World future

Todd Hayen October 23, 2023 We have finally reached a point in the advancement of our technology where we no longer can believe anything we see or hear. I mean, we can if we want to, but we can also choose not to, because the presentation of anything in a photograph, a video, or an audio recording, is no longer reliable evidence of reality. Originally published at Off-Guardian Soon we will not be able to rely on what we see right in front of our face when we are taking a walk in what we believe to be the real world. In fact, we don’t have to wait for this, it is already here. Holographic technology can already deceive us into believing something we see occurring in our own perceived reality. Many say the planes flying into the World Trade Center were holographs. Maybe they were. The technology probably exists to do...

© Jan Oberg “Biking Mom in Xian” Collage – 2023 Certainly, China has evolved continually and progressively, step by step. My expectations were high when I visited this autumn, my first trip post-pandemic. Between 2015 and 2020, I had visited this vast country almost 20 times. Each visit revealed positive changes and swift progress. Allow me to share some observations from my daily experiences there. Firstly, what remains unchanged is their absence of cheese (!). This tradition stems from their historical lack of cattle farming, prioritizing crops and vegetables. However, cows are now present, particularly in Hebei province’s highlands. They’ve even adapted to the sound of wind windmills, unlike the reindeer in Norway’s Sami-land. Another crucial observation is the deep integration of mobile phones into daily life. You can hardly catch a taxi without a mobile app, and ordering coffee from the highly successful chain, Luckin Coffee, also necessitates an...

In the 17th century, Ming China represented roughly one-third of global output, and Mughal India a little less. Together the two countries accounted for more than half of the world’s output, with a corresponding size of populations (as a proportion of the total global population). By the 1950s, Mao China was a mere 5 per cent of global GDP. India only 1 per cent. Today, after several decades of exceptional economic progress, particularly in China, there is now a historic rise of the Global South. The two behemoths – China and India, and others in the South – are now reclaiming their historic economic weight in the world.  The 2013 UNDP Human Development Report documented this rise of the Global South presenting evidence that China, India, and Brazil were collectively in the process of exceeding western developed countries in terms of trade and global output. China is now the largest...

A major peace publishing event across cultures: The cover story of the esteemed “China Investment” Magazine’s July 2023 edition Jan Oberg July 23, 2023 Can you imagine a leading economics, finance and investment magazine in the Western world publishing a 30 A4-page (10 000 words) article about the future peace and security world order – a thinkpiece consisting merely of concepts, theories, visions and philosophical aspects of the theme? I can’t. They would not see it as meaningful to include perspectives on peace, nonviolence, security and related matters. But they’d probably gladly publish articles about military corporations, profits and the like. But in China, they see the value of such holistic thinking between interrelated dimensions of society – and of the world – as it really is. Economics is not only about economic things; it takes place in a framework that influences it – past, present and future. In contrast,...

• 1 NATO is not going to let Ukraine in as a full member. Probably never. All the statements about getting it in and its rightful place in NATO is sugar-coating. NATO cannot say that but knows now that its ill-considered promise in 2008 to make Ukraine a member is as dead as the promises made to Gorbachev that the alliance would not expand one inch. All the NATO words about military packages, G7 security assistance, reform path to be drawn up but no timetable, the new NATO-Ukraine Council with so-called ’equals,’ long-term commitments, etc. – all were words of cruel diplomacy serving to soothe a very disappointed Zelensky. • 2 The Ukrainian president will also have understood by now that the US has achieved what it wants: Economic deals with Ukraine about its resources, huge debts and a very high price to be paid by Ukraine and European NATO...

David SwansonWorld Beyond War & TFF Associate June 12, 2023 For any given war, one can examine the months or years or decades during which one or both sides worked diligently to make it happen, and both sides conspicuously failed to develop peaceful alternatives. Even in the moment of greatest violence, one can consider the unarmed-resistance alternatives that are carefully kept out of consideration. But even if you can explain away all justification for every side of every particular war — yes, even that one, there remains the false claim that war is somehow simply part of “humanity.” If ants were to stop waging wars, nobody would bat an eye, but such a feat is deemed simply beyond the intelligence of homo sapiens. There is a problem for this nonsense. It is the problem of peaceful human societies. We know that many, if not most, hunter-gatherer groups of humans engaged...

The US/Western media of various kinds increasingly raise critical questions about the NATO expansion and the NATO/EU countries’ response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Although it is “too little and years too late,” one must appreciate this trend – if for no other reason than that it may eventually contribute to stopping the militarist madness. Jan Oberg, editor Benjamin Schwarz & Christopher Layne Harper’s Magazine, June 2023 Issue June 5, 2023 From Murmansk in the Arctic to Varna on the Black Sea, the armed camps of NATO and the Russian Federation menace each other across a new Iron Curtain. Unlike the long twilight struggle that characterized the Cold War, the current confrontation is running decidedly hot. As former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice and former secretary of defense Robert Gates acknowledge approvingly, the United States is fighting a proxy war with Russia. Thanks to Washington’s efforts to arm and...

Andrey Kortunov June 5, 2023 A Quad summit meeting in Sydney scheduled for May 24 was abruptly cancelled. The US president had to pull out of his long-anticipated trip to Australia and Papua New Guinea. Instead, the heads of the four Quad member states got together on the margins of the G7 Summit in Hiroshima on May 20.  The main reason for the change of plans was the continuous struggle between the White House and Republicans on the Hill over the national debt ceiling. [This issue has now been solved by raising once again the debt ceiling – The editor]. This rather awkward last-minute cancellation of the Quad summit reflects a fundamental US problem – a growing imbalance between the US geopolitical ambitions and the fragility of the national financial foundation to serve these ambitions.  This article was originally published by Gobal Times on May 25, 2023 The Biden administration appears...

Waving goodbye? Not agreeing whether to wave at the world or not… Words. Words. Words. And words missing. Jan Oberg June 1, 2023 The G7 countries’ share of the global GDP has fallen from about 70% in the 1960s, to 46% in 2019, to 31% in 2021 and is projected to fall to 28% in 2027. They make up less than 10% of the world’s people. According to the World Bank, between 2013 and 2021, all the G7 countries contributed 26% to world economic growth, and China 39%. I shall argue here that the G7s are in denial and need a reality check. The Hiroshima summit will, I predict, be seen in the future as a milestone of Western decline and militarism’s self-destructive role in it. These countries had agreed in advance on a statement of no less than 19 000 words, 40 pages. It contains all kinds of things...

Edward Curtin May 30, 2023 By the lake’s lapping shore above the town and the railroad tracks, my wife and I stopped and marveled, struck stone silent by two dazzling Baltimore Orioles, clawed together as they tumbled, wrestling in the green morning breeze above our heads. They perched upon a branch and sang a morning hymn, an ode to joy and the spring’s morning glory. Their black and orange throats vibrated amid the green quaking aspen’s leaves as the lake’s low lapping sounds lent counterpoint. They were sublime. Originally published at Off Guardian on May 14, 2023 I too felt a quake, a shiver down my spine as associations tumbled through my mind. Poems, songs, memories of other early morning walks in spring. Intoxication, elation, the horripilation that accompanies spring’s rising, the sexual excitement. Hope, and the loose feeling of being forever young. No solution to anything, just reverence for existence. Nothing changed, except a few years....

Source: World Atlas. Maps of Russia Ivan Timofeev May 9, 2023 Long before relations between Russia and the West spiralled into a comprehensive political crisis, officials and experts here were enthusiastically voicing ideas about developing ties with the rest of the world. At the administrative level, such a course began to take shape as early as the 1990s, starting from the views of former Foreign Minister Evgeny Primakov. Subsequently, it also received practical development within the framework of a multi-vector foreign policy. Originally published by RT on May 4, 2023 The gradual growth of contradictions with the West accelerated the formation of ‘pivot to the East’ ideas, although their implementation was slow. It was limited by objective infrastructural and economic conditions, as well as the absence of a direct and painful incentive for such a ‘turn’. However, the current crisis in relations between Russia and the West, for all its...

© Oberg PhotoGraphics 2022 Hussein Askary April 27, 2023 American political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared in his “End of History and The Last Man,” published in 1992,that the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War era in 1991 marked “not just the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” Originally posted on the Belt and Road Institute in Sweden’s website on March 23rd, 2023 A utopian, rosy picture of a world living a submissive, silent, and in Fukuyama’s word “boring” life under what turned out to be a sword of the Western liberal democratic military power. The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 was followed by the U.S. invasion of Panama a month...