Articles/Essays/Notes

Indonesia to 2030: a monitorable framework of scenario probabilities, 12 indicator thresholds, event triggers and falsification tests.

Indonesia's 2026 crisis: record-low rupiah, disputed GDP data, and a state reasserting control via Danantara, capital controls and export monopolies.

How Prabowo's New Order military formation shapes Indonesia's 2025-26 institutions: Kopassus, the 1998 abductions, Danantara and Suharto's hero decree.

An anarchist in Bali, a 15,000-document knowledgebase, a 40-year question: how this unlikely dharma series was built, sourced and written.

Dharma means 'that which holds', not destiny or doctrine. Tracing its Sanskrit root shows why every society builds an ethics to hold itself together.

How did dharma arise? When cities outgrew face-to-face morality, humans engineered explicit codes—and the Axial sages answered, not revealed, that need.

An illiterate Javanese farmer built a dharma from scratch in 1890. A century on, his heirs set feet in cement to defend the same principles.

Five dharmas—Ubuntu, Stoicism, Aboriginal Dreaming, Sumarah and the Abrahamic covenant—disagree on nearly everything, yet rhyme underneath.

A dharma feels like truth because it was grooved into gut, habit and brain wiring, below the reach of the self that could doubt it.

Every strength of a dharma has a dark twin: the fence that unites also excludes, the authority that frees also rules. No dharma escapes its own failures.

'Spiritual but not religious' isn't dharma's absence but its search — without gods, without ritual, against an attention economy built to fight it.

Dharmas were built, not found. Gary Dean asks what happens when we build them on purpose—for a warming planet, for AI, and for ourselves.

What is a dharma? A concise definition, four defining features, and two tests for judging whether a way of living holds without crushing.

Gary Dean's two-part test for judging dharmas: holding without crushing, and staying revisable by those they bind—applied to real cases and objections.

LLMs recovered the linguistic key from text alone, and confabulation research shows human minds were guessing too. We aren't as smart as we think.

48.7% of developers use Bash, yet 80% of scripts have code smells. Gary Dean argues Bash deserves real engineering discipline, not cargo-cult scripting.

Oxytocin isn't the 'love hormone' fuelling tribal hatred—evidence shows it strengthens in-group bonds far more reliably than out-group hostility.

How Gen Y and Gen Z employees at Okusi Associates in Jakarta communicate and collaborate across departments, per this qualitative case study.

Why do taxonomists still argue over species after centuries of data? Gary Dean explores splitters, lumpers, and how naming forces continuums into boxes.

A journalist on compassion fatigue after Indonesia's 2004 tsunami and years of disasters—empathy, exhaustion and self-preservation.

Gary Dean recalls life as a quiet 14-year-old in suburban Perth, Western Australia, and the yearning for escape that shaped a lifelong journey abroad.

Guide to Indonesian land law for foreigners: UUPA rules, land titles (HM, HGU, HGB, HP) and legal ways to secure property in Indonesia.

A fiery 2002 polemic: an expat Australian explains why he prefers Indonesia's chaos to Australia's smug, bureaucratic certainty.

Why understanding Javanese and Indonesian culture is vital for foreign business success, illustrated by a consultant's real case from Tasikmalaya.

Analysis of the 1999-2000 Maluku conflict: how ethnic tension, religion and Jakarta's power struggles turned communal strife into war.

Examining Australia's complex relationship with Asia, from colonial ties to APEC diplomacy, cultural barriers, and the challenge of regional acceptance.

How Singapore's FDI-driven industrialisation compares to Taiwan and South Korea's approach, and what it reveals about technology transfer and innovation.

A critique of Brian Toohey's 1999 'Jakarta Lobby' article, exposing Australian ignorance towards Indonesia during the East Timor crisis.

How Indonesia's 1994 Tempo banning exposed a deeper clash between New Order corporatism and Western liberal individualism under Soeharto.

Examining the 1997 East Asian crisis: how Western neoliberal assumptions clashed with Asian collectivist business and state-capital ties.

Comparing Indonesia, South Korea and Taiwan: how patrimonialism, Confucian values and education shaped divergent economic development paths.

How security concerns shape Australia's foreign policy: the US alliance, forward defence, ASEAN engagement and UN multilateral diplomacy.

Trace Australia's foreign policy shift from British colonial dependency to US alliance and independent middle-power diplomacy in Asia.

How trade shaped Southeast Asia from Srivijaya and Malacca to European colonialism, transforming societies and politics before 1870.

Tracing the nation-state from hunter-gatherer bands to Westphalia and colonialism, and its decline under globalisation and the rise of global cities.

How financial globalisation and neoliberal ideology erode nation-state sovereignty, policy autonomy and territorial governance.

A critical review of Marx's Capital on capitalism's origins, weighing feudal breakdown and wage labour against his prophetic voice.

Javanese cosmology and aliran streams, not Western political science, explain Suharto's 1998 fall—an anthropological analysis.

Analisis akademis tentang dampak globalisasi terhadap kedaulatan negara bangsa, peran AS dan MNC, serta potensi konflik masa depan. Esai UGM 1997.