BIG Exclusives

Figure 1: Graphic c/o Grok. Last week’s statement by General Dan Caine, Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space,” was the first in a series of noteworthy announcements at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference. His comments at the National Harbor, Maryland, event last week called into question almost 70 years of international negotiations on the nonproliferation...

In June 1215, King John sealed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, establishing the foundational principle that no sovereign power could deprive a free person of liberty or property without lawful judgment.The document did not grant rights; it recognized them as pre-existing, constraining the Crown from acting above by law. The genius of that settlement was structural – power was not merely restrained by goodwill or royal grace, but by enforceable legal architecture binding on...

Humanity’s first and most consequential surrender is not to the drones or surveillance grids of cinematic appeal. Surrender occurs earlier, in the quiet outsourcing of cognition itself. We trade the friction and discomfort of independent thought for the immediate fluency and serenity of algorithmic output. Prompting a large language model (LLM) yields polished summaries, coherent arguments, and the appearance of literacy – eroding the slower, demanding work of deep reading, sustained focus, original synthesis, and...

In 2000, the United Nations set eight millennium development goals (MDGs). They were not poetry. They were a short list of mostly efficient, targeted aims: cut extreme poverty in half, get children into school, slash child and maternal deaths, fight the big killer diseases, and give people clean water. Fifteen years later, the world retired them. In their place came sustainable development goals (SDGs) – 17 of them, with 169 targets and enough indicators to...

Artificial intelligence has no shortage of ethical principles. Fairness, transparency, accountability, privacy, human oversight and explainability now appear in corporate policies, government frameworks, and international standards around the world. The broad direction is remarkably consistent. Organizations deploying AI should understand the risks, protect people from discriminatory outcomes, maintain appropriate human control, and remain accountable for the consequences. The difficulty begins when those principles encounter an actual decision. A facial-recognition system identifies someone entering a store as...

On “eclipse day”, I found myself compelled to write about a confounding question; how many existential crises does it take? It might sound like the start of a joke involving a light bulb, but my (hopefully) bright idea is to examine how we humans are facing a few more, shall we say, critical challenges than we are used to. For many, it seems to have become overwhelming. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, in his latest...

Many published articles and other media content have come to the forefront on mainstream and social media related to so-called anthropogenic global warming (AGW) in the last year. Core to “the climate narrative” is that carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, one of multiple variables that may be affecting our atmosphere and climate, is the dominant, if not the sole variable causing warming. In my last article, “Controlling perception – how images and colours are used to...

In a publicly funded healthcare system already strained by wait times, staffing shortages, and an aging population, the emergent normalization of medical assistance in dying (MAiD) was never going to remain constrained. Once a procedure enters the bureaucratic and budgetary machinery, incentives emerge – quiet, structural, unspoken. And denied. What began as a compassionate response to irremediable suffering becomes entangled with the cold, objective logic of resource allocation. This is the financial reckoning Canadians have...

The preceding essays in this series have mapped the new terrain of conflict: mineral chokeholds that determine what can be built, energy shell games that determine what can be moved, machine-speed systems that compress decision cycles, narrative filters that shape what the public accepts as true, and quiet resource captures that shift the balance of endurance.  The Iranian flashpoint serves as both catalyst and stress test for an emerging order. Principled war strategy begins with the...

Since the war in Iran started in late February, everyone has been anxiously following crude oil prices because energy prices affect every household and business every day. The impact of the war has been significant, as illustrated in the crude oil price chart below. Suddenly, evening news reports provide a daily update on consumer gasoline prices. Figure 1 – Source: Petroleum markets responded to disruptions in the Middle East in the second quarter, EIA The impact of...