A scary sentence.

There is also a 53 km (33 mi) long Pyongyang Tram and 150 km (93 mi) trolleybus service, but tourists have heard that few locals use them due to the high and frequent hazard of electrocution.

Something fascinating.

Sometimes I browse foreign media with nothing but google translate to help me. This is choppy but fascinating.

Something reasonable.

There are a lot cnidarian* defenses of Roman Polanski being put forth today by some of the most detestable people I have encountered on the internet in days.


This, however, strikes me as a reasonable and important point. At the end of all this, Roman Polanski may walk out of a Los Angeles court room as a free man. That might be the correct decision based on the way the case was handled. It is in the laws interest, though, that Mr. Polanski see the inside of a court room again, whatever the final verdict.

*I sort of like that word.

This article embodies all conservative stereotypes about the liberal media.

It is official.

"In the coming weeks, the Polanski affair will no doubt become a tabloid sensation, with op-ed moralists, excitable bloggers* and the Glenn Becks of the world noisily weighing in on the propriety of his possible prosecution."

Only people on the level of Glenn Beck find child rape and fleeing the country to be actions deserving of legal consequences.

*Hi! I am an excitable blogger.

Come on, NYT.

Someone is being a lazy editor today. The headline for this piece makes no sense, since 12:40 AM is not, in any way, prime time.

The best sentence I have read today.

"Only a handful of literary novelists born since World War II have published a book that reached the top of the Times list, and two of those best sellers were the result of cult leaders’ shocking public pronouncements — the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and Oprah Winfrey’s 2001 endorsement of Jonathan Franzen."- NY Times

Too vigorous on the F-22

This is a ridiculous sentence by an otherwise quite reasonable author.

"And even if China were building Raptor-level fighters, there’s no reason to assume Beijing has designs on the U.S. interests — unless for some reason you consider the defense of Taiwan a strategic imperative for Washington."

Way too much of a jump there. A U.S. interest and a strategic imperative are fairly different things. Also, why does Beijing need to have designs on U.S. interests today, when the fighter production we are talking about right now would cover the next decade.

I totally agree, though, it is a great thing the F-22 extra funding was voted down by the Senate. I just think Axe overstated his case.

A quick request.

Dear Mr. President,

Please stop using the formulation "the politics of _______." It was great for a while. Please brainstorm with Jon Favreau and come up with something new.

Thanks,
IG

An attempt at a rule for internet reading.

I think the following rule is a fairly good one. I imagine someone else has already thought it up. It probably has a cool name, like Tim’s Axiom, or Johnson’s Directive.

So here it is- Do not get outraged when an author you have never heard of writes something outrageous on website you have never heard of.*

As a corollary, Think for a bit before deciding if you should get outraged when an author you have never heard of writes something outrageous on a website you have heard of.

* Obviously, this rule is intended for the relatively well traveled internet user. It seems too often that in order to provoke a response in a reader, a columnist/blogger will quote someone at an obscure and out of the way publication/blog. They then attempt to direct the outrage just generated at other, less deserving targets.


There are many many people who write things that appear on the internet in relatively serious locations. On any given issue, it is easy to find some one person who says something so insane that the only response you can think of is "you certainly do remind me of Adolf Hitler." It is then easy to focus on these writers and focus efforts on refuting them.

For me personally, this makes it too easy to turn many good and decent people into the caricature embodied by the outrageous writer of the moment.

Someone was at a memorial day barbecue.

This is the laziest opinion column in this history of the world.

Awkward times

You know what must have been awkward? This photo.