Paper-Rattling

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I can't adequately stress the impotency of divestment as a means of stopping genocide. If Rwanda has taught us anything, it's that genocide can be at once startlingly low-tech yet gruesomely swift. That said, such atrocities occasion legions of blue-helmets on the ground and humanitarian aid, not a foolhardy, irresponsible long-term policy.

*Correction: Some silly City Council subsidiary panel denounced (and rejected) the U of C, not the entire Council. Bloody bureaucrats.

Blood Price

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Granted I wholeheartedly endorse the liberation of oppressed people everywhere, I'm at once not terribly fond of the artificial, deleterious particular-ism nationalism engenders.

Roughin' It: Irony in a Time of Genocide

In what could only be described as a textbook example of irony, China has dispatched a contingent of blue-beret engineers to resolve the fine mess that it had helped to create in Darfur. Unsurprisingly, this move was not well received, though I still regard it as a welcome departure from the People's Republic's usual intransigence in such matters, more cynical suspicions notwithstanding.