Search: “iraq”

I have just had the pleasure of seeing Steven Pinker give a talk at the Ottawa Writers’ Festival about his new book Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism and progress.  Picking up where he left off in The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined, Mr. Pinker makes a compelling case […]

This piece appeared in The Hill Times on March 9, 2018   In the 1997 movie Rocket Man (starring Canadian actor Harland Williams), a comedy about the first manned mission to Mars, there is a scene where a senior NASA manager, played by Jeffery DeMunn, is trying to justify why he did not predict and […]

I would like to announce the creation of a fund for Canadian pedophiles.  Not those in prison or getting treatment but those languishing in squalid jails pending trial in southeast Asia after they were caught abusing young children, having traveled intentionally to that part of the world with the sole intention of having sex with […]

If you had to come up with a recipe for a terrorist attack or an extremist movement what would you include? To my mind there are a number of ingredients that must be there in order for the finished product to succeed.  These are, among other things, a sense of grievance/anger, an identified target (meaning […]

Every year many Canadians flock to Trinidad and Tobago to escape the harsh winter climate.  In addition, there are some 70,000 Canadians of Trinidadian stock, including one of the hosts of CBC’s The National, Ian Hanomansing, and pop singer Amanda Marshall.  The ties between the two nations run deep. Alas, these ties also extend to […]

I am a parent (and now even a grandparent – how the hell did I get THIS old?).  As a parent I helped to raise three children, all of whom are now young adults. As all parents know, our kids do (or did) things we had a problem with and there were times when we […]

You gotta feel for the Kurds, history’s version of ‘always a bridesmaid, never a bride’.  Oft described as the world’s largest ethnic group without a country to call their own, the Kurds have come ever so close on several occasions.  They were kinda promised autonomy following the breakup of the Ottoman Empire in the post […]

On my first trip to Singapore many years ago I was struck by signs placed throughout the airport that warned of severe penalties for drug trafficking.  If my memory isn’t failing me, I seem to recall that those signs didn’t mince words.  They made it quite clear that the penalty for peddling in illegal drugs […]

I am a parent and that means I worry about my kids.  Not that I have any real reason to do so since my three are all grown up, on their own, doing well and appear for all intents and purposes to be well-adjusted, functioning human beings (thanks in no small part to their mother!).  […]

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 […]