It's not the taste, it's the smell

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 12:39 PM - 0 Comments

Chewing many times before you swallow a bite of food seems more than just good motherly advice to prevent choking. Researchers in the Netherlands have found that food aromas released while chewing work to satiate appetite. Basically, the molecules that make up aroma activate the brain to encourage a sense of fullness. They suggest that in the future, food could be developed that contains more powerful aromas as a way of curbing obesity.

Science Daily

Not on the list

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 12:32 PM - 58 Comments

Upon arriving in Copenhagen this morning, U.S. President Barack Obama convened a meeting of 19 other world leaders. The meeting included British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, but not Prime Minister Stephen Harper. Harper’s office says it was the Danes who were responsible for compiling the guest list.

CP

How to get on a restaurant’s hit list

By Anne Kingston - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 12:30 PM - 83 Comments

The owner of a popular Toronto gastropub who asks to remain nameless is showing off what he calls his “nightly journal,” though “naughty journal” is a more accurate descriptor. Most of the handwritten entries deal with the dull details of restaurant life—nightly sales, tables turned, supplier snafus. Where reading turns interesting, even salacious, is in its dutiful recording of customer misbehaviour collected via staff and fellow customer complaints. Names are used when they’re known. Otherwise, physical descriptions suffice.
A notation was made the night a notoriously difficult-to-please regular, a well-known writer, pulled a diva act, and told her waiter: “When you make me unhappy, you make thousands of my readers unhappy.” Another entry refers to a couple found in flagrante delicto in the beer fridge; they were married, though not to one another. Then there are the customers who’ve been banned—the restaurant’s “no-fly” list. They include a patron who was a little too free with his hands with female wait staff and a big-name businessman the owner says is known for stiffing restaurants: “His MO is to hand over his credit card; then when it’s declined he promises to come back the next day. He says, ‘I’m worth 30 mill, I have two luxury cars.’ He’s burned me in other establishments. He showed up a week ago and we said,‘Mr. Doe, we asked you not to come back.’ ”

Keeping such careful track of customers may seem creepy—like moralizing black marks made by a 19th-century schoolmarm or potential ammunition for an aspiring extortionist. After all, who wants to go out for a romantic dinner and have to worry that the waiter is doing double duty as a Stasi agent? Yet the note-keeping proprietor, who has been in the industry for decades, defends the practice as an essential part of doing business, like keeping glasses spotless. Staff are expected to read the latest entry every night before service as a precaution, he says: “You wouldn’t want to go to a bad restaurant and we don’t want a bad patron.” Some of the most successful restaurants he’s worked at, he says, kept a similar book.

Continue…

Week in Pictures: December 11th – December 17th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 12:16 PM - 0 Comments

'The buck stopped nowhere'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 11:52 AM - 34 Comments

Global details the case of a detainee kept in extreme conditions while in Canadian custody and the alleged indifference of Canadian authorities. The Star tries to sort out what our allies were doing and why a separate prison was never constructed. And the Globe depicts a mission sorely lacking in organization.

Mr. Colvin sparked a firestorm at the highest levels in Ottawa when he told a parliamentary committee that he warned for a full year that detainees Canadian troops handed over to Afghan forces faced torture before the government began to monitor them.

But behind that furor is another story: outside the combat-focused military, no one was in charge in the early part of the Afghan mission. A scattered batch of mid-level officials, lacking the incontrovertible proof that Canadians had no means to find, didn’t have the overall responsibility or weight to push for big change. “The buck stopped nowhere,” said one official involved in the Afghan mission.

Econowatch: A decade's end

By Steve Maich - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 9:10 AM - 62 Comments

Congratulations, ladies and gentlemen, you have survived your worst fears.

When we began Econowatch a little over a year ago, the world economic order seemed to be breaking  all around us. We warned that things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better, and indeed they did. World governments pressed ahead with emergency policies that had only ever been considered in theoretical discussions of worst-case scenarios. The good news is, those policies successfully doused what can be thought of as a global economic forest fire. Often, forests grow back stronger and healthier than before, but it takes time.

These days, we hear a lot of fretting that world economic powers are headed toward a “lost decade” with stagnant growth and stubborn unemployment. Well, folks, look in the rear-view mirror—or better yet, look at the graph below—and you will discover that our stock market is pretty much exactly where it was nine years ago. Now, if this were just about stock prices, it wouldn’t be such a big deal. But in fact, the Canadian and especially the American economies have stagnated in a host of ways over the past 10 years. The most striking might be private sector employment in the U.S. There were 108.4 million private sector jobs south of the border in October of this year. In October 1999 there were 1.1 million more. Another example? American industrial production is down about four per cent from a decade ago.

And where are the numbers bigger than they were a decade ago? Well, mortgage delinquencies in the U.S. are at an all-time high. Claims for jobless benefits are also in uncharted territory. On the more positive side, retail sales are more than 25 per cent higher than in 1999. But that’s no great mystery when you consider that consumer debt is up by 60 per cent over the same period.

Believe it or not, though, the point here is not to despair but to focus on our resiliency. To avert financial calamity, the world’s financial powers transferred the staggering cost of financial malpractice onto the public books. You’d be well justified to complain about this, but it’d do no good. Problems this big belong to everybody, and instead of watching the system implode quickly, we all get to pay to fix it slowly. We’ll pay through higher taxes, weaker growth, higher interest rates and a whole lot more uncertainty than we’ve ever known before. The well-educated, flexible and relatively debt-free will find the future a lot less scary than others.

For a long time, we were taught to believe that markets only ever go up. By now, it’s clear that they can gyrate sideways for a long, long time. But that, in itself, isn’t a disaster. We’ve seen all this before—weak markets, expensive energy, high unemployment, bouncing interest rates—and we lived through it. By some measures, it might be another lost decade while the forest recovers. But hey, we’ve just lived through one of those, too.

THE GAME CHANGERS

The Chinese worker
Toiling for low wages, the Chinese labourer churned out cheap goods to fill the aisles of stores like Wal-Mart. This reorganization of production helped North American companies turn big profits, but it also made China an economic force to be reckoned with.

Michael Osinski
He wrote the computer program that would be used by financial insitutions to bundle and sell mortgages—a time bomb that would bring Wall Street to its knees with the subprime crisis. Osinski retired to become an oyster farmer.

The Google guys
Larry Page and Sergey Brin turned a university research project into an Internet search and advertising juggernaut that rivals Microsoft. With free video, software and phone services, Google has upended entire industries.

The U.S. consumer
With an unrivalled appetite to buy and spend, American shoppers fuelled the economy through the 2001 recession and powered home and auto sales to new heights. But when they lost steam in recent years, so did the economy.

The oil sands
The commodities boom reshaped the Canadian economy and labour force, not to mention national politics. Everyone knew someone who moved to Fort McMurray to work in the oil sands—or at Tim Hortons for $17 an hour.

WHAT HAPPENED TO?

RadioShack
The name was a fixture in Canadian shopping malls until a dispute in 2005 with the U.S.-based RadioShack Corp. forced a Canadian name change to The Source by Circuit City.

Netscape
It was the Web browser that introduced the world to the Internet. But in 2007, Netscape’s owner, AOL, announced it would no longer support the browser, effectively killing it.

Canada 3000/JetsGo
Two of the biggest discount airlines in Canada went bust in what would be a brutal decade for the industry. First it was 9/11, then record fuel prices and finally the economic crash.

Pontiac
With its “We Build Excitement” slogan, the GM brand was much loved by Canadians. But Pontiac, which launched in 1926, was axed by GM in April as part of the automaker’s restructuring.

FAMOUS LAST WORDS

Economists are notorious for flubbing forecasts—even the best do it from time to time. And when it comes to making predictions about the economy, business people and politicians are no different.

“After their substantial run-up in recent years, home prices could recede . . . Any bubbles would tend to be local, not national, in scope.”—then- U.S. Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, March 2003

“We’re not going into a recession.” —Prime Minister Stephen Harper, October 2008

“Eventually, Canada and its biggest trading partner will move to a common currency. But the broader point is that we must have a discussion on this now.”—Paul Tellier, former CEO, Canadian National Railway, December 2001

“In today’s regulatory environment . . . it’s impossible for a violation to go undetected.”—Bernard Madoff, October 2007

DISORDER YEARS

TOP 10 COMPANIES

Ten biggest Canadian companies (by revenue) in 2000
1.   General Motors of Canada*
2.   Nortel Networks*
3.   Ford Motor Co. of Canada
4.   DaimlerChrysler Canada*
5.   George Weston Ltd.
6.   CIBC
7.   RBC
8.   The Seagram Co.*
9.   Bank of Montreal

10. Bank of Nova Scotia

* Companies that went on to file for bankruptcy, were broken up or acquired

Ten biggest Canadian companies (by revenue) in 2009
1.   RBC
2.   Power Corp of Canada
3.   Manulife Financial
4.   George Weston Ltd.
5.   EnCana Corp.
6.   Imperial Oil
7.   Suncor Energy
8.   Petro-Canada
9.   Onex Corp
10. Bank of Nova Scotia

CHUMPS AND CHAMPS

When you have a decade as volatile as the one we just experienced,  those who win win big, and those who lose . . . well, you get the picture.

Bankers
From pimping shoddy dot-coms to even crappier collateralized debt obligations, it was a lucrative decade for the red-suspender set. Canadian banks fared especially well, coming out of the crisis largely unscathed. But even in countries where big banks went bust, it’s back to business as usual—they face public scorn, but still collect huge bonuses.

Taxpayers
Unlike bankers, taxpayers have no one to bail them out. As the orgy of stimulus spending comes to an end, governments, including Ottawa, have racked up record deficits. Expect the taxman to come knocking soon.

Steve Jobs
iMac, iPod, iPhone . . . for the mercurial founder and CEO of tech giant Apple Inc., the last decade can be summed up nicely in one word: iWin. True, he faced criticism for concealing his heath problems. But in the end Jobs redefined consumer cool while helping to save the music industry. Up next: the iTablet?

Dubai
In a decade marked by mindless excess, Dubai stood apart. From palm-shaped islands and indoor ski hills to the world’s tallest building and largest mall, Dubai’s ability to waste money was limitless. Now the creditors are calling, and Dubai is shaping up to be the world’s biggest financial flop.

Warren Buffett
When Buffett gave away a US$37-billion gift to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006, he made charity look easy—like everything else. During the darkest days of the crisis, his words of calm assurance helped to jump-start consumer confidence. But will his bold US$39-billion bet on railroads prove as sage?

The Big Three
After years of signing insane labour agreements and pumping out cars nobody wanted, the end of cheap money meant Detroit automakers could no longer hide from reality. Mass layoffs and bankruptcies were a sad inevitability.

A page out of Harper’s playbook

By Paul Wells - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 9:00 AM - 178 Comments

When 2009 began, Stephen Harper was rattled and exhausted. His attempt to cut off public funding for political parties had led every opposition MP to unite against him. He survived only by shutting down a parliamentary session that was weeks old. He spent most of January licking his wounds while Michael Ignatieff settled in as the popular leader of a newly united Liberal party.

Very little that has happened since could have been predicted. By autumn, Harper was, briefly, a sort of media darling, popping up on the stage of the National Arts Centre to serenade the audience while his Conservatives flirted with levels of public support that would, if sustained, ensure them a majority in the next election. Ignatieff’s Liberals sank as low as 22 per cent in internal tracking polls—comfortably lower than Stockwell Day’s Canadian Alliance scored in the 2000 general election. Ignatieff replaced just about all of his senior advisers. The Conservative lead has since shrunk, but only a little. The election that reared its head a couple of times during the year seems distant today.

Yet the Prime Minister’s grasp on power remains shaky. In January, he held his office only after getting the Governor General to shut Parliament down. In December, he devotes much of his time to ignoring Parliament. Your MPs voted, in a clear majority, to require the government to produce documents relating to the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan. The government is ignoring the demand. On Tuesday, a parliamentary committee on the Afghanistan mission met. Conservative MPs didn’t attend.

Continue…

Charitable Questions

By Andrew Potter - Friday, December 18, 2009 at 12:13 AM - 99 Comments

I received a phone call a few days ago as I was getting ready to go to work. Like a lot of calls I get this time of year, it was a woman calling from a charity. I can’t remember what it was – childhood leukemia maybe – but as she was in the midst of telling me about their poster child for this year’s campaign, I cut her off. I said look, you’re wasting your breath, I won’t be giving. “Not even a small donation?” she asked. Nope, I said, rushing to get off the phone. As I was hanging up, the cliche making me cringe even before I’d formed the sentence, I said “I have another charity I give to.”

Which is true enough. Actually I have two charities I donate to, in monthly installments charged automatically to my credit card. It isn’t a huge amount though, and I could easily afford to give more, either to the chosen two, or even to one of the charities that comes a-ringing at Christmas time.

The amount I give is, roughly, about 0.75% of my before-tax income. Which is to say, Not Much. But in many ways, I’m a typical Canadian. According to the Fraser Institute’s latest study comparing generosity in Canada and the US, 24.0 percent of Canadians give to charity each year, and we give, on aggregate, 0.73 percent of our personal income.

The figures vary considerably by province. Manitobans are the biggest givers on both scores (27.3/1.02) followed by Saskatchewan (25.7/0.86) and Ontario (25.7/0.84). Quebecers (21.9/0.33) give the least.

Like most of what it publishes, the Fraser Institute is interested here in making Canada look bad compared to the US, so what analysis there is in the study consists mainly of pointing out how poor our showing is compared to Americans. And it’s true, we are bad givers compared to Americans, though there are a lot of complications, caveats and other factors at work in making cross-border comparisons (here’s a not-bad quick pass at some of the issues.)

But back to me. Continue…

The house Maclean's built

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 6:44 PM - 1 Comment

The neighbours are furious, but their protests can barely be heard over the sound of contractors shattering glass and pummelling concrete at 7 Austin Terrace, the former home of Lt.-Col. J.B. Maclean, the founder of Maclean’s magazine. By the time they’re done, gone will be some of the century-old Toronto home’s most distinctive architectural features—windows, wood frames, columns, and the portico are already mostly destroyed.

Robert Levy, the president of the local housing association in Casa Loma, the northwest Toronto neighbourhood where Maclean House is located, stopped by the home earlier this week. The workers, he says, “were trying do as much damage as they possibly could. This basically had every characteristic of vandals going to town.” According to Levy and members of the housing association, John Todd, the local developer who purchased Maclean House in 2008, is scrambling to prevent it from being designated as a historical site by the city. Should it be recognized as such, Todd’s plans to demolish the $2.3-million residence and replace it with a new housing development would grind to a halt.

Continue…

Inuit communities torn over emissions reductions

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 6:18 PM - 13 Comments

The ice is receding, coastlines eroding and permafrost melting, but Arctic Inuit leaders are divided over the ongoing environmental negotiations at the COP15 conference in Copenhagen.

Jimmy Stotts, chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council (ICC), an organization representing Inuit from Canada, Russia, the U.S. and Greenland, says a fair, enforceable and balanced agreement is needed to save the north from climate change. But he also emphasizes that the Inuit have only recently started to realize the economic advantages of oil, gas and mineral reserves on their land. Proposed emissions targets could undercut his people just as they begin to get on their feet, he argues, and he wants any treaty to contain provisions allowing Inuit communities to utilize their natural resources. “This is our way to improve our lives,” he says. “There really is nothing to replace those revenues.”

But Sheila Watt-Cloutier, a Canadian Inuit environmental activist, says there is no justification for further eroding the northern climate by excavating for natural resources. “Economic gain must not override the existence and well-being of a whole people whose way of life is already being severely taxed.”

Meanwhile, Greenland—a country primarily populated by Inuit—plans to start aggressively tapping its oil, gas and mineral deposits and build an aluminum smelter that could greatly increase national emissions—by up to 75 per cent, some environmentalists say. The country’s position has put a rift between Inuit groups and is making international talks difficult. It refuses to abide by restrictions on its industries, claiming emissions targets will make resource development impossible.

Unfortunately, Stotts says, those disagreements among the Inuit are only one part of the general disarray in Copenhagen, and he thinks the talks will bring little help to the north. “It’s crazy what’s going on here . . . I’d be real surprised if something strong and meaningful came out of this.”

"Heading for disaster"

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 4:39 PM - 2 Comments

The European Union wants the U.N. Copenhagen climate talks to result in a new treaty that binds nations to climate actions, but French President Nicolas Sarkozy says that may be impossible. “We need to change track or we are heading for disaster,” he says. Sarkozy wants countries to switch direction and start seriously negotiating a compromise. And keeping the Kyoto protocol, which the conference was designed to replace, may be the best option available. Developing nations have stalled the talks because they don’t want new treaty that would require them to take action on climate change. They prefer to keep the protocol, which requires them to do nothing. Sarkozy says there’s still hope for replacing Kyoto, but that it won’t happen at Copenhagen.

Reuters

Chuck Lorre Wants Critics To Hate Him Again

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 4:33 PM - 4 Comments

When Chuck Lorre received a critics’ award for The Big Bang Theory, he seemed as amazed as everyone at the change in his critical fortunes. A few years ago we were seeing stories about how Two and a Half Men was the most popular comedy on TV despite the scorn of critics, with Lorre doing the usual routine of a successful creator whose show gets bad reviews (claiming, correctly, that he mostly cares about pleasing the public rather than critics, but betraying some insecurity about the critical putdowns). Big Bang Theory started off with the same kind of reviews, but once it got funny, it became a favourite with critics — particularly younger critics who maybe were getting a little fed up with non-traditional sitcoms. (Part of the success of the show, I think is based on the fact that if you can come up with a young-skewing traditional sitcom, you pull in young viewers who have grown to see the single-camera format as the boring old establishment, with theatre-style comedy as the insurgent upstart. Something like that already happened in the early ’70s.) But Lorre’s next show sounds like it might bring him some critical scorn and restore order to the universe:

CBS has handed out a pilot order to “Mike and Molly,” a multicamera comedy from Chuck Lorre — the mastermind behind the network’s top comedies “Men” and “The Big Bang Theory” — and “Men” executive producer Mark Roberts.

Roberts wrote the pilot, an ensemble revolving around a couple who struggle with overeating and meet at Overeaters Anonymous. He will executive produce with Lorre for Warner Bros. TV, where Lorre is based.

This concept can be summed up as “it’s another show about a fat guy and a hot girl, except they’re both fat.” (Lorre used to produce Roseanne, after all.) Though to be fair, when I describe it that way, it actually sounds mildly refreshing in a comedy world mostly composed of skinny people.  Of course, I actually have no idea if this show will be good or bad. The only interesting question at the moment, then, is whether Lorre’s newfound critical respectability will help or hurt it in the reviews; will it arrive in an atmosphere where critics have high expectations? If so, that might hurt it critically,  since it will undoubtedly be a lot closer to Men. BBT obviously has a lot of Men‘s smarmy sex jokes in it, but it’s separated from Lorre’s other show because its co-creator, Bill Prady, did not work on Men. Roberts, a former actor whom Lorre took under his wing as a writer, has been working on Men since the beginning.

Now, Two and a Half Men isn’t a bad show either; it’s got a strong cast and can be funny. It’s mean-spirited, and it’s unusually weak for a show that holds the title of Most Popular Comedy On TV, but that says more about the state of U.S. comedy than the show itself; in the ’90s, it would have been a middling success, but this was not the ’90s, and it rose to the top of a weak field.

(I know this is repeating what I’ve said on previous occasions, but many of the best U.S. half-hour comedies of the ’00s wouldn’t have made a top 20 list for the ’90s. But these things go in cycles: the ’70s was a golden age of U.S. sitcoms, and in spite of that — no, because most of the good work was in sitcoms — most of their best dramas wouldn’t even rank among the best 30 of this decade. One reason I like ’90s TV a lot was that it was closer than most decades to having excellent work in both comedy and drama; drama has been stronger in this decade, but a lot of what we’re seeing now is an outgrowth of what started in the ’90s.)

Freedom and accountability

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 3:58 PM - 40 Comments

David Eaves considers the implications of Richard Colvin’s accusations.

When the most senior ranks of the public service – those who pride themselves on their ability to speak truth to power and whose job it is to protect junior ranks from political interference – feel pressured to do the very opposite, it should send a chill down every Canadians spine. Worse still, we may never know the full truth of what contrary evidence was presented to politicians since, when confronted with countering facts, today’s public servants feel increasing pressure to “put down there pen” and stop writing.

In the end, transparency is a powerful tool, but we Canadians rely on a public service that speaks truth and engages in facts and evidence. If we have lost that, then we can never know, can never learn, can never hope for even the tiniest bit of accountability. In short, our challenges are even greater than the already terrifying allegations that we may be handing prisoners over for torture.

On this issue of access and accountability, Gil Shochat recently detailed, at some length, how far we currently are from freedom of information.

Dick Tracy, He's a Good Cop, or "The Plot To Kill NATO"

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 3:48 PM - 3 Comments

Someone has finally uploaded the unsold “Dick Tracy” pilot made by Batman producer William Dozier in 1967.  (I previously posted the theme song, but the actual pilot was not available at the time.) As you can see, among Dozier shows, the tone of it is somewhere between the purely comic Batman and the basically serious Green Hornet; it’s less silly than the former, sillier than the latter. It’s not surprising that the networks passed on it, since the Batman craze was already over. Unlike the terrific Batman pilot, it doesn’t really do much to establish a distinctive voice — and makes the terrible mistake of waiting almost five minutes to bring in the lead character.

It’s too bad that there has never been a Dick Tracy adaptation that fully worked, since Chester Gould’s strip has a lot of the elements that could make for an effective TV show — most importantly, a big pool of villains to draw on. But Gould’s fable-like approach, where all the characters are deliberately simple, allegorical figures in a stylized morality play, defeats most adaptors. The other great U.S. comic strip that used a similar approach was Little Orphan Annie, and in a strange way I think Dick Tracy might also have a better chance as a musical (maybe someone could get Stephen Sondheim to take his songs from the Warren Beatty film and write a few more).

Anyway, in this pilot you’ll see future soap star Ray MacDonnell as Dick Tracy, and all-purpose TV and movie villain Victor Buono as the bad guy. Oddly, Tess Trueheart is mentioned in the credits but doesn’t appear in the show (neither does Dick’s daughter, who the main title assures us is played by Eve Plumb).

Part 1 (of 3)

Part 2

Continue…

Cameron pulls it off again—Avatar is exhilarating

By Brian D. Johnson - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 3:03 PM - 18 Comments

I was fully expecting to dislike Avatar. Having donned the 3-D glasses on “Avatar Day” in August, and watched the 15-minute preview on an IMAX screen, I was left unimpressed. I thought it looked too juvenile, too “cartoony.” The Fern Gully comparison made in the YouTube Downfall satire seemed all too true. But now that I’ve seen the whole thing, I’ve changed my tune. Sure, the dialogue is wooden and the story is generic and derivative, but in spite of that, Avatar doesn’t suck; it rocks. Despite the odd amusing catch phrase (often containing the word “bitch”), you don’t go to a James Cameron movie for the dialogue. It’s all about spectacle—the action and the art direction. And no matter what the Most Expensive Movie Ever Made eventually cost — estimates range from US$240-$300 million — you don’t come out of  it wondering where Cameron spent the money. It’s all up on the screen. With his first fictional feature since Titanic blew all box-office records out of the water 12 years ago, the Canadian director has made good on the promise to create a game-changing movie. It’s also a game-like movie, one that borrows its avatar concept from video gaming and turns it into big-screen flesh. And as a skeptic who had always thought that inbreeding between movies and video games is a despicable trend that’s going to kill cinema, I was shocked to find myself exhilarated by Avatar.

While Cameron has made his name as an action director, here he reveals himself as a consummate visual artist. In designing the flora, fauna and blue aboriginals of this moon called Pandora, he has created a whole world from scratch. Well, not entirely from scratch—there are monsters that look like the demented offspring of a rhino and a hammerhead shark, and a lot of Pandora’s bio-luminescent jungle is clearly inspired from the director’s underwater explorations. Jellyfish are so cool.  But what’s astonishing about this world is its beauty. When you combine that with the environmental message of saving the (alien) planet from Earth’s strip-mining colonial marauders, hard-core action buffs might wonder if James Cameron has gone soft. Clearly, the guy still loves the high-tech military hardware; he just can’t help himself. But Avatar shows us a filmmaker merrily at war with himself—a testosterone-loaded, gun-loving tree-hugger. Continue…

My Guest Comments On Someone Else's List

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 2:39 PM - 0 Comments

Todd VanDerWerff was nice enough to invite me onto his podcast where he and his wife Libby listed “the top 10 comedies of the aughts.” The podcast can be found here.

I’m recognizable as the guy saying “yes, it is” or “yes, he is” more than might be considered absolutely necessary.

It's a wonderful life

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 2:03 PM - 5 Comments

From 22 Minutes.

Manhattan mosque rises from the ashes of 9/11

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:49 PM - 11 Comments

A mosque has sprung up in what at first seems like the unlikeliest of locations in Manhattan: around the corner from Ground Zero. But those who frequent the Muslim place of worship say that its proximity to the worldwide symbol of Islamist violence is key to the city’s healing process. While in other parts of the world, governments have banned minarets and burkas, in New York City, Muslims and Christians are taking a more tolerant approach to living side by side. The mosque, whose founders want to expand to include a museum and cultural centre, is sandwiched between an Amish market and an Irish pub. As Daisy Khan, executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement, explains: “It was almost obvious that something like this had to arise from the ashes of 9/11 [...] In some way, this has the hand of the divine written over it. It’s almost as if God wanted to be involved.”

Der Spiegel

Will Big Oil catch a big break?

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:44 PM - 34 Comments

Some new fodder for the Canada-bashers in Copenhagen: Ottawa is considering granting the oil industry some extra leniency when it comes to climate-change regulations. Alberta’s export-driven oil industry has asked the Canadian government to grant it the kind of relief that the U.S coal industry will likely receive from its government. Nothing has been finalized, but Environment Minister Jim Prentice hasn’t ruled out giving the industry permits to exceed emissions caps. Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers  president David Collyer stresses that the “trade-exposed” oil sands need protection from environment regulations. “We need to make sure that climate policy doesn’t disadvantage the oil industry in terms of competitiveness.” Between 2006 and 2020, output from the oil sands is expected to triple.

The Globe and Mail

In France, mushroom wars rage

By Tom Henheffer - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:33 PM - 4 Comments

Looking for some French champignons for your cheesy mushroom canapés? Here’s some advice: don’t pick them on French soil—you might wind up beaten and bloody, or even shot.

Until recently, property owners in France would generally let their neighbours pick mushrooms for personal use, and anyone could harvest the fungi on public property. But that’s been changing since 2006, when a worldwide shortage caused mushroom prices to soar, and money-hungry gangs started flooding France’s forests. They aggressively steal tons of truffles, ceps and chanterelles, harming ecosystems and robbing forest owners of estimated hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Whereas casual and professional pickers are normally careful to reduce their environmental impact, the gangs damage undergrowth with rakes, harm future harvests by picking underdeveloped mushrooms, and take away truckloads. The problem is at its worst in the south, where people from all over France, Italy and Spain travel to make over $5,000 a week gathering and selling mushrooms to restaurants on the black market. “Some villages only have the forests for income,” says Odile Champion, president of the Société Mycologique de Vaucluse in Avignon. “Forests are sometimes ravaged and owners lose the benefits of their produce.”

Continue…

Soviet-style law returns to Russia

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:27 PM - 5 Comments

For years, Russia has been a dangerous place for journalists and human rights activists who probe the murky relationship between government, police, and organized crime. Now, it is becoming increasingly treacherous for businessmen and their associates who do the same.

Sergei Magnitsky, a lawyer working for William Browder, CEO of the London-based investment fund Hermitage Capital Management, died last month in Moscow’s Butryka prison, where he had been held for a year without charge. Magnitsky had helped Hermitage reveal an alleged $230-million tax fraud that implicated Russian police and government officials. Other lawyers hired by Hermitage to investigate the case have also been arrested and severely beaten. Several have fled the country.

Magnitsky, a father of two children, officially died of heart failure. His colleagues say he was kept in a tiny, filthy cell and denied medical treatment in an effort to force him to “confess” to the tax fraud he had uncovered. Russian authorities refused to allow an independent autopsy, but last month announced an investigation into the circumstances of his death. Browder doubts it will accomplish anything.

Continue…

Ontario mulls Crown asset sales

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:21 PM - 13 Comments

The Ontario government is considering selling off some of its most lucrative Crown corporations in a bid to reduce its yawning $24.7 billion budget deficit. Provincial officials have admitted liquor stores, casinos and the electricity system could be wholly or partly privatized once the two investment banks hired by the government to evaluate the returns they could generate complete their assessments. “We’ve got a responsibility to look at all our assets to make sure we’re getting the best bang for the buck,” said Premier Dalton McGuinty, “and especially now in the context of a global recession and a significant deficit.” Like his sudden support for a harmonized sales tax, a move towards the privatization of public assets would mark a significant departure from past positions for McGuinty. In 2003, the Liberal leader criticized the then-Conservative government for selling Highway 407 and pledged not to privatize Hydro One when the Conservatives considered doing as much in 2002. McGuinty has defended his latest potential change of heart as the “right thing to do.”

Toronto Star

Saddam is back – on TV, at least

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 1:19 PM - 6 Comments

Saddam TV is on the air. A mysterious television channel dedicated to celebrating former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein made an unexpected debut across the Arabic world last week. The so-called Saddam Channel, launched by al-Lafeta TV, headquartered in the United Arab Emirates, has no actual programming: instead, it presents a flattering montage of still pictures that show Saddam dressed in uniforms, a variety of suits, even straddling a white horse. Accompanying the pictures are recordings of Saddam’s speeches and poetic recitals, and a patriotic song urging viewers to “liberate our country.”

The Saddam channel is shrouded in mystery—nobody knows who is bankrolling it, or from where exactly it is being broadcast. The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus named Mohammed Jarboua, who claims to be running the channel, but he balked at divulging too many details due to “threats that the Iraqi government will shut it down [and] kill its employees.” He also denied reports that the channel is being funded by Baathist loyalists, former members of the outlawed Sunni-dominated political party Saddam once led.

Other versions of the station’s origins have also surfaced. The man who headed Saddam’s defence team at the start of his trial in 2004, Jordanian Baathist Ziad Khassawneh, claims it is supported by wealthy Iraqis in Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of the Arabic world, although he declined to mention who they are. The launch of the Saddam Channel on Nov. 28 coincided with the third anniversary of Saddam’s execution, according to the Islamic calendar. Officials in Iraq have labelled the channel “an attempt from the dissolved Baath party to return to Iraq’s politics,” but are undecided about shutting it down.

Continue…

Major cancer breakthrough

By macleans.ca - Thursday, December 17, 2009 at 12:37 PM - 0 Comments

The first full DNA mapping of two types of cancer has been completed in what scientists are hailing as “a fundamental moment in cancer research.” Researchers discovered the tens of thousands of genetic errors in cancerous cells by comparing them with cancer patients’ normal cells. In the case of melanoma (skin cancer) the errors were mutations caused by ultraviolet light, whereas the mutations in the case of lung cancer were caused by smoking. The findings were published yesterday in the science journal Nature and are expected to help create new types of screening tests and drugs that accurately target cancer on a genetic level. “This is the complete list, so we now see uncovered all the forces that have generated that cancer and we now see all the genes which are responsible for driving those two cancers,” said Prof. Michael Stratton, one of the researchers who worked on the paper.

CBC News