Here’s an interesting fact. Only 14 per cent of people in England and Wales are ‘Black, Asian, Mixed or Other’ (i.e. non-white). Yet half the candidates vying to take the place of disgraced British prime minister Boris Johnson as leader of the Conservative Party-and therefore the new prime minister-are non-white. Four out of eight. In …
Political Leaders and the Great Multicultural Experiment Read More »
12 January 2022 Covid Fatigue By Gwynne Dyer Once they called it ‘combat fatigue’, and treated the soldiers who showed the symptoms with a mixture of pity and contempt. Then they renamed it ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) and broadened the definition to cover similar responses to other stressful situations. And now we have Covid fatigue. …
26 October 2021 “The world is on a catastrophic pathway to 2.7°C of heating,” said UN Secretary General António Guterres. “There is a high risk of failure of COP26.” That’s the global climate summit that meets every five years (but was postponed last year because of the pandemic) to plot a course away from climate …
Looking for the Pain Threshold: Why COP26 Won’t Deliver Read More »
29 September 2021 Humans in the Americas: Two Mysteries By Gwynne Dyer It’s been the biggest shock in archaeology for a long time. British and American archaeologists have found solid evidence that human beings – we could call them ‘the forerunners’ – were in the Americas around 6,000 years before the earliest previously accepted date. …
12 September 2021 Auto-Eugenics in America By Gwynne Dyer Eugenics was a 20th-century pseudo-science that purported to improve the human breed by weeding out the ‘least fit’, often by measures like compulsory sterilisation or, in the case of the Nazis, death camps. But this is the 21st century, and now people can do it for …
4 July 2021 First the ‘heat dome’, with temperatures in the mid-to-high forties Celsius in many parts of western North America for up to a week (49.6° C in Lytton, B.C.). Then, when the forests were tinder-dry, came the wildfires (which wiped Lytton out). From northern California to northern BC, the records were being broken …
1 February 2021 My wife and I had our first shots of a Covid-19 vaccine this weekend (Astra-Zeneca, since you ask), and none of our children are old enough to be particularly vulnerable. I therefore no longer have a dog in this fight, and can write with godlike impartiality about who else should get the …
January 07, 2021 If I have to read one more hand-wringing article about the ‘crisis of American democracy’ and what it means for the world, I’m going to retch. The last straw was an article in the ‘New Yorker’ this week by Adam Gopnik, an accomplished journalist whom I usually admire. It was called ‘What …
5 August 2020 An ‘October Surprise’ in the United States is now almost inevitable, because that will be Donald Trump’s last chance to get re-elected legitimately. He might try to cling to office even if he loses the vote, but it would be a lot easier and neater if he actually won a majority in …
In times of great emergency, when the normal rules have been suspended, all sorts of things that used to seem unthinkable suddenly enter the realm of possibility. A national health service paid for by taxes and free at the point of delivery in the United States, for example – or a guaranteed basic income in …