"That Humility Has Been Lost"

"It's hard to recapture the horror that earlier generations of Americans felt about preventive war when it was still something that other countries did to the United States and not merely something Americans contemplate doing to others. They viewed it the way some Americans still view torture: as liberation from the moral restraints that human beings require. One of the things that frightened them most about the Nazis was that Hitler had dispensed with the concept of original sin. He had aimed to create a new class of infallible, god-like, humans who need not be encumbered by the fetters that bound lesser races. Totalitarianism, argued Arthur Schlesinger in The Vital Center, aimed 'to liquidate the tragic insights which gave man a sense of its limitations.' For Schlesinger, Reinhold Niebuhr, Walter Lippmann and other intellectuals who shaped America’s foreign policy debate in the early Cold War, acknowledging these limitations was part of what made America different. Because Americans recognized that they were fallible, fallen creatures, they did not grant themselves the illegitimate, corrupting power of preventive war."

Peter Beinart at The Atlantic looks at the American embrace of preventive war.

"I Demand You Get a Grip"

"Yeah, that's her, staring you down, eyes blazing, cursing under her breath. She's a piece of work with zigzag black bangs, a blood-red shirt and hands firmly planted on hips. When the guy who's in love with her inches forward, telling her, 'I can't live without you,' she shoots him down: 'Then why aren't you dead yet?'
"She's not big on holding back."

Anh Do in the Los Angeles Times talks with Lela Lee, creator of Angry Little Asian Girl.

Demise of Dear Leader

"Short and round, he wore elevator shoes, oversize sunglasses and a bouffant hairdo—a Hollywood stereotype of the wacky post-cold-war dictator. Mr. Kim himself was fascinated by film. He orchestrated the kidnapping of an actress and a director, both of them South Koreans, in an effort to build a domestic movie industry. He was said to keep a personal library of 20,000 foreign films, including the complete James Bond series, his favorite. But he rarely saw the outside world, save from the windows of his luxury train, which occasionally took him to China."

In The New York Times, David E. Sanger reports the death of Kim Jong-il.

Asian Markets Fall Like Cherry Blossoms In Gentle Spring Rain

"'Our worst monthly drop; rate cuts make investors flee—to commodities,' Nikkei Index vice commissioner Fukako Mishima said, claiming job creation by Mitsubishi, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, and Sony failed to provide confidence in a market already as skittish as the aging husband of a teenage bride, forcing investors to shore up cash reserves with orders of durable goods and agricultural products. 'Fading dollar's gleam, a feeble warning beacon: Seek bellies of pork.'"

From The Onion.