“In the war of ideas, it is the crudest and the most simplified ideology that wins. During our own lifetimes we have seen spectacular examples of this. We have seen great and highly civilized countries becoming infected by epidemics of ideological insanity, and whole populations being destroyed for the sake of some irrational slogan.”
~ Christopher Dawson, The Movement of World Revolution
The new biography about the son of famed media mogul Kerry Packer, titled The Price of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer, is filled with revelations about the 50-year-old
Irish woman 27 admits stabbing controlling fiance The new biography about the son of famed media mogul Kerry Packer, titled The Price of Fortune: The Untold Story of Being James Packer, is filled with revelations about the 50-year-old
"One Less God" is sold out at HOYTS this week, however, PALACE cinema will take care of the distribution. God Bless Tony who looks after the Antipodean talents everywhere, just as Kevin and David Jacobsen do ...
Antonio Zeccola – Founder, Owner & Managing Director of Palace ...
A MEdia Dragon deep blog devoted to good podcast episodes
Mumbai terrorist attack thriller One Less God gets US world premiere
Why we like being scared. More here
Margaret Thatcher's message to the future
Sculpture by the Sea
HOLLYWOOD STRIKES BACK?: Endeavor is preparing paperwork to pull out of a $400 million
deal with Saudi Arabia after the disappearance of dissident and
Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, writes The Hollywood Reporter.
Endeavor represents journalists such as Soledad O’Brien, Ronan Farrow and Joe
Scarborough. AMC, IMAX and World Wrestling Entertainment are other Hollywood
entities doing business with Saudi Arabia.
USING FACEBOOK FOR GENOCIDE: The NYT details
how Myanmar authorities posed as fans of pop stars and national heroes on the
social network to spread anti-Muslim hate. The propaganda
against the Rohingya group “incited murders, rapes and the largest forced human
migration in recent history,” Paul Mozur reported. The campaign went on for at
least five years on Facebook, which said it only discovered the depth of the
government’s tie in August.
International film investment in Australia: the Location Incentive Funding Program
DAILY DOUBLESPEAK AWARD: A Chinese governor tries to find the
bright side of internment camps for as many as 1 million minority Uighurs.
Instead of focusing on torture, family separation, poor nutrition, mandatory
Mandarin teaching and Communist Party propaganda, Xinjiang Governor Shohrat
Zakir stresses "vocational education." “Many
trainees (i.e. prisoners) have said they were previously affected by extremist
thought and had never participated in such kinds of arts and sports activities.
Now they realize how colorful life can be,” Zakir said.
Third Saudi explanation for Khashoggi killing gets short shrift on Capitol Hill
Almost every day new explanations
about how and why Jamal Khashoggi was killed keep coming from Saudi
Arabia, but none of it's flying in Washington, writes Conor Duffy.
New York Times op-ed: It’s Getting Harder to Talk About God, by Jonathan Merritt
(author, Learning to Speak God From Scratch: Why Sacred Words Are Vanishing — And How We Can Revive Them (2018)):
More
than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, but you wouldn’t
know it from listening to them. An overwhelming majority of people say
that they don’t feel comfortable speaking about faith, most of the time.
During
the Great Depression, the playwright Thornton Wilder remarked, “The
revival in religion will be a rhetorical problem — new persuasive words
for defaced or degraded ones.” Wilder knew that during times of rapid
social change, God-talk is often difficult to muster.
We
may have traded 1930s-level poverty and hunger for a resurgence in
racism, sexism and environmental cataclysm, but our problems are no less
serious — or spiritually disorienting. While many of our most visible
leaders claim to be religious, their moral frameworks seem
unrecognizable to masses of other believers. How do we speak about God
in times like these when God is hard to spot?
As
a student of American Christianity and the son of a prominent
megachurch pastor, I’ve been sensing for some time that sacred speech
and spiritual conversation are in decline. But this was only a hunch I
had formed in response to anecdotal evidence and personal experience. I
lacked the quantitative data needed to say for sure.
So
last year, I enlisted the Barna Group, a social research firm focused
on religion and public life, to conduct a survey of 1,000 American
adults. This study revealed that most Americans — more than
three-quarters, actually — do not often have spiritual or religious
conversations. ...
What do we really learn from disasters?
"In practice, governments may be just as subject to wishful thinking about past experience and future risks as individuals are." (Medium)
’Not exercising worse for your health than smoking, diabetes’
"We've all heard exercise helps you live longer. But a new study goes one step further, finding that a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease." (CNN)
What do we really learn from disasters?
"In practice, governments may be just as subject to wishful thinking about past experience and future risks as individuals are." (Medium)
’Not exercising worse for your health than smoking, diabetes’
"We've all heard exercise helps you live longer. But a new study goes one step further, finding that a sedentary lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking, diabetes and heart disease." (CNN)
