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  • THAILAND

    Starship: The Iterative Design Methodology

    News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 23/04/2023

    » '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 Mr Musk's employees, hundreds of whom were watching live, cheer when it blew up only four minutes into flight?

  • OPINION

    Sudan: Thieves fall out and the people suffer

    Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 18/04/2023

    » 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: the rival generals both want to strangle the democratic revolution that began in Khartoum four years ago.

  • OPINION

    Before the Great Ukrainian Offensive

    News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 09/04/2023

    » Monday's stunt, when 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 the Russian winter offensive. It was just a charade, of course.

  • OPINION

    Pakistan bound for crisis amid changed reality

    Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 04/04/2023

    » Last year US President Joe Biden called Pakistan "one of the most dangerous countries in the world", presumably because of its potentially lethal cocktail of nuclear weapons and unstable politics. But somehow it staggers on endlessly, never resolving its permanent political crisis but never quite exploding either.

  • OPINION

    Freddy and the Ice: Messages From the Future

    News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 19/03/2023

    » Two new things on the climate front this week, both bad news. Typhoons used to be like drive-by shootings: one pass, one hit and then gone. Now they're starting to come back for a second hit.

  • OPINION

    Beijing will use 'floggings' until morale improves

    Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 14/03/2023

    » 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, and the chief Wizard doesn't even to need to hide behind a curtain.

  • OPINION

    Israel pogroms reflect nation's shift to right

    News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 06/03/2023

    » The dictionary definition of "pogrom" is "an organised massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries." So, there is something deeply strange about hearing pogrom used in Hebrew to describe what some Jewish people are doing to Arabs in 21st-century Israel.

  • OPINION

    Earthquakes, Turkish politics and culpability

    Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 15/02/2023

    » If you are trying to dodge the blame for a great disaster, the best policy is to say that it was God's will. So Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visiting one of the 6,000 buildings that collapsed on their sleeping residents in eastern Turkey last week, said: "Such things have always happened. It's part of Destiny's plan."

  • OPINION

    Ardern's exit and the persistence of other politicians

    Oped, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 25/01/2023

    » '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 truth of this proposition in his own lengthy but undistinguished political career.

  • OPINION

    A resurgence of alliances is an echo of past wars

    News, Gwynne Dyer, Published on 21/01/2023

    » Alliances are as old as civilisation. Older, actually: almost every hunter-gatherer band that anthropologists have studied, from the New Guinea highlanders to the Yanomamo in the Amazon, made alliances with other groups to try to protect themselves.

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