We now introduce Wells’s Rules of Politics. I have been working on them for years. So far I have only come up with two. If your goal is to understand Canadian politics, there is no obvious need for more than two rules. Here they are:
Rule 1: For any given situation, Canadian politics will tend toward the least exciting possible outcome.
Rule 2: If everyone in Ottawa knows something, it’s not true.
The rules are closely related. Usually when Everyone Knows what’s about to happen, they’re really only hoping it will happen so their boring lives (see Rule 1) will become more interesting.
Paul Wells, “My Rules of Politics”, Macleans, 2003-07-28
March 24, 2010
QotD: The rules of Canadian politics
Using carbon dating to detect fake vintage wines
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me this link on a subject I’ve blogged about before: detecting fakery and fraud in the fine and vintage wine market:
Up to 5% of fine wines are not from the year the label indicates, according to Australian researchers who have carbon dated some top dollar wines.
The team of researchers think “vintage fraud” is widespread, and have come up with a test that uses radioactive carbon isotopes left in the atmosphere by atomic bomb tests last century and a method used to date prehistoric objects to determine what year a wine comes from — its vintage.
[. . .]
“The problem goes beyond ordinary consumers being overcharged for a bottle of expensive wine from a famous winery with a great year listed on the label, that isn’t the right vintage year,” Jones said.
“Connoisseurs collect vintage wines and prices have soared with ‘investment wines’ selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars a case at auction,” he said.
I read Benjamin Wallace’s The Billionaire’s Vinegar which was rather an eye-opener about both the rare wine trade and the potential for fraud in that market (posts here and here). It’s nice to see that technology is coming to the rescue in cases where this kind of fraud is suspected.
Comments Off on Using carbon dating to detect fake vintage wines
The Guild breaks into comics
Didn’t it used to be the other way around, with comics graduating to live action shows or movies? Well, in this case, Felicia Day’s brilliant web series The Guild is moving to comic form, at least for three issues:
It’s too bad she has to work on her new Syfy movie today. Otherwise, Felicia Day would totally be stopping by any and all Toronto comic shops.
An actress, writer and much-loved geek goddess, Day has successfully transplanted her popular Web series The Guild from the Internet to the page as scribe for Dark Horse Comics’ charming new The Guild, a three-issue miniseries debuting in stores today.
She’s reminded of the one random day in Barnes & Noble when she first saw a DVD of The Guild, the award-winning online comedy that for three seasons has followed a girl named Cyd (Day) and her guild of eccentric fellow online gamers known as the Knights of Good.
“I kind of geeked out and took a picture of it for my own posterity. But I’m such a book and comic lover. It’s just seeing something that has my name on it. And then my face twice on one of the covers! So that’s kind of like, ‘Ugh, get over yourself,’ ” Day says, laughing.
“I can’t help but get a little sick of my face, but it is exciting. It’s fun to see myself drawn.”
I’m sure hoping that the no-longer-accurately-titled “World’s Biggest Book Store” has a copy in stock when I visit there tonight.
Update, 25 March: No, they didn’t. They also didn’t have John Scalzi’s The God Engines or The Trade of Queens, the final book in the Merchant Princes series by Charles Stross. I did manage to get one of the four items I was looking for, The New Vichy Syndrome: Why European Intellectuals Surrender to Barbarism by Theodore Dalrymple.
Comments Off on The Guild breaks into comics
Another “don’t pay attention to the facts” editorial
James Delingpole looks at the long, sad decline of The Economist from a bastion of common sense and rationality to today’s same-as-all-the-rest advocacy publication:
Can anyone tell me how The Economist got its title? I’m guessing it was probably founded in the early 18th century by some crazed charlatan called, perhaps, Zachariah Economist, who, because of the unfortunate coincidence of his surname managed to persuade thousands of gullible fools to part with their shirts on one of the South Sea Bubble companies. The one whose prospectus read “A company for carrying out an undertaking of great advantage, but nobody to know what it is.”
One thing I know for sure: The Economist’s name can have no relationship whatsoever with the “dismal science” of economics because if it did then never in a million years could it have run an editorial (and feature) as lame, wrong-headed, intellectually dishonest and positively dangerous as the one it produced this week on the subject of Climate Change.
When I started reading The Economist, back in the early 1980s, I was very impressed by the quality of writing and the rather eclectic things they covered every week. I took up a subscription and it was something I never dumped in the garbage (or, later, the recycling bin), as there was always an interested party willing to take it off my hands.
I have to assume either an ownership change or very heavy turnover at the top of the editorial chain happened in the late 1990s, as the “tone” of the coverage changed significantly. The editorials and the choice of articles switched away from a free market emphasis to become much more like a British version of Time or Newsweek. The long-standing defence of free markets dwindled down to the occasional desultory mention of free trade, as they became more pro-state and pro-managed trade. I gave up my subscription a few years after that, as I found I was reading less and less of every issue. Where once I’d read the majority of the articles, at the end, I was just reading the odd editorial, an occasional feature, and the arts and sciences pages at the back.
From what James Delingpole writes, even the science pages have “turned”:
So, let me get this right: as even the Economist admits, scientists don’t really have a clue what the future holds regarding global warming. But that still doesn’t mean we shouldn’t DO something. Anything is better than nothing.
Let’s transpose that level of lame-brainery to the world of business, shall we? The real, decisions-have-consequences world in which, I imagine, most of The Economist’s readers operate.
So, we currently have a proposed scheme by Global PLC to spend around $45 trillion (that’s the International Energy Agency’s best estimate) combatting a problem which may or may not exist. The potential returns on this investment? Virtually nil. As the Spanish “Green Jobs” disaster has demonstrated, for every Green Job created by government intervention, another 2.2 jobs are lost in the real economy. It will also shave between 1 and 5 per cent off global GDP, create massive new layers of business-stifling taxation and regulation, and cause energy costs to rise to stratospheric new levels. Nice.
This combines the pro-state preferences of the current editorial group with the “consensus” science of the current science correspondant. I’m glad I gave up my subscription when I did . . .
