The religion of Apple

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 12:40 PM - 4 Comments

Apple and its products inspire a cult-like devotion out of their fans, say neuroscientists who ran a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) test on one fanatic’s brain for a BBC documentary. They found Apple gadgets activated the same parts of the brain that religious imagery does for believers. The documentary highlighted scenes from the opening of an Apple store in London, where employees were “whipped up into some sort of evangelical frenzy.” Apple is widely known in tech circles for cultivating a profound sense of loyalty among its fans, some of whom were portrayed in a 2009 documentary entitled “Macheads.”

CNN

Atlanta Thrashers on the move to Winnipeg: report

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 0 Comments

According to a report in The Globe and Mail, the NHL’s Atlanta Thrashers are definitely moving to Winnipeg. An announcement confirming the team’s move is expected Tuesday, ending months of speculation about the return of NHL hockey to Winnipeg. While it was initially believed the troubled Phoenix Coyotes would pack up their bags and head north, Mark Chipman and David Thomson, the investors behind potential owner True North Sports and Entertainment, are believed to have targeted the Thrashers all along. NHL commissioner Gary Bettman denied the team would be leaving Atlanta on Thursday night.

The Globe and Mail

CTV News

House GOP press for Keystone XL approval by Nov. 1

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 12:10 PM - 9 Comments

House Republicans have drafted legislation that would require the Obama administration to approve by Nov. 1 TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline from the oil sands in Alberta to the Gulf Coast.

On Monday, members of House Energy and Commerce committee will hold a hearing to make the case for “North American made energy security”.

It’s interesting that the notion of  ”North American energy security” (as opposed to the oft-cited “American energy security”) is gaining political traction in Washington, DC.

Links to witness list, written testimony, press release, and Monday webcast are here.

***

On Twitter at luizachsavage

Ryan Gosling and Sean Penn heat up Cannes

By Brian D. Johnson - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:47 AM - 11 Comments

Ryan Gosling at the Cannes press conference for 'Drive' / photo by Brian D. Johnson

In the final lap of competition at Cannes, which wraps tomorrow, the race just heated up between Drive and This Must be the Place—two movies shot in America by European filmmakers. Both have emerged as real contenders for the Palme D’Or, which will be awarded Sunday. And the jury, led by Robert De Niro, will likely end up trying to decide which of their respective stars most deserves the best actor prize, Ryan Gosling or Sean Penn.

In Drive, a noir thriller set in Los Angeles, Gosling stars as an ace stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. The movie is styled with the kind of arty visuals and cutthroat wit that would make Tarantino jealous. Call it Pulp Traction. Directed by Denmark’s Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising), it’s a contemporary samurai western, with sparse dialogue, and a quiet tone of hair-trigger suspense that’s snapped by short bursts of extreme, bone-crushing violence. As a noble hero on a mission to save his neighbour (Carey Mulligan) and her boy from a gangland retribution, Gosling combines a sensitive, Zen-like grace with a slow-fused capacity for psychotic brutality. Albert Brooks makes a surprisingly scary villain. And in a bravura performance, Gosling reveals himself as an über-cool action hero reminiscent of Steve McQueen or the young Clint Eastwood. Continue…

Newt, Ryan and Tactical Radicalism

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:46 AM - 7 Comments

I’ve been fascinated by the TV and print coverage of Newt Gingrich’s flailing Presidential campaign. I never thought he had much of a chance at the nomination; he’s not particularly well liked by the public at large or by the Republican base. He thought he had a chance because he used to be very popular with journalists – both conservative and “MSM” journalists, who considered him a man of ideas and something of a policy wonk. What smashed his standing among those groups was his decision to criticize Paul Ryan, who is also very much beloved by those groups, and for many of the same reasons: he’s thought of as a wonk, a visionary, a very serious person.

Gingrich thought he was going to get some traction by taking a middle ground between Socialism and Ryan’s plan for privatizing Medicare. He didn’t realize until it was too late that there is no middle ground; privatizing Medicare is a new litmus test. This is part of a movement in the Republican party that has been called “Tactical Radicalism,” the idea that the most right-wing policies are also the ones that are most politically advantageous.

The thinking goes like this: Republicans lost in 2006 and 2008 (and in 1992 and 1996 for that matter) not because they were too conservative, but because they were insufficiently conservative. In this Continue…

Harper and Stelmach to tour Slave Lake devastation

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 0 Comments

Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach will be in Slave Lake, Alta. on Friday, touring the town that was ravaged by wildfires earlier this week. Fire destroyed 433 properties in the community of 7,000 people. Many of the town’s residents are now in emergency shelters in nearby Athabasca and other communities. It may be weeks before they are able to return to their town. While it appears Harper has no plans to visit evacuees or speak to the media, Stelmach is scheduled to address reporters after the PM leaves the area later this afternoon.

CBC News

National Energy Board predicts costly fuel for summer drivers

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:36 AM - 2 Comments

Canada’s National Energy Board is predicting an expensive driving season this summer. Citing continued political unrest in some oil-producing countries, the agency expects average oil prices to be somewhere between US$100 and $120 per barrel, significantly higher than last summer’s range of $70 to $80. This rise in oil prices translates to a spike in the cost of gasoline and diesel, since crude oil is their main ingredient. According to GasBuddy.com, the average price for a litre of gas in Canada on Thursday was $1.33.

CTV News

What's in a name change

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:33 AM - 10 Comments

Bill Curry considers the department formerly known as Indian Affairs.

At first glance, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s reclassification appears to be in keeping with prevailing moves toward political correctness: replacing a label that doesn’t have much relevance any more with one more widely accepted. “Indian” is dated, in much the same way as Inuit are no longer called Eskimos. But there is power in naming. The semantic shift could have all sorts of consequences for native people from the laws governing their treatment, the services they get, and even their identities.

Obama and Netanyahu to meet in Washington

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 11:08 AM - 1 Comment

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in Washington on Friday for talks with U.S. President Barack Obama. The two leaders are expected to discuss their disagreement about the borders of a future Palestinian state. In a widely publicized speech on Thursday, Obama said a Palestinian state should exist within the borders that were in place before Israel captured much of East Jerusalem, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights in 1967. But Netanyahu said those borders would leave Israel “indefensible.” On Friday, his office released a statement saying that they feel Washington doesn’t have a full understanding of Israel’s security concerns. Meanwhile, Arab League chief Amr Moussa urged Obama to stay true to his endorsement of the 1967 borders, saying peace talks should not just focus on Israeli security.

BBC News 

The Secret

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 10:02 AM - 28 Comments

The Canadian Press interviews the previously elusive Jim Hillyer.

A local student group revealed during the campaign that his “MA in Political Economy” and “advanced PhD studies in Constitutional Law” came from tiny George Wythe University. It’s located off the side of a highway in Cedar City, Utah, and is not accredited to grant recognized degrees. The school was founded in 1992 by a man who argued that The Book of Mormon contains “all the necessary fields of study, at levels from kindergarten to doctoral studies … both for religious and secular education.” 

Hillyer, who also has a BA in philosophy from the University of Lethbridge, said the complaints about his credentials come from “bitter people grasping at straws and finding anything.” He said the notion of university accreditation is misunderstood and overrated: “Theoretically, a school could form it’s own accreditation body and call itself accredited.”

The Liberal party may change, but some traditions endure

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 30 Comments

Rest assured that however few Liberal MPs remain, there will still be anonymous whining.

“It gives one a completely unfair advantage compared to everybody else,” said a re-elected Liberal MP, who deemed Rae’s letter a showcase of “unbelievable vanity.” ”I know what Rae is banking on that a new executive elected in January at a biennial convention . . . may want to lift that sort of impediment and that there will be such a groundswell of support for him so that to, you know, save the country, he’ll just have to run and they’ll beg him to run.”

Bob Rae and sources close to him are assuring he has no plans to seek the permanent leadership post. One source says Mr. Rae thinks the next Liberal leader should come from outside the current caucus.

High-tech smear job

By Chris Sorensen - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 8:05 AM - 0 Comments

Keystone Press

The overlap between Facebook and Google isn’t immediately obvious—one is a social network, the other a search engine—but Facebook’s recent attempts to plant nasty news stories about Google demonstrates just how intense the rivalry between the two tech giants has become. Facebook was recently forced to admit it secretly hired PR firm Burson-Marsteller to urge journalists to investigate claims that Google had invaded people’s privacy with its new social networking tool, Social Circle, a potential Facebook competitor.

Despite their different business models, both companies rely on online advertising to pay the bills, with Google leading the charge with annual sales of about US$29 billion, compared to an estimated US$1 billion for Facebook. But Facebook is growing fast and, in many cases, is competing for the same bucket of ad dollars. Longer term, there’s speculation Facebook could replace Google as the Web’s gatekeeper, with users turning to their social networks when looking for online information. This may be the first time the fight between the duo has turned dirty, but likely not the last.

Talk of the town

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:45 AM - 2 Comments

Graham Hughes/CP

On a recent Wednesday, Liette Carle was bicycling along the main strip of Louiseville, Que., a town of about 7,500 about an hour’s drive northeast of Montreal, when she came upon a swarm of journalists in front of the town hall building. In the midst of it all was Ruth Ellen Brosseau, the local NDP candidate, who earlier this month defeated the two-term Bloc Québécois incumbent seemingly despite herself.

“I’m happy to meet you,” Carle said, en français. Brosseau said the same back, thereby exploding one of the myths about the 27-year-old politician: her French is actually quite good, despite claims to the contrary floated in the press during the election.

The non-journalist crowd, Carle included, was instantly smitten with the intensely friendly woman in a black pantsuit. Really, though, Carle would have voted for just about anything with an NDP orange hue. She didn’t care that Brosseau had never set foot in the district until that day, or that she’d spent a considerable part of the campaign vacationing in Las Vegas. Carle didn’t even blink at the post-election news that Brosseau’s resumé had been mildly embellished on the party website. “I didn’t vote for Brosseau,” Carle says over red wine and radishes at her kitchen table. “J’ai voté pour Jack.”

Continue…

On the death of Osama bin Laden—and the secret life of the elite Navy SEALs who killed him

By Michael Friscolanti - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:30 AM - 25 Comments

Photographs by Stephen Morton/Getty Images

A sniper by trade, Howard Wasdin was a special forces commando attached to the U.S. military’s most covert unit—the same squad that would later assassinate Osama bin Laden. His new book, SEAL Team Six, offers a rare glimpse into the top-secret world of America’s best-trained warriors.

Q: How did you find out that Osama bin Laden had finally been located and killed?

A: My neighbour actually came over. I had gotten up early that Monday, was getting ready to take the dogs out, and my neighbour knocks on the door. He said, “Happy Dead bin Laden Day.” I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” He said, “SEAL Team Six shot him in the head.” While I was relieved—as most of us were at first—I wasn’t completely at ease until I found out that nobody had been wounded or killed. In that type of operation, that is just amazing.

Continue…

Can you fight a flood by creating one?

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:25 AM - 0 Comments

Fred Greenslade/Reuters

The bright red “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster went up on Steve Ashton’s office wall on May 7. Manitoba’s minister of emergency measures had originally given it to his son Alex as a gift last Christmas, but faced with a massive once-in-300-year surge in the Assiniboine River, the 55-year-old politician figured it might be of more use down at the provincial legislature.

It also happened to be the weekend he and his colleagues were grappling with a stark dilemma: let nature take its course, or intervene and create a smaller, and hopefully controllable flood of their own. The Assiniboine was rising at an unprecedented rate. As the Souris River joined the flow southeast of Brandon, the waters were already 1½ times greater than the last major flood in 1976. And plenty of rain was in the forecast.

For more than a month, Ashton had been locked into a schedule that moved from briefing, to meeting, to media conference, to more obligations. (And continues still: the conversation with Maclean’s was sandwiched in between a helicopter tour of the flood zone with opposition leaders and question period.) But by Mother’s Day it was becoming clear that weeks of frantic work to shore up dikes downstream at a cost of $25 million wouldn’t be enough. Neither would further tweaks to a floodway at Portage la Prairie that diverts water into Lake Manitoba. The predicted peak flows of more than 52,000 cubic feet per second would overwhelm the defences.

Continue…

Inside the Slave Lake inferno

By Colby Cosh - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:20 AM - 4 Comments

The fire destroyed 40 per cent of the community’s structures

“At 4 p.m. I was taking aerial photos of the forest fire,” says reporter-photographer Caezer Ng of Slave Lake, Alta.’s Lakeside Leader. “Based on what I saw from the air, I was fairly encouraged. It looked like there was a comfortable kilometre-and-a-half, maybe two-kilometre gap between us and the fire. By five o’clock I was on the ground in a burning town.” It was the afternoon of Sunday, May 15. In a matter of minutes, some 40 per cent of the structures in the community of 7,000 would be lost to a conflagration of unexpected speed and destructiveness. Slave Lake’s gleaming $36-million town hall, completed just 17 months ago, went up in flames almost as though it had been built out of thermite. So too did the Catholic church, the public library, and the mall.

The town, a fast-growing centre for oil patch activity, forestry and tourism, sits 200 km north of Edmonton at the eastern tip of Lesser Slave Lake. Like much of northern Alberta, it had been scourged for much of the previous week by dry, warm winds gusting up to 100 km/hr, winds normally much more characteristic of the province’s arid south. Duncan MacDonnell, a public affairs man for the provincial ministry that oversees forest protection, walked outside Saturday in Edmonton and immediately kissed his leisurely Sunday goodbye: “I knew there was a full day of wildfire briefings in front of me.” He was right; within the next few days, two dozen wildfires would grow out of control throughout the province and 1,100 sq. km would be scorched.

Slave Lake’s rapid expansion over recent years had left it without much natural separation between new subdivisions and the surrounding bush. The fire that eventually ravaged the town began 15 km to the southeast on Saturday, and residents were advised to be ready to bug out on two hours’ notice. When the inferno arrived, they did not get half that. The front of the blaze leaped local highways with an ease that surprised firefighters, and hot winds spread the fire in sudden terrifying flashovers rather than picturesque tongues of flame. Propane tanks and other fuel-storage facilities exploded in a steady stream of pops as families sought out safer parts of town. The burning of the local Ford dealership, with its trucks and its repair shop full of flammables, is said to have been especially memorable.

Continue…

The power to appoint judges doesn’t mean Harper will get what he wants

By Paul Wells - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:10 AM - 59 Comments

Chris Wattie/Reuters

On May 13, Mr. Justice Ian Binnie and Mme. Justice Louise Charron announced they’ll retire from the Supreme Court of Canada this summer. Their replacements will be Stephen Harper’s third and fourth appointments to the top court, but the first two he’ll make as head of a majority government. By the next election, Harper will have named at least five of the court’s nine justices, maybe more.

The day before Binnie and Charron announced their retirements, quite by coincidence I spent half a day attending the top court’s hearings. The Supremes were hearing arguments about Insite, the Vancouver clinic where drug addicts use their street-bought heroin and other substances under medical supervision.

The case illustrated why a prime minister takes a keen interest in his power to appoint judges to the Supreme Court. But it also showed that the power to put a judge on the court isn’t a magic wand. When the final Insite decision comes down, don’t expect much of a rift between Harper’s appointees and the majority who were there before he came along.

Continue…

Some Liberals still see Bob Rae as their next saviour

By Erica Alini - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 7:00 AM - 20 Comments

Photograph by Andrew Tolson

On the subject of the Liberal party circa May 2011, and specifically how the most dominant political institution of the 20th century has come to be in its present situation, Bob Rae recalls some words offered to him by the late Philip Givens, a former mayor of Toronto who also served in the House of Commons and the Ontario legislature. “He once said to me,” Rae recalls, adopting a nasal tone to impersonate Givens, “ ‘Bobby, in politics, you don’t get what you deserve, you get what’s coming to you.’ ”

So fated does the Liberal Party of Canada now find itself with 34 seats, relegated to third-party status in the House of Commons for the first time in its history and confronted with myriad questions about its purpose and future. From his place within this shrunken caucus, Bob Rae has to decide, after a long and varied career of public life, what he is to do next. And with the stories of the Liberal party and Rae having come to this, the first question seems to be how they will move forward together.

“I want to be a constructive member of the team and I’m happy to help in any way that I can,” he says, “but obviously I want to make sure, I think everybody wants to make sure, that everybody knows what we’re getting ourselves into—and right now it’s still a little unclear to me.”

Continue…

Dominique Strauss-Kahn's open secret

By Leah McLaren - Friday, May 20, 2011 at 6:45 AM - 23 Comments

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

A wave of stunned indignation washed across France this week. The allegations of sexual assault against one of country’s most powerful men were appalling—but it was the image of Dominique Strauss-Kahn handcuffed and being escorted by police into a New York City police station that truly shocked the nation. In his position as head of the International Monetary Fund, Strauss-Kahn (or DSK, as he is commonly known in France) is a man who is used to jetting around the world to sort out economic affairs with members of the global super-elite. But today, the man who was once touted as a Socialist party presidential contender sits in a single jail cell in Rikers Island, where he was remanded by a judge without bail.

It is a far cry indeed from the $3,000-a-night suite in Manhattan’s Sofitel, where he last slept. It was in that plushy abode, with its grand foyer, living room and marble bathroom, that Strauss-Kahn is accused of sexually assaulting a chambermaid. According to authorities, the 32-year-old woman claims she entered the room to clean it, whereupon a naked Strauss-Kahn chased her thoughout the suite, finally dragging her into the bathroom where he forced her to perform oral sex, before she broke free and fled. He was arrested several hours later, having boarded Air France flight 23 to Paris at John F. Kennedy International Airport, just minutes before takeoff. He was later charged with attempted rape, a criminal sexual act, sexual abuse, unlawful imprisonment and forcible touching.

Despite his gilded career and exalted status in France (he served as a government minister under François Mitterrand and is credited with helping manage the recent global economic crisis), the allegations against Strauss-Kahn cannot come as a complete surprise to anyone who knows him well. “Paris has buzzed for months, if not years, in the political and journalistic milieu about the rather pathological relationship that Mr. Strauss-Kahn maintains toward women,” Marine Le Pen, his far-right political rival, gloated to the press this week. And, she added, the news Strauss-Kahn had been arrested “did not make me fall from my chair.”

Continue…

The chamber of second chances

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 5:32 PM - 13 Comments

Jeff Jedras counts 11 defeated Conservative candidates in the Senate.

Sending people that quit the Senate to run for the House and lost back to the Senate was a new twist, but still, the list of failed candidates appointed to the Red Chamber by Harper was already long, and includes Salma Ataullahjan, Yonah Martin, Claude Carignan, Fabian Manning (now twice), Michel Rivard, John Wallace, Leo Houskas, Michael Fortier and Suzanne Duplessis. And now add Larry Smith and Josee Verner to the list, making 11 Conservative Senate appointments have been rejected (at least once) by the electorate.

Insite: does it incite insight?

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 5:00 PM - 158 Comments

Brian Lilley’s latest piece criticizing Vancouver’s Insite safe-injection facility has been a source of continuing fascination to me since he posted it a couple of days ago. There is a certain courage about the thing, I think, that sets him apart from other Insite objectors. Let’s not get too caught up in the quarrel over the quantitative evidence from Insite, he suggests. This is convenient, to be sure, since the evidence is all against him; but I think he is right to say the question whether Insite should exist can’t quite be settled by means of numbers alone.

In designing a policy, we must always weigh many groups of what it has become trendy to call “stakeholders”, and many kinds of interests and possible consequences. “Just because something may work,” Lilley writes, “doesn’t mean we should do it.” This is a difficult statement to absorb, for those of us who’ve noticed that the drug war involves doing a whole lot of harmful things that obviously don’t, in any specifiable sense, “work”. But he is entitled to raise the prior question of how we decide whether something is working.

Which is, of course, is the point at which everything turns to porridge [emphasis mine]:

Helping junkies shoot poison into their veins and then putting them back on the street is wrong. Would I have as much of a problem if these drugs were administered as part of an ongoing treatment program to help wean addicts off of drugs? Probably not.

But that’s not what InSite does. InSite allows people to enter a government backed facility and use street drugs that they have purchased on the street, drugs that could have anything mixed in, and shoot those illegal drugs into their veins. The addict then leaves the facility and heads back out on the street.

It’s discouragingly common for people, particularly those who have lost loved ones to heroin abuse, to ascribe special demonic attributes to the drug, distinguishing it from other substances of abuse by anthropomorphizing it in a frankly untenable, ridiculous way. Lilley is not to be confused with these people. He has little or no inherent problem with the idea of government letting people inject heroin under supervision, in the name of utilitarian health-care considerations.

What bothers him, it seems, is that the clients bring the “street drugs that they have purchased on the street” with them into the facility. He’s worried about the “poisonous” nature of what they’re shooting. But he’s also admitted it’s not the heroin itself he really has an issue with. So what can he mean? The whole point of Insite is largely to let junkies inject without the fear of AIDS or hepatitis, and with the assurance of immediate medical assistance if they get a too-pure or adulterated batch. Surely it is indisputable that Insite accomplishes that much—that it protects the drug user, while he is within its confines, from the “poisons” that actually threaten his life—whatever other problems may be hazily attributed to it?

It is impossible for me to see what kind of coherent understanding, what non-contradictory set of principles, could lead one to Lilley’s position. If we are going to have the “moral” conversation about Insite, the soundness of the moral reasoning ought to count for something. Lilley doesn’t score high marks here. The “immorality” of Insite, which doesn’t give anybody drugs and has kept plenty of people alive long enough to kick them, has to be located and specified by its opponents rather than just presumed. Personally, I’m damned if I can find it.

Peter Kent's brave stand

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 4:21 PM - 11 Comments

John Baird said the Liberal cap-and-trade plan was “unCanadian” and Stephen Harper said the NDP cap-and-trade plan would “wreak enormous havoc on the Canadian economy,” but Environment Minister Peter Kent apparently thinks cap-and-trade could still be pursued at some point.

“There’s no expectation of cap-and-trade continentally in the near or medium future and we don’t believe that it would be wise to go with a shallow market in a closely integrated continental economy,” Kent said. “It can always be something to consider in the future.”

Week in Pictures: May 16th – 22nd 2011

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 4:07 PM - 0 Comments

0

Week in Pictures: May 16th – 22nd 2011

Prev

Next

Obama

President Barack Obama speaks at a Democratic National Committee campaign fundraising event at Austin City Limits Moody Theater in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, May 10, 2011. (AP Photo/The Daily Texan, Tamir Kalifa)

1 of 15 Photos

Next Supporters celebrate Trinamool Congress victory

Tags

Bestsellers

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 3:50 PM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of May 16th, 2011)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)