Category: Outlook

  • Overstory

    Things are not looking good for Ukraine, but at least the country seems able to strike Russian oil depots and refineries, thus in effect striking the rest of us. All our efforts day after day – yours and mine – to reduce our carbon footprints are derisory compared to the output of a few hours’…

  • Whitherto

    Where are we heading? I wonder. When the USA and the UK and Israel (attacks against Palestine, Lebanon and Syria) go around bombing countries they dislike, there is reason to fear anarchy in the worst sense of that word. For one thing: If they can do it, why can’t anyone else? One or more of…

  • Cartel

    What’s the matter with those people? Running around the world shooting and killing as though they were a drug cartel…! The cartel barons in Washington take it into their heads to go off and bomb Jemen, and since self-gratification is Law for cartel barons, there is nothing to stop them from doing just that: bombing…

  • Hail South Africa

    Where I live, winter has been unusually severe so far. Temperatures have dropped to 24 below zero (centigrade), and dog walkers like me have had to wade in knee-deep snow. Yet, South Africa’s powerful response to the Israeli genocide and in defence of innocent Palestinian civilians, has warmed every last one of my frozen bones.…

  • A Christmas Carol

    I wept in front of Al Jazeera television for much of the holiday. That is the long and the short of it. I still feel numb and shaken. The horror of what we have witnessed – are still witnessing – the evil of it, is beyond anything I had been able to fathom. I check…

  • Harnessing history to politics, part II

    The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the second part of his analysis. Causes of grain shortage Historians explain the food shortage in the Soviet Union in 1933 in various ways. The predominant view is that the dramatic changes imposed by the…

  • Harnessing history to politics

    The Icelandic historian Thorarinn Hjartarson has written a piece about the 1932–33 famine in Ukraine. What follows is most of the first part of his analysis. The quotes included by the author were translated by him to Icelandic from English. Since I have been unable to consult all his sources, I must include some of…

  • The tightening of the screw

    Europe is currently undergoing a tightening of the screw. As most of you will have learnt from either Milton Friedman or Naomi Klein or both, crises (e.g. the 2008 financial crisis, Covid, the war in Ukraine, etc.) will be inexorably exploited by the powers-that-be. Result: the poor will become poorer, the rich richer. This is…

  • Anger

    I am just a common inhabitant in a country of just five million – just one country of 195. I live in the West – i.e. the part of the world that makes up just 15 per cent, or so, of the world’s population. Countries in the West take orders from an infinitesimal minority of…

  • Change

    The very word – change – is a little scary. For a child, moving with parents to a different district means moving away from friends and/or bullies, to potential new friends and/or bullies. As adults we may think we have grown out of such starkly black-and-white notions, yet, we are still vulnerable, maybe as vulnerable…