Showing 1 - 6 of 6
Covid: Digital peasants and the ignorant rich
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/12/2021
» The new Omicron variant of the Covid-19 virus was discovered last week by scientists in South Africa and Botswana, the only countries in southern Africa that have the skills and resources to detect a new variant.
Bolsonaro must quarantine Brazil -- now
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 11/03/2021
» If I were a world dictator, I would immediately place Brazil under total quarantine: nobody gets in, nobody comes out. And I would keep it isolated until they (a) arrest and jail President Jair Bolsonaro; (b) impose a strict countrywide lockdown for at least two months; and (c) vaccinate everybody in the country (all 213,584,556 of them). And then we'll see.
What the virus is telling us about climate change
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 29/05/2020
» Human beings respond well to a crisis that is familiar, especially if it is also imminent. They don't do nearly as well when the threat is unfamiliar and still apparently quite distant. Consider our response to the current coronavirus threat.
Donald Trump and the 'Yellow Peril'
Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/05/2020
» It was completely predictable that Donald Trump would try to blame China for the fact that at least 30 million Americans are unemployed and that 70,000 Americans have already died of Covid-19. His polling numbers are down and the election is only seven months away. What else was he going to do? Blame himself?
Is the Wuhan 'devil virus' a 'black swan'?
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/02/2020
» China officially went back to work on Monday, after an extended two-week Lunar New Year holiday, while the authorities struggled to get the spread of the new coronavirus under control. But a lot of Chinese are not going back to work yet, and the spread of the "devil virus" (as President Xi Jinping called it) is manifestly not under control.
Coronavirus response reveals China's fatal weakness
News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 28/01/2020
» In an emergency, the good thing about a dictatorship is that it can respond very fast. The bad thing is that it won't respond at all until the dictator-in-chief says that it should. All the little dictators who flourish in this sort of system won't risk their positions by passing bad news up the line until the risk of being blamed for delay outweighs the risk of being blamed for the emergency in the first place.