Search: “far right”

If there is one thing that people consistently get wrong it is the certain belief that violent crime is on the increase.  We are convinced that the situation is getting worse, not better, and the depth of this certainty is probably due, in no small part, to the constant media feed over acts of violence.  […]

Is it any surprise that citizens distrust governments in the West?  Whether it is the assumption that those in power are only after their own interests or that regimes are really bad at what they do with taxpayers’ money, it is hard to find examples where a country’s population is satisfied with the level of […]

Well, the knives are out already.  As we learn more and more about the harrowing history of murders in Toronto’s LGBT community over a number of years, but before all the facts are in, many people are already convinced that the local police screwed up.  There are even calls for a public inquiry or even […]

I am far from the only one to label the recent trip by our Prime Minister to India a disaster.  Several media outlets have called it so and I will leave it to the reader to follow up on those.  What I wish to pursue is the Jaspar Atwal affair.  For those Canadians living in a parallel […]

There are a few things that hold a place of note in my memory whenever I think back to the start of my career in intelligence in 1983. As a wet-behind-the-ears multilingual analyst fresh out of university I had joined CSE – Canada’s SIGINT agency – with little to no clue as to what intelligence […]

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 […]

There is not a lot left to say about what happened in a Florida school yesterday on Valentines’s Day of all days. Another mass shooting, this time with at least 17 dead, in a country where mass shootings are all too common (one of my colleagues tweeted that this is the 18th school shooting in […]

One would think that a state has fundamental rights and obligations in the same way that people do.  Any state must, for instance, have a monopoly on the use of force since in the absence of such we would live in anarchy.  I agree that the state exists only – or rather should exist only […]

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 […]

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 […]