I keep thinking that living in today’s world is akin to someone holding on for dear life to an aircraft they somehow got outside of, but it’s about to crash anyway. People are on edge. Societies are bending before the strain of a whole raft of factors topped by a virus that, alas, won’t go … More As the world comes undone…
This week New Zealand’s inflation hit a 31-year high after decades when the spectre of relentlessly rising consumer prices seemed to have been conquered forever. What happened can only partly be blamed on domestic issues – a 32 percent rise in the price of fuel, for instance, simply had to be accepted. Although that last … More The inflation monster is baaaaaaack
Reports this week of alleged Russian murder of civilians in Ukraine on a large scale – denied by Russia but essentially confirmed by German intelligence and aerial photography, which showed bodies strewn on the ground – are horrifying on many levels. It has been called genocide by President Zelenskyy: other commentators are more circumspect, but … More Possible genocide in Ukraine? Humanity never learns
This week’s events reveal something disturbing about our society. When some guy slapping another at the Oscars makes more headlines than the war in Ukraine and all the other troubles of the world, I have to wonder what’s going on. To an extent it’s predictable. The entertainment industry is a big business like any other, … More Something wrong with society’s priorities
I recently read an opinion piece from a UK journalist suggesting that Ukraine’s biggest mistake in recent years was to get rid of its nuclear weapons. When the Soviet Union broke up, Ukraine ended up with a significant part of the former Soviet arsenal – 176 ICBM’s carrying 1900 independent warheads, coupled with around 2600 … More The moral bankruptcy of nuclear weapons
The spectre of armoured vehicles (not all of them are ‘tanks’) grinding across the roads of Europe to prosecute a hot war, of refugees carrying their belongings with them along roads jammed with civilian vehicles, seems somehow out of date to me, echoing grainy monochrome newsreel footage from another century. And yet, here it is. … More The tragedy of the war in Ukraine
This year’s situation over Covid puts me in mind of a speech Winston Churchill gave on 10 November 1942, after the second Battle of El Alamein. This decisively defeated a German-Italian Army in the field of battle; and by early November the Axis force was fleeing west, pursued by Lieutenant-General Sir Bernard Freyberg’s Second New … More The end of the beginning for Covid – lessons from Churchill
The occupation of New Zealand’s Parliament grounds by a disparate group of protesters – ostensibly over the Covid mandates, but representing a multitude of causes and apparently without a single organiser – follows similar occupations in Canada and elsewhere. It’s a disturbing development. Protests usually focus on an issue. They are usually led and organised … More New Zealand’s parliamentary protest and the lessons of 1848 Europe
Back in the 1950s and 1960s the popular vision of the 2020s was simple. The future was defined as the turn of the millennium; the 2020s were the future of the future, and this nebulous future future had every potential to fix humanity’s problems. By the 2020s all disease would be conquered. We’d have climate … More We’ve missed our utopian future
This week I watched Don’t Look Up. I was impressed. Others may have different opinions, but to me it came across as a razor-sharp satire on the current zeitgiest, a social commentary of the highest order and a dark comedy with some solid science behind it. The scary part wasn’t the concept of a planet-killer … More What happens when Earth is hit by a 10km wide banana…
Matthew Wright 
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