Letter from Jyri (Finland): Some quite interesting reflections and observations

Just a quick comment and then Jyri's good letter.  Predicting weather here in our specific local Pocatello setting is precarious.  There are several different weather systems, all fluky -- one from the Seattle area, and another from the Utah and Nevada region to the south/southwest, and another straight from California.  We also have differences of significance elevation-wise even within greater Pocatello -- and this engenders differences in temps.  Most of Pocatello is about 4500 feet in elevation but we up here are over 5,000.  It can snow here but not below us.  In addition, there are high hills and mountains all around.

There are also several different weatherpersons in the several different TV outlets.  Lack of consensus can certainly occur.  A saving grace of that is -- if you don't like one prediction, go to another.  Best, H.

Hunter,

First of all our best wishes for the New Year.

Your local weather forecast on the Net tells me it's down to 18F/-8 C over there and snow expected today. If you've got the snow cover and if the wind isn't too bad that's not too bad for cross-country skiing or snowshoe walking. Over here  on the other had,  we've had one of the warmest winters on record, +4 C as I write this and no sign of snow, though we're told things will change at the end of the week (-10 C and snowstorms predicted)

One of the problems of a long wet winter is the risk of trees getting blown down in storms because of the unfrozen wet soil getting loose around the roots, and we've had a few quite bad storms over the past couple of months.  It's a humbling feeling to wake up in the early hours of the morning at the country place and just listen to the wind roaring in the trees, waiting to hear a cracking sound. Or driving out there from the city after a storm to check on things. Fortunately no damage yet. There's an old tall spruce, maybe 55 ft. or more, not too far from the house that I really have to get rid of, though I don't want to. I'm not a "tree-hugger" per se, but there's a spiritual dimension about old trees that you have to be aware of and try to respect whenever possible. It's too tricky for me to cut down, and my chain saw is too small for the job. I'll have to get one of the locals to help me. The last time I got a couple of guys to do some felling, I'd marked the trees to go, but that didn't stop of the crew from starting by cutting down a tree on the neighbour's property.  Phoning the neighbour about it, I prayed that the lady of the household - a formidable woman - wouldn't answer. Fortunately, her husband took the call, accepted my apologies and asked us only to cut it up, pile the timber and leave it there,

The government here is cooking up a plan to revise automobile taxation, shifting the tax, or taxes, from the purchase and tax on fuel to a mileage basis. It's rational as such and one of the arguments is to make new, safer  and ecologically improved vehicles more accessible by lowering the tax on their purchase. At present, the tax on new vehicles accunts for something like 25% of the price, with slight variance according on the  CO2 emission level of the engine. The result is that the present system encourages the use of old cars (average age 12 yrs), which can be either good or bad. Anyway, the new plan, still on the drawing board, is to fit all cars with an electronic device for satellite tracking of mileage, with taxes levied accordingly. Criticism of this idea has mainly focused on its cost and other practical aspects, but very little on what I would call the outright abomination of having a system that can track and record the (in principle) free movement of citizens from one place to another. I find it very strange that this basic libertarian dimension, or whatever one might call it, has not been noted in the debate here, at least not yet . The Minister for Traffic and Communications, a woman of the Left Alliance, assures us that only mileage will be recorded and people should not worry about an eye in the sky watching their movements on the roads and highways. B-s say I. If such technology is put in place uses can certainly be found for it that encroach on basic liberties and no one will be told about it.

Of course, I and most of my cronies at the public sauna are up in arms about it, but I think we have still some way to go before  gaining political momentum as a force to be reckoned with. Quite seriously though, one of the problems here is that we don't have the kind of libertarian tradition that some other countries have that would raise hell about something like this. 

Till later,

Jyri

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq / 
St. Francis Abenaki / St. Regis Mohawk 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO

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