Disclosure.
This page is written in the register of a securities disclosure: complete, flat, and unembarrassed. Where a published document touches one of the interests declared below, this page records it, and the most material cases also carry a note in the document itself. If this page and a paper ever disagree, that is a defect — report it and it will be corrected publicly.
The imprint
The North Pacific Strategy Initiative is written, edited, and funded by one person: Jesse James, of Victoria, British Columbia. There is no staff, no external review board, and no outside funding of any kind. Papers are signed by the author and hosted by the imprint; the institutional register of the site is a discipline of voice, not a claim of institutional scale.
No paid engagement, sponsorship, commission, or compensation of any kind has been accepted — or sought — in connection with this site or any document published on it. No one has commissioned, requested, or directed any NPSI document. A GitHub Sponsors channel was listed on /engage/ from June to 14 October 2026; nothing was received through it, and it has been withdrawn so that every statement of no outside funding on this site is true as written. If any of this changes, this page changes first.
The one paid piece of work connected to the imprint is external to it: an essay commissioned and paid for by Korea Pro, published under the editor's NPSI affiliation. It is declared at item 6 below.
Declared interests
The editor's outside ventures and interests that touch published subject matter, and the papers each touches. Working Paper No. 5, Special Briefings Nos. 1, 2, 3, 5, 6 and 8, Technical Briefings Nos. 1 and 2 and both Pacific Ledger issues also carry their own interest notes, and Working Papers Nos. 10 and 11 and Special Briefings Nos. 4 and 5 state their AI assistance in the document itself; for the other papers listed, this page is the record.
1 · Fit For Gov — civic technology
The editor owns and operates Fit For Gov, a civic-technology practice serving Canadian municipal governments. Touches: Working Paper No. 5, Sovereign Compute North, which was co-issued with Fit For Gov and whose recommendations extend sovereign compute to the municipal layer — a market in which the practice operates. The paper's page carries a co-issuance note. Also adjacent: SB1's municipal sovereign-cloud content.
2 · Enterprise software and applied intelligence
The editor works professionally as a systems architect in enterprise software, data systems, and applied-intelligence platforms. Touches: WP5 and SB1 (sovereign compute and cloud), TB1 (sensing and edge-inference adjacency — TB1 was written independently, with no client and no commission), TB2 (it assesses defence fusion software, Palantir’s Gotham and Gaia and the Maven Smart System among it), and the AI-policy subject matter of WP10 and WP11.
3 · Energy facilitation
The editor manages Western operations for an international energy facilitation firm. Touches: WP1, The Bilateral Foundation (whose bond finances a heavy-oil export corridor); WP2, A Canada–United States Energy and Compute Compact; WP4, The Addition Paradox (a global energy thesis); SB3, The Ledger With One Entry (oil-custody analysis); and the LNG and crude entries of The Pacific Ledger. No client of that firm is a subject of, or source for, any NPSI document.
4 · Korean reunification advocacy
The editor separately maintains a public advocacy platform concerning Korean reunification, published under his own name in Korean and English. It is deliberately kept apart from this imprint: NPSI is analytical, not advocacy, and the two are written in different registers for different readers. Touches: the Korea-related papers (WP1, WP3, WP5), the Long Game section of The Pacific Ledger, and SB5, One Day, Four Names, on how the end of the Pacific war and the division of Korea are named, which carries its own interest note. Those papers are sourced and falsifiable regardless of the editor's views — that is the standard by which they ask to be judged.
5 · Indigenous standpoint
The editor is of Sagkeeng (Ojibway) ancestry. This is disclosed as standpoint relevant to the Indigenous co-ownership provisions designed into WP1 and WP2 — it is not a claim to speak for any nation or community, and the provisions stand or fall on their design merits.
6 · External writing
The editor writes occasionally for external publications under editorial arrangements that are theirs, not NPSI's. Most recently: a commissioned essay on Korean market structure for Korea Pro (Korea Risk Group), published 29 July 2026. The essay was paid: Korea Pro paid the editor a fee for it. It ran under the editor's NPSI affiliation and was supplied with four chart figures credited to the North Pacific Strategy Initiative. The editor retained control of the substance, and the piece went through the publication's independent fact-checking process. Adjacent: SB4, The Tollgate Markets, which rates Korea's enforcement against market manipulation among seventeen markets.
Corrected 5 October 2026. This entry previously stated that no compensation had been arranged as of publication. Korea Pro paid the editor for the essay.
7 · Research and drafting assistance
NPSI documents are researched and drafted with substantial assistance from AI systems, principally Claude, made by Anthropic. Where the subject matter makes that assistance material — as in WP10 and WP11, which examine Anthropic's own conduct and statements — the paper carries its own disclosure inset. SB4 and SB5 also state the assistance in the document itself. Editorial responsibility for every published claim rests with the editor.
What the Initiative does not do
No paid engagements for the imprint's own documents; the editor's paid external writing is declared at item 6. No sponsored research. No advertising, sponsorship, or paywalls. No funder influence — the sole funder is the editor. No document has been commissioned by, written for, or shaped by any client, government, or institution. SB2, The Three Doors, maps public funding programs; no engagement is sought or accepted in connection with the programs it describes. TB1, The Verified Sky, was written on the editor's initiative with no client and no intended customer.
Working-paper numbers are assigned at drafting, and the published sequence carries intentional gaps — Nos. 6 and 8 remain unreleased. No published document has been withdrawn; where a document is superseded (WP10, by WP11), it remains available unaltered with a notice attached. The public git history is the audit trail for both claims.
Corrections
This page is maintained under the same discipline as the papers: versioned in public, corrected in public. If a reader identifies an interest that should be declared here and is not, write to editor@npsi.ca — the correction will be published, not argued with.