The renowned US journal Scientific American put out a fascinating article today in which leading scholars were asked what the top 20 “big questions” facing humanity in the future. The questions posed ranged from space exploration to medicine, but it was the following that caught my eye (reproduced in its entirety: for the complete list […]
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Neutralising the radicalisers
If there is one thing that any serious researcher or professional who has studied radicalisation to violence knows all too well is that the process or path from normalcy to extremism does not happen in a vacuum. And it certainly does not take place on one’s own. The term “self-radicalisation”, all too frequently uttered by […]
One thing I find fascinating is the science of lie detection. There is a lot of research out there about which tools can pick up on an attempt to avoid the truth, ranging from eye movement (saccades) to vocabulary use. As a former intelligence analyst I had to undergo periodic lie detector tests. They were […]
As we still reel from the foiled terrorist attack last week in Strathroy, Ontario, we can still rest assured that attacks, successful or not, remain a rarity in Canada. In the period since 9/11 we have had no more than 8 such incidents: on average one every two years. When we compare our experiences […]
The Canadian Minister of Public Safety, Ralph Goodale, will make some comments later today on the Liberal government’s plans on counter radicalisation. The Liberals have promised to create a centre of excellence, to be known as the Office of the Coordinator for Counter Radicalisation and Community Engagement, to be housed within his department. The Minister […]
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How should we respond to terrorism?
I apologise for leading off with a statement of the obvious, but terrorism is real. We in Canada were reminded of that this week when the RCMP and its partners thwarted an attack by Aaron Driver in Strathroy. Regardless of whether Mr. Driver’s attempt was amateurish or not, whether he was an “A”-team member or […]
Another video, another promise of terrorism. You would think that we’d be getting tired of these by now. Every wannabe martyr goes online, films himself (or herself) – or gets someone else to film – rants on about how we in the West are the aggressor against Islam and Muslims, and threatens to kill us […]
Today in the small southwestern Ontario town of Strathroy a young man known to police for having terrorist connections was killed by security forces after he appeared to have exploded a device and had another in his possession. The victim, Aaron Driver, had been arrested in June 2015 after expressing support for Islamic State (IS) […]
In Cixin Liu’s science fiction novel The Dark Forest (sequel to The Three Body Problem), a race from the Alpha Centauri system has identified Earth as a suitable home and is seeking to thwart any efforts from our planet to interfere with their takeover plans. One of the new technologies developed by the “Trisolarans”, who […]
The other day I was reading a fascinating article in Discover science magazine on Robert Hare, a Canadian psychologist who revolutionalised our understanding of psychopathy through years of studying inmates in Canadian correctional institutions. Some of his more famous subjects, familiar to all Canadians, include Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. His diagnsotic tool, the Psychopathy […]