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Week 48

A more focused study, however, is needed to truly understand that the Star Wars films are actually the story of the radicalization of Luke Skywalker. From introducing him to us in A New Hope (as a simple farm boy gazing into the Tatooine sunset), to his eventual transformation into the radicalized insurgent of Return of the Jedi (as one who sets his own father’s corpse on fire and celebrates the successful bombing of the Death Star), each film in the original trilogy is another step in Luke’s descent into terrorism.

Hah

The article turned everthing upside down: Luke is not a hero, but a religious fundemantalist bent on jihad. The empire and Vader were actually the good guys… Weird.. and complete non-sense - but it’s funny.

Link

Realists agree that power is what drives international politics, but they disagree about exactly when and where it should be unleashed or husbanded [..] Realism is an attitude, not a doctrine.

Even as an attitude it is misguided

Bruce B. de Mesquita

The set of disputes also allows us to examine how the outcomes of disputes affect the ability of leaders to retain office. The members of the winning coalition and selectorate care about how their state fares in international politics, both for material and policy concerns. Militarized disputes are the most signal international events a nation and its leader face, so we expect that the outcomes of disputes should have a large effect on the ability of leaders to hold office. Even if the enemy cannot remove a leader, her failure to best that enemy may lead her own winning coalition to abandon her in favor of a new leader. We draw attention to this claim as we explore the question suggested by the title of this chapter: Is the enemy outside more dangerous than the enemy within? Are leaders more worried about being overthrown by another state or by their own supporters? This question returns us to a central problem in the theory of international relations. Realists (e.g., Waltz 1979) claim that the external threat to a state’s existence is so great that its leaders must always attend to the external security of the state. We and others (e.g., Lamborn 1991) contend that leaders see international politics through a lens of domestic politics. How a state fares in international politics is important for a leader, but she perceives success through the eyes of her winning coalition (BBM, The Logic of Political Survival).

I’ll go with the guy who knows math

According to BBM, leaders do not act for ‘national interests’ or ‘balance of power’ - they make choices to satisfy / grow / keep their winning coalition.

Research

A large body of research identified, and then sought to explain, the tendency for democracies to win wars. The effect is large—democracies win almost all the wars they start and about two-thirds of the wars in which they are targets of aggression [..]

While both democracies and non-democracies have an obvious interest in victory, democracies are better able to make war collectively. Autocracies, with the small winning coalitions highlighted by the literature, tend to seek private benefits from fighting. A thirst for private goods means that autocracies optimize at a smaller coalition size to avoid diluting the spoils of war. Democracies, in contrast, already supply public goods to large domestic winning coalitions. They therefore gravitate toward war aims that are less adversely affected by the number of allies or participants. [..]

Interesting

This is the kind of research I’d like to see more of. A suggestion to IR practitioners: learn statistics, math (and follow BBM!). Otherwise it’s all bunch of hand waving, and words.

OpenAI, a new non-profit artificial intelligence company that was founded on Friday, wants to develop digital intelligence that will benefit humanity [..] We need both [code and data] to make predictions [.. O]pening the benefits of AI to all requires that everyone has a source of high-quality data.

Sharing is Caring

A representative sample of data accompanying each approach would be fine too; I don’t understand, even that is not in the cards?

MIT Technology Review

[I]s deep learning based on a model of the brain that is too simple? Geometric Intelligence [..] is betting that computer scientists are missing a huge opportunity by ignoring many subtleties in the way the human mind works. In his writing, public appearances, and comments to the press, [AI expert] Marcus can be a harsh critic of the enthusiasm for deep learning. But despite his occasionally abrasive approach, he does offer a valuable counterperspective. Among other things, he points out that these systems need to be fed many thousands of examples in order to learn something. Researchers who are trying to develop machines capable of conversing naturally with people are doing it by giving their systems countless transcripts of previous conversations. This might well produce something capable of simple conversation, but cognitive science suggests it is not how the human mind acquires language.

Good Point

Not that a system must always be built to reflect its biological counterpart exactly; our planes are built differently from a bird. Maybe we can rephrase the last sentence in the paragraph above: we didn’t even know what thinking even was in order to copy it incorrectly / differently :). It’s no wonder that the main thread of initial AI research revolved around various forms of rote learning; because that’s what we thought learning was: rote. ML systems do generalize obviously, but a lot of data is needed just so these systems can generalize properly (maybe the previous sentence will be considered an oxymoron one day).

Plus, from another angle / technologically speaking deep learning might turn out to be an evolutionary dead end. I always felt the approach to be a little hodge podge, the statistical properties of a network do not flow out of a model naturally. [geek] an analogy here would be the difference between K-Means clustering and mixture models

NYT

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University and the University of Toronto reported a new type of “one shot” machine learning on Thursday in the journal Science, in which a computer vision program outperformed a group of humans in identifying handwritten characters based on a single example.

The program is capable of quickly learning the characters in a range of languages and generalizing from what it has learned. The authors suggest this capability is similar to the way humans learn and understand concepts.

The new approach, known as Bayesian Program Learning, or B.P.L., is different from current machine learning technologies known as deep neural networks.

Nice

The aftermath of the Paris terrorist attacks has now devolved into a dark and dishonest debate about how we should respond: let’s ban encryption, even though there’s no evidence the terrorists used it to carry out their crime, and let’s ban Syrian refugees, even though the attackers were neither.

It’s hard to overstate how disgusting it has been to watch, as proven-false rumors continue to be the basis for the entire political response, and technology ignorance and full-on xenophobia now dominate the discussion.

The entire encryption subject became a shiny scapegoat while the truth slowly trickled in: as of Tuesday, it was clear that American and/or French intelligence agencies had seven of the eight identified attackers on their radar prior to the attacks. The attackers used Facebook to communicate. The one phone found on the scene showed the terrorists had coordinated over unencrypted SMS text messages – just about the easiest form of communication to wiretap that exists today. (The supposed ringleader even did an interview in Isis’s English magazine in February bragging that he was already in Europe ready to attack.)

As an unnamed government official quoted by the Washington Post’s Brian Fung said, if surveillance laws are expanded the media will be partly to blame: “It seems like the media was just led around by the nose by law enforcement. [They are] taking advantage of a crisis where encryption hasn’t proven to have a role. It’s leading us in a less safe direction at a time when the world needs systems that are more secure.”

As dishonest as the “debate” over encryption has been, the dark descension of the Republican party into outright racism and cynically playing off the irrational fears of the public over the Syrian refugee crisis has been worse. We now know the attackers weren’t Syrian and weren’t even refugees. It was a cruel rumor or hoax that one was thought to have come through Europe with a Syrian passport system, but that was cleared up days ago. But in the world of Republican primaries, who cares about facts?

Virtually every Republican candidate has disavowed welcoming any refugees to the US, and they are now competing over who is more in favor of banning those who are fleeing the very terrorists that they claim to be so against.

It doesn’t matter that the US has a robust screening system that has seen over 750,000 refugees come to the United States without incident – the Republican-led House has now voted to grind the already intensive screening process to a virtual halt [..]

Sad but true

Link

Senior members of the US intelligence community, still smarting from the loss of the bulk data collection of phone records in the Freedom Act this summer, are taking advantage of events in Paris to renew arguments over surveillance.

In New York on Wednesday, the director of the FBI, James Comey, complained that too much of the internet had gone dark. Intelligence and law enforcement agencies both needed faster and better access to communications data, he said.

The stripped down argument is that if you have access to everything, it is easier to keep everyone secure. When there are attacks such as those in Paris, the agencies say they quickly need to search back through data to see who suspects had been talking to, helping to identify the networks and prevent potential other attacks.

The problem with this, as with almost every terrorist incident since 9/11, is that the French intelligence agencies already knew at least three of the attackers.

Abelhamid Abaaoud was known as an accomplice of two jihadis killed in Belgium in January. The police had a file on Omar Ismaïl Mostefai even before he travelled to Syria in 2013, while Sami Amimour had been detained in 2012 on suspected terrorist links.

In other words, the failure of the French intelligence agencies is not that they did not have enough data – but that they did not act on what they had.

Yep

If someone merits surveillance, they have been around terror networks, have been in and out of jail a few times, and especially for dual-citizens they can be stripped of citizenship, and be dropped on their country of origin preferably out of a plane with a parachute, or somewhere else where they cannot do any more damage. Hell, I’d drop them on one of those man-made Chinese islands and let them enjoy the grand hospitality of the Chinese government. 

I believe some in security services have and odd obsession with “catching the guy on the act”. Like wanting to say “freeze! hands up!” right before guy is about the press a button to blow some shit up. It’s already to late by then. These suckers need to be taken care of before that point.

Official

But still, would it not help to have all information, on everyone, all the time?

Naaah

You just want to pass around pictures of naked people at the office and have a gas at their expense. Pervert.

You said here self-driving car technology is not ready [..]

That’s not what I said

I said self-driving car tech does not drive like a human, but AFAIK even at its current state, it drives better than a human. Self-driving car tech  solved the problem differently (utilizing accurate Lidar based distance data for objects, instead of going through vision), creating a specialized software for the task much like a chess playing program. This is far from human-like AI, but it is usable.

Side note: AI, even at this specialized / single-purpose state can displace workers though, that much is certain. I’ve argued before that it should, and that we should speed up this process as much as possible, creating massive unemployment in the process, hastening the onset of the 3rd Wave.

HuffPost

Among all of the AI issues debated by researchers [all big shots, Yann LeCun, Andrew Ng, Gary Marcus], the one that received almost universal agreement was the detrimental impact AI could have on the job market. Erik Brynjolfsson, [..] explained that we’re in the midst of incredible technological advances, which could be highly beneficial, but our skills, organizations and institutions aren’t keeping up. Because of the huge gap in pace, business as usual won’t work.

Ng quickly became one of the strongest advocates for tackling the economics issue. “I think the biggest challenge is the challenge of unemployment,” he said.

In fact, the issue of unemployment is one that is already starting to appear, even with the very narrow AI that exists today. Around the world, low- and middle-skilled workers are getting displaced by robots or software, and that trend is expected to increase at rapid rates [..]

The possibility of a basic income [..] were both brought up as possible solutions. However, solutions like these will only work if political leaders begin to take the initiative [..]

Go for B.I., K.I.S.S.

News

Finland is [..] conducting a pilot project [on basic income] with a [..] fraction of the Finnish population participating, according to Olli Kangas [..]. Kangas and his research team have been tasked by the Finnish government with presenting proposals for testing [it out..]. If the trial is a success, they could go all in, but that could be years off. Nonetheless, Finland is on the verge of conducting the most methodologically rigorous and comprehensive test of basic income to date. And that alone is a big deal.

Yey

Question

If there was no peace agreement after the end of the Cold War, how did countries manage?

It was called “globalization”

.. which was actually a by-word for Pax-Americana. Noone sat around the table to hammer out the new division of power among nations after the Cold War, USA’s hegemony was subtituted for an agreement between nations. This left Russia in an odd position, “am I the WWII victor, or the Cold War loser?”, the UN arrangement pointed to the former, post-[Cold-]war status pointed to the latter. Everyone else, fearing an agreement of some sort would come at some point, started to “prepare” for this eventuality.

And now,  US wants to pull out of certain regions (i.e. Middle East) then this creates a double-weird situation, no agreement + no hegemony.

Zlkhlkhlkjkjlk Brzezinski

[From his book Strategic Vision] Historically, Russia considers itself to be too powerful to be satisfied with being merely a normal European state and yet has been too weak to permanently dominate Europe. It is noteworthy in this connection that its greatest military triumphs—notably, Alexander’s victorious entry into Paris in 1815 and Stalin’s celebratory dinner in Potsdam in mid-1945—were more the byproducts of the folly of Russia’s enemies than the consequence of enduringly successful Russian statesmanship. Had Napoleon not attacked Russia in 1812, it is doubtful that Russian troops would have marched into Paris in 1815. For within less than five decades of Alexander’s triumph, Russia was defeated in the Crimean War by an Anglo-French expeditionary force deployed from afar by sea. Five decades later in 1905, it was crushed in the Far East by the Japanese army and navy. In World War I,  Russia was decisively defeated by a Germany that was fighting a prolonged two-front war. Stalin’s victory in the middle of the twentieth century, precipitated by Hitler’s folly, gained Russia political control over Eastern Europe and extended into the very heart of Europe. But within five decades of that triumph both the Soviet-controlled bloc of Communist states as well as the historic Russian empire itself disintegrated due to exhaustion resulting from the Cold War with America.

Nonetheless, the contemporary postimperial Russia—because of the wealth of its sparsely populated but vast territory rich in natural resources—is destined to play a significant role on the world arena. Yet historically, as a major international player, Russia has not displayed the diplomatic finesse of Great Britain, or the commercial acumen of the democratically appealing America, or the patient self-control of the historically self-confident China. It has failed to pursue consistently a state policy that prudently exploits its natural resources, extraordinary space, and impressive social talent to rise steadily while development. Rather, Russia has tended to engage in bursts of triumphant and rather messianic self-assertion followed by plunges into lethargic morass.

Moreover, though Russia’s territorial size automatically defines it as a great power, the socioeconomic condition of its people is detrimental to Russia’s global standing. Widespread global awareness of Russia’s social liabilities and relatively modest standard of living discredits its international aspirations. Its grave demographic crisis—a negative population growth marked by high death rates—is a testimonial to social failure, with the relatively short life span of its males being the consequence of widespread alcoholism and its resulting demoralization. At the same time, the growing uncertainties regarding rising Islamic unrest along its new southern borders and Russia’s barely hidden anxieties regarding its increasingly powerful and densely populated Chinese neighbor, situated next to Russia’s empty east, collide with Moscow’s great power hubris.

[..] Russia’s social performance ratings—despite the fact that it ranks overall number one in territory, number nine in population, and number two in the number of its nuclear weapons—are actually somewhat worse and can be considered at best only middling in a worldwide comparison. In the area of longevity and population growth, Russia’s numbers are disturbingly low. Cumulatively, Russia’s and Turkey’s ratings dramatize the dialectical reality that both are simultaneously in some respects advanced industrial countries and yet still somewhat underdeveloped societies, with Russia specifically handicapped by its nondemocratic and corruption-ridden political system. The comparisons with other countries ranked immediately above or below Turkey and Russia respectively are especially telling. Russia’s demographic crisis, political corruption, outdated and resource-driven economic model, and social retardation pose especially serious obstacles to a genuine fulfillment of the understandable ambitions of its talented but often misruled people [..B]oth nations would benefit greatly from a genuinely transformative relationship with a Europe that is able to reach out confidently to the East because of its ongoing links to America.

Moreover, the persisting disregard specifically in Russia for the rule of law is perhaps its greatest impediment to a philosophical embrace with the West. Without an institutionalized supremacy of law, the adoption of a Western-type democracy in Russia has so far been no more than a superficial imitation. That reality encourages and perpetuates corruption as well as the abuse of civil rights, a tradition deeply embedded in the historically prolonged subordination of Russian society to the state.

Complicating matters further, the current geopolitical orientation of Russia’s foreign policy elite [..] is quite conflicted and in some respects escapist. At this time [..] full-fledged membership in the Atlantic community through eventual membership in its economic as well as political and security institutions is not yet Russia’s explicit and dominant aspiration. In fact, there exist within Russia’s political and business elites multiple interpretations of Russia’s appropriate global role. Many wealthy Russian businessmen (especially in St. Petersburg and Moscow) would like Russia to be a modern, European-type society because of the resulting economic advantages. Meanwhile, many in the political elite desire Russia to be the dominant European power in a Europe detached from America, or even to be a world power on par with America. And still other Russians toy with the seemingly captivating notions of “Eurasianism,” of Slavic Union, or even of an anti-Western alliance with the Chinese.

The “Eurasianists,” mesmerized by the sheer geographic size of Russia, see it as a mighty Eurasian power, neither strictly European nor Asian, and destined to play a coequal role with America and China. They fail to realize that with their trans-Eurasian space largely empty and still underdeveloped, such a strategy is an illusion. A variant of this notion, the idea of a Russo-Chinese alliance presumably directed against America, also represents an escape from reality. The fact of the matter, painful for many Russians to acknowledge, is that in such a Russo-Chinese alliance—assuming that the Chinese would want it—Russia would be the junior partner, with potentially negative territorial consequences eventually for Russia itself.[..]

Finally Moscow’s relationship with the West is still burdened by Russia’s ambiguous relationship with its Stalinist past. Unlike Germany, which has repudiated in toto the Nazi chapter of its history, Russia has both officially denounced and yet still respects the individuals most directly responsible for some of history’s most bloody crimes. Lenin’s embalmed remains continue to be honored in a mausoleum that overlooks the Red Square in Moscow and Stalin’s ashes are installed in the nearby Kremlin wall. (Anything similar for Hitler in Berlin would surely discredit Germany’s democratic credentials.) An unresolved ambiguity thus persists, reflected in the absence of a clear-cut indictment of Lenin’s and Stalin’s regimes in officially approved history schoolbooks. Official unwillingness to fully confront head-on the ugly Soviet past, epitomized in Putin’s own equivocations on this subject and his nostalgia for Soviet grandeur, has obstructed Russia’s progress toward democracy while burdening Russia’s relations with its most immediate Western neighbors.

Therefore, a Russia left to its own devices, and not deliberately drawn into a larger democratically transformative framework, could again become a source of tension and occasionally even a security threat to some of its neighbors. Lacking leadership with the strength and the will to modernize, increasingly aware of its relative social retardation (with only Moscow and St. Petersburg regions matching the West’s standards of living), still uneasy regarding China’s growing global power, resentful of America’s continuing worldwide preeminence, proud of its vast and resource-rich territory, anxious over the depopulation of its far east and its general demographic crisis, and alert to the growing cultural and religious alienation of its Muslim population, Russia remains unable to define for itself a stable role that strikes a realistic balance between its ambitions and its actual potential.

Interesting

Ban-ki Moon

Excellencies:

When historians look back on this day, they will say that global cooperation to secure a future safe from climate change took a dramatic new turn here in Paris.

Today, we can look into the eyes of our children and grandchildren, and we can finally, after so many years of discussion and delay, tell them that we have joined hands to bequeath a more habitable world to them and to future generations.

We have an agreement. It is a good agreement. You should all be proud.

Now we must stay united – and bring the same spirit to the crucial test of implementation.

That work starts tomorrow.

For today, congratulations again on a job well done.

Let us work together, with renewed commitment, to make this a better world for all.

Thank you.

Merci.

Congrats

Nick Brown

Daniel Kahneman’s warning of a looming train wreck in social psychology took another step closer towards realisation today with the publication of this opinion piece [..] entitled “Your iPhone Is Ruining Your Posture — and Your Mood” [in the New York Times].

[In it], Professor Amy Cuddy of Harvard Business School reports on “preliminary research” [..] that she performed with her colleague, Maarten Bos.  Basically, they gave some students some Apple gadgets to play with, ranging in size from an iPhone up to a full-size desktop computer.  The experiment gave the participants some filler tasks, and then left, telling them that he would be back in five minutes to debrief them, but that they could also come and get him at his desk.  He then didn’t come back after five minutes as announced, but instead waited ten minutes.  The main outcome variable was whether the participants came to get him, and how long people they waited before doing so, as a function of the size of the device that they had.  It turned out that, the smaller the device, the longer they waited [..]

It’s hard to know where to begin with this.  There are other plausible explanations, starting with the fact that a lot of people don’t have an iPhone and might well enjoy playing with one compared to their Android phone, whereas a desktop computer is still just a desktop computer, even if it is a Mac.  And the effect size was pretty large: the partial eta-squared of the headline result is .177, which should be compared to Cohen’s (1988) description of a partial eta-squared of .14 as a “large” effect.  Oh, and there were 75 participants in four conditions, making a princely 19 per cell.  In other words, all the usual suspect things about priming studies.

But what I find really annoying here is that we’ve gone straight from “preliminary research” to the New York Times without any of those awkward little academic niceties such as “peer review”.  The article, in “working paper” form (1,000 words) is here; check out the date (May 2013) and ask yourself why this is suddenly front-page news when, after 30 months, the authors don’t seem to have had time to write a proper article and send it to a journal, although one of them did have time to write 845 words for an editorial in the New York Times.  But perhaps those 845 words didn’t all have to be written from scratch, because — oh my, surprise surprise — Professor Cuddy is “the author of the forthcoming book ‘Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges.’“  Anyone care to take a guess as to whether this research will appear in that book, and whether its status as an unreviewed working paper will be prominently flagged up?

If this is the future — writing up your study pro forma and getting it into what is arguably the world’s leading newspaper, complete with cute message that will appeal to anyone who thinks that everybody else uses their smartphone too much — then maybe we should just bring on the train wreck now.

Darn

Not that the peer review process is the bestest filter around; but there is something wrong with this half-baked research getting out there.

NYT

The [self-driving] cars now being tested by Google, BMW, Ford and others all see by way of a particular kind of scanning system called lidar (a portmanteau of ‘‘light’’ and ‘‘radar’’). A lidar scanner sends out tiny bursts of illumination invisible to the human eye, almost a million every second, that bounce off every building, object and person in the area. This undetectable machine-­flicker is ‘‘capturing’’ extremely detailed, millimeter-­scale measurements of the surrounding environment, far more accurate than anything achievable by the human eye.

Yes

The excerpt above accentuates the point that  self-driving cars are not yet driving like humans; their AI solves a simpler problem, by relying on more accurate sensor data that contains, within it, accurate distance information.  Obviously self-driving car tech is still an incredible achivement, but there is a long way to go to replicate humans.

Humans can drive simply by using their eyes as sensors, even one eye because we are able to perform tasks that are known as “structure from motion” in the vision literature (or visual SLAM, or 3D reconstruction, or monocular vision, etc). I look at a building, extract “interesting points” from this image, take a step, look again, extract the same features, they would have shifted in my 2D vision, my eye. Extrapolating from my step, the 2D dislocation, I can roughly compute a 3D model of the environment. More images would increase the accuracy.

This is not an easy task. In fact nearly half of a human’s cortex activity is dedicated to vision (Felleman, D. J. and van Essen, D. C. (1991). Distributed hierarchical processing in the primate cerebral cortex. Cerebral Cortex, I : 1-47.). SfM  is an active area of research (mathematicians - jump in!), and an area of interest for me personally (I like doing more with less, human-like 3D reconstruction from one bloddy camera, it’s beyond cool IMO).

Note: there have been self-driving cars that are based on pure vision, and vision is being used in current state-of-art self-driving cars to complement Lidar. But there is no human-like pure vision driven system out there ready for commercial use.

News

Would-be presidential nominee and full-on American bigot “The Donald” has gotten so out of hand with his derision toward women, African-Americans, Mexicans, the press, the disabled, and now calling for a ban on all Muslims, that Anonymous is starting to take some of its focus off Daesh (formerly known as the Islamic State) and focusing it right here on our very own terrorist-in-the-making, Donald Trump.

David Keirsey

Because of their utilitarian character, [MBTI] Artisans will strike off down roads that others might consider impossible, tackling problems, making deals, clearing hurdles, knocking down barriers-doing whatever it takes (authorized or unauthorized) to bull their way through to a successful outcome. One prominent State Department negotiator has exhibited all of these SP traits in his roller-coaster career:

He has yelled at Foreign Ministers and cursed at a President. He has negotiated agreements of immense consequence on the fly, making them up as he goes along … betting on himself and the deal in hand at two o’clock in the morning. He has politely negotiated with killers and, by his own account, at least one psychopath …. He has shamelessly and effectively exploited the media .. .in order to promote American policy aims and to intimidate those who stood in his way.

No high-flown speculation for the Artisan, no deep meaning or introspection. Leave to others the protocol, the scientific inquiry, the inward search. SPs focus on what actually happens in the real world, on what works, on what pays off, and not on whose toes get stepped on, what principles are involved, or why things happen (Keirsey, Please Understand Me II).

Yes

Trump, an ESTP, shows all of the traits above. This might all be okay in their little world, or in more tactical scenarios, but is this sort of behavior fitting for a President? Bush was another ESTP let’s not forget (and he shares another trait with “The Trump” that I might touch on later). Dubya was less of a loud mouth, but he did f**k it all up in a rather STP kinda way.

Puten

Your excellency Mr. President, your excellency Mr. Secretary General, distinguished heads of state and government, ladies and gentlemen, the 70th anniversary of the United Nations is a good occasion to both take stock of history and talk about our common future.

In 1945, the countries that defeated Nazism joined their efforts to lay solid foundations for the postwar world order.

But I remind you that the key decisions on the principles guiding the cooperation among states, as well as on the establishment of the United Nations, were made in our country, in Yalta, at the meeting of the anti-Hitler coalition leaders.

The Yalta system was actually born in travail. It was won at the cost of tens of millions of lives and two world wars.

This swept through the planet in the 20th century.

Let us be fair. It helped humanity through turbulent, at times dramatic, events of the last seven decades. It saved the world from large-scale upheavals.

The United Nations is unique in its legitimacy, representation and universality. It is true that lately the U.N. has been widely criticized for supposedly not being efficient enough, and for the fact that the decision-making on fundamental issues stalls due to insurmountable differences, first of all, among the members of the Security Council.

However, I’d like to point out there have always been differences in the U.N. throughout all these 70 years of existence. The veto right has always been exercised by the United States, the United Kingdom, France, China, the Soviet Union and Russia later, alike. It is absolutely natural for so diverse and representative an organization.

When the U.N. was established, its founders did not in the least think that there would always be unanimity. The mission of the organization is to seek and reach compromises, and its strength comes from taking different views and opinions into consideration. Decisions debated within the U.N. are either taken as resolutions or not. As diplomats say, they either pass or do not pass.

Whatever actions any state might take bypassing this procedure are illegitimate.

Blah blah

So much talk on WWII - but the war he should be concerned about is the last one, the Cold War, after which the world did not get a new world order. The Cold War, remember…? The one Soviets lost? He is all about the security council that was established after WWII because Russia has a vote there. But some emerging countries and Germany do not, so the council misrepresents the current world structure. Puten pines for the last time his country was a victor, a time when his country was treated as a great power. He wants the thing before the thing.