Quotulatiousness

November 11, 2010

Chinese wine buyers get all-VQA store that Ontario wine buyers can’t have

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Cancon, China, Law, Wine — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 12:56

I’m all in favour of improving the visibility and availability of Ontario’s VQA wines in other markets, so this news is both good and infuriating simultaneously:

A couple of weeks ago the Government of Ontario announced the opening of an all-VQA wine store in China (in the city of Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province). Oh happy day — now the Chinese can drink (and copy) all the Ontario icewine they want . . . but this begs the question: why should the Chinese have an advantage that we Ontarians do not? Do the Chinese drink more Ontario wine? Why is it so important that China get the opportunity to drink Ontario wines that folks in Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury can not?

I have nothing against the Chinese getting their hands on our wine; I’m glad to see a country embrace our wines as so many of us have embraced their food. But seriously, why should folks living in China have more and better access to Ontario wines then those of us living in the actual province. When I first heard the news, all I could say was an incredulous, “Seriously?” Has Ontario really become, as wine writer Dean Tudor puts it, every time he mentions Ontario, “a have not province”? When it comes to our own wine industry it keeps getting more and more “have not” and won’t get.

See what I mean? Great that they’re opening outlets in a new foreign market, but we still can’t get that kind of opportunity to buy here at home? All-VQA stores have been discussed (and rejected) before, but they’re apparently a great idea for foreign markets.

Update: Fixed the broken link.

Even more reason to believe that ACTA is a bad deal

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Law, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:45

From the folks at BoingBoing:

New revelations on ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), a secretive global copyright being privately negotiated by rich countries away from the UN: ACTA will require ISPs to police trademarks the way they currently police copyright. That means that if someone accuses you of violating a trademark with a web-page, blog-post, video, tweet, etc, your ISP will be required to nuke your material without any further proof, or be found to be responsible for any trademark violations along with you. And of course, trademark violations are much harder to verify than copyright violations, since they often hinge on complex, fact-intensive components like tarnishment, dilution and genericization. Meaning that ISPs are that much more likely to simply take all complaints at face-value, leading to even more easy censorship of the Internet with nothing more than a trumped-up trademark claim.

More on gerrymandering

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: — Nicholas @ 08:41

Zombie explains the weird and distorted results of gerrymandering:

Not every state redraws its district lines according to gerrymandering principles. Some have independent supposedly bipartisan commissions to do the job. But most states, alas, leave it up to power-hungry politicians. Republican, Democratic, it doesn’t matter: given half a chance they will gerrymander the hell out of their constituents. And there’s not a damn thing we can do about it, because the system is self-perpetuating: the politicians we elect through these gerrymandered districts (and that includes state-level gerrymandered districts) are the ones making the rules, and they’re not likely to give up their grip on the controls.

Adding to the craziness: There are federal rules in place to ensure that ethnic minorities don’t get completely disenfranchised by racial gerrymandering, so states often have to also incorporate race into the mix, going to extreme lengths to create districts populated mostly by this-or-that racial group — federally mandated “packing.”

What makes things complicated is that not every state is consistently under the control of the same party census after census. So while the Republicans in a given state may have gerrymandered the district boundaries after the 1980 census, the Democrats may have had a majority after the 1990 census and counter-gerrymandered the existing districts; in 2000 a divided legislature may have argued over and re-re-counter-gerrymandered those districts, and so on. The end result is often what we see today: ludicrous, labyrinthine district boundaries that are the detritus of decades of back-and-forth gerrymandering attempts.

Although this is a generally informative article, a bit of careful juxtapositioning is required:

End of the article: “Is this the end of real democracy?”

Start of the article: “Gerrymandering is not a new phenomenon. It’s been around since the very beginnings of our nation, so long that one could fairly say that the United States has been built on the principle of gerrymandering. The very first congressional districts were somewhat gerrymandered, and it’s been downhill ever since. The phenomenon was finally noticed and properly named in 1812“

In memorium

Filed under: Britain, History, Military, WW1, WW2 — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:03

A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:

The Great War

  • Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
    (Elizabeth’s great uncle)
  • Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
    (Elizabeth’s great grandfather)
  • Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
    (my great uncle)
  • Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
    (Elizabeth’s great uncle)

The Second World War

  • Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
    (my uncle)
  • Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the Defensively Equipped Merchant fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
    (Elizabeth’s father)
  • Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
    (Elizabeth’s uncle)

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

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