https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/public/ recent bookmarks from jerryking 2026-06-24T10:59:19+00:00 https://archive.is/20260622204312/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/2026/06/trump-bunch-smithsonian/687660/#selection-615.0-647.1 jerryking African-Americans cultural_institutions Donald_Trump exhibitions history leaders museums Smithsonian white_fragility white_grievances https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:672605a9bd6c/ 2026-06-16T20:16:53+00:00 https://idlewords.com/talks/fan_is_a_tool_using_animal.htm jerryking Talks > Fan is A Tool-Using Animal. https://x.com/ChrisCroy/status/2066912876221301090 ***************************************************** Fandoms will sometimes produce "google docs" or "masterdocs" collecting and **synthesizing information** on some fandom topic. How do I explain to them that these are memos. That is a memorandum. The corporate world calls out to you. You should be producing shareholder value. ***************************************************** ++@pinboard gave a talk about what happened when he asked fanfic writers to generate a spec document about what features they needed him to add to Pinboard.++ This is the written version of a talk I gave on September 6, 2013, at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England.]]> bookmarks conferences Delicious online_communities fans fan_engagement fiction history Pinboard social_bookmarking Star_Trek information_synthesis Maciej_Cegłowski speeches https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:1ed951889180/ 2026-05-29T10:49:32+00:00 https://guyanabusinessjournal.com/2026/05/what-the-flour-cost-and-what-our-silence-costs-now/?fbclid=IwY2xjawSF_KRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBzcnRjBmFwcF9pZBAyMjIwMzkxNzg4MjAwODkyAAEecwsPA6mL9BDp1QmeECd7BgwjjoDVRTIDy0d41DpbooU9_lY7LZCSHnrcEAc_aem_nQkPPe5joQww4XQpIkqPPw jerryking '70s Cuba guyana Guyanese history silence sovereignty flour_mills https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:31ffeb8ce6a4/ 2026-04-29T17:42:28+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-history-archives-digital-management/ jerryking>government accountability<<. Canada needs a well-funded records management system and archival and library infrastructure that can deal with both the challenges and opportunities of the digital world. We also need to update access to information legislation to take into account the new >>record-keeping<< realities of the digital world. Failing to act would be like allowing government records to go up in flames, once again.]]> accessibility archives Canada Doug_Ford historical_preservation historical_records history libraries lost_history national_libraries record-keeping data_purge government_accountability https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2182862fea7d/ 2026-04-28T13:43:29+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/information-technology-us-4f3c71f3?mod=hp_listc_pos1 jerryking history IT John_Steele_Gordon U.S. https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:15f3679281b1/ 2026-04-28T13:37:27+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/business/entrepreneurship/best-entrepreneurs-us-history-23c83c23?mod=hp_lead_pos11 jerryking best_of entrepreneur history rankings U.S. https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a3f34cf2a7e5/ 2026-04-26T23:35:12+00:00 https://archive.is/20260425055333/https://www.ft.com/content/ca40eb02-0a6a-4d50-9e1c-6daec499e7d8#selection-1591.0-1927.11 jerryking>television<< adaptation and the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for >>playwriting<<. First staged at London’s Almeida Theatre last year, it instantly announced itself as a dazzling new work, combining a trenchant portrayal of >>misogyny<<, a shrewd reframing of history and a frank depiction of female >>friendship<<. Witness the moment when Mariella brandishes definitive evidence that Jane must have got engaged: “Oh my God. She’s washed her neck!” “I wanted them to sound like my friends,” says Pickett, as we slip into a meeting room, nursing mugs of tea. “They’re young, they’re feral and they’re living life. So I wanted it to feel quite primal and like you were with them in that field: this is their space, it’s private, they can be their ugliest, quickest selves. And I wanted it to feel dangerous.” 1536 unfolds over an unseasonably hot May in a field in Essex (Pickett’s home county), where the women meet to gossip, quarrel and share confidences. But that easy routine begins to strain and fracture as news arrives from London that the king has arrested his second wife. Like many English children, Pickett (now 32) learnt of Anne Boleyn’s fate in the schoolyard chant about Henry VIII’s six wives: “divorced, beheaded, died . . . ”. It was only later that she was hit by the full force of what that meant...........“We become so de-sensitised to stuff in the news,” says the playwright, a warm and delightfully direct person. “Violence, domestic violence, another woman has died, another woman has gone missing . . . And with 1536 I just felt that the way we remember Anne Boleyn, and the way we remember a lot of women in history, is so narrow and without context. It was really thrilling to write characters who didn’t know what was going to happen and were shocked by it.” The reactions of the women to the news, as it filters through, brings home the visceral horror of beheading. Disbelief — “kings don’t kill their wives!” — gives way to mounting fear as reality bites. The mood of the play gradually darkens as the king’s brutality fuels >>misogyny<< in their neighbourhood, emboldening men to beat and bully women. In nearby Colchester, two wives are burned in the market square for adultery; the three friends start to moderate their own behaviour. The echoes in today’s world are clear in the pernicious influence of figures such as Andrew Tate and in multiple examples of powerful men who have abused their authority. **Period drama**, says Pickett, can be a prism through which to examine our own times. But it’s also an opportunity to redress the balance: to give a voice to people whose lack of agency and influence means that their lives and experiences go largely unrecorded. An onstage scene in which a surprised-looking young woman is being helped to put on an 18th-century dress by a cast dressed variously as an angel, a nurse, a Roman soldier and a 1990s clubber in bucket hat........“We know so little about women like Jane, Anna and Mariella,” Pickett says. “I feel so angry that we haven’t remembered them. I’d like to imagine that they were funny, sharp, sweary and complicated, that they liked sex, and that they had hopes, ambitions, dreams and fights. I’d like to put that version of them into the world.” The pungency of Pickett’s script supports that desire: her characters speak a spicy modern Essex vernacular. That’s not a provocative move: Pickett tried a version in 16th-century English, but found it stilted. For her, there is, however, “a sweet spot” between immediacy and wilful anachronism: “There’s stuff that I’ve cut because it’s too knowing. And there are certain words that the play can’t hold. At one point, Anna said ‘mate’, and it just didn’t work. So much of it is about rhythm.” Accepting the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 2024, Pickett described the play as “a love letter to friendship”, a subject close to her heart. She initially wanted to act but endured a bleak time after leaving the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.......A producer encouraged her to try writing, and that, together with the support of friends, helped her to find her métier: “My mates got me a job in a [London] pub and let me stay on their sofa. That belief and encouragement: it changed my life.” She’s since written for Hulu’s satirical The Great (about Catherine the Great) and worked on Lisa McGee’s How to Get to Heaven from Belfast. For stage, she’s adapted AK Blakemore’s The Manningtree Witches for Colchester’s Mercury Theatre and dramatised Jane Austen’s Emma (“I loved how difficult and annoying and self-righteous she was!”) for the Rose Theatre in Kingston. In the wings are Bloodsport, a new play about Helen of Troy, opening at Theatre Royal, Stratford East in September, a film about Joan of Arc co-written with Baz Luhrmann, and an eight-part BBC series of 1536. The intention, says Pickett, is to keep the play’s tight focus, but to spend more time with the characters — including the men, who are also miserable: “no one wins. The system serves no one.”......Most of Pickett’s work to date has drawn on the past. And, in a sense, her plays join shows like Netflix’s megahit Bridgerton in redefining period drama and exploring the biting points between then and now. Even so, does Pickett not fancy escaping the bonnets and petticoats occasionally? Maybe handing her characters a mobile phone or a car? “I just love [>>historical drama<<],” she replies, laughing. “Every time, I’m like, ‘Ava, try writing about now.’ But I just love it. You should write what you love . . . And the frocks are fun!” ]]> characterization erasure friendships historical_fiction history make_it_dangerous misogyny period_dramas playwrights reframing reimagining rewriting romance_adaptations television Tudors women Henry_VIII living_dangerously https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:14da03df4d61/ 2026-04-22T10:12:00+00:00 https://www.ft.com/content/82a608ae-be79-4457-b6a4-c163f2b8b962?accessToken=zwAAAZ203-nckdOCpgiuvnlEV9O2pMFj8ri5Yg.MEYCIQD_YSacA8OqTJ3me8qAvpaZbANnsGgJ93fwiPUTxwJF_QIhAOZmPv0xYq_EhdVQR_TgArNQHSUAAewuEpJtDlE1g_X_&sharetype=gift&token=c7485f63-ee48-49b5-adba-65ad8ea99fd7&syn-25a6b1a6=1 jerryking21st._century books book_reviews dark_side history London Margaret_Thatcher money_&_power Edward_Luce investigative_journalism “light-touch”_regulation moral_decay United_Kingdom financially_compromised https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bb6f00160c0f/ 2026-04-22T05:54:25+00:00 https://www.ft.com/content/0bd796c9-bc0e-43ab-bedd-d0294c2efd17?accessToken=zwAAAZ2z9M0lkc8L15bJvA5Dq9O-3dApTC79Fw.MEUCIQDEGsUUkRRCoHP8WN1tqRabtMx1jPnP1tdvdLFCMfaEQQIgST581PF1AAbijEKebAzDjLcgwA1c2wl1Jelei2lK67E&sharetype=gift&token=40c68706-1f66-4132-a5b4-6c88c407d58a&syn-25a6b1a6=1 jerryking financial_crises Gillian_Tett history know_your_history lessons_learned financial_history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e1a00787053a/ 2026-04-19T09:45:27+00:00 https://guyaneseonline.wordpress.com/2022/12/12/history-patrick-dargan-guyanas-original-non-white-politician/#:~:text=HISTORY:%20Patrick%20Dargan%20%E2%80%93%20Guyana's%20original,non%2DWhite%20politician%20%7C%20Guyanese%20Online jerryking Afro-Guyanese Guyana history lawyers pre-Independence Great_Man_Theory_of_History politicians British_Guiana creole https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f7416b56c4a2/ 2026-04-19T00:34:42+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-us-negotiators-iranian-poetry-history/ jerryking>negotiations<< to end this latest conflict. “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles,” Chinese strategist and general >>Sun Tzu<< wrote more than 2,500 years ago. “If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.” So how well does the Trump administration know Iran? Nicholas Hopton, director-general of the U.K.’s Middle East Association and a former ambassador to Iran, is skeptical: “The fundamental problem seems to be that the White House and the U.S. President **do not seem disposed to listen to advice from experts**.” [i.e. = "eschewing advice & expertise"/"incurious"] The decimation of the State Department and the diplomatic corps has left the administration reliant on negotiators with limited experience - in this case, VicePresident JD Vance, along with Mr. Trump’s friend, real estate developer Steve Witkoff, and son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Iranian officials, meanwhile, are steeped in >>brinkmanship<< and the dark art of achieving a deal in their own time and on their own terms, based on clear objectives, red lines and well-honed tactics. The first thing for Western negotiators to bear in mind is that history in Iran is much more than background noise. While Western officials focus on the >>Strait of Hormuz<<, >>blockades<<, >>sanctions<<, nuclear enrichment levels, missile capabilities and military pressure, Tehran’s approach to talks is shaped by Iran’s history, routinely used and abused to reinforce nationalist sentiment. History, like poetry, is a living force in Iran. It informs the regime’s profound mistrust of the West, the pathological aversion to foreign intervention and, even long before the mullahs arrived, the **culture of resistance** seared into the country’s DNA. How many in the West remember the Anglo-American coup to overthrow Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, in 1953? What about Iran’s survival of the apocalyptic invasions of >>Genghis Khan<< in the >>13th century<< and Timur in the 14th? Understanding all this is a necessity. When Explosive Media, the Iranian digital media company producing viral, Lego-style AI videos, includes Husayn ibn Ali, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, in its clips, that’s because Husayn’s martyrdom at the Battle of Karbala in 680 still resonates with Iranians in ways Westerners struggle to fathom. It’s a commemoration of resistance against tyranny. As Ali Ansari, a professor of Middle East history at St Andrews University, argues in The Art of the Deal (Iran edition), negotiators must “>>know your history<<.” Any encounter with Iranian diplomats begins with a litany of grievances intended to place the burden of guilt on their Western counterparts. “Be knowledgeable enough to respond and point out that the Russians did far worse to Iran in the last 200 years, and there seems little problem with them.” Knowledge of Iranian history and culture also serves the important purpose of flattery. Iranians are just as likely “to act from the dictates of imagination and vanity, than of reason and judgement,” 19th century diplomat Sir John Malcolm observed. “A fundamental part of negotiating with Iran is to recognize and respect their national history of almost 3,000 years, their independence and position as a regional power,” Mr. Hopton said. “Failing to do this makes achieving a deal much harder.” No matter the corruption and savagery of this regime, Iranian nationhood draws upon a vast store of dynastic history and confers considerable pride. The list of civilizations and empires that have fed into modern Iran - Elamites, Medians, Achaemenids, Sasanians, Seljuks, Timurids and Safavids, Qajars, Pahlavis and revolutionary mullahs, to name a few - is like sifting through archeological strata. Today’s dystopian theocracy, in power since 1979, represents but a nanosecond in that history. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Three years in Washington acquainted me with a political class that is, like London’s, hardworking, civic-minded and, if not blazingly original, smart enough. If there was a >>blind spot<<, it was for the ingrained insecurity of much of the world: for the role of humiliation as a driver in so many national histories. Chinese conduct, for instance, absorbed everyone. What George Kennan would have called the “sources” of it, didn’t. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ]]> Iran Iranian negotiations poetry U.S.-Israel_War_on_Iran 13th_century ancient_civilizations brinkmanship Donald_Trump Genghis_Khan history Revolutionary_Guards Sun_Tzu watch_the_enemy blind_spots collective_memories collective_psyche cultural_appreciation cultural_understanding eschewing_advice/expertise grievances historical_amnesia historical_anxieties shallowness challenge_protest_resistance know_your_history cultural_knowledge blockades incurious sanctions Strait_of_Hormuz https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:86ae7c451548/ 2026-03-31T12:14:12+00:00 https://archive.is/20260331112323/https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-strait-of-hormuz-iran-history-explainer/#selection-2601.0-2623.19 jerryking>Tehran<<’s use of the >>Strait of Hormuz<< as a very physical >>chokepoint<< has not only sharply driven up worldwide prices of petroleum and natural gas, and thus threatened economy-wide inflation by raising the consumer prices of just about any product that is delivered by land or sea. It has also cut off supplies of fertilizer (a third of the world’s supply is made with natural gas from the >>Persian Gulf<<), threatening the entire harvest of important crops in several countries. It has potentially stalled the production of crucial medicines and pharmaceuticals in Asia that rely on Gulf petroleum products as precursors. And it has jeopardized semiconductor production that relies on the region’s shipments of helium. The Iranian tactic of using the >>Strait of Hormuz<< to hold the world economy hostage has remained virtually unchanged over more than 1,800 years. Because of this outsized **economic power**, the Strait became renowned in literature and politics as a mythic symbol of diabolical power, civilizational schism and global wealth – in the words of Marco Polo, it is “the gem in the ring of the world,” or, in the words of a Portuguese viceroy in the sixteenth century, “the hand on the throat” of global commerce. We ought to be asking why, after almost two millennia, we all remain so vulnerable to this simple strategy. The Strait’s enduring potency is a reminder of how little has really changed in the architecture and substance of global commerce, how much of our futuristic life of invisible, clean-looking technology remains rooted in a deeper movement of ancient, crude combustible resources passing through millennia-old sea channels between fortified cliffs......The cargo being carried through the narrow strait and the primary direction of transit have changed since then, replaced in the 20th century by petroleum – more than a fifth of the world’s supply today – being shipped outward from the Persian >>Gulf states<< to the wider world economy. That made Hormuz a key >>strategic asset<< in the Second World War, as the Allied forces were heavily dependent on Persian Gulf petroleum. The Nazis, knowing this, harassed the Strait with U-boats and tried to win the influence of neutral Iran, whose Shah was thought to be sympathetic to the fascist powers. This potential threat to the security of the Strait led to a British-Soviet mission in 1941, codenamed Operation Countenance, in which the Allied powers invaded Iran, expelled the Shah and directly governed the country until 1946, when his more pliable son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi succeeded him. It appears that Mr. Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were hoping for a similar outcome when they launched their own military assault on Iran in February – but they discounted the possibility that the Ayatollahs, unlike the elderly Shah, were prepared to pull the trigger on the >>Strait of Hormuz<< if backed into a corner. The Americans seem to have disregarded more recent history, which has showed that both Arab and Iranian forces are capable of holding the world hostage over the Strait. During the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi dictatorship attempted to destroy the Iranian regime’s ability to export oil by launching air-to-ground and cruise-missile attacks on Tehran’s fleet and its oil infrastructure, striking 46 of its tankers. Iran’s Islamic regime, with a less sophisticated military, responded by attacking ships belonging to Iraq’s trading partners, damaging or sinking more than 200 tankers between 1981 and 1987. This struck terror in the world’s financial capitals and provoked a very expensive coalition response from the U.S. military to keep the Strait open. But it failed as a blockade – dozens of vessels continued to navigate the Strait, and markets quickly recognized that Tehran was not going to fully shut it down as it would annihilate their own oil export economy, the one source of leverage they possessed. That became an underlying assumption of Western powers – that Iran would use the Strait of Hormuz only as a negotiating threat, a geo-economic version of a nuclear deterrent. Tehran had threatened to use it before, most recently during nuclear-deal talks in the early 2010s. But actually triggering a full-scale Strait blockade would be an act of wild desperation, >>immolating<< Iran’s economy and doing terrible damage to the Arab kingdoms around the Persian Gulf, uniting them in enmity. Only a moment of >>scorched-earth<< desperation could provoke such a dramatic act – exactly the sort of moment that is now occurring......The use of geographic features as force-multiplying instruments of >>economic warfare<< seemed to many like an anachronistic relic of a distant past. Many of history’s renowned topographic >>chokepoints<<, such as the Pass of Thermopylae, the Bosporus or the Strait of Gibraltar, have largely been bypassed by new technologies and lost much of their former strategic power, although a few human-created ones, such as the >>Suez<< and >>Panama canals<<, are still capable of paralyzing the world economy. But when strategists have invoked “>>chokepoints<<” in recent years, they’ve strictly referred to the abstract economic tools used to hold rogue regimes in check. In fact, Chokepoints was the title of an acclaimed book on >>economic warfare<< published last year by Edward Fishman, an international-relations scholar and former Obama administration official, and it concerned itself almost entirely with the use of banking restrictions, sanctions, asset freezes and similar instruments to constrain Russia and Iran. The possibility of an 1,800-year-old physical >>chokepoint<< strategy being turned against the United States was beyond its imagination. Interviewed on TV this week, Dr. Fishman seemed shocked that the Trump administration could fall into such a trap: “It really is a remarkable development,” he said, “and it shows that Iran’s strategy, which has been to retaliate by waging war on the global economy … can actually get the Trump administration to do wild things.” The Hormuz action has won Iran more relief from >>sanctions<< than it got in exchange for stopping uranium enrichment a decade ago, he observed. The fact that it did illustrates a fundamental infrastructural weakness in the global economy today – we are still reliant on patterns of movement and >>fossil-fuel<< resource suppliers that make us >>vulnerable<< to a low-technology trap that would have been familiar to people almost 2,000 years ago. Perhaps the revival of this ancient form of economic terror will finally provide an incentive to move our energy economy and our trade patterns into a more modern world.]]> blockades choke_points Doug_Saunders history Iran Persian_Gulf Strait_of_Hormuz U.S.-Israel_War_on_Iran economic_warfare geoeconomics maritime books economic_clout fossil_fuels immolation Panama_Canal sanctions_&_embargo_breaches scorched-earth Suez_Canal vulnerabilities asset_freezes Gulf_states strategic_assets Tehran https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b5971492742f/ 2026-03-27T13:43:01+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/strait-of-hormuz-control-history-b2e2b0b9?mod=series_israeliranhav jerryking choke_points history Iran Persian_Gulf piracy Strait_of_Hormuz ancient_civilizations https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:420f9e987cd8/ 2026-03-25T06:28:55+00:00 https://www.stabroeknews.com/2010/08/19/features/history-this-week-44/ jerryking Chinese-Guyanese Guyana history indentured_laborers https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5bbd8cf0f943/ 2026-03-20T12:33:41+00:00 https://www.stabroeknews.com/2026/03/15/sunday/the-story-of-our-western-frontier/ jerryking borders disputes Guyana history Venezuela https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:09e33057b43d/ 2026-03-15T19:06:08+00:00 https://www.stabroeknews.com/2026/03/15/sunday/educator-extraordinaire-clarence-trotz-still-teaching-at-92/ jerryking Guyana high_schools history QC https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2a27a00c3f39/ 2026-03-10T14:51:33+00:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZpG2_yMVLw jerryking history landfills parks Toronto garbage quarries remediation Leslie_Street_Spit man-made ravines rewilding wilderness https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d23ae5353e66/ 2026-02-16T01:16:06+00:00 https://guyanachronicle.com/2015/06/20/preserving-our-literary-heritage-73/ jerryking Guyana history magazines literary_heritage https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:00ac3a5f92bb/ 2026-01-27T01:33:24+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-how-canada-can-move-away-from-its-whack-a-mole-national-security/ jerryking>defence spending<<. For the short term, this approach is entirely reasonable and practical, but for the long term it will not advance Canada’s broader >>national security<<. Rather, it represents a form of “>>whack-a-mole<<.” There are many definitions of national security used by Canada and other countries. In practical terms, protecting and advancing a country’s national security means protecting its >>sovereignty<<. Put bluntly, it means protecting its ability to be the “king of its castle,” and to make its own decisions. Never absolute in today’s world, national sovereignty varies with >>geography<< and a variety of other factors such as >>history<<, the state of the economy as well as **military and security capacity** [i.e. = "state capacity"] – and, >>national will<<.[i.e. = "collective will"/"willpower"] The national security concerns of the “>>great powers<<,” as well as those of smaller countries are not the same as Canada’s. Nor are our concerns the same as those of other middle powers. Our definition of national security must begin with the **awareness** that we are today a not-so-strong middle power next to the world’s premier power. Both factors are critical to how we might develop the most effective national security policy possible. Over the years, Canada’s governments have tended to treat >>national security<< issues as transactional problems that needed to be resolved, using the minimum amount of attention and resources necessary. Some crises, such as 9/11 and the war in Afghanistan, required more holistic and considered responses, but economic and social issues have received priority attention from recent Canadian governments. In today’s brave new world, this approach risks limiting our capacity to advance our national security. A >>middle power<< should utilize all the tools at its disposal and maximize their effect by ensuring their **co-ordination**. Thus, foreign, defence, security, development and international economic policies need to be developed in the full awareness that their effectiveness will be significantly enhanced **if they are mutually reinforcing** [i.e. = "policy coordination"]. The same applies, depending on circumstances, to emergency planning, international criminal activity, control of our borders, and aspects of national economic activity that promote our capacity to make our own rules. Entirely reasonably in the circumstances, the government has committed to significant increases in defence and >>defence-related<< spending. But it has done so without setting out an up-to-date policy framework that takes into account the current world environment and is integrated into a broader national security policy framework. The Royal Canadian Navy is already committed to purchasing a dozen submarines and is positing the acquisition of a number of ocean-capable frigates and one or more amphibious landing ships for >>Arctic<< use. There is nothing inherently wrong with those ideas, but it is unclear how such major expenditures – and commitment of >>CAF<< resources – should rate when compared with the requirements of other parts of the Canadian Armed Forces. And, perhaps more importantly, it is not clear how such acquisitions would fit into a comprehensive view of how Canada might wish to protect its national security by projecting its influence abroad. Another standalone suggestion is the recommendation from a number of think tanks, and recently argued in the Globe and Mail, that Canada should create a foreign intelligence service capable of gathering intelligence abroad. While it is a tactical rather than a strategic matter, the idea deserves consideration, but only in the context of a broader national security review. Among the questions that should be asked is whether the significant resources necessary should not first be allocated to domestic security or to digital security. Another is the not-insignificant issue of against whom would Canada be prepared to spy. Unlike some of our allies, Canada does not have a tradition of regularly issuing major policy statements on national security issues. I suspect this is partially because of our long-term (and recently abandoned) reliance on the United States. That change alone should encourage the government to not just issue a policy statement, but to ensure that it is developed with some involvement by Parliament and the public. Governments require flexibility in dealing with national security issues, not all of which can be discussed publicly. But a commitment to issuing a broad national security policy would not prevent this engagement, and would encourage a shift away from stand-alone decisions and toward a more comprehensive approach to dealing with all manner of national security issues. ]]> Canada national_security national_strategies Richard_Fadden middle-powers sovereignty defense_spending economic_clout geography history national_willpower whack-a-mole collective_will great_powers policy_coordination situational_awareness state_capacity willpower Arctic CAF security_&_intelligence submarines defence-related https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:de9d6586f067/ 2026-01-15T12:51:57+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-rust-spots-always-show-eventually-on-the-iron-law-of-might/ jerryking>Nicolás Maduro<<, the Venezuelan dictator, the Trump administration made some shocking boasts about American power in the 21 st century. U.S. President Donald Trump said that the international laws meant to prevent powerful nations from preying on weaker ones are irrelevant to him, and that the only thing that constrains his use of dominant military force is “my own morality.”[i.e. = "whims"] One of his chief advisers, >>Stephen Miller<<, was just as blunt. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties,” he said. “But we live in a world, in the real world […] that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.” This “>>might is right<<” posturing was not unexpected, given that the Trump administration had announced it late last year in its >>National Security Strategy<<. But to see it suddenly in action was still jarring. An emboldened Mr. Trump followed up the Caracas coup by renewing his threat to take >>Greenland<<, without ruling out military force. As this space has said, the Trump administration’s claim that power, not law, provides legitimacy does indeed date back to ancient times – the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, to be exact, when Athens told the island state of Melos to surrender or face annihilation. The Athenian general and historian >>Thucydides<< famously summed up Athens’ attitude when he wrote that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.” But is it true, as Mr. Miller claims, that it is an “iron law” that the world is governed by strength and power, and that international laws are mere niceties? On the contrary, >>history<< teaches us that countries that forgo the >>legitimacy<< and >>stability<< gained from respect for the >>rule of law<< often do not last long. Napoleonic France, Wilhelmine Germany and Hitler’s Thousand Year Reich: They were all built on fear and seemingly overwhelming >>military power<<. But they didn’t last long once a >>coalition<<, reacting to their aggression, got rolling. Today, a big reason the U.S. is in a position of economic dominance is the >>rules-based<< liberal order it helped to create after the Second World War. Mr. Trump and his advisers are now pretending that never happened and are returning to an era of >>unchecked power<< that has repeatedly been rejected as unworkable, but only after great catastrophes. One historic instance of that was the >>Congress of Vienna<< in 1815. An attempt to rebalance power in Europe after the disastrous >>Napoleonic Wars<<, it is criticized for cementing the **powers of the great kingdoms** of that era, but it is also praised for bringing a century of relative peace to the continent, and for its recognition that >>diplomacy<<, not dominance, creates stability and prosperity. The real lesson of history, Napoleon included, is that **unchecked might** makes right for only a short period of time. Countries that **rely on force alone** [i.e. = "ultima ratio"] for >>legitimacy<< can quickly become overextended and isolated. Already, America’s allies are questioning the reliability of an administration that blithely boasts that no one can stop it from seizing >>Greenland<<, as Mr. Miller did. They are also, by necessity, beginning to explore ways to limit their reliance on the American market. This week, for instance, Prime Minister Mark Carney is in China hoping to reset trade relations with >>Beijing<<. Countries such as Canada may have no choice but to realign themselves if Mr. Trump intends to dictate from his office, based on his “morality,” which smaller nations will be granted sovereignty and which won’t, and on what bullying terms that sovereignty will be permitted. In regurgitating its own version of the tired contention that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must,” the U.S. is also overlooking an important fact: The Athenians sacked Melos, but lost the war with >>Sparta<<. It’s worth remembering, too, that Napoleon, for all his military brilliance, only held sway over Europe for 15 years and died alone in exile. He and other would-be >>strongmen<< found out that, given time, the iron law of might corrodes. If history is any guide, Mr. Trump and his administration may well be planting **the seeds of American decline**.]]> Donald_Trump Law_of_the_Jungle Stephen_Miller Trump_2.0 unchecked_power unilateralism America_in_Decline? Beijing coalition-building coalitions Congress_of_Vienna diplomacy great_powers Greenland history legitimacy military_power Napoleon_Bonaparte Napoleonic_Wars Nicolás_Maduro rules-based rule_of_law Spartans stability strongmen Thucydides ultima_ratio whims might-is-right https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d16107d943cf/ 2026-01-11T03:05:22+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-john-a-macdonald-canada-leader/ jerryking>revisions<< in recent memory. Only last month, Omeasoo Wahpasiw, professor of Indigenous Studies at Carleton University, told the CBC, speaking of Macdonald, that “we don’t even know what kind of person he was besides an alcoholic.” The smear is representative of the >>ad hominem<< attacks against Sir John A., often based on misinformation, a selective view of history, or both. Macdonald is one of the most studied figures in Canadian history, so there is a very good understanding of what kind of person he was: charismatic, affable, **flawed**, humble and witty. He may have been our most human prime minister. “Ordinary people outright loved him,” wrote Macdonald’s modern biographer, the late >>Richard Gwyn<<, “because he was funny, unstuffy, a natural showman, daring, treated all as equals and was adept at putting down hecklers in a way that never humiliated them.” Sir John A. also suffered more personal tragedy than any prime minister in Canadian history. His first child, John Alexander, died 13 months after birth in 1857. Ten years later his wife, Isabella – addicted to opioids – passed away. Macdonald married again in 1867. The daughter he and his new wife Agnes had together in 1869, Mary, was born with hydrocephalus; her disability confined her to a wheelchair. Mary was a major presence in his life, and he was a devoted father. What kind of person was Sir John A. Macdonald? Not the cartoon villain as people have tried to portray him. During the 1891 election campaign – Macdonald’s last, as he died later that year – a citizen yelled out, “You’ll never die, John A.!” He was right. Canadians still care deeply about his legacy. Both his detractors and his supporters have plenty to say and readers of this newspaper will know that many inches of column space have been devoted to debating the place of a man who served 19 years as this country’s leader. More broadly, the interest in Macdonald reminds us of the importance of >>leadership<< and the study of >>history<<. The decisions of prime ministers have >>consequences<< for all Canadians, and we ought to learn about the people who made them so we understand the context and >>consequences<< in full, rather than cherry-picking episodes from the past to suit our needs in the present, as has regularly been the case with Sir John A. Macdonald is not meant to be venerated as some sort of infallible mythical hero. But our first prime minister was undeniably a visionary leader who forged a nation in the face of potential threats from the United States. He built a railway and laid the foundation for who we are today. He was indispensable to the creation of a country that is the envy of the world. Macdonald made errors along the way – but there is room in history for **more than one thing to be true at the same time**. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Charlotte Gray weighs in here: https://www.facebook.com/reel/1237589441529590]]> Canada history prime_ministers ad_hominem books human_frailties leadership nation_builders revisionism Richard_Gwyn Sir_John_A._Macdonald two_things_can_be_true_at_the_same_time human_failings flawed_people consequential https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7def5aa36bae/ 2026-01-02T18:17:30+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-history-teaches-us-how-to-manage-risk/ jerryking>accident<<; it exposed a strategic vulnerability at the very nexus of Venetian military might. The Venetian response exemplifies a sophisticated understanding of risk that modern institutions would do well to recover. In the wake of the disaster, the Republic’s leadership moved decisively. The Senate decreed that gunpowder would no longer be stored in the Arsenal, the collection of shipyards and armouries in the city. Gunpowder would henceforth be produced and stored away from urban Venice at Sant’Angelo Della Polvere, an island in the Venetian lagoon, so no single >>accident<< could ignite such devastating consequences. Security protocols were tightened, inattentive guards dismissed and replaced with proven men. By 1570, despite war having been declared by the Ottomans, the Arsenal was back in operation. By 1574, during King Henry III of France’s visit, the arsenalotti famously assembled and outfitted an entire galley in a single day. Casualties tied to Arsenal mishaps dropped dramatically within a generation because the Republic treated >>danger<< as data, not destiny, and accidents as pathways to remedies rather than reasons for despair. This fusion of rigorous >>crisis response<< and pro-active >>risk mitigation<< would prove strategically decisive within two years. When the Christian fleet assembled to sail for the Ottoman naval station of Lepanto, located in what is now western Greece, in October, 1571, Venice’s contribution emerged from an Arsenal that had not merely recovered from catastrophe but had systematically eliminated the vulnerabilities that caused it. The victory was a profound psychological blow to Ottoman prestige, restoring European confidence after decades of seemingly inexorable advance by the Ottomans. While its long-term strategic impact was complex, the triumph at Lepanto gave Christendom a generation’s breathing room – a lesson in institutional resilience whose consequences extended far beyond naval warfare. The Venetian example is a case of >>institutional memory<< – a collective, documented approach to decision-making. This principle of embedding memory into practice is not a historical curiosity; its presence or absence determines the outcome of modern crises as well. Time and again, we are reminded that robust institutions survive the adverse periods of “leaderism” and “personalism” that dominate our current moment. These destructive periods inevitably give way to moments of profound institutional recalibration, often forced by systemic shock. Without the Second World War, for example, we would not have had the European construct; the war solidified the institutions and agreements that built modern Europe. Interestingly, our current nationalist moment may similarly herald a reinforcement of institutional effectiveness on both sides of the Atlantic as governments seek to shore up their defences against external geopolitical shocks and the internal political volatility inherent in personalized leadership. This principle of >>institutional memory<< as >>risk mitigation<< appears equally in contemporary settings, proven in both observance and breach. The 1984 Bhopal disaster in India led to **widespread adoption** [i.e. = "mass adoption"] of systematic hazard analysis frameworks mandated by national and international regulatory bodies that embed operational memory into industrial processes. By contrast, the 2017 collapse of Puerto Rico’s water infrastructure after Hurricane Maria demonstrated how a breakdown in >>institutional capacity<< – both in terms of >>deferred maintenance<< and a catastrophic failure of logistical response – can amplify a disaster’s impact. More recently, the institutional chaos during the 2020 pandemic could have been mitigated if the existing preparedness documents and strategies had been actively maintained, adequately resourced and sufficiently integrated into operational reality. In each case, the core lesson remains: Risk lives in the gap between what institutions remember and what they forget............What >>Venice<< learned centuries ago – that resilience begins with >>institutional memory<< – is precisely what today’s risk frameworks are forgetting. Even central banks quietly concede this. A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that recession models, long viewed as reliable, carry far more uncertainty than most assume. The real problem isn’t randomness – it’s the institutional tendency to sidestep inconvenient forecasts. Banking regulations developed since the 2008 financial crisis taught banks to hoard capital; the next generation of rules, if they are to matter, must teach them to hoard memory. The intensity of political and historical forces now outstrips any model’s backward-looking window. Each modern crisis has a historical twin, dissected in dusty reports few bothered to read. The 1907 collapse of **lightly regulated** trust companies eerily presaged the 2021 implosion of the opaque and undercapitalized fund >>Archegos<<, a U.S. family office that utilized undisclosed, leveraged derivative positions. Likewise, the 1929 market crash, fuelled by investors borrowing heavily against their stock portfolios, was a structural forerunner of the 1998 collapse of Long-Term Capital Management (>>LTCM<<), whose demise was triggered by similarly overleveraged derivative positions. These names may mean little to current executives, but they are object lessons that could have alerted decision-makers to disasters they were hurtling toward. A critical challenge is selecting the right **temporal horizon** for each risk type. Financial rules require banks to maintain short-term risk measurements – standard metrics looking at potential losses over days or a year – to ensure day-to-day stability. However, these capture only narrow historical slices. Leading into 2007, bank risk models showed historically low readings because they were calibrated primarily to the unusually placid “Great Moderation” period, a two-decade era of decreased macroeconomic volatility and stable inflation in the U.S. When unprecedented shocks appeared, these models catastrophically underestimated systemic risk. When LTCM collapsed in 1998, it could have taught financiers to institutionalize lessons from the risks of excessive leverage and flawed models. Their failure to institutionalize these lessons contributed significantly to the financial system’s subsequent fragility and the eventual eruption of the larger subprime crisis a decade later. >>Risk management<< requires more than algorithmic sophistication – it demands a fundamental recalibration of how institutions process time itself. Rather than generating stress tests from mathematical extremes alone, resilient organizations build scenarios from historical precedents. In response to the widespread >>systemic failures<< exposed by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, >>regulators<< like the >>Bank of England<< have developed sophisticated >>stress tests<<, using long-run historical data to calibrate severe but plausible ‘>>tail risk<<’ scenarios that force institutions to look beyond recent placid periods. When properly recontextualized, the Panic of 1907, when customers rushed to withdraw their deposits from banks over fears of banks’ solvency, offers more insight into modern fintech vulnerabilities than many synthetic models. Progressive boards balance quantitative expertise with historical literacy. **True diversification** [i.e. = "intellectual diversity"] includes >>dissent<< – sponsoring contrarian scenarios and funding asymmetric experiments the herd ignores. This call for historical consciousness directly challenges the ethos of the machine-learning age. Advocates insist that vast data streams and transformer models have made history obsolete. They are half-right: Computation is indispensable. Yet models without memory resemble >>GPS<< systems with no underlying map data: They provide precise co-ordinates but lack the geographical context essential for navigation during disruptions. >>Black-box<< engines still >>underprice<< >>tail risk<< because they train on placid decades and ignore infrequent but devastating avalanches. Pre-embedded historical consciousness becomes the only brake that works at microsecond speed. These principles demand cultural transformation, not cosmetic adjustments. Organizations must marry artificial intelligence’s >>computational power<< with archives’ >>institutional wisdom<<. La Serenissima earned its “serene” title through >>foresight<<, not temperament. When the Arsenal exploded in 1569, the Republic’s leadership moved with decisive clarity, dispersing powder magazines and institutionalizing risk memory. Intriguingly, the bronze lion dominating Piazza San Marco whispers an additional lesson: As reported in the journal Antiquity, recent analysis suggests this quintessential Venetian symbol may have originated in Tang Dynasty China, masquerading for centuries as purely Western iconography. Like complex financial instruments and geopolitical currents, >>symbols<< harbour hidden depths and unexpected provenances. What appears immediately obvious often obscures more intricate histories – just as current models frequently miss fundamental elements shaping our reality. Today’s risk frameworks must embrace both technological sophistication and historical preservation. Ignore historical depth and >>chief risk officers<< from Toronto to Rome to Mumbai will reap an ever-bitter harvest, as political economy writes its ledgers in defaults, sanctions and sudden devaluations. Instead, marry artificial intelligence’s computational power with archives’ >>institutional wisdom<<, and organizations can navigate uncertainty with the balanced stance of that Venetian lion: one paw planted firmly on solid memory, the other testing the turbulent waters of change. The choice is urgent, the tools are ready, and >>history<< – quite literally – waits for no one. ]]> accidents archives catastrophes crisis_response dissension GPS history howto institutional_capacity institutional_memory institutional_resilience institutional_wisdom Laurence_Mussio LTCM organizational_capacity risk-management risk-mitigation symbolism Venice Bank_of_England black_box computing_power CRO foresight intellectual_diversity “light-touch”_regulation regulators stress-tests systemic_failures tail-risk time_horizons underpricing city-states dangers deferred_maintenance Archegos mass_adoption Cosimo_Pacciani https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e068a05b8e87/ 2025-12-21T13:30:35+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/culture/books/article-canadian-prime-ministers-historian-jdm-stewart/ jerryking>Canadians<< to know their >>history<<. He worries they don’t, and he’s on to something. In the opening pages of his recent book, The Prime Ministers: Canada’s Leaders and the Nation They Shaped, he writes of high-school students who didn’t know who >>Lester B. Pearson<< was. Not knowing the name of a prime minister may be disconcerting, but it’s worse than simply being weak on trivia. It points to a lack of historical knowledge and capacity to understand the breadth and depth of the country, both its past and, perhaps, its present. The late editor and writer Lewis Lapham defended historical education with passion and purpose, once writing: “Unlike moths and goldfish, human beings deprived of memory tend to become disoriented and easily frightened. Not only do we lose track of our own stories – who we are, where we’ve been, where we might be going – but our elected representatives forget why sovereign nations go to war. The blessed states of amnesia cannot support either the hope of individual liberty or the practice of democratic self-government.” If you believe that >>to be forewarned is to be forearmed<<, then it’s important to know just what we’re up against, present and past. The Globe and Mail spoke to Stewart about the importance of Canadians **telling their own stories** and talks about who this country’s most consequential leader was. Why did you write a book about the prime ministers? It’s been more than 25 years since there had been a book on Canadian prime ministers. A lot of history has happened since 1999. Topics that weren’t covered in previous books on prime ministers are now necessary parts of the story. That’s why I’ve included a significant amount of information on relations with **Indigenous peoples** and the environmental policy of prime ministers. Why did you choose to include all of them? I wanted to have a comprehensive place for readers to come to where they would be able to get important information on all of our prime ministers. I think that’s really the only way to handle it. That’s also why I included a rich and detailed index. This is a book that can be useful for journalists. It can be useful for students, which I think is important either at the secondary or postsecondary level. Throughout the book, you lament how little we know about our history. How did we get there? This lament has been around for a long, long time. I think part of the reason is we’re overshadowed culturally by the United States, and so they take up a big space in our mind. We’ve had to fight against that. And then we’ve just never really taken our history seriously. Most Canadian provinces don’t require a high-school credit in Canadian history. That’s something that I just still can’t understand. We don’t do a very good job of telling our stories. It may also be part of that Canadian modesty, but it’s been something that I’ve tried to fight for my whole life, and it’s one of the reasons why I was a teacher. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve written this book, and it’s one of the reasons why I just write generally on stories about Canadian culture and history. There might be a bit of a moment right now for the history of prime ministers. We have your book, as well as Raymond Blake’s Canada’s Prime Ministers and the Shaping of a National Identity, which won the Shaughnessy Cohen Prize; John Ibbitson’s The Duel was excellent and well received. Stephen Maher captured the Justin Trudeau years in The Prince. What do you make of the recent bump in books about prime ministers? If you go back even to John English’s two volumes on Pierre Trudeau, there is a decent library of books on Canadian prime ministers if you look at recent history. But a lot of them are also really outdated. There hasn’t been a biography on Robert Borden since 1980. That’s almost 50 years. There hasn’t been a comprehensive biography on Wilfrid Laurier in 60 years. There are some books on the prime ministers, though, and we are in a bit of a moment. The thing is, we have to keep making those moments and keep making contributions so that not only are those books out there, but so that we also ensure there’s an audience for them. And that comes back to this idea that political history has kind of fallen out of fashion in educational circles. I think that’s one of the reasons why the kids didn’t know who Lester B. Pearson was. I think we still have to continue to make a sincere and concentrated effort to teach our political history. If you were to write a biography of a prime minister, just one, who would it be? I would love to try to write the magisterial biography of Wilfrid Laurier, just because he was one of our greatest prime ministers. His eloquence with his oratory would be beautiful to try to dig into. He was an interesting human. So, if I had the time and the financing to write a book like that, that’s what I’d like to do. In addition to Laurier, I think it’d be fun to take a stab at writing a political biography of the Brian Mulroney years because he’s a fascinating character as well. Who’s the most consequential prime minister? I won’t ask about the best because we could run out of ink debating that. But for better or worse, who’s the most consequential? It’s probably John A. Macdonald. We’re still talking about him today. The railway remains a vital piece of Canadian infrastructure and imagination. His treatment of Indigenous peoples still animates us with our unhappiness, with how he handled relations with them. He also forces us to reckon with the imperfection of our political figures, because he was a consequential and great prime minister who did great national things, but he also has significant blemishes on his record that make us wince. So we have to reckon with those things. And I think it forces us to, in the best scenario, understand that two things can be true at the same time, even among our leaders; it reveals to us the challenges of evaluating historical figures, but also reminds us people who led the country more than 150 years ago can still have an impact on how we feel as Canadians today, both for good and for ill. The government’s treatment of Indigenous peoples features prominently in the book. Do you think mainstream publishing and media, and readers themselves, are taking the history of Indigenous peoples in Canada seriously now? I think they are taking it very seriously. Ever since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report or even Stephen Harper’s apology in 2008 for the residential-school system, we’ve been forced to take that history seriously. And we’re pulling it out of the shadows. I’m pleased to have been able to bring forward some of those stories to new readers and expand the interpretation of Canadian prime ministers. ]]> aboriginals books Canada Canadians Canadian_culture cultural_overshadowing historians historical_amnesia history indices multidimensional national_identity political_biographies political_history political_writing Sir_John_A._Macdonald Sir_Wilfred_Laurier prime_ministers Lester_Pearson to_be_forewarned_is_to_be_forearmed https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:728a7bc05649/ 2025-12-14T13:01:15+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/30/arts/yale-grand-strategy-resignation.html?searchResultPosition=1 jerryking>Grand Strategy<< course since 2017, says the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts to influence the curriculum.++ ++“It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being >>second-guessed<< and >>undermined<< and not protected,” Beverly Gage said in explaining her decision to resign.++ The Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy is one of Yale University’s most celebrated and prestigious programs. Over the course of a year, it allows a select group of about two dozen students to immerse themselves in >>classic texts<< of history and statecraft, while also rubbing shoulders with guest instructors drawn from the worlds of government, politics, military affairs and the media.......a program created to train future leaders how to steer through the turbulent waters of history is facing a crisis of its own. Beverly Gage, a historian of 20th-century politics who has led the program since 2017, has resigned, saying the university failed to stand up for academic freedom amid inappropriate efforts by its donors to influence its curriculum and faculty hiring........The donors, both prominent and deep-pocketed, are Nicholas F. Brady, a former U.S. Treasury secretary under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and Charles B. Johnson, a mutual fund billionaire and leading Republican donor who in 2013 made a $250 million donation to Yale — the largest gift in its history......Professor Gage said, an opinion article in The New York Times by another instructor in the program calling Donald J. Trump a demagogue who threatened the Constitution prompted complaints from Mr. Brady. Four months of wrangling over the program later, Professor Gage resigned after the university administration informed her that a new advisory board it was creating under previously ignored bylaws would be dominated by conservative figures of the donors’ choosing, including, against her strong objections, Henry A. Kissinger, the former secretary of state under President Richard M. Nixon. Her resignation, which Yale has not yet made public, raises the question of where universities draw the line between honoring original agreements with donors and allowing them undue sway in academic affairs. It’s a question that can become turbocharged when colliding political visions, and the imperatives of fund-raising, are involved. Since taking over the program, Professor Gage has expanded the syllabus to include grass-roots social movements, like the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong and the civil rights movement in the United States. Until late last year, she said, she had received no criticism from the donors or the administration about the course’s direction. In a statement, Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, offered praise for her teaching and scholarship. But the administration disputed her claims that Yale had given in to donor >>pressure<<. Pericles Lewis, the university’s vice president for global strategy and vice provost for academic initiatives, said the university was simply adhering to its 2006 agreement with the donors, which Professor Gage had resisted. “It wouldn’t have a controlling power,” he said of the board. “But I can understand why that would not be her cup of tea.” What the administration sees as legitimate oversight, Professor Gage, who remains a tenured professor in the history department, sees as a sudden effort by the donors to establish “some form of surveillance and control” over the program. “It’s very difficult to teach effectively or creatively in a situation where you are being >>second-guessed<< and undermined and not protected,” The Grand Strategy program was founded in 2000 by the Yale historians John Lewis Gaddis, a leading scholar of the Cold War, and Paul Kennedy, the author of “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” along with the diplomat Charles Hill, a former aide and adviser to George P. Shultz and Mr. Kissinger. The idea was to teach >>leadership<< through an eclectic curriculum of >>classic texts<<, case-studies and crisis simulations, incorporating thinkers and topics from >>Thucydides<<, >>Sun Tzu<<, and >>Machiavelli<< to the >>Cold War<<. The course “arose out of the desire to reaffirm the power of the >>big idea<<,”........“It came from the professors’ alarm at the rise of the ‘wonk,’ the Clinton-era policy expert with no concept of broad context.” The course quickly drew admirers (and imitators) well beyond Yale, along with plenty of suspicion on the predominantly liberal campus, where some saw it as a cultish bastion of retrograde >>“great man” history<<. In 2006, it was formally endowed with a combined gift of $17.5 million from Mr. Johnson and Mr. Brady. In a 2013 article in The Yale Daily News, Professor Gaddis said Mr. Brady had given a single directive: “Teach common sense.” “Grand Strategy” is a capacious but slippery concept, one that has generated continuing debates about its meaning. In his 2018 book “On Grand Strategy,” Professor Gaddis defined it as “the alignment of unlimited aspirations with necessarily limited capabilities.” [i.e. = "creating the conditions"/"laying the groundwork"/"shaping the environment"] In recent years, scholars have extended the concept to business, global public health, party politics and other areas. Professor Gage, 49, has incorporated social movement strategy into the course........she has sought to bring in a demographically, politically and intellectually diverse group of practitioners as teachers and guest speakers. Recent invitees have included the former defense secretary James N. Mattis; the conservative intellectual Yuval Levin; the civil rights lawyer Vanita Gupta, and the racial justice activist Heather McGhee. Professor Kennedy said he supported the direction of the course under Professor Gage. “She is a very gifted leader and teacher,” he said. Professor Gaddis echoed the sentiment, adding: “I don’t think the Yale administration has sufficiently insulated her. It is traditionally thought that the faculty determine the curriculum, and I think that’s how it should be.” Professor Gage described her previous relationship with the donors as supportive. But she said the tone abruptly changed last November, a week after the presidential election, when Bryan Garsten, a Yale political scientist who teaches in the program, published an opinion article called “How to Protect America From the Next Donald Trump.” The next day, Professor Gage received an email from Mr. Hill saying Mr. Brady had called “to grouse” about the article, “complaining that there was no grand strategy in it.” According to the email, which was viewed by The Times, Mr. Brady also said that “this is not what Charlie Johnson and I signed up for.” [i.e. = "disenchantment"] In a phone call with Professor Gage that day, Mr. Brady reiterated his view and began asking about the syllabus and practitioners. “It was strange, because none of that had changed much in the past three years,” she said. Representatives for Mr. Brady, 91, and Mr. Johnson, 88, said they were unavailable for comment. In another phone call, on Nov. 13, Professor Gage said, Mr. Brady lamented that the program isn’t “what it was.” When she pressed for specifics, he said she wasn’t teaching Grand Strategy “the way Henry Kissinger would.” “I said, ‘That’s absolutely right. I am not teaching Grand Strategy the way Henry Kissinger would,’” she said. Later that day, Mr. Brady sent her an excerpt from the 2006 donor agreement, outlining an outside five-member “board of visitors” that would advise on the appointments of the practitioners. Professor Gage had never heard of this board, which had never been established. Dr. Lewis, the vice provost, told her he would look into it. Two weeks later, Dr. Lewis said he had confirmed details in the donor agreement, and Yale had a legal obligation to create the board. Professor Gage wasn’t happy. But if it were created, she insisted to Dr. Lewis, it would need diversity across generational, ideological, methodological, racial and gender lines. And the donors could not be allowed to appoint its members. ]]> academic_freedom alumni books Colleges_&_Universities culture_wars curriculum diplomacy geopolitics grand_strategy historians history innovation statecraft strategic_thinking strategy Sun_Tzu the_big_picture Yale donors founder's_intentions undermining_of_trust apply_pressure big_ideas Cold_War Great_Man_Theory_of_History leadership leadership_development Niccolò_Machiavelli Thucydides under_pressure Heather_McGhee James_Mattis Yuval_Levin creating_the_conditions disenchantment laying_the_groundwork shaping_the_environment classic_texts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ca6c7962ed26/ 2025-12-11T06:50:30+00:00 https://archive.is/20251210210207/https://www.ft.com/content/5e353728-80bd-46bf-82bb-57ab05cf37c6#selection-1541.0-1911.12 jerryking>domino<< can produce a **cascade of tumbling pieces**. On a planetary scale, >>geohazards<< like earthquakes and >>volcanic eruptions<< can potentially set in train sequences of physical, social and political upheaval. That might be the story behind the >>Black Death<<, the wave of bubonic >>plague<< that hit >>medieval<< Europe and killed up to half its population. According to new research, the 14th-century pandemic could be rooted in a series of >>volcanic eruptions<< that cooled the climate. This caused crops to fail, prompting Italian >>city-states<< like >>Venice<< to import grain from further afield. Those imports, from across the Black Sea, also included fleas carrying Yersinia pestis, the >>bacterium<< that causes bubonic >>plague<<. On arrival, the disease swept through a population weakened by >>malnutrition<<. That devastating episode makes visible a profound >>interconnectedness<< between the environment and societal flourishing, linking natural hazards, climate, food supply, politics, trade and disease. The research, recently published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, also highlights how quickly >>environmental change<< can >>destabilize societies<<. The message is clear: when lava flows, empires can fall. Leaders ignore nature at their peril. To investigate how and why the bubonic >>plague<< spread so rapidly after 1347, Martin Bauch, a historian of medieval climate at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe, teamed up with Ulf Büntgen, a Cambridge university geographer. >>Tree rings<< from the Spanish Pyrenees, they found, showed evidence of something unusual: three consecutive years, starting in 1345, of anomalously cold and wet summers. The researchers also studied >>ice cores<< from Antarctica and Greenland, which contain geochemical signatures of eruptions in the form of sulphate concentrations (deposited from volcanic sulphur dioxide belched into the atmosphere). They found a sulphate spike in 1345, with evidence of more modest eruptions in 1329, 1336 and 1341. Chronicles around 1346 and 1347 record >>food shortages<< and >>famine<< in parts of Spain, France, Italy, Egypt and the Levant. Italian grape harvests failed; cereal and wheat prices soared. In 1347, meanwhile, Genoa and Venice eased hostilities with the Mongols of the Golden Horde to lubricate grain trading routes across the Black Sea. Cruelly, this plan traded starvation for the >>Black Death<<, with the disease arriving as grain embargoes were lifted. Italian trade ships loaded with grain returned to home shores in the second half of 1347, with the first human plague cases in >>Venice<< reported soon after. The circumstantial evidence linking trading routes and outbreaks is persuasive: the resumption in March 1348 of Venetian grain exports to Padua coincided with a >>plague<< >>outbreak<< there. The researchers conclude that the sequence of eruptions, climate downturn and subsequent >>food shortages<< “can provide a mechanistic explanation for the synchronized onset of the second plague pandemic in many major Italian sea ports in 1347 CE”. Oxford university >>historian<< Peter Frankopan, author of The Earth Transformed, which explores how a **changing climate** has shaped the rise and fall of civilisations, describes the research as “very exciting stuff”. The evidence of a 1345 eruption, he tells me, “is the smoking gun many of us have been looking for”. The pattern echoes the multiple 6th-century eruptions thought to have triggered the >>Justinianic Plague<< (the first recorded pandemic of bubonic plague). By some accounts, there is a one-in-six chance of a major eruption this century. Frankopan and several volcanologists have been trying, unsuccessfully, to win funding to study the implications of such an event on the global economy and international security, as well as on biodiversity and climate. Research like that conducted by Bauch and Büntgen should not be seen solely as fascinating historical anecdote, the >>historian<< warned, but also as “clarion calls for the sorts of ways that history can offer important insights for the present and future”. The past indeed holds lessons for today. The >>Black Death<< tarnished the rulers of the Golden Horde; it is not complicated to imagine how the >>Justinianic plague<< weakened the >>Byzantine Empire<<. An Icelandic eruption is a suspected trigger, via >>food shortages<<, of the French Revolution. When nature goes rogue, the social and political aftershocks can reverberate for centuries. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Fascinating and powerful argument. But the message is lost as the author focuses too much on volcano eruptions and too little on the actual trigger of climate change, excessive CO2 in the air. Which, at present can by triggered by both, human and natural causes.-----> excessive SO2, coolant. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ The deadly and destructive period of the 1300s ultimately led to the erosion of feudalism as well the erosion of the power of the Church over the State in Europe and this provided the impetus for innovation under the aegis of the Renaissance and Reformation respectively. Some good did , accordingly, ultimately come from the natural catastrophes - whether geological or indeed bacterial - in question. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Venetians were the pioneers in communicable disease prevention because of their large trading fleet via the sailors, rats and fleas. Their innovations included health passports and the quarantine islands for incoming ships from previous “unhealthy” ports. Quaranta (40) days became the ideal time and hence name. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ If I can put this another, very obvious way - our planet is teeming with evolved life, which forms an exceedingly complex ecosystem. That system is always changing, and shocks to it can have large impacts. We - us humans- think of ourselves as separate from everything else, and able to deal with any and all problems through our ingenuity, but - and this is the problematic bit - we tend to think of solutions as human-centric, not ecosystem-centric eg thinking all our economic problems can be solved with constant growth, which is true but only up to a point, given a finite set of resources. It’s a difference in perspective, but until we reconcile ourselves to being a fully embedded part of the overall system, it’s going to be a struggle.]]> Anjana_Ahuja Black_Death books Mother_Nature volcanic_eruptions bacteria Central_Asia disease_vectors domino_effects epidemics interconnections plagues city-states civilizational_dangers climate_change destabilization environmental_change famines flu_outbreaks food_shortages geohazards historians history ice_cores Justinianic_Plague malnutrition medieval tree_rings Byzantine_Empire Venice cascading_crises-failures https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:358e54f13bbb/ 2025-11-30T20:55:56+00:00 https://archive.is/ff99V#selection-1589.0-1849.14 jerryking capitalism clocks history museums Oxford https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c536cb7c0301/ 2025-11-05T17:15:21+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/first-person/article-walking-through-torontos-st-jamess-cemetery-is-like-moving-through/ jerryking cemeteries history outdoors Toronto the_counsel_of_the_dead https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:91c6970bb26c/ 2025-11-05T15:01:41+00:00 https://www.facebook.com/reel/796830299844970 jerryking>critical thinking<< and questions. They’re not easily deceived by propaganda. They are harder to scare and control. This explains why some forces in this country want to demonize or outright destroy TRUE education and its advocates! +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ “The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. ” ― James Baldwin +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ W.E.B. Du Bois believed education was a tool for social change, empowerment, and full human development, not just vocational training. He argued for a broad, classical education that fostered >>critical thinking<< to combat prejudice and create informed citizens. For Du Bois, education was also about creating leaders, instilling >>cultural pride<< in African Americans, and helping individuals find their own path and potential. ]]> African-Americans purpose_of_education Colleges_&_Universities history mis-education professors James_Baldwin W.E.B._Du_Bois ahistorical black_studies Carter_Woodson engaged_citizenry Morehouse students critical_thinking cultural_pride https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c35e5013cedb/ 2025-10-14T04:13:01+00:00 https://stratechery.com/2025/openais-windows-play/ jerryking>Samsung<< and >>SK Hynix<< for >>memory<< for AI chips - The Sora 2 video generation model and Sora the app - A deal with AMD for 6 GW worth of AMD chips and an associated OpenAI stake in the chipmaker - A slew of DevDay announcements, including apps in ChatGPT, AgentKit, Sora 2 and GPT-5 Pro in the API, the GA release of Codex, and more. The last two announcements just dropped yesterday, and actually bring clarity and coherence to the entire list. In short, OpenAI is making a play to be the Windows of AI. For nearly two decades smartphones, and in particular >>iOS<<, have been the touchstones in terms of discussing >>platforms<<. It’s important to note, however, that while >>Apple’s<< strategy of integrating hardware and software was immensely profitable, it entailed leaving the door open for a competing >>platform<< to emerge. The challenge of being a hardware company is that by virtue of needing to actually create devices you can’t serve everyone; >>Apple<< in particular didn’t have the capacity or desire to go downmarket, which created the opportunity for Android to not only establish a competing platform but to actually significantly exceed iOS in market share. That means that if we want a >>historical analogy<< for total platform dominance — which increasingly appears to be >>OpenAI’s<< goal — we have to go back further to the PC era and Windows."]]> windows platforms history ibm software sora oracle samsung via:robertogreco AMD artificial_intelligence Ben_Thompson Chatgpt computer_memory e-commerce iOS microsoft Nvidia OpenAi SK_Hynix Apple data_centers historical_analogies https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:9e8b0f67abd1/ 2025-10-08T22:27:39+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/08/opinion/trump-republicans-hypocrisy-small-government.html jerryking>small government<< is merely rhetorical. It is not small government to abuse the National Guard to invade the cities led by your political opponents. It is not small government to send roving bands of masked agents across the nation to intimidate and harass the people you’ve deemed to be outside the political community. It is not small government to turn the federal law enforcement apparatus into a machine for the persecution of your political opponents. The reason this antebellum battle over slavery and the scope of federal power is a useful antecedent to the Trump administration is that, like the slave owners and their minions, the MAGA movement and its allies are opposed only to those aspects of government that they can’t wield against their political enemies. They will happily enlarge the scope of federal authority beyond the limits of our Constitution so that they can subject the country to nakedly authoritarian rule. To recognize this dynamic is to see something important. Consistency is worthwhile only inasmuch as it is useful. Trump and his allies will use whatever political approach is necessary to achieve their goals. As their opponents contemplate a response, they should take this as a lesson. ]]> Donald_Trump history slavery antebellum authoritarianism Confederacy DEI Jamelle_Bouie small_government states’_rights Trumpism Trump_2.0 https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:2894c6f90182/ 2025-09-17T22:02:48+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/magazine/racial-differences-doctors.html jerryking 1619 African-Americans discrimination false_beliefs health history legacies medicine race racial_disparities slavery https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:256654b8115c/ 2025-09-07T21:11:18+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/books/review/the-second-emancipation-howard-french.html jerryking books book_reviews Ghana history Kwame_Nkrumah pan-African https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e882c50b4797/ 2025-09-06T12:05:36+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/we-need-to-know-history-especially-now-politics-policy-public-standards-dbb73889?mod=opinion_trendingnow_article_pos3 jerryking authors biographies Civil_War contextual David_McCullough historians historical_lessons history interestingness John_Adams Peggy_Noonan sense_of_proportion storytelling Pulitzer_Prize know_your_history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:741e45373de8/ 2025-08-20T10:20:11+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/19/us/politics/trump-smithsonian-slavery.html jerryking African-Americans Donald_Trump history museums Smithsonian white_fragility cultural_institutions white_grievances exhibitions https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e8b96af3e8ca/ 2025-08-18T16:57:12+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-canada-trade-strategy-delusions-of-friendship/ jerryking crossborder delusions friendships history national_interests tariffs https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a28a896395ac/ 2025-08-14T00:54:44+00:00 https://ourworldindata.org/ jerrykingcharts data economics history politics primers research statistics visualization https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4fa71432ac8d/ 2025-08-05T12:37:00+00:00 https://ia600504.us.archive.org/33/items/handbookofbritis00bayl/handbookofbritis00bayl.pdf jerrykingGuyana history statistics British_Guiana https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:b49f30a5175c/ 2025-07-18T21:10:36+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/opinion/a-civil-war-sergeant-and-his-old-flag-1525f26d?mod=opinion_lead_pos12 jerryking African-Americans all-Black Andre_Braugher black_manhood black_men Civil_War Denzel_Washington fatherhood films Glory heroes history inspiration masculinity Morgan_Freeman movies responsibility https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:51afca2f4067/ 2025-06-20T17:02:23+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-the-press-of-history-on-the-ai-revolution/ jerryking>printing press<< as any kind of low point in human history. It represented an existential moment for scribes and content creators of all kinds – history truly does echo – yet it also accelerated the distribution of the >>Bible<<, helping to trigger the >>Reformation<<; made information more accessible and portable, laying the groundwork for the >>Scientific Revolution<<; and fuelled a rise in literacy that helped usher in the >>Enlightenment<< and circulate ideas foundational to modern democracy. Today, there is another massively disruptive technology that is reshaping the way we live, work and conduct business: >>artificial intelligence<<. In Canada, high-profile companies such as >>Shopify<< Inc. and >>Open Text<< Corp. are announcing plans to shift investment into this technology, and are drawing predictable scrutiny for the painful yet inevitable flipside of that focus: **fewer employees will be needed** [i.e. = "people-less"]to perform tasks, and at a much lower cost. That change is striking more directly at **junior-level jobs** as AI carries out an increasing amount of >>menial<< and repetitive tasks. More roles will be expected to review, refine and build upon first drafts. These are responsibilities that require stronger >>judgment<<, **domain knowledge** and a higher level of decision-making than many >>entry-level jobs<< previously demanded. While high-tech companies like Open Text and >>Amazon<< are the ones drawing attention, the impact of AI is unfolding across the economy – in banks rebuilding >>underwriting<< models, in retailers automating inventory planning, in >>farms<< deploying **predictive tools**. No sector will be untouched. Canada, of all countries, should see these moves as a road map to solving its long-simmering productivity crisis and to restoring economic competitiveness. Since the early 2000s, when commercial uses of the internet began remaking global markets, corporate Canada has consistently >>underinvested<< in machinery, software and >>intellectual property<<. >>Business investment<< per worker in Canada – across all sectors – fell to just 85 % of its 2014 level by 2023. In the United States, it rose by 21% over the same period, the OECD reported last month. At this rate, the report warns, Canada will fall further behind in productivity, miss the gains of emerging technologies and grow more vulnerable to economic shocks. For businesses and workers, too little investment in modern tools and skills means stagnant wages and weaker profits. The challenge for Canadian businesses isn’t just spending more – it’s spending better. Like any tool, AI has its limits: There is no substitute for human >>creativity<<, and it relies on people to >>ask the right questions<< and recognize the right answers. For now, at least. Which brings us to another important limitation that is more likely to withstand the test of time: the ability of technology to put >>guardrails<< around itself [i.e. = "self-police"/"self-regulate"]. The overall arc of improvement owing to those innovations is undeniable – but so is the fact that left unchecked, they can lead to greater >>inequality<<.[i.e. = "widening the gap"] In each of these areas, humans can and should find the future of employment. That is, if companies and policy makers treat the moment for what it is: a >>disruption<< that has already taken hold and an opportunity to shape it before it shapes us. Those disruptions will be painful in the short run but bear fruit in coming decades. Looking back again to the >>15th century<<, the >>printing press<< indisputably upended the lives of writers and illustrators. But from that rupture came the birth of entirely >>new industries<< – publishing, advertising, mass education – and with them, inventions that reshaped how knowledge moved through the world: the newspaper, the novel, the magazine, the public library, the scientific journal. None of those changes could have been predicted [i.e. = "hard to predict"] when >>Johannes Gutenberg<< set his first page of type. Today’s AI-generated upheaval might look like the end of something. It’s actually just the beginning.]]> artificial_intelligence history Open_Text Shopify 15th_century Amazon asking_the_right_questions Bible entry-level_positions Johan_Gutenberg printing_press scientific_revolutions the_English_Reformation the_Enlightenment agriculture business_investment creativity disruption domain_expertise farming guardrails hard_to_predict income_inequality intellectual_property judgment menial new_industries people-less predictive_analytics predictive_modeling scentific_method self-police self-regulation underinvestments underwriting widening_the_gap https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8b13029171f3/ 2025-06-16T17:08:23+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/16/magazine/ai-history-historians-scholarship.html jerryking artificial_intelligence digital_humanities history rewriting scholarship storytelling tools https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0ac1f3a39090/ 2025-06-10T17:15:29+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/commentary/article-does-canada-really-need-the-us-market-a-history-lesson-in/ jerryking>Made in Canada<<” on the world’s manufacturing map. In the lead-up to Canadian Confederation in 1867, the U.S. had abrogated a free-trade deal and imposed new tariffs. Canadian businesses and farmers were compelled to figure out how to manage increased costs while seeking >>new markets<<, both internal and external. One of those businesses was family-run H.A. Massey and Company, based in Newcastle, Ont. The Masseys immigrated to Cobourg, Ont., from the U.S. in 1802 and took up >>farming<< as their chance at fortune. They soon realized that the farming tools their prosperity depended on – equipment used to clear land, prepare soil, plant crops and harvest them – were, as one family member told a reporter at the time, “the same as those used in the days of the Pharaohs.” Thus began a quest to find, build and innovate new technologies that would transform farming from an arduous, subsistence exercise to one that generated prosperity and nation-building growth. The Masseys >>tinkered<< with their own >>farm implements<< in their work shed and foundry. Yet they also long spent time and money exploring the innovations emerging across Lake Ontario in places such as New York state, where a much larger and wealthier market fostered technological successes and failures at a **rapid pace**. [i.e. = "fast paced"] They bought >>farm implements<< and tools from the U.S., >>reverse-engineered<< them and then licensed the best ones for use in Canada, which they would then produce, honing their manufacturing capacity in the process. At the same time, they learned to market and took advantage of new railway building in Canada to expand their customer base. The company won >>critical acclaim<< for its harvesting equipment at home and soon found itself representing Canada at the 1867 International >>Exhibition<< in France. There, it walked away with two gold medals: one in marketing for its display and the other, importantly, in recognition of the superior performance of Massey harvesters. From gold medals to foreign sales, Massey reapers and mowers found markets. Twenty were sold to buyers in Germany after the exhibition in France. Twenty years later, Massey equipment was being sold in Europe, Britain, Turkey, Russia, South America, Jamaica and most British colonies. Massey farm machinery and tools were made in factories in Ontario and shipped overseas using steam-powered ships with corkscrew propellers that opened global markets. But the one market Massey avoided was the American one to the south. What the Masseys had accomplished is what business schools today call the >>multiplier effect<<. Through market diversification, the company built >>economies of scale<<, mitigated the seasonality associated with selling only in Canada, widened its field of learning to global customers and suppliers, and refined its ability to win business in the face of strong competition that further supported >>research and development<< of their own products at home. The take-away for diversifying away from the U.S.? Rather than compete against their American counterparts in the U.S., the Masseys made the critical decision to learn as much as they could from American enterprise and >>know-how<<, add their own >>innovations<< and >>expertise<<, and use the outcome to beat brash U.S. competitors at their own game on the global stage and in Canada itself. Only after that, in 1910, did they enter the U.S. market. “Made in Canada” became a market differentiator in the 19th century. Today, it still can be. ]]> Canada diversification history U.S. beyondtheU.S. farming farm_equipment farm_implements fast-paced made-in-Canada new_markets reverse_engineering tinkerers tinkering critical_acclaim economies_of_scale exhibitions expertise innovation manufacturers multiplier_effect national_champions R&D know-how https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:0289e604bd3f/ 2025-05-29T14:41:00+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/opinion/black-history-trump.html jerryking African-Americans Donald_Trump history https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:237de41bdb74/ 2025-03-23T22:51:05+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-mark-carney-turns-the-page-on-justin-trudeaus-postnational-canada/#comments jerryking>sovereignty<< under threat amid a rapidly changing world order unleashed by political forces (and farces) beyond its control, it does seem urgent that our government reassert and promote what makes us Canadian in the first place. Our previous prime minister began his first term in office, in 2015, by declaring Canada the world’s “first >>postnational<< state” with “no core identity.” He seemed to conceive of our country’s >>history<< as not much more than a collection of past injustices that, thanks to his enlightened leadership, we could atone for by embracing our postnational nirvana. In truth, the postnational concept was always a load of tripe. In January, after Donald Trump began trolling him and calling him the “governor” of a future 51st U.S. state, >>Justin Trudeau<< went on CNN to defend our independence. “That’s not going to happen. Canadians are incredibly proud of being Canadian,” he insisted. “One of the ways we define ourselves most easily is, ‘Well, we’re not American.’ ” No wonder The Bay is going under. If being Canadian only means not being American, then what is the point? If our prime minister cannot articulate a stronger case for our continued existence as a sovereign country, then what hope do we have of surviving as one? As for The Bay, after almost two decades under U.S. ownership, it had lost most of its Canadian cachet. Despite being disparaged as a symbol of colonialism, many Canadians rushed this week to buy an iconic Hudson’s Bay blanket (if they could find one). But few shed tears at the demise of the world’s “oldest continuous capitalist corporation still in existence,” as author >>Peter C. Newman<< described it in his 1985 history of the Hudson’s Bay Co., Company of Adventurers. “The history of the Bay may at the same time be seen as a history of Canada,” Mr. Newman said in 1983 in embarking on his project. “It is my hope to do this book not only as a chronicle of the world’s longest lasting commercial empire, but as a social history of the country.” Until this century, The Bay was an integral part of the Canadian identity. Much like rivals >>Eaton’s<< and Simpson’s, its stores anchored our downtowns and suburban malls as proud champions of Canuck retailing and >>Made-in-Canada<< quality. In 1999, much of the country went into mourning after Eaton’s declared bankruptcy. As the CBC declared then: “It’s not just a store. It’s part of our >>national psyche<<.” In contrast, the reaction to The Bay’s filing for court protection from its creditors and likely liquidation has been pretty much “meh” – even though the loss of Hudson Bay Co., which was founded a full two centuries before Eaton’s, is, symbolically speaking, a much bigger deal. What could be more Canadian than a British Crown-chartered fur trading company founded by two French coureurs de bois that opened up much of the country’s northwestern frontier, forging deep commercial (though often exploitative) relations with Indigenous peoples and keeping Canadian territory out of American hands? To be sure, Canada’s identity is strong, resilient and regenerative enough to survive without The Bay. But at a time when Canada’s existence is being threatened by our superpower neighbour and erstwhile best friend, we need leaders who are unafraid of celebrating the history of a country that remains one of the world’s most envied. Mr. Carney seems to get it. “The ceremony we just witnessed reflects the wonder of a country built on the bedrock of three peoples: Indigenous, French, British,” he said after being sworn in on Mar. 14. “The office of Governor-General links us through the Crown and across time to Canada’s proud British heritage …Our bilingual identity makes us unique. And the French language enriches our culture.” Of course, it will take more than replacing the words “Canadian Heritage” with “Canadian Culture and Identity” in a ministerial title for Mr. Carney to prove he is an uninhibited Canadian nationalist willing to challenge those who disparage our history and our (yes, flawed) heroes, all while encouraging a respectful dialogue about our past and future. Still, Mr. Carney does appear to have turned the page on postnational Canada – an entity which, it must be said, only ever existed in our ex-PM’s imagination. In this respect Mr. Carney has more in common with Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, a stalwart defender of Canadian symbols and all things John A. Macdonald. They are both post-postnationalists. Vive le Canada.]]> Canada bankruptcies Canadiana HBC history Konrad_Yakabuski Justin_Trudeau Mark_Carney national_identity postnational retailers sovereignty Made-in-Canada national_psyche Peter_C._Newman Sir_John_A._Macdonald department_stores Eaton's store_closings https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d99069a35903/ 2025-02-27T06:46:40+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-understand-the-past-to-fight-for-canadas-future/ jerrykingCanada Canadians Confederation history inspiration nation_builders Pierre_Berton prime_ministers railways Sir_John_A._Macdonald values https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:8016695596ce/ 2025-02-03T03:03:05+00:00 https://www.teachersgram.com/collections/black-history?ads=16068101056583916635380520%25252C16068130107387868697100520%25252C16066215274237363537940520&show_page=first_page%25253Futm_source%25253DFacebook&utm_id=120218040611420188&fbclid=IwY2xjawIMXIJleHRuA2FlbQEwAGFkaWQBqxpg1_vcvAEddnDNZDYrf45iUtgo0ezzYbhlnn0f9cujQDl5Eqc0MedLTQipqv7m7y02_aem_HuOUxdgGeQVH9AF2oQgmFQ jerrykingAfrican-Americans black_men history T-shirts https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:a3d854b9c960/ 2025-01-22T17:50:23+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/sports/article-need-a-cure-for-todays-anxieties-on-the-field-or-otherwise-grab-a-book/ jerryking>history<<, you could do worse than the case of A.J. Brown, renaissance man & wide receiver for the Philadelphia Eagles. .....Brown did something to set himself apart – he read......Cameras caught Brown mid-game with a self-help book, Inner Excellence, open in his hands..............I get that reading isn’t cool any more, and that buying books is the new collecting china. But it had not occurred to me how bizarre a behaviour it now seems to most people until Brown’s story made headlines, and then kept making them for days and days. The initial reaction online was rage and confusion – How could he be reading right now? What sort of a layabout reads at work?? The secondary reaction was worse – mild amusement tinged with scorn. Reading is now something done by the sort of people who pop the collars on their polos. Showoffs, poseurs and other vaguely effete types. There have always been **meatheads** [i.e. = anti-intellectuals"] who fear >>literature<<, but until recently they knew to be ashamed of it. Now they are in the ascendance.........It is not a coincidence that the >>golden ages<< of American literature and >>sports<< were simultaneous. One fed the other in an inspired loop. If you want to talk about the artifacts, say, baseball has produced, I would put The Natural above any home-run record. Great >>novelists<< once took sports as their subject because people wanted to consume and discuss ideas that happened to be most easily explicated through games. Sports was the artistic means, not the end. You think of a piece like Gay Talese’s The Loser and you realize that not only is it not being done any more, but that it couldn’t be. There is no outlet regularly writing that way, and no club or manager that would allow them the access if there were. Athletes want to tell their own stories now – understandable – but they’re not good at it. Not much better than the writers would be playing the games. As a result, most >>sportswriting<< has become a roughage of stats and cliches, the stories told about athletes are news releases and the people who like sports no longer get why anyone who’s made the pros would bother reading a book. That’s part of what success has become – never again feeling you must read anything. It would amaze me to hear that any of our leaders today, in any industry, of any political persuasion, read >>fiction<<. Or not the good kind, at least. The stuff that isn’t **purpose-designed** to make you feel better about your choices. If they did, they wouldn’t be so dull-minded. Go back and read anything – anything at all – written by >>Abraham Lincoln<<. It will make you weep at the poverty of modern discourse. After years of absorbing what now passes for discussion, you get one mildly thoughtful person breaking cover in a space reserved for face smashing and his audience’s reaction is ‘Burn the witch.’ And I’m okay with that. In a world where no one reads, the few who do have an advantage. They already know what’s happening and where it’s headed [i.e. = "foresight"/"to be forewarned is to be forearmed"] because it was in a book they read. Nothing people say or do amazes or unsettles them. They’ve heard about much worse. Why are people so anxious today? Everyone’s got their pet theory so here’s mine – they don’t read. If they did, they wouldn’t feel so >>adrift<< in >>history<<. If they had regular access to the deepest feelings of others, they wouldn’t be so captive to their own.[ i.e. = "a sense of proportion"] Strangely, it is the >>non-readers<< who now operate in the realm of fantasy. Everything that happens surprises them. >>Current events<< are their magic. They keep using words like ‘unprecedented’ for things that are not that. But they were precedented in books, so … ]]> Abraham_Lincoln adrift anti-intellectualism athletes_&_athletics books Cathal_Kelly fiction golden_age history learning_from_others NFL non-readers novelists purpose-built reading sports the_counsel_of_the_dead writers foresight sports_journalism literature anxiety current_events sense_of_proportion to_be_forewarned_is_to_be_forearmed https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:cc0115e00ba8/ 2024-12-15T15:12:27+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-william-lyon-mackenzie-kings-prime-ministership-represented-a-turning/?login=true jerryking Canada Canadian history prime_ministers turning_points https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:e4edd82f2b08/ 2024-12-01T17:00:08+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/01/world/africa/angola-biden-slavery.html jerryking Africa African-Americans ancestry Angola descendants DNA genealogy genetic_ancestry gene_pool historians historical_data historical_records history Middle_Passage mistreatment researchers slavery trans-Atlantic U.S. https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7362d5f41067/ 2024-10-07T01:36:48+00:00 https://www.stabroeknews.com/2024/10/06/sunday/from-military-base-to-international-airport-historical-notes-on-atkinson-field/ jerryking airports colonialism Guyana history infrastructure prewar wartime WWII munitions British_Guiana https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:4b474db9ab39/ 2024-09-28T02:31:54+00:00 https://www.kaieteurnewsonline.com/2024/03/31/deconstructing-false-narratives/ jerryking Afro-Guyanese Desmond_Hoyte history letters_to_the_editor Ravi_Dev false_beliefs false_claims https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c0fceb6135dd/ 2024-09-22T21:05:21+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/10/books/review/nexus-yuval-noah-harari.html jerryking artificial_intelligence books book_reviews historians history information_networks Yuval_Harari https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d2864a26aec3/ 2024-09-18T13:28:48+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/sep/10/nexus-a-brief-history-of-information-networks-from-the-stone-age-to-ai-by-yuval-noah-harari-review-rage-against-the-machine jerryking artificial_intelligence books book_reviews history information_networks historians Yuval_Harari https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:c7cf569c0230/ 2024-09-14T15:54:49+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-why-we-think-so-much-about-the-roman-empire-and-why-it-matters/ jerryking history inspiration Romans Pax_Americana Pax_Britannica Pax_Romana https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:26246fe6a9cc/ 2024-08-22T14:28:52+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/history-in-flames-review-tracing-the-lost-pages-of-the-past-c9e9b62f?mod=arts-culture_lead_pos4 jerryking> Many medieval records were destroyed in moments of social upheaval. Legal records were often burned in popular uprisings<< ++ "History in Flames: The Destruction and Survival of Medieval Manuscripts" By Robert Bartlett. Today we have only scraps—at most 15%—of the tens of millions of written records created in the >>Middle Ages<<. Much of what has been lost, we will never even know existed......Bartlett’s “History in Flames” provides a partial catalog of this destruction and something more .... the medievalist analyzes episodes of violence against manuscripts and records [i.e. = "vandalism"], teasing out the different motivations and causes, and describes heroic efforts at preservation. Most important, Mr. Bartlett highlights the reality that even the best attempts to preserve the past have a baked-in tension between making old books and manuscripts available to people [i.e. = "accessibility"] and keeping the documents safe [i.e.= "safekeeping"] ........Walking readers through both bibliographic minutiae and broad swaths of European history, “History in Flames” demonstrates that “the past is not presented to us on a plate.” Our knowledge of history lives and dies by what survives and our ability to understand what those traces of the past can tell us......amongst the most egregious examples of destruction illustrate how fragmentary our understanding is of the medieval past. Very little remains from the thousand years of the >>Byzantine empire<<. In the 9th century Patriarch Photius of Constantinople wrote a descriptive summary of almost 300 works he had read; a recent analysis concludes that fewer than half of them survive. Almost all of the works in the large medieval library created by King Mattias Corvinus of Hungary vanished into the hands of the sultan following the Ottoman conquest of Budapest in 1526. Likewise, some 90% of the Benedictine library in Canterbury was lost during Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries. Unintentional destruction due to poor storage, natural disasters [i.e. = "natural calamities"] and accidental mayhem could be as dangerous as an invading army. The Ashburnham House fire in London burned most of a fifth-century illustrated copy of Genesis, along with an untold number of other treasures in the library collected by Sir Robert Bruce Cotton in the early 17th century (fortunately the single surviving manuscript of “Beowulf” was spared). Today, the remaining manuscripts from Cotton’s collection can be found at the British Library.........Modern attempts to preserve fragile documents draw both approval and concern from Mr. Bartlett. Over the past three centuries, nation states have centralized records in >>national libraries<< and >>archives<<, making them available to a wider public. ]]> accessibility antiquities books book_reviews cultural_heritage editorials extremism heresies historical_preservation historical_records history manuscripts medieval Middle_Ages plunder social_unrest social_upheaval uprisings vandalism natural_calamities safekeeping Byzantine_empire archives libraries lost_history national_libraries https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:09b6415f9f3f/ 2024-04-30T21:38:12+00:00 https://notes.pinboard.in/u:jerryking/9c250c829161448f1ab7 jerryking Arctic beyondtheU.S. bilateral Brian_Mulroney Cameco Canada comforting_illusions critical_minerals crossborder defense_spending Donald_Trump Edward_Greenspon friend-shoring FTA history indispensable inward-looking isolationism Janice_Gross_Stein leverage LNG made-in-Canada NAFTA national_interests national_strategies NORAD playing_a_weak_hand populism protectionism USMCA uranium vulnerabilities blueprints U.S. mattering_more https://notes.pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:bafc7524e200/ 2024-04-29T20:06:20+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-canada-needs-to-have-a-plan-for-the-us-no-matter-who-becomes-president/ jerryking>isolationism<<, >>populism<< and >>protectionism<< have made that orbit less stable. Our destiny will depend on whether we allow muscle to turn to fat and initiative to passivity – or whether we can do what it takes to matter more. So it’s not just about Mr. Trump. He simply concentrates the mind........Canada’s vulnerability to U.S. regression is clear. That single market accounts for 78% of our exports and a quarter of our GDP. Even Germany leans less heavily on its combined EU neighbours. Securing access for our goods has preoccupied our political leaders since before Confederation. We have never found an escape clause from or an antidote to our geography........In the midst of the 2018 renegotiation of NAFTA, Mr. Trump remarked that “every time we have a problem [with Canada], I just put up a picture of a Chevrolet Impala.” The taunt about the Oshawa-assembled model underscores the asymmetry of the relationship, particularly when it’s reduced to mercantilism. What if a second-term president Trump scuppered free trade altogether, as he could just by giving six months’ notice that the U.S. intended to withdraw from what is known in Canada as the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA)? Or what if he triggered a review in 2026, as any of the parties can do?........... for all the hand-wringing over Canada being more alone in the world than ever, our good geography and better geology mean we are not without **cards to play** [i.e. = "bargaining power"/"leverage"] . Our advantages include critical minerals, oil, natural gas, uranium, clean electricity, food, fertilizer, water, carbon burial, space technologies, AI and quantum research, advanced health research and products, three oceans, much of the now-contested Arctic, and tried-and-true north-south corridors. These Canadian assets are made-to-measure for an era in which the “friends” in >>friend-shoring<< efforts are desperate to reduce their exposure to the >>geoeconomic<< extortions of >>Russia<< and >>China<<........**What we lack is a strategy** [i.e. = "strategy-less"]. Where are the most promising intersections of U.S. and Canadian >>national interests<>free-trade Agreement<<. Brian Mulroney’s government was able to offer a solution to the persistent and existential U.S. energy security threat and place it within a broader trade access pact.....First, we need to clear away those comforting yet distracting illusions that align more with the world we want, rather than the one we have. We are not going to lower >> interprovincial barriers<< or grow the population fast enough to build an autonomous >>Fortress Canada<< economy. We can’t count on domestic respite from what Pierre Trudeau characterized as the grunts and twitches of an arguably less even-tempered beast. Nor are we going to sidestep U.S. >>protectionism<< with another pass at his “Third Option” of finding alternative markets to the United States........now for some positives. Our early research suggests that a “matter more” strategy should focus both on economic and physical security and should comprise three pillars. First: deepening. We must identify bilateral opportunities that benefit both ourselves and the U.S., such as critical minerals or Arctic security. What is the 2024 equivalent to oil in the 1980s? Second: broadening. We need to use Canadian assets to help our shared allies in the friend-shoring club with their economic and national security. One of the unspoken truths of Canadian diplomacy is that we matter more in the United States when we matter more in the world, beyond the United States (and vice versa). And thirdly: accelerating. To matter more, we must build more of everything – from mines and >>carbon capture<< to ports and border crossings – and do so more quickly. We need to double down on our investments in the technologies of today and tomorrow, especially AI. These will power the next generation of industrial production and defence systems. For decades, deepening and diversifying were treated as competing or counterbalancing approaches. Today’s geopolitics erases the distinction. If you help an ally reduce its dependence on Russia for gas or China for critical minerals, is that diversifying or deepening? If you increase spending on NATO or station troops in an at-risk area like Latvia, which is it? This marks a return to classic Canadian diplomacy; in his Nobel Prize-winning peacekeeping work in the Suez, Lester B. Pearson was acutely aware that his most grateful audience resided in Washington. Deepening and broadening again serve us best as complementary concepts.......Consider the incredible and unheralded story of Canada’s uranium, probably the most underappreciated of our resource superpowers, through the lens of our three-pillar approach. Shortly after Russia’s invasion, Ukrainian officials approached Cameco, a Saskatoon-based uranium producer that is the second-largest in the world, with a James Bond-like proposition. Ukraine’s Soviet-era nuclear reactors furnished 55% of its electricity, but depended on the invader to fuel them – and the country was determined to break this stranglehold. Obviously, converting and fuelling reactors in a war zone would be risky, it warned. “We stepped up and said, ‘we can manage the risk. We want to do it,’ ” recounts Cameco president Tim Gitzel.........That’s the broadening and the accelerating. How about the deepening? The United States operates the largest fleet of reactors in the world, supplying one-fifth of the country’s electricity. But the most powerful country on Earth no longer produces or processes much uranium. Canada is its largest supplier, with a 27% market share.......Mr. Gitzel, who has seen his company’s market capitalization double since the invasion began to $24-billion today, says: “We have all the pieces of the puzzle to be energy self-sufficient together in North America and still be able to help the rest of the world.”......The periodic political paroxysms of our restless neighbour have challenged Canadian prime ministers since John A. Macdonald. Isolationism is, after all, one of the recurrent traditions of American public life,.......The modern collaborative relationship was born in Kingston on Aug. 18, 1938. A month before the infamous Munich Agreement, then-president Franklin Delano Roosevelt christened the Thousand Islands Bridge alongside prime minister William Lyon Mackenzie King and received an honorary degree from Queen’s University.......After Pearl Harbor, we worked feverishly with the Americans to protect Alaska from possible blockade through the speedy construction of the Norman Wells pipeline and Alaska highway. We restarted uranium mining in support of the Manhattan Project.......The Cold War reoriented but did not fundamentally change that security focus. Canada partnered with the U.S. on the famous Distant Early Warning (DEW) line in the Northern Arctic, the creation of NATO, and the crown jewel of bilateral relations, the North American Aerospace Defence Command (NORAD). The postwar boom increased commerce across the industrial heartlands in the 1950s and 60s. The two countries built a >>Seaway<< together and negotiated the >>Auto Pact<<. The lesson: as global circumstances change, how Canada can matter more also can change – but the imperative of >>mattering more<< remains the same.......An Arctic rich in minerals and open to navigation matters more than ever to the security of both the U.S. and Canada, especially given Russian and Chinese ambitions. ..............We need to move quickly on building dual-use infrastructure and state-of-the art satellite technology, in partnership with the private sector and Indigenous communities, and invest in next-generation technology for underwater surveillance.......Investment in the Arctic also provides us with a path of least resistance in the inevitable move toward NATO’s target of 2% of GDP defence spending. Canadians may not like to spend on the military but do identify with the North. For five decades, Canada and the U.S. have managed to set aside questions of sovereignty while continuing joint patrols of North American airspace through >>NORAD<<. If we want to >>matter more<<, it may be time for NORAD to play a bigger part in maritime and satellite surveillance operations and for a NATO with two new northern members in Sweden and Finland to assume a role in the Arctic..........We also need to turn our gaze farther south, all the way to the American border with Mexico, where migration has become a defining bipartisan issue.......Americans have asked pointedly if Canada might direct some development funding to help stabilize the infamous northern triangle of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, where many migrants originate. ....There are also a plethora of economic opportunities that offer similar possibilities to uranium. Some of these can be rolled together in an updated version of the original 1989 free-trade agreement’s energy chapters, possibly covering such assets as critical minerals and carbon management. The early months after the invasion of Ukraine provided a fascinating demonstration of just what collaboration can accomplish. With Europe reeling, we teamed up to expand gas production from Canada to assist with emergency exports of LNG to Europe from Gulf Coast facilities. At one point, the extra volume of Canadian gas was equal to about two-thirds of the emergency U.S. shipments. With liquefication capacity soon coming on-stream on Canada’s Pacific coast, we now have a chance to further co-ordinate in addressing energy insecurities in Asia (from Canada) and Europe (from the United States)...................Halfway through the next U.S. presidential term, any of Canada, the U.S. or Mexico can initiate the CUSMA review and demand changes. Our negotiators >>played a poor hand<< exceptionally well the last time around, but we must be attentive to the risks of a repeat of the 1866 abrogation. The Biden administration’s chief trade official has already served notice that the agreement will be back on the table. “You do not want that review to happen in a way that all three parties come to the conversation too comfortable,” Katherine Tai said in March. “The whole point is to maintain a certain level of >>discomfort<< – which may involve a certain level of >>uncertainty<< … That discomfort is actually a feature – not a bug.” Whether it’s four more years of Mr. Biden or Mr. Trump, the clock is ticking on our opportunity to maximize our assets and once again make ourselves indispensable. In the next two years, we need to give Team Canada more to work with. Entrenching a “Matter More” mindset in every aspect of the relationship – both in classic bilateral fashion and beyond North America – is imperative. And we need to be >>all-in<<, which means the kind of foreign policy consensus at home that we enjoyed during the renegotiation of NAFTA. Neither >>Lester B. Pearson<< nor >>Brian Mulroney<< resorted to half-measures in aligning Canadian and U.S. interests. They understood that a “Matter More” approach is not for the ambivalent, or the faint of heart. We have their >>made-in-Canada<<, plays-well-in-the-U.S. model to follow. Now it’s our turn. If we don’t want to be alone in the world, we need to go >>all-in<< on a strategy for today’s circumstances.]]> Brian_Mulroney Canada crossborder Edward_Greenspon FTA history indispensable Janice_Gross_Stein LNG national_interests national_strategies uranium Arctic beyondtheU.S. bilateral comforting_illusions critical_minerals defense_spending Donald_Trump friend-shoring inward-looking isolationism leverage NAFTA populism protectionism USMCA vulnerabilities Cameco made-in-Canada NORAD playing_a_weak_hand blueprints U.S. all-in discomfort Lester_Pearson uncertainty mercantilism shared_perspectives deepening_&_broadening Auto_Pact Fortress_Canada St._Lawrence_Seaway mattering_more ITB assets carbon_capture China fertilizer food geoeconomics natural_gas strategy-less water oil_industry bargaining_power https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:03900f8492e1/ 2024-04-21T20:48:04+00:00 https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly/status/1781071031173832753 jerryking>annoy<< them in their daily lives.] • Admitting that “I don’t know” at least once a day will make you a better person.[i.e. = Feigned >>omnipotence<< is not the way to go. Show your >>vulnerability<<. Say it with confidence to indicate that it's OK that you don't know everything and follow up your statement with an effort to find out the answer. Role-models curiosity and a desire to learn."] • Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years. • Aim to be effective, but >>unpredictable<<. That is, you want to act in a way that AIs have trouble modeling or imitating. That makes you >>irreplaceable<<. • Whenever you hug someone, be the last to let go. • Don’t save up the good stuff (fancy wine, or china) for that rare occasion that will never happen; instead use them whenever you can. • The best gardening advice: find what you can grow well and grow lots and lots of it. • Never hesitate to >>invest in yourself<<—to pay for a class, a course, a new skill. These modest expenditures pay outsized dividends. • Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse. • Read a lot of >>history<< so you can understand how weird the past was; that way you will be comfortable with how weird the future will be. • To make a room luxurious, remove things, rather than add things.[i.e. = "via negativa"] • your parents while they are still alive. Keep asking questions while you record. You’ll learn amazing things. Or hire someone to make their story into an oral history, or documentary, or book. This will be a tremendous gift to them and to your family. • If you think someone is normal, you don’t know them very well. >>Normalcy<< is a fiction. Your job is to discover their weird genius. • When shopping for anything physical (souvenirs, furniture, books, tools, shoes, equipment), ask yourself: where will this go? Don’t buy it unless there is a place it can live. Something may need to leave in order for something else to come in. • You owe everyone a >>second chance<<, but not a third. • When someone texts you they are running late, double the time they give you. If they say they’ll be there in 5, make that 10; if 10, it’ll be 20; if 20, count on 40. • >>Multitasking<< is a myth. Don’t text while walking, running, biking or driving. Nobody will miss you if you just stop for a minute. • You can become the world’s best [i.e. = "world-class"] in something primarily by caring more about it than anyone else. • Asking “>>what-if<>art<< and things that will >>inspire<< others to **make art** [i.e. = creating something new"] and things. • Once a month take a different route home, enter your house by a different door, and sit in a different chair at dinner. No ruts.[i.e. = "defamiliarizing oneself of the familiar "/"novelty"] • Where you live—what city, what country—has more impact on your well being than any other factor. Where you live is one of the few things in your life you can choose and change. • Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account. • Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing. • The surest way to be successful is to invent your own definition of success. Shoot your arrows first and then paint a bull’s eye around where they land. You’re the winner!]]> advice artificial_intelligence Kevin_Kelly unpredictability history invest_in_yourself multitasking normalcy novelty second_chances via_negativa irreplaceability omnipotence what-if? art inspiration world-class messages_from_the_future vulnerabilities creating_something_new zero_to_one defamiliarizing_oneself_of_the_familiar https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:afa6d54b428d/ 2024-04-15T21:57:01+00:00 https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/revolutions-in-american-music-review-how-a-country-got-in-rhythm-970174f5?mod=music_news_article_pos3 jerryking history music race https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:d79f1726d231/ 2024-04-15T21:28:13+00:00 https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/americans-are-still-not-worried-enough jerryking>South China Sea<<.........I felt like I was shouting into the void...... Since the pandemic, and especially since the wars in Ukraine and Gaza erupted, those worries have gone mainstream.................... the big one >>unspoken<<: >>World War 3<<. If China and the U.S. go to war, it’ll make what’s happening now in East Europe and the Middle East look like child’s play — not just because the forces involved would be larger, but because the existing wars in East Europe and the Middle East would likely expand into regional wars as well. You can bet that although he doesn’t talk about it, Jamie Dimon is thinking about WW3, as are many others. As I see it, the mere fact that not many people are talking about the danger represents evidence that we’re still not taking it seriously. And because Americans aren’t talking about it, our country doesn’t have the urgency required to do something about it. One of our great strengths as a nation has always been that we start shouting about problems before they become severe, giving us time to prepare. Right now we’re not shouting, so we’re not preparing. So although I’m just an unimportant little economics blogger, I will do my best to shout about the likelihood of an onrushing >>catastrophe<<. Let’s begin with a scary historical parallel. ++When did >>World War 2<< begin?++ From from late 1941 through 1945?........although the official start date is September 1, 1939, it’s easy to make an argument that the war began long before that.....there were no fewer than six wars in the 1930s that ended up feeding into World War 2 itself! ...............It wasn’t until 1941 that World War 2 became what we Americans remember it as. It was then that the Nazis attacked the Soviets and Japan attacked the U.S., bringing the world’s two most powerful countries into the fray, raising casualties enormously, sealing the fate of the Axis, and creating the grand alliance that would form the basis of the postwar world order...................if you were living at any point in 1931 through 1940, you would already be witnessing conflicts that would eventually turn into the bloodiest, most cataclysmic war that humanity has yet known — but you might not realize it. You would be standing in the foothills of the Second World War, but unless you were able to make far-sighted predictions, you wouldn’t know what horrors lurked in the near future. In case the parallel isn’t blindingly obvious, we might be standing in the foothills of World War 3 right now. If WW3 happens, future bloggers might list the wars in Ukraine and Gaza in a timeline like the one I just gave. Or we might not be in the foothills of WW3. I think there’s still a good chance that we can avert a wider, more cataclysmic war, and instead have a protracted standoff — Cold War 2 — instead. But I’m not going to lie — the outlook seems to be deteriorating. One big reason is that China appears to be ramping up its support for Russia. ++China is now engaged in a proxy war against Europe++ The Ukraine War is a proxy war. This is not because Ukraine is a U.S. or European “proxy”, in the sense that we tell the Ukrainians what to do. We do not. But the U.S. and Europe are contributing to Ukraine’s defense in order to keep Russia bogged down........ it makes sense to view the Ukraine War ......as a Chinese proxy conflict against Europe..........For example, the U.S. is now claiming that China is providing Russia with both material aid and geospatial intelligence (i.e. telling Russia where Ukrainian units are so Russia can hit them):.......This is very similar to the aid that Europe and the U.S. are providing Ukraine. We also provide geospatial intelligence, as well as materiel and production assistance. ........What does it mean that China is now engaged in a proxy war against Europe? Several things. First, it means U.S. influence over the conflict is a lot more limited than we like to think. Americans like to believe that we’re still the hegemon we were in 1999 — that we can just stretch out our mighty hand to stop any war, and that wars therefore continue only when we want them to. This is complete fantasy.......And Vladimir Putin, emboldened by Chinese production and intelligence support, and having staked not only his legacy but his regime’s entire reason for existence on the conquest of territory in East Europe, will have little reason to stop fighting no matter what the U.S. says...........if Trump’s America withdraws into isolationism — or worse, collapses into civil conflict — it will simply give a green light to the authoritarian powers to carry out more conquests, as the Axis was emboldened in the 1930s.......... ]]> Cassandras false_sense_of_security historical_amnesia history tail-risk underpricing geopolitical-risk geopolitics political_risk war WWIII 2010s catastrophes events Gaza South_China_Sea U.S.-China_relations Ukraine unspoken WWII https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:73c40c37019d/ 2024-04-02T15:09:24+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/editorials/article-who-is-junius-the-subject-who-is-truly-loyal-to-the-chief-magistrate/ jerryking>George Brown<< chose those words, and that author, because they spoke to his beliefs about the dividing line between legitimate government and illegitimate rule. The original Junius was an 18th-century British Whig who wrote under a >>pseudonym<< to avoid winding up in court, or jail, for his broadsides against the British government of the day, and what he saw as its >>abuse of power<< against the rights of Parliament and people. In Canada, where the burning issue of 1844 was whether the country would get >>responsible government<< – government accountable to Parliament – Junius’s dictum must have struck Brown as particularly apt. The governor-general of the Province of Canada at the time, Sir Charles Metcalfe, was attempting to govern without the support of the majority in the colony’s legislature. For Brown, it meant that the Crown’s representative in Canada was claiming powers that the Crown in Britain had long ago surrendered to Parliament. However, Upper Canada’s Tories were supportive of the governor, and he of them. They accused opponents of being radicals and revolutionaries, disloyal to Canada and Britain. Brown would become famous for his editorials (many, in fact, penned by his younger brother, Gordon), which bulldozed opponents with a torrent of logic, facts and, often, mockery. But before he published his first Globe editorial, he came up with an editorial motto whose meaning readers would have grasped instantly, at least in 1844. Brown used the original Junius’s words to say that if anyone was loyal, it was Junius of The Globe – and if anyone was disloyal, it was the governor and the Tories. Ruling without the support of the representatives of the people was unconstitutional in Britain, so how could it be desirable in British North America? The subject who was truly loyal would not consent to arbitrary government, nor would he advise the Crown to govern arbitrarily. Yet arbitrary government is what the governor and the Tories were advising and practising. In such circumstances, what was true loyalty? Opposition. “Let me exhort and conjure you,” the original Junius had warned readers in 1772, “never to suffer an invasion of your political constitution, however minute the instance may appear, to pass by, without a determined, persevering resistance.” He said the best protection against such invasions was a >>free press<< – “the palladium of all the civil, political and religious rights.” That made newspapering, and editorial writing, not just a business for Brown, but a high calling. In the years before Confederation, Junius became Upper Canada’s leading voice for free trade with the United States (but firmly against talk of annexation); British-style parliamentary government (but not American-style Jacksonian democracy, with its elected upper house and elected judges); separation of church and state (opposed by Anglicans and Catholics); representation by population (opposed by Quebec, which feared the growing English-speaking majority); and joining the Atlantic provinces, British Columbia and the vast territories of the Hudson’s Bay Company to Canada (ditto). Junius had big dreams, but Canada’s two decades before Confederation were marked by political paralysis, because of seemingly irreconcilable “racial” differences between French and English. Some said separation was the answer; Junius called that “the advice of the coward.” Separation would landlock Ontario and “place our foreign commerce at the mercy of Brother Jonathan” – an earlier personification for Uncle Sam – “and Jean Baptiste.” And a divided Canada, lacking “the strength to command respect,” risked being swallowed by the U.S. “To be a great state, we must continue our alliance with Lower Canada,” insisted Junius. But how? The answer Junius came to embrace was federalism. Federalism made Confederation possible. On July 1, 1867, Junius celebrated the new Dominion of Canada. The editorial was the only thing on the front page, and its nine columns of dense type consumed page 2 and turned to page 3. In 9,000 words, written by Brown himself, Junius laid out Canada’s possibilities – which, in a particularly Canadian move, he saw in America’s reflection. The Dominion Day editorial offered a compendium of comparisons between the infant America of 1776 and a nascent Canada in 1867. The United States had gone from fragile experiment to continent-spanning colossus – could not Canada do the same? Canada already had “a population greater than that with which the United States began their career ninety years ago,” and like the U.S. could one day extend all the way to the Pacific. Junius saw a future of “teeming millions who in ages to come will people the Dominion of Canada from ocean to ocean.” In the run-up to Confederation, Junius and Brown alienated French Canadians and Catholics with strident calls for secular schools and rep-by-pop, yet they also learned to **compromise** [i.e. = "Canadian genius for compromise"] , even on big issues, in pursuit of the larger goal of a greater country. And for the next century and a half, keeping that country whole, by balancing competing desires across the sectional divide, remained top of mind for Junius. Sometimes Junius found the balance. Sometimes not. On the North-West Rebellion of 1885, Junius was sympathetic to the plight of the Métis, arguing that the Conservative government of Sir John A. Macdonald had ignored their legitimate claims, year after year, leaving them no choice but to take up arms. With Louis Riel on trial, the headline on a July 27, 1885, editorial was: “One criminal tried by a greater.” On Oct. 7: “Blame the real criminal.” And on Oct. 24, after Riel was sentenced to hang, Junius wrote: “The responsibility for the rebellion, and for all the bloodshed in the North-West, rests upon SIR JOHN MACDONALD.” Junius called the prime minister “the first criminal in this case” and “the greatest criminal, because his cold-blooded criminality was the cause of all the crimes of all these unfortunate Metis.” Attacking Macdonald and the Conservatives was par for the course for The Globe of that era, for it was not just a liberal paper, but a Liberal paper. Nevertheless, these were remarkably strong words, and many readers would not have appreciated them. Junius took a position in line with that of most French Canadians – who were outraged by the treatment of the mostly francophone and Catholic Métis – but against >>majority opinion<< in mostly Protestant English Canada, particularly in deeply Orange Toronto. Junius wasn’t always so solicitous of the francophone minority. When Ontario brought in Regulation 17, forcing French speakers to go to school mostly in English, Junius was supportive. In an editorial on Feb. 26, 1916, Junius said that Le Devoir founder Henri Bourassa, by demanding “the principle of equality of rights for both races all over the land,” was trying to create “a racial cleavage.” Junius argued that forcing French children into English classrooms was for their own good. “Quebec is likely to be bilingual for all time but Ontario is firmly resolved to maintain English as the official language.” By the early 1960s, Junius worried that “Canada must surely be the first nation in history that courted elimination because its citizens could not work up the interest to keep it alive.” Junius wondered if Canadians might be “perfectly willing to submerge their Canadianhood in the great nation to the south, and add a few more stars to Old Glory in place of the Canadian flag they never got around to creating.” But as for that new flag, Junius was opposed. He called prime minister Lester Pearson’s push to replace the Red Ensign “a silly issue” that risked igniting conflict. When the conflict caught fire, Junius was not surprised: The prime minister had “chosen to press the divisive issue of a national flag at a time when emotions are already deeply stirred by the question of national unity – or rather, by the lack of unity.” Through the winter and spring of 1964, Junius urged Pearson to drop the flag business. Then, as the debate reached a peak, Junius reversed position. Recognizing the danger of an unbridgeable gap being opened between French and English, Junius asked the opposition Conservatives, and no doubt many Globe readers, to make a gesture of reconciliation and back a new flag. Why? Because “they must concede that they have no real alternative to a flag designed around the maple leaf. French-speaking Canada can no more be persuaded to accept a flag in which the Union Jack is the dominant symbol than English-speaking Canada could be persuaded to acknowledge a flag in which the fleur-de-lis was pre-eminent … if we have to choose a flag at this time – and the Government is forcing the choice – we must look for a symbol that is offensive to none and acceptable to all.” Junius also weighed in as Canada fought two era-defining federal elections on free trade with the United States, in 1911 and 1988. In both, Junius backed free trade as economically beneficial. In both, the opposition attacked free trade as an assault on Canada’s essence. For more than 16 years, I was Junius, or a Junius, as an editorial writer from 1991 to 1999 and the editorials editor – Junius inter pares? – from 2013 to 2022. Writing an editorial – they run about 700 words these days – is as much about what you say as what you leave out. The latter is the hardest part. In this essay, I have of necessity left out much. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ **‘The job of the newspaper is to comfort the afflicted [i.e. = "downtrodden"] and afflict the comfortable’[i.e.= "rich and powerful" as in asking "hard questions"/"punching up"]** ]]> Canada Canadian Confederation editorials editorial_power Globe_&_Mail George_Brown history journalists nation_builders newspapers politicians pseudonyms abuse_of_power accountability free_press punching_up responsible_government Tony_Keller majority_opinion Canadian_Genius_for_compromise https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:af8900f12714/ 2024-01-08T05:01:16+00:00 https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-a-nations-paper-george-brown-confederation/ jerryking>rapprochement<< with one of them would usher in a new country++ ]]> abolitionists ahead_of_the_curve Confederation forethought forward_looking futurists George_Brown George-Étienne_Cartier Globe_&_Mail history John_Ibbitson journalists money-making nation_builders newspapers politicians prison_reform Sir_John_A._MacDonald technology reconciliation rivalries rapprochement https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:ae3914007788/ 2023-10-16T04:51:28+00:00 http://alonben-meir.com/writing/never-missed-an-opportunity-to-miss-an-opportunity/ jerryking>Abba Eban,, once remarked that the Palestinians "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to >>seize on historic opportunities<< for ending their conflict with Israel. In 1947 they rejected, with the support of the Arab States, the United Nations' Partition plan that would have established a Palestinian state. Subsequently, up till 1967, the Palestinians categorically rejected every Israeli peace offer. Following the Six Day War of 1967, >>Golda Meir<<, then Israel's Prime Minister, offered to return virtually all the territories Israel had just captured in exchange for peace. The Palestinians and Arab States answered with the famous three no's–no recognition, no negotiation, and no peace. In 1979, the Palestinians declined a joint Egyptian and Israeli invitation to join the peace negotiations at >>Camp David<<, which if they accepted, could have led to >>self-rule<< and then to an independent state. In the Summer of 2000, the PA turned down the historic offer by former Prime Minster >>Barak<< and President Clinton at Camp David. If >>Mr. Arafat<< had accepted, we would have seen the beginnings of a thriving Palestinian state spanning all of Gaza and 97% of the West Bank. Not only did the PA turn down the offer, it unleashed the second Intifadah that has left the infrastructure and cities of the Palestinians in ruin. This overarching pattern of rejecting off-hand any offer that could lead to a permanent peace confirms the belief of many Israelis that the Palestinian leadership has never accepted the principle of two states living side-by-side. The vehemence of the rejection of Sharon's plan and the rationale behind it speak volumes about the PA's real intentions, especially in regards to its demand of the "right of return." ]]> history Israel Mideast_peace missed_opportunities Palestinians Palestinian_Authority Ariel_Sharon Arab-Muslim_world seizing_opportunities Six-Day_War Abba_Eban Camp_David_accords Ehud_Barak Golda_Meir self-rule Yasser_Arafat two-state https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:564fc65daaf0/ 2023-08-28T15:01:31+00:00 https://www.oldtorontoseries.com/?fbclid=IwAR2HjfJw4jje0GKYgOe0tIDsSwVyhQugtyIaG6n_gIb8_6TpVSHRsCffQoo jerrykingFacebook history nostalgia Toronto https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:67341316fe15/ 2023-08-17T16:07:23+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/16/opinion/florida-prager-slavery-frederick-douglass.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Opinion%20Columnists jerryking Charles_Blow education Florida Frederick_Douglass indoctrination public_education public_schools rationalizations slavery history propaganda Ron_DeSantis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:11534aaafd62/ 2023-07-31T00:47:52+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/28/opinion/desantis-slavery-florida-curriculum-history.html jerryking education politics racism Florida history Ron_DeSantis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:7ff1bd8fc550/ 2023-07-24T17:44:12+00:00 https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/05/industrial-revolution-iron-method-taken-from-jamaica-briton jerryking economic_history England history history_of_technology industrialists industrial_espionage Industrial_Revolution inflection_points intellectual_property Jamaica jump-start know-how manufacturers metallurgy narratives predatory_practices private_records slave_holders slavery tacit_knowledge United_Kingdom colonialism innovation https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:82ff11d4ccee/ 2023-06-07T19:28:59+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/opinion/resistance-black-advancement-affirmative-action.html jerryking affirmative_action African-Americans history Randall_Kennedy https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:692792923766/ 2023-05-21T22:30:03+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/20/opinion/desantis-history-education.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage&section=Opinion%20Columnists jerryking history Lost_Cause Ron_DeSantis https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:f5dd8f3880c0/ 2023-05-04T13:33:50+00:00 https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/03/opinion/tucker-carlson-mob-mentality.html jerryking Charles_Blow Fox lynchings power_relations Tucker_Carlson white_men white_supremacy extrajudicial_killings history herd_behaviour mob_justice https://pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:5b016b604be2/ 2023-04-22T20:43:03+00:00 https://notes.pinboard.in/u:jerryking/215c6ae63501616b6578 jerryking>codebreakers<< at >>Bletchley Park<< asserted that recovering th...]]> '30s Bletchley_Park books book_review codebreaking Czechoslovakia economic_data France Germany history intelligence-gathering intelligence_analysts intelligence_failures interwar_years national_interests Nazis open_source Poland political_manipulation prewar security_&_intelligence sigint United_Kingdom Weimar_Republic WWII https://notes.pinboard.in/ https://pinboard.in/u:jerryking/b:305284092f13/