11 December 2024 Superstitious Peasants By Gwynne Dyer More than half the world’s people (4.3 billion) own smart phones, and practically everybody has access to one. All the information in the world is available to everybody. Yet willful ignorance and superstition still flourish. From Tiktok to YouTube, the web is currently seething with videos of […]
25 September 2024 Who Ruined Sri Lanka? By Gwynne Dyer It’s hard to know who ruined Sri Lanka, because are so many plausible candidates. You could blame the Buddhist extremists of the majority Sinhalese population who led the first pogroms against the Tamil minority in 1958, or the Marxist insurrection that broke out in 1971
22 September 2024 Animal Consciousness By Gwynne Dyer A bit behind the curve (it was first posted last April), I have stumbled across ‘The New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness’. It is a brave attempt by a coalition of forty prominent scientists in relevant fields (evolutionary biology, neural science, psychology, etc.) to promote the idea
18 September 2024 Exploding Pagers: What Was the Point? By Gwynne Dyer The exploding pagers that killed at least twelve people and injured 2,800 others in Lebanon and some adjacent places on Tuesday were mostly just a new wrinkle on the exploding cellphones that Israel has used to assassinate its opponents in the past, but
15 September 2024 Uncharted Territory By Gwynne Dyer No sirens are blaring, nobody even looks frightened, but they should be. Last week the world moved into uncharted territory. The ‘aspirational’ goal of never allowing the average global temperature to rise more than 1.5 degrees Celsius higher than the pre-industrial norm (+1.5°C) has been breached for
21 August 2024 The Very Precious Life of Elon Musk By Gwynne Dyer Elon Musk is heading for a crash. It’s only a matter of time before one or another of his random enthusiasms brings him down. But if I had the power I would guarantee him at least two more years of solvency before
14 August 2024 Ukraine: Rumours of Ceasefires By Gwynne Dyer Ukraine’s major cross-border attack into the Kursk region of Russia last week has triggered the usual claims and counter-claims. First, former Russian defence minister Sergei Shoigu said that Russia had taken 420 square km. of territory from Ukrainian forces since June 14 along the old
7 August 2024 Bangladesh, Venezuela and Democracy By Gwynne Dyer If all that mattered is economic growth, then Shaikh Hasina would still be in power. She has ruled Bangladesh for fifteen continuous years during which the country’s per capita income more than tripled. Yet she has been overthrown by the very same students who stood
31 July 2024 Climate Change: The August Deadline By Gwynne Dyer When you spend four years writing a book on climate change, you get to know most of the leading players. I have never seen them so dismayed. “By August, if we’re still looking at record-breaking temperatures, then we really have moved into uncharted territory,”
16 June 2024 Second Chance for South Africa? By Gwynne Dyer Cyril Ramaphosa is the president of South Africa again, but everything else is different. He got his job back in a vote late on Friday, but only because at the last moment he managed to cobble together a coalition that has a majority in