Sunday, March 31, 2019

Closing Night A Commedy - Czech Film Festival - strange how communism is shifting to Antipodean Landscapes

“I am happy not just for the result but mainly that it is possible not to succumb to populism, to tell the truth, to raise interest without aggressive vocabulary,” Caputova told a crowd of supporters in her acceptance speech.

“I am happy not just for the result but mainly that it is possible not to succumb to populism, to tell the truth, to raise interest without aggressive vocabulary,” Caputova told a crowd of supporters in her acceptance speech.

WHY CHINA’s WeChat COULD BE A KEY BATTLEGROUND IN THE AUSTRALIAN ELECTION 


WHAT IS IT ALL ABOUT? 

The lesson learnt from the NSW Election with a Michael Daley comment being released by a Mole in the final week of the campaign was to cause maximum damage …

THE COMMENT was not Racist … in fact what Michael Daley said happens to be true … there is a PhD Student Visa offering Permanent Residency! 

-there are 1.6 Million Visa Workers in Australia

THAT the Chinese community is now big enough to determine Who Wins and Who Loses!

WeChat provides a tool for the Chinese Communist Party to fundamentally compromise Australia’s sovereignty … given the CCP’s political organising of the Chinese community in Australia …

HOW Best to overcome this? 

Check Party Policies …

-to eliminate Money Laundering in Real Estate … this is at the CRUX of our woes, and the ALP has a Policy!

-to stop Liberal Cuts to Health, Education

-improve outcomes for the cost of living

-Climate Change & Environment

CHECK PARTY PREFERENCES … to ensure they do not preference the LNP …

THEN number all the boxes and

Vote the LNP out …


 SHARE!



Why China’s WeChat could be a key battleground in the Australian election 





















shutterstock_1108017188-940x580

WeChat is the most popular social networking platform among Mandarin speakers in Australia. Source: Shutterstock
NSW Labor leader Michael Daley’s “young Asians with PhDs taking our jobs” blunder cost him dearly in the recent NSW state election.
His defeat also offered a taste of the crucial role the Chinese social networking platform WeChat could play in the forthcoming federal election.
After Daley’s comments were publicised, Liberal candidate and Chinese-Australian Scott Yung reportedly published articles on WeChat accusing Daley of being a “racist”. Yung says this helped him secure an 8.4 percent swing in the primary vote in the seat of Kogarah held by Labor candidate Chris Minns.
It’s likely WeChat also played a role played a role in Labor’s disastrous loss in the 2016 federal election, when the Liberal Party successfully harnessed the platform in the key marginal seat of Chisholm in Victoria.
Focusing more attention on the platform is a smart strategy for politicians. The 2016 Census counted approximately 1.2 million people of Chinese ancestry in Australia.
Around 510,000 of these voters were born in China, and 597,000 speak Mandarin in the homeA large majority of these Mandarin speakers prefer WeChat as their social media platform.

Mainstream politicians are getting on board



































we-1
Mainstream Australian politicians have long used social platforms like Twitter and Facebook to engage voters, but their use of WeChat is a relatively recent phenomenon.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison opened his official WeChat account in early February in anticipation of the forthcoming federal election. But he wasn’t the first Australian prime minister to open a WeChat account. Kevin Rudd claimed that honour nearly six years ago.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten had already taken to WeChat by May 2017, while Chris Bowen was the first federal Labor politicianto own a subscription account. In October 2017, he became the first politician from either side of politics to use WeChat Live to engage and interact in real-time with the Chinese community.
Aiming to up the ante with Morrison, Shorten participated in a WeChat Live interactionsession for the first time this week, answering questions from 500 WeChat users.
Major parties at federal and state levels, as well as an increasing number of politicians at federal, state and local levels – including Clare O’Neil, Craig Laundy, David Coleman, Sam Crosby, Chris Minns, Jodi McKay, and many others – have now opened WeChat accounts.
we-2

Candidates of Chinese heritage are using WeChat

Hong Kong migrant Gladys Liu (Liberal) and Taiwan migrant Jennifer Yang (Labor) are using WeChat to campaign for the federal seat of Chisholm in Victoria. WeChat is not only a valuable way for mainstream politicians to reach out to Chinese Australians.
we-3-300x185
It has also provided a crucial campaign platform for political candidates of Chinese heritage to garner support from Chinese communities.
And Scott Yung, Liberal candidate for Kogarah in the recent NSW state election and possibly also for the federal election, has become such a celebrity on Chinese social media that he caught the attention of China’s CCTV.
These, and other political players, publicise their credentials and policies by posting material on “Moments” – a WeChat featurethat allows users to reach everyone within their “circle of friends”.
They also maintain an active, and often interactive, presence in the myriad WeChat groups – self-formed interest groups with as many as 500 Chinese-speaking members.

Politicians need a specific WeChat strategy

Whether WeChat will help federal candidates win Chinese votes depends on the extent to which candidates are prepared to invest in WeChat in the next few weeks, and how effective their communication strategies are.
So far, neither major party seems to have a coordinated strategic communication plan for WeChat. Users are yet to see a clearly articulated comparison between their respective policies on key issues. Nor is there evidence that politicians of any persuasion have figured out how to translate policies into information that Chinese voters can relate to or identify with.
The first problem seems to lie in attempts to use WeChat as a top-down, sender-to-receiver, one-to-all instrument of communication. In most cases, their accounts are maintained by Chinese-speaking proxies, which does little more than increase their visibility.
The story’s attention-grabbing, even sensational, headline uses words such as “secret conversation” and “exposed” to describe a routine WeChat interaction between Crosby and an individual WeChat user to attract readers. Language barriers aside, a knowledge of how WeChat works as a culture-specific platform is also crucial.
A Sydney Today story provides an example of how Sam Crosby, Labor’s candidate for the seat of Reid, managed to beat his erstwhile opponent Craig Laundy in a “popularity contest” on WeChat.
Whether politicians should stoop to such sensationalism to gain popularity is debatable. Nonetheless, politicians need to adopt the communication styles, vernacular and personas that are preferred by Chinese-speaking WeChat users.
With Scott Yung poised for Liberal preselection in Reid, and even more active and better known than Crosby on WeChat, this is a seat to watch closely leading up to election.

Treating the Chinese community as ‘us’ not ‘them’

One politician who has made effective use of Chinese-language media is Labor’s Jodi McKay, who retained the seat of Strathfield in the recent NSW election.
we-4
In addition to having a WeChat account, McKay has frequently engaged with Chinese communities through interviews with opinion leaders as well as various Chinese-language media. The content of these interviews, written in Chinese and relayed through WeChat, was widely circulated among Chinese-speaking WeChat users living in Strathfield and beyond.
Perhaps the biggest obstacle facing politicians is the temptation to use WeChat for political point-scoring. This is most clearly demonstrated in the uproar among Chinese-speaking communities following National Senator Barry O’Sullivan’s comment during a Senate Estimates hearing last month:
“There’s a bigger chance of us having a biosecurity breach from some bloody old Chinaman that brings in his favourite sausage down the front of his undies.”
Scott Morrison took to WeChat to distance himself from O’Sullivan’s remark. But some Chinese commentators noticed that Morrison’s statement was made only on WeChat, in Chinese.
There seems to be a view among Chinese communities that, in this instance, WeChat was used mainly to pacify a particular community, while also minimising the risk of alienating mainstream voters. This should alert politicians of all stripes that targeting Chinese-speaking communities via WeChat could backfire, if these communities feel that they are being treated as “them” rather than “us”.
It’s clear that WeChat is now a must for politicians, and the contest on this battleground will only intensify as the federal election looms. How best to harness WeChat to win key votes without being shafted by opponents is a trickier question.count
By Wanning Sun, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Technology Sydney. This article is republished fromThe Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.


“Unwrapping the Most Beautiful Gutenberg of Them All" - a single copy required the skin of 170 calves.






Tyrell Wellick:  Give a man a gun and he can rob a bank, but give a man a bank, and he can rob the world.

My father picked me up from school one day and we played hookey and went to the beach. It was too cold to go in the water so we sat on a blanket and ate pizza. When I got home my sneakers were full of sand and I dumped it on my bedroom floor. I didn't know the difference, I was six. 
My mother screamed at me for the mess but he wasn't mad. He said that billions of years ago the world 's shifting and ocean moving brought that sand to that spot on the beach and then I took it away. Every day he said we change the world. Which is a nice thought until I think about how many days and lifetimes I would need to bring a shoe full of sand home until there is no beach. Until it made a difference to anyone. Every day we change the world. But to change the world in a way that means anything that takes more time than most people have. it never happens all at once. Its slow. Its methodical. Its exhausting. We don't all have the stomach for it.


How Miami Became A Book Town



Mitchell Kaplan founded Books & Books in 1982, a time when Miami was seen as a place of drug running, diet culture, and political unrest – and certainly not literary culture. But, well, “thirty-seven years, an international book fair and eight additional locations later, Kaplan is celebrated as the man who turned Miami into a book town, and one of the foremost literary centers in the world.” – The New York Times



       New World Literature Today

       The Spring issue of (now only quarterly ?) World Literature Today is now online, with a focus on Hong Kong. 
       Lots of interesting content beyond that too, of course -- and, as always, an extensive book review section



       At British Council Voices they have a Q & A withNovelist Hamid Ismailov on storytelling, social media and censorship -- and specifically his novel The Devils' Dance. 


       Via Book Inq Epilogue I'm pointed to Our Personal Libraries: A Symposium, where the: "National Review asked some writers and collectors to describe their personal libraries" -- including Richard Brookhiser, Joseph Epstein, Otto Penzler, and Terry Teachout.
       Always fun to see what kind of libraries people have .....
 

Literary Hub: “Unwrapping the Most Beautiful Gutenberg of Them All:”….Most scholars believe that Gutenberg produced about 180 copies, and among these, most likely 150 were printed on paper and 30 on animal skin known as vellum. The price of the book when it left the printer’s workshop was believed to be about thirty florins, equivalent to a clerk’s wages for three years. The vellum versions were priced higher, since they were more labor-intensive and expensive to produce—a single copy required the skin of 170 calves.




The world’s happiest countries REVEALED: Finland comes top while South Sudan is the bleakest Daily Mail














Present with captions in Google Slides Google Blog: “…The closed captions feature is available when presenting in Google Slides. It uses your computer’s microphone to detect your spoken presentation, then transcribes—in real time—what you say as captions on the slides you’re presenting. When you begin presenting, click the “CC” button in the navigation box (or use the shortcut Ctrl + Shift + c in Chrome OS / Windows or ⌘ + Shift + c in Mac).


Satellites just photographed California’s dazzling ‘super bloom’ of spring flowers from outer space Business Insider


Hunt for Gatwick drone saw police blow £400,000 on bungled investigation Metro.co.uk


How to green the world’s deserts and reverse climate change Allan Savory , YouTube (furzy). From 2013

Shipwreck on Nile vindicates Greek historian’s account after 2500 years Ars Technica


Catch them while you can: Messi and Ronaldo will not be around for ever Guardian


A journey to the Disappointment islands BBC


Exclusive: Aztec war sacrifices found in Mexico may point to elusive royal tomb Reuters


Watch: Snake-removal company pulls out 45 rattlesnakes from underneath a Texas house Scroll