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Gwynne Dyer
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Japan's PM risks bankruptcy
Shinzo Abe, now six months into his second try at being prime minister of Japan, is a puzzling man. In his first, spectacularly unsuccessful go in 2006-07, he was a crude nationalist and an economic ignoramus who rarely had control of his own dysfunctional cabinet. By the time he quit, after only a year in office, his popularity rating was below 30 per cent and his health was breaking down. Last December, his Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) won a landslide victory in the elections for the lower house of the Diet (parliament), and as party leader, he became prime minister again -- but what a difference six years makes. He's still a radical nationalist who on occasion comes close to denying Japan's guilt for the aggressive wars of 1931-45, but in economics, he is now Action Man. His approval rating is currently over 70 per cent.View Full Column | 05/22/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Glimmers of hope for Pakistan
The first time Nawaz Sharif became prime minister of Pakistan was almost a quarter-century ago. His second term was ended 14 years ago by a military coup that drove him into exile. Now he's back, a good deal older -- but is he any wiser? Pakistanis seem to think so -- or at least Punjabis do. Almost all of the seats won by his Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz Party in last Saturday's election were in the province of Punjab, which has more people than all of Pakistan's other provinces combined.View Full Column | 05/17/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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3D printers will make outsourcing so yesterday
The story so far: Cody Wilson, who describes himself as a "crypto-anarchist" and almost certainly wears a Second Amendment belt buckle, had a bright idea early last year. No government could ever oppress its people again, reasoned the 25-year-old law student at the University of Texas, if everybody in the world was able to manufacture their own guns at home. Well, not everybody in the world, exactly, but at least everybody with $8,000 to buy a 3D printer on eBay, or access to one of the 3D printing shops that are springing up in major cities. So Wilson set out to design a gun made entirely of high-density ABS plastic that could be printed on a standard 3D machine. He printed and tested it, and last week, he made the blueprints available online.View Full Column | 05/14/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Kids born in 2000 should live to be 100
One hesitates to quote Dave Barry, but sometimes you just have to: "Thanks to modern medical advances such as antibiotics, nasal spray, and Diet Coke, it has become routine for people in the civilized world to pass the age of 40, sometimes more than once." The most startling statistic I have seen in years is this: Since the 1840s, life expectancy in the developed countries has increased by three months per year. That rate of increase continues to apply today. Unless it deviates radically from its historic pattern, now almost two centuries old, the children born in 2000 have a life expectancy of around 100 years.View Full Column | 05/11/2013 5:40 AM | 0
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Climate options -- grim, grimmer, grimmest
There are, we are told, only two options. Either we stop burning fossil fuels before our carbon dioxide emissions drive the planet's average temperature up a full 2 degrees C, in which case we will push the world into the biggest-ever recession. Or we continue to burn fossil fuels and push the planet into runaway warming, with lethal consequences for a large part of the human race. The 2008 bank crash that triggered the recent recession was caused mainly by reckless investment that created a bubble in house prices. When the bubble burst, hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of investments suddenly became worthless. The losses were so great that they nearly brought the whole banking system down.View Full Column | 04/24/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Giving guns to Somalia is good news
There have been no elections in Somalia since 1967 and there won't be any this year either. But the country has a new parliament (appointed on the advice of clan elders) that has elected a new president, and the new government now actually controls the capital, Mogadishu. The world's only fully "failed state" may finally be starting to return to normality. A failed state is a horrendous thing: no government, no army, no police, no courts, no law, just bands of armed men taking what they want. Somalia has been like that for more than 20 years, but now there is hope. So much hope that last month the United Nations Security Council partially lifted its embargo on arms sales to Somalia in order to let the new Somali government buy arms, and last week the U.S. government followed suit.View Full Column | 04/12/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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'Genetic engineered' might save planet
Fourteen years ago, scientists developed a genetically engineered version of rice that would promote the production of vitamin A to counter blindness and other diseases in children in developing countries. In a few months, the Philippines will become the first country to start giving "golden rice" out to its farmers. Bangladesh and Indonesia will follow suit soon, and India is seriously considering it. Good, but 14 years is rather a long time, isn't it? The number of children in developing countries who went blind from vitamin A deficiency during that time (half of whom died 12 months after losing their sight) runs into the low millions. (The World Health Organization estimates that between a quarter-million and a half-million children a year go blind from vitamin A-deficiency.)View Full Column | 04/6/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Karzai's games could prove fatal
2The "foreigners" he is talking about are the troops from the United States and various NATO countries in Europe that have been in Afghanistan for the past dozen years. They will almost all be gone by the end of next year. Can Karzai seriously think that the Taliban bombs in Kabul and Khost on March 9, which killed 19 people, were meant to get the Americans, British and Germans to keep their soldiers in Afghanistan longer? If he were the leader of al-Qaida, you can imagine him saying that. It was always al-Qaida's goal to get western military forces entangled in military occupations in the Muslim world, in the belief that would nurture popular hostility both to the West and to the local leaders who collaborated with it. But Karzai is a collaborator, parachuted into Afghanistan after the American invasion in 2001.View Full Column | 04/1/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Failed bank heist threat to the euro
Could a failed bank robbery in Cyprus cause the collapse of the euro? It's hard to imagine how anything that happens in Cyprus, with fewer than one million people, could bring down the common currency shared by 300 million Europeans, but there are few human behaviours as infectious as a run on the banks. Strictly speaking, the Greek-Cypriots are not having a bank run, because their banks have all been closed since last Saturday and the cash machines will only give out 500 euros (about $650) per customer. But there would certainly be a nationwide bank run if they reopened the banks without strict limits on cash withdrawals and transfers overseas.View Full Column | 03/21/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Iraq war lessons will be forgotten
Why did George W. Bush choose March 19, 2003, to invade Iraq, rather than some day in May, or July, or never? Because he was afraid further delay would give United Nations arms inspectors time to refute the accusation (his sole pretext for making an unprovoked attack on an independent country) that Saddam Hussein's regime was working on nuclear weapons. The U.S. president couldn't say that, of course, and so instead his administration's spokesmen mumbled about the need to get the war over and done with before the summer heat made fighting impossible. Yet American soldiers proved perfectly capable of operating in that summer heat during the ensuing seven years of fighting, in which more than 4,000 of them were killed.View Full Column | 03/19/2013 12:01 PM | 0
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The Koreas risk miscalculation
The joint U.S.-South Korean military exercises known as Key Resolve and Foal Eagle are underway, and so far the heavens have not fallen. The American forces have not launched an unprovoked assault on North Korea, despite the strident claims of Pyongyang's media that the exercises are a cover for exactly such a plan. In fact, joint exercises on this scale -- they only involve 13,000 American and South Korean troops -- have been held every year of the past 40 and pose no threat whatever to North Korea.View Full Column | 03/15/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Chávez at least was a democrat
"THE graveyards are full of indispensable men," said Georges Clemenceau, prime minister of France during the First World War, and promptly died to prove his point. He was duly replaced, and France was just fine without him. Same goes for Hugo Chávez and Venezuela. Comandante Presidente's death on Tuesday came as no surprise. He was clearly coming home to die when he returned from his last bout of surgery in Cuba in December, and since then everybody in politics in Venezuela has been pondering their post-Chávez strategies. But none of them really knows what will happen in the election that will be held by the end of April, let alone what happens afterwards.View Full Column | 03/7/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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China has good reason to embrace carbon tax
The announcement last week by China’s ministry of finance that the country will introduce a carbon tax, probably in the next two years, did not dominate the international headlines. It was too vague about the timetable and the rate at which the tax would be levied, and fossil fuel lobbyists were quick to portray it as meaningless. But the Chinese are deadly serious about fighting global warming, because they are really scared. A carbon tax, though deeply unpopular with the fossil fuel industries, is the easiest way to change the behaviour of the people and firms that burn those fuels: it just makes burning them more costly. And if the tax is then returned to the consumers of energy through lower taxes, then it has no overall depressive effect on the economy.View Full Column | 03/4/2013 1:11 PM | 0
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Italians select a monster
The winner of election in Italy this week was a mythical beast called "Grillosconi." That is bad news for Italy, for the single European currency, the euro and even for the future of the European Union. Not that "Grillosconi" will ever form a coherent government in Italy. The problem is that he -- or rather, they -- will prevent anybody else from doing that, too. The newer part of this hybrid beast is Beppe Grillo, a former standup comedian who is essentially an anti-politician. His blog boils with bile against Italy's entire political class, and his public appearances are angry, foul-mouthed, arm-waving rants against the whole system.View Full Column | 03/1/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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The decline of the West?
You know the storyline by now. There are one million millionaires in China. ("To get rich is glorious," said former leader Deng Xiaoping.) Seventy per cent of the homes in China are bought for cash. China's total trade -- the sum of imports and exports -- is now bigger than that of the United States. "They're going to eat our lunch," whimper the faint-hearted in the West. It's not just the Chinese who are coming. The Indians and the Brazilians are coming, too, with economic-growth rates far higher than in the old industrialized countries, but it doesn't even stop there. There's also Mexico, Turkey, Indonesia and half a dozen other big countries in what used to be called the Third World that have discovered the secret of high-speed growth. The power shift is happening even faster than the pundits predicted.View Full Column | 02/21/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Still the 'Roman' Catholic Pope
It's the 'Roman' Catholic Church, not the Republican Catholic Church or the People's Revolutionary Socialist Democratic Catholic Church. Its rigid hierarchy and its centralizing instincts are almost entirely due to the fact that it became the state religion of the Roman Empire more than 1,600 years ago. And the pope is still, in essence, the emperor. How Roman are the traditions and instincts of the church that Pope Benedict XVI has led for the past seven years? Well, one of his titles is "pontifex maximus", usually translated from the Latin as "Supreme Pontiff."View Full Column | 02/16/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Mackerel wars harbinger of things to come
It’s hard enough to manage a fishery stock sustainably when the fish stay put. Once they start moving around, it’s almost impossible. That’s why the European Union and Iceland are heading into a mackerel war. It’s a foretaste of things to come, as warming oceans cause ocean fish to migrate in order to stay in their temperature comfort zones. The conflict this time is quite different from the “cod wars” between Iceland and Britain in 1958 and in the early 1970s, as Iceland progressively extended its maritime boundaries in order to save its cod stocks from over-fishing by British trawlers. Back then, Icelanders were indisputably in the right. If they hadn’t acted decisively, their cod fish would have gone the way of the world’s richest cod fishery, on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland.View Full Column | 02/11/2013 4:46 PM | 0
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A king is dead, long live his face
You can hear them shouting it in the horrible mobile-phone footage of the mob killing the wounded, befuddled Moammar Gadhafi: "Not the face, don't touch the face." They weren't feeling sorry for the dying dictator of Libya. They just wanted to make sure that his corpse was recognizable. A lot of people would not feel safe, and some other people would not give up fighting for him, until they were sure he was really dead. They probably yelled the same thing while they were killing King Richard III on a battlefield near Leicester in 1485. He had only been on the English throne for two years when Henry Tudor came back from exile and overthrew him in the Battle of Bosworth, but it was essential that many witnesses saw and recognized his corpse. Otherwise there would be endless rebels claiming to be Richard and trying to overthrow the new king.View Full Column | 02/9/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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China, Japan risk stumbling to war
Chinese survey vessels go into the waters around the disputed islands and Japanese patrol ships tail them much too closely. Twice last month Chinese maritime surveillance aircraft flew into the airspace around the Japanese-controlled islands and Tokyo scrambled F-15 fighters to meet them. On the second occasion, China then sent fighters, too. Can these people be serious? The rocky, uninhabited group of islets in the East China Sea, called the Senkaku Islands by Japan and the Diaoyu Islands by China, are worthless in themselves, and even the ocean and seabed resources around them could not justify a war. Yet both sides sound quite serious, and the media rhetoric about it in China has got downright bellicose.View Full Column | 01/31/2013 3:30 PM | 0
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The Little Englanders win big with EU referendum
The real problem is continental drift: Brussels, the capital of the European Union, is getting further and further away from England. Or at least that is British Prime Minister David Cameron's line. Cameron made his long-awaited speech promising a referendum on continued British membership in the European Union Wednesday, and he placed the blame squarely on plate tectonics: "People are increasingly frustrated that decisions taken further and further away from them mean their living standards are slashed through enforced austerity or their taxes are used to bail out governments on the other side of the continent."View Full Column | 01/25/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Election likely to confirm Israel's right shift
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was once seen as a right-wing figure. Now he's widely considered to be a moderate. But it's not Netanyahu who has changed; Israel has. His governing coalition will certainly win the largest number of seats in the Knesset (parliament) again in the election on Tuesday, but his new government will contain lots of people who make him look very moderate indeed. Consider, for example, Moshe Feiglin, one of the ultra-right-wingers who recently displaced the remaining moderates in internal elections in Netanyahu's own Likud Party. "You can't teach a monkey to speak and you can't teach an Arab to be democratic," Feiglin told the New York Times recently. "You're dealing with a culture of thieves and robbers. The Arab destroys everything he touches."View Full Column | 01/19/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Another Western war in a Muslim nation
222But the days in question weren't over for very long. Last Friday, France sent a squadron of fighter-bombers to the West African country to stop the Islamist fighters from taking the capital. "We are making air raids the whole time," said French Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. "They are going on now. They will go on tonight. They will go on tomorrow."View Full Column | 01/16/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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Syria — no end in sight
The most frustrating part of covering the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) was that after a while there was nothing left to say. Syria is starting to feel just the same. It’s horrible, but atrocities are a daily event in all civil wars. It’s not going to stop any time soon, but you can only say that so many times before people get bored and move on. Except for the people who actually live near Syria’s borders, the audience for “news” about Syria has already moved on.View Full Column | 01/11/2013 12:31 PM | 0
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Russia a tax haven? Ask Depardieu
It's as if Paul Newman and Jane Fonda had fled the U.S. in protest of something or other -- they were always protesting -- and sought Russian citizenship instead. Americans would be surprised, but would they really care? It's a free country, as they say. Whereas the French are quite cross about the decision of Oscar-winning actor Gerard Depardieu, who received Russian citizenship at the hands of President Vladimir Putin personally last Saturday. A taxi driver in Paris went on at me about it for the whole ride. (Talking to taxi drivers is how we journalists keep our fingers on the pulse of the nation.)View Full Column | 01/8/2013 1:00 AM | 0
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A shortage of sperm
Many years ago, when I was young and handsome, a friend inveigled me into taking a small role in a film he was making – a proper film, with a real budget and a commercial release, though mercifully it never got much attention. It was a Cold War spoof called The Last Straw in which the Soviets were plotting to bring the West to its knees by causing the sperm count in Western males to collapse, and I got the Dr Strangelove role. This friend — let’s call him Giles Walker, because that was his name — picked me for the role because at the time I was known for making weighty prognostications on the strategic balance and matters pertaining thereto. (You have to make a living.) So I played myself, briefing the leaders of the Free World on the appalling strategic consequences if the Soviet plot succeeded.View Full Column | 01/3/2013 3:28 PM | 0
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