I am pretty sure that each and every one of us were taught as kids the following phrase/advice by our parents/teachers/elders: “If you can’t find anything nice to say best say nothing at all”. This is a good adage in that it should make us think twice before we open our pie holes, especially if […]
We live in a win-lose world. Whether we are referring to sports, politics, game shows or whatever, there is usually a winner and one or more losers. We may simply be wired for dividing things into two categories, at least after initial analysis: good-bad, black-white, winner-loser. As I know I have read somewhere, way back […]
Every end of year we are inundated with two phenomena in our newspapers, TV broadcasts and Web sites. These two are: the year that was and the year that will be. The former recaps the important events of the 12 months drawing to an end and always includes, and I am not sure why, a […]
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. If that is true, how much is a video worth? A million? We are inundated with images, both still and moving, wherever we go. We watch videos on our cellphones all the time, even if most of them are crazy cat ones. And given that anyone […]
I recently wrote a blog in which I stated that doing stupid shit in the ill-named ‘war on terror’ is a bad idea that will result in worse problems down the road. The examples I provided on that occasion included the Iraqi Shia-dominant regime campaign of revenge against the Sunni population accused of helping Islamic […]
It is somewhat – no very – disconcerting that we are still dealing with the myth that is the connection between immigration and terrorism. In several Western countries there are movements that are in part or in whole anti-immigrant and one of the primary reasons for their opposition to newcomers is the belief that immigrants […]
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Hi tech,encryption and terrorism
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 17, 2018. There has been an awful lot of news lately on privacy in the digital space. Facebook in particular has been in the hot seat over what it does with our data – data that we willingly provide every time we post a photo or […]
Spain has been the target of two significant jihadi attacks in the post 9/11 period. In what has become known as 4-11, four bombs went off on the Madrid transit system in 2004, killing 191 and injuring more than 1,800. Al Qaeda (AQ) was responsible for that act, despite initial the Spanish government’s initial awkward […]
Photo ops by leaders of states with the military are no-brainers I suppose. The president/prime minister/king/grand poobah gets on plane, flies to Lower Slobovia to meet his/her country’s soldiers serving to maintain a war/keep the peace in a faraway land, thanks them for their service, assures them that what they are doing is right, acknowledges […]
Tis the season, as they say, and at the Walsh-Gurski household Christmas movies are a tradition, no matter how many times they have been viewed. Me, I like A Christmas Carol, the 1951 British version with Alistair Sim as Scrooge: I have viewed it every Christmas Eve for I don’t know how long. My wife […]