The mantra of Mad Magazine‘s Alfred E. Neuman continues to apply to the day’s events: Residents of Hawaii appear unfazed by North Korea’s recent threat of nuclear attack on the island — as an octopus-cooking interviewee put it to the NY Times, “You are going to go sometime, whether it’s on a wave, or a missile, or your buddy knocking you down and you hit your head;” Meanwhile, Christopher Hitchens frames the current Iranian mess in the context of the mullahs’ persistent worrying that Anglo-Saxons will be forever evilly meddling in their affairs, all the while chastising the Obama administration’s nonplussed stance toward the situation: “Want to take a noninterventionist position? All right, then, take a noninterventionist position — but also try to bear in mind that one day you will have to face the young Iranian democrats who risked their all in the battle and explain to them just what you were doing when they were being beaten and gassed;” Finally, the BBC notes in regard to yesterday’s fatal train crash in Washington, DC, that transit officials may have adopted too Neuman-esque a stance when they ignored warnings from the National Transportation Safety Board in 2006 to replace the trains that wrecked. ***STOP SMILING interviewed Christopher Hitchens in its Rebels + Outlaws Issue.