1. If North Korea is selling weapons to Hamas, we are sorta living the plot of Team America: World Police.
2. Tyler Cowen’s brief blog post on food in China touches on an attitude I find to be of very bad taste, though my cynicism toward what I perceive others may find my opinion to be of bad taste. He suggests that the quality of food (from the perspective of the traveler-foodie) will fall as refrigeration proliferates as China gets richer. While I don’t lump Cowen in with this crowd, to me, many foodies effectively take pleasure in the poverty of others. It’s as if the traveler-foodie asserts unabashedly, “I’m sad people are rich enough to own refrigerators, because then maybe when I travel more of my food will have been frozen at some point.” Third world countries are places of suffering, not freaking amusement parks. Celebrate when that sleepy impoverished village gets its first McDonald’s – the people living there have more important things to do than making sure your children and your children’s children can experience the street food there as you remember it.
