Space war and other completely unnecessary distractions
When Troy Meink, the chief of the US Space Force, announces for no obvious reason that the United States “now has on-orbit space-control weapons”, people naturally assume that something is ...
Articles
Not AI doom
Somebody was bound to sound the alarm eventually. In this case it was a young British artificial intelligence researcher called Jacob Coxon, who quit his job at the AI company ...
Netanyahu’s expansionist obsessions have become mainstream in Israel
It has been a year since Canada, France and the United Kingdom officially recognised the State of Palestine (under Israeli occupation, final border to be determined). The killings by Israelis ...
Climate: “No good outcomes”
“El Niño is being supersized before our eyes,” said United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. “The science leaves no room for doubt: the planet is in uncharted waters, ...
Africa and getting the history of slavery wrong
“I think that there’s a strategy to divide and conquer and to create a very contrived confusion,” said Samuel Okuzeto Ablakwan, Ghana’s foreign minster. “We denounce and totally ...
A climate grand jeté
The first hurricane to hit Hawaii in 34 years. The Mediterranean on fire from Spain to Greece. ‘Heat domes’ one after another for months on end in Europe and North America. ...
AI and bio-weapons
‘Artificial intelligence’ based on Large Language Models is shaping up to be the most efficient destroyer of value since the South Sea Bubble. After the Crash, some specific functions of ...
Cyril Ramaphosa and the law
It’s outrageous. You’re at your hobby farm in the country, just pottering around, so you stuff the $580,000 in your pocket under the sofa cushions temporarily just to get ...
All roads lead to Donald Trump
I have been writing this column twice a week for a long time, so I have a finely developed a sense for when the audience is sick of a subject. ...
Trump and the threshold of pain
It would be so easy for Donald Trump to escape from the trap he has built for himself in the Persian Gulf. Just declare a victory and leave.
So what ...
Courts are the last defence against tyranny
India and the United States are the world’s two biggest democracies, and both of them seem to be in danger. In each of them populist federal governments are deliberately ...
It’s a shame they can’t both lose
The last time oil-tankers were being shot up in the Persian Gulf, back in the 1980s, it was Saddam Hussein’s brutal tyranny in Iraq versus Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolutionary ...
It’s not the weather: it’s a wandering ‘heat dome’
Last week it was Europe’s turn, with a slow-moving ‘heat dome’ that gave almost everybody from the United Kingdom to Poland three consecutive days of record-breaking temperatures. In Germany ...
Venezuela: Things could change
Bad things happen, and some of them are nobody’s fault. Big earthquakes in Venezuela are about a century apart (1812, 1902, 2026), so you can’t blame the planners and the politicians ...
The slave traders
At a ‘high-level United Nations consultative conference’ in Ghana earlier this month, African and Caribbean countries called on the countries that benefitted from the transatlantic slave trade to make a ...
Netanyahu does what he always does: makes minor concessions
“The war is over,” US Secretary of State Marco Rubio told Congress last Tuesday, but it isn’t.
In the Persian Gulf there is a sort-of ceasefire between the United ...
Iran: The curious absence of nuclear weapons
Tulsi Gabbard, the recently resigned/retired/fired US Director of National Intelligence, told Congress just two months ago that US intelligence agencies had concluded Iran was not building nuclear weapons. ...
Is demographic collapse a good idea?
Smart phones seem to be directly linked to a worldwide crash in the birth rate.
It is “quite plausible that the modern digital media environment has had profound effects on ...
How realistic are the fears of World War III?
A Politico opinion poll conducted in the four biggest Nato countries in February revealed almost identical popular expectations about the likelihood of a global war in the next five years. ...
Israel: The widening war
There are really two wars in the Middle East, and only one of them is paused. The US-Iran war has been stuck in a ragged ceasefire for more than a ...
Would Cuba resist?
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio should be careful what he wishes for. Donald Trump has speculated that Rubio could be “the next president of Cuba” after the US overthrows ...
Oil: the writing is finally on the wall
Eat your hearts out, Pablo Escobar, Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzman and Nemesio ‘El Mencho’ Oseguera Cervantes. The richest cartel by far is still the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (...
Speaking English badly
It is a matter of chronic surprise that politicians, otherwise well-trained in saying just the right thing for the audience they are addressing, forget that whatever they say can be ...
Death Rattle of a Superpower?
“We’re offering a very fair and reasonable DEAL, and I hope they take it because, if they don’t, the United States is going to knock out every single ...