His original story was all about The Earth is Flat, and why Tom Friedman is a rich asshole who butchers the English language and is not particularly bright. So the new piece is on, you know, pretty much the same theme, except it's about 'stache's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded. Sample:

And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?”Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

Ha, he sounds like us! Matt Taibbi is great and if you think you are too cool to like Matt Taibbi, you are incorrect. Suck it, 'stache. [NYPress]

And sold it on the black market. Or tried to sell it, anyway. Says the AFP:

"The investigation also revealed that the men had tried to sell some of the alcohol in Tallinn in early November 2004 but the quality of the spirit was too bad and no buyers were found. They then transported their cargo back to Narva and later managed to sell it in Tartu, the second largest town in Estonia," Luuk said.

So I guess Tartu is the Williamsburg to Taillinn's West Village?

Oh and the other amazing thing about the international "Vodka Galore" investigation: this is not the first time authorities have discovered a vodka pipeline from Russia. It happened two years ago too! Get on this important trend now, news organizations slightly classier than the Daily Mail?

Photo via Hicker Photo

1994 John B. Oakes Award for Distinguished Environmental Journalism founded at Columbia University.
1998 Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation created to fundraise for environmental programs.
2003 Toyota Prius goes on sale in America.
2003 Arnold Schwarzenegger promises to convert his Hummer to hydrogen fuel.
2005 Flaunt magazine's "Green Issue."
2005 Government employees forbidden from speaking to media regarding climate change.
2006 Al Gore premieres "An Inconvenient Truth" at Sundance.
2006 Elle's "Green Issue."
2006 Vanity Fair's "Green Issue."
2006 Al Gore publishes "Inconvenient Truth" companion book.
2007 Times op-ed columnist Tom Friedman publishes piece in New York Times magazine; he is "getting a lot of mileage out of his motto, 'Green: The New Red, White and Blue,'" notes WWD.
2008 Tom Friedman to consider book counterpart to his Discovery channel program; also considers selling 11,400-square-foot house. —choire

Mr. Thomas L. Friedman — in my culture, it is customary to shorten the name "Thomas" to "Tom," but my American friend said there were some things even he would not countenance in the name of golden interdependence — was craving a Royale with Cheese, so I pulled over at the neighborhood McDonald's, and he disembarked. Though he is a very good friend whose inner life I understand with a depth comparable only to the height that that bird I talked about earlier can fly, this was sadly the last time I saw Mr. Thomas L. Friedman. I am not sure, but I believe his country and my country are now at war.

In any case, imagine the surprise when I saw my old friend's article on the cover of today's New York Times magazine! I am embarrassed to say, though I am a subscriber (there are things behind the Select wall that infidels could not even fathom!), I make it past The Funny Pages only rarely — in my culture, The Funny Pages are the funniest pages in the media and all the online blogs talk about them, so I always laugh so hard at them the whole magazine rips apart in my hands. But, of course, I owed it to Mr. Thomas L. Friedman to read what he had to say about America and the environment and the world, because he once showed me such empathy and understanding, and because, as I learned from our last meeting, Mr. Thomas L. Friedman entertainingly enjoys pointing outside the windows of moving vehicles and yelling out new, absurd words for the familiar things he sees. In my culture, this way of communicating is very non-traditional and exciting — alas, we know about Koko the talking gorilla only from pirated VHS copies of PBS documentaries purchased at bazaars, next to harems, next to sultans — so I set aside my insatiable curiosity over what happens next in that Michael Chabon serial novella, and turned straight to "The Greening of Geopolitics" by Mr. Thomas L. Friedman.

Wow! Things are very different in the United States and — praise be the Merovingian kings! —not entirely in a bad way either. We in the Emirates have a lot to learn from the simplicity and resourcefulness of Americans like my friend Thomas L. Friedman, and so, before you make judgments based on preconceived notions of what an original, properly argued magazine article should be, I ask you to read "The Greening of Geopolitics" in a generous and culturally sensitive way that does not immediately appeal to such terms as "hack" and "embarrassment to the Pulitzer committee and, moreover, the art and practice of writing as such." For example, I read in a fascinating (though traditional and properly argued) piece by John Colapinto in the New Yorker last week that there is a very primitive tribe in Brazil that can only count with "one," "two," and "many," and have no fixed words for colors. I did not expect this to be true of Mr. Thomas L. Friedman the time I met him — when he told me I have a "beautiful odor" and a terrifically patterned traditional tunic (it was a slim-fit Zegna my sister-in-law picked up for me in Milan) — but perhaps he in fact exhibits the same marvelously dignified penchant for solipsistic extrapolation and sophistic elision (so often ridiculed in our traditional culture as "lazy 'tardation") as those wonderful Pirah tribesman. Perhaps it is a recessive allele?

That is to say, we are being dangerously ethnocentric if we ask my American friend Thomas L. Friedman to have the same sense of history, or even basic non-demagogic short-term memory, that we would expect of a journalist here at home. Of course, because we are always shopping for pirated DVDs of An Inconvenient Truth at bazaars, next to harems, next to sultans, we remember the man named Al Gore, and, as such, it would be plainly ridiculous for any individual in our traditional culture to claim to make, on April 15, 2007, an original argument about how environmentalism should become a non-partisan issue that everyone rallies around. But, with no fixed words for colors — or, for that matter, the sets of programmatic predilections customarily second-order signified by them — in my friend Thomas L. Friedman's society, a shamanistic practice ethnologists call "obliviously stating the obvi" holds sway:

We will need to find a way to reknit America at home, reconnect America abroad and restore America to its natural place in the global order — as the beacon of progress, hope and inspiration. I have an idea how. It's called "green...." Well, I want to rename "green." I want to rename it geostrategic, geoeconomic, capitalistic and patriotic. I want to do that because I think that living, working, designing, manufacturing and projecting America in a green way can be the basis of a new unifying political movement for the 21st century.... How do our kids compete in a flatter world? How do they thrive in a warmer world? How do they survive in a more dangerous world? Those are, in a nutshell, the big questions facing America at the dawn of the 21st century. But these problems are so large in scale that they can only be effectively addressed by an America with 50 green states — not an America divided between red and blue states.

The good news is that after traveling around America this past year, looking at how we use energy and the emerging alternatives, I can report that green really has gone Main Street — thanks to the perfect storm created by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and the Internet revolution. The first flattened the twin towers, the second flattened New Orleans and the third flattened the global economic playing field.

My Pakistani friend and I were allowed to observe a class of young boys who sat on the floor, practicing their rote learning of the Koran from texts perched on wooden holders. The air in the Koran class was so thick and stale it felt as if you could have cut it into blocks.... I went to Moscow in February, and my friends told me they just celebrated the first Moscow Christmas in their memory with no snow.... Outside my window the smog was so thick you could not see the end of the terminal building. When I got into Beijing, though, friends told me the air was better than usual.

The Power of Green [NYTM]