When I was in high school the movie Midnight Express came out (yes, I am THAT old). This was a film adaptation of the true story of Billy Hayes, an American arrested and jailed in the early 1970s for trying to smuggle hashish out of Turkey. The movie portrayed Mr. Hayes as the poor American […]
Category: Perspectives
Shakespeare must have had a lot against lawyers. It was the great English playwright after all who had a character in Henry IV Part 2 say “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers’. There has been a lot of debate over what this quote means – in any event it has stood […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on January 3, 2018 http://www.hilltimes.com/2018/01/03/need-ignore-jihadi-propaganda/129769 In the lead up to New Year’s a lot of people were very nervous that festivities would be interrupted by a terrorist attack. To be fair, the fear was not completely unfounded as at last year’s celebration in Turkey a gunmen opened fire in […]
It stands to reason that senior officials, be they civilian leaders or military officers, want to provide the public with good news. Whether it is to gain votes or to instill pride in a country’s armed forces, these individuals see the benefit of telling the (voting) population that success is at hand or that whatever […]
When I was growing up in London (Ontario) there was a famous quasi-mythical family that lived near the town of Lucan, about a half-hour away, in the 19th century. The Donnellys, or the ‘Black Donnellys’ as we were taught about them, were Irish immigrants who were killed by a mob in 1880 in a feud […]
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 21, 2017 http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/12/20/australia-belgium-lead-example-returning-foreign-fighters-canada/129572 Canadians are nice people, or so we think of ourselves that way. There is not much doubt that many see Canadians as ‘nice’ and even harmless: I recently read a Doonesbury comic in which one of the characters comments that there are few things […]
I read the other day that the widely-held belief that we lose 70% of our body’s heat through our head on a cold day is a myth. I am probably not the only one who was long assured that this maxim was true and hence wore a toque (that is Canadian for a knitted hat […]
I must confess that I despair at times about the average person’s knowledge about and reaction to terrorism. On occasions some people panic and build the threat out of all proportion, cancelling their travel plans, calling for bans on immigration and ranting about the presence of ‘undesirables’ (i.e. Muslims) in our societies whom they view […]
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A better way to react to terrorism
On December 12 I went to see Come From Away on Broadway with my wife and friends. For those not familiar with this award-winning musical it is based on what happened in the small Newfoundland city of Gander on 9/11 when almost 40 transAtlantic flights were diverted to the local airport, once a major refuelling […]
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War with an ‘ism’ is a bad idea
This piece appeared in The Hill Times on December 18 http://www.hilltimes.com/2017/12/18/war-ism-bad-idea/128951 Last week I was invited to a conference in the UK hosted by the Henry Jackson Society, a US-UK think tank that looks at a variety of issues. At this particular conference, entitled ‘A wake-up call for all: creating a trans-Atlantic network to battle radical […]