If You Work at CNN, You’ve Got to Know Your Stans

You know I remember when the war first broke out, and we all said to each other, OK, we have to learn the “stans.” You know? It’s not just Kyrgyzstan, but you’ve got all the other stans in that area.

— Kyra Phillips discovers that land wars in Asia force CNN anchors to learn geography.

It’s not “Common Era.” CE stands for Christ’s Empire.

— Doug Wilso n explains the real meaning of the abbreviation.

Let’s get something straight: A vegetarian is someone who doesn’t eat meat. It’s not someone who loves vegetables.

— Ezra Klein , grumpy from a lack of protein, attempts to unite his fellow vegetarians against something called the “grilled vegetable plate.” (Natually, as a carnivore, I have no idea what a GVP is. But if it’s so bland that even people who eat tofu and bean sprouts balk at eating it, then it must be truly horrible.)

If ever again somewhere down the road I would be debating him, I would be happy to take credit for his accomplishment.

—Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is happy to take credit for Obamacare.

[Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] get a job for a company as security, stopping robbers like themselves. This solution fails because of their preferences; they don’t like to kill people. Security requires more violence than robbery because when you’re a robber you can make credible threats that actually prevent violence (“don’t move or I’ll shoot!”), and so you can avoid actually killing people. When you’re on the security side, once someone has decided to rob you they have already decided that the level of violence you are implicitly threatening is not enough to stop them, and so you have to use more violence than they were expecting to stop them.

— Adam Ozimek on the economics of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Additional sources: Gawker , The Browser