American Buddhist Net

She makes a good point. ABN
____________

by Robin Abrahams August 7, 2008 07:32 AM

According to Buddhism, desire is the root of suffering. I desire many things, which is a spiritual struggle for me at times. Thanks to the miracle of spam, however, I have come to realize that there are also many things I do not want. Here are some:

A job from home ... starting this month!
A time share in Costa Rica
A safe and secure Canadian pharmacy
Discount printer ink
A Rich Beautiful Lawn
To Meet Christian Singles
To satisfy her all night long

Thank you, spam, for helping to liberate me from the tyranny of desire.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Last night we received the message below in an email from a very reliable source. Today, we found confirmation here. Since this is all coming from Mike Whitney, it is surely very reliable information. ABN
____________

My friend Tom Feeley is in Big trouble. He runs the web site informationclearinghouse.info which updates "news you won't find in the corporate media" every day. The site is strongly anti-war. Tom has gotten his share of death threats over the years, but what happened this week is a lot more serious. Two days ago, Tom's wife found three well dressed men in their kitchen. The man who did all the talking, told Tom's wife (I won't give her name) that Tom must "Stop what he is doing on the Internet, NOW!" As crazy as it sounds, he pulled back his lapel and showed her a gun of some kind which she could not identify.

Actress from Newton hopes games alleviate cultural tensions

By Patricia Wen
Globe Staff / August 6, 2008

BEIJING - It was 19-year-old Kerry Brogan's movie debut, and she stood out just a bit on the set in southern rural China - with her light brown hair, blue eyes, and eagerness to prove that a Caucasian woman could make it in the government-controlled Chinese film industry.

The Newton South High School graduate had just landed a role in the 1999 film, as the headstrong and spoiled American teenager who falls in love with an earnest young man from one of China's ethnic minorities. She had impressed the director with her fluent Mandarin. Everything was going smoothly until news broke that the Chinese Embassy in Serbia had been bombed, in what China branded a deliberate act.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

A reporter and photographer from two Japanese news organisations were detained and beaten by Chinese police as they were covering yesterday's terrorist attack on a police station in Xinjiang province, the organisations said.

Uighur separatists killed 16 police when they attacked a police station using a truck, home-made explosives and knives.

The two organisations said Masami Kawakita, a 38-year-old photographer from the Chunichi Shimbun newspaper's Tokyo headquarters, and Shinji Katsuta, a 37-year old reporter from Nippon Television Network's China General Bureau, both suffered light injuries.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

How many of us could withstand that kind of pressure from the FBI?

While we are on the subject of credibility, is anyone else noticing that a fair number of mainstream journalists have been doing a good job digging for the truth about Ivins? That's good, right? Yes, it is. But how come they don't do the same thing concerning 9/11 where there are scores of questions even more serious than those being asked about Ivins? The cases are related in many ways. Have journalists been warned away from 9/11? Do they fear where an investigation might lead? Why is the truth suddenly so important in the Ivins case (which it most emphatically is) but not when it comes to 9/11? Already, journalists have investigated Ivins' therapist Duley, found out about the questioning of his children, and made distinctions about his having the skills to work with wet anthrax versus the skills to weaponize it. But have any of these same journalists asked how a paper passport from one of the alleged hijackers survived the crash into one of the Twin Towers, or how a bandanna and visa from another hijacker survived the crash in Pennsylvania? Or why Atta would have brought with him that morning a suitcase full of incriminating evidence that conveniently did not make it onto his plane? What's going on here? Why so fearless about anthrax and Ivins but so incredibly silent about 9/11? In this Ivins case, we all are fully aware and state outright that we don't know all the facts. Maybe he did do it. But is that stopping anyone from asking serious questions? From doubting the government's story? Not really. So why not give 9/11 the same treatment? Just ask the questions, pursue the truth, find out where it all leads? Who put that passport in the street and why did they do it? Where is the wreckage of Flight #93 and why has no photo ever been published of it? We have photos of the visa and bandanna that miraculously survived the crash Flight #93 but not of the plane itself which allegedly disappeared into a hole in the ground. How can journalists get so jazzed about the truth in one case but not the other? ABN
____________

By SCOTT SHANE and NICHOLAS WADE
Published: August 5, 2008

...They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Consider this in light of the shifting focus of the US "war on terror" to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia, and the importance of public opinion in India to that effort. Is this not a clear sign that we are still vigorously playing a "grand chessboard" strategy to control Eurasia? "...it is imperative that no Eurasian challenger emerges, capable of dominating Eurasia and thus of also challenging America." --Zbigniew Brzezinksi in The Grand Chessboard. ABN
____________

Mon Aug 4, 2008 11:00pm AEST

Media mogul Rupert Murdoch announced plans to launch six new regional television channels in India, where the media is expanding at a frenetic pace.

Murdoch has a strong television presence in Asia's third-largest economy through leading broadcaster Star, a wholly owned subsidiary of the tycoon's News Corp.

"The investments will be in the region of $100 million and we will launch in the next 12 months," Murdoch told reporters in India's business capital, declining to give further financial details.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Monday Aug. 4, 2008
Glenn Greenwald

...Duley herself has a history that, at the very least, raises questions about her credibility. She has a rather lengthy involvement with the courts in Frederick, including two very recent convictions for driving under the influence -- one from 2007 and one from 2006 -- as well as a complaint filed against her for battery by her ex-husband. Here is Duley's record from the Maryland Judicial data base:

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Here is a really crappy story that practically convicts Ivins in print. It does have some interesting new info, though: Officials: Sorority obsession seen in anthrax case

Business lobbyists and politicians will be meeting today to discuss the controversial Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, according to an internal memo released today by Wikileaks.

The proposed agreement would criminalize copyright and intellectual property offenses. Under ACTA, Internet service providers would be required to filter illegal transfers of content and help the government track down the people downloading it. Border patrols would gain the authority to seize and destroy copyrighted materials at the border.

Also, governments would be able to charge individuals with copyright-related crimes even if rights holders do not request that charges be pressed. For comparison, in the U.S., victims of robberies and domestic assaults must press charges against their assailants — the government can’t press charges without compliance from the victim.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By ANICK JESDANUN , AP Internet Writer, Technology / Internet
July 30, 2008

(AP) -- A massive project to redesign and rebuild the Internet from scratch is inching along with $12 million in government funding and donations of network capacity by two major research organizations.

Many researchers want to rethink the Internet's underlying architecture, saying a "clean-slate" approach is the only way to truly address security and other challenges that have cropped up since the Internet's birth in 1969.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

This is looking pretty good. Personally, I believe that anyone who opposes an open internet is an enemy of human civilization and progress. "Bandwidth," "copyright," "censorship," or "free market" excuses are nothing more than stalking horses for private interests seeking to control the internet for private gain. The database of information made available on the internet and the potential for communication across it are unprecedented in human history. To turn this wonderfully functioning mechanism over to private corporations and individuals who inevitably will seek to strangle it and squeeze it for personal gain would be an offense ranking with some of the worst in history. ABN
_____________

Nate Anderson | Published: July 25, 2008 - 09:13PM CT

Once FCC Chair Kevin Martin announced his support for sanctions against Comcast, penalties looked inevitable. The two Democrats on the Commission, long supportive of network neutrality, seemed set to vote along with Martin and punish Comcast for its P2P "delaying" techniques; late this afternoon at FCC headquarters, they did, and a majority has now spoken.

The Wall Street Journal reports tonight that commissioners Copps, Adelstein, and Martin have decided against the cable giant, paving the way for an official vote when the order is publicly voted on next Friday. US ISPs, take note: the FCC has just used its 2005 Internet Policy Statement to draw a line in the sand. Step across it at your peril.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Network Neutrality -- or "Net Neutrality" for short -- is the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet.

Put simply, Net Neutrality means no discrimination. Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from blocking, speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination.

Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. With Net Neutrality, the network's only job is to move data -- not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By DAVID BARBOZA
Published: July 26, 2008

SHANGHAI — China said the number of Internet users in the country reached about 253 million last month, putting it ahead of the United States as the world’s biggest Internet market.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Tip of the iceberg. This is simply the yet another example of how US mainstream media plays the game. It's news because McClellan is fessing up to it, but is nothing new. Just as sinister are all the tacit little red lines journalists know they must never cross, and even more sinister is how they all know they must not cross them. ABN
_____________

Jul 25, 2008
Anita Chang, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING — An aggressive tabloid newspaper has had its Web site censored and could face further punishment by China's media authorities for running a photograph from the still-taboo 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy movement.

Editors at the Beijing News declined comment Friday about the photo published Thursday: a black-and-white image showing wounded young men in bloodstained shirts on the back of a three-wheeled cart. Captioned "The Wounded," the photo was one of four that accompanied a profile of Liu Heung Shing, a former photographer for The Associated Press and Time.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Anonymous speech is an essential part of First Amendment rights. Here's a link to the website in question: MPD Enforcer 2.0. ABN
____________

Site popular with citizens, officers

By Amos Maki (Contact), Memphis Commercial Appeal
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

Memphis Police Director Larry Godwin and the city of Memphis have filed a lawsuit to learn who operates a blog harshly critical of Godwin and his department.

The lawsuit asks AOL to produce all information related to the identity of an e-mail address linked to MPD Enforcer 2.0, a blog popular with police officers that has been extremely critical of police leadership at 201 Poplar.

"In what could be a landmark case of privacy and the 1st Amendment," the anonymous bloggers write on the site, "Godwin has illegally used his position and the City of Memphis as a ram to ruin the Constitution of the United States.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

A federal appeals court agreed Tuesday with a lower court ruling that struck down as unconstitutional a 1998 law intended to protect children from sexual material and other objectionable content on the Internet.

The decision by the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia is the latest twist in a decade-long legal battle over the Child Online Protection Act, which now could head to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The law, which has not taken effect, would bar people from making harmful content available to minors over the Internet. The act was passed the year after the Supreme Court ruled that another law intended to protect children from explicit material online _ the Communications Decency Act _ was unconstitutional in the landmark case Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

The USA continues its race to the bottom. Hmmm... “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” says Savage. ABN
___________

By JACQUES STEINBERG
Published: July 22, 2008

Michael Savage, the incendiary radio host who last week characterized nearly every child with autism as “a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out,” said in a telephone interview on Monday that he stood by his remarks and had no intention of apologizing to those advocates and parents who have called for his firing over the matter.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

It is clear to me, and I am sure many others, that representative democracy as practiced in the USA is a horribly wasteful and inefficient system. It has been entirely compromised--taken over--by big money, greed, secrecy, blackmail, and corruption. Mainstream media has long been folded into the mess and has long been incapable of offering any relief. Ordinary voters can NEVER be expected to understand the in-and-outs of the system or to vote wisely (on rigged machines) for candidates who almost never fulfill their promises anyway. I believe this basic state of the nation must be taken as a given. It is square one. Once this is fully accepted as being more or less the way things are, we will be able to move on to square two--figure out ways to change the system. The website described below can give some insights into how we might go about doing things differently. Basically, politics is an information system. If the system is well-made and well-controlled, and if good information is input, the output will be good. If the system is clogged with corruption, bottlenecks, and special interests as the US political system now is, we will ALWAYS get bad output; that is, bad government, mismanaged resources, bad laws, stupid policies, and so on. Please take a moment to consider the position we are in as a nation. Then consider how it is simply IMPOSSIBLE for this system to fix itself through "better leadership" or whatever. The biggest problem we face today is our system of government does not and cannot work unless it is modified. I have made a few preliminary proposals for ways we might consider changing the US system by making a few changes in the Constitution--basically greatly expanding the size of Congress by replacing fake "representatives" with millions of QUALIFIED citizens. I do not expect everyone to agree with the changes I have proposed, but I do hope that people will consider the basic idea of changing our present system of government by amending the Constitution so that Congress can be expanded enough to allow for much better information input and output. ABN
_______________

By CORNELIA DEAN
Published: July 22, 2008

John Davis, a chemist in Bloomington, Ill., knows about concrete. For example, he knows that if you keep concrete vibrating it won’t set up before you can use it. It will still pour like a liquid.

Now he has applied that knowledge to a seemingly unrelated problem thousands of miles away. He figured out that devices that keep concrete vibrating can be adapted to keep oil in Alaskan storage tanks from freezing. The Oil Spill Recovery Institute of Cordova, Alaska, paid him $20,000 for his idea.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

This Website will go live on July 24, 2008

Codex Sinaiticus

Codex Sinaiticus is one of the most important books in the world. Handwritten well over 1600 years ago, the manuscript contains the Christian Bible in Greek, including the oldest complete copy of the New Testament. Its heavily corrected text is of outstanding importance for the history of the Bible and the manuscript - the oldest substantial book to survive Antiquity - is of supreme importance for the history of the book.

The Codex Sinaiticus Project

The Codex Sinaiticus Project is an international collaboration to reunite the entire manuscript in digital form and make it accessible to a global audience for the first time. Drawing on the expertise of leading scholars, conservators and curators, the Project gives everyone the opportunity to connect directly with this famous manuscript.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

By Dave Graham Mon Jul 21, 12:46 PM ET

BERLIN (Reuters) - More than 1,600 years after it was written in Greek, one of the oldest copies of the Bible will become globally accessible online for the first time this week.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

July 21, 2008, 4:25 GMT, ColomboPage News Desk, Sri Lanka.

By Athula Pushpakumara:

The Information & Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka's initiative to include the famous Buddhist text Pansiya Panas Jathakaya based on stories relating to previous births of the Buddha in the Internet came in for high praise from President Mahinda Rajapaksa recently.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

LINK TO ORIGINAL

YouTomb is a research project of MIT Free Culture. The purpose of the project is to investigate what kind of videos are subject to takedown notices due to allegations of copyright infringement with particular emphasis on those for which the takedown may be mistaken. Although our initial focus is on videos hosted by YouTube, we are interested in other video collections as well.

YouTomb is currently monitoring 246393 videos, and has identified 7052 videos taken down for alleged copyright violation and 25858 videos taken down for other reasons.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

18 July 2008

Musician Cat Stevens - now known as Yusuf Islam - has won libel damages over articles suggesting he refused to talk to women not wearing a veil.

The stories also claimed that the singer - a Muslim convert - would only speak to women other than his wife through a third party.

His lawyer told The High Court in London that "Mr Islam has never had difficulties working with women".

LINK TO ORIGINAL

Multiple sources have confirmed that China has openly threatened anyone who reuses or rebroadcasts the Beijing Olympics. Chinese officials publicly stated they will “punish” Internet Web sites, Re-broadcasters and other “new media” that replay the 2008 Olympic Games and related events without the authorization of state-run China Central Television.

Xu Chao, deputy director of the Copyright Management Division in the State Copyright Bureau said “during the Olympic Games, many unauthorized broadcasts will flood into the market. We should initiate an “attack” against broadcast piracy.” Xu went on to discuss some of their anti-piracy measures including a public hotline for reporting illegal broadcasting through the State Copyright Bureau website or by dialing the "12390" anti-piracy hotline to collaborate with the government. People involved will be rewarded for the reports once the report is found to be true.

LINK TO ORIGINAL

China and Russia top roster of copyright violators

Baidu may be worst copyright violator, says Wikipedia: Chinese search engine scarfing up entries without honoring GNU license

China leads list of copyright violators.