Happy holidays to all, and may we reflect on our province’s government during this festive season.

First, our government closed hospitals and eliminated numerous hospital beds. Unneeded, these were. Then we experienced a spate of new hospitals under construction and stories of patients lining corridors and being forced into rooms with patients of the opposite gender, because of lack of hospitals and beds.

Second, the government created local boards of health. The rationale was that local men and women would staff the boards and create priorities based on local knowledge. The secret reason was that the government could evade accountability by blaming local boards for errors. Then the government abolished local boards and created a super board, which again it can blame for errors, but which has no conception of local needs and supplies. For example, there used to be three or four doctors in Calgary who performed prostate cancer surgery. Now there’s one. Why? Because of lack of operating room time. Patients have to wait longer for surgery. We know that there’s a lack of operating rooms, but does the super board? Apparently not. And did you know that robotic equipment, which makes prostate surgery much more accurate and successful, has sat for months unused because nobody is being trained to use it? Great job, super board.

Third, the H1N1 vaccination fiasco, in which nobody thought there would be line-ups for the vaccine. Great planning by our government.

Fourth, the closure of beds for senior citizens just as the boomers are increasing demand.

We must be wrong. Everything is fine in Alberta.

Click here to see the calendar of events for this month. Use it as a reference by rolling your mouse over the links or just as a reminder. Bookmark it today!

1) Here is a mental exercise. First, imagine an equilateral triangle on a flat surface. Label the triangle’s corners A, B and C. Place one point of a compass on A and the other on B, and draw an arc from B to C. Draw similar arcs from C to A, and A to B. The result is an equilateral triangle whose corners are joined by arcs. What formula gives you the area of this curve-sided triangle? You may use paper to calculate.

2) What shape is produced if you rotate this curved triangle on a flat surface?

The answers to November’s puzzles were supplied in the November issue.

Here are the answers to this month’s puzzles:

1) The curved triangle you’ve imagined is called a Reuleaux triangle. If the straight length of its equilateral parent is x, we find the Reuleaux area by taking pi minus root 3, multiplying the result by x squared, then dividing by 2.

2) The area covered by rotating a Reuleaux triangle (as craftsmen will know) is a square! Well, not precisely a square, because of very slightly rounded corners. The actual area produced is 0.9877… of the area of a square. Close enough.

THE war in Afghanistan is “madcap” and “futile” and serves “no conceivable national interest”, says Sir Christopher Meyer, who as Britain’s ambassador to Washington had a ringside seat on the dispatch of troops there.

The fighting is “a waste of blood and treasure” because there is no coherent purpose behind it, he argues scornfully in a new book.

Meyer, who was Tony Blair’s man in America from 1997 to 2003, writes that: “After nearly eight years in Afghanistan . . . there is still no clarity about why we are there. Is it to stop Al-Qaeda returning on the shirt-tails of the Taliban? Or are we trying to create the conditions to transform Afghan governance and society? Depending on who you speak to — British or American — it is either, both, or something in the middle.

“A punitive expedition against Al-Qaeda is one thing; but to seek, against the grain of history, to rebuild Afghanistan from the ground up, in the name of a western concept of democracy and human rights, is futile.

“If this madcap venture is to take 40 years, as General Sir David Richards, chief of the general staff, averred this year, no conceivable national interest can be served by such an eccentric concentration of resources on a country of marginal importance.”

Meyer adds: “The poor, bloody infantry can win a thousand firefights in Helmand province, and earnest officials from the Department for International Development can make plans for a bridge here, a dam there; but until these efforts are linked to a political process, underpinned by diplomacy, they are so much waste of blood and treasure.”

(robert watts, The Sunday Times, 18October2009)

A senior diplomat has become the first US official to resign in protest at the war in Afghanistan, in a move that has shaken the White House, according to reports.

Matthew Hoh, 36, a former captain in the Marine Corps who fought in Iraq before joining the US State Department, resigned from his post as the senior US civilian in Zabul province, a Taleban stronghold in Afghanistan. He said that he believed the war only fuelled the insurgency, the Washington Post reports.

“I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan,” Mr Hoh wrote in his resignation letter, dated September 10.

“I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end.”

He said that many Afghans were fighting the United States largely because its troops were there. While the Taleban was a malign presence, and al-Qaeda needed to be confronted, he said, the US was asking its troops to die in Afghanistan for what was essentially a far-off civil war.

American families, he wrote, “must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, love vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can be made any more.”

In an interview with the newspaper, Mr Hoh described his time in Zabul as the “second-best job I’ve ever had”, and said of al-Qaeda and the Taleban: “There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed.”

“I’m not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love,” he added.

However, he said he was speaking out because he did not believe in the war in Afghanistan any more, and believed that the White House should not deploy any more troops there.

As President Obama continues to deliberate over whether to order a surge of additional troops into Afghanistan, Mr Hoh, who according to diplomats held a position in the State Department equivalent to Lieutenant-Colonel, said: “I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, ‘Listen, I don’t think this is right.’”

Richard Holbrooke, the White House’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told the Post he disagreed that the war “wasn’t worth the fight”. However, he added that he agreed with “much of his analysis”.

(Times Online, 27October2009)

The news that Disney is offering full refunds to anyone who bought its Baby Einstein videos — and admitting they don’t in fact make infants smarter — has come too late for an embittered generation of parents. Their babies are playing with jam jar lids, as babies always have, instead of staffing the Large Hadron Collider project.

My baby won’t even need diapers, was probably how the thinking went when the craze for these videos — offering music, puppets and almost no words — began in 1997. But Disney mashed those dreams like ripe bananas for Little Mr. Intellectual in His Baby Stupid High Chair, resentful social-climbing parents have been heard to mutter. By 2003, fully one-third of American babies had one of the videos.

Thanks a lot, Disney.

But if the target babies turned out to be less than geniuses, it appears the Disney “imagineers” were not at the top of the intellectual sand pile, either. They sit in front of their now-disgraced DVD babysitter, babbling and wailing along with their “dumb” little customers. (Disney’s competitors, the people who make Brainy Baby products, are not just refusing comment, they’re holding their breath and turning blue, I hear.)

As for the credulous parents, I note an indignant online blast to the New York Times from a distraught mother, one “Tammy” of Maryland.

“I don’t care if they were not ‘educational,’ ” Tammy wrote last week. “My kids ADORED those videos, and despite having spent hours watching them before and until about the age of four, they are now high-achieving elementary school students.” She also said that shoving the kids in front of the TV screen saved her sanity (let’s keep that between ourselves, Tammy, shall we).

George W. Bush similarly raved about Baby Einstein in his 2007 State of the Union address, but later that year, two studies revealed that the videos named after the explosive-haired oracle actually decreased babies’ language acquisition.

For studies have proved that babies lip-read. They learn the connection between mouth movements and sounds by watching adults speak, and they can distinguish between English and French. This is only one reason why watching cartoon television rather than being with other humans slows them down intellectually.

For more on the remarkable intelligence of babies, read Alison Gopnik’s The Philosophical Baby. Far from being blank slates, she writes, babies are intensely curious creatures, smarter in their own way than adults. “Babies explore; adults exploit” knowledge, as she puts it. “Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on ‘enriching’ toys and DVDs!)”

Take that, Baby Einstein.

What worries me about Tammy is her description of her kids as “high-achieving.” In grade school, you draw circles. You splodge paint, you glue macaroni. Then your teacher praises you to the skies and your mother slaps your industrial-quantity versions of John Constable’s The Hay Wain on the fridge. This is many things — cute, sticky, annoying — but it’s not high-achieving in the sense of being measurable. It’s just what kids do.

What worries me about Disney’s Baby Einstein is the product line includes videos called Baby Galileo and Baby Van Gogh. I have just finished reading van Gogh’s letters, which run past the ear incident and right up to the suicide, and I cannot think the painter is a role model for any infant, even if Disney has planted his ghost in, I am sorry to report, a puppet named Vincent Van Goat.

But there’s another disconnect here. Tammy is trying to nudge her unfortunate kids into attaining an adult IQ measure of achievement while Disney is trying to dumb down a manic, violent genius into something “cute and adowable.” She’s trying to magnify a childish thing and Disney’s trying to cute-ify the tragically magnificent.

They are at cross-purposes. I don’t know whether this helps explain why American (and Canadian) students aren’t rating highly on international science tests.

I recoil from everything Disney.

It isn’t just the pastelling of the world, the cheesiness of the costumes and the marketing machine behind each sugary project — or even the fact that for one year of my life, everything I bought had “Lion King” on it. Parenthood means abandoning good taste. I accept that.

What I object to is Disney’s literalism.

“Look, Mom, I’m a warrior.”

“No, you are dressed by Disney in cruddy camouflage gear sewn by exploited peasants for corncob wages.” (The fact that you are a violent little boy who will come to a bad end is being concealed by your Disney accoutrements.)

I most despise Disney for its former master, Michael Eisner, who bought Baby Einstein in 2001. His ghostwritten autobiography, Work in Progress, is on my political bookshelves next to Alexis de Tocqueville’s eerily prescient U.S. travelogue Democracy in America and What’s the Matter with Kansas by Thomas Frank.

Here’s the nut: Eisner felt American children were “appallingly” ignorant of history. He was thrilled that the U.S. Holocaust Museum was using pioneering Disney techniques like film, animation, music and voice-over narrative “to re-create and evoke the horror of the Holocaust.”

“I sat through many [American] history classes,” Eisner said, “where I read some stuff and I didn’t learn anything. It was pretty boring.”

Eisner was saying that young people can’t learn from teachers or books. Words don’t work. Rather, they have to smell the leather of the abandoned shoes of the gassed children, hear music for the death scenes, and watch cartoons of historical events in order to learn about them.

Eisner, whose marketing for Baby Einstein created a monster brand and a monster problem, thought the mass Disney audience was as dumb as babies.

But babies are smart. They are the most curious adventurous creatures on this Earth. They are helpful, empathetic, questing, experimental, loving and, of course, meltingly attractive.

We’re at our best in babyhood, and thoughtless schemes like Baby Einstein are what make it all downhill from there.

(by heather mallick, CBC, 30October2009)

At the police training centre in Kabul, American trainers take a wearily pragmatic view of corruption. Even after recent increases in salaries for Afghan security forces (all of them paid by the US) an Afghan policeman earns $130 (£80) a month. The cost of living in Kabul for an average family is about $250. For many there’s no other way to make up the shortfall. “The best we can hope for is that if they are taking bribes, at least they know it’s wrong,” says an American mentor.

In Afghanistan everything has its price. You don’t want to queue in Kabul airport? Jump it for $2. You want a driving licence, but not the lessons or test? That will cost $160. You want a place at Kabul University but can’t pass the exam? $6,000. You want to be released from a prison sentence for drug smuggling? $60,000.

The country comes in the bottom five states in the world on Transparency International’s measure of corruption. It would be astonishing if Afghanistan were not a very corrupt country. It is the fifth-poorest on Earth and corruption is a feature of all its neighbouring states. It has traditions of patronage to which corruption is a natural adjunct. It has little manufacturing but does boast an astonishingly lucrative black economy in the smuggling of various commodities, notably heroin. The drugs trade is equivalent to about a third of the legitimate economy and worth about $4 billion a year. It pushes up living costs and creates almost irresistible temptations for low-paid government officials. Western officials say a border police commander on a key drugs route can expect $400,000 to wave a large shipment through.

Afghan officials say that corruption is also a growing problem within Western companies working for the US and other governments in the country. Only 20 per cent of aid money actually goes through the Afghan Government. The US Government admitted this week that the industry was so poorly regulated it didn’t know how many US contractors were working for it in Afghanistan.

(tom coghlan and jerome starkey, The Times, 4November2009)

The roots of modern warfare stem largely from the two Boer Wars fought in the last decades of the 19th century. Examples include training and fitness in the armed forces, concentration camps, equipment and supply routes, counter-insurgency methods, and the importance of public opinion. Likewise the importance of allies and treaties. American schools appear not to teach the lessons learned during these wars. But Mensans remember, and to fix certain of the facts in our minds, we extract the Wiki summary of these most bloody battles.

Summary:

Two Boer Wars were fought between the British Empire and the two independent Boer republics, the Orange Free State and the South African Republic (Transvaal Republic), founded by settlers known as Voortrekkers who made the Great Trek from the Cape Colony.

The war most commonly referred to as the “Boer War” is the Second Boer War.

The First Anglo-Boer War (1880–1881), also known as the “Transvaal War,” was a relatively brief conflict in which Boer settlers successfully resisted a British attempt to annex the Transvaal, and re-established an independent republic.

The Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902), by contrast, was a lengthy war – involving large numbers of troops from many British possessions – which ended with the conversion of the Boer republics into British colonies (with a promise of limited self-government). These colonies later formed part of the Union of South Africa. Unlike many colonial conflicts, the Boer War lasted three years and was very bloody. The British fought directly against the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The bloodshed that was seen during the war was alarming and many of the British soldiers faced unfit conditions.

The Second Boer War was a major turning point in British history, due to world reaction over the anti-insurgency tactics the army used in the region. This led to a change in approach to foreign policy from Britain who now set about looking for
more allies. To this end, the 1902 treaty with Japan in particular was a sign that Britain feared attack on its Far Eastern empire and saw this alliance as an opportunity to strengthen its stance in the Far East. This war led to a change from “splendid isolation” policy to a policy that involved looking for allies and improving world relations. Later treaties with France (”Entente cordiale”) and Russia, caused partially by the controversy surrounding the Boer War, were major factors in dictating how the battle lines were drawn during World War One.

The Boer war also had another significance. The Army Medical Corps discovered that 40% of men called up for duty were physically unfit to fight. This was the first time in which the government was forced to take notice of how unfit the British Army was. This led to individual investigations by Booth and Rowntree into the poverty in Britain, and ultimately gave the Liberals ideas on which to base their Welfare reforms, beginning in 1906.

Another significant event was the British policy of rounding up and isolating the Boer civilian population into concentration camps. The wives and children of Boer guerrillas were sent to these camps with poor hygiene and little food, although this was remedied to some extent as time went on. The death and suffering of the civilians, according to many scholars, is what broke the guerrillas’ will. The “pacification” theory has been repeated many times in warfare since.

This column is under review.