7 May 2023 Massacres and Guns By Gwynne Dyer Here’s how to sound wise when writing a story about mass killings and gun control. Last week saw two such massacres in Serbia (eight deaths and nine deaths respectively) and only one in the United States (eight killed in a mall in Allen, Texas). There was …
5 May 2023 A Spike in the Ocean By Gwynne Dyer There is a fever raging in the ocean. Last month it was worst off the eastern coast of North America, where the sea surface temperature was as much as 13.8 degrees Celsius higher than the 1981-2011 average for this time of year. Not only …
30 April 2023 Thailand: Another Round? By Gwynne Dyer There have been occasional violent episodes in Thai politics and one recent massacre (2010), but the struggle for a genuine democracy has usually been relatively restrained. Maybe that is why it has lasted so long. In fact, the tug-of-war between the army, the monarchy and the …
22 April 2023 Starship: The Iterative Design Methodology By Gwynne Dyer “Obviously, this is not a nominal situation,” said John Insprucker, a senior engineer at Space-X, who was doing a webcast on Thursday’s launch attempt of Elon Musk’s gigantic Starship rocket. So why did Musk’s employees, hundreds of whom were watching live, cheer when it …
19 April 2023 What Goes ‘Moo’ And Then Explodes? By Gwynne Dyer “When I do a puzzle with my daughters, there is usually an elephant next to a giraffe next to a rhino,” said Prof. Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science. “But if I was trying to give them a more realistic sense …
16 April 2023 Sudan: The Thieves Fall Out By Gwynne Dyer It’s a pity that both sides can’t lose in the war that broke out between rival generals in Sudan on Saturday, but the best that the 48 million Sudanese can hope for now is that one side loses quickly. Beyond that, it’s all bad: …
4 April 2023 Before the Great Ukrainian Offensive By Gwynne Dyer Monday’s stunt, where Yevgeny Prigozhin held a Russian flag in his hands and declared that his ‘Wagner’ mercenary soldiers have finally conquered the Ukrainian city of Bakhmut, probably marks the end of Russian winter offensive. It was just a charade, of course. The footage …
23 March 2023 UN Climate Report: Clutching at Straws By Gwynne Dyer The final report of the United Nation’s climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has come out at last. The desperate optimism that characterised the last few volumes (this is Part Four of four) has frayed away to almost nothing. UN …
12 March 2023 China: The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves By Gwynne Dyer Xi Jinping was confirmed in a third term as president of China at the National People’s Congress last week, and not one of the 3,000 delegates voted against him. Why would they? Everything is perfect in the People’s Republic of Oz, …
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22 January 2023 On the Persistence of Politicians By Gwynne Dyer “All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs,” wrote British politician Enoch Powell half a century ago – and then proceeded to demonstrate the …