Framing interpersonal-local-national-global connections for fulfillment in sustainable, peaceful, nuke-free world. Framing shaped by social theory, philosophy
Motueka, New Zealand
Joined September 2010
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From US & Israel attacking Iran to big oil shortages & out of control rioting across the West!
An Aotearoa-NZ prioritizing peacemaking cd/wd be in touch with involved parties & encourage Wellington inter-embassy conversations!
@chrisluxonmp @chrishipkins @MFATNZ @vanushi_walters @GeoffMillerNZ @HelenClarkNZ @MCrawshawNZ @negarpartow
🇮🇷🇮🇹🇫🇷 This is what the Iran war looks like for ordinary people.
Empty supermarket shelves in southern Italy because truckers and farmers are blocking roads over diesel prices they can’t afford.
No deliveries, bare shelves, and people saying they can’t make ends meet.
Same pressures hitting France with protests today.
Trump keeps saying prices will drop like a rock once the war ends.
The problem is, nobody knows when that day is coming.
Writer: Daniyal
Potential for a breakthrough between Iran and the Gulf powers?
@GeoffMillerNZ @MatyOBrien @NegarPartow @UnPressed @les_politiques @Oggie_A
MASSIVE
Iran CONFIRMS ultra-high-level security summit with Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan in Tehran, TODAY.
Ali Bagheri Kani says the summit was proposed by Asim Munir - during his latest trip to Tehran.
They will talk in detail about - yes, Grandmaster Lavrov explained it, also in his latest visit to Tehran:
Indivisible regional security.
Iran wants:
• A security framework led by REGIONAL POWERS.
• Cooperation WITHOUT U.S. or Israeli interference.
• West Asia stability and security independence.
In the room:
• Iran's Security Council Secretary, Major General Mohsen Rezaee
• Saudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman
• Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir
• Turkish Intelligence Chief Ibrahim Kalın
The Mecca Defense Alliance finally wakes up.
MASSIVE
Iran CONFIRMS ultra-high-level security summit with Saudi Arabia, Turkiye and Pakistan in Tehran, TODAY.
Ali Bagheri Kani says the summit was proposed by Asim Munir - during his latest trip to Tehran.
They will talk in detail about - yes, Grandmaster Lavrov explained it, also in his latest visit to Tehran:
Indivisible regional security.
Iran wants:
• A security framework led by REGIONAL POWERS.
• Cooperation WITHOUT U.S. or Israeli interference.
• West Asia stability and security independence.
In the room:
• Iran's Security Council Secretary, Major General Mohsen Rezaee
• Saudi Defence Minister Khalid bin Salman
• Pakistan Army Chief Asim Munir
• Turkish Intelligence Chief Ibrahim Kalın
The Mecca Defense Alliance finally wakes up.
John Gallagher retweeted
Openly, GCC countries support Trump's war on Iran. Secretly, they are all dealing with Iran to extinguish fires, except maybe Bahrain.
This is normal behaviour for GCC rulers who never showed an ounce of courage.
So it is just a matter of time before Iran dominates the region. The US is already on its way out.
John Gallagher retweeted
JUST IN: 🇺🇸 Pentagon prepares every major US military base to survive 90 days without outside electricity, fuel, water, or supplies
John Gallagher retweeted
UK loses nearly $4B as international student numbers fall: report - VnExpress International e.vnexpress.net/news/news/ed…
"A significant diesel shipment from China arrived at Toamasina, marking the start of the new policy."
Africa’s largest island nation breaks up private companies' hold over its oil imports africa.businessinsider.com/l…
John Gallagher retweeted
UK universities rush to cut tuition fees to win back international students amid decline - VnExpress International e.vnexpress.net/news/news/ed…
John Gallagher retweeted
Neoliberal financialisation will go down in history as the West’s most catastrophic economic blunder.
A self-inflicted act of economic vandalism that sacrificed productive industry at the altar of speculative greed.
Vladimir Putin moved to reverse Russia’s disastrous 1990s shock therapy, rejecting the economic wreckage of that era in favour of restoring state control over strategic sectors.
(Alastair Crooke,Geo-Political Analyst)
John Gallagher retweeted
The Americans spent 20 years and 3 trillion Dollars replacing the Taliban with the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Chinese have just delivered their first freight worth 8 million yuan to Afghanistan.
Billions more to come. Where the US made war, They make business.
John Gallagher retweeted
The lie about Africa was not a small lie carelessly told.
It was a structural lie, deliberately constructed, institutionally maintained, academically defended.
It required the renaming of things. Egypt became, in the Western imagination, not quite African. The pyramids became a "mystery," because the alternative was crediting Africans with their construction, which the framework could not accept.
It required the discrediting of Arab and African scholarship about African history.
It required the dismissal of oral traditions as legend rather than history.
It required deciding that writing on paper counted as "civilization" and other forms of knowledge transmission did not.
It required, essentially, redesigning the criteria for what counted as "civilization" so that the places being colonized would fail the test.
The test was not neutral.
The test was written to produce a specific result.
And that result was: "Africa has no history worth the name."
Therefore what colonialism destroyed was not civilization. Therefore what colonialism did was not destruction.
This is not an accusation of individual ignorance.
This is a description of institutional architecture, built over centuries, maintained by people who understood exactly what it was for.
John Gallagher retweeted
Kudos Sony, for your efforts trying to educate those sworn into denial of the basic truth before their own senses once it concerns black Africans and blackness in general, while these same people simultaneously claim to pursue an objective scientific method sworn to the elucidation of truth without compromise!
A contradiction.
More like a reversal or an inversion.
This cognitive inversion is apparent in everything called the modern world. Now everyone can see where it comes from, and most importantly, why.
The obsessive need for a bleached biological superiority that simply doesn’t exist in nature and so is therefore being fabricated from social falsehoods.
An obsession!
Nature herself does not contain this inversion, and will not ever contain this artificial inversion.
How Sudan's civilization preceded Egypt's!
Sudan, which has more pyramids than Egypt!
@les_politiques @Oggie_A @PacGeopolitics @jofromgreylynn @VillageBrooke
The Nile is not a border.
This is the simplest version of the argument and also the one that should require the least explanation.
The Nile flows from the interior of Africa northward to the Mediterranean.
The civilizations along its length were in constant contact, trading, fighting, exchanging people and ideas and religious concepts and agricultural techniques across what was not a separation but a connection.
The civilization of ancient Egypt did not emerge in isolation.
It emerged in relationship with the Nubian civilizations to its south, some of whose cultures predated the unification of Egypt, which contributed to and drew from Egyptian culture across millennia.
The kings of Kush would eventually rule Egypt as its 25th Dynasty.
And across the centuries that followed, Kushite civilization would leave behind something that still surprises people today.
More pyramids.
In what is now Sudan.
Built by the civilization that the Western imagination has most completely erased.
There are more ancient pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt.
Most people reading that sentence right now are encountering it for the first time.
That is not because the information is obscure.
It is because the information does not fit a story that someone needed to be true.
And the information that does not fit the story does not make it into the classroom.
ALT The Royal Pyramids of Meroë, Sudan. An aerial view of the ancient royal burial grounds of the Kingdom of Kush, one of Africa's great civilizations. These pyramids were built largely between the 3rd century BCE and the 4th century CE to honor Kushite kings and queens. Centuries earlier, Kushite rulers had governed Egypt itself as its 25th Dynasty. Today, Sudan contains more surviving ancient pyramids than Egypt. These monuments are evidence of a civilization that developed its own traditions while exchanging culture, knowledge and power with its northern neighbour across centuries. The Nile did not divide these civilizations. It connected them. The pyramids are still standing. What remains missing from too many classrooms is the history of the people who built them.
John Gallagher retweeted
Polls show Americans fully agree with @ChrisVanHollen that the war must end NOW.
Trump’s illegal Iran war is turning into our next forever war.
8 months in, Trump & Republicans have deluded themselves into thinking the next strike or another bombing campaign will finally bring victory.
From Vietnam to Iraq, we know how this ends.
This war must end NOW.
ALT U.S. and Israel Draw Up Plans for Renewed Strikes on Iran After Elections Renewed hostilities might not be any more successful than the war’s first phase, and President Trump has repeatedly canceled plans for a return to major combat.
John Gallagher retweeted
Rubio invokes the 300 Spartans fighting "the vast armies of Persia" to the last man — noble, heroic, sacred.
Then, in the same speech, he condemns Iran's "cult of death" that "portrays martyrdom as an end to itself."
The juxtaposition isn't accidental. It's targeting.
Sparta becomes America. Persia becomes Iran. A battle from 480 BCE is resurrected to make a 2026 war of aggression feel like the continuation of a sacred struggle.
Why myth instead of evidence? Because the evidence doesn't exist:
🔴 Iran has not attacked the United States.
🔴 Iran poses no threat to the American homeland.
🔴 Iran was in full IAEA-verified compliance with the JCPOA — until the US unilaterally withdrew in 2018.
There is no legal case. No security case. No defensive case.
So Rubio builds a mythic one. You don't need proof if you can make Iran feel like Persia at the Gates of Fire.
And notice the inversion: Achilles choosing death is glory. A besieged nation resisting the largest military in human history with the means it has is a "cult of death."
Identical conduct. Opposite classification.
The only variable is which side Washington is on.
Chinese propose a "Rules-Based Space Order".
Something #NuclearFreeAotearoaNZ should support instead of getting itself embedded into a US Space Force that'd direct any nuclear attacks on, notably, China & Russia.
@chrisluxonmp
@4disarmament @MFATNZ @chrishipkins @vanushi_walters @HelenClarkNZ @Robert_Patman @PeacemovementA @pjppenn
Washington announced weapons in orbit. Beijing answered with a 10-point paper.
14 September, US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink: the Space Force "now has on-orbit space control weapons." The Pentagon's most direct admission yet. Details ? "We're not going to talk about the specifics."
23 October, Wang Yi at the first Global Governance Forum in Xiong'an. China's paper on outer space calls to:
> oppose the weaponization of outer space
> oppose offensive military policies in space
> back an international legal instrument on space arms control
> regulate commercial space firms so they don't intervene in other countries' armed conflicts
Read that last point again after this month's Starlink row in Ukraine.
My take: one side tells you it has space weapons and won't say what they do. The other proposes rules at the UN. Western media will still call the second one the threat.
There would also then no longer be any reason for Iran to attack the Gulf States.
@GeoffMillerNZ @diplosphere @NegarPartow @UnPressed
@vanushi_walters
Arab states hold the simplest lever for pressing Washington to end this war: a joint declaration. If the states hosting US forces declared collectively that no base, port or airspace on their territory may be used to resume the war of aggression against Iran, Washington would lose the main platform from which this war is waged.
This is an exercise of sovereignty. Basing agreements rest on the host's continuing consent, and no agreement can oblige a state to join an unlawful use of force; under Article 103 of the UN Charter, Charter obligations prevail over any conflicting treaty.
It is also a legal duty. The General Assembly's Definition of Aggression (1974, Article 3(f)) treats a state's allowing its territory to be used by another state to commit aggression against a third as itself an act of aggression. Article 16 of the ILC Articles on State Responsibility engages the responsibility of states that knowingly aid or assist another state's wrongful act. And under the law of neutrality (Hague Convention V), a state whose territory serves as a launch pad forfeits its neutrality and, with it, any claim to a mediator's standing.
It also serves regional security. Lending their soil to this war has made their own territory a target; refusing it removes the grounds for escalation. A single, jointly issued sentence would do more for peace than months of denying involvement.
Re-embedding Egypt in its African historical context
@VillageBrooke @les_politiques @Oggie_A @PacGeopolitics @HarindaV
Cleopatra. You picked Cleopatra.
Out of three thousand years of ancient Egyptian history, three thousand years of pharaohs, pyramids, medical texts, mathematical papyri, architectural achievements that engineers still study today, you reached for the one ruler whose dynasty wasn’t even Egyptian.
The Ptolemaic dynasty was founded by Ptolemy I Soter, a Macedonian Greek general of Alexander the Great.
His descendants intermarried obsessively, and we mean obsessively, sibling-marriage-as-policy obsessively, within their own dynasty, while also marrying into the Seleucid royal family, founded by another Macedonian general, Seleucus I Nicator.
What the Ptolemies were not, in their dynastic origins, was indigenous Egyptian. They were a Hellenistic foreign dynasty that ruled Egypt for its last 275 years before Roman annexation.
At the very end.
Before them came the Persian conquests.
Before the Persians came over two and a half millennia of Egyptian civilization.
So your argument against the Africanness of ancient Egypt is: the last dynasty, installed by a Macedonian conqueror, whose ruling family maintained its predominantly Greek bloodline, wasn't indigenous Egyptian.
That's like arguing Britain was never Celtic because William the Conqueror was Norman.
You have just independently confirmed that foreign conquerors took control of a civilization that had existed in Africa for millennia before they arrived.
Thank you, Mike. You walked in to rebut the argument and handed it ammunition instead.
The pyramids were not built by Macedonians.
They were built by ancient Egyptians. Africans. More than 2,500 years before Cleopatra was even born.
John Gallagher retweeted
They taught African children, in colonial schools, that their continent had no history before Europe arrived.
Let that sit for a moment.
They took children whose grandparents had lived in functioning kingdoms, whose oral traditions carried the history of empires spanning centuries, whose communities had legal systems and agricultural science and trade relationships and philosophical frameworks for understanding the world.
And they sat those children in European-designed classrooms and taught them that their past was darkness.
That their ancestors had been waiting. Waiting without direction or achievement or meaningful civilization. Waiting to be found.
That the story of their people began when Europeans arrived to begin it.
This is not ancient history.
The generation of Africans who received this education are alive. Their children are alive.
The psychological work required to recover from being taught that your people had no history.
To excavate your own past not from lived memory but from archives that were often kept by the people who had the strongest interest in what was and wasn’t in them.
That work is ongoing.
And the people who created the need for that work are still explaining that colonialism, on balance, was not so bad.
John Gallagher retweeted
Ditto NZ : Australia should keep out of Ukraine Russian affairs pearlsandirritations.com/pos…
John Gallagher retweeted
Last week, NATO Secretary Mark Rutte encouraged NATO members to blame Russia for incidents "when you are even almost sure it is the Russians, attribute it to the Russians…” adding, "We must sustain support for Ukraine, keep the financial and military pipelines heavily funded."
Across Europe, while the “Coalition of the Willing” remains committed to defeating Russia, buildings are burning, shops are looted, protests are spreading, and citizens are clashing with baton-wielding police in areas of Belgium, Italy, Portugal, Spain, and especially in France.
Hopelessly in debt, European countries are under pressure from the bond markets to slash public spending - ramp up austerity. Meanwhile, these hamstrung governments have no answers to the protestors’ demands, channeling Margaret Thatcher’s “there’s no alternative to austerity.”
The fiscal crunch in Europe is primarily a consequence of funding war in #Ukraine, at best, a wasteful allocation of resources, justified by demonizing Russia as a “threat to Europe.” And, of course, Western media do not question how European economies have cut themselves off from affordable, reliable Russian energy, once the lifeblood of their industries.
To alleviate social chaos, European leaders must first stop financing the war and, second, negotiate a mutual security accord with Russia as Putin proposed in December 2021. That, in turn, will save European nations from the unsustainable debt driven by nascent militarism and the subsidization of Zelensky’s failing kleptocratic regime."
