As if the recently terminated (and interminable) US Presidential election campaign wasn’t bad enough, right on cue at least two terrorist groups have threatened to carry out attacks to disrupt it. The first out of the box was apparently Al Qaeda, at least according to US officials, who warned about non-specific plots in New York […]
In the wake of a Canadian Federal Court decision that my former employer – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – illegally retained data that it had collected legally under a court warrant, the fur is really flying. Every major Canadian media outlet has been all over this story and the reporting has been uniformly […]
Those who know me know I am not a fan of Tom Cruise for all kinds of reasons not relevant to this blog. But one movie he appeared in is directly germane to today’s topic. In Minority Report, a film based on a short story by US science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, a man […]
A new salvo has been fired in the continual contest that pits national security vs. privacy rights in Canada. A federal court judge has ruled that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) illegally held on to data that was not threat-related for an unnecessary period of time. The judicial decision was announced the same week […]
You have all heard of the butterfly effect, right? The idea that a very small event can have enormous implications well beyond its initial parametres. The official definition, courtesy of Wikipedia, is “the sensitive dependence on initial conditions in which a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large […]
In many instances historically amnesties were offered to former combatants in the interests of getting the violence to stop and giving a society a chance to rebuild itself. A really good example where amnesty seemed to work would be in South Africa where it was part of that nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission after Apartheid […]
One of the great Canadian novels of the 20th century was Two Solitudes by Hugh MacLennan. It is the story of the troubles between Canada’s two European founding nations – the French and the English (both had been preceded by the First Nations thousands of years earlier). The phrase “two solitudes” has entered Canadian English […]
Surprisingly, if there is one issue many people differ on it is what constitutes terrorism. There are so many different definitions and in some places, like my country (Canada), it is not even spelled out in law (the Canadian Criminal Code outlines what a terrorist act is, not terrorism per se). You would think that […]
Woodstock, Ontario, a small city just up the road from where I grew up, is having a tough time of it. A nurse has just been accused of killing at least eight elderly patients over a seven-year span by giving them lethal drugs. She is already being called one of Canada’s worst serial killers even […]
In 1866 the Société Linguistique de Paris included in its constitution the notice that it would not entertain any more research on the tricky question of the origin of language. At that time there was a lot of speculation on this issue, much of it iffy at best, and it was decided that linguistic science […]