The Russian word ‘derzhavnost’ is usually translated as ‘great power status’, but the real meaning is closer to the gangland concept of ‘respect’. The word was beyond the reach of my feeble Russian vocabulary until I heard it about twenty times in twenty minutes while interviewing an ultranationalist ideologue called Aleksandr Dugin about twenty years […]
Back in the 16th and 17th centuries, two-thirds of the Danish kingdom’s income came from taxes paid by every ship passing through the Øresund strait (‘The Sound’), the only exit from the Baltic Sea. Each ship had to declare the value of its cargo – and if the Danes thought they were understating it, Denmark
“The thing that comforts me,” said Jeff Boudier at Hugging Face, the leading open platform for AI builders, “is that the internet was built on the ashes of the over-investment into the telecom infrastructure of yesterday” during the dot.com boom of the late 1990s. The coming AI crash “is going to enable lots of great
Ukraine: Deadlines By Gwynne Dyer “I love deadlines,” said Douglas Adams, author of ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” Donald Trump sets deadlines for more complicated reasons that purport to be tactical, but he too is addicted to the whooshing sound they make when
Counting Babies in China (and Elsewhere) By Gwynne Dyer In 2014, Chinese filmmaker Zhang Yimou and his wife paid a fine of $1.2 million for having a third child, which was against the law. They didn’t go to jail – it was treated more like a very big parking ticket – but it was assessed
Taiwan: No Panic By Gwynne Dyer . “I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we [the US and China] will fight in 2025,” wrote General Mike Minihan, head of US Air Mobility Command, in a private memo two years ago. There’s still five months to go, but I’m going to go out on
Ukraine: Buying Time By Gwynne Dyer There was rejoicing when US President Donald Trump announced that he was going to let Ukraine have weapons after all, but it was conspicuously contained joy. Half-smiles and sighs of relief were plentiful; cheers were absent or faked. The Ukrainians were relieved because this is the first time they
Musk, Trump and Mao By Gwynne Dyer The only place where some people still see Elon Musk as a political genius is China. “Brother Musk, you’ve got over a billion people on our side backing you,” wrote a fan on Weibo, China’s biggest social media site. “If Elon Musk were to found a political party,”
Long Live the Dalai Lama! By Gwynne Dyer The whole business of succession would be a lot simpler if the Dalai Lama could just regenerate, like Doctor Who. When the time comes for The Doctor to stop looking like David Tennant and start looking like Matt Smith, there’s flame coming out of his head and
The World Is Closing Down By Gwynne Dyer Straws in the wind: recently I ran across a post by the CEO of a nationwide professional association in Canada. People like him are used to hopping across the US border for various meetings several times a month, but he was remarking on what people had been