Banking Secrecy Laws and Weddell Seals are a Winning Combination

My shoes leak. My shoes always leak. I keep telling myself that I need to buy shoes that don't leak but I don't tell myself this at the right time. I tell myself I should buy new shoes when its raining but by then my feet are already wet and there doesn't seem much point. Of course I don't buy new shoes when it isn't raining because my shoes don't leak then. I may be the first person in my apartment block to get trench foot. Even my slippers have holes in them (although skilfully stuffed with newspaper).

As might be seen from the above its raining again. Australia is supposed to be the driest continent inhabited continent in the world but you wouldn't believe it if you had visited me over the last few months. Besides the term "inhabited" is a cop out. Penguins are people too and that puts Antarctica back in the game. Actually penguins aren't people, if they were people they'd move somewhere warmer. What is the point of trying to live in Antarctica anyway? People worry about penguins and whales and seals but I personally think any species that chooses to live its life in a frozen hellscape is just begging for extinction. Take the Weddell seal for example. The Weddell seal lives its entire life in Antarctic waters rather than swimming north in Winter like the marginally more sensible whales. In order to breath it scrapes a hole in the sea ice with its teeth. The Weddell seal has the shortest life span of any seal because all that scraping wears its teeth out and then it starves to death. Can you imagine deliberately encouraging your doom simply so you can continue to live in the most god forsaken place on earth?

There can only be one thing more truly stupid than living your life in a wretched place like the Antarctic and then dying because you can't scrape a hole in the ice any more. This is when an animal that lives in a much nicer climate travels to such a place for no particularly good reason. Human race, step forward. Yes, its true. The Weddell seal may be stupid but it was born in the Antarctic and knows no better. Humans are born, for the most part, in much nicer places but insist on travelling to Antarctica anyway. I can almost see the Weddell seals gathering around Scott of the Antarctic's frozen corpse and wondering what the hell he thought he was playing at.

Humans have always done this. No matter how bleak or miserable a place is some portion of the population always seems to want to go somewhere worse. As I mentioned before Iceland was colonised by people from Norway for crying out loud. Of course there may be reasons; population pressures, persecution of some kind, the possibility of resources to exploit, sheer mind buggering stupidity the list goes on.

The Human race started off in Africa, that's an ok continent. All right there are some deserts and heaps of lions and crocodiles but by and large it seems reasonably liveable. But that wasn't good enough for Humans oh no. The first place we went to was apparently the Middle East. Does anybody think that was an improvement? After that emigration becomes a bit more understandable as people tried to get the hell away from the place but that initial surge is hard to explain.

I suspect that a good part of our urge to explore comes from the fact that certain people are encouraged to go somewhere else and see what's there. If you take a look at many of the ground breaking pioneers and explorers we see a group of dangerously unstable malcontents that any self respecting nation might have been glad to get rid of. Russia colonised Siberia by the simple expedient of sending prisoners there until some of them didn't die. Francisco Pizarro who conquered half of South America was a ruthless mercenary who ran out of wars in Europe. Britain colonised a third of the world as a means of employing otherwise useless offspring of the ruling classes. Oh, and money. People will go to hell if they think they can make a buck. They will stay if the money flow seems permanent. Antarctica is one set of banking secrecy laws away from being the new Liechtenstein.

Think about it for the moment. They both have lots of snow, a low population and there really isn't a good reason for going to or living in either place. Of course the weather is better in Liechtenstein but on the other hand you don't get Weddell seals in Liechtenstein. And Weddell seals are rather cute.