Saturday 23rd of November 2024
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I dream a dream....

“Everything begins with a dream” – Rumi

This dream stays with me as we observe more days this week in which the decisions of various leaderships, who seem never to meet each other, kill other people and their children; destroying homes and communities.

Through the UN Secretary General there is to be a UN Summit of the Future in late September.

It is a precious opportunity, as others like Alison Brionowski have conveyed.

 

A dream: of world leaders meeting to make peace      By Philip Huggins

 

Meditating at the weekend, we imagined a line of sight to world leaders sitting in a large circle at the UN. Their stillness and silence together is deep. After meditating in the silence, each according to their spiritual practice, they visually take in each other’s presence. Thus prepared they focus on this question:

How do we make the most of our time on this earth

and in leadership now as peacebuilders?

Always we have the question of how we live a beneficial life. But this is the question for those leaders who will soon share September days in New York, at least in our meditative imagining.

Of course it is a dreamer’s dream, a childlike imagining, that the perennial wisdom of meditators, across centuries and spiritual traditions, will now find a timely place in the UN’s Summit of the Future.

What is clear is that this September opportunity is not one to waste. As our Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator Penny Wong, said in February at the Indian Ocean Conference, “across our region, we see military power is expanding, but measures to constrain military conflict are not-and there are few concrete mechanisms for averting it…Peacebuilding today must rise to this potentially catastrophic challenge.”

Nothing better will happen unless leaders actually meet in ways that make for healthier relationships.

What we have learned is that, once we are practiced in meditative stillness and silence, we are better able to do the listening that can lead to a renewed culture of dialogue.

With our line of sight, can we then see world leaders reaching agreement on initial trust building steps that take us towards a better future? Towards an enchanting and sustained peace?

Not easily, obviously!

There was a Roundtable last week in Canberra on Australia’s possible contribution to the UN Summit of the Future. Intentionally it was on 6 August, the 79th Anniversary of Hiroshima.

Everything conveyed comes down to the choice before us.

Do we choose life or death; to heal or to harm; to repair relationships or to destroy each other?

Professor Tilman Ruff encouraged Australia to give bipartisan support and join the other 50 nations which have already ratified the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

He put this in context:

  • all nuclear weapon states are currently expanding the lethality, the reach and speed of their arsenals;
  • there is an increasing risk of more nuclear weapon states, given the depleted framework of Treaties to contain this;
  • there is a heightened vulnerability to cyber attacks on current protections against a mistaken, unintended use of nuclear weapons. We are thus facing a greater risk of nuclear war by mistake.

These bleak deteriorations are elaborated by Ramesh Thakur who has followed these matters for decades.

Tilman’s haunting presentation came after a session on Lethal Automated Weapon Systems, led by Matilda Byrne, Stop Killer Robots Campaign.

She described us as being in an Oppenheimer Moment, still with an opportunity to prevent Autonomous Weapons that attack without human input and could proliferate to drug traffickers; those engaged in illegal fishing and other non-state actors.

What is already placing us at risk is mad enough. What term do we use for the delegation of decisions on life and death to machines which operate without human decisions or control?

So, briefly sketched, this is the context in which our choices must be for life, not death; for peace, not more war.

It seems like our world is like a large therapy centre, full of people who are traumatised and traumatising.

The steps needed for better engagement and diplomacy are clear enough: steps that reduce risks by greater transparency and a promise of no-first use of these terrible weapons; the revitalisation of arms control negotiations, etc.

But these steps require that leaders meet and shape relationships of trust and integrity.

Our learning is how meditative stillness and silence makes this more possible. Of encouragement, when sharing with an international zoom gathering of Christian meditators about our Australian Meditations for a beneficial UNCOP29, folk on the call went from one story to the next of similiar initiatives.

https://johnmenadue.com/a-dream-of-world-leaders-meeting-to-make-peace/

 

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

news dream....

 

The ABC of telling tales    By Duncan Graham

 

ABC chair Kim Williams reckons the Corporation should focus more on hard news than lifestyle fillers. While purging the pap, he might also look at how some stories get told, particularly to international audiences.

This is a competitive market, with the US, Brits, French, Russians, Chinese, Qatar, South Korea, the Japanese and others telecasting in perfect English and jostling to tell the world how the world should see them.

Much is propaganda, but usually watchable if the bias is remembered.

Seldom seen Down Under is our flag-waver ABC Australia. Stories on this site haven’t always shown the best available, as outlined on this website earlier this year.

The latest is the coverage of Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina fleeing the nation she’s ruled for 20 years as mobs raided her palace.

Presumably using the weird theory that an Asian story should be given an Asian treatment, the report, based on wire services, was delivered by the Indonesian correspondent Bill Birtles from a street in Jakarta.

The capital is 3,780 km from Dhaka and Indonesia had no known involvement in the regime change. The clip could have been shot on a roadway anywhere in Oz.

On 14 August, another Jakarta skyline was used when Thailand’s Constitutional Court sacked Prime Minister Srettha Thavisin. Bangkok is 2,325 km from the Indonesian capital which had no relevance to Thai politics.

Bangladesh is tough to penetrate (I’ve been trying), but Bangkok has scores of competent English-speaking reporters with insights and authority through being at the spot where it was all happening. An academic appeared later to explain the situation, though not from Thailand.

On the ABC’s Just-In news site available anywhere, a story about nuclear waste disposal described the Sandy Ridge location as “outback WA”. No further ID. It’s 240km northwest of Kalgoorlie and the company involved makes no secret of its geography – only the ABC.

Sloppy reporting or indifference to viewers and listeners with no influence? Take your pick.

This one’s tragic, so all the more reason for care. It was about Megan Jayne Somerville who allegedly stabbed her kids alongside a motorway in 2022.

A court was told drugs were a major factor in the case and that she was suffering psychosis when she allegedly assaulted her two sons, then aged three and eight. She’s reportedly pleaded not guilty and the trial will continue to be heard in October.

Now the gaps; what we also wanted to know was the fate of the little boys. The story didn’t say. A search on other sites reveals they survived.

The woman came from Modbury Heights. It’s a well-known suburb to those who live there, though not to the millions unfamiliar with South Australia. Would it have been too hard to add the line “16 km northeast of Adelaide”?

A big yarn here about the Australian navy firing a missile, something which is happening hourly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, but fortunately rare for the Oz armed forces protecting our neck of the oceans.

Yet the test was launched near the US state of Hawaii, too far away to defend our nation should the need ever arise, may the deity forbid.

The story didn’t come from a journalist’s diligent sleuthing, but a Navy hand-me-down, aka media release. Australians might have been interested in the cost, how far the weapon went, what was the target and whether it hit.

The military didn’t say, the ABC apparently didn’t ask, or even say it tried to ask. That’s its job.

US singer Katy Perry got herself on ABC news “for possible environmental damage of protected dunes following her latest Ibiza-set music video”.

This tabloid sniff included a “supplied” photo of the barely-clad lady and her video to help us ponder the despoliation and whether this might warrant extradition, jail time or worse.

It was left to The Guardian to reveal the crime was not the ruthless trashing of the landscape to look like the Gaza Strip, but filming on an uninhabited island without authorisation. By then, the harm to the beach and the ABC’s credibility had been completed.

Selection could have been deliberate, a clever ploy to get the indifferent young to watch a snippet and maybe hang around for some real news. It probably drew more clicks than an Albanese and Dutton presser combined, whatever the topic.

To this cynic, it should have been flagged as a free promo stunt and left to commercial media which has little reputation left for impartiality. Ms P’s previous video release apparently hadn’t done well, so her career needed a boost.

Come in, sucker.

This website has previously alerted Australian viewers that news for overseas audiences gets shoved aside three nights a week to make way for hours of AFL. League is not played in any Southeast Asian state that gets ABC Australia.

It would be good to report that these flawed samples are rare. They’re not.

Saucepans calling kettles sooty is to invite a dash to the files to reveal the critic’s hypocrisy. Don’t bother; this writer has made enough errors in the ABC and elsewhere to power a studio with his blushing. But he’s survived, thanks to alert colleagues who have edited with care and managements that supervised seriously.

Williams might want to read and watch his corporation’s exported products with the same scrutiny. In manufacturing it’s called quality control and essential to keep shoppers returning.

Then he could let offenders know of his disquiet, as Jo and Joe Public’s complaints won’t make a frame of difference.

Viewers near and far concerned about the way the world is heading seek out the ABC as a trusted, balanced, honest news provider. It would be good to believe the ABC respects our needs. On its present performance, it doesn’t.

https://johnmenadue.com/the-abc-of-telling-tales-x2-links-b/

 

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.