peacemaking – Village Connections

September 20, 2018

Published by John Gallagher at September 20, 2018

Categories

An International Brokering Platform For A “Wellington Diplomatic Village”

An Open Letter to Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern By the Antipodean Blogger (Photo source: Wairarapa Times Age) Dear Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, Very shortly you will […]

February 18, 2012

Published by Village Connections at February 18, 2012

Categories

Antipodean Blogger

Neutral communication brokering between Asia-Pacific elephants

“The very fact of New Zealand being an anglophile outpost in Asia-Pacific makes it possible to search for strategies of niche diplomacy…. as interlocutors between Asia-Pacific and the West.” Ramesh Thakur, 1992

December 31, 2011

Published by Village Connections at December 31, 2011

Categories

Antipodean Blogger

From US-Iran problems to a new, local-global solutions paradigm

New Zealand diplomats with nuclear-free peacemaking credentials based already in Tehran, Washington, London, and Europe could right now begin...

October 1, 2010

Published by Village Connections at October 1, 2010

Categories

Soap Box

Muddling into world war 3, or helping to prevent it?

Scenario 1: United States-Chinese crisis, nuclear redeployment and ships in New Zealand waters/ports… Scenario 2: neutral peace-broking and neutral zone of peace

February 4, 2009

Published by Village Connections at February 4, 2009

Categories

Soap Box

First, Winston Peters and North Korea – now, Murray McCully and Iran?

John Gallagher notes how a new way for nuclear-free New Zealand to relate well to the US is to help it to make peaceful connections. The previous Foreign Minister, Winston Peters, helped connection-building between North Korea and the US. Could Peter’s successor, Mr McCully, work with his officials to do something similar between Iran and the US?

January 23, 2009

Published by Village Connections at January 23, 2009

Categories

Soap Box

Jobs need much more than a Job Summit (part two)

John Gallagher continues his blog on life after the February 2009 New Zealand Jobs Summit. This time he looks at how wider vision in this information age can keep pragmatism working for jobs and for much else besides.

The suspense is terrible. I hope it will last.
Oscar Wilde
The person with a new idea is a crank until the idea succeeds.
Mark Twain
The philosophy of one century is the common sense of the next.
Henry Ward Beecher
Any fool can get the right answer, it takes real intelligence to first get the right question.
Unknown
There is nothing so practical as a good theory.
Unknown
What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Henry David Thoreau
The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
Lily Tomlin
Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?
William Lloyd Garrison
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is the safest of times, it is the riskiest of times.... What the Dickens is going on here?
Denton Morrison
Suburbia is where the developer bulldozes out the trees, then names the streets after them.
Bill Vaughn
This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.
Oscar Wilde
Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
Oscar Wilde
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
T.S. Eliot
The trouble with our age is that it is all signposts and no destination.
Unknown
The world has achieved brilliance without conscience.
Omar Bradley
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.
Paul Valery
One of the definitions of sanity is the ability to tell real from unreal. Soon we'll need a new definition.
Alvin Toffler
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
Oscar Wilde
What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
A poem is true if it hangs together. Information points to something else. A poem points to nothing but itself.
E.M. Forster
To make us feel small in the right way is a function of art.
E.M. Forster
The only books that influence us are those for which we are ready, and which have gone a little farther down our particular path than we have yet got ourselves.
E.M. Forster
In a sense, Economic Analysis established my respectability so that I have been able to be disreputable ever since.
Kenneth Boulding
If you haven't found something to be passionate about, keep looking. The possibilities are endless.
Unknown
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.
Kenneth Boulding
On a cosmic scale, our life is insignificant, yet this brief period when we appear in the world is the time in which all meaningful questions arise.
Paul Ricoeur
We need the spirit of levity to counteract the laws of gravity.
Christchurch Wizard
To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.
Thoreau Walden
Thirty spokes share the wheel's hub, It is the center hole that makes it useful.
Tao Te Ching
Shape clay into a vessel; It is the space within that makes it useful.
Tao Te Ching
Cut doors and windows for a room: It is the holes which make it useful.
Tao Te Ching
See simplicity in the complicated. Achieve greatness in little things.
Tao Te Ching
It is by being alive to difficulty that one can avoid it.
Tao Te Ching
Be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves.
Rainer Maria Rilke
Every ending has a new beginning.
I Ching Wisdom
In the hands of a great master, all material is productive.
I Ching Wisdom
Only connect...Live in fragments no longer ...
E.M. Forster
The world has become too complex for individuals...to have enough knowledge to tackle complex problems by themselves.
Gerhard Fischer
Conflict will not and should not cease, but will creative be, when wrapped in peace.
Kenneth Boulding
One reason why we fail to learn is that we only talk to those who agree with us.
Kenneth Boulding
...what might I hope for?
Paul Ricoeur
Learning through play.
New Zealand Playcentre movement
Knowledge is transgressive. Nobody, in my awareness, has succeeded anywhere for very long in containing knowledge. It seeps through institutional structures like water through pores of a membrane.
Gibbons & Nowotny
I believe New Zealand can aim to be the first nation to be truly sustainable - across the four pillars of the economy, society, the environment, and nationhood.
NZ Prime Minster Helen Clark, 2007
To learn gives the liveliest of pleasure.
Aristotle
Know that many personal troubles cannot be solved merely as troubles, but must be understood in terms of public issues.
C Wright Mills
A compelling story connects personal experience to public narratives, allowing society to "speak itself" through each individual.
Ronald Berger
Human societies not only have an ability to learn, but they also 'learn to learn' and experience themselves as 'constructed'.
Alberto Melucci
Drama is a mirror of society.
Dorothy Heathcote
Whether you are a politician or a bureaucrat, a business person or an academic, you should be paying creative writers and artists to produce your content
Ross Himona
It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories.
Thomas Berry
Dare to create!
John Wall