Politics – Page 34 – Spinor Info

Borderline fascism?

Dec 132009

In case there are still doubts, here’s another fine example demonstrating that our fearless guardians of freedom, liberty, and all that’s sacred to life at the US-Canada border might consider fascism as the preferred form of society: apparently, science-fiction authors have nothing better to do with their time than to assault hapless border guards. I have often said that my experiences on the border between Hungary and Ceaucescu’s Romania back in the 1980s were significantly less unpleasant than many of my crossings of the US-Canada border… the one thing I fail to understand is why, in these supposedly free societies, we don’t just fire these “public servants” en masse, why we allow them to treat us the way they do.

41,000 tons of CO2

Politics, Weather and Climate No Responses »

Dec 072009

41,000 tons of CO2 is the amount of “CO2 equivalent” that the Copenhagen climate summit is expected to produce. No, it’s not the amount produced by Switzerland in a year, even though CNN’s Jack Cafferty said so, probably missing the phrase, “thousands of” in the column heading of Wikipedia’s statistics. But it IS the amount of CO2 some smaller or less developed countries, e.g., Slovenia, Lithuania, or Kenya produce in a day. Another way of looking at it is that during its 12 days, the climate summit will be responsible for about 0.004% of the entire world‘s CO2 output.

No need to worry, I am sure there is a neat “trick” that can be used to “hide” this embarrassing little data point, too, lest it dilutes the message about the coming climate disaster.

The Soviet-Afghan War

History, Politics No Responses »

Dec 072009

I’m done reading The Soviet-Afghan War by Grau and Gress (eds.) The final paragraph of the book, which was prepared just before the US invasion of Afghanistan, is prescient: “It is easy to dismiss the Soviet failure in Afghanistan, but it is not wise. Armies seldom get to choose the wars in which they fight and this type of difficult war is as likely a future conflict as a war involving high-technology systems in which the sides seldom get close enough to see each other. Russia continues to fight guerrilla wars. Other nations may also have to.”

Indeed.

Ritual Liberal suicide?

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Dec 022009

While I was never overly fond of Stephen Harper’s brand of Canadian conservatism, I was reasonably comfortable with him leading a minority government. I might have preferred, though, a Liberal minority. I supported Stéphane Dion’s coalition idea, and I was appalled by the way the Conservatives delayed, and eventually avoided, the confidence vote.

None of this seems to matter anymore. Ignatieff, who was expected to bring charisma where Dion supposedly had none, not only failed to do so, he seems hell bent on leading his party into ritual suicide. Take this harmonized sales tax business in Ontario and BC. While it may be the technically sensible thing to do (indeed, that’s the way the sales tax should have been done, would have been done back when the GST was introduced were it not for provincial opposition to the idea), many argue that it’s precisely the wrong thing to do at the time of a recession, especially as the provinces are unwilling to lower the provincial rate at the same time, which means that harmonization will turn into a sizable tax grab. But even if none of that is true, the HST is quite unpopular… and now Ignatieff’s federal Liberals are supporting it.

If I were Stephen Harper, I’d engineer an election in the near future. I think a majority Conservative government is all but guaranteed this time.

Is Kim Jong Il running Canada?

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Nov 282009

The answer to my rhetorical question is clearly negative, otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this. Still, sometimes you have to wonder.

Like the other day, when our fearless guardians of Canadian sovereignty, our border guards, detained and questioned a US journalist for 90 minutes, apparently concerned that she might have something unpleasant to say about the upcoming Olympics.

I have no idea what they were thinking, but I am outraged. I never much liked the Olympics, but if this is the price we pay (not to mention Chinese mittens and incessant “I believe” television commercials that sound like they have more to do with televangelism than sport) I say, screw the Olympics, let them have it somewhere else, I don’t want it in my country, not even if it’s on the other coast, 3000 miles from here. It has a lot more to do with crass commercialism and performance enhancing drugs than true sportsmanship anyway.

And if border guards were concerned that an American journalist might damage Canada’s Olympic image… well, she doesn’t have to. Our border guards have done a splendid job already, thank you. I suppose if it were up to them, we’d have guard dogs, mine fields, and barbed wire, too, perhaps some second hand leftover from the Berlin Wall.

One of these days, I’m going to have another unpleasant encounter with them, and I am not looking forward to it. That is, one of these days, they’ll want to search my laptop, and I won’t be able to allow them to do so. That is because I will have taken the necessary precautions of carrying only a dysfunctional laptop with me, disabled by a password that I cannot retrieve. (This is necessary in order not to lie to them and to avoid not complying with their instructions.) No, I am not a kiddie porn smuggler, nor do I have any terrorist secrets or other unsavory stuff on the poor little machine. I just don’t accept the idea that a clueless border agent can rummage through my most personal material simply because I happen to be traveling internationally. To be rhetorical about it, this is not why I escaped from a Communist country 23 years ago.

Climate change?

Politics, Weather and Climate 1 Response »

Nov 252009

I’m still trying to digest this… the meaning of recently released e-mails that suggest, to put it mildly, questionable behavior on behalf of some of the world’s leading climate researchers.

One e-mail that’s most hotly debated is about this:

mbh99smooth_no_inst

This plot contains two types of data: long-term reconstructed temperatures from the fossil record, and shorter term instrumental temperatures. Now the trouble is, the smoothed curve (green) based on the reconstructed temperatures alone points slightly downward… no dramatic warming trend. In contrast, the instrumental temperatures show an upward trend. This apparent disagreement is purely a mathematical artifact; anyone who ever attempted to fit, for instance, a polynomial curve to some data knows that the fit tends to diverge near the ends of the data interval. But it wouldn’t look good on a report that is designed to influence world opinion and global policy to show a downward trend, would it. So there’s a neat “trick”: the apparent downward trend can be eliminated by using the instrumental temperatures to pad the reconstructed temperature data set, and produce an upward trend.

Note that this doesn’t mean that there is a downward trend. The planet may very well be warming, due to what people are doing to it. Unfortunately, the information content of manipulated graphs is zero, or less than zero even… they can generate skepticism towards genuine future results and delay a necessary public response.

There are many other questionable e-mails in the lot, including e-mails that suggest the hiding of data from freedom-of-information requests, e-mails that suggest efforts to block the publication of research by climate change skeptics, and at least one eyebrow-raising comment cheering at the death of a climate change skeptic, leading to calls for a researcher to resign.

I’m still digesting this, but it reinforces my conviction that phrases like “standard model” or “scientific consensus”, far from reassuring, should be a clear indication that the science might be shaky, and that an attempt is being made to substitute authority in place of convincing data and firm logic.

Twenty years of democracy

Politics No Responses »

Nov 182009

Radio Free Europe (yes, they still exist) have an article on their Web site, about the threat to democracy represented by public cynicism and corruption. While I don’t expect democracy to collapse in Eastern Europe just yet, I can’t disagree with their concern. Curiously, a reader comment on the same Web site by a “Sergey” from New York (originally from Ukraine) provides, perhaps unwittingly, a perfect demonstration of the first point: Sergey writes that “there is no ‘democracy, market economy, and civil society’, not in EU, not in US”, calling democracy “just another utopia”, and questioning the wisdom of “supporting corrupt and malfunctioning ‘democracies’ in Ukraine and Georgia” (do I detect more than a tinge of Russian nationalism here?).

One defeats enemies, not fellow citizens

Canada, Politics No Responses »

Nov 172009

Concerned that Canada’s Conservative Party might win a clear majority in parliament in the next elections, some political commentators began offering ideas on how to prevent this from happening, how to defeat Stephen Harper and his government.

I am not interested in anyone telling me how I can stop the Conservatives. I don’t want to stop anybody. I want to vote FOR something, not against; I’d like to live in a country in which people from different political backgrounds can work together, as opposed to working to defeat one another. Let’s leave divisive partisanship to the Sarah Palins of this world.

What I’d like to be able to do is to vote for a party that tells me how they will actually govern and make things better. For instance, how they will:

Balance the need to balance budgets with the need to use public funds to help the economic recovery.
Formulate an intelligent policy concerning Afghanistan, not dogmatic deadlines (no “bring the troops home” populism but a policy that tells us what goals we’re trying to achieve there, why they’re achievable, and how they will be achieved).
Fix Canada’s broken immigration system before we have to institute visa requirements for everyone just in case they claim refugee status here and manage to stay in the country for years while they wade through an antiquated and underfunded process.
Examine the need for copyright reform (which may not even be necessary) that represents the interests of Canadians as opposed to secretly negotiated reforms like ACTA that are designed to turn everyone into a potential criminal for the sake of maximizing Disney’s profits.
Address those social issues that prevented Canada from staying on the #1 spot in the UN quality-of-life lists.
Address the need for a national infrastructure: for instance, an east-west electricity grid, an east-west highway network that is more appropriate for a first-world country (I just read an interesting article about this topic yesterday), and more domestic energy production, including a shift away from fossil fuels and towards nuclear, if necessary (I know my physics and I don’t duck-and-cover every time someone utters the word “uranium”).
Perhaps tax reform, considering the idea of eliminating the income tax in favor of an increase in the GST, since it’s fairer, can be graduated to reflect public policy (e.g., reduced GST on essentials, higher GST on luxury items or items with a high environmental cost), MUCH easier and cheaper to administer, and removes a gross intrusion into privacy that income tax returns represent.
Electoral reform that might include direct election of the head of government (like the US presidential elections; indeed, it’s not a shame to copy something if it happens to be a good idea), fully separating executive and legislative powers; no mandatory party-line votes, since MPs should represent their district, not their party leader; and runoff elections to prevent vote-splitting.
Last but not least, in this security-conscious high-tech era, strengthened guarantees of individual rights and freedoms, yes, even if it means taking some security risks, as I’d much rather be free than safe.

OK, I’ll get off the pulpit now. The one thing I’m NOT interested in is defeating anybody. One defeats enemies, not fellow Canadians who happen to have a different opinion about some political topics.

Nuke inspectors

Politics No Responses »

Oct 022009

Breaking news on CNN:

Nuke inspectors But is it really a good thing? Who else agreed with Iran that inspectors should be nuked?

Tear down this wall

Politics No Responses »

Sep 262009

How times change.

Twenty-some years ago, a certain American president spoke at the Berlin Wall and said: “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”

He did.

Now it’s time to say the same thing over here:

Mr. Obama, Mr. Harper! Tear down this wall!

That is, tear it down before it goes up. The US-Canada border doesn’t need its Berlin wall.

Border nazis

Politics, Transportation 1 Response »

Sep 082009

A friend of mine visited this weekend from the US, and bought some Hungarian salami. It was confiscated at the border upon his return. They couldn’t fine him, because he wasn’t hiding anything, but two nice, yummy (not to mention pricey) sticks of world class salami are now in the garbage somewhere, probably marked with biohazard stickers.

He was given extra scrutiny because last year, when he brought back some salami from Hungary, it, too, was confiscated. After all, Protecting the Homeland cannot be accomplished without preventing Americans from eating foreign meats on home soil. (Curiously, before Hungary joined the EU in 2004, the same salami was widely available in the US but not in Canada. It is the same salami, made using the same hundred-year-old recipe.)

My friend’s misfortune reminded me of one of my encounters with Canada’s fearless protectors of the border many years ago: I drove to Ogdensburg to pick up a parcel (value: approximately 20 dollars) but on the way back, I also visited a Radio Shack where I found some high capacity NiCd batteries (value: approximately 20 dollars). At the border, it didn’t even occur to me to mention the batteries, I did mention that I went to pick up a package. They decided to search my car. They found the batteries. They kept me at the border post for a whole hour, while they did the paperwork necessary in order for me to pay about 5 dollars in sales tax on the imported items. They also warned me that my name will be on some list for a year or more, and that I should anticipate increased scrutiny in the future. Apart from the fact that this experience was both annoying and intimidating, I was also wondering: is this really the best use of taxpayer money?

Then there’s the Sunday last year when I was driving to the US to attend a conference, only to be drilled by a US border agent extensively about why I am going and who’s paying me. I kept telling him that the only paying that’s being done is payment of a hefty conference fee by me, and eventually, managed to convince him to look up the conference Web pages (on a NASA Web site, no less) that, fortunately, contained a list of all attendees. Thus I was able to enter the great United States of America without being further accused of trying to steal a job from an illegal Mexican immigrant.

Or here’s another experience: I was flying back from Europe, and at Ottawa airport, I was asked if I had a laptop. Yes, I answered. I was asked if I use it for personal purposes. Yes, I answered. So I was directed to the examination room. Ahead of me, a person had two laptops, a Mac and a PC, and Canada Customs’ well trained experts had real trouble examining the Mac. For this reason, they kept me waiting. And waiting. Meanwhile, they were going through the family photos of my fellow passenger. The time I spent waiting kept me thinking. I decided that under no circumstances will I give these goons my passwords, or give them control of my machine. I would tell them that the machine’s data are encrypted (they are) and that they are free to confiscate the computer, which would only cost me some money and some inconvenience, as I’d have to set up a new laptop with all the software I use. But I did not escape from a one-party dictatorship only to give up basic, fundamental rights to privacy just because these goons look at me, in my mid forties, and conclude that I must be dumb enough to traffic in kiddie porn, carrying it on a physical laptop across the border. Fortunately, I did not have to test my resolve: to their credit, they first apologized to me a couple of times because of the extra wait, and eventually (after some 20 minutes or more), they let me go without inspecting the laptop. But, my policy stands… indeed, I am ready to follow one of security expert Bruce Schneier’s recommendations and encrypt the laptop prior to crossing a border using a one-time, unrecoverable password that I first communicate to a third party in a safe third country. That way, I could tell them truthfully that nobody, neither they nor I, can recover the contents of the laptop for inspection.

Anyhow, here is my question, to the citizens of the US and Canada. Clearly, these people do not serve our collective interests. Even when they (rather rarely) catch the occasional kiddie porn or drug trafficker, the price we pay, I submit, is way too high. In any case, it seems that most of the time they’re just harassing law-abiding citizens for the fun of it, because they can. Supposedly, our great countries are true democracies. So… exactly why do we keep these bullies, these goons, in lawful employment, costing taxpayers billions of dollars every year, why don’t we kick them in the butt so hard that they wouldn’t even be able to sit for weeks, and get rid of this stupid, anachronistic border control system?

Meanwhile, in Europe, you can land at the airport in Lisbon, Portugal, rent a car, and drive all the way to Vilnius, Lithuania, without ever being stopped for a customs inspection. The example set by Europe is not always something we should follow, but perhaps in this case, we should make an exception and get rid of this ridiculousness. And the goons.

Don’t work for the military

Physics, Politics No Responses »

Sep 022009

If you’re a scientist or engineer, you don’t need to be a pacifist never to work for the military. J. Reece Roth, a 72-year old professor emeritus at the University of Tennessee, didn’t know this when he hired two graduate students (one from Iran, one from China) and when he took his laptop to China. His reward, for a lifetime of working hard and being a loyal citizen of the United States? Four years in prison.

Start of the nuclear cold war

History, Politics No Responses »

Aug 292009

Exactly 60 years ago, on August 29, 1949, the Soviet Union exploded their first nuclear bomb in the Semipalatinsk test field located in present-day Kazakhstan. The nuclear cold war began. Some forty years later, the cold war supposedly ended, but the vast nuclear arsenals are still there, ready to be deployed on a moment’s notice… so I am not sure what, if anything, has changed in the last 20 years other than the fact that the weapons systems are now older and less reliable… which is not exactly reassuring.

Lovell and Cold War assassins

Astronomy, Politics No Responses »

Aug 252009

I’m reading the autobiography of Fred Hoyle, and I’ve been perusing Wikipedia for background, in particular, reading about the Jodrell Bank radio telescope and its founder, Sir Bernard Lovell.

This is how I came across a news item from earlier this year, according to which Lovell recently revealed that back in 1963, he has been targeted by Soviet assassins during a visit to the Soviet Union.

This sounds improbable except… even in recent years, Russian intelligence agents/agencies have been using novel methods in assassination attempts (e.g., radioactive polonium in the case of Litvinenko). Further, the rationale Lovell gives is quite plausible: back in 1963, when satellite-based early warning systems were not yet available, something like Jodrell Bank may very well have served either as an over-the-horizon radar or perhaps using the Moon as a reflector.

Lovell promises to reveal more posthumously. What can I say? Our curiosity can wait. I wish him many more happy and healthy years.

Hydro plant disaster and terrorism

Politics No Responses »

Aug 212009

An inexplicable disaster destroyed the turbines of Russia’s largest hydroelectric plant, killing many workers and putting the plant out of commission for years. According to official reports, the aging infrastructure is to blame, but apparently, a Chechen terrorist group also claimed responsibility.

Russian officials deny this, but it’s hard to decide whom to believe, since they don’t exactly have a spotless track record when it comes to truthtelling. Yet on the other hand, even if they lie, perhaps it’s the right thing to do in this case. Terrorism, by definition, relies on publicity to achieve its intended purpose; it can be fought most effectively by denying that publicity.

Of course if you actually want to fight, an act of terrorism may be precisely what you need to justify a war. Which, I suspect, is just what happened back in 2001, when America’s political leadership, inspired by the ideology of the Project for the New American Century, used the terrorist attacks as pretext to launch its neverending “war on terrorism“, complete with the illegal war in Iraq, secret indefinite detentions on communist Cuba’s soil, torture, and deportations.

Can things get weirder in Gaza?

Politics No Responses »

Aug 162009

The news tonight is that the security forces of Hamas destroyed an Al-Qaeda group in a violent clash. Hamas is supposedly a terrorist organization… but it seems that there is terrorism and there is terrorism. While Hamas may not refrain from the use of suicide bombers and whatnot in its struggle against Israel, it seems that Hamas leaders were not particularly interested in promoting Al-Qaeda’s global Caliphate.

Russian hackers?

Internet, Politics No Responses »

Aug 082009

Concerning the recent massive DDoS attack on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites, one sentence in particular caught my attention as I was reading news reports: “A source close to Facebook further told IDG News Service on Friday that the attack was aimed at a specific user based in Georgia.”

Is this true? And does this mean that Russian hackers (with possible support from Russia’s government) are behind this? And, if such attacks on the global IT infrastructure become more frequent, what can the world do? Firewall Russia off the Internet? It may be feasible to do so technologically, but it also amounts to a kind of a “nuclear option”. However, as the Internet is becoming ever more vital, if there are “rogue nations” that refuse to police online criminals within their borders (or perhaps even actively support them) the “nuclear option” may very well be the only practical alternative.

Kitchen debate

History, Politics No Responses »

Jul 252009

Amidst all the excitement, I almost forgot: Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the unforgettable Kitchen Debate between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev.

Why no Nortel bailout?

Economy, Politics No Responses »

Jul 222009

There is an interesting article in The Globe and Mail this morning that asks a very curious question: given the amounts of money spent in Canada to help save GM and Chrysler (who do most of their research and engineering outside of Canada), why was there not a similar government effort to save Nortel from bankruptcy, even though this company was by far Canada’s largest contributor to private research?

New visa rules: A manufactured crisis?

Canada, Politics, Transportation No Responses »

Jul 152009

When I heard yesterday that the government of Canada was about to impose visa requirements for Czech and Mexican citizens visiting Canada, my first thought was to wonder just how inept Harper’s government really is: imposing a visa requirement smack in the middle of the summer tourist season, with no warning and no preparation, is just plain stupid, it will inconvenience tens of thousands of legitimate visitors, and will cost the Canadian tourism industry millions of dollars.

But today, there are comments from the immigration minister that the Canadian immigration system is in need of a serious revision. What a wonderful country we live in, with all those rocket scientists working for the government who figured this out. But if this ever so clever minister of ours actually knows this, then why the visa requirements? Why not spend his efforts instead on these supposedly much needed revisions of the immigration system itself?

Ah, I got it. Now that the whole thing is on the national news, which wouldn’t have happened without seriously pissing off the Czechs and the Mexicans, he can claim urgency, and perhaps even get credit in the end for a decisive solution. That the urgency is a result of his own ineptness, I guess he hopes it will be quickly forgotten.

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