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Showing posts from May, 2026

from aid to extraction

The Value Always Flowed One Way Foreign Policy & Accountability The Value Always Flowed One Way Thirty Years of American Interest in the Balkans · May 31, 2026 There is a word that has always circulated in development circles: monetization. It sounds like policy. It is, in practice, a direction. After the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the United States arrived with a reconstruction model built around what were called counterpart funds. The mechanism worked like this: surplus American agricultural commodities — the overproduction of a heavily subsidized farm sector with nowhere domestic to go — were shipped to Bosnia and sold on local markets. The proceeds funded programs: schools, clinics, civil society organizations, governance initiatives. Western institutions pointed to the results as evidence that aid was working. What they pointed to less often was where the money came from. It came from Bosnian consumers — peop...

The Sea Turtle Strategy: A Management Consultation

 We have reviewed your survival portfolio and are pleased to present our findings. Your current model is frankly inspirational. A 1% success rate sustained over one hundred million years represents the kind of consistent performance our firm rarely encounters. Most of our clients are targeting quarterly growth. You are targeting geological epochs. We respect the vision. Let us walk through the key innovations. First — the losses. You have reframed what lesser organisms call catastrophic failure as infrastructure investment. Each of the 99 represents not a cost but a distribution mechanism. Nutrients. Calories. Narrative momentum for the survivors. You are not losing children. You are populating the ecosystem with your intentions. Second — no middle management. No administrators. No one on the beach suggesting the hatchlings might perform better with a clearer rubric and less sand. The algorithm runs clean. This is extremely rare and we cannot stress enough how much this contr...

Roy Larick / Bluestone Heights — remarkable local scholarship worth revisiting and continuing

Roy Larick is one of Northeast Ohio's most interesting public intellectuals, and his website bluestoneheights.org appears to be down. The work he assembled there deserves a wider audience and some of the questions he raised deserve answers. His background is extraordinary — a PhD archaeologist who spent decades doing fieldwork across Java, East Africa, Southwest France and Island Southeast Asia tracing early hominin migrations, who came home to Northeast Ohio and applied that same deep history methodology to Euclid Creek, Doan Brook, Cedar Glen and the Portage Escarpment. The contrast sharpened his thinking considerably — someone who studied how Homo erectus navigated Ice Age shorelines naturally notices that most Clevelanders have no idea why their township is named Euclid. He authored two books worth knowing: Euclid Creek in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America series, and the more scholarly Euclid Township, 1796-1801: Protest in the Western Reserve (Western Reserve His...

Many Are the Fin-Backs

"Oh! many are the Fin-Backs, and many are the Dericks, my friend" — the final line of Chapter 81, ironic, closing a scene where another captain chases something uncatchable and loses. The Fin-Back whale cannot be taken. It's too fast, it sinks when killed, it isn't worth the chase by practical whaling standards. Derick pursues it anyway, incompetently. Ishmael watches and delivers the verdict with a kind of exhausted comedy. I found the phrase the way Ishmael finds things — by being in the right condition to recognize what it meant. The book handed me the ironic last line of a chapter and I held it as something true. That may be the only way the book actually exists: in the condition of the reader who needs it. Many are the finbacks. It sounds like catalog, like plurality, like Ishmael's way of letting quantity stand in for meaning. But underneath it is also: many are the uncatchable things, and many are the fools who chase them anyway. Melville puts the irony in ...