TFF global posts 2020

It might seem that the world is going to pot in a hand-basket. Not quite true. There are ways out. Asia has shown how to deal with the Coronavirus and how to stay politically stable. Europe, with the exception of wise Sweden, has muddled along, following belatedly the conventional wisdom of its scientific community. As for the United States, President Donald Trump has made a fool of himself and his country, ending up with the highest death rate in the world. No longer can the West rely on the US to be its leader. Even if Trump is deposed in the November election, the Europeans, the Canadians and Japanese should not let it return to being treated as the number one. It is too beholden to the military/legislative/industrial/academic complex. The consensus appears to be that confronting China and Russia is the right thing to do. The Coronavirus has shown up...

Renowned psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton on the Goldwater Rule: We have a duty to warn if someone may be dangerous to others. 23 april, 2020 Bill Moyers There will not be a book published this fall more urgent, important, or controversial than The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, the work of 27 psychiatrists, psychologists and mental health experts to assess President Trump’s mental health. They had come together last March at a conference at Yale University to wrestle with two questions. One was on countless minds across the country: “What’s wrong with him?” The second was directed to their own code of ethics: “Does Professional Responsibility Include a Duty to Warn” if they conclude the president to be dangerously unfit? Originally published at billmoyers.com, September 14, 2017 As mental health professionals, these men and women respect the long-standing “Goldwater rule” which inhibits them from diagnosing public figures whom they have...

Remember this? It seems that God is saying: “America, you are too arrogant and I will break the backbone of your power!” – Martin Luther King, Jr. Listen! MLK’s strong prophecy came to me today when I read this article in TIME magazine today – “Begging for Thermometers, Body Bags, and Gowns: U.S. Health Care Workers Are Dangerously Ill-Equipped to Fight COVID-19.” TIME – April 20, 2020 The health care workers have to beg – and people have to die – because their mal-developed country lacks the most basic. It’s a country which, at least since 1945, has created human history’s largest military machine, sees itself as “the policeman of the whole world” – a country that conducted wars virtually every day, built 600+ bases in 130+ countries, deploys its CIA and Special forces virtually everywhere, destroyed societies and killed millions of people around the world in warfare and economic...

The greatest American foreign affairs columnist since Walter Lippmann was William Pfaff of The International Herald Tribune. He wrote in his path-breaking book, “Barbarian Sentiments” that the US political atmosphere was full of “exhausted ideas, like a dead star”. Nevertheless, “these ideas remain central to the way certain subjects are discussed and to the formulation of national policy. These are ideas that people want or need to be true”. I was told by the editorial page editor, Serge Schmemann, that when the New York Times bought the Herald Tribune the paper decided to cut back on printing Pfaff after 20 years of using him because he was considered anti-American – which, ironically, was one indication that he was right in his diagnosis. Freud reminded us in his “Civilization and its Discontents”, that we should “familiarize ourselves with the idea that there are difficulties attaching to the nature of civilization which...

Part 3 Part 1 and 2 were introductory and then made the diagnosis.In this part, we shall outline some theories and concepts that will lead to – Treatment. Part 1 of this series • Part 2 • Part 4 Jan Oberg April 16, 2020 Militarist threat analysis that lead to disaster In spite of the often enormous sums at stake, few funds are allocated with so little intellectual input as those for the national military budget. It basically seems to be enough to point out – through the media – that there are some countries that threaten us and thereby instil fear among the citizens who are to pay for the policies. Once it was the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, then Iraq in Kuwait, then Serbia, then Afghanistan (in response to 9/11), then Iraq again and Saddam’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, then Libya, then Syria, then Iran...

President Trump has taken one more step toward self-isolation of the US from the world community. This BBC post tells who the main contributors to the WHO were in 2018-2019 and – yes – you’ll see that the US was the largest contributor. But at least three things are striking. 1) The US contribution seems to be only US$ 400; that is the same sum Trump recently gave in military support to Ukraine. The price of just one Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II fighter aircraft ranges between US$ 90 and 115 million.In the larger scheme of things, the WHO is a cheap organisation and the real priorities of the US are crystal clear: We can’t afford millions on something so useless as the WHO. We have more useful things to spend our money on! 2) China contributes US$ 86 million to the WHO and doesn’t rank among the ten largest...

Joseph Biden for president! Yesterday his main rival for the Democratic Party’s nomination, Bernie Sanders, endorsed him. If the world could vote, the overwhelming majority would vote for Biden, despite some misgivings. My reservations would be on his foreign policy. Like President Barack Obama he would be good on domestic policy but mistaken on much of his foreign policy. Obama made Biden responsible for dealing with the Ukraine crisis where he fashioned an anti-Russian policy based on little evidence that this was fair to the facts. He writes now of the need to “counter Russian aggression” and that “we must impose real costs on Russia for its violations of international norms”. If he can’t get Russian policy right, what hope is there he will get other issues right? We don’t need an unnecessary second Cold War. If the US can’t have a policy for rapid nuclear disarmament with Russia, going well...

Let’s get death in proportion. True, Coronavirus is an appalling disease but the number of deaths it has caused this year is far lower than deaths caused by either common flue, car accidents, drug-taking, alcoholism or cigarette smoking.  Governments don’t like these things and make an effort to combat them. But they don’t get themselves as worked up as they have with Coronavirus (For starters, why don’t they outlaw all smoking?). A Russian friend texted me from Moscow the other day saying the pandemic we should worry about is “the pandemic of fear”. Where is our sense of proportion? Another issue to examine in order to clarify our thinking is how many people have US and NATO troops killed compared with the numbers killed by terrorism. Again it is a matter of getting things in proportion. Terrorism puts the fear of God up to people and governments. But there’s less...

Part 2 Governments have spent trillions upon trillions of dollars on a ‘security’ politics that has had only destructive effects on humanity and on Nature.What are the security theories and concepts – the way of thinking – that have led governments to run only militarist and military-dominated security policies to the extent that their own populations are left completely unprotected when a thing like the Coronavirus happens?And why have people accepted to be cheated so grossly? Part 1 of this series • Part 3 • Part 4 Jan Oberg April 7, 2020 How threat analyses are constructed to assist elites rather than provide security “There is nothing so practical as a good theory,” said the father of social psychology, Kurt Lewin, as far back as in 1943. It’s still true. One reason so many countries are hit now by the Coronavirus is that their governments have based their policies on...

Imagine, it is the year 2050 and we are looking back to the origin and evolution of the coronavirus pandemic over the last three decades.  Extrapolating from recent events, we offer the following scenario for such a view from the future. As we move into the second half of our twenty-first century, we can finally make sense of the origin and impact of the coronavirus that struck the world in 2020 from an evolutionary systemic perspective. Today, in 2050, looking back on the past 40 turbulent years on our home planet, it seems obvious that the Earth had taken charge of teaching our human family. Our planet taught us the primacy of understanding of our situation in terms of whole systems, identified by some far-sighted thinkers as far back as the mid-nineteenth century.  This widening human awareness revealed how the planet actually functions, its living biosphere systemically powered by the...

… and for artists to contribute to it … Have you often seen conflicts – big or small – escalate out of control? What do you do when it happens? Do you know how to intervene and de-escalate it again? Do you want more peace in your everyday life? A more peaceful world? Of course, you do! So let’s create something that works with children and adults together. Imagine Creatively is my homepage. It’s a storytelling-for-peace platform. I’m an academic with an MA in peace studies; I have taught courses and written several books before, and I have two children. I’m into both theory and practise. I know what works. You can trust me! It will be another bedtime story for children and a waking up story for parents and adults. I imagine it creatively as a constructive follow-on to the world-renown “Butter Battle Book” of the much endeared Dr...

Part 1 Governments have spent trillions on preparing for military threats created by their own policies. No one prioritised human and societal security. The unique over-reaction to COVID-19 should worry us much more than the virus itself. It can be seen as a panicky attempt to cover-up the failure of an outdated militarist security policy. #coronaissecuritypolitics Part 2 of this series • Part 3 • Part 4 Jan Oberg April 2, 2020 The Coronavirus is a comparatively small killer Over the last 3 months, about 40.000+ people have died worldwide because of (or with) the Coronavirus. No other phenomenon in contemporary history has caused so many drastic decisions in democratic and authoritarian governments alike as thi pandemic. Constitutions, a series of freedoms, including the freedom of movement, and much else have been suspended and new emergency laws passed fast enough to qualify for the Guinness World Records. Not to diminish...