Covering Afghanistan: logistics and ethics

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 10:13 AM - 2 Comments

I have recently returned from Afghanistan. The first of several articles appeared in last week’s magazine and was posted online earlier this week. A second appears in print today.

Given that I have previously criticized journalists accepting junkets, I think I’m obligated to reveal and discuss the nuts and bolts of my reporting over there.

To get to Kandahar, I accompanied Lt.-Gen. Peter Devlin, Canada’s chief of the land staff, on a military flight from Ottawa to Kandahar, with a stop at the Spangdahlem Air Base in Germany. The Canadian Forces covered the cost of this leg.

Myself and reporter Alec Castonguay then toured throughout Panjwaii district, including several forward operating bases and patrol bases, with foot and light-armoured vehicle (LAV) patrols between them. During this time I was dependent on the Canadian Forces for food, water, and shelter. The also provided me with protective kit, including a ballistic vest, glasses, and helmet. Maclean’s covered other incidental costs, the most pricey of which was life insurance. Continue…

Whatever happened with UBB?

By Jesse Brown - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 10:09 AM - 7 Comments

Remember the uproar over usage-based billing? Sure you do, it was the single biggest consumer rights issue to hit the Canadian Internet. Heck, if we measure these things by the number of people who signed on—almost half a million—it was the single biggest issue of any kind on the Canadian Internet ever.

So whatever happened to it? Consumers won, right? Well, sort of.

Yes, Stephen Harper stepped in to tweet his demand that the CRTC “review” their decision to support of the practice, and yes, then-industry minister Tony Clement did talk tough, vowing to overturn the CRTC if they didn’t reverse themselves. One ISP, Shaw, later decided to just go ahead and give customers what they wanted without being forced to. They upped their bandwidth caps to levels *closer* to what Americans enjoy (though in most cases, far from unlimited).

And that has been it… so far. Continue…

Review: Edith Sitwell: Avant garde poet, English genius

By Nicholas Köhler - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 0 Comments

Fifty years ago, Edith Sitwell was one of the U.K.’s leading poets. Today no one reads her. Small wonder that Richard Greene, whose new biography is the first in 30 years, has titled its prologue simply: “Why?” The reasons are many and at the same time one: her gender. “Of the great poets of her generation, Sitwell was the easiest to knock off the pedestal,” writes Greene, who teaches at the University of Toronto. “She was a flamboyant, combative aristocrat and, better still, she was a woman.” She could make it easy for opponents. Tall, ethereal, with an outlandish beaked nose and wild clothing, she was the epitome of the decadent Chelsea snob. Her barbs could confirm such charges—answering a nasty letter to the Daily Mail, Sitwell wrote that its author “has taught me the value of birth control for the masses.”

Others dismissed Sitwell and her brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell—“the Sitwells,” as they were called, wielded much power in literary circles—as rank self-promoters. F.R. Leavis judged that they “belong to the history of publicity rather than of poetry.” Younger writers, like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, reviled the high rhetoric of Sitwell’s poems.

She came by it honestly, and Greene’s account of her upbringing can be as surreal as her poetry. While at Eton, her father invented a “tiny revolver for killing wasps.” Her mother, who boasted Plantagenet blood, drank, gambled and was later jailed for fraud. The Sitwells and their Derbyshire manor may have inspired Lady Chatterley’s Lover (Sitwell never forgave D.H. Lawrence). Young Edith was made to wear a nose truss to straighten a crooked proboscis; there’s no evidence she ever had a sexual relationship.

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Review: The secret knowledge: On the dismantling of American culture

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross) has written what amounts to a high-class version of Fox News. Most of the author’s points in his first political book, where he explains how he discovered “the great wickedness of liberalism,” aren’t particularly new. But his formal, quasi-Talmudic writing style (“The written law proceeds from the unwritten law”) gives a new slant to the expected denunciation of liberals and feminists. And in typical Mamet fashion, he sometimes conflates his new political views with the machismo familiar from his plays and screenplays; when he argues for traditional gender roles by saying “boys are born to contest with the world,” he sounds like a David Mamet character.

What Mamet doesn’t really explain is how he came to believe that global warming is a made-up “story known of old as the history of Chicken Little,” or that “America is a Christian country.” The closest he comes is in the acknowledgements, where he thanks his friends (including actor Jon Voight) for introducing him to conservative books and radio talkers like Glenn Beck. Like the thinkers and personalities he’s discovered, the book seethes with rage against an amorphous enemy called “the Left.” When Mamet writes, “the Left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker,” it seems less a revelation and more a rehash of something Rush Limbaugh says every day.

That means Mamet has abandoned his dramatist’s ability to see both sides; the villains in one of his plays would get more of a fair hearing than he gives to liberals, whom he now accuses of “the destruction of our culture.” Though he says that a liberal is one who “never talks to anyone outside of this group,” the book unwittingly tells a similar story: a man who believes whatever his current friends believe.

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Review: Just words: Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the failure of public conversation in America

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

In an episode of Dick Cavett’s PBS talk show broadcast on Jan. 25, 1980, the redoubtable writer, critic and political activist Mary McCarthy, 67, pronounced that everything Lillian Hellman, 74—another redoubtable writer, critic and political activist—ever wrote “was a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’ ” Hellman sued for libel and $2.25 million. In one way it was a tempest in a teapot: whatever legal benchmark might have been set, the case died with Hellman in 1984. Yet in another sense, one Ackerman, a University of Toronto English professor, mines to subtle effect, the lawsuit was also about the U.S. failure to establish norms for public argument in a nation that is more constitutionally committed to free speech and more litigious than any other.

The two women were re-fighting battles within the American left that went back to the Spanish Civil War and Stalinist show trials of the 1930s, battles that mostly turned on whether one stuck by Communism whatever its barbarities because the end—defeating fascism—justified the means (Hellman). Or didn’t (McCarthy). But the long-simmering tensions between them were just as important. During one rare personal encounter, a 1949 cocktail party, McCarthy heard Hellman telling a sneering story about novelist John Dos Passos, who had split with former friends Ernest Hemingway and Hellman after they ignored Soviet involvement in the 1937 murder of Dos Passos’s friend, Spanish radical José Robles. McCarthy denounced her on the spot for slander and left Hellman trembling in fury.

For all its roots in the deep past, Ackerman shows the libel case, with its implicit claim that there was only one true account of past reality (all others being “lies”) and its blurring of the line between private and public, points the way forward to America’s present uncivil discourse. From denunciations of James Frey for fraud for having mixed fact and fiction, à la Hellman, in a memoir, to demanding that Barack Obama release personal documents to counter outlandish claims, U.S. public conversation is now a full-contact sport.

Continue…

Sober second thoughts

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 9 Comments

Senators appointed by Stephen Harper with the expressed purpose of pushing through his reforms apparently aren’t entirely supportive of his proposals. And so Bert Brown, the nominally elected senator, steps in to remind his caucus mates to whom they should be absolutely loyal.

“Those of us who came to the red chamber were there to get a majority vote for reform. Those in the Senate before Harper became prime minister need to realize that, had he not made appointments, the Conservatives appointed by Mulroney would now be a very small group struggling to do anything!” Brown wrote in an email to all Conservative senators.

“Every senator in this caucus needs to decide where their loyalty should be and must be. The answer is simple; our loyalty is to the man who brought us here, the man who has wanted Senate reform since he entered politics, the Rt. Hon. Stephen Harper,” Brown wrote.

Review: The forgotten waltz

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 9:15 AM - 1 Comment

On New Year’s Day in Dublin, Gina Moynihan is at a party hosted by Seán Vallely and his wife, Aileen. At the end of the evening, Gina goes to collect her coat from an upstairs bedroom. Seán follows Gina and kisses her—it isn’t the first time—as his nine-year-old daughter Evie walks into the room. Evie laughs and yells, “Happy New Year!” The Forgotten Waltz, the latest novel from Anne Enright, who won the 2007 Man Booker Prize for The Gathering, tells the story of Gina and Seán’s affair. When they first meet, Gina is a young woman growing bored in her marriage: she calls her husband Conor “low and burly,” and “my idea of fun.” Seán, though, is aloof and charming, “with too sharp a crease in his summer pants.” He’s also a father to Evie, a fragile child who suffers from seizures. Evie’s parents—especially Aileen, who appears frantic and anxious to Gina—are consumed by her care.

Enright is a wonderful observer of human nature, and through Gina’s eyes she captures the evolution of the affair, from early, all-consuming infatuation to denial and disappointment. Once the relationship is finally exposed, and both marriages start to crumble, Gina begins to wonder whether it was worth the price they both had to pay. “Myself and Seán have loved a whole litter of For Sale signs into being,” she says. Unfortunately, Dublin is snowed under, she says, and “no one is about to buy anything.”

Gina calls Seán “the love of her life,” but as she gets to know him, she starts suspecting the affair has meant something different to both of them. It’s Seán’s relationship with Evie that really defines him; if it wasn’t for his daughter, Gina says at the beginning of the book, none of this might have happened. Even so, “the fact that a child was involved makes everything that much harder to forgive.” The Forgotten Waltz is a smart, sad, funny and beautiful book.

Continue…

Bestsellers – Week of June 13th, 2011

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, June 16, 2011 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Top-selling fiction and non-fiction titles (week of June 13th, 2011)

Fiction

Non-fiction

LAST WEEK (WEEKS ON LIST)

THE TIGER’S WIFE

Meli-Melo

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 11:50 PM - 4 Comments

A roundup of stuff I’ve written recently, here and there:

For Canadian Business, I interviewed Major Marc Dauphin, a military physician who was the last Canadian to head up the Role 3 hospital at Kandahar Airfield. It was a seriously fascinating chat, I wish we could have printed the entire conversation. Instead, you’ll have to be satisVirfied with this piece. 

That interview took place the day after I served as MC at the launch of Fawzia Koofi’s book in Toronto, which I wrote about on the blog.  I also got irritated with John Ibbitson’s suggestion that Stephen Harper has a coherent foreign policy, let alone something that could be elevated to the status of a doctrine.

For the print edition of Maclean’s, I wrote about Toronto’s war on fun, which was in many ways  just an excuse to grind a well-worn axe about the need to provide immigrants with the opportunity to properly integrate.  That said, all the evidence suggests that Canadian multiculturalism is doing just fine, despite what Muslim-baiters like Geert Wilders and his estate agents over at Sun Media want you to think.

Over at my other blog, I explained why I have no intention of voting for Dalton McGuinty. It has to do   with Virginia Postrel and  light bulbs.  By the way, did you know there’s been a measles outbreak in Massachusetts?

I also reviewed a book about Jay-Z, the business, man, and saw some very cool shorts at the disposable film festival. 

The Commons: The NDP disappoints John Baird

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 6:18 PM - 16 Comments

The Scene. In an attempt perhaps to preempt the Prime Minister’s dismissal, Bob Rae attempted a preface. ”The Prime Minister is constantly saying that those of us who quote the Auditor General are not telling the truth,” Mr. Rae posited. “So let me simply quote the Auditor General very directly with respect to the activities of the President of the Treasury Board and ask him one simple question.”

With the parameters thus set, the interim Liberal leader proceeded. ”The Auditor General said that he found what the government did ‘unusual and troubling,’ ” he reported. “I would like to ask the Prime Minister, is the Auditor General telling the truth when he says those words?”

Would it surprise you to learn that the Prime Minister sidestepped the specifics of this question? If so, you should be commended on the open-hearted naïveté with which you approach the world. Continue…

Week in Pictures: June 13th – 19th 2011

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 5:29 PM - 0 Comments

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Week in Pictures: June 13th – 19th 2011

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Gbagbo arrested

Former Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and his wife, Simone, are seen in the custody of republican forces loyal to election winner Alassane Ouattara at the Golf Hotel in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, on April 11, 2011. Forces stormed the bunker where Gbagbo hung on to power Monday, arresting the man whose refusal to hand over the presidency to the election winner left hundreds dead and threatened to re-ignite a civil war in the world's largest cocoa producer. (AP Photo/Aristide Bodegla)

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Journal de Montreal: xenophobic, lazy or both? You decide!

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 4:33 PM - 13 Comments

Picture courtesy la Clique du Plateau

Last week, Journal de Montréal columnist Richard Martineau wrote one of his blah-blah-everything-sucks columns that, as his regular readers will recognize, means it must be Sunday. Or is it Thursday? It can’t be Wednesday: that’s when Ricky attacks the leftists. Or the righties. Or the fact that we just don’t have time for our family anymore. Surely it can’t be Friday already, can it? Look out, Dominique Strauss-Kahn! So much righteous anger, and only seven days in the week to vent it. WHY ISN’T THERE AN EIGHTH DAY IN THE WEEK, DAMMIT?! Blame the socialists!

Anywhoo, Tricky Dick was about half-finished shotgunning away at the apparent Third World awfulness of Montreal Continue…

Goin' To Cabletown

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 4:08 PM - 1 Comment

There’s more discussion lately (See here and also here for starters) about whether cable has plateau-ed and whether its superiority over broadcast is about to end. I talked about this in an earlier post, and don’t want to repeat myself too much, but I do think that ultimately we’ll always be talking about different standards.

The U.S. broadcast model is not very receptive to the most acclaimed format, the serialized show that is not just a soap opera. Cable is perfectly suited to that type of show, while broadcast network TV shows struggle to do the same thing with 22-episode seasons and more commercial pressures. So I don’t think it likely that the complex serialized drama will make its home on broadcast television, though “not likely” doesn’t mean “impossible.” The reason you can’t do Breaking Bad or Mad Men for broadcast isn’t about censorship or network notes, but about the big difference between 13 and 22 episodes a season, and also about what constitutes success and failure. A success on cable is a show that does well enough not to be a flop, while enhancing the network’s brand and drawing more people to the network overall.

One reason why broadcast comedy dominates the Acclaim Sweepstakes now is that half-hour comedy strips away most of cable’s advantages. Comedies don’t have to be Continue…

A point of clarification

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 4:02 PM - 2 Comments

In response to Monday’s sketch, Tony Clement’s office sends along the following note of clarification, which I reprint here in its entirety.

“To avoid misinterpretation: when Minister Clement referred to this “perhaps anachronistic process,” he was in fact agreeing with and echoing the Auditor General’s recommendation that the mechanism by which government reports to Parliament should be updated.

“In no manner whatsoever was he suggesting that the idea itself, that of reporting the financial dealings of government to parliament was out-of-date.  As he mentioned, the current process that has been used for nearly 100 years and absolutely should be looked at with an eye to improving. That is why he has instructed TBS officials to review the process by which this information is presented to Parliament, seeking ways to make it as transparent as possible.”

For the sake of the record, here’s the comment, also reprinted here in its entirety, in which Mr. Clement employed the adjective in question. Continue…

To reform the Senate: Why term limits?

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 3:36 PM - 35 Comments

Let’s set aside, for now, the inherent ridiculousness of Bert Brown chiding fellow Conservative members of the Senate — intended as a chamber of sober second thought, and at least nominally a check on the House of Commons — for their lack of loyalty to the prime minister.  Here’s something I’ve never really understood about Harper’s bid to implement a term limit of eight (now nine) years for appointed Senators:

What problem with how the Senate is currently constituted and functions is this designed to solve?

The quiet cuts

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 3:03 PM - 33 Comments

The hunt for the government’s mysterious cuts—as initiated by our Paul Wells—continues. Bill Curry finds $45-million taken from the Green Infrastructure Fund. Meanwhile, Tim Naumetz reviews the main estimates.

Almost all of the government’s security and public safety programs are increasing either modestly or substantially, including a 21 per cent hike in spending for the Correctional Service to $2.98-billion. The Canada Border Services Agency is receiving a 14 per cent increase, to $1.84-billion, and the Office of the Correctional Investigator, responsible for hearing complaints from offenders, is going up by 21 per cent, to $4.3-million.

But spending by the Department of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness is being reduced by 5.9 per cent to $414.6-million … The National Research Council will have its spending cut by 7.8 per cent to $690,836,000. Spending by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission is set to drop by 10 per cent to $118,264,000 … The Hazardous Materials Information Review Commission is targeted for a 20 per-cent reduction in its spending, to $4.5-million from $4.7-million. Among the other agencies where cuts are planned, the Public Health Agency of Canada is set to have its spending cut by 8.2 per cent to $622-million.

Children in China denied lead poisoning testing, treatment

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 2:42 PM - 0 Comments

Following China’s latest lead pollution outbreak, in which 103 children and many adults were poisoned by tinfoil-making workshops in the eastern Zhejiang province, a new report from Human Rights Watch says that Chinese children with lead poisoning have been denied testing, proper treatment, and even basic information. Beijing has promised to clean up chronic pollution, but the New York-based advocacy group says they need to do more as hundreds of thousands of children in China are suffering from lead poisoning. This can lead to learning difficulties and behavioural problems, as parents who work in these plants will bring home extra doses on clothes and skin. Those who complain about the problem—including parents, journalists and activists—face being detained, harrassed, and silenced, the group says. China is the world’s biggest consumer of refined lead.

Reuters

Caravaggio's unsettling images at the National Gallery of Canada

By John Geddes - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 2:05 PM - 6 Comments

In the first room of the big summer show Caravaggio and His Followers in Rome, which opens on June 17 at the National Gallery of Canada, hangs the famous painting The Musicians, on loan from New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.

There’s no more arresting example of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio’s uncanny ability to create drama by capturing natural expressions and informal poses. The young musicians—two gazing out at us, two with downcast eyes—are seated closely together, and yet each is achingly alone.

Continue…

Art In LUTHER

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 0 Comments

Via Jeremy Mongeau, Stuart Heritage of the Guardian has written a spectacular review of Idris Elba’s BBC crime procedural Luther (which just started its second series in England, and whose first series played on Showcase earlier this year).

It’s a positive review, but makes the show sound deranged and crazy – because it sort of is. The Wire, the show Elba is most associated with, was the show that tried to avoid over-the-top crime-show Tropes™. This show sometimes seems lik the reverse; as the first series went on, creator Neil Cross took the typical unrealistic elements of gory cop procedurals – the brilliant hero with a problematic past, the creatively gruesome corpses, the this-time-it’s-personal twists – and instead of trying to disguise or paper over the implausibility, ratcheted them up to almost mythic levels. A sample from Heritage’s review – but read the whole thing – suggests that this continues in the second batch of episodes:

There’s a policewoman straight from the school of suspicious colleagues. There’s a hard-drinking mother of a prostitute. There’s the prostitute herself, who can’t work out which role from The Black Swan she’s supposed to be ripping off. And then there’s Alice, played by Ruth Wilson. It’s Alice who dances closest to the precipice; a cartoonish, lip-licking, sibilant psychopath who should be laughed out of every scene she’s in but manages not to be purely through the strength of Wilson’s conviction.

However improbable you may find Luther, you have to admire its audacity. It represents storytelling on a scope that isn’t often attempted in this country. It makes London look beautiful. And the last few minutes of tonight’s episode will grab you, force you to the end of your seat, give you about 12 consecutive heart attacks and then drop you at precisely the right time. Sincerely, I’m thrilled to have it back.

Most crazy shows are sort of accidentally crazy, which is mostly fun in an MST3K, ironic sort of way. You can make fun of Criminal Minds‘ bloody, serial-killer-filled fantasy world, but the show has a ploddingly realistic core; it thinks it’s trying to be plausible. One of the U.S. shows that has a willingness to truly, consciously risk being insane is Fringe, but that’s a science fiction/fantasy show, and we sort of expect craziness from shows with shapeshifting Senators. Luther is more of a regular cop show, but it’s a much more wild ride than the description would suggest.

NDP looks to ditch 'socialism'

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 2:01 PM - 34 Comments

According to a report in the Toronto Star, the NDP is planning to refresh the language of its constitution, a move which will include the removal of the word ‘socialist’ from the document. Where the party used to call for the establishment of “democratic socialism,” and decried profits and private ownership, its new mission statement will tout “an unwavering commitment to economic and social equality.” The change is one of many that are expected to be borne out of the party’s convention in Vancouver this weekend, though it’s already being criticized by the NDP’s “socialist caucus.”

Toronto Star

Canada's seal hunt dwindles

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 1:53 PM - 0 Comments

This year’s East Coast seal hunt was one of the worst since the early 1990s, according to federal officials, with a total catch of less than 10 per cent of the allowable 400,000. In all, seal hunters slaughtered just 38,000 animals. The slump is being blamed on a combination of factors, including poor ice conditions. The most significant may be the EU’s wholesale ban on seal product imports, which dropped the price of pelts so much the hunt was no longer profitable.

Chronicle Herald

Greece PM offers to step down, reports say

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 1:47 PM - 0 Comments

Greek state television is reporting that Prime Minister George Papandreou has proposed to step down so his Socialist party can form a coalition with the centre-right opposition if it supports a new bailout for the country’s debt issues. The news surfaced on Wednesday as thousands of protesters faced off with police across the country to protest new austerity measures. The offer to resign is a significant compromise for Papandreou, who has struggled to pass new spending cuts and receive more international aid in order to avoid a financial collapse amidst abysmal support and growing cracks within his party.

New York Times

Government won’t reveal its position on asbestos

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 1:34 PM - 3 Comments

The federal government won’t reveal what its stance will be on chrysotile asbestos at an upcoming international conference in Geneva. Twice in the past, Canada has blocked the known carcinogen from being placed on a global list of hazardous chemicals under the Rotterdam Convention, which operates by consensus. Even though Canada has spent tens of millions of dollars removing the chemical from public buildings, including Parliament, it remains one of the world’s main exporters of asbestos. Minister of Industry Christian Paradis told the CBC that the Canada’s position on asbestos hasn’t changed in 30 years and that “we won’t necessarily recommend” the chemical to be listed at the meeting in Geneva. PMO spokesman Dmitri Soudas said the Canadian government maintains that chrysotile asbestos “can be used safely under controlled conditions.” More than 200 health experts have signed an open letter to the prime minister saying the government’s position is “harming Canada’s international reputation.”

Canadian Press

$720 million of programs and operations to be cut this year

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, June 15, 2011 at 1:10 PM - 4 Comments

The federal government is cutting $720 million worth of programs and operations this year, including those belonging to sensitive agencies. The cuts are part of a total of $10.4 billion in federal spending reductions this fiscal year, most of which are the result of the end of recession-fighting infrastructure programs. Agencies affected by the program cuts or reductions include the federal nuclear safety watchdog, the public health agency, an agency that tracks hazardous materials and a 20 per cent reduction in Environment Canada’s budget. However, nearly all the government’s public security and safety programs are seeing spending increases, such as a 21 per cent hike for the Correctional Service, bringing it to $2.98 billion.

The Hill Times