Should journalists be part of the solution, and not part of the problem?

Freedom of the press describes the right to gather, publish, and distribute information and ideas without government restriction.  This right encompasses freedom from censorship, but does our media really have complete freedom in New Zealand? We need to ask this question when we see the government’s response to Nicky Hager’s investigative journalism, and Channel 7 is removed from TV in spite of having half a million viewers. A journalist was recently no longer required by the Herald after writing an honest critique of the TPPA, and what happened to Campbell Live and why?

David Robie, Professor of Communication Studies and Pacific Journalism, Director of the Pacific Media Centre, journalist and author asks these questions and more.

After seven years of negotiations on the TPPA, Ministers from twelve countries have reached agreement, but all is not lost as it has not been signed and sealed. Even though Tim Groser and other governments Ministers reached agreement, the TPPA has not been finalised. There are further steps before ratification and many ways that the TPPA could still fail.

Under the US Fast Track law, President Obama has to give 90 days notice to Congress before he can sign the TPPA, and must make the text public 30 days into that period.

Meanwhile, members of the US Congress and the corporate lobbyists who are ‘cleared advisers’ will get to see the deal. They will be seeking to change what they don’t like and making new demands. That will be the first of many opportunities for them to seek to rewrite the ‘final’ deal. So the earliest that the TPPA could actually be signed is next February, and that would assume that all governments agree with the final tweaking. So there is time to mobilize!

See below for details on the nationwide marches on Saturday November 14th 2015.

James’s aim is to bring community based grassroots organisations into fruition at the same time optimising conscious choices as to how we work and meld together as self actualised team members.

He sees an immediacy in doing this.

He brings people together to mesh them into a team, by using practical components including self reflection and meditation so as to have real grounded intentions. Be it through engineering to horticulture, he works to share skills and create products.

However, his message is that to make things happen we have to do them at grassroots level - here and now. His local project up in central North Auckland on the East coast is that in 18 months time he will show people that they can come and start working immediately as a localised opportunity in action. He maintains that if the community is not on board with their heart it simply does not happen, as he found out when working up in Shanghai, China for a year and that another important quality is that we have to be an active part of our community with no separation. To be inclusive is so important.

It is the 20th year anniversary of the yacht flotilla to the Mururoa atoll to halt French Nuclear tests.

New Zealand has always been an outspoken critic of Nuclear testing and nuclear weapons. In total, 175 explosions took place at Moruroa and Fangataufa, in French Polynesia - 41 of which were atmospheric.

In 1973,the New Zealand and Australian governments took France to the International Court of Justice in an attempt to ban the tests. France ignored the court’s ruling that they cease testing.

Glen Atkinson is a philosopher, biodynamics and agricultural expert, published author and was the astrologer for the NZ’s Womens Weekly for many years. He discusses his recent theories with John Coombs of Global Health Clinics.

Glen offers various solutions to the current challenges facing individuals and society. These include simple health issues, with reference to the work of Dr Rudolf Steiner, Astrology, and some of the key planetary dynamics currently influencing our planet.

Glen's theories include new advancements on the energetic qualities of the Torus, practical fractal significances and how the periodic table of chemical elements can be viewed in a more dynamic and easy to comprehend manner which directly correlates to our health and active consciousness.

Glenn's work with agricultural forces through his BD Max products have been developed over 40 years and include simple homeopathic solutions to help produce a better quality of organic nutrients and manage plant resistance to various pests and temperature fluctuations.

This conversation touches on esoteric knowledge as well as simple practical chemistry and social dynamics.

Glen has written 5 books which are available free on his website www.bdmax.co.nz

Glen also produces a range of synergised homeopathic human health products, which are available online or through Global Health Clinics.

For more information on the work of Global Health Clinics and practical health solutions to your daily needs please go to www.globalhealthclinics.co.nz

A group behind a web presence called You Being You, an online home for sharing wisdom to connect us with our true nature, ourselves and others.

One of the important gifts of ‘You Being You’ is that they have a wide experience and the skills to assist people address the psychological challenges of a world in transition.

That includes understanding your inside nature and focussing on easily understood vocabulary to express your feelings. Because one of the greatest challenges we have today is to be able to vocalise our feelings in such a way as to be clearly understood. There is a gigantic chasm especially among boys and men in finding the vocabulary to express their needs.

So what is it that affects us in a tragedy that directly afterwards people instinctively lean into each other for support and comfort?

This Interview covers the largest Peace Conference in New Zealand since the 1970’s and the need for action especially as New Zealand ‘has been' in the forefront of disarmament for global peace.

The necessity for New Zealanders and especially mothers who in nurturing their children need to strongly encourage their husbands to become far more proactive in communicating methods of curtailing and then disarming the escalating challenges of full spectrum warfare that is starting to dominate the news and media and that seeps into our consciousness on a nightly basis.

Inclusive of letter writing and rallies John says lets hit the military industrial complex in the pocket book. Lets follow up on any corporation or business what so ever that is making money out of armaments and warfare and target them at their finances by boycotting them and especially their subsidiaries and suppliers. Even a university that may be getting money from the arms race to further their research in hi tech design and electronic components.

Challenge the universities and challenge them on where they are getting their funding … ask for student boycotts of classes …. boycott paying fees - Now this is the Dr Hinchcliff  a ”Companion of New Zealand Order of Merit” for services to education and the very first Emeritus Vice Chancellor of AUT University here in Auckland New Zealand and challenge them not just with words but with actions.

What is the over arching view point of human endeavour?  Can humanity en masse turn our civilisation around?

How is it that we ‘are in our heads’ and forgetting our deep yet subtle connection to our planet and great sustainer? Everything in our world is basically cyclical and that we humans are embedded within all these cycles that are taking place around us, yet - without us noticing. We are instead, increasingly caught in the corporate treadmill of slash and burn and ‘get it now without looking at the consequences of our actions.’ This appears to be what western society is basing its economics and its life on.

Fortunately, more and more people are waking up to what is happening today.

New science has given a deeper understanding of biology and associated quantum systems to practically influence our quality of life.

This discussion reveals how by combining the opportunities presented by new technology with positive attitudes, lifestyle decisions and exercise we enhance our qualities of individual happiness and the wellbeing of our whole society.

If we are well we have more energy and mental focus to helps others, and have higher creative faculties for political or ecological considerations.

The core work of Shanti Mission is to give everyday people tools that allow access to their full humanity and thus their divinity - the inner landscape and the wisdom of the heart.

Parvati discusses why despite knowing that changing consciousness is the key to living in a sustainable world, it’s not the same thing as simply changing your mind.

Is the New Zealand government sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella?

113 nations have endorsed the Humanitarian Pledge which is to stigmatise, prohibit and eliminate nuclear weapons. Why hasn’t our nuclear-free country signed this?

Nine countries together possess more than 15,000 nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia maintain roughly 1,800 of their nuclear weapons on high-alert status – ready to be launched within minutes of a warning. Most are many times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945. A single nuclear warhead, if detonated on a large city, could kill millions of people, with the effects persisting for decades.

There are global treaties prohibiting the use, production and stockpiling of certain weapons that the international community has deemed to be inherently inhumane and indiscriminate: chemical weapons, biological and toxin weapons, anti-personnel mines and cluster munitions. No comparable treaty exists for nuclear weapons. These remain, despite their unparalleled destructive capacity, the only WMD not yet comprehensively outlawed.

Tim Wright is Asia Pacific Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), a global coalition of non-governmental organisations working to mobilise people in all countries to inspire, persuade and pressure their governments to initiate and support negotiations for a treaty banning nuclear weapons.

Jonathan, opens with where we focus our attention is where we end up going and we are trained at a very young age from conception onwards there is conditioning and whatever our parents are thinking we as the embryo and baby become programmed with the thought forms that emanate from our mother then father etc. Bruce Lipton eloquently covers this subject.

The amount of information that is reaching the senses and inner sensibility of developing baby and child is vast. Including the receptiveness of a baby's brain wave sensitivity of its mother and what she is tuning into and all the variables of a baby basically awash in an ocean of information that is infinite.

Covering loving parents, family relationships extended family which spread outward into the surrounding community it bodes well for that child, and the necessity for us as a humanity to continually work towards this end. Cooperative cohesive tight, loving relationships are key to our individual and collective future.

Prominent Naturopath, Medical Herbalist and Educator Marianne Stobie discusses with John Coombs some of the radical new science based natural health options.

Marianne describes simple and practical systems now available to help achieve optimal wellbeing. Combined with this knowledge and the long term confidence this imbues, people can be helped to radically improve their quality of life and future potential.

What is happening in Russia at the moment, since the Anastasia series of Ringing Cedars books?

What is a Dolmen?  Are they an extension of an ancient Vedic culture  and are these monoliths really 7,000 - 9,000 years old, and how come they are reflected in the constellations of the night sky?

What type of schooling are the children in this particular area of Russia experiencing, relating to 'how does a human being live on a planet?'

What is happening at the many summer Eco Festivals across the face of Russia? Where people go back to the land to reconnect and seek community.

8 years ago Tim experienced a profound dream whilst camping between, of all things, two cedar trees, when attending a gathering of Dances of Universal Peace. This dream compelled Tim to travel to Russia for one month to investigate what it meant and along the way he discovered something extraordinary and magical.

In what has been called the defining decade, there's a growing sense of the need to reappraise our current global situation, and to question many of our prevailing assumptions. What if we really are the people we've been waiting for?

Christopher Le Breton is uniquely placed to make a difference at the interface of environment and development, having been an environmental project officer in the European Commission in charge of projects in the former Soviet Union. He was also a European Union environmental adviser and capacity-builder on the ground in Serbia.  He has lived, worked, and travelled in 97 countries around the world, engaging at all levels, from Government to grassroots, from private sector to not for profit sector.

Christopher walked away from this lifestyle, sold his house in London, and set out to bike the world giving Awakening the Dreamer Symposiums as he went. After completing 75 educational workshops in 7 countries over years, including 50 of them cycling through Australia and Indonesia, Christopher Le Breton has settled in New Zealand.

He had been able to implement a number of projects in 10 countries over 7 years, inspiring people to create thriving, dynamic projects in their communities. These projects are boosting, for instance, local economies in Australia, saving indigenous wisdom in Indonesia & Ecuador, saving orangutans, and addressing climate change in Indonesia. On leaving Ecuador recently an indigenous elder asked Christopher to go back and change the dream of the modern world – that is to wake every one up!

Here in Aotearoa New Zealand, Christopher has set up Earth Partners Trust in partnership with tangata whenua, promoting the concept, understanding and implementation of Kaitiakitanga, guardianship and stewardship of the environment for the current and the next seven generations.

This wide ranging interview covers many interlinking and overlapping subjects, including; Consciousness, New Paradigm, Quantum Realities, Space Time - ET’s and UFO’s - Trans Pluto, Mother Earth, Sustainability, Ecological Awareness, Co-creation and Co-operation.

When we sleep at night we basically disconnect from our outer realm and bodily sensations and enter what JJ Hurtak says is ‘an ocean of consciousness, swimming in hyperspace’ - that our consciousness is not localised in our body it is open to a vast plethora of dimensions - as the Australian Aborigines aptly named the 'dream time.'

That there are many levels of sleep. Beyond rapid eye movement and all the analysis that has take place, and the usual mixed messages of dreams we experience, we can tap into other realms that are available to us every night. JJ Hurtak mentions the dreams of Joseph when back in Egypt and his ability to interpret them for the Pharaoh. So there is a long history of the potency of dreams, however with present day humanity, especially in the western world, we are awash in things, data, distraction and consumerism and rarely take the time to cultivate our inner being, and the levels of unconsciousness that may be just waiting to be acknowledged.

Desiree, also mentions how dreams can give us warnings and predictions and tells of one, as well as experiences of déjà vu.

“You cannot insert a gene you took from a bacteria into a seed, and call it life. You haven’t created life, you have polluted it.”
~ Vandana Shiva.
 
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization's definition of 'forest' includes commercial plantations of fast growing trees - often replacing biodiverse native forests relied on by local communities.

Perhaps this shonky description of a forest is really to accommodate industry, carbon sinks for emissions trading, and making money from climate change.
 
Forest conservation has been thought to be the simplest way to fight climate change, particularly in New Zealand, where cars and cows are incredibly effective carbon producers.

Have we now reduced the description of forests to ‘any area covered by trees’, discarding the structural, functional and biological diversity of non-tree elements that make up a forest, as well as the cultural importance of the interaction between forests and communities?

Drawing parallels between the treatment of workers and the treatment of natural systems, Gary  Cranston talks about how the privatisation and the commodification of natural systems is being dressed up by polluters as a solution to climate change, and how these solutions must be replaced by solutions designed and implemented by and for those most threatened and least responsible for causing climate change itself if we are to realise an effective response to today's crisis of climate change and capitalism itself.

Forty-five years since the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) took effect, and 70 years since the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 16,000 nuclear weapons still exist-many on Cold War-era alert, ready to launch in 15 minutes.

Over the past 45 years, the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) has put in place an indispensable yet imperfect set of rules for creating a safer world.

Under the treaty, countries without nuclear weapons agree not to get them, and countries with nuclear weapons, (China, France, Russia, the UK and the US) agree to eventually get rid of them. India, Israel and Pakistan have nuclear weapons but have not joined the NPT; North Korea withdrew from the NPT in 2003, and then began testing nuclear weapons.

Meanwhile, nuclear armed countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on modernising their arsenals.

Is our lifestyle impacting on our health more than it did when our grandparents were growing up?

We have better hygiene for sure, so why are we not the picture of health that we should and could be?

Perhaps in the old days people spent more time out of doors and not on electronic equipment; they ate seasonally when food was available; they cooked at home and ate far less pre-prepared food; they didn’t eat GMOs, preservatives, stabilizers and food additives, and they had far fewer prescription drugs.

A Major Leftwing Think Tank In Aotearoa: Call To Action Or Impossible Dream? Sue Bradford interviewed by Lisa Er.

A Think Tank is a community-based not for profit organisation which undertakes detailed research and policy development in order to influence and enhance public policy formation across a broad range of issues, through publications, media work, lobbying, conferences, workshops and other forms of advocacy and education.

To improve the lot of the many disadvantaged New Zealanders it is imperative that we Kiwis join together and stand up for a significantly more egalitarian society.

If a Left Wing Think Tank can share input and influence in all sorts of areas where people show compassion for those less fortunate than themselves, then it will be well worth the effort getting this initiative off the ground.

Jeff is a gifted New Zealand composer and musician, especially in marrying the pan pipes with electronic synthesizers.

He has been playing since 1984 and has been consistently bringing through new sounds, hitting some profoundly beautiful notes and melodies as well as haunting numbers that touch the very soul of your being.

Over the last 10 years he has started to teach meditation that is very complimentary to the soft clear sounds or nature that he creates.

Can a new ‘conscious’ political party come into being from the grass roots up and take a large majority of New Zealanders with them to reshape our political landscape as well as revitalise our cultural aspirations?

NZ was once the envy of the world, as many New Zealanders owned their own homes as well as had a stake in a large number of co-operatives, mutual insurance societies, trust banks, building societies plus liquor and hotel trusts. Today - all gone.

We were once seen as a fair country where everyone basically would get a good deal. To many overseas countries, we in NZ were seen as more egalitarian, as well as a moral compass for good and we were known as being charitable.

So what are the key ingredients to governance and self governance so that we can all take our place within the context of a participative and an anticipatory democracy where we as a 'conscious' communities come together to cooperatively shape our entire nation.

How would a ‘new manifestos’ look when pulling all the differing threads from left, right and centre, into one coherent, dynamic and synergistically, resourceful whole?

Anne Huxtable, is an executive producer of the documentary, “Song of the New Earth – Tom Kenyon and the Power of Sound”, and is on tour in Australia and New Zealand during March and April 2015, to promote screenings of the film.

The film features the transformative life journey of the renowned sound healer, psychotherapist and modern day mystic Tom Kenyon, from a young aspiring Nashville musician to an internationally revered sound alchemist. Western science has confirmed what ancient traditions have known for centuries; sound has the power to heal.

Sound Healing (also known as Sonic Therapy) can be used as pure tones or as music and can positively affect a large array of physiological and psychological states.

We in New Zealand are still pushing nature closer to extinction and there are huge challenges. Yet, there are also some major game changer solutions that we can enact.

Like altering the New Zealand economic way of life to recognise that Conservation would be a very sensible thing to do. This being to place penalties that are such high costs on business that damages ecosystems, that it is just economical not to engage in.

This interview covers a vast amount of important information and was most enjoyable with Marie making very poignant points in a very eloquent fashion.

With a 1/4 acre section Dee has turned her garden into a food forest - saving heaps of visits to the supermarket, yet becoming super healthy in the process. She has 30 odd fruit trees in that area with raised veggie garden plots plus chickens and growing and harvesting 4 times a year the only things she buys are onions and mushrooms, because onions take to long to grow.

Visitors are totally blown away by the diversity of plants when visiting Dee’s garden. Yet, she also allows weeds like horehound to grow to make cough medicine including red sage as it may even be the first traditional Chinese remedy to gain approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

However, the biggest challenge for home gardeners is that for 9 out of 10, it is the soil that is the problem, having no humous and lacking in minerals, and prospective gardeners think that they can just buy fertiliser and pour it on however that's is not like it at all. We have to build it up, with seaweed, horse, cow and sheep manure, compost and involve yourself in a dedicated process for a wholesome soil web.

This lead her to writing a book on how to achieve this and that is how Gardening for Planet Earth was written, being totally different from other books because it was based on natures cycles that make life on earth possible.