security administrators as well as representatives of the media. A fellow passenger felt ill. Instead of medics, though, the airport’s security and FSB boarded the plane and cleared it out.

It is unclear right now who this guy is or how one guy can hold up a plane or why he did this and how an offer of information constitutes a demand or how good of a hijacker he was if the pilot was able to, you know, land the plane exactly where he wanted, or whether this is anything more than the froth of a drunken rant, but Komsomolskaya Pravda reports that a body presumed to have fallen out of the plane [sic] and that police have cordoned off some of the landing/take-off strips and are not letting passengers off their planes on this, the hottest day of the year in Moscow. The planes are stuffy, out of water and even juice.

In short: who knows. More knowledge when I know it.

Image via Wikipedia

Let us say it. Barring the unforeseen, there will be a major Middle East war in the next two years.

On one side will be Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and possibly Syria. On the other side will be Israel… and likely just Israel.

Furthermore, odds are that Israel will initiate the war.

But they will have Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United States quietly (and not so quietly) offering support. The United States, for reasons of its own related to both the continued Iraqi occupation and support of the Saudi and Israeli governments, may even enter the war. If the war goes especially bad, the Arab powers may even enter as separate combatants agaist Iran. Turkey, meanwhile, will say platitudes in support of Iran while profiting off of both sides.

Meanwhile, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak is at death’s door. Whoever his successor is will face a lively Islamist opposition movement. Over in Saudi Arabia, the King is gravely ill. It’s a bad time in geopolitical terms.

As much as Israel is disliked in the Arab Middle East, Iranian hegemony is feared more by old-line powers such as Saudi Arabia and Mubarak’s Egypt. Syria is not necessarily opposed to it due to their own unique situation.

In the thinking of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, Iran simply appears more dangerous than Israel. Their fear is that a nuclear-armed Iran will upend the regional balance of power and endanger their regimes. From the viewpoint of the rulers, it is a rational fear.

So in a word, the situation is a catastrophe. But how will this war play out?

The Los Angeles Times’s excellent “Babylon & Beyond” blog has a list of possible Iranian war scenarios with a wealth of links. The Los Angeles Times says the unsaid — that in an Iranian-Israeli war, Saudi Arabia will likely grant Israel rights to their airspace.

Israel and Iran share no land border and are on opposite ends of the Middle East.

The Atlantic’s equally invaluable “Atlantic Wire” blog has a list of reasons Israel has not bombed Iran yet that is a must-read.

Meanwhile, the American neoconservative-leaning journalist Michael J. Totten jokingly wrote on his blog that he was headed to the Middle East to bring his readers “pre-war coverage from Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza.”

Unfortunately, Totten is right. He may be flip about it, but the coming war will be especially bad for the Middle East.

Israel will suffer greatly. Iran will suffer greatly. The Palestinians will suffer greatly. Lebanon will suffer greatly. At the end of the war, there will likely be no winners. There will still be no Palestinian state and the Islamic Republic of Iran will still be in power. Israel will likely incur the world’s wrath, given the state’s leadfooted inability to gain public sympathy. Odds are that the regional power balance will shift greatly. Odds are that Israelis, Palestinians, Lebanese and Iranians will suffer mass civillian casualties. Whatever power shifts may happen in the region, millions will suffer. Greatly.

The only consolation is that the war will not occur in the coming months unless Israel decides to attempt a Ramadan attack before the rainy season kicks in. Odds are unlikely, but in the Middle East, nothing is impossible.

This war will be nothing to laugh about. Writing as an American, as a citizen of the one true global hegemon, I’m intensely worried about what the coming years will bring for us. How will America cope when the entire Middle East, from Cairo to Tehran, goes to war?

Image by AFP via @daylife

Y’all, it is so hot in Moscow. There are peat-bog fires in the countryside so the city is choked with a visible, and pungent, white smoke. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve beaten every record ever set since they started recording the temperature here 130 years ago. At this writing it is 97 degrees.

So instead of writing something about corruption or the fact that the budget deficit will be double what the Finance Ministry projected, I will bring you this awesomeness: a music video by comedian Aleksandr Revva under the pseudonym Artur Pirozhkov. (English speakers are free to tune out, as are Russian speakers who don’t get Russian humor.)

And, for context, some of his precious hilariousness.

You’re welcome.

This Friday a demonstration is planned in New York City to bring more attention to these American citizens held captive by the Iranian theocrats; here’s the organizers’ website: freethehikers.org.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from June 1998 through May 2010 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the successful 2004 completion of the popular television series, producers refused to give up on the Sex and the City franchise even while opposition to it increased exponentially with the 2008 release of the first Sex and the City movie.

Sex and the City 2, released in May 2010, brings to the screen the now familiar gal-pals, Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda, who are flown on an all-expenses paid trip to Abu Dhabi by an Arab sheikh.  Culture clashes ensue.

“Frankly, since the movie was already a critical failure back in May, we thought we dodged a bullet,” said a senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the subject. “The fact that WikiLeaks released these documents means someone simply wants to embarrass Warner Brothers, HBO, and the White House.”

The reports — some spare summaries and others more detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the Sex and the  City 2 production that pointed toward almost certain failure:

• Grossly oversimplified stereotypes would be inflicted upon civilians not just in US movie theaters, but around the world.

“The bitch, the slut, the princess, and the everywoman – forming a circle of friendship unlikely to sustain itself in real life -– these are stereotypes that might have had some traction in the late 90’s, but are long since past their sell-by date,” said one report.

• Those stereotypes would only be amplified in a Middle Eastern setting.

“Of course they have to ride camels,” said one classified document.  “Of course most Muslim men are portrayed as thugs, while Muslim women are all simply closeted Manhattanites.”

• Obscene displays of conspicuous consumption far outweighed concerns related to narrative flow, plot development and character growth.

“This is what happens when power is taken out of the hands of the American movie-goer and put into the hands of those who benefit from product placement,” said another secret document.   “It’s the rise of the fashion-industrial complex.”

The hugely popular Sex and the City television series starred Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall -  all hailed for their portrayals of modern women in a post-feminist landscape.

The series, which ran from 1998 until 2004, was nominated for 50 Emmy awards, winning seven times.   The Sex and the City movie, released in 2008 – and focusing on the married lives of the characters -  faced lackluster reviews.

While not directly involved in the production of Sex and the City 2, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs says President Obama “is owning up to the responsibility” of what the US “foisted” upon its allies, the emirate of Abu Dhabi (UAE), where major segments of the film are set, and Morocco – where the movie was actually shot.

“These documents simply highlight what the President has been saying since the campaign,” Mr. Gibbs said in a White House briefing. “Not every superhero, not every theme park ride, and not every tv series needs to be made into a film  – or a sequel.”

Image by law_keven via Flickr

Ever have a candy bar made of delicious camel milk chocolate? Or how about a glass of refreshing camel milk? Over in the United Arab Emirates, several firms — including a company owned by the Emir of Dubai — are betting gourmands will go crazy for them.

Al-Nassma, founded in 2008 by Dubai ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, has launched a campaign to sell European, North American and Chinese wholesalers on the virtues of camel milk chocolate. As with all things in Dubai, the company does not do novelty food marketing on a budget: the firm owns a farm of 3000 camels and is expecting to produce 100 tons of premium chocolate annually. Rather than producing budget Hershey’s or Cadbury’s-style bars, Al-Nassma is instead producing high-end bars with flavorings such as coriander and dates.

Meanwhile, two companies are applying for permission to export camel milk to the European Union.

If all goes well, Al Ain Dairy’s “Camelait” and the Emirates Industry for Camel Milk and Products’ “Camelicious” will be on European shelves in 2011. Camel milk is a popular drink in the United Arab Emirates and in some other parts of the Middle East: Camelicious produces 5000 liters a day.

Camel milk tastes largely similar to cow’s milk but has vastly more vitamin C and insulin.

A major selling point in efforts to market camel milk to Europe, China and North America is the beverage’s lack of lactose: Lactose intolerance-sufferers can drink camel milk with no problems at all.

This reporter has sampled camel milk before. While it does not taste unpleasant, it’s not going to go in his fridge anytime soon.

But the important question: How does camel milk chocolate taste?

The good people at Candyblog gave it a try:

The Whole Milk Camel Milk Bar is nicely molded and tempered. It’s quite a dark looking milk chocolate bar. It has a distinct, thick snap to it.

The flavor is immediately a bit salty to my tongue. The caramel flavors are noticeable as is the smooth texture but still on the rustic side. It’s not quite fudgy but also not completely slick or oily like some milk chocolates. It’s sweet but also well rounded with toasted notes and maybe a hint of malt and cheese. The ingredients on all bars list honey, though it’s far down on the list and I didn’t really get the honey notes here. The chocolate flavors are mild but more to the malt and woodsy side of things than raisins/berries or coffee.

But standing in the way of Al-Nassma’s cornering of the gourmet chocolate market is one thing: Dubai (and the Emirates) lack a processing facility for high-end chocolate. Al-Nassma sends shipments of camel milk to Vienna, where high-end manufacturer Manner processes the chocolate and sends the bars back to Dubai to have flavoring added.

Al-Nassma is opening retail outlets throughout the UAE and is beginning to sell their chocolates through retailers such as Harrods in London; Americans eager to give camel milk chocolate a shot can contact San Francisco store Chocolate Covered, who already stock them.

Sheikh al-Maktoum, Al-Nassma’s founder, is widely believed to have causd Dubai’s economic meltdown through his poor business decisions.

But if the WikiLeaks docs were good news for the Taliban, you’d think they’d be confirming all of the contents, wouldn’t they? Not so, according to The Daily Beast’s Mushtaq Yusufzai:

Responding to WikiLeaks’ release of tens of thousands of pages of classified military documents about the war in Afghanistan, a high-ranking Taliban commander rejected reports that the Taliban had any links with Pakistan’s spy agency.

“Look, we’re at war and would like to get aid from anyone to fight against the U.S. and its allies who invaded our homeland,” Sirajuddin Haqqani, a senior leader of the Haqqani network, told The Daily Beast on Monday, denying any existing links with Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence, known by its acronym ISI.

via WikiLeaks Secret Documents: The Taliban Responds – The Daily Beast.

Haqqani goes on to play up US and NATO ‘atrocities’ and how incidents the documents might confirm help bring Afghan civilians over to the Taliban side. What he neglects, deliberately, is that appearing too cozy with the Pakistani side isn’t good for the Taliban’s cause either. Afghans don’t want to be under the thumb of NATO and America, but they also don’t want their country run as a satellite of Pakistan, a country whose decades of basketcase rule no one in the world aspires to resemble. Portrayal of the Taliban in Afghanistan as mere proxies for Afghanistan’s slightly less dysfunctional but militarily much powerful neighbor could help the government of Hamid Karzai and his American sponsors in ways the Islamists understand all too well.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Interior Ministry’s Department of Economic Security reports today that as President Dmitry Medvedev’s war on corruption heats up, so has corruption. In the first six months of 2010, the size of the average bribe has nearly doubled, from 23,000 RUB ($760) to 44,000. Since Medvedev was elected in 2008, bribes have quadrupled.

Quadrupled.

And bribes for bureaucrats who are of middle or low-middle rank have grown faster than inflation.

This confirms what I’ve been hearing from Russian businessmen in Moscow, who complain that visits from renegade tax inspectors, fire inspectors, pencil inspectors have grown more frequent and more brazen, and the size of bribes they ask for, well, see above. Some speculate that it is because the average bureaucrat’s sense of uncertainty has grown, especially if he thinks his money spigot is in imminent danger of being shut off, so they take as much as they can for the long winter ahead. But that is, of course, just the speculation of the people who have to deal with these inspectors.

No wonder even Medvedev admits he’s made no progress on fighting corruption. Quoth he: “Often efforts toward fighting corruption are limited to energetically signing papers.”

via Gazeta.ru

Because you guys seem to enjoy discussions about Russian women and money, I figured I would repost my latest article, from Slate, here. It is about how corrupt Russian bureaucrats use their wives as offshore bank accounts to hide the money they steal, and why that undermines the millions of Russian women not married to chinovniki, and who work for their family’s bread.

A strange thing happened in late June, when the big Russian Internal Ministry bosses disclosed their earnings and those of their family members, thanks to President Dmitry Medvedev’s new anti-corruption measures. The surprise didn’t come from the men: The head-honcho cops were the fat cats everyone assumed them to be, declaring incomes that strangely exceeded that of the president. And the ranks of the obscure upper-middle management fittingly declared modest incomes, usually topping at out around $50,000. A Russian-made car here, a modest apartment there.

But the wifely half of the family disclosures was far more revelatory. There was, for example, the amazing financial statement of the spouse of Viktor Smirnov, the deputy director of the Russian Internal Ministry’s Center to Ensure Operation Performance to Combat Extremism. In 2009, a year in which the Russian economy struggled to get back on its feet after the financial crisis turned it virtually inside-out, Mrs. Smirnov made $500,000. She also owns two plots of land, each about 40 acres. She has shares in two apartments as well as in a housing complex, plus a Subaru Outback, an industrial truck, and a BMW 3-Series, which can retail for over $60,000. What does Mr. Smirnov own? One-quarter of one apartment.

Read the rest here.

via Slate’s Double X

Regardless of whether or not the Iranians crossed into Iraq or whether the hikers mistakenly crossed a mile or two into Iran somewhere along the poorly-marked border, the Iranian regime has quite clearly been using these three detainees as chips in its high-stakes poker game with the U.S. and other of its international adversaries. The hikers are being accused of espionage, presumably on behalf of the CIA or NSA; and although both the U.S. and Israel are known to engage in espionage against Iran, the details of this particular case would not seem to indicate that these particular graduates of a distinctly anti-CIA educational institution were working on behalf of the perceived imperialistic interests of the U.S., Israel, or both. Detainee Sarah Shroud taught Iraqi refugees in Damascus and otherwise spent her time advocating on behalf of the reasonable aspirations of various oppressed Arab groups; one article she wrote for a left-leaning online media outlet – entitled “Families Shout Their Love Across Minefields in Golan Heights” – is particularly non-indicative of someone in the planning stages of some daring espionage action in service to the U.S. intelligence community. Another of the hikers is an acquaintance of one of my top associates with Project PM, who summed up his experiences with the fellow to me thusly: “If he was under cover, it was a damned good cover.”

What we have here, then, is a case of three American activists who are not only clearly innocent of espionage, but who have actually done more than their part to improve relations between the U.S. and the Muslim world during a low point in that volatile relationship. These are the three individuals whom the Iranian regime have chosen to use as pawns in an attempt to score public relations points against the U.S., among other things; that the Iranian government has proposed a prisoner swap indicates that its more ambitious goal is to buy back its own operatives with the espionage equivalent of counterfeit currency.

It is all well and good to know of some injustice perpetrated by a far-away theocracy, but in order to provide these three noble young people with a better chance at eventual liberty, it is necessary to bring further attention to this ongoing incident so that those of our own representatives with the means to act  will be compelled to do so. This Friday – the first anniversary of the hikers’ detention by Iranian forces – friends and family of the three Americans will be holding a rally in New York in an effort to prompt firmer action on behalf of Shane Bauer, Sarah Shourd, and Josh Fattal, who have languished in an Iranian prison for a year and who will continue to do so until such time as the Obama Administration steps up to the plate and does everything in its power to secure the liberty of three American citizens who’ve found themselves abducted by a theocratic and criminal regime.

“Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of occupation”, proclaims a headline in the Guardian.  John Kerry says they raise significant questions about the conflict. The iconic Daniel Ellsberg himself says he was “very impressed by the release.” Pundits have been focusing on various elements that are mentioned in the papers, such as civilian deaths from American fire, Pakistan’s covert support of the Taliban even while they’re supposed to be fighting them, and the existence of an American special operations group to hunt down Taliban leaders.

Yet when even Mother Jones says the Wikileaks papers are no big deal, then perhaps there’s more smoke than fire here. The best commentary so far comes from counterinsurgency scholar Andrew Exum, whose reaction can be summed as: Dead civilians? Pakistani double-cross? Taliban leaders on a hit list? No kidding? What rock have you been living under?

The Pentagon Papers were a bombshell because they showed that the American government lied when it claimed to want peace in Southeast Asia, even as it escalated the Vietnam war. The snippets I’ve seen of the Afghanistan documents so far aren’t bombshells. They’re routine reports from American soldiers in the field. They mostly say that “we handed out goodies to the civilians. They still don’t like us. Our Afghan allies are a bunch of boobs.” These are not revelations to those who have been following the conflict. And those who don’t follow the war, which includes the majority of the American public, will not be galvanized. Dry bureaucratic reports don’t have the same impact as a video of helicopters strafing Iraqis.

If there is any good to come out of the Afghan and Iraq wars, it’s that any romantic illusions that war is precise and high-tech have been shredded. After nearly 10 years of fighting, we know that civilians die in war.

Unfortunately we have also become anesthetized to this. An after-action report of a botched commando raid that killed civilians isn’t gong to provoke mass protest. And perhaps it shouldn’t, because all wars have their share of stupidity and futility, which are usually documented somewhere in the vast military machine. The difference is that they are being revealed now by WikiLeaks instead of by some historian digging through archives 40 years later.

The WikiLeaks documents will provide ammunition for those who want us out of Afghanistan now. But the ammunition will mostly be blank, because Obama has laid down his Afghanistan policy, and like Johnson and Nixon, he will be reluctant to back out of it. So we will snort and snarl at the Wikileaks Papers. And the war will go on.

Here’s the nut of the story:

“They know they’re Indonesian,” Ms. Sugiarto, 34, said. “They love Indonesia. They just can’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. It’s tragic.”

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.

For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.

via Indonesians’ Focus on Language Is Often English – NYTimes.com.

What’s so wrong about this article is its conclusion that Indonesian is becoming ’second-class.’ If you spend enough time around actual Indonesians, you start to understand that Bahasa Indonesia has always had a second-class status.

The article goes through the familiar history of the language – that the Dutch chose it as the language of colonial administration. What it leaves out is that part of the reason for doing so was that it was a relatively easy language for anyone to pick up. Its relative simplicity is an important fact when you contemplate the number of languages spoken across the Indonesian islands, as well as the complexity of some of the major tongues like Javanese and Sundanese with their caste-oriented manners. Insisting that other ethnic groups of Indonesia speak these languages would have caused an immediate breaking point for a massive civil war. Which is why the Dutch first, and subsequently the founders of the Indonesian nation selected Bahasa, a relative of Malay that already served as a trading language,

That’s why everybody in Indonesia speaks Indonesian, but no one really speaks Indonesian. In Jakarta, you’ll find kids speaking a pidgin, a mash-up of Javanese, Betawi, and Bahasa Indonesia. When they hear your intermediate Indonesian, they start chuckling as you use formal pronouns like saya and anda for ‘I’ and ‘you’ because they use more informal and even slang elements of the language in their daily communications. The formality that you might hear coming out of President Susilo Bambang Yudohoyo’s mouth in a major speech or read in formal government publications, the kind that Onishi’s article laments, doesn’t really exist in daily communication in a marketplace or at home for most of Indonesia’s 250 million people with their hundreds of native languages.

Moreover, this isn’t a language known primarily for its beauty – for instance, it’s hard to imagine anyone telling you that you really haven’t read Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet unless you read it in Indonesian, the way Russophiles talk about Tolstoy or Dostoevsky. Fittingly in the series’s first novel, This Earth of Mankind, Pramoedya’s colonial-era protagonist Minke is scolded by his mother for writing newspaper articles in Dutch because they aren’t written in her native language – Javanese. While Pramoedya wrote in Bahasa Indonesia, he did so because it was the language of the times – his works like those of the Dutch author Multatuli might have been composed in that language had he written them in an earlier generation.

So it’s certainly true that Indonesia needs a working lingua franca so that a Javanese housewife can transact business with a Buginese hawker in a district on the outskirts of Jakarta. But it’s not like a decline of the most formal, proper Indonesian would represent the decline of one of the world’s most elegant languages. Bahasa Indonesia has always been a language of function more than a language of form. If English begins to take on that function, it’s not like it will be the end of Indonesia. The peoples in that country, educated or dirt poor, will continue speaking their mother tongues while finding a language that allows them to communicate in spite of their legion linguistic differences.

Image via Wikipedia

92,000 documents. This week, Wikileaks unloaded on the world the greatest leak since the Pentagon Papers. On one level, the five years of secret documents obtained by Wikileaks and released in conjunction with the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel tell a harrowing tale of the Allied failure in Afghanistan. But they also represent a sea change in journalism.

I’ll leave the parsing of the documents — which tell of Pakistani treachery, government corruption and of everything from botched operations to pederasty — for another occasion. What really matters is the role of the internet in 2010.

I am 29 years old, a journalist and a native New Yorker. My CV includes work for Slate, Wired, Foreign Policy and some of the biggest dot-coms in the world. In career terms, that means I have been blessed. I am grateful.

Growing up, my family always had a newspaper in the house. These days, my parents — divorced now — both read the paper online rather than buying a paper copy. For lifestyle and sport stories, they often read the email forwards their friends send them or the content that pops up on their ISP’s homepage instead of reading newspaper content. They’re just two examples out of millions of Americans who no longer read the daily newspaper.

It’s no secret that the journalism business is a mess. Publications are folding, salaries are getting slashed, the old guard is regrouping in every possible permutation. But newspapers also sponsor incredible investigative journalism. The kind of stories that can’t be completed in a day or a week. The stories that citizens — taxpayers — have a right to know.

In this case, Wikileaks did the work. Wikileaks, unlike the Times or the Guardian, makes no pretense of objectivity. They are expressly partisan, expressly anti-war. Every time I read about Wikileaks, it seems like they stepped out of a 1990s Bruce Sterling story. In fact, hell, they are the dream of the old cyberpunk aesthetic writ large. They’re also saving investigative journalism.

I started my BA at the relatively late age of 20. I studied journalism at Temple University in Philadelphia — a school I enthusiastically recommend to anyone crazy enough to consider that career. The learning was vocation oriented — by the time I graduated, I knew LexisNexis and the arcana of Philadelphia’s City Hall inside out. My first major gig was writing over at Gawker Media’s Wonkette during the 2004 Presidential Election. Me and about a third of my classmates stumbled into digital journalism; most of the others fell into print. The print journalists seemed to denigrate the web journalists with the claim that “blogs weren’t journalism.” The only problem is that most of the web isn’t blogs… and that blogs are just a platform, rather than a genre. Thousands upon thousands of journalists research, source and verify stories that are published only on the web each day. I should know; I’m one of them.

The variety of original information and research posted to the web is staggering. Covering the Middle East here at True/Slant, for instance, I have become familiar with sites that collect and translate Jihadist literature, clearinghouses for translated articles for Arabic newspapers and offer first-hand reports from warzones. But so much information is only read by experts and enthusiasts — especially here in the United States where global ignorance is an art form.

No matter what, someone needs to keep serious enterprise journalism going. Newspapers like the New York Times, Washington Post and The Guardian will keep on producing serious journalism even as they transition from “newspapers” to “brands.”

The switch from reading news on printed ink-stained paper to computer screens, iPads and smartphones is a strange one. In the past it was only the young and tech-savvy. Now it’s everyone. Just as the music industry suffered an upheaval in the wake of too much connectedness, so did journalism.

Nonetheless, a few operations are out there keeping the work of enterprise journalism alive. Wikileaks, ProPublica and the few dozen thinktanks that offer funding for investigative reporting, for instance. But we need more.

In the meantime, Wikileaks is fighting the good fight of allowing journalists to do what they do best — and we can only thank them for it.

This Saturday found Vladimir Putin in Sevastopol, a city made famous by Tolstoy and the fact that this Ukrainian Black Sea port has a large Russian population that once spoke openly of seceding.

The press has mentioned this historic visit because, at a press conference there, Putin confirmed that he had, in fact, met with the 10 Russian spies deported from the U.S., and even sang patriotic songs with them. (The cause of their downfall, the premier said, was “treachery” and, as we know, “traitors always end badly…either from drinking, or drugs” they end up, he said, “in the gutter.” He also sympathized with how hard spying is: “Just imagine: you have to acquire the fluency of a native. You have to think in [the language], speak in it, and do that which has been assigned in the interests of your homeland.” He added that the 10 Illegals will have “bright futures” in Russia and will work in high-level positions.)

Anyway. The visit, I would argue, was important in the world-historical sense for a different reason: Putin attended an international biker convention.

He rode in like a conquering knight on a three-wheeler Harley Davidson, dressed in black and sporting black gloves. The Russian Prime Minister tore up the chalky dust before taking the stage and expounding on why he loves bikes.  You guessed it. FREEDOM.

“The important thing,” he said, “is that the bike gives its owner a sweet feeling of freedom. And that’s why we can say, without any exaggeration, without any tenousness, straightly and bravely, that the bike is a symbol of freedom.”

Opposition leaders, I hope you were listening: bikes.

via Gazeta.ru, Thompson Reuters