COUNTERWEIGHTS EDITORS. GANATSEKWYAGON, ON. THURSDAY, OCTOBER 24, 2024. [UPDATED OCTOBER 25: see below]. An at least temporary technological disaster has befallen our counterweights site.

It is apparently not altogether uncommon. And our (not very expert) local staff will be working to fix the technical issues over the next (perhaps longish?) while.

For the moment the disaster does mean that we are unable to illustrate and otherwise accompany our words with images of one sort or another. We are also unable to provide direct links to our source material online.

Our most recent post on the October 21 New Brunswick election was delivered under the new narrower realities — without illustrations or source linkages. But its structure was still tied to the old school, when pictures and source linkages could relieve the many words in the typical newspaper-column-plus on this site.

For the immediate future we editors have agreed to a new-school interim strategy for adjusting to our technological disaster. If pictures and source linkages are not immediately possible to relieve the many words, just reduce the number of words!

So for the next while counterweights will feature short-short notes on the unfolding political (and economic) drama in Canada, the United States, NAFTA/CUSMA, the Commonwealth, La francophonie, and the wider global village.

We have concluded as well that this policy is most suited to the filters of a single individual. Our half-managing editor Randall White has agreed to fulfill this role for the short-term future immediately ahead — most of the time. We editors will continue to pick up the slack when most-of-the-time intermittently expires.

We’re told that Randall White’s first short-short post of this new sort will appear next week: No more than eight lean paragraphs on the supposed final results of last weekend’s BC election, on Canada’s Pacific Coast.

UPDATE OCTOBER 25. Mirabile dictu, our (not very expert) local staff SEEM to have fixed our technological disaster sooner than expected! We say seem because no one here can still quite believe that we are back in our ordinary business so soon. To prove the point for the moment in any case we have now posted a few earlier images in this piece itself (tho to keep things simple we haven’t spent hours searching for the relevant source links in the complex counterweights data warehouse or writing up new captions).

For the moment, however, we editors have also agreed that while the images and source links are mercifully back (again it seems), for the near future we’re going to hang in with the short-short notes on the unfolding political and economic drama in Canada, the United States, and beyond in the North American anxious autumn of 2024. (Which no doubt will not exactly end on November 5, no matter what finally happens in all the nooks and crannies of American government in the 2020s.).