Photo: The World's Largest Tin Ghost

This is the sort of thing that happens when New Westminster gets into the Halloween spirit.

I remember Halloweens of the past. I remember an occasion, or maybe multiple occasions - I can't rightly remember anymore - when the setup for trick-or-treaters at the door included me sitting as still as possible in a big dark cloak, so that it would look stuffed or something, and moving or groaning when the kids came up to ring the bell. It scared the hell out of some of them.

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The News Is True, From a Certain Point of View

There's an interesting article on the front page of the Toronto Star website as I write this, posted around 10:40 AM Eastern Time this morning. It deals with the troubles that Australia's flag airline Qantas has been experiencing, most notably the grounding of its entire fleet, and says that an "Australian court ends Qantas strike and grounding of fleet that stranded thousands."

And nothing else.

That is the entire article, as of this writing (9:00 AM Pacific Time).

And what an article it is. Especially for a newspaper such as the Star, which has its Atkinson Principles to think of. The implication you get from this unbelievably terse article is that the unions have done it again, that they weren't satisfied with a normal labor disruption but they somehow grounded the entire fleet as well.

Except they didn't. What set off this latest round of stuff wasn't the strike - it was the lockout imposed by Qantas management. There's a very distinct difference; but just so everyone's aware, a strike is when employees refuse to work, and a lockout is when management refuses to allow the employees to work.

There are indications that it may have been premeditated; I've seen reports that Qantas had been booking up hotel rooms around the world, presumably for its bumped passengers, during the lockout despite the CEO's claim that the decision was only made Saturday morning.

Whether or not those are the facts is one thing. But it's irresponsible to go to news with only the barest summary of a situation when you're not even including all of the relevant information that's already out there in the wild. Hell, the Toronto Star reporters may know more than me about this, and yet I've managed to write several paragraphs about this.

They managed one sentence.

Which makes it look a lot more like anti-labor propaganda than honest reporting - or, at least, just another data point to make readers grumble about the "damn unions."

Really, a Qantas strike is effectively irrelevant for Canadians. Once upon a time those planes with the kangaroo tails landed in Toronto and Vancouver, sure, but not anymore. Today it only flies to four cities in all of North America, and one of them is Honolulu. Given that, I'd imagine that the Star should have the flexibility to not go live with a story such as this until it has more information than one damn sentence.

It's just sloppy, and not befitting a newspaper.

Photo: Grâce â vous, Jack

It had already been three weeks since the death of Jack Layton when I returned to Toronto, and yet bits and pieces of the spontaneous memorial to him in Nathan Phillips Square were still there. The chalk had been washed off the ground earlier, and without eyes on the scene, I'd thought that was the end of it - as it was, the messages on the walls survived long enough for me to get there, though I understand they were washed off by the rain a few days after I passed through.

This was just one of the hundreds of messages that had been left all around the square. Considering that whoever wrote it did so while leaning over the lip of a walkway elevated about fifteen feet above the ground, the inverted letters are understandable - and lend a bit of a personal touch as well, I think.

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The United States of Flat-Tax-Land

We've got barely more than a year until the keys to the White House are up for grabs again, and in my following of the news a peculiar meme has once again emerged among the vying Republican candidates. Not only emerged, but held aloft - the flat tax. I remember it primarily from the presidential campaigns of Steve Forbes, who kicked around the idea in 1996 and 2000 before being crushed into fine powder. Today its main standard bearers are Herman Cain, who first brought it to the table in a big way through his 9-9-9 plan, and Rick Perry, who seems to have a greater affinity for the number 20.

The flat tax represents a stark departure from the income tax codes in place throughout the Western world, commonly seen as byzantine mazes that are impossible for any one person to understand and which were purposefully designed to confuse people into paying as many taxes as possible. Personally, I use computer assistance programs to prepare my taxes, so I'm not too sure about that. By contrast, proponents of flat taxes like to say it would be simple enough "to fit on a postcard." So this weblog has more than enough room! Under a flat tax, filers pay one specific, particular rate - Rick Perry's optional flat tax, which is a weird as hell way to try going about implementing one, would be a firm 20%. That is, aside from a few specific, enumerated deductions, you pay 20% of your income in taxes and that is that, no matter how much you make. That's it at its core.

Today more than twenty countries around the world have flat taxes in place, though disproportionaly focused around the Eastern Bloc and concentrated in the former Soviet Union, with Russia leading more than half of the ex-Soviet states in the establishment of flat tax systems. Whether these taxes are responsible for economic growth is a difficult thing - after all, correlation doesn't equal causation, and a lot of the flat tax countries are only twenty years removed from communism. It's too bad there's no real laboratory for economic science.

Flat tax supporters make a lot of noise about how fair it is. But, the more I think about it, the more it becomes obvious that that's not really the case at all.

That tax wasn't flat, but the sign was pretty ragged.

If the concept of a flat tax is simple, let's run with it to the degree that my conception of the concept will allow. Take the example of... Examplevania, a small republic that has thrown out its old financial jargon and instituted a 20% flat tax code. For the purposes of this hypothetical, and to keep things simple - because, you know, simplicity is one of the reasons why everyone is so agog over the flat tax - Examplevania does not have any substantial deductions. Rick Perry's plan, by contrast, allows "$12,500 per person and mortgage interest, charitable donations, state and local taxes for those earning as much as $500,000 a year." Let us also assume, for the purposes of this hypothetical, that Examplevania has no sales taxes; presumably it's sitting on its own tar sands or something. Now let's look at five Examplevanians chosen purely for their annual income, from the high strata of society to the lowest.

Examplevanian #1 earns $304,000 per year. Taxes of 20% work out to $60,800.

Examplevanian #2 earns $152,000 per year. Taxes of 20% work out to $30,400.

Examplevanian #3 earns $76,000 per year. Taxes of 20% work out to $15,200.

Examplevanian #4 earns $38,000 per year, putting him or her squarely in the lower middle class or upper working class. Taxes of 20% work out to $7,600.

Finally, on the ground floor of this particular ladder, Examplevanian #5 earns $19,000 per year, most likely in some soul-crushing customer service job with a monolithic, uncaring company. Their taxes of 20% work out to $3,800 over the course of the year.

Now, on the face of it, you may be tempted to say that it's fair - isn't it? Everyone is paying the same percentage of their income, paying what they can toward the maintenance of the state and of civil society. This is where people can easily trip up; by focusing in on the rate of tax itself, rather than what's left after the taxman has gone off again.

So let's look back in on our Examplevanians. Once the return's in the envelope, Examplevanian #1 is out more than #4 and #5 combined make in a year, but is still left with $243,200. Examplevanian #2 has $121,600 for booze and exotic vacations, and Examplevanian #3 has $60,800 left over.

As for #4 and #5? #4 ends up with $30,400, and #5 is left with $15,200 to get them through the year.

The percentage is the same, but even the same percentage carries more weight on smaller numbers than it does larger. The difference between $200,000 and $300,000 of liquid capital boils down to differences in comfort - whether Examplevanians #1 and #2 will visit this or that gourmet restaurant, take this Caribbean cruise or that Alaskan one, and so on. It's a question of quality.

For Examplevanian #5, it's something quite different. Look again at that number, $15,200. For an entire year, that's it - and that works out to $1266.66 per month. I know cities where rent alone is more than that per month; hell, while I was pricing apartments in Toronto before moving out west, a $1000/month single-bedroom apartment was cheap - and living in rented basements will only scoop a couple of hundred dollars off the top of that. That doesn't even factor in food, transportation, or emergencies. What's more, this is only considering the Examplevanians as completely independent, responsible only for themselves - what happens when you bring family in? What happens when Examplevania's economy collapses, and Examplevanian #5's soul-crushing clerking job is the best they can find to support not only thesmelves, but others?

It's poverty any way you slice it, but what makes it worse is the idea that this is somehow more "fair." The more important thing, the thing to really consider, is how is this equal?

Now that the money's parcelled out, what happens? That depends a hell of a lot on the national character of Examplevania. If it's one that accepts a robust social safety net that includes good health coverage, unemployment assistance, inexpensive or free public transit, and other such programs - that recognizes the responsibility of citizens to contribute to the construction of an equal and harmonious society - Examplevanian #5 still isn't living the easy life, but at least is living easier. If it takes more after the "fuck you, got mine" ethos that appears to be dominant in the modern Republican Party, well... I suppose #5 could try to get a second job selling bootstraps.

The biggest problem we have to deal with today, I think, are the institutionalized, systemic inequalities that exist throughout the West in general and in the United States in particular. Chasing flat taxes isn't going to fix this; after all, many of the flat tax proponents have made it clear that it's just part of a goal to drastically draw down government spending as a whole. We need something better.

Photo: A Brighter Day in Oakland

It's staggering, the difference in the reception the Occupy demonstrations are getting when you go from city to city. Up here the biggest issue in the newspapers has been the cost of policing the camp at the Vancouver Art Gallery, but after the wooden boards on the side of the Bay filled with thank-you notes to the Vancouver Police Department after the Stanley Cup riot, it's not all that surprising.

The people of Oakland don't have nearly as good a rapport with the Oakland Police Department. Occupy Oakland has been grabbing headlines for a couple of days now, with police dismantling and demonstrator re-occupying of Oscar Grant Plaza, the reclaimed Frank Ogawa Plaza outside Oakland City Hall, and police officers doing such protect-and-serving things as firing a flash grenade into a knot of people trying to lend assistance to a demonstrator, a military veteran to boot, who suffered a fractured skull from a police projectile. It sounds more like what you'd expect to come out of a Middle Eastern dictatorship, not the United States... but the times, they are a'changin'.

Photographed here is Oscar Grant Plaza in May this year, when I was down in the Bay Area... but for many people, it will never look quite this way again.

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In the Shadow of the Moon Treaty

This is one piece of prospective international law that you may never have heard of, but it was a rather prominent thing among certain circles in the late 1970s. The Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, which is generally known as the Moon Treaty just for conservation of letters, was introduced in the wake of the Apollo missions in an attempt to establish an international regime for how people would deal with other worlds in the future - or, as it may well have turned out had the treaty honestly come into force, wouldn't.

That's not to say that the Moon Treaty is a horrible crock. There are important things with in it, such as Article 3, which forbids the installation of military bases or weapons of mass destruction on or orbiting the moon, and Article 6, which protects freedom of scientific research by anyone on the moon - and by extension anywhere in the solar system other than Earth, as that's what this treaty was meant to apply to. They were not thinking small back in the 1970s.

Actually... they were, just in a different way.

On the bright side, it would mean that you wouldn't have to worry about some joker writing "EAT AT JOE'S" on the near side.

So what's the problem? Apparently that the Moon Treaty, despite not having been signed and ratified by any state relevant in the modern space program, could be argued to have wormed its way into the status of "customary law," and binding upon non-States Parties because... well, presumably because they haven't been carrying out activities in violation of its terms, notwithstanding the fact that no state on Earth has had the capacity to do so since the 1970s, with the last Saturn V launch that put Skylab into orbit. Still, I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know whether legal scholars would take "inability to take action" into account for this. Michael Listner at The Space Review wrote an overview of the situation the other day, which I encourage you to read.

There are several massive sticking points, which I went over in a post last June. Reading it now, the Moon Treaty strikes me as something that could only have been drafted by a one-planet civilization, and its terms are understandable in the context of a one-planet civilization; I may be a space booster, but even I recognize it will be a long, hard, expensive road before human presence off Earth becomes something more permanent. The problem with the treaty as I see it, though, is that it seems able to very effectively strangle any attempt to build any kind of off-Earth human presence.

It strikes me as rather Earth-chauvinistic... and in a bad way. Article 7 lays out that "States Parties shall take measures to prevent the disruption of the existing balance of its environment, whether by introducing adverse changes in that environment, by its harmful contamination through the introduction of extra-environmental matter or otherwise" - language that could easily be used to throw cold water on any kind of organized resource extraction on, say, an asteroid. It seems a bit out of joint - do nothing about adverse changes in the environment of Earth, but make damn sure that nothing bad will happen to airless rocks where nothing will ever, ever live unless we make it so.

I'm not saying that something like the Moon Treaty could never work. It's not like it forbids activities in space... but I can see its terms actually leading to conflict; since "States Parties have the right to exploration and use of the moon without discrimination of any kind," I could easily envision a situation similar to that which comes up in Issui Ogawa's The Next Continent, with construction-phase rivalry between the NASA and private Japanese lunar bases - it would be easy for some State Party to be an asshole by actively and "innocently" getting in the way of any exploration or development attempts that it doesn't like. It's just that in a form such as this, especially when it's hewing so heavily to nebulous "international regimes," I'm rather skeptical of how much progress would have been made under it - aside from progress on how to violate the spirit of the treaty while abiding to its letter.

The ideals of the Moon Treaty are good. What's really necessary is to figure out a way to bring them into the twenty-first century without strangling the spirit that would make it necessary.

good thing chairface chippendale didn't have to worry about this

Photo: Fog Across the Fraser

It must be down to the changing of the seasons; a few times over the past couple of weeks when conditions are right - that is, it's not raining to drown the world, for starters - I've woken up to find a heavy bank of fog settled over the Fraser River, completely concealing the Surrey shoreline and a couple of times creeping a fair bit into New Westminster as well. On Sunday, the fog lasted until eleven o'clock before the sun burned it off. I was down there in time to get a fair number of pictures, including this one of the Skybridge and the Pattullo Bridge partially concealed by the fog.

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Surrey's Quest for Rail

When I left Toronto, I'd hoped that it would be a while before I had to reckon with another spate of light rail bashing. After all, just look what Rob Ford's reflexive opposition to, and unilateral "cancellation" of, the planned Transit City LRT network got that city - yet another grand plan that failed to materialize into anything, yet more wasted years in which things will continue to get worse before they get better. Thankfully, Metro Vancouver doesn't appear to be heading down that road; despite grumbling over the source of its funding TransLink is finally making headway on the Evergreen Line, and plans and artists' conceptions of the Vancouver Downtown Streetcar are still prominently displayed at the Non-Partisan Association's campaign headquarters.

Light rail has the potential for some time in the sun here, as well - more specifically, in the city of Surrey. Being right across the river from it, it's never that far from my mind, particularly when it comes to transit; I covered it in a post last year, though I was more focused on alleviating the transit bottlenecks between it and Vancouver. What's just as important is the issue of transit within Surrey itself, and with that city set to overtake Vancouver's population in the next couple of decades, there's no time like the present to address it. In that vein, earlier this year Surrey mayor Dianne Watts spoke strongly in support of the construction of a light rail transit network to serve the city of Surrey, and to start as soon as possible.

Not everyone south of the Fraser is behind that. In particular, there's already online and flyers-on-telephone-poles opposition from the SkyTrain for Surrey initiative, which is dismissive of light rail technology and would much rather see Surrey be served by rapid transit, using the same ICTS technology currently used by the SkyTrain's Expo and Millennium lines. How dismissive is this initiative? Well, for starters the website rarely hesitates to remind readers that the light rail in Surrey not only "may make transit service worse instead of better," but would be "cataclysmic."

Pictured: a light rail train in Phoenix, Arizona, broadly similar to what may run in the Surrey of tomorrow. Unless they're talking about the cataclysmic effect that big a stack of IHOP pancakes will have on your waistline, I'm not really seeing it.

I'm still pawing through the pages on the SkyTrain for Surrey website, but as of now a lot of the arguments I've uncovered seem to spring from the same train of thought that Rob Ford derailed in Toronto - that light rail would take away lanes for cars, and that's bad. One particular focus is on Surrey's 104th Avenue, which is featured in a video that depicts a light rail line along that street, anchoring its planned downtown core and connecting the existing Surrey Central Station with the up-and-coming developments at Guildford Town Centre to the east. Just yesterday, SkyTrain for Surrey posted a blog entry railing against this idea, stating that "a removal of capacity on 104th Avenue in Surrey is not an acceptable option."

So what's its answer? SkyTrain, of course! SkyTrain for Surrey's "Surrey Connected" plan envisions extensions and new lines radiating across the generally low-density Mississauga of the West, from TransLink's own long-term Expo Line extension to Fleetwood and Langley City to another route that would not only replace the LRT concept along 104th, but eventually extend south to the border of White Rock and wind its way north across the new Port Mann Bridge to connect with the Evergreen Line in Coquitlam. The fact that the installation of SkyTrain lines along these corridors would still demand a removal of capacity - even if it's only in the shape of a median, rather than multiple lanes - isn't really discussed.

That's a lot of SkyTrain track - sounds expensive! SkyTrain for Surrey cites "rough ballparks of about $110 million/km," though given that the Evergreen Line project website is currently estimating $1.4 billion in capital costs, it works out to be more like $127 million per kilometer on that basis. Given that, I can't see that SkyTrain network of theirs costing less than billions upon billions. I suppose the big question is, then, can demand in Surrey justify the expense of building a SkyTrain network, or would it just be a Sheppard Line writ large?

In the end, though, what I really take issue with is SkyTrain for Surrey's laundry list of reasons why they think light rail is bad. While concerns about the cancellation of parallel bus services are well-grounded, the idea that light rail lines "will disrupt communities and stall economic development" - not just during construction, mind you, but merely by existing - rings hollow when I consider the explosive growth of light rail systems in the United States. Cities like Portland, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles have built or are building streetcar and light rail lines to revitalize neighborhoods and fill in cracks in their own transit pictures.

My opinion? TransLink doesn't have infinitely deep pockets, and Surrey's not going to be able to fund a rail network - light or otherwise - on its own. Better that we focus SkyTrain development on wider, regional connections between the cities of Metro Vancouver. Forcing all the transit growth south of the Fraser onto one single line doesn't strike me as the best path toward the future. Using words as charged as "cataclysmic" doesn't exactly strike me as reflecting a nuanced, incorporating approach... rather, it suggests that SkyTrain for Surrey is guided by ideology above practicality.

Photo: Signs of the Election

Just as I leave one municipal election behind, I stumble into a bunch more. At the very least, New Westminster and Vancouver are set to decide their mayors and city councils and school trustee boards next month, and with those weird municipal political parties that don't exist back in Ontario, they seem almost like a provincial or federal elections in miniature. Still, there's less than a month to go before Vancouver's election and things aren't nearly as heated as they were this time last year in Toronto, so that's a definite advantage to being on the west coast.

I haven't noticed much of anything in signage yet. The only exception was the other night, when I stumbled on to a makeshift cardboard sign placed at the Dunsmuir entrance of Granville Station by the campaign of Darrell "Saxmaniac" Zimmerman, who is running for Mayor of Vancouver on a platform that seems to focus exclusively around free transit. The sign didn't last long, though; it was gone when I went through the entrance the next day.

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Short SF Review #19: The Thirst Quenchers

The Thirst Quenchers, by Rick Raphael
Appeared in Analog Science Fact - Science Fiction, September 1963

There was water in the highlands, in watersheds and spilling unused down to the sea in many areas. Soon the cities and industries sent out great plastisteel arteries to bring the lifeblood of the land to the vast sponges of the factories and showers in homes and food-processing plants and laundrounits. Water for the machine-precise rows of soy bean plants and for babies' formulas and water for great nuclear power plants and water for a tiny, sixty-fifth floor apartment flower box.

They say that science fiction, no matter what year or world it's set in, is really about the time in which it was written. It's something that becomes increasingly obvious as a work of science fiction ages, and the cultural assumptions underlying it become progressively more out of step with the present day. While this may mean greater speedbumps in the path of a modern reader's suspension of disbelief, it also makes the story into a cultural time capsule of sorts - through it, and through the attitudes, concepts and ideas it incorporates, we can gain fresh insight on the time of its origin.

Over the last few years, the 1960s seem to have picked up a lot of traction in popular culture, starting with the success of Mad Men and going out from there; it's got to the point where I've seen clothing stores advertising new lines that are explicitly derived from period styles. That, really, is the core of it, I think - people today are looking to emulate the style of the 1960s while preserving twenty-first century sensibilities. Sure, it had its cultural dark spots, but there was a profound sense of optimism there too; it was the decade of Civil Rights, of the Prague Spring, of Apollo 11... an optimism that would be more than welcome in these cynical times.

Rick Raphael's "The Thirst Quenchers" is at home in the early 1960s, suffused with the sense of technological optimism that reached its zenith in the 1950s and which today is often zeerusted beyond recognition. The story is set in the mid-21st century and follows Troy Braden and Alec Patterson, snow hydrologists in the employ of the United States Division of Agriculture. This is a more important job than it may seem at first, because "Quenchers" is one of those "if this goes on" stories, where a trend of the present is extrapolated into the future. Unlike other roughly contemporaneous stories, which would look ahead and see overpopulation, the future trend that Raphael follows is the increasing demand on water resources.

It's the manner in which this trend is sketched out, and the way society is depicted as responding to it, that makes "The Thirst Quenchers" a true product of that 1950s sensibility. The story depicts a world where the population has grown to a point where the situation demands active, careful management of the United States' water resources - to a point that, from my 21st century perspective, seems both horrifying in its complexity and stunning in its laxness. It begins from the start; we first meet Braden and Patterson ascending a peak in the Sawtooth Range to replace a snow depth monitoring gauge. Such things are of key importance in a world where the water cycle has, effectively, been completely re-engineered to supply the needs of civilization. In the future of "Quenchers," snow isn't allowed to just melt like it does now; rather, after snowstorms, planes are sent out to spray the white stuff "with clouds of black, monomolecular film" that insulates it from the sun so that its meltwater can be directed where it needs to go, when it needs to be there.

As a project in isolation, it would be one thing... but it's not in isolation, and in fact it's probably the least environmentally impacting measure depicted in the story. No, this is a world where "total conservation of every possible drop of moisture" is seen as utterly necessary to the survival of the United States. Where electricity is generated universally by nuclear power and the hydroelectric dams shut down so that the water of their rivers and reservoirs can be redirected into vast pipelines and massive underground aqueducts. The main conflict of the story, after several pages of Braden and Patterson installing the snow gauge and returning to their home base in the thriving metropolis of Spokane, Washington - with a population of over three million in this story's future - centers around an earthquake cracking one of these underground reservoirs, and the desperate struggle to save as much water as possible for the factories and cities that will never, ever let up in their demands.

It's a world where "conservation" obviously means something completely different than today, since it scarcely even recognizes the environment as a thing that exists. Sure, what we recognize today as the environmental movement hadn't had an opportunity to come together when the September '63 Analog hit the stands, but it's still kind of staggering to get a window into some of the assumptions that were prevalent at the time. It's a world where nuclear power is an unqualified good, where nature is something that exists separately from civilization and will get along fine no matter what we do - I'm sure those spawning salmon from drained rivers will just, y'know, evolve legs or something - honestly, it's a world that's bloody unsettling from a modern perspective. The everyday standard is that every drop of water has to be accounted for, that water rations are so tight that bringing five major industrial units online is a substantial and complicated problem, that there are more and more competitors after less and less water... and yet it never departs from that cheery, starry-eyed, can-do, rather dissonant optimism. It's creepy.

It's a story that, bluntly, could not be written today as it is. The cultural assumptions have changed too much in the intervening fifty years. It would be stronger, I think, if there was some sociological speculation in it as well, a look at how American society changed and adapted to not only this kind of extreme water insecurity, but the political changes that would be necessary to manage it - but there aren't any. There are gadgets, though, and a overwhelming spirit that with the right tools, people can solve any problem. There are mobile nuclear reactors and nuclear-powered drilling lasers and nuclear sump pumps.

Today, though, it seems hollow. At the time, I'm sure it was probably intended for the reader to come away with the idea that there will be challenges in the future, but we'll be equipped to solve those problems if only we're smart and courageous enough to tackle them head-on. Today, what I take from it is a sense that this is a world just before the end - that it's desperate to maintain things as they are no matter the cost, without taking firm action to change the situation to something more stable or sustainable. The world of "The Thirst Quenchers" has the tinge of incipient dystopia to it; like society in that world is running on the top of a wheel, having to constantly struggle lest it be crushed.

But you don't have to take my word for it - draw your own conclusions. If you're interested in reading it yourself, the story is available as an ebook from Project Gutenberg.

ANDREW'S RATING: 3/5

Previous Short SF Reviews:

• #18: "Hackers" (Rick Cook)
  
• #17: "Attached to the Land" (Donald J. Bingle)
  
• #16: "The Great Gizmo Machine!" (Pierce Rand and John Forte)
  
• #15: "Alien Psychologist" (Erik Fennel)
  
• #14: "The Frontliners" (Verge Foray)
  
• #13: "Second Chance" (Walter Kubilius and Fletcher Pratt)
  
• #12: "Hades" (Charles F. Ksanda)
  
• #11: "Revolt of the Ants" (Milton Kaletsky)
  
• #10: "Blessed Are the Meekbots" (Daniel F. Galouye)
  
• #9: "To Make a New Neanderthal" (W. Macfarlane)
  
• #8: "Funnel Hawk" (Tom Ligon)
  
• #7: Testing... One, Two, Three, Four" (Steve Chapman)
  
• #6: "Bite" (Lawrence A. Perkins)
  
• #5: "No Shoulder to Cry On" (Hank Davis)
  
• #4: "Crazy Oil" (Brenda Pearce)
  
• #3: "The Saturn Game" (Poul Anderson)
  
• #2: "Job Inaction" (Timothy Zahn)
  
• #1: "Roachstompers" (S.M. Stirling)

Photo: Walk Like a Seagull

There are a lot of birds in Vancouver, especially when you get close to the shore. At the edge of Granville Square yesterday, I found this one - I believe it to be an American Herring Gull, but as I've said before, I'm no ornithologist. Look at the severity of its expression, as if it wants to say something like, "Look at you. You're pathetic. Don't you have anything better to do than spend you lunch break taking photos of birds?"

Well, maybe I don't. Answer that, seagull!

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Justice and the Death of Muammar Gaddafi

Recent events in my life have led me to remind myself of a core truth, one that we tend not to think about or try to explain away, but which remains nonetheless - there's no such thing as natural justice. Justice is a fiction invented by humanity to keep society running, just like the concept of a punishing afterlife came about so that people could take comfort in knowing that even if someone dodged the law in life, they would pay for it in death. But there's no justice in death... there's no justice anywhere except where we make it. Nothing in the world, in and of itself, is fair. Nothing is just. It just is. This was one of the themes behind "The Platinum Desolation."

That's what came back to me when I heard the news this morning that Muammar Gaddafi, erstwhile dictator of Libya, has been confirmed killed in the fall of the last loyalist bastion of Sirte - and with his death comes the effective end of the Libyan Civil War, but of a stench of dictatorship that has been in the air since 1969, the brightest bloom yet of the Arab Spring. Whether the new government of Libya will be able to keep a strong hand on the tiller, or whether this will only expose another country to instability and terror, it's too early to say. Nevertheless, what upset me the most is that Gadaffi is dead - shot in the legs and head and not, as first reported, taken into custody.

Because he's escaped. The victims of Gadaffi's forty-two years in power will only be able to find a hollower justice now. There'll be no trial for Muammar Gadaffi, no judgement, and no sentence passed down - there'll only be the people left behind in his wake, struggling to build up what they can, while he went where no justice can ever follow. It's a road that's been impressed with the footprints of many dictators - Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Kim Il Sung, and so on - but that's the hard thing, isn't it? Dictators, by their very nature, are polarizing figures; what sort of justice would Gadaffi have gotten if he'd been brought to it - would it have been a trial like Nicolae Ceausescu's?

Is justice really justice when the result is self-evident? Would justice really have been done if Gadaffi had lived to be brought to trial, or would it be, like in the case of Ceausescu or Saddam Hussein, vengeance under a different name?

Those questions, I think, are way beyond my pay grade - and the themes that underlie them will be debated back and forth for as long as there are humans to wag their jaws at one another. But there's not even a show of justice here, just death - and I still don't like it.

I found this circa 1986 "Khadaffy Duck" T-shirt at a store in Toronto's Kensington Market in 2003. It hung in the kitchen of my last apartment for three years. It is finally, finally topical.

Photo: A Brief Stop at Blue River

On August 30, 1991, the eastbound Canadian - Via Rail's transcontinental train linking Vancouver and Toronto, since we all know that the Atlantic Ocean starts at Oshawa - made a stop in the small community of Blue River, British Columbia, on the rails between Kamloops and Jasper up in the Interior. Whatever the reason for the stop, it gave the passengers at least a little bit of time to stretch their legs. This image is actually a screen capture of the video my grandfather took with his trusty Camcorder, with some steam curling around one of the dome cars and the train stretching off into the distance.


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Quaff Review #16: Mana Energy Potion

Not all drinks are made equally. For the past fifteen installments of this series, I've taken a look at craft brews, microbrews, and interesting or generally unusual brews like, say, Sparks Plus. Still, they've all been brews, beers of some kind or another - but there's more to drinking than alcohol. Shock, horror, I know, but I thought it was time for a bit of variety - energetic variety.

The Canadian market for energy drinks has grown explosively over the last ten years. Back when I was in high school, I don't recall them being readily available at all - the best around was Jolt Cola, and even that got pulled off the shelves eventually for its "excessive" caffeine content, later going bankrupt. It wasn't until the early 21st century that I was first introduced to energy drinks in the form of Jones Whoop Ass Energy Cola, and even then I only ever found it in one particular store in Peterborough.

But that was years ago, and it's an energy drink world now, from Red Bull and Starbucks Doubleshot to the Happy Bunny-branded Spaz Juice, a can of which has been standing at the back of my refrigerator since 2010 - and then there's the specifically targeted kinds, for people who want their energy drinks to dovetail with their lifestyle.

Kinds like Mana Energy Potion - a kind of 50 milliliter energy shot "made by gamers, for gamers." It's actually two varieties, the blue Mana Potion and the red Health Potion, originally made available in 2008, online and in select brick-and-mortar retailers - more so in the United States than Canada, it seems. I found mine at Golden Age Collectables on Granville Street in Vancouver, and it's the only place I currently know of to find them in all of British Columbia. Admittedly, though, it's not like I've actually been looking.

The Mana Potion is on the left, and the Health Potion is on the right.

The marketing to gamers starts from the beginning, with the design of the bottles rather similar to Super Health and Super Mana Potions from World of Warcraft, though these potions seem to be wholly free of felweed and netherbloom. That's not to say that they don't contain a panoply of sheer stuff - it was actually by reading the Supplement Facts on the back of the bottles that intrigued me to these energy shots; if you've got a need for vitamins, these will set you up. For instance, the Health Potion contains one hundred percent of your daily value of Vitamin C... and 1600% of the daily value of Vitamin B6. Still, the real winner in this sweepstakes is the Mana Potion, which contains a staggering six thousand, six hundred, and sixty-seven percent of the daily value of Vitamin B12... which works out to four hundred micrograms.

Unlike other energy drinks I've encountered, there's no medical warning on these potions to restrict intake, presumably because there's not much there to take in - only fifty milliliters, comfortably shotglass-sized. The manufacturer's website recommends that intake be separated out by twenty-four hours, but just to be certain, I gave the Mana Potion a week to settle out through my system before starting in on the Health.

The Mana Potion is depicted in advertising as being a deep blue, and it is likely a function of the yellow of the shotglass that it appeared rather green once I poured it out. The smell is something rather outside my experience when it comes to drinks - the best I can reach for is that it was vaguely chemical. As for the taste, it begins with a sharp citrus flavor, but this is quickly overwhelmed by an incredible bitterness, beyond the league of everything I've reviewed here except for Earthquake High Energy Lager, and look how that ended up. To its credit the bitterness did subside quickly - though that was just the start. Fifteen minutes after I drained the potion my head was spinning, and I was left with a headache that lasted for a couple of hours and didn't really go away until I was able to get some nice outside air. Conclusion: absolutely vile.

So it was with some trepidation that I approached the Health Potion the following weekend - absolutely I tried these on a weekend, I wasn't about to go to the office not knowing what these would do. I expected bitterness, discomfort, and so on - what the Health Potion gave me was entirely different. Rather than the Mana Potion's vaguely chemical tang, the deep red Health Potion smelled almost like a used gym bag, and "saturated," as if there was a lot of stuff in it. The taste - is considerably milder than the Mana Potion, citrus-flavored but far weaker, and it's also rather sweet. It took a moment to figure out why it was so familiar - it tastes like cough syrup. Still, there was no noticeable aftertaste, and it didn't leave me feeling like hell afterward. The website states they don't need to be chilled, but put them in your refrigerator anyway. Cooling them down takes some of the edge off.

So that's it - though if this is the best all those warriors and mages have got to replenish their powers, don't be surprised when you graph the precipitous drop in their numbers. Americans will be able to find these at Fry's Electronics, f.y.e., Hastings, Hot Topic, and ThinkGeek, which for some reason cannot ship them outside of the United States. At Golden Age, they retail for $3.99 each, and this appears to be the base price... and honestly, beer is a hell of a lot cheaper.

ANDREW'S RATING: 1.5/5

Previous Quaff Reviews

• #15: HE'BREW Messiah Bold
  
• #14: Mackinac Pale Ale
  
• #13: Ola Dubh Special Reserve 40
  
• #12: Hitachino Nest Japanese Classic Ale
  
• #11: La Loubécoise
  
• #10: Summer Honey Seasonal Ale
  
• #9: Earthquake High Gravity Lager
  
• #8: Route des épices
  
• #7: Sparks Plus
  
• #6: Hurricane High Gravity Lager
  
• #5: L'Indépendante
  
• #4: Antigravity Light Ale
  
• #3: Nektar
  
• #2: Innis & Gunn Original
  
• #1: Abbey Belgian Spiced Ale

Photo: Presidio Crow

This is no Vancouver crow. I found this one in the grounds of the Presidio in San Francisco, hopping around in the grass. Look at its eyes - looks like it's not that happy about its cover being blown.


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Scheduled Track Chaos

It's a fact - rails get weathered, rails get old, rails need to be replaced. The SkyTrain, for all of its skyness, is still a train and thus is not immune to the necessity of maintenance. Generally speaking, though, in the year that I've been living here it's something that I didn't need to consider - presumably, the track got polished when it needed to, and the details were none of my concern.

Now, TransLink has gone and made it my concern - mine, and everyone in Metro Vancouver who uses the Expo Line. For this entire weekend, TransLink is undertaking what appears to be a substantial maintenance program between Edmonds Station and Metrotown Station. Through that portion of the system, eastbound and westbound trains are obligated to use a single track, and because head-on collisions would not reflect well on its transit boosting, the train frequency on the tracks between Waterfront and Columbia has been dialed down substantially - by about a factor of four - to accomodate the work. But throughout a Saturday?

"They are replacing rails. They cannot possibly do the work in a few hours." That's what TransLink representatives have been posting on the organization's Twitter feed again and again, but it only explains the question - it doesn't answer it, and poses more. For example, why couldn't the work be staggered over a longer period of time, focusing on individually shorter segments of track, with train frequencies being reduced in the evening and early morning but left as normal during the height of the day, and with shuttle buses helping to pick up the slack? This is how Toronto handles its tunnel maintenance - the extremes of the lines close a few hours earlier than usual, with buses substituted over the inactive portion. Is it that the ICTS design that was picked for SkyTrain back in the 80s can't be compartmentalized like this?

I understand the need to do the work; over the last twenty-five years, the SkyTrain has become an essential part of Metro Vancouver's transit infrastructure. It's critical that it remains able to handle the passenger loads placed on it without breaking, since that would be bad. What's also critical, however, is for TransLink to effectively communicate projects that disrupt such a massive swath of the network. In my opinion, it's really dropped the ball on this one.

Passengers wait for a westbound train at New Westminster Station on Saturday, October 15.

For a public transit operator, communication is essential. I'll grant that TransLink did do a good job keeping people informed about the delays... when they were already in the middle of them. What it didn't do was adequately inform people about what they were going to face in the weeks and days leading up to it. I mean, it's not as if this came out of nowhere. There are already notifications on the station update boards about how service will be running a Sunday schedule on Remembrance Day, but notifications of rail replacement? I didn't see so much as one. They did have the boards out yesterday that helpfully suggested adding ten or fifteen minutes to your regular commute time - which is laughably optimistic; when I was attempting to get to Vancouver yesterday my train was held up at 22nd Street Station for ten minutes alone.

"The signage [informing passengers of upcoming maintenance] has been up at all stations for a few weeks. There was the same maintenance last weekend too," dixitque TransLink. I remember that maintenance - I wouldn't exactly call it the same, not when it's out past Columbia in the Surrey bottleneck; with Columbia still able to act as a line terminus, last week's maintenance only effected Expo trains on their legs south of the Fraser. What's more, I ride the SkyTrain every day, and I don't remember any such signage - the first times I encountered any notification of last week's or this week's track maintenance were when I made it to the platforms of Columbia and New Westminster, respectively.

The platforms themselves are barely restrained chaos that underscore just how many people use the system. On an ordinary Saturday, you've got alternating Expo and Millennium Line trains passing through about once every two or three minutes, and that's enough to handle the passenger loads. The abbreviated Expo-only service isn't - and the station dwell times, for some damn reason, have not been adjusted in recognition of that fact. When my eastbound train passed through 22nd Street Station, passengers weren't able to finish alighting before the doors started chiming to close. Boarding? Forget it! We were just lucky the doors weren't pushed open enough times to trigger a train shutdown.

To me, this weekend's experiences with SkyTrain delays illustrates how vital it is to the region through all the people that rely on it to get where they're going... it also suggests that it wasn't necessarily designed with a great eye toward the future. I've said it before and I will say it again - the system is full of bottlenecks; the Surrey leg of the Expo Line is only the most visible. I have to wonder how many riders had yesterday as their first experience with the SkyTrain, and how many potential riders would be soured on it as a result.

The best part, though... the best part is that, for the track work scheduled for next weekend - this time, between Edmonds and Columbia Stations - is classed as being of "minor" severity. Because, you know, cascading delays throughout the system is just one of those things. Good one, TransLink - you should take that to Lafflines or something.

Photo: There From Almost Everywhere

There are some cities that it seems everyone wants to go to, and one way to tell is to look at the airlines that fly into its airport. Los Angeles International Airport is one such place; it's the fifth-busiest in the world, and planes fly there from every continent in the world except Africa and Antarctica. When I left there in December 2009, I managed to take this shot during the early stages of takeoff that shows the variety of airlines that drop their wheels at LAX; from the left there are planes from TACA Airlines, Cathay Pacific, Korean Air, EVA Air, and Air Tahiti Nui - that last one is an uncommon find, since LAX is the only place in North and South America where it lands. As for the last one, the small one - I have no idea what airline that is.

Incidentally, this talk of planes and airlines reminds me that even seventeen years after its initial release, Aerobiz Supersonic for the Super Nintendo remains an excellent game.

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Flying the Flag Ragged

If things in May had gone a bit different, and the map of Canada hadn't been painted quite so blue, Air Canada's flight attendants could well be on strike right now. Whether or not the situation would have hashed out the same way is an academic, but if Canada had continued to be run by a hamstrung minority government the same way it had been since 2006, my own suspicion is that the government would have stood back and let it happen, if only to keep the Liberals and NDP from making noise and possibly precipitating yet another election.

However, this is the world in which the Conservatives have a majority, and so much like Chretien's Liberals from 1993 to 2001, what the Opposition does is irrelevant; they don't have enough bodies to throw into the gears of government. So, as the Vancouver Sun reported on Wednesday, there was really nothing preventing Labour Minister Lisa Raitt from asking the Canadian Industrial Relations Board to take a look at the proposed contract that's the source of the acrimony between the flight attendants and Air Canada management - "to determine whether a disruption of service would pose a health and safety risk to the public," and while that investigation is going on, Air Canada is obligated to continue services "to the extent necessary to prevent an immediate and serious danger to the safety or health of the public."

Which means, in simple English, no strike for you.

I don't like the idea of governments involving themselves in labor disputes, outside of very narrow areas. For issues like transit strikes, like the one the Toronto Transit Commission held back in 2008, I can understand the necessity of government intervention; Toronto as a city literally could not run without its public transit system, and police, fire, and EMS departments provide services so critical that a universal, sustained job action on their part would mean that people would die - but there are ways to square the circle in these cases, to undertake a job action without putting people at risk.

I think most people would agree that Air Canada flight attendants are not in quite the same position as police, fire, and EMS services. No one will die if they don't get their miniature can of pop or package of Bits and Bites at 35,000 feet. Yet, nevertheless, the federal government feels compelled to ride to Air Canada's rescue, to yet again prop up an airline that's built itself with so many tax dollars, it shouldn't rightly be considered a private company.

It would be ridiculous if it wasn't so transparent.

An Air Canada Airbus A321 is ready to take on baggage at Toronto Pearson International Airport in December 2009.

Here's what I think - the Conservatives, flush with a sense of power now that they have the majority they'd been chasing for five years, want to make an example of the Air Canada flight attendants. Remember the postal strike a few months ago? That dragged on seemingly for weeks, and any back-to-work legislation would have needed Opposition support. Well, it's a different world now. What was once an issue between the employer and the workers has now been complicated by the government, that organization that's supposed to represent the interest of all the people, taking sides and standing back-to-back with management.

The Conservatives can spin whatever rhetoric they want about this, but that's all it is - rhetoric. Legislating an essential service back to work, whether or not it's officially called that, is one thing - this is entirely another. Flight attendants do not represent an essential service in that sense of the term. The planes can still be loaded, fueled, and flown. The government has no business sticking its nose into this. The idea that a suspension of Air Canada services would pose a "pose a health and safety risk" to the public is ludicrous - I'm sure WestJet would have loved the opportunity to fill the gap. I have thus far been unable to find an airport where the only scheduled flights are flown by Air Canada; thankfully, our national flag carrier does not monopolize the friendly skies.

I suppose the Conservatives really are friendly to business, all right. From their conduct we can infer that they're also hostile to the workers who make those business work.

Photo: A Flurry of Flashing Steel

There were a lot of things to see at VCON 36, and one in particular that I'd never run into at any other convention - a demonstration of actual swords. Academie Duello, the swordplay academy in downtown Vancouver, gave a few demonstrations during the convention. Swords tend to show up a lot in science fiction and fantasy literature, and it's instructive to see them being used by modern-day swashbucklers who know how to use them; unlike fistfights in TV and movies, swordfights really do sound like that, though they also tend to be "blink and you'll miss it."

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The Wonderful, Wonderful Q Machine

People are always looking for the next big way to get something from nothing. We've seen it again and again in the financial world, with banks filling their coffers from trading toxic assets that weren't actually worth anything to begin with, and it's there in the history of space exploration too. Space is big, space is vast, space takes a long time to get through; just think of how much easier everything could be if you could get through it fast. It's too bad space doesn't work the same way as Earth does - if you want to move through a vacuum, the only way we've got is to throw crap out the back of your ship in a stunning proof of the Newtonian principles of action and reaction.

People tend to chafe at this. As a result, there's never any shortage of inventors who claim to have built something that would shatter the foundations of modern physics - a reactionless drive, a mode of thrust that doesn't throw any crap out the back of the ship. Considering that ships would need to carry a hell of a lot of crap with them to get anywhere in a reasonable time, a reactionless drive would really make things a hell of a lot easier for those spaceship engineers.

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the standard bearer of the field was the Dean drive, a purported reactionless thruster that was championed by John W. Campbell and G. Harry Stine over at Analog, presumably because they really wanted to believe. The drive has since been demonstrated to not be a drive at all, its thrust illusory based on friction with what it's sitting on... not exactly workable for a space drive.

But fear not! We may yet be able to transform submarines into spaceships! Because, ladeez and germs, here comes... the QDrive! It is, according to the website, some sort of radiation pressure thruster designed in such a way that a "differential in radiation pressure generates an unbalanced force that creates thrust... without use of propellant." It's being developed by Cannae LLC, a company apparently focused solely around the development of the drive, presumably deriving its name from the Battle of Cannae out of the hope that the modern scientific orthodoxy will play the part of the Romans, and that the metaphor will not go any further than that... after all, Rome eventually annihilated Carthage.

That's incredible, folks! Just imagine what you could do with something like this! Those QDrive people must be just bursting with ideas...

...well, okay then! (Screen capture from QDrive website.)

The most important sentence in the entire sphere of science, I believe, is this: extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. If you claim that there's an invisible pink dragon living in your garage, you'd better have some good information backing it up if people don't want to think you're crazy. If you claim that pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year is having no effect on the planetary climate whatsoever, it behooves you to offer an explanation for what it's doing instead. And if you've put together a machine that appears to give you something for nothing, it's your responsibility to look very, very closely at it.

I'll admit, not all thrust modes use propellant in the "throw crap out the back of the ship" sense. Solar sails are the usual suspect here; they generate thrust by the pressure of radiation in the solar wind. I note that this is rather similar to the explanation as to how the QDrive works - all I'll say is that not only am I not a physicist, I don't even play one on TV.

Nevertheless, for something like this it's only proper to be skeptical. If an actual reactionless drive ever comes along, it would thrust past skepticism.