Be Mental With Me

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 12:17 PM - 8 Comments

I caught up with the season finale of The Mentalist, one of those shows I don’t watch regularly but sort of feel like I should. The show has for some reason become a punchline – all the hacky jokes about old people watching Matlock and Touched By an Angel have been transformed into hacky jokes about old people watching The Mentalist – but it’s a pretty strong show in many ways, and certainly different from most of the other procedurals. (It probably helps that it’s produced by Warner Brothers and isn’t an in-house CBS production.) It focuses less on the “magical technology” element that has been part of the genre since CSI, and has more of a timeless style.

It also has a pleasantly classy look to it, thanks to shooting on 35mm film and making some reasonably creative use of colour sometimes; this seems to be a Warner Brothers TV thing, since the studio has many of the best-looking shows – they produce the exceptionally colourful and charming-looking comedy The Middle. Compared to the washed-out HD look of Hawaii 5-0 (to say nothing of that show’s washed-out writing) it’s usually at least nice to look at even when the stories don’t make a lot of sense. It has too many weakish characters (guest and regular) to be a fully satisfying series, and and the mysteries can be a bit perfunctory; if it were on any other network, the Red John arc would be dominating almost every episode by now, though that wouldn’t be a good thing. But it is a watchable show with a strong star – i.e. not Alex O’Loughlin – and its own distinct approach.

In many ways it’s a superhero show in plain clothes: Patrick Jane’s superiority to everyone around him is hyped up to nearly-parodic levels – to the point that some have speculated that Bruno Heller is secretly making fun of the whole concept – he has a super-powerful arch-nemesis, and the police can’t solve cases without this crazy civilian who fights for justice. The whole Red John concept even reminded me a bit of the way the Joker was portrayed in The Dark Knight, which came out the same year, and as the series has gone on it’s amped that up to beyond 11; like the Heath Ledger Joker, Red John is this lone lunatic who also happens to be infinitely powerful and influential. It’s a bit ridiculous, as it was in The Dark Knight, but it is part of the show’s personality, just like the willingness of Fringe (another Warner Brothers TV production) to go crazy.

That brings us to the season finale, which will be discussed below (spoilers):

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Air France Flight 447 captain not in the cockpit

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 12:16 PM - 13 Comments

The flight recorders from Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic in June 2009, reveal that the captain was not in the cockpit when the aircraft began its fateful descent. Instead, the plane’s two co-pilots were at the controls. Pilots on long flights often take turns at the controls to rest and remain alert. The revelation comes as part of the ongoing crash investigation being conducted by the French agency, BEA. The flight recording devices were recently recovered from the bottom of the ocean. They also indicated that the plane had stalled numerous times as the co-pilots were maneuvering through heavy clouds. The Air France flight was travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 people onboard were killed.

The Globe and Mail

MPs need to know more about spending bills

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 0 Comments

Outgoing Auditor General Sheila Fraser said on Thursday that MPs don’t have enough “oversight” on the government spending decisions they vote on. She told Postmedia News on Thursday that MPs are too often in the dark when a spending bill goes to a vote in the House of Commons. She said the government should provide opposition MPs with better information about government spending, and that the opposition should dig deeper to understand what they are voting on. MPs often feel “intimidated” by the numbers contained in the bills that go before the House, she said. Fraser will finish her 10-year tenure as Auditor General on Monday.

Ottawa Citizen

The Russians are mocking

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 12:02 PM - 25 Comments

Russia’s Arctic ambassador questions the Harper government’s fears of invasion.

“It could come from lack of knowledge of reality,” Vasiliev told The Canadian Press during a major conference on Canada-Norway-Russia Arctic co-operation at Ottawa’s Carleton University. ”I think that time and reality proves that this is all wrong.”

Mladic fit for extradition from Serbia

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 11:49 AM - 0 Comments

Former Bosnian-Serb general Ratko Mladic has been declared fit for extradition from Serbia by the U.N. International Criminal Tribunal to the former Yugoslavia. It is expected that his legal team will appeal the decision, arguing that Mladic’s health is too poor. If he is extradited, he will be sent to The Hague to face a war crimes tribunal. Mladic was arrested on Thursday and is charged with genocide and other crimes that allegedly occurred during the Bosnian war in the early 1990s. It is believed he is responsible for the killing of about 7,500 Bosnian Muslims at Srebrenica in July 1995. Mladic had been in hiding for 16 years, but was found by Serbian security forces in Lazarevo, a village about 80 kilometres north of Belgrade. Serbian President Boris Tadic said Mladic’s arrest is a step forward in the countries efforts to become a member of the European Union.

BBC News

Harper says no new money for 'Arab spring' countries

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 11:07 AM - 11 Comments

As G8 nations pledge US$20 billion to support countries emerging from the ‘Arab spring,’ such as Egypt and Tunisia, in their transition to democracy, Stephen Harper has said that no new money would come from Canada, the CBC reports. Instead, Harper says the money should come from international monetary institutions, such as the World Bank and European Investment Bank, which already receive yearly contributions from Canada. “Canada has been increasing its commitment to those agencies,” the CBC’s Susan Lunn reports. “They now pay more than $12 billion (Cdn) a year into those international agencies, like the World Bank, and that’s how Canada is going to continue to support those two countries.” Meanwhile, U.S. President Barack Obama has offered to forgive Egypt’s debt and a US$2 billion package of loan guarantees, while France and Britain have pledged “hundreds of millions,” to support both Egypt and Tunisia’s transition to democracy.

CBC News

Pay up‚ or else…

By Leah McLaren - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 10:15 AM - 0 Comments

Christopher Furlong/Getty Images

Monday morning, 8 a.m., and the drop-off area outside St. James Senior Girls’ School in west London is a bustling picture of urban affluence. Rosy-cheeked students in kilts and matching knee socks hoist overloaded backpacks out of Porsche Cayennes and Lexus SUVs. Many wear matching straw boater hats decorated with ribbons in the academy’s official colours. Parents and nannies chat amicably on the sidewalk, clutching take-away lattes, before hopping back in their double-parked vehicles and zooming off to work. It’s the sort of idyllic scene that takes place every school day in prosperous cities around the world. But here in Britain, it’s one that conceals the darker economic reality facing private schools today.

Since the recession hit a couple of years ago, many families have found themselves struggling to keep their children in the private school system—and with average tuition fees of $21,000 per child per year, it’s no wonder. As a result, an increased number of schools are now turning to debt collection agencies to recover the outstanding fees owed to them by parents who have either defaulted or found themselves in arrears. According to Michael Lower, head of the Independent Schools’ Bursars Association, this method of fee collection is less costly and time-consuming than the other option: taking parents to court. “While the parents struggle, it also means a bigger shortfall for schools who have overhead and staffing costs to think about. In the end they are left with two choices: remove the child—which is usually a last resort for obvious reasons—or take action.”

The collection agency Daniels Silverman recently said it expects to collect almost $14.4 million in outstanding fees from parents this year. That figure is up by around $5 million from last year. Agencies are also reporting a sharp increase in the number of private schools that have retained their services: Daniels Silverman is acting for 74 schools, up from 48 last year, while a competing collection agency, Sinclair Goldberg Price, is reporting a 70 per cent increase in the number of private schools it now works for. According to Daniels Silverman, its average private-school client is owed around $190,000 in fees. Not a huge number when it comes to the educational institutions of the global elite—but enough to push many smaller private schools to the brink of closure.

Continue…

Still fighting for clarity

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 10:14 AM - 39 Comments

Stephane Dion takes aim at Jack Layton’s position on secession.

Dion said the top court would have said so if it meant a bare majority would be good enough to trigger secession negotiations. Instead the court insisted, 13 times, that a “clear majority” would be necessary. ”If (Layton thinks) 50 per cent plus one is a clear majority, what is an unclear majority?” Dion asked in an interview.

Dion said the debate has been framed as though accepting a bare majority result would be showing respect to Quebecers. But determining something as momentous as the fate of the country on the basis of one vote, is “not respecting Quebecers, not respecting their rights to be Canadians unless they clearly decide to stop being Canadians.” ”You are in the situation to decide the choice of a country (based on) the results of a judicial recount or the examination of rejected ballots. It would be an absurd, untenable position,” he added.

Henry Kissinger on China

By John Fraser - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 10:10 AM - 26 Comments

Christopher Wahl

Henry Kissinger, the extraordinary German-born Jew who bestrode most of 20th-century postwar American foreign policy, has written—at the age of 88—an important book on China, called just that: On China. Who better? At the most basic level, it’s important simply because of who Kissinger is and was: national security adviser and then secretary of state for two presidents (Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford), the realpolitik author of détente with the Soviet Union, which ultimately led to its dissolution; the high and mighty sherpa who cajoled the United States into recognizing “Red China” after decades of dangerous adversarial pyrotechnics; and the man who negotiated the end of the war in Vietnam, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, he presides over Kissinger Associates Inc., the mother of all international consulting firms, representing everyone from Coca Cola and Fiat and Volvo to (once upon a time) Hollinger Inc., whose former proprietor, Lord Black of Crossharbour (late of Coleman Correctional Center) was a close colleague. It may be fanciful, but I wouldn’t be surprised one day to learn Kissinger was on retainer to the politburo of the People’s Republic of China. As a locally famous consultant at Navigator Inc. of Toronto once said when criticized for taking a consulting fee from a dubious client: “Everyone deserves representation.”

The presiding premise of On China is to provide a detailed strategy on how best Sino-American relations should be conducted in the emerging era, which is a good enough reason to pay attention to such an experienced practitioner. Yet for all his valiant efforts to put a new glaze on well-known views, the inimitable wheeler-dealer of international diplomacy is still pretty easy to find. Although it takes 148 pages to get to it, it wasn’t a surprise to see the fulsome reference to Kissinger’s hero in the first paragraph of chapter six, entitled “China confronts both superpowers”: “Otto von Bismark, probably the greatest diplomat of the second half of the 19th century, once said that in a world order of five states, it is always desirable to be part of a group of three. Applied to the interplay of three countries, one would therefore think that it is always desirable to be in a group of two.”

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Superheroes vs. right-wing Canada

By Elio Iannacci - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 10:00 AM - 8 Comments

Courtesy Marvel Entertainment; Richard Comely 2011

When news of Canada’s federal election hit Marvel comics headquarters in New York, a group of employees interrupted work on an important deadline to do a happy dance. “We jumped for joy, literally!” laughs graphic novelist Fred Van Lente via phone from Manhattan. “It was as if we’d won the lottery.” As luck would have it, Van Lente, his co-writer Greg Pak and illustrator Dale Eaglesham were just putting the finishing touches on the relaunch of their latest comic book, Alpha Flight, due out in June. The Flight, as it’s called on many fan sites, is a team of Canuck superheroes defending truth, justice and the Canadian way. Created in 1983 by John Byrne, Alpha Flight ceased publication in 2005. Van Lente and Pak’s prequel to the first issue—which landed on comic book stands this week—focuses on Byrne’s original nine-member team of caped and bodysuited crusaders. What’s different is who they’re up against: namely an enemy Van Lente calls “their most horrific villain of all time—the Canadian government.”

In fact, the plot Van Lente and his crew boiled up—months before Stephen Harper, Jack Layton and Michael Ignatieff were waging their own epic battles—includes our nation going through some serious political unrest post-election. The prequel begins weeks after an extreme right-wing majority takes over the country and Vancouver is completely destroyed. After a series of events unfolds, Alpha Flight, a government-hired group of freedom fighters, are suddenly deemed enemies of the state for not toeing the line.

“It’s so perfect,” explains Van Lente. “Our actual tag line is: ‘Do you fear your country turning on you?’ It is definitely an art-imitating-life moment if you look at what is going on today. As American writers, we do take liberties, of course,” Van Lente says, jokingly. “Despite Alpha Flight’s best efforts, the Canadian government goes fascist and chaos ensues.” One of the historical liberties they’ve taken is using parts of Pierre Trudeau’s October Crisis speech to frame the catastrophe.

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How everyday products can cure your pet

By Julia McKinnell - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 9:55 AM - 0 Comments

iStock; Getty Images; Photo illustration by Lauren Cattermole

Here’s a tip for dog owners from the guy who once talked Jay Leno into shaving with peanut butter and convinced Barbara Walters to put a wet diaper on her head. “To ward off unwelcome, prowling male dogs eager to mate, rub a dab of Vicks VapoRub near your female dog’s tail. The pungent smell of eucalyptus and menthol masks the odour that attracts males,” advises Joey Green, who used to write TV commercials for Burger King but now makes a living finding alternate uses for everyday products.

In his latest book, Joey Green’s Amazing Pet Cures, he describes how he solved the problem of his neighbour’s dog leaving “unwanted presents” in his front yard. “The first time I left the evidence untouched and put up a sign that read, ‘Please clean up after your dog.’ Three days later, the sign and the proof remained on the lawn.”

Realizing he couldn’t retrain his inconsiderate neighbour, Green decided to retrain the dog, by liberally sprinkling his own lawn with cayenne pepper. “In fact, every other day for the next two weeks, I went out and peppered the grass to make sure the dog, with his acute sense of smell, got the message loud and clear. The dog never soiled in front of our house again.”

Continue…

Just a number

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 9:01 AM - 5 Comments

Behold, our baby-faced new Parliament.

Samara and a group of volunteers–Janet Rodriguez, Tyler Somers, and Sarah Somerton–have been compiling information on the new MPs, including their year of birth. This information has proved enlightening. For instance, the average age of an MP taking office in the 40th Parliament was 52. The average age of an MP taking office in the 41st Parliament is 51 … And our new MPs are also a year younger than their more seasoned counterparts were when they entered politics. Given this information, perhaps the media’s focus on the youth of the new Parliament is a little exaggerated.

Nonetheless, a few points of interest. Continue…

Fannie, I wish I'd never seen your face

By Colby Cosh - Friday, May 27, 2011 at 7:16 AM - 67 Comments

This transcript of a public-radio interview with New York Times finance writer Gretchen Morgenson is long. I would have everyone read it anyway. Like the Great Depression before it, the Great Recession has put free markets on the defensive. It’s not quite clear to me how fair this is. It is surely fair at least to some trivial degree, in the sense that markets are ultimately made up of regrettably fallible humans, prone to superstitions and herd behaviour and poor judgments of risk. But everyone seems to have managed to take the lesson that is most convenient for himself from the crisis; for those on the left it has been “markets fail”, and for those in the muddled mixed-economy middle it has been “regulators fail to smack those nasty markets back into line”.

What I see when I look at the origins of the financial pandemic is the story “government-sponsored enterprises that subsidize crazy lending practices and puppetize legislators fail.” Mortgage-writing institutions did things throughout the late 1990s and early oh-ohs that weren’t just likely to turn out badly; they made enormous amounts of loans that were practically certain to go bust in the short-to-medium term, loans that your mother could have told you would go sour. It wasn’t a “free” market that relaxed mortgage underwriting standards to the point of annihilation; it wasn’t a “free” market that put unskilled workers in million-dollar homes in the Sand States, or that spent too long ignoring the rising default rates that resulted. Continue…

For your consideration: Denise Savoie

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 5:26 PM - 0 Comments

Following Lee Richardson and Bruce Stanton, here are responses from Denise Savoie, the MP for Victoria, to our questions for the prospective speakers. Continue…

100 Year-Old Playlists

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 4:52 PM - 3 Comments

The success of the Library of Congress’s National Jukebox is quite a delightful thing.

It’s a collection of recordings made by the powerful Victor Talking Machine Co. (the one with the dog) in the first quarter of the 20th century, and as Will Friedwald explains in the Wall Street Journal, it took 10 years to get the site up and running, mostly because of all the rights issues that had to be worked out. (Many of the songs are not in the public domain, and due to the U.S.’s bizarre copyright laws, even the recordings that are public-domain in most parts of the world aren’t public-domain there.) They still can’t offer anything from later than 1925 – meaning nothing from after acoustical recording was replaced by the electrical recording process, which was better able to capture what voices and instruments really sounded like. And they aren’t able to offer the recordings for downloading. But there are lots of great recordings in there, and it’s great to be able to browse through all these recordings and listen to the birth of recorded music’s ability to democratize and internationalize music.

And since so many musical styles are represented here, there’s something for everyone. As a fan of the American musical, for example, I enjoy checking out Victor’s recordings of show tunes, which rarely utilized performers from the actual shows (that came later) but were often handled by in-house singers like Billy Murray, with his fine diction (that allowed the words to be clear despite the limitations of the recording process) and his famous technique of deliberately singing flat in comedy songs, as in this song from a show by Jerome Kern (music) and P.G. Wodehouse (lyrics). But there’s a lot more in there that I haven’t heard yet and have still to discover.

[vodpod id=Video.9625269&w=425&h=350&fv=config%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fmedia.loc.gov%2F%2Fmedia%2Fembed%2Fid%2FA2671ACD5842037CE0438C93F116037C]

Slave labour video gamers

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 3:49 PM - 3 Comments

We’ve known about gold farming for years. It’s the practice of monotonously earning virtual currency in games like World of Warcraft in order to sell it for real cash to less patient gamers. Building up gold takes hours and hours, and is still only worth the effort if you’re doing it in a country where wages are very low and you’re selling your product to gamers in countries that are relatively affluent. Most of the world’s gold farming takes place in China, where young men live in flophouse apartments and go on 20 hour marathon gaming stretches, methodically whacking goblins on the head to earn livings slightly better than what they’d get working at real-world factories. Here’s a great audio documentary my colleague Geoff Siskind produced on the subject (skip to 12:45).

As grim as that all sounds, a report has emerged of a much more sinister practice: forced gold farming in labour camps. A former inmate of the Jixi labour camp in north-east China tells The Guardian of long days spent digging trenches, followed by long nights of forced video gaming. Hundreds of prisoners were reportedly exploited by corrupt guards into gaming into the night. Those who failed to meet their virtual gold quotas would be beaten with plastic pipes.

Besides being absolutely bonkers crazy, the gold farming phenomenon is instructive in getting us thinking about best practices for a globalized online economy. This isn’t the cheery world-flattening that Thomas Friedman promised us—it’s the realtime exploitation of radical disparities in wealth, divorced from any one nation’s labour laws and depersonalized by anonymizing technology.

Stephen Harper's Truth Plane

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 3:25 PM - 16 Comments

Robert Cribb talks to the Prime Minister’s body language advisor.

Watch the debate clips now and note the placement of Harper’s hands, cupped and open, directly at stomach height. Bowden refers to this as the “Truth Plane” — a visual expression that communicates the right mix of composed, competent resolve and level-headed credibility … Bowden would say our reptilian brains saw something different in him during the debate and campaign. Harper appeared to be the candidate “most assertive and in control,” says Bowden. “If you ask people what they thought of him, they’ll say he was prime ministerial. I think he did brilliantly.”

Layton announces NDP shadow cabinet

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 3:12 PM - 3 Comments

Jack Layton unveiled his 43-member shadow cabinet on Thursday with a promise that his team of 102 NDP MPs would refrain from the heckling and poor behaviour that has come to sully the tone in the House of Commons. Joe Comartin, Jack Harris and Paul Dewar will remain as the official critics of justice, defence and foreign affairs, respectively. Libby Davies has been moved to the health portfolio, previously the domain of Halifax MP Megan Leslie, who will move to environment. Peggy Nash will move to finance, while newcomer Jasbir Sandhu is now the public safety critic. Thomas Mulcair will remain as deputy leader.

The Globe and Mail

Preliminary inquiry launched into Schwarzenegger's double life

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 2:58 PM - 0 Comments

California’s attorney general will launch an inquiry into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s tenure as governor, specifically into the alleged misuse of public funds to cover up his extramarital liaisons, reports RadarOnline.com. The Office of the Attorney General will conduct a “preliminary evaluation into the scope of Schwarzenegger’s double life,” including using his security detail to facilitate sexual encounters. A security officer at the Sacramento Hyatt Regency said he saw California Highway Patrol officers and vehicles escort women to and from the Governator’s hotel room. “On three differed occasions after the governor arrived alone at the Hyatt Regency, CHP Dignitary Protection Services arrived in their official vehicles, black Ford Crown Victoria sedans – about one to two hours later with one or two young females,” William Taylor, the head of hotel security, told the National Inquirer after passing a polygraph test. Schwarzenegger’s public relations firm issued a press release denying the allegations, which included statements from CHP and hotel officials.

RadarOnline.com

Meanwhile, in Libya

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 1:28 PM - 15 Comments

While the NATO mission grinds on, officials confirm that Canadian jets have dropped 240 laser-guided bombs on Libyan targets so far. David Pugliese reported last week that each bomb costs approximately $100,000 and that the Defence Department has ordered another 1,300.

In other news, Foreign Affairs confirms that Canada has been in contact with the Libyan Transitional National Council.

Job cuts loom over Defence Department

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 1:22 PM - 18 Comments

A total of 2,100 jobs will be cut from the Department of Defence over the next three years, according to reports circulating Thursday. The cuts come as a part of the broader scaling back of the public service expected the Conservative majority government has promised. Last week, Conservative MP Julian Fantino was appointed associate minister in charge of procurement, putting him in charge of a budget that is between 14 and 16 per cent of the department’s $22-billion total budget.

The Globe and Mail

U.S. recalls diplomats from Yemen

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 12:59 PM - 2 Comments

The U.S. recalled all non-essential diplomats and their families from Yemen on Thursday, as President Ali Abdullah Saleh maintained his refusal to step down in favour of a transitional unity government. “We continue to support the departure of President Saleh who has consistently agreed that he would be stepping down from power and then consistently reneged on those agreements,” said Secretary of State Hilary Clinton. Hundreds of people have fled the capital of Sanaa, where tribal groups and government troops are exchanging sporadic artillery and gun fire after clashes broke out on Monday. President Saleh has so far refused to sign a transitional deal offered by the Gulf Co-operation Council, although he said in a statement on Wednesday that he would sign a deal “within a national dialogue and a clear mechanism.” Seventy-two people have died in the last three days of clashes.

BBC News

Harper presses G8 leaders to fulfill maternal health pledges

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 12:46 PM - 0 Comments

Europe’s financial crisis is hindering Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s efforts to secure funds for the G8′s maternal health initiative. At last year’s G8 summit in Muskoka, Harper secured pledges of $5 billion in aid from leaders that would go towards maternal and child health in the developing world. Canada pledged $1.1 billion between 2010 and 2015, while the U.K. pledged the most with $3.4 billion. But France and Germany have only managed pledges of a few hundred million euros, while Italy and Russia have committed only $75 million each. A report by a United Nations commission released last week revealed that “of the eight Millennium Development Goals, the two specifically concerned with improving the health of women and children are the furthest from being achieved by 2015.” EU leaders are hinting that bringing the eurozone economies out of sovereign debt crisis trumps aid commitments on the list of G8 priorities.

The Globe and Mail

Team Layton

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 26, 2011 at 11:41 AM - 13 Comments

The NDP leader has announced his shadow cabinet.

I count 19 new MPs (Peggy Nash and Francoise Boivin are newly elected, but not new to Parliament).

Possibly of note: the NDP have split Human Resources and Skills Development between six shadow ministers. Jean Crowder will be Diane Finley’s main counterpart, but Minister Finley will also have the attention of Marjolaine Boutin-Sweet (Skills), Marie-Claude Morin (Housing), Claude Patry (Employment Insurance), Manon Perreault (Disabilities) and Rathik Sitsabaiesan (Post-Secondary Education).