My husband came home from an antique store the other day with a great find.

He paid $5 for an issue of Life magazine that originally cost 10 cents in the United States — equivalent to about $2.50 today. But it felt like a steal when I realized that it’s not just any old back issue of Life, but the very first issue to roll off the press as a magazine devoted to sharing news of the world through photography, on Nov. 23, 1936.

An earlier iteration of Life as a humour magazine had folded during the Great Depression, but this new publication was spearheaded by Time magazine publisher Henry Luce.

Reading it today is like delving into a time capsule. Its pages reflect the state of the world as it was, revealing an enthusiasm for travel, discovery and pushing boundaries, as well as rampant racism and sexism. These were the dark days of Hitler’s rise and the Spanish Civil War, but also a time of technical innovation and the economic and social reforms of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

In his outstanding book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, author Omar El Akkad criticizes Western governments for their limp and immoral response to the deaths of thousands of innocent children in Gaza.

He essentially argues that they invariably look away from the human carnage, calculate their national interests and say that they truly care — though their words never translate into meaningful deeds.

Near the end of the book, he asks the reader to finish the following sentence: “It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…”

There are many other pertinent queries such as, “What are you willing to give up to alleviate someone else’s suffering?”

They came. They saw. They left. They achieved nothing. So much for the “Baked Alaska” summit.

“Russian America” just ain’t what it used to be. It’s plain old America nowadays, although on a clear day, disconsolate Russian border guards can be spotted on Big Diomede Island. About 10 of them are there, against whom some 75 Alaskans stand firm on Little Diomede Island. This is probably a secure border, at least for the moment, as the closest Russian Orthodox community is in Nome, about 215 kilometres away. Anyway, these “Arctic Ivans” won’t try anything. Surviving island life in the Bering Strait is much easier than staying alive in sunny Crimea, to say nothing of on the battlefields around Pokrovsk.

The guy who wasn’t there wasn’t invited. You might think he would be offended. He isn’t. He knows who’s won. And that’s not U.S. President Donald Trump, much less Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had no role to play. He is neither a real estate developer nor a dictator. Instead, he is “Ukraine’s Moses,” determinedly leading his nation away from Moscow’s pharaoh, continuing along a well-beaten and rather “long and winding road” in the historical experience of Ukrainians. Once the crippling legacy of Russia’s imposed settler colonial project has been fully shed, as it will be, Ukraine will resume its rightful place in Europe. Meanwhile, Muscovy will just further mire.

As ever, we are living on borrowed time.

There’s the familiar old threat of global nuclear war and the growing risk of global climate catastrophe, plus not-quite-world-ending potential disasters like global pandemics and untoward astronomical events (asteroid strikes, solar flares, etc.) Lots to worry about already, if you’re that way inclined.

So it’s understandable that the new kid on the block, artificial intelligence, has been having some trouble making its presence felt. Yet the so-called godfather of artificial intelligence, scientist Geoffrey Hinton, who last year was awarded the Nobel Prize for his work on AI, sees a 10 per cent to 20 per cent chance that AI will wipe out humanity in the next three decades.

We will come back to that, but let’s park it for the moment because the near-term risk of an AI crash is more urgent and easier to quantify. This is a financial crash of the sort that usually accompanies an exciting new technology, not an existential crisis, but it is definitely on its way.

WASAGAMING — A legal threat convinced Parks Canada that its promise to reintroduce motorized boats on Clear Lake this season would not be viable, a Parks Canada spokesperson told a crowd of 600 people at a town hall Tuesday night in Wasagaming.

Andrew Campbell, senior vice-president of operations at Parks Canada, told the crowd that the agency found out with a two-week window before the May long weekend that it was going to face a judicial review for the planned “one-boat, one-lake” policy on the lake.

The review would have caused the plan to be paused, he said, and so there would have been no boats on the lake whether Parks Canada instituted a ban or the judicial review was filed.

“We made decisions based on, would the one-boat one-lake (policy) be able to survive a judicial review?” he said.

Leading an entire country for a few years is a steep learning curve, but it’s useful experience.

Being in power for a dozen years makes most leaders arrogant and careless, but some remain more or less functional. Being in power for more than 30 years just makes you stupid. Consider Cambodia’s Hun Sen and Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Hun Sen began as a Khmer Rouge commander and went on to rule Cambodia effectively as an absolute dictator for 36 years. (He is by far the country’s richest man and his personal guard rivals the national army in size.) He passed the prime ministership on to his son, Hun Manet, two years ago, but he really still rules.

There is an old history of military confrontations between Thailand and Cambodia, but relations have been stable since Hun Sen came to power. In fact, there were close links between him and the Shinawatra family that has dominated democratic politics in Thailand for half of this century.

One of the obvious lessons of history is that it is much easier to start a war than to predict how it will end.

But you have to study history, specifically military history, to learn that lesson. Too few ever do.

It is important to realize that those most responsible for starting a war, and even those who lead the fighting once it begins, may know few of the lessons that history so obviously provides.

In an uncertain world, we will unfortunately always make some wrong decisions. Those wrong decisions become “dumb” ones, however, when such mistakes could (and should) have been avoided.

With 95 per cent of this year’s crop seeded as of this week, Manitoba farmers are again watching the skies for rain, along with thousands of firefighters and the tens of thousands of people displaced by wildfires across Western Canada.

Most of Manitoba received a good shot of moisture two weeks ago, but this weekend’s forecasted rain could prove pivotal to whether this year’s crops will be sparse or plentiful and whether entire communities will be razed or spared. Environment Canada is forecasting continued hot and dry weather into summer.

If it seems the rain we do receive these days doesn’t go as far as it did in the past, it’s more than a hunch.

We’ve all had the experience of drinking more on a hot day. As it turns out, the atmosphere reacts similarly under global warming.