More power to you, Dr. Rassias!

The Legacy of Our Moat Mentality: John Rassias on the importance of language for international understanding

Very sad news--George Kennan died last night.

The world has lost an incredible intellect and insight into how we interact with one another.

Aie!! Bush is trying to put Wolfowitz forward as the head of the world bank?!!?

This is absolutely ridiculous! First John Bolton, and now this?! This isn't Michael Bolton, the "no-talent ass clown". This is infinitely worse.

Every time the Bush administration does something so incredibly idiotic and harmful to the US and the world, it goes out and finds some way to screw things up even more. I hate these kinds of surprises.

I've included an article by Samantha Power that gives a good overview of what is going on, for non foreign policy wonks.

Boltonism
by Samantha Power
From the New Yorker
March 21, 2005

Barring a sudden and improbable outbreak of independent judgment in the Senate, John Bolton will soon be confirmed as President Bush's Ambassador to the United Nations, an institution he openly disdains. "It is a President's prerogative to name his ambassadors," Secretary-General Kofi Annan meekly told reporters last week. When he was asked whether he saw the nomination as a hostile act, he laughed and said, "I'm not sure I want to be drawn on that one." At U.N. headquarters, staffers walked around in a daze of disbelief. They had hoped that Bush's congenial European trip—combined with the U.N.'s moves toward internal reform and its indispensable role in pulling off the Iraqi elections—would spawn a U.S.-U.N. detente. Then came word that Bush was sending them Bolton.

"I'm pro-American," Bolton says, as if that required him to be anti-world. He dismisses the U.N.'s tools for promoting peace and security. International law? "It is a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so—because, over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States." (Never mind that such laws might have "constricted" the torture of detainees.) Humanitarian intervention? It's "a right of intervention that is just a gleam in one beholder's eye but looks like flat-out aggression to somebody else." Negotiation as a way of dealing with rogue states? "I don't do carrots," Bolton says.

It is easy to catalogue the things that John Bolton doesn't "do"—encourage payment of U.N. dues, support the International Criminal Court, strengthen international disarmament treaties. What he does do is less obvious. As Under-Secretary of State for Arms Control and International Security, he has rightly been given credit for the Proliferation Security Initiative, which attempts to interdict shipments of fissile material and which is supported by sixty nations, including France and Germany.

But on his watch North Korea, the chief target of his ire, reprocessed enough plutonium to make six new nuclear weapons. Bolton boasts of "taking a big bottle of Wite-Out" to President Clinton's signature on the statute for the International Criminal Court ("a product of fuzzy-minded romanticism" that is "not just naive but dangerous"). Yet the Administration's assault on the I.C.C. has, in fact, bolstered the court's legitimacy internationally. Powerful middle-tier countries (like Germany) have helped make up the loss of American funds and personnel, and the court is now deep into investigations of mass slaughter in Congo and Uganda.

Bolton is also a longtime skeptic of tools that are increasingly part of the Bush Administration's arsenal. Nation building is a "fallacy," he thinks. "The U.S. is still engaged in nation building here two hundred and twenty-five years plus after the Declaration of Independence, and we still have a long way to go," he said in 2002. "The idea that we can nation-build for somebody else is just unrealistic." When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced Bolton's nomination, last Monday, she said, "We who are on the right side of freedom's divide have an obligation to help those who are unlucky enough to be born on the wrong side of that divide." But Bolton, who stood stoically next to her, has never believed that spreading freedom is America's business.

It is unclear what the Bush Administration has in mind by shipping Bolton to New York. The appointment has been spun as "Nixon goes to China." Nixon, however, actually went to China: the visit was compatible with his world view. Bolton, by contrast, seems averse to compromise, and is apparently committed to the belief that the U.N. and international law undermine U.S. interests. If he is to be an engine for U.N. reform, he will have to jettison his core values. He will have to work on expanding the Security Council, even though, in 1997, he said, "Leave the veto alone, and leave the Security Councils membership alone." (More recently, he suggested shrinking membership to a single state: his.) He will have to work with European states, even though he believes that "some Europeans have never lost faith in appeasement as a way of life." He will have to cooperate with China, even though he has called for full diplomatic recognition of Taiwan. And, if the Administration is serious about prosecuting the perpetrators of atrocities in Darfur, he will have to allow the Security Council to refer the case to the I.C.C.

The appointment of John Bolton has the look of a bureaucratic fix for an Administration that doesn't really care what happens to the U.N. At the State Department, Bolton, a protege of Vice-President Dick Cheney, has behaved more like a grandstander at a conservative think tank than like a diplomat. Colin Powell endured the collateral damage caused by his outbursts, but Rice made it plain that she would have none of it, and passed over Bolton for Deputy Secretary of State. Cheney reportedly then insisted that Bolton get the U.N. When Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke were appointed U.N. Ambassadors, President Clinton announced the nominations. Bush did the same for his first-term nominees, John Negroponte and John Danforth. Rice, in naming Bolton herself, sent a not so subtle signal that she expects to remain boss.

Nobody is more aware of a "U.N. in crisis" than the U.N.'s senior officials. They know that the U.N. is first and foremost a gathering of states, and an organization run by the most powerful of them. To be effective, the U.N., as Bolton himself has said, "requires sustained American leadership." Kofi Annan, speaking in Madrid three days after the nomination, praised Bolton's Proliferation Security Initiative and said that the "most vital" aim of the U.N. should be denying terrorists access to nuclear materials. The Administration did not return the love: instead, Rice sent Annan a letter informing him that the United States had unilaterally withdrawn from yet another international agreement, this one regarding an international court's jurisdiction over the claims of foreigners held in American jails.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee will have a lot to contemplate when the ever-quotable Bolton arrives for confirmation. At the U.N. last week, the most discussed Boltonism was the claim that if the U.N. building "lost ten stories it wouldn't make a bit of difference." One staffer sighed and said, "He didn't say which ten floors he would like to see disappear. Perhaps that leaves us some room for influence."

Happy Pi Day!

Today is March the 14th or 3.14, as it might be written, and all over the world, engineers, high school math teachers and the odd college mathematics professor throw down their slide rules (or in high school, their graphing calculators) and dance around them (in circles of course).

Since I know people in each of those categories (especially some very odd math teachers and professors), I encourage you all to take the opportunity to act as odd as they do!

Listen to this discussion of the history of Pi, from the BBC program In Our Time