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G7 Kananaskis 2025

Had not heard of the Guns and Bonds part. Something to consider on a calmer day.

Just thinking of how communities used to self fund planes/tanks/ships in WW2, how local farmers used to fund raise for local infrastructure projects like schools and halls, and now today we lack some of those mechanisms. A person can still donate lump sum money but there's' nothing like Victory Bonds/War Bonds/CSB's that allow for an investment in the countries future the same way.

Some of this is a moral position but I also learned a lot of about basic investing concepts via the parents taking my down to the bank to decide which bonds to renew and/or purchase as a kid (a token amount in hindsight) but important financial education was learned young.

The government loves the flexibility that comes with General Revenues. It permits the allocation of funds by the government of the day.

Defence Bonds, Arctic Bonds, Energy Bonds, would all have merit IMO.
 
Had not heard of the Guns and Bonds part. Something to consider on a calmer day.

Just thinking of how communities used to self fund planes/tanks/ships in WW2, how local farmers used to fund raise for local infrastructure projects like schools and halls, and now today we lack some of those mechanisms. A person can still donate lump sum money but there's' nothing like Victory Bonds/War Bonds/CSB's that allow for an investment in the countries future the same way.

Some of this is a moral position but I also learned a lot of about basic investing concepts via the parents taking my down to the bank to decide which bonds to renew and/or purchase as a kid (a token amount in hindsight) but important financial education was learned young.

As I recall, War Bond drives - as well as other propaganda efforts - were attempts to keep the population engaged in a potentially civilization ending conflict in which they were deeply uninterested.

One of the great fallacies of WW1 and WW2 is that national populations, especially in North America, were enthusiastically behind the war effort, but they weren't and that was a problem.
 
By final warning measures, does that mean that they would have shot it down if it didn't comply?

It's a large gathering of very powerful world leaders, in an age of small planes being converted into remote bombs.
 
One of the joys of being a bit of a history nerd is when some Granola crunching granny bitched to me about funding the military and said: "They should have a bake sales to raise funds like everyone else" . I replied "Most of the armouries you see were partly funded by such events back in the day". She was taken aback that average Canadian would view their military in a positive light. How much local support and effort was a factor in the government authorizing units and armouries back in the day.
 
If ever they're were an example of a self inflicted crisis it has the conscription crisis of '17 .
Letting the Orange Lodge cronies of the MND run the draft board in Quebec probably didn't help
It was also the gift that kept on giving see the Crisis of '44.
La Loi 17 around that time (1912) in an effort to culturally assimilate Francophones and deny them educational rights didn’t help.
 
By final warning measures, does that mean that they would have shot it down if it didn't comply?
Yeah that’s pretty much exactly what it means.

ADATS almost got to splash a Dash-7/8 in K country at the 2002 G-7. It was the first one since 9/11, and some folks always seem to want to push the timeline for a boundary…
 

After 1945, the US and Britain led the way in restoring global order with an unprecedented network of international bureaucracies – the United Nations, Nato, the IMF, the World Bank, GATT (now the World Trade Organisation). Later came what are now the EU and G7.

For the duration of the Cold War, these institutions worked, more or less. But the fall of the Berlin Wall, which ushered in a “New World Order”, led to the decay of the old order that had functioned tolerably well. Hubris – “the end of history” – was followed inexorably by nemesis: a new authoritarian wave.

Some of the postwar bureaucracies (such as the EU) fell prey to institutional overreach, leading to a malaise of which Brexit is only the most obvious example. A new elite of international lawyers and judges, empowered by international courts such as the ECHR, unleashed “lawfare” in the name of “human rights” against the very nation states that had created these rights.

Other institutions fell into decay, most notably the United Nations itself. Its Security Council has now been deadlocked for so long that when a war breaks out, what happens at the UN hardly counts any more.

At a time of transatlantic tensions occasioned by the Iraq War, the neoconservative Robert Kagan coined the phrase: “Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus.” In his 2003 book Of Paradise and Power, he explained that while Europe aspired to Immanuel Kant’s ideal of “perpetual peace”, the United States still inhabited a world in which life was memorably described by Thomas Hobbes as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”.

A generation later, the world does indeed increasingly resemble the Hobbesian one, while Europe has only recently begun to wise up to the hollowing out of the postwar order.

While Trump’s attempts to drag Americans back into isolationism, protectionism and nativism may or may not succeed, we would be foolish to rely on the US to save Europe from its own follies.
 
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