Darwin's Theories - Politics category

Iqaluit, Nunavut, Canada

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 13:49:00 GMT

It was cold - approaching -40, the one temperature to which you don't have to append F or C. I was there. I have the photos to prove it. I've put a few of them into a Flickr Set. My client Learning Tree sent me up there to teach a computer course in February, 2013.

Iqaluit ("place of many fishes" in Inuktituk, known for a while as Frobisher Bay, for the English explorer who pranced in thousands of years after the Innu settled it) is now an "artificial" town. Canada has brought technology, schooling, our two official languages, and our levels of government, and "given" them to the Innuit. Thus today live 7,000 people in a "city" (smaller than many towns) but totally dependent upon the outside world for food and energy. If there ever comes a total shutdown of the oil supply or of civil aviation, many of these people will probably starve. Do I worry too much?

The Frobisher Bay name hangs on in a few old maps, and in the city's airport code YFB - apparently it's easier to change the name of a city than its airport code. Oh, and the body of water it sits on the tip of is still called Frobisher Bay.

We tend to think of the Arctic as flat, tundra, but Iqaluit sits on the hills that form the side of Frobisher Bay. See the photostream cited above; this place is hilly! There is, in fact, a hillside right across from the Frobisher Inn. In one of those pictures you can see a tiny little cross on the top of it. I hiked up it one night to take pictures of the town at dusk; the next pictures shows how big the cross is up close. That was bloody cold - probably the coldest I've ever been in my life (or I'm feeling it more in my advanced age). One eyelid froze half shut due to tearing from the wind; temp was near -36, wind chill must have been a lot colder as it was pretty breezy. Camera battery went from full to 30% in the cold, returned to 60% when thawed out. Walked down the lee side.

The internet service in this town really sucks, because it's satellite based. Long-established local business Coman Arctic is trying to get better internet using newer satellites. Hopefully soon! They have a free high-speed WiFi at the Tim Hortons (Trivia Factoid: Iqaluit is, I believe, the only Canadian Capital City to have only one Tim Hortons!).

One night there was an "Ice Music" concert - two musicians from Norway playing percussion on xylophone and chimes and horn all carved from local ice (only modern feature was the electronic echo box). The young woman in the duo, Mari Kvien Brunvoll, has a beautifyl singing voice. The evening was opened by some local talents: throat singers and more.

If you have time, you can read more about the city in the Wikipedia article Iqaluit.

All considered, I had a great time, and would be glad to go again.

View Iqaluit in a larger map

Less taking is not Giving

Sun, 24 Apr 2011 14:20:00 GMT

I've heard this fallacy a number of times in political discourse this year. People accuse one or another politician of wanting to "take money from medical care and give it to the rich", meaning, to give "the rich" a tax cut. Now the last time I looked, taxation consisted of taking away money that belongs to a person or company, by threat of force ("you no pay, we take your house and/or put you in jail"). So: raising the tax rate means taking more money away from people in the targetted tax bracket. And lowering the rate does not mean "giving them money", it means letting them keep what they have!

The only scenario in which a tax cut would mean "giving money" to the tax-reduced bracket would be a country in which the country legally owned everything within it. The name for this system is communism. If you really want to write about politics from a communist (or Marxist) point of view, well, why not move to North Korea for a year and see how well it works for you?

If you really want to stop "giving to the rich", you need to stop subsidies, corporate handouts, enforced monopolies, and all the other forms of corruption that absolute power has absolutely corrupted our legislatures with. But we all know that won't happen, as these are the channels though which some of the rich get funded by the taxes paid by the poor and middle class. Let's be charitable and call these the less productive rich, the ones who subsist at the public trough. Also, part of this funding goes into the election coffers of both halves of what Sheldon Richman calls "the Uniparty" (Dems and GOP in the USA, by extension, Liberal and Conservative in Canada). Thus we know this stream of money from the poor and middle-class to the less-productive rich is unassailable. So it's far easier to rally votes by claiming to "soak the rich", and that's what is happening now.

Top Ten for 2011

Tue, 04 Jan 2011 21:03:00 GMT

Happy {New,Gnu,Blue,Pneu} Year Everybody! As usual there may be less than 10 items.

Sheldon Richman's Why WikiLeaks Matters
Fred Branfman on WikiLeaks' Most Terrifying Revelation: Just How Much Our Government Lies to Us
CBS news on How WikiLeaks Enlightened Us in 2010
Martha Rosenberg with some interesting (but unsubstantiated) claims that US government agencies kill millions (literally) of blackbirds, 1000 times more than the 1000 that died in Arkansas
John McWhorter on Getting Darnell Off The Corners: Why America Should Ride The Anti-Drug Wave (alternate title: Why Legalizing Drugs—All Of Them—Is The Only Path To A New Black America)
Cambridge University refuses to bend over to the "house of cards" and censor a students research into pin-chip card insecurity. Professor Ross Anderson's response is a delight.
Eliezer Yudkowsky on Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate (where "our kinds" is defined as computer geeks, libertarians, rationalists, etc.)
Kyung Hee Kim on the precipitous decline of productivity among American schoolchildren
Bradford Schmidt on expected sub-$100 Android smartphones (no-contract price). Maybe this will be the death knell of smartphone subsidies; why lock into a 3-year contract at $60/month when you can buy the phone for $100 and get service at $10 or $20/month?

Another Top 10

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 17:29:00 GMT

Here we go again:

Security Theatre, Part n

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:35:00 GMT

According to a BBC report on the latest security theatre, airline customers are now to be subject to the following indignities for in-flight entertainment:

Customers to remain seated during final hour of flight;
No access to hand luggage and a ban on leaving possessions or blankets on laps during this hour.

Now I don't know about you, but I don't find this very comforting. The thought of being forced to sit still is inculcated in obedient citizens from kindergarten (a German word meaning roughly "vegetable garden to grow kids"). But at a certain point things like bladder pressure will win out. And what happens if you're in mid-whiz at the one-hour mark? Do you get shot by the air marshall while trying to return to your seat? (Watch the news for this one, folks). The entire process is utterly ridiculous. If the bomber had tried to light his fuse at the 45 minute mark into the flight, who can doubt that they'd ban visiting the toilet between 37 and 52 minutes after takeoff?

Remember the shoe bomber and how airport security made everybody take their shoes off before flight? Didn't stop the next religious fanatic with a fuse to light, did it?

The notion of an allegedly civilized nation dancing its "security" policies in the wind every time there's a real or perceived threat, to so vastly inconvenience its population while at the same time making no difference to the actual terrorists, is so laughable it's earned the term "security theater" - putting on a big show, but doing nothing for actual security.

It's not just me saying so. See Bruce Schnier's many writings on this topic, and his essay The Psychology of Security. Bruce is a well-known cryptology and security researcher; he knows whereof he speaks. TSA, not so much.