Our Afghan M*A*S*H unit

By Jinder Oujla-Chalmers - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 4 Comments

U.S. and Canadian military helicopters sound in the distance at the Role 3 Multinational Hospital on the Kandahar Airfield in Afghanistan. The dusty, sandy lobby is full of young multinational soldiers wanting to see the social workers, while others wait to get their prescriptions filled at the pharmacy. I am stunned to find that the facility is made out of freight containers, plywood, duct tape and wires. It is September 2009, and I have just arrived to spend three weeks doing research for a TV drama series, as the guest of the Canadian Forces.

As the sound of the choppers gets louder, Col. Danielle Savard, the hospital’s commanding officer, announces that multiple casualties are arriving. The international team of doctors, nurses, anaesthesiologists, lab techs, radiologists and specialists, along with Afghan interpreters, abandon what they are doing and get ready as Maj. Marc Dauphin, in operational charge of the hospital, starts assigning medical teams to the trauma bays (both Savard and Dauphin have since left Afghanistan, and administration of the hospital has been taken over by U.S. forces). “You are about to see something you will never see in any major trauma hospital in any city in North America,” Dauphin warns me. “These aren’t motor vehicle casualties, these are war injuries.”

And from a variety of sources: improvised explosive devices, suicide bombings, gunfire. Dauphin says that the hospital treats not just soldiers, but also local Afghan children and adults who arrive with blunt and penetrable head injuries, limbs blown off, burns, chest wounds and other horrific injuries. I remind him that I am not a medical student but a civilian planning to write a television series based on the Role 3 hospital. Standing in the blistering heat, with ambulances and stretchers ready, he assures me: “You’ll get used to it.”

Continue…

Q & A: Bruce Mau

By John Intini - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 3:53 PM - 4 Comments

Photographs by Tim Klein/Getty

Bruce Mau, who started out as a graphic designer in the 1980s, uses design principles to develop strategies for a range of major clients—from big businesses (Coca-Cola, MTV) to governments (Guatemala). The 50-year-old, who moved from Toronto to Chicago two years ago, cemented his global reputation as a big thinker in 2004 with Massive Change: The Future of Global Design, an exhibition of the latest innovations in everything from health and warfare to transportation and manufacturing (a follow-up is planned for 2011). Mau, whose theories are the subject of Warren Berger’s new book, Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World, will be speaking at a symposium associated with Toronto’s Interior Design Show this week about a world less dependant on oil.

Q: So what does Bruce Mau’s world without oil look like?

A: It’s not a world without oil, but a world with an ecology of energy sources, where oil is used when it is the absolute right tool.

Q: How do we get there?

A: We’ve had 50 years of telling people to get out of their cars. In every one of those years the number of cars in the world went up. The idea that we’re going to punish or embarrass them into it has simply not worked. It’s like there was a focus group of six billion people around a table, and someone said, “Hey guys, give up your car” and they said, en masse, “No.” This is where design comes in. Ultimately, the way to solve the problem, and so many problems, is to make things cooler and sexier than the older ones. I have a friend who has a Tesla and a Ferrari. He says the Tesla is way cooler. That changes the game. We’re not telling him don’t. We’re telling him, here’s an exciting way you can do it that ultimately can be sustainable. How do we get to do the things we do without stealing from our kids or leaving a toxic legacy? And at the same time, how do we do them in such a way that is smarter and more fun than the old way?

Q: How far off is this future? Continue…

The politicizing of Haiti

By Katie Engelhart - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 3:50 PM - 27 Comments

Photography roundup: January

By Andrew Tolson - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 3:31 PM - 1 Comment

Martin Parr of the Magnum photo agency shoots quirky photo essays that don’t always show his subjects in the best light, but he somehow gets to the truth.

The Guardian.co.uk – Martin Parr’s photos

Some of the best coverage out of Haiti, particularly from the Los Angeles Times.
Boston.com

LATimes.com

These images from Vanity Fair are amazing in the way they’ve caught the essence of classic Hollywood photographs.
Vanity Fair

And because it’s been such a heavy week, this is just amusing:
Urlesque.com

Connecting the dots

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 3:23 PM - 45 Comments

To recap, Stockwell Day is a winner, moving from International Trade to President of the Treasury Board to handle the difficult task of enforcing fiscal discipline on government operations. Peter Van Loan is a loser, demoted from Public Safety to International Trade because the Prime Minister was dissatisfied with his performance, even though Day’s move from Public Safety to International Trade a little over a year ago was seen as an important promotion to a pivotal file. Meanwhile, Vic Toews, who seemingly couldn’t be trusted to oversee the difficult task of enforcing fiscal discipline on government operations, moves from Treasury Board to Public Safety, where he will be charged with a massive review of national security.

Afghanistan Fact of the Day

By Andrew Potter - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 2:46 PM - 12 Comments

Afghans paid more than $2.5 billion US in bribes between the fall of 2008 and the fall of 2009, or about one quarter the value of the country’s gross domestic product

Link

The dreaded invoking of Trudeau

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 96 Comments

Last weekend, Lisa Raitt held a town hall meeting in her riding. She brought donuts and maple leaf pins. At least a couple of her constituents were unpersuaded.

“The man (Harper) has become more of a dictator than Pierre Trudeau had ever done (sic),” said Paul Redvers, a Conservative voter in the last election. The Oakville resident said the government has broken campaign promises to cooperate more with other parties in Parliament and be more accountable to Canadians.

“Is your integrity so low you would rather stay on as a cabinet minister than confront Mr. Harper about proroguing government to avoid bad press?” Redvers asked Raitt.

Raitt denied the implication and said she has no fear of expressing local feedback to her caucus. “I will go and say these (things) are what my constituents are saying,” said Raitt, noting she had heard similar opinions at earlier town halls in Burlington and Milton Saturday.

Brazen Taliban attack shows tactical skill, military limits, says analyst

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 1:15 PM - 1 Comment

Monday’s Taliban attack in Kabul was show of force more than anything else, according to a political analyst interviewed by Reuters. “It was an ‘attack show’ from the Taliban, not a military-based action,” says Wahid Mudjah. “They just wanted a show for the international community.” And what a show it was; the attacks involved at least ten gunmen and suicide bombers and was very well-coordinated, coinciding with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s swearing in of cabinet ministers only hundreds of meters away. While the attack was a tactical success, the shortcomings of the Taliban resulted in relatively few casualties; three Afghan security force members were killed along with two civilians, while 71 were injured.

Reuters

Cabinet shuffles

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 12:29 PM - 2 Comments

Three weeks after proroguing Parliament, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has shuffled his cabinet, giving new portfolios to 10 members of his party. Vic Toews is now public safety minister, Stockwell Day is president of the Treasury Board and Peter Van Loan has taken over the international trade portfolio in a three-way trade. Three other senior ministers also changed positions, with Christian Paradis moving to natural resources, Rona Ambrose to public works and Lisa Raitt to labour. Day’s move is seen as a promotion, revealing that the prime minister is putting more trust in the former Alberta finance minister, whereas Raitt’s shift is considered to be a demotion resulting from her controversial time as natural resources minister. Less high-profile changes include Diane Ablonczy becoming minister of state for seniors, New Brunswick MPs Keith Ashfield and Rob Moore taking over the national revenue and state small business and tourism portfolios, respectively, and Jean-Pierre Blackburn becoming the minister of veterans affairs. A government spokesperson says the shuffle is meant to give ministers a chance to adjust to their new jobs before Parliament’s resumption on March 3.

CTV News

A green-eyed monster of another kind

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 12:03 PM - 4 Comments

Therapists are reporting an increase in clashes between spouses over environmental issues. Some arguments are fairly banal, along the “Where are your recycling bins?”-line. But other times, the disputes can paralyze relationships. Consider a married couple planning a vacation. One might want to bake in the Caribbean heat, while the other might be opposed to taking high carbon footprint flights. Or imagine a couple figuring out where to eat dinner. One might feel like sushi, whereas the other might oppose eating unsustainable sources of salmon. Thomas Joseph Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Oregon whose practice focuses on environmental concerns, says climate change “touches every part of how they live: what they eat, whether they want to fly, what kind of vacation they want.”

New York Times

UN guilty of exaggeration in the first degree?

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:47 AM - 21 Comments

The glaciers are melting! The glaciers are melting! Or not. The New York Times reports that an oft-cited UN study about the melting of the Himalayan glaciers may have been grossly exaggerated. In 2007, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said it was “very likely” that the glaciers would be gone by 2035. By UN standards, the “very likely” designation meant there was a 90 per cent chance the prediction would come true. But now, it looks like that prediction was based on a single interview of an Indian scientist that appeared in The New Scientist magazine. (Moreover, that scientist, Dr. Syed Hasnain, has since claimed that he was “misquoted” about his 2035 estimate.) Christopher Field, co-chairman of the UN panel, says “the I.P.C.C. considers this a very serious issue and we’re working very hard to set the record straight as soon as we can.”

New York Times

Your questions, answered (or, failing that, ignored)

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:36 AM - 31 Comments

Submit your questions below for this week’s mailbag, or send them to scott.feschuk@macleans.rogers.com.

Folk singer Kate McGarrigle dies

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 1 Comment

Montreal-born folk and roots music singer Kate McGarrigle has died of cancer. Best known for her work in the McGarrigle Sisters, a sister act with Anna McGarrigle, she was also the mother of musicians Rufus and Martha Wainwright. McGarrigle was made a member of the Order of Canada in 1994 and received a Governor General’s Performing Arts Award in 2004. She was 63.

CBC News

You say demoted, I say potato

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:28 AM - 31 Comments

While most everyone else seems to be using that dreaded word to describe Lisa Raitt’s situation, here is the official line.

Harper said Raitt “has a great future, and I think this move will give her a little more varied experience in government.”

Who seems to be up, who seems to be down

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 11:11 AM - 22 Comments

Conventional perception seems to have Stockwell Day, Christian Paradis and Rona Ambrose rising, Lisa Raitt and Peter Van Loan falling. Keith Ashfield gets a promotion to cabinet, Rob Moore gets to call himself a minister of state.

Early reviews from the Canadian Press, Globe, Star, Canwest, Reuters, Bloomberg, CBC and CTV.

Canada among foreign lenders cancelling Haitian debt

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:56 AM - 1 Comment

The Paris Club of creditor nations—a group which includes Canada—has promised to cancel Haiti’s foreign debt obligations, and is calling on other nations to do the same. The informal group of 19 lenders, formed in 1956, is owed a total of $214 million and also includes Belgium, Denmark, Italy, France, Britain, and the U.S. Haiti’s total foreign debt was worth US$1.8 billion as of Sept. 2008.

CBC News

Insite, foresight, hindsight

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 10:27 AM - 70 Comments

The B.C. Court of Appeal’s ruling on Vancouver’s Insite shooting gallery for heroin addicts makes for interesting reading. We are all so busy arguing over the merits of harm reduction, and the wisdom of the Harper government’s attempt to shut down the clinic, that it is easy to forget the big constitutional issue that was the chief concern of the court here. You would think that Canadian jurisprudence had developed a clear objective rule for settling even the trickiest “double aspect” issues, wherein both federal and provincial governments can claim that some crumb falls within their respective spheres of constitutional power.

You would, apparently, be wrong. Continue…

Kate McGarrigle's setting sun

By John Geddes - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:43 AM - 5 Comments

Although we’re sometimes resentful and overwrought concerning our neighbour, we Canadians, in our more reflective moments, are also capable of observing the United States with surprising tenderness.

This thought crosses my mind as I learn of the death of Kate McGarrigle, one of our finest songwriters. My favourite McGarrigle composition is “Talk to Me of Mendocino,” which belongs on a short list with “America the Beautiful” and “This Land Is Your Land” as alternative American national anthems.

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If Oprah says so

By Cathy Gulli - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

While preparing for her role in a satirical performance about self-help gurus, actor Robyn Okrant kept bumping up against one name: Oprah Winfrey. Her mother, friends, students, all the women she knew, were continually citing the queen of talk’s advice. “I just felt like Oprah was setting this bar for women to live up to and I was a little, I don’t know, defensive,” Okrant told Maclean’s from her home in Chicago, where she also teaches yoga. “I thought, how come she gets to do this? Does her advice really work? And why are we putting ourselves under so much duress to live up to that model?”

And what would happen if a woman did everything Oprah said she must for one whole year? Two weeks before the start of 2008, Okrant decided she would find out: her new book, Living Oprah, recounts the experiment, which was originally documented on a “Living Oprah” blog. For 12 months, every time Oprah implored her TV audience, magazine readers or website visitors to do something, Okrant obliged. Vote for Obama. Stop drinking diet pop.

Take 10 deep breaths every morning and night. Get a mammogram. Dump toxic people. Consider: what can I live without? Forgive.

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The man who wants to kill crunches

By Patricia Treble - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 78 Comments

After three decades of figuring how out the spine works, Stuart McGill has come to loathe sit-ups. It doesn’t matter whether they are the full sit-ups beloved by military trainers or the crunch versions so ubiquitous in gyms. “What happens when you perform a sit-up?” he asks. “The spine is flexed into the position at which it damages sooner.”

The professor of spine biomechanics at the University of Waterloo knows a thing or two about snapping spines. In his lab, McGill proudly shows off a machine that’s probably created more disc herniations than any other in the world. “We get real [pig] spines from the butcher and we compress them, shear them and bend them to simulate activities such as golf swings and sit-ups, and watch as unique patterns of injury emerge.” A disc has a ring around it, and the middle, the nucleus, is filled with a mucus-like liquid. Do a sit-up and the spine’s compression will squeeze the nucleus. On his computer, McGill shows how the nucleus can work its way out of the disc, hit a nerve root and cause that oh-so-familiar back pain. “From observing the way your total gym routine is performed, we can predict the type of disc damage you’re eventually going to have.”

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The scary truth about airport security

By Cathy Gulli, with Tom Henheffer, Rachel Mendleson and Nancy Macdonald - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 7:49 AM - 39 Comments

When it comes to combatting terrorist bombers and hijackers on airplanes, Canada has a secret weapon that is the envy of every nation: our sky marshals, a covert cadre of elite RCMP officers. Armed undercover operatives, they are rigorously trained to detect and eliminate any and every threat to passengers, flight crew and aircraft, and they must be re-certified twice a year. “What happens at 30,000 feet must end very quickly,” the officer in charge of the Canadian Air Carrier Protective Program told Maclean’s on condition of anonymity. “The only way to do that is to be very­, very good at your job.”

Canadian sky marshals are so good at their job, in fact, that they have trained Thailand’s unit, and played a major role in creating the French, Dutch, Czech, Polish and British in-flight security programs. Now even Israel, whose Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv is considered the gold standard of airport security, wants to learn from Canadian sky marshals. “Their training is first-class, next to none,” says Rafi Sela, president of AR Challenges, a security consulting agency active in Israel and North America, who has chastised other aspects of Canadian air transport security. “The air marshal program in Canada,” he told Maclean’s, “is the best in the world.”

But can the same be said about other security measures at Canadian airports? As hyper-competent as our air marshals may be, they are a last line of defence. Before a terrorist meets them, a lot of other airport security measures must fail—or be missing altogether. Ever since a Nigerian linked to al-Qaeda tried to bomb a plane flying from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day, Canadian airports have come under scrutiny by esteemed aviation experts and frustrated travellers alike. They condemn the ever-expanding prohibited items list and mandatory pat-downs of people going to the United States—after Dec. 25, Toronto and other Canadian cities had the worst travel delays in the world, according to the International Air Transport Association. New security measures, such as the 44 body scanners, each worth $250,000, that will soon be delivered to major Canadian airports, are being called everything from a knee-jerk reaction by the federal government to a waste of money. If a terrorist stuffed explosives in his body cavities, this cutting-edge technology probably wouldn’t catch him, according to Mathieu Larocque of the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority (CATSA), a division of Transport Canada in charge of pre-screening passengers and baggage.
Even though Canada wasn’t directly involved in the Christmas Day incident, what happened matters to us because so many flights that originate here head to the U.S., and the two countries share a similar approach to aviation security. Our realities are intertwined, and we are now living in a “post-Dec. 25” society, as Jim Facette, president of the Canadian Airports Council, puts it. “I don’t know if threat levels have changed, but what has changed is the airport experience.” There is a growing sense throughout the global security community that while traditional tools such as metal detectors and bomb-sniffing dogs are important in a “multi-layered approach” to air transport security, they aren’t the only or even the best ways of fighting terrorists.

Continue…

Where’ve you been, curly parsley?

By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 6:00 AM - 2 Comments

Food fashion has an uncanny knack of echoing the culture at large. Consider the ephemeral bubbles of the last decade—in economic markets and on plates in the form of subatomic foams, “Powdered Anjou Pigeon” and other overhyped molecular gastronomical concoctions. So there’s some definite cosmic realignment in the fact that the next touted trend is the return of a classic ingredient long sneered at by a crowd looking for the next big “wow.” In its year-end “trends for 2010” issue, Canadian House & Home identified curly parsley as a “hot” gourmet food item, proclaiming the common herb the new “star of high-end cuisine,” with chefs suddenly favouring “its intense flavour over flat-leaf.”

As reversals in culinary conventional wisdom go, this is major. For eons, curly parsley has been regarded as the maraschino cherry of the herb world—a fusty dowager garnish of interest to serious cooks only as an ironic retro touch or when replicating Julia Child recipes to a T. Of course, when Child introduced bouquet garni to North American kitchens in the 1960s, leaf formation wasn’t an issue. It wasn’t until the advent of Emeril, Mario, Jamie, Marcella et al. that flat-leaf or “Italian” parsley eclipsed the WASP staple as the more full-flavoured, “authentic” culinary essential.

Its less-expensive frilly sibling was demoted to vastly inferior species, reflected in a post on the food blog Chowhound by a gourmand stranded with “a HUGE amount of curly parsley instead of the flat-leafed I asked for,” which created a crisis: “I think curly parsley is pretty flavourless, but have got to use this up! Any ideas?” (Responses ranged from chimichurri sauce to the obvious tip it be used in recipes that call for parsley.)

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Caption Challenge Vol. 2, No. 3: The Voting

By Scott Feschuk - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 5:27 AM - 28 Comments

UPDATE just before 2 p.m ET: A convincing victory for Not Stephen Colbert, who is, I am assuming, not Stephen Colbert. Whoever you are, email me at scott.feschuk@macleans.rogers.com and I’ll send along your reward.

•

I’m not saying this wasn’t one of your finer efforts, people, but it’s only 5:15 in the morning and I’ve already been exposed to twice the recommended daily allowance of subpar.

Some solid finalists, though, so let’s get to them. Winner receives an Amazon.ca gift certificate courtesy of Feschuk.Reid, the world’s first and only speechwriting and communications firm ever. Feschuk.Reid: Because You’re Continue…

Mr. Overrated

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 at 2:56 AM - 32 Comments

I hope, though I doubt, that Nate Silver’s performance during the stretch drive of the Massachusetts special Senate election will finally lead to him being downgraded from “All-seeing HAL-9000-esque quantitative wizard” to “Just another guy with a computer”. Armed only with the traditional maxims of psephological interpretation, which teach that a late polling break away from the incumbent party is a very unfavourable omen, one could have figured out ten days ago that repulsive Democratic candidate Martha Coakley was in a heap of trouble. Silver, with his revolutionary disregard for everything but the polling numbers, was still arguing as late as Thursday afternoon that Coakley was the clear favourite; he changed his mind at midnight that evening and acknowledged that Scott Brown had a puncher’s chance.

He continued to soothe jumpy Democrats throughout the weekend in the manner of a government radio station denying rumours of a coup d’etat, writing on Sunday night that the election was still a “toss-up”. (He had already cheated on his mechanical bride by citing traditional eyeball analysis from NBC’s Chuck Todd: “If this were any other state we’d say this one was over”). There followed another handful of balm. Tonight, as the national party prepares for the probably loss of its congressional supermajority, he’s still distributing it.

Silver (or “Nate P. Silver”, as I will always think of him) may still be “right”, in the limited sense that a probabilistic prediction about an event that will only happen once can be “right” at all. But even if Coakley does surprise everyone by pulling this election out, the gruesome lack of robustness in Silver’s approach should be evident. We don’t need an advanced proprietary model to tell us what the polls are saying with a five- or six-day lag time built in. I have always understood Silver’s core claim of special expertise to inhere in the ability to give useful information about the future. Boasts like “[the model] correctly predicted the outcome of all 35 Senate races in 2008” are nothing but distracting hype, since 95%+ of Senate elections are easy to call on the morning before they happen. And as Silver certainly knows, a model that delivers probabilistic estimates of outcomes of one-time events has to not only be “right”, but right in such a way that bettors using it would, in the long run, outperform other bettors or prediction markets not equipped with that model. That’s the only appropriate test, and I know of no evidence that he has passed it.