I visited my home town of Napier a few weeks back and was stunned by the obvious poverty now evident across the place – this in the past twelve months, since a disastrous cyclone. This much poverty hasn’t generated that quickly, but it’s as if the cyclone made it visible. There are homeless people trying … More A visit to art deco central – and its poverty
Welcome to 2024, nearly a quarter of the way through the 21st century. When I was a kid that was science fiction, but it’s a world very different from the one envisioned by many sci-fi writers of the twentieth century. I’m still waiting for my flying car. But hey – we’ve social media, trolls, malware … More Captain Cynic and the existential crisis of the 2020s
The past few years have been among the most dramatic seen in the world in decades. Social unrest across wide swathes of the civilised communities; a United States riven by a social and political rift; the biggest war in Europe since 1945; Britain collapsing into clown-status. And, here in New Zealand – one of the … More Where now for the world? Armageddon or paradise?
Back in January 2021 I published a rather gloomy post speculating that the year would be worse for the world than 2020. It was. By the end of 2021, New Zealand – which had escaped the pandemic until then – was amidst a Delta outbreak and struggling to keep Omicron out. The science was underscored … More And so 2022 backs into view, complete with butt-trumpet
I write this in December 2020, as one of the most difficult years in living memory draws to a close. Globally. It’s rare that virtually the whole planet shares a crisis. Usually it’s due to war. This time, it’s a pandemic, and the whole has been buoyed on an unprecedented swirl of social media. The … More Will things be better in 2021? Read on…
It’s fair to say that 2020 has been the worst year in living memory. The world has, in the span of just a few months, been plunged into one of the most widespread and severe crises since the Second World War. Even the Cuba Crisis of 1962, with all its implication of nuclear armageddon, was … More How to understand 2020 – the worst year in living memory
I am beginning to wonder whether the real nature of humanity is not care or nurture, but psychotic violence. It’s not just the relentless streams of the latter that flow past me in the news. It’s something I discovered directly, the other week. I was in my home town of Napier, taking a photo of … More Are humans really just violent, psychotic apes?
Have you ever tried to get help from one of the web-companies we seem to be increasingly dealing with – only to discover the response is totally disconnected from the problem? It seems to be happening more and more lately. Something goes wrong in their automated systems at the server-side end (their doing), leaving you … More When online ‘help’ doesn’t relate to the problem
Matthew Wright 