There is an old saying that goes “If my grandmother had wheels she’d be a bus (or a bike, apparently. in the original Spanish)”. This very silly sentence means that there are things that are unlikely to happen and therefore are not worth mentioning. This phrase was the very first thing that came to my […]
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One of the most difficult challenges for governments around the world is what to do with their citizens who left to join Islamic State (IS) or other terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq from 2013ish to 2017. As we all know, IS is a shadow of its former self. It has lost swaths of territory. […]
According to the standards of witches and warlocks in the Harry Potter series there were three curses or spells that were ‘unforgivable ‘. These three are the Imperius curse (it forces one to do the bidding of the caster), the Cruciatus curse (it subjects the victim to excruciating pain) and the Killing curse (which does […]
I am enjoying a relaxing weekend at my brother’s house in London, Ontario, a welcome respite after a number of speaking engagements in a variety of places recently. This is where I was born, where I grew up, where I went to school – elementary, secondary and university – and where I will always consider […]
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 […]
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 […]
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A mother’s dilemma – and society’s
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!). […]
I learned a new word this week: swatting. This phenomenon describes when someone calls in a fake crisis to get local law enforcement involved and often entails sending out the SWAT team (hence the name_ to an address to prevent a murder or resolve a hostage situation. This very thing happened to a Calgary woman […]
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 […]
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 […]