7 January 2025 Canada: Trudeau Bites the Dust By Gwynne Dyer Donald Trump excels in every field, including surrealism. Leonard Cohen sang “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!” but it’s completely outclassed by Trump’s “First we take Greenland, then we take Canada!” And he’s going to take the Panama Canal too! It’s probably […]
22 December 2024 Nobody Wants to be a Nazi, but…. By Gwynne Dyer ‘Alternativ für Deutschland’ (AfD) means ‘The Alternative for Germany’, and the alternative on offer is fascism. Not actual Naziism, but the AfD uses fascist rhetoric and tactics to attract German voters. It has also attracted some improbable foreign admirers. One of those
3 March 2024 South Korea: Hyper-Competitive and Childless By Gwynne Dyer There are enough people to go around: eight billion now, compared to two billion less than a hundred years ago. Fifty-one million in South Korea, compared to only twelve million a hundred years ago. So why are South Koreans obsessed about their low birth
28 February 2024 The Utility of Neutrality By Gwynne Dyer Neutrality used to be a European thing, but it is now in steep decline. If it were an animal, we’d have to declare it an endangered species. For hundreds of years Europe was the ‘cockpit of war’, but if a country got sick of the
20 September 2023 So Hard to Choose: Canada or the Quad? By Gwynne Dyer First Prize: Two Fabulous Days in Beautiful Delhi! Second Prize: Four Days in Delhi! Having to wait an extra two days in Delhi after the G20 while the Canadian armed forces fixed a plane to bring Prime Minister Justin Trudeau home
12 July 2023 Boing! The Anthropocene By Gwynne Dyer “I was there when the Anthropocene was born. It was so amazing,” said Dr. Katherine Richardson, leader of the Sustainability Science Centre at the University of Copenhagen. “It was actually in 2000, at one of these meetings of the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme Scientific Steering Committee.” The
17 May 2023 The Baby Bonus Doesn’t Work Any More By Gwynne Dyer I was one of five children – not seen as a particularly big family in Newfoundland at the time – and there was one year when we allegedly beat Guatemala to have the highest birth rate in the world. (That’s probably not
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 »