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Europe in the Caribbean, Part I: The Age of Catholic Kings | History Today - 0 views

www.historytoday.com/...bean-part-i-age-catholic-kings Spain England France Caribbean
shared by manhefnawi on 15 May 18 - No Cached
  • remote but wealth-providing islands on the other side of the Atlantic was always lively and inquisitive
  • The islands may be said to have European status not only because from the age of Queen Elizabeth to that of Napoleon they were involved in quite as many wars, rivalries and conflicts as were the great powers of the Old World themselves. The Spanish, English, French, Dutch, Swedes, Danes and, for a brief moment
  • Unlike the Spaniards, the British understood from the beginning the importance of a numerous and agile merchant navy
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  • Las Casas insisted that the Indians, no less than any other of God’s creatures, were capable of receiving the Faith under instruction; and it was this part of his doctrine that aroused the strongest controversy of all, for the Spanish settlers in 1511
  • We came here to serve God and the King, and also to get rich
  • The story opens with Spain. It was during the reign of King Charles I of Spain, who is better known in history as the Emperor Charles V, that the South American Empire was added to the Crown of Spain, which in the person of Charles already included his Burgundian and Netherland inheritance
  • Habsburg Spain, in fact, was culturally and socially the oddest mixture
  • Like Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England, Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, under whose encouragement Colombus had established the island spring-board from which the South American possessions had been conquered under Charles V, belonged in several respects to what is commonly called the ‘New Monarchies’, a somewhat simplified term for the Crown striving to establish its own power at the expense of the feudal overlords
  • The Catholic Kings therefore welcomed any and every move that was likely to curb the power of the land-owning classes overseas
  • in government circles and even at the Courts of Charles V and Philip II
  • The Spaniards exercised not the slightest measure of control over these swift and elusive marauders who, over large stretches of the outer islands, had things all their own way until the French and British arrived
  • The King of France declared that his countrymen would never acquiesce in being ‘disturbed in their navigation of the seas, nor will they consent to be deprived of the sea or the sky’
  • both France and England challenged Spain’s monopoly in the Indies without at first going to war with her for that reason in Europe. Sir John Hawkins sailed to the Indies three times between 1562 and 1568
  • in the end the Spanish monopoly, though being patently far from inviolate and getting more than a little frayed at the fringes, remained intact while the Habsburgs occupied the throne of Spain until the end of the seventeenth century
  • We might finish this chapter of Spanish supremacy in the West Indies with a glance at the most serious challenge yet thrown out to Spain in Elizabethan times.
  • For both, as later for Nelson, all oceans of the world were one, a way of thinking that led to Drake’s great voyage of circumnavigation of 1577-80, while it caused Menéndez, in the last year of his life, to lay before Philip II the bold plan of making one of the Scilly islands a Spanish base to deal with the menace of foreign privateering by the French and English in the Caribbean
  • The sixteenth century ended with England and France’s failure to cut the life-line between Spain and the Indies that ran through the Caribbean and enabled Spain to take events like the defeat of her Armadas in European waters in her stride
  • The Spaniards were apt to call both French and English enemies Corsarios luteranos, Protestant corsairs, but as in Europe Anglo-French relations under Henry VIII were anything but friendly
  • It was only when England and France were ready again to resume their offensive against the Caribbean and each other that Spain fell from the rank of an Imperial power to the sorry role of a professional ally of the stronger battalions and navies
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Senior members of military call out Tucker Carlson for mocking women serving in armed f... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html Fox-News Tucker-Carlson Sexism military US Politics Culture
shared by aidenborst on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • In an extraordinary rebuke, the Pentagon and several senior members of the US military called out Fox News host Tucker Carlson on Thursday for a sexist segment in which he mocked women serving in the armed forces.
  • "So we've got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits," Carlson snarked. "Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It's a mockery of the US military."
  • Speaking to reporters Thursday, Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby said the Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin shared the same "revulsion" that many military leaders have expressed about the comments Carlson made.
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  • Kirby said the military still had "a lot of work to do" to become "more inclusive, more respectful of everyone — especially women."
  • "We pledge to do better, and we will," Kirby said. "What we absolutely won't do is take personnel advice from a talk show host, or the Chinese military. Maybe those folks feel like they have something to prove. That's on them."
  • "Women lead our most lethal units with character. They will dominate ANY future battlefield we're called to fight on," tweeted the Sergeant Major of the Army, Michael A. Grinston. "@TuckerCarlson's words are divisive, don't reflect our values. We have THE MOST professional, educated, agile, and strongest NCO Corps in the world."
  • "They are beacons of freedom and they prove Carlson wrong through determination and dedication," Funk added. "We are fortunate they serve with us."
  • Carlson regularly makes incendiary comments on his primetime show. He was also called out by The New York Times this week for encouraging harassment against one of its journalists. And, in the past, he has seen large-scale advertiser boycotts over comments on the Black Lives Matter movement and immigration.
  • Carlson's top writer quit his job last year after a CNN report revealed he had for years used a pseudonym to post racist and sexist remarks on an online forum.
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A Long-Lost Manuscript Contains a Searing Eyewitness Account of the Tulsa Race Massacre... - 0 views

www.smithsonianmag.com/...a-race-massacre-1921-180959251 race massacre manuscript racism white supremacy 1920s
shared by Javier E on 26 May 19 - No Cached
  • an eyewitness account of the May 31, 1921, racial massacre that destroyed what was known as Tulsa, Oklahoma’s “Black Wall Street,” are searing. “I could see planes circling in mid-air. They grew in number and hummed, darted and dipped low. I could hear something like hail falling upon the top of my office building. Down East Archer, I saw the old Mid-Way hotel on fire, burning from its top, and then another and another and another building began to burn from their top,” wrote Buck Colbert Franklin (1879-1960). 
  • The Oklahoma lawyer, father of famed African-American historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), was describing the attack by hundreds of whites on the thriving black neighborhood known as Greenwood in the booming oil town. “Lurid flames roared and belched and licked their forked tongues into the air. Smoke ascended the sky in thick, black volumes and amid it all, the planes—now a dozen or more in number—still hummed and darted here and there with the agility of natural birds of the air.”
  • The younger Franklin says Tulsa has been in denial over the fact that people were cruel enough to bomb the black community from the air, in private planes, and that black people were machine-gunned down in the streets. The issue was economics. Franklin explains that Native Americans and African-Americans became wealthy thanks to the discovery of oil in the early 1900s on what had previously been seen as worthless land.
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  • “That’s what leads to Greenwood being called the Black Wall Street. It had restaurants and furriers and jewelry stores and hotels,” John W. Franklin explains, “and the white mobs looted the homes and businesses before they set fire to the community. For years black women would see white women walking down the street in their jewelry and snatch it off.”
  • More than 35 blocks were destroyed, along with more than 1,200 homes, and some 300 people died, mostly blacks. The National Guard was called out after the governor declared martial law, and imprisoned all blacks that were not already in jail. More than 6,000 people were held, according to the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum, some for as long as eight days.
  • “It was the frustration of poor whites not knowing what to do with a successful black community, and in coalition with the city government were given permission to do what they did.”
  • “Then whites were deputized and handed weapons, the shooting starts and then it gets out of hand,” Franklin says. “It went on for two days until the entire black community is burned down.”
  • As in other places, the Tulsa race riot started with newspaper reports that a black man had assaulted a white elevator operator. He was arrested, and Franklin says black World War I vets rushed to the courthouse to prevent a lynching.
  • “(Survivors) talk about how the city was shut down in the riot,” Gardullo says. “They shut down the phone systems, the railway. . . . They wouldn’t let the Red Cross in. There was complicity between the city government and the mob. It was mob rule for two days, and the result was the complete devastation of the community.”
  • Franklin says he has issues with the words often used to describe the attack that decimated the black community. “The term riot is contentious, because it assumes that black people started the violence, as they were accused of doing by whites,” Franklin says. “We increasingly use the term massacre, or I use the European term, pogrom.”
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Ultimately, Napoleon Did Not Achieve His Ambitions - Here Are Eight Reasons Why He Failed - 0 views

www.warhistoryonline.com/...ltimately-napoleon-failed.html
shared by marvelgr on 13 Jan 22 - No Cached
  • Napoleon had a grand vision for himself and his country. He wanted to be a new Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Only the most ambitious of endeavors could have the impact his heroes had achieved.It was this that led him to a succession of wars that spanned a continent. It led him to attain much, but also to go too far. No time was left to consolidate what had already been taken. Wars were launched on multiple fronts, most famously the invasion of Russia while his troops were fighting the British in the Iberian Peninsula. The Emperor bit off more than he could chew.
  • Throughout his Italian campaigns, he picked off Austrian armies piece by piece, using flanking movements to overcome defensive positions.As he grew older, his mental agility faded. On several occasions, he resorted to trying to win by throwing thousands of men straight at the enemy. It led to great losses in his armies and less dramatic successes in battle.
  • Napoleon expected a great deal of the people around him, both in their willingness to follow his agenda and their ability to achieve it. These unrealistic expectations saw parts of his schemes for Europe fall apart.
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  • From the start, the British Navy far outmatched that of France. An oceanic superpower whose fleet dominated the seas, Britain repeatedly beat France. The most famous defeats were both delivered by Admiral Nelson, who destroyed Napoleon’s transport fleet at the Battle of the Nile and then smashed a Franco-Spanish force at Trafalgar, where the British Admiral lost his life.
  • As a mercantile nation, the British were reliant upon international trade. Napoleon, therefore, tried to win the economic war through the Continental System, a blockade of British trade at ports across Europe. It was easier to enforce in some areas than others. Anywhere directly controlled by France, Napoleon could order the system into place. Elsewhere, he had to win cooperation through diplomacy.
  • The system was full of holes. Occupied territories became resentful of the imposition, stirring opposition to the French. France’s Atlantic ports were hit hard by the British counter-blockade, their trade and supporting industries badly savaged. In the Netherlands, Napoleon’s brother failed to crack down on smuggling, while in Russia the Tsar gave up on the blockade as unhelpful for his nation.Not only did the Continental System fail to cripple Britain, it also damaged France’s own economy.
  • Between the driving determination of Tsar Alexander of Russia; the international influence of Austria; the freshly mobilized and experienced armies of Prussia; and the financial and military power of Great Britain, this alliance was finally able to push Napoleon’s troops back into France and defeat them there. He had offended too many people, leaving his nation without potential allies. The Coalition finally brought together enough strength to bring him down.
  • Napoleon always had to win on his terms. Ultimately, that led him to lose.
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Russian Military Is Repeating Mistakes in Eastern Ukraine, U.S. Says - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-military-eastern-ukraine.html
shared by criscimagnael on 31 May 22 - No Cached
  • The Russian military, beaten down and demoralized after three months of war, is making the same mistakes in its campaign to capture a swath of eastern Ukraine that forced it to abandon its push to take the entire country,
  • And since the war started, Russia has lost 1,000 tanks,
  • Russia still has not established any kind of air superiority
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  • After three bloody months, Russia finally took Mariupol in mid-May, potentially creating a land bridge from the Russian-controlled Crimean Peninsula to the south.
  • As Russia struggles to move forward, Ukraine has also suffered setbacks.
  • So now Ukrainians are threatening to cut off Russian lines of supply and pushing their forces to the rear.”
  • Cutting off Russian supply lines east of Kharkiv would put Russian troops in the same situation they were in after their advance on Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, at the beginning of the war, officials said
  • In Ukraine, he established a more streamlined process. Russian pilots began coordinating with troops on the ground toward a similar objective in the eastern region of Donbas, and Russian units were talking to one another about shared goals.
  • “There are some deep flaws in the Russian army that they could not have repaired in the last few weeks even if they had tried. The flaws are deep and fundamental.”
  • Though most of the city’s civilian population has fled in the past few weeks, 12,000 people, many of them elderly, are said to be trapped there in appalling conditions.
  • European Union members finally reached an agreement on a Russian oil embargo and new sanctions against Russia.
  • It was the second guilty verdict handed down by Ukrainian courts for war crimes since the invasion began.
  • The Ukrainians, after seven years of training alongside troops from the United States and other NATO countries, follow the more Western method and have proved particularly agile at adapting to circumstances, American military officials said.
  • But, General Breedlove added: “Even our army would be hard-pressed to refit, refurbish and reorganize in two weeks after having received such a sound whipping.
  • “We keep hearing accounts of Putin getting more involved,” said Ms. Farkas, who is now executive director of the McCain Institute. “We know that if you have presidents meddling in targeting and operational military decisions, it’s a recipe for disaster.”
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How We Can Control AI - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...how-we-can-control-ai-327eeecf ai threat control crisis
shared by Javier E on 26 Jan 24 - No Cached
  • What’s still difficult is to encode human values
  • That currently requires an extra step known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback, in which programmers use their own responses to train the model to be helpful and accurate. Meanwhile, so-called “red teams” provoke the program in order to uncover any possible harmful outputs
  • This combination of human adjustments and guardrails is designed to ensure alignment of AI with human values and overall safety. So far, this seems to have worked reasonably well.
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  • At some point they will be able to, for example, suggest recipes for novel cyberattacks or biological attacks—all based on publicly available knowledge.
  • But as models become more sophisticated, this approach may prove insufficient. Some models are beginning to exhibit polymathic behavior: They appear to know more than just what is in their training data and can link concepts across fields, languages, and geographies.
  • We need to adopt new approaches to AI safety that track the complexity and innovation speed of the core models themselves.
  • What’s much harder to test for is what’s known as “capability overhang”—meaning not just the model’s current knowledge, but the derived knowledge it could potentially generate on its own.
  • Red teams have so far shown some promise in predicting models’ capabilities, but upcoming technologies could break our current approach to safety in AI. For one, “recursive self-improvement” is a feature that allows AI systems to collect data and get feedback on their own and incorporate it to update their own parameters, thus enabling the models to train themselves
  • This could result in, say, an AI that can build complex system applications (e.g., a simple search engine or a new game) from scratch. But, the full scope of the potential new capabilities that could be enabled by recursive self-improvement is not known.
  • Another example would be “multi-agent systems,” where multiple independent AI systems are able to coordinate with each other to build something new.
  • This so-called “combinatorial innovation,” where systems are merged to build something new, will be a threat simply because the number of combinations will quickly exceed the capacity of human oversight.
  • Short of pulling the plug on the computers doing this work, it will likely be very difficult to monitor such technologies once these breakthroughs occur
  • Current regulatory approaches are based on individual model size and training effort, and are based on passing increasingly rigorous tests, but these techniques will break down as the systems become orders of magnitude more powerful and potentially elusive
  • AI regulatory approaches will need to evolve to identify and govern the new emergent capabilities and the scaling of those capabilities.
  • But the AI Act has already fallen behind the frontier of innovation, as open-source AI models—which are largely exempt from the legislation—expand in scope and number
  • Europe has so far attempted the most ambitious regulatory regime with its AI Act,
  • both Biden’s order and Europe’s AI Act lack intrinsic mechanisms to rapidly adapt to an AI landscape that will continue to change quickly and often.
  • a gathering in Palo Alto organized by the Rand Corp. and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where key technical leaders in AI converged on an idea: The best way to solve these problems is to create a new set of testing companies that will be incentivized to out-innovate each other—in short, a robust economy of testing
  • To check the most powerful AI systems, their testers will also themselves have to be powerful AI systems, precisely trained and refined to excel at the single task of identifying safety concerns and problem areas in the world’s most advanced models.
  • To be trustworthy and yet agile, these testing companies should be checked and certified by government regulators but developed and funded in the private market, with possible support by philanthropy organizations
  • The field is moving too quickly and the stakes are too high for exclusive reliance on typical government processes and timeframes.
  • One way this can unfold is for government regulators to require AI models exceeding a certain level of capability to be evaluated by government-certified private testing companies (from startups to university labs to nonprofit research organizations), with model builders paying for this testing and certification so as to meet safety requirements.
  • As AI models proliferate, growing demand for testing would create a big enough market. Testing companies could specialize in certifying submitted models across different safety regimes, such as the ability to self-proliferate, create new bio or cyber weapons, or manipulate or deceive their human creators
  • Much ink has been spilled over presumed threats of AI. Advanced AI systems could end up misaligned with human values and interests, able to cause chaos and catastrophe either deliberately or (often) despite efforts to make them safe. And as they advance, the threats we face today will only expand as new systems learn to self-improve, collaborate and potentially resist human oversight.
  • If we can bring about an ecosystem of nimble, sophisticated, independent testing companies who continuously develop and improve their skill evaluating AI testing, we can help bring about a future in which society benefits from the incredible power of AI tools while maintaining meaningful safeguards against destructive outcomes.
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