Search: “Terrorists”

I suppose it was inevitable.  An armed attack on Republicans at a baseball practice in Virginia wounded the House majority whip and several others appears to have been carried out by a leftist terrorist.  66-year old James Thomas Hodgkinson, a former house inspector from Illinois, was apparently distraught at the election of Donald Trump as […]

Terrorist acts are often heinous in nature.  People targeted at a club in Orlando (or Istanbul) dancing the night away.  Passengers on a city bus in Tel Aviv.  Young political activists on an island in Norway.  When we are happily doing whatever it is that we like and we are felled by indiscriminate terror and […]

It was the US artist Andy Warhol who once said “In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes”, a phrase that seems to have underscored a universal desire to get noticed.  There is no question that it is much easier in a world of 24/7 news to have one’s story told: recall the […]

Now that the recommendations of the Iacobucci Commission in Canada have finally been implemented and three Canadians who claim to have been tortured in Syria with the alleged complicity of the Canadian government and CSIS have settled their case, it is time for a comment.  A few weeks have passed and I for one can […]

There sure seems to be a lot of hand wringing over travel these days.  We have had two bans imposed by the US, one ridiculous (the generic ban on anyone coming from 6 Muslim countries) and one more realistic, albeit still open to question (the ban on electronic devices for passengers boarding aircraft in 10 […]

I see that Martin McGuinness died the other day. Mr. McGuinness was an Irish republican, a member of the Sinn Fein political party and, until he left politics in part because he was stricken with cancer, the Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland from 2007 to early 2017. He was also, according to some, a […]

I am sure you have all read the stories.  In the aftermath of an arrest of a mass murderer (or a terrorist), neighbours, friends and colleagues are interviewed about what they knew about the suspect.  Here is what they tend to say: I never saw it coming! He was the nicest guy! I can’t believe […]

Sometimes I think most of us get terrorism very, very wrong.  I am not sure whether this is due to the Hollywood effect where terrorists seem to be popping up in more and more films each year.  Can anyone point to a movie from the 1960s where violent extremists played a major role?  Aside from […]

The debate over what to do with terrorists is neverending.  Positions range from one extreme to another, from “kill them all”  to “maybe it’s our fault they are they way they are”.  I would hope that by now we have learned beyond any doubt that there is no one cause, one driver, one explanation for […]

Years ago when I taught an introductory course in linguistics I included a small section on the brain and how scientists have determined – to an extent – how language is both processed and produced in all that grey matter.  Beginning in the 19th century really smart researchers learned that specific parts of our cortex […]