Search: “Terrorists”

It  makes sense to adapt existing models to handle new phenomena where there are enough commonalities between the existing and emerging issues.  I am not so sure it is easy to make that determination but if the costs and downsides of modifying approaches we already know well are low then I suppose no harm is […]

Thank God for reporters like Stewart Bell of the National Post.  Now that I am outside the realm of state secrets I have come to rely on people like him to do the investigative legwork that keeps me informed on what is going on in the world of terrorism, both in Canada and abroad.  Just […]

I have just finished watching a very interesting film, the 2012 drama The Company You Keep.  Starring Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon, Shia LaBoeuf and Julie Christie and based on a novel by Lem Dobbs, it tells the story of the Weather Underground (WU), a violent left wing group that came out the Students for a […]

As I have noted in an earlier blog,  I am a Sherlock Holmes fan.  The first story published in The Strand magazine under the “Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” beginning in December 1892 was  ‘Silver Blaze’, in which  Holmes has to solve the disappearance of a famous race horse 0n the eve of a big race […]

Those who know me know I am not a fan of Tom Cruise for all kinds of reasons not relevant to this blog.  But one movie he appeared in is directly germane to today’s topic.  In Minority Report, a film based on a short story by US science fiction writer Philip K. Dick, a man […]

Woodstock, Ontario, a small city just up the road from where I grew up, is having a tough time of it.  A nurse has just been accused of killing at least eight elderly patients over a seven-year span by giving them lethal drugs.  She is already being called one of Canada’s worst serial killers even […]

In the ill-named “war on terror” small victories, let alone crushing ones, are hard to find.  It seems that no matter how many terrorists we kill more rise up like the warriors that sprang from dragon’s teeth in Greek mythology and we see more attacks (one more today in Jerusalem).  So it is little wonder […]

In all my time as an intelligence analyst I had some amazing opportunities and worked alongside some truly outstanding men and women.  We collectively did our best to gather and analyse intelligence with the constant view to providing the best advice we could to Canadian decision makers.  I may be biased but I think we […]

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 […]

Media have one important job to do: report the news.  Sometimes they also bring in people to help us understand the news and speculate on what it means.  At times outside experts contribute much needed analysis and insight and at others provide little of value to the issue at hand. In reporting the news there […]