Is the E.U. an Unimportant Tower of Babel?

With 24 official languages, the E.U. spent about 1 billion euros on translation and interpretation in 2016. The defense that diversity and language-learning were promoted is based on the specious reductionism of cultural diversity to language and the faulty assumption that E.U. business being conducted in a myriad of languages prompts E.U. citizens to pick up an additional language. After all, such an undertaking is not like changing clothes or knitting a sweater. Meanwhile, the true cost of using the E.U. to make ideological claims using language as a symbol goes beyond euros to include the foregone ability of the E.U. to integrate even enough to adequately conduct its existing competencies, or domains of authority.

The full essay is at "A Linguistic Tower of Babel."

The Electoral College Hampered: The Case of Nixon’s 1968 Campaign Treason

While he was running for the U.S. presidency in 1968, Richard Nixon told H.R. Haldeman “that they should find a way to secretly ‘monkey wrench’ peace talks in Vietnam” by trying to get the South Vietnamese government to refuse to attend peace talks in Paris until after the U.S. election.[1] Specifically, Nixon gave instructions that Anna Chennault, a Republican fundraiser, should keep “working on” South Vietnamese officials so they would not agree to a peace agreement before the U.S. election.[2] “Potentially, this is worse than anything he did in Watergate,” said John Farrell, who discovered evidence of Nixon’s involvement from Haldeman’s notes on a conversation with the candidate. That Nixon committed a crime to win the election is itself an indication that the way Americans elect the federal president was flawed. That he went on to cover up the Watergate crime committed during the 1972 campaign only to win by a landslide should give pause to anyone having faith in an unchecked popular election.  I contend that the American Founders had designed the Electoral College in part to catch such a candidate from becoming president, even if the College had never operated as such. Yet it could.

The full essay is at "The Case of Nixon's Treason."

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1. Peter Baker, “Nixon Sought ‘Monkey Wrench’ in Vietnam Talks,” The New York Times, January 3, 2017.

2. Ibid.