Hallowe'en

The seasons of gibbering, ghosts, goblins, and ghouls has been extended this year for an extra four days of politicians, polls, and predictions, before the ballots, bluster and blame sweep over us.

As the long time reader in this space knows all too well, the Spy's manse is an igloo in the far frozen North of the arbitrary 49th, a country very like Russia's southern neighbour in that it is right next door to that toxic autocratic oligarchy and has a large ethnic Ukrainian population Putin and his allies want to exterminate. He recently pondered aloud (in addition to here) whether the U.S. election would trumpet its invasion and annexation of Canada before the Russians do it or after. His listener suggested the two might rather partition the Dominion between then, given that one of the presidential candidates is a good buddy of Putin. Hmmm. Food for thought. Perhaps "54-40 or fight" will come true after all. But said macho candidate, if elected, might not want la Belle Province. Too much Poutine there; sounds like a feminine form of his political buddy's name, so he'd only want to grope or protect it, whether it wanted either or not.

Ah but by the time this is read, the outcome will be known, half the voters will be angry and either want to "fight like (insert a globally warmed place)" or become refugees outside their former democracy less they become targets for nine guns at once for having supported the wrong person. The pollsters meanwhile will still make a living, only now by explaining why their methods had not correctly predicted the results.

However, unless one polled a few thousand voters in every state, got a detailed demographic profile from each, including who they'd voted for in the past, what they thought of the major party policies, their favorability ratings, who they favored in the actual vote, and who likely they were to vote, compared that with the last two elections from similar poll populations, corrected for skewed samples, the propensity for lying, whether the wind was blowing from the east, the time of day, the person's education (and in what), how much, if anything, they knew or cared about the candidates personally and politically, and whether the interviewee were a woman with a husband listening nearby, the Spy would have to predict that the outcome of said poll would be...wrong. They might as well read tea leaves or taro cards for a living--too many unknown variables to do good statistics. Polling is an art, not yet a science.

But, take note

all the "evangelical christian" men out there who support racism, hatred of and lies about immigrants, demeaning women, exploiting the poor, taking revenge on dissenters, and supporting greedy dictators at home and abroad. Read your Bible, especially the parts where God says he hates injustice, mistreating foreigners, and worshiping false gods. In particular consider Ezekial 16:49-50 "Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy."Whoops. What about the reason usually given for Him destroying that and its sister city? Read that part too, taking note that God had already decided on their destruction well before that sorry incident of threatening visitors took place. Rampant injustice is the stated reason. What took place the evening He visited Lot in the guise of an angel was incidental to an ingrained culture of injustice. So, be careful what you ask for. You might get it.

Meanwhile, the frozen North

of Canada has political drama of its own. Last month's British Columbia election ended in a predictable virtual tie between the governing socialist party and an upstart Conservative one that got about two percent the previous election, whose leader was kicked out of the Liberal opposition party for questioning climate science, and whose former party in turn imploded and gave up mid campaign because it was nearly broke and sinking in the polls to rise no more. It also was not a true classical conservative party (government should be as small as possible and as large as strictly necessary) and had some candidates with pretty wild views.

The now re-elected but chastised government, sans several cabinet ministers has a one seat majority, but that vanishes if the combined members elect a member of that squeaky margin to the Speaker's chair. 'Course, in the worst case (for them) of a tie vote, their speaker could dutifully cast her vote for the Premier's bunch. Interesting factoid: this is the first parliament in Canada's history at either the Federal or Provincial level to have the majority of its members be women. It therefore has potential to be more...humane? competent? sensible?

What did the Spy do? Glad you both asked. Well, his riding boasted three candidates, one for the governing party (a fairly mild socialist lot--didn't expropriate anyone' business or home, threw a few bones to union organizers, though only the ones they counted as friends and allies), did the usual socialist thing of turning a $6B surplus into a $9B deficit without blinking an eye or having a clue where the money had gone, but otherwise and surprisingly only mildly mismanaged the Province).

Mind you, the bar was extremely low after the previous Liberal government's years' long mismanagement. The second local hopeful was a local career politician who'd been on the school board, had previously run for other offices and lost, but was now under the resurrected Conservative banner. The third was an independent of the FOITRF ("Far Out In The Right Field ") persuasion. For the first election in fifty five years, the Spy did the previously unthinkable. He toyed voting for the socialists as the least objectionable of the lot or voting for the Conservative (if he had known him) while holding his nose against the party. But in the end he could not stomach voting for any party, knew there would be no box labelled "none of the above" so stayed home.

"Is that all? Where's the tech stuff?"

Ah, but the Spy's schtick has always been the subtitle of his near thousand-page textbook "The Fourth Civilization," namely "Ethics, Technology, and Society," and this time around, he'll save the ubiquitous, M4, and other tech for later and concentrate on the first two this time. Perhaps a post-mortem on November fifth will be tacked on as well. No predictions now though; he's not a pollster.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is Professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fifty-fourth year as a high school and university teacher in 2024. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations and participated in developing industry standards both nationally and internationally. He is a long-time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (both dead tree and online formats) since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular participant and speaker at churches, schools, and academic meetings and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and lived in the Langley/Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. from 1969 to 2021 and cancer happened, so he latterly continues alone, depending heavily on family and friends to manage.

URL s for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: https://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : https://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : https://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : https://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : https://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : https://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: https://www.arjay.ca

TechEthics Site (Fourth edition of text; the fifth is in preparation) : httpss://www.arjaybooks.com/EthTech/index.htm

Publisher's Site: https://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

URL s for products mentioned this month:

Ubiquity Wi-Fi devices Canadian store: https://ca.store.ui.com/ca/en?category=wifi-flagship