I Am Very Tall

I've always been a big fan of the NYT, so it saddens me that they're getting totally hammered (stock price way down, credit rating cut to junk). Blog posts routinely refer to the company as "running on fumes," which is a generally uncool state of existence for a company.

Hopefully, there's some way out there to save them before they go down. Aside from providing excellent global news coverage, the Times has shown themselves to be a consistently thoughtful paper, providing the world with thoughtful and creative pieces. For instance, you should check out this latest piece on Moscow. It's a set of comments from Russian readers in Moscow that have been translated into English. For me, this is totally incredible. If you had told me a few years ago that we could read the thoughts of people in Russia about foreing policy articles written in the Times, I would have written it off as being possible but probably fanciful. But things are different now. Some of the more interesting quotes:

Does Russia have a right for zones of influence of its own? Well…
To begin with, zones of influence is a political category invented in the West to justify its expansions. Now various Kremlinologists are using it to explain Russia’s motivations as to different events. - Russian person #1

The longer I live the more I share the imperial aspirations of Russia because otherwise we will not be able to safeguard our country. Because the West, specifically the United States, conducts a very aggressive policy against Russia, as its former adversary and the only real rival and competitor.
We have no other way out.
How long can we dance to somebody else's tune? - Russian person #2

P.S.: Dear American Readers: Many of you have seen the movie RoboCop. So, in my humble opinion, you’d understand the actions of Yuri.M. Luzhkov much better if you simply imagined him being a vice-president of the OCS corporation (or how it was called). On one hand, the robotic cops it produced enforced the law with an iron fist. On the other hand, nuances of their production guaranteed that this iron fist would never, under any circumstances, be linked to the corporation’s leaders, whatever they do. So it’s only about making people think that any actions of the corporation are socially useful – and that there’s nothing to worry about. In Luzhkov’s case, meetings in support of Sevastopol and building of schools and hospitals in Ossetia are very helpful. - Russian person #3