@randtntx agreed who owned what in the world. Thanks for the clip.

Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 CE by the Pope dividing the world between Portugal and Spain was no longer enforceable. The European Thirty Year War between Protestants and Catholics ended in 1648 CE with the Treaty of Westphalia.

The war was largely fought on German soil and reduced the country to desolation as hordes of mercenaries, left unpaid by their masters, lived off the land. Rapine, pillage and famine stalked the countryside as armies marched about, plundering towns, villages and farms as they went. ‘We live like animals, eating bark and grass,’ says a pitiful entry in a family Bible from a Swabian village. ‘No one could have imagined that anything like this would happen to us. Many people say that there is no God...’ Wenceslas Hollar recorded devastation in the war zone in engravings of the 1630s and starvation reached such a point in the Rhineland that there were cases of cannibalism. The horror became a way of life and when the war finally ended, the mercenaries and their womenfolk complained that their livelihood was gone.

The peace conference to end the war opened in Münster and Osnabrück in December 1644. It involved no fewer than 194 states, from the biggest to the smallest, represented by 179 plenipotentiaries. There were thousands of ancillary diplomats and support staff, who had to be given housing, fed and watered, and they did themselves well for close to four years, despite famine in the country around. Presiding over the conference were the Papal Nuncio, Fabio Chigi (the future Pope Alexander VII), and the Venetian ambassador.

The first six months were spent arguing about who was to sit where and who was to go into a room ahead of whom. The principal French and Spanish envoys never managed to meet at all because the correct protocol could not be agreed.

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That Docherty and Macgregor book looks good. Thanks for the book review link.
It puts me in mind of this M. Python sketch;

@enhydra lutris is to start discussion with various historical events and viewpoints over time at the beginning. Build consensus while moving forward to contemporary design and trial implementation.

Interesting listening to 2015 video for the changes and consistency in the past few years of the Belt and Road progress.

Compare to the promises and projections of US politicians, business leaders, government officials and opinion writers of 2015 and today's situation.

good idea to review and re-review periodically as new info escapes or is discovered. Assuming that it will upon expiry of official classification period may be, all the same, to quote Eddie Izzard, "a bit naive". If operation SNAFU's classification period expires next month there is no reason somebody can't shred some, reclassify some under a new pretext, or decide that national security requires a current propaganda operation regarding significant facts and actions involved in the original. The classification of said current propaganda campaign will perforce include all those facts and actions from original, and possibly the whole operation if the exclusion of those facts from the release would raise questions that could cripple the current propaganda campaign.

Generally, history has shown us that in the US, classification and secrets act invocations have as often as not been invoked to protect the US or some of its agencies or actors from liability, civil and/or criminal, for their actions or negligent failures to act. National sekurity is only sometimes even remotely involved. The perps, having committed the original acts, and then committed the crime of improperly classifying them, seemingly would not be beyond the further crime of withholding or destroying critical bits of information or evidence.

For example, as their continuous and continuing behavior clearly shows, the Feebs never shut down COINTELPRO in any meaningful sense. They may no longer refer to it by that name, but the acts, actions, behavior and targets have never changed except that the target list keeps growing with the times, as do the techniques and tricks, witness their campaign against so-called "Black Identity Extremists" or the completely baffling campaign against the Juggalos, probably because their makeup blows up all their so-called facial recognition tech. There are no doubt many things from the original program which will never come to light because of their rampant criminality and the fact that everybody who was ever informed thereof and/orr had access to the information and helped conceal it, or knew anybody who did, became thereby an accessory.

Likewise we will not only never know all of the crimes against humanity and war crimes committed during the Vietnam war, (likewise the war in Iraq), but all the motives, goals and purposes will never come to light either. True, little bits might slip out now and then, occasioning review, deathbed confessions and leaks, etc., but the totality is forever buried.

be well and have a good one