Tuesday, October 23, 2018

SOLD OUT: Hoyts Screening One Less God: True, false, or “It’s complicated”?


INK BOTTLE“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.”

Irish woman 27 admits stabbing controlling fiance

"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.

MP calls for snap federal poll to save state seats

A NSW MP's call for an early federal election is being dismissed as 'Sydney-centric', writes Patricia Karvelas.


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)