American Buddhist Net

July 7, 2008
By HANNAH BEECH

...Buddhist-majority Thailand displays what may be the world's most tolerant attitude toward what locals call kathoey, loosely translated as "ladyboys." The term, which does not have an exact counterpart in English, refers to people who are born male but, as one Thai saying goes, "have a female heart." Kathoeys include everyone from occasional cross-dressers to those who have completed gender-reassignment surgery.

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July 7, 2008

President Pratibha Patil Monday called for strong social and community action to eliminate social evils like dowry, child marriage and female feoticide.

Inaugurating the platinum jubilee celebrations of Tirumala Tirupati Devasthanam (TTD), the governing body of India's richest temple, she also underlined the need to educate people on the harmful effects of alcohol, drugs and intoxicating materials.

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July 7, 2008
By MATTI FRIEDMAN

JERUSALEM - In a stuffy basement off an Old City alleyway in Jerusalem, tailors using ancient texts as a blueprint have begun making a curious line of clothing they hope will be worn by priests in a reconstructed Jewish Temple.

The project, run by a Jerusalem group called the Temple Institute, is part of an ideology that advocates making practical preparations for the rebuilding of the ancient temple on a disputed rectangle in Jerusalem sacred to both Jews and Muslims.

...If you are a descendant of the Jewish priestly class, a full outfit, including an embroidered belt 32 cubits (48 feet) long, can be yours for about $800.

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Where in Asia do people eat dog meat?

Monday July 7, 2008
By MAJORIE CHIEW

...In recent times, the bulk of dog meat has been produced commercially by dog breeding farms. Various breeds are reared but many farmers prefer St Bernards for their rapid growth, bulk and flavour. Today, however, they appear to have fallen from favour because of their substantial feeding costs.

Farmed dogs endure short, cramped, miserable lives. Brutal death awaits them. Many are said to be tortured or bled to death slowly. This results in adrenaline-rich meat which, according to folklore, makes men who eat it more virile.

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Sunday 6th July, 2008

The 73rd birthday of the 14th Dalai Lama is being marked by the University of Madras and Alliance Francaise here Sunday with a three-day festival of Tibetan culture.

The festival began with a presentation on an extraordinary French woman, who was one of the only two French explorers to be able to reach the forbidden land of Lhasa in the hundred years between 1846 and 1950.

Many foreign explorers, 'missionaries, army officers, diplomats, spies' wanted to have a look at Tibet at the time, explained Claude Arpi, French journalist and historian, speaking on the life Alexandra David-Neel whose numerous writings contributed to make Tibet and Buddhism known the world over.

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Very depressing. Once destroyed, natural lands almost never recover. Anyone who has traveled widely in the USA must know how much land has been ruined over the last fifty years. And how many towns have had the life sucked out of them by vampire chain stores. The area discussed in this story is the largest piece of wild land left in the lower 48. Frankly, it makes me want to scream. ABN
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Forest Service Angers Locals With Move That May Speed Building

MISSOULA, Mont. -- The Bush administration is preparing to ease the way for the nation's largest private landowner to convert hundreds of thousands of acres of mountain forestland to residential subdivisions.

The deal was struck behind closed doors between Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, and Plum Creek Timber Co., a former logging company turned real estate investment trust that is building homes. Plum Creek owns more than 8 million acres nationwide, including 1.2 million acres in the mountains of western Montana, where local officials were stunned and outraged at the deal.
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"We have 40 years of Forest Service history that has been reversed in the last three months," said Pat O'Herren, an official in Missoula County, which is threatening to sue the Forest Service for forgoing environmental assessments and other procedures that would have given the public a voice in the matter.

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Sunday, July 6, 2008
By Evan Osnos

In the 26 years she has risen through the ranks of China's religious-affairs bureaucracy, Ma Yuhong has watched a radical shift in the way an officially atheist Communist Party talks about the faithful.

"There was a saying: 'One more Christian is one less Chinese,'" Ma recalled. "Nobody says that anymore."

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Psychologist Robert Epstein argues in a provocative book, "The Case Against Adolescence," that teens are far more competent than we assume, and most of their problems stem from restrictions placed on them.

Psychologist Robert Epstein spoke to Psychology Today's Hara Estroff Marano about the legal and emotional constraints on American youth.

HEM: Why do you believe that adolescence is an artificial extension of childhood?

RE: In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing—30 is the new 20—and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.

The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.

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"[We give you] a Republic, if you can keep it." -Benjamin Franklin, on presenting the final draft of the federal Constitution, Philadelphia, September, 1787.

We haven't. ABN
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July 4, 2008

(CNN) -- How would the likes of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin feel about the way the United States has turned out 232 years after declaring its independence?

Not pleased, a majority of Americans recently polled said.

According to a new CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, 69 percent of adult Americans who responded to a poll June 26-29 said the signers of the Declaration of Independence would be disappointed by the way the nation has turned out overall.

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July 4, 2008

DOVER, N.Y. — Two teenagers who drove to Oniontown after a series of YouTube videos portrayed the hamlet as a run-down, backwoods dump were pelted with rocks by an angry group of young residents, authorities said.

The two 17-year-olds from Mahopac, about 30 miles south of Oniontown, suffered head and face injuries.

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One writer discovers that anonymity is the only way to explore Pyongyang, the North Korean capital

July 5, 2008

...Privacy was one thing I quickly learnt not to expect. Tourists are watched carefully by official guides, who report to the secret police. I was on a nine-day visit on a package offered by a British travel company - a handful offers trips - and I was monitored the entire time.

My guides, whose names I won't reveal in case I cause them trouble - which is why I am writing this article anonymously - were with me almost every moment I was not in a hotel room. They met me at Pyongyang's giant station, and hardly let me out of their sight.

The only time I was allowed to walk “on my own” from my hotel one afternoon, I soon discovered that X had been following. “You went farther than you said you would,” she admonished in a friendly way.

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VIDEO: Pyongyang traffic ladies

Friday, 27 June 2008
Written by Tracey Shelton and Nguon Sovan

Passing motorists who glance at the building beside a quiet stretch of National Road 5 in Kampong Chhnang province are likely to assume it's just another farm house.

But a closer look reveals something eerie about the house, known according to local legend as "the house the ghost bought."

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Sunday, June 29, 2008

...It was partly her desire to give such a firsthand account that prompted social anthropologist and filmmaker Fiona Graham to join a geisha house early last year and then to live, at least for a while, that life of legend.

"I have investigated a number of Japanese topics, and doing geisha seemed a great idea, as not much has been written on geisha from an insider's point of view," said the Australian.

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03 July 2008, 07:34 GMT]

The presentation of the History of Eezham Tamils, in some of the international reference material such as Britannica Concise Encyclopedia and The World Factbook by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has become a matter of serious concern for Tamils all over the world. When history is being deconstructed in the portals of knowledge of the postmodern era on one hand, these international sources of information are still harping on colonial brand of Orientalism, by basing history on myths.

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Change in the face of foreign devils

By Francesco Sisci

BEIJING - Libraries are filled with thousands of volumes explaining all the problems and intricacies of the momentous passage from agricultural to industrial society, from rural to urban life, from a world marked by huge gaps in time and space to another in which communications and telecommunications immensely narrow time and distance.

These changes still puzzle us and seem largely unexplained. Yet the changes, occurring over a span of 200 years, are minimal if compared to what has happened in China in the past 30 years.

The changes have been concentrated in a little more than a generation. But this is just a small part of a larger phenomenon: in the past 150 years, China's complex cultural values have been under constant attack, forcing revision. That is, not only did China have to undergo the same structural changes as the West in a shorter period, at the same time it also underwent dramatic cultural changes.

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Thursday, July 3, 2008
By TOM MORTON

BIG SANDY -- They pray, enjoy and discipline their kids, walk their dogs, eat together, do art, fall in and out of love, work day jobs, volunteer, disagree, agree to disagree, play, grow older and usually wiser, behave imperfectly, love the land, and believe America's vision as a home of the free and land of the brave.

Sort of like your family.

"Welcome home" to the Rainbow Family of Living Light, which is conducting its annual international Gathering of the Tribes this year at this site southeast of Pinedale in the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

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03 July 2008
By Heather Whipps

Ancient hunters painted the sections of their cave dwellings where singing, humming and music sounded best, a new study suggests.

Analyzing the famous, ochre-splashed cave walls of France, the most densely painted areas were also those with the best acoustics, the scientists found. Humming into some bends in the wall even produced sounds mimicking the animals painted there.

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July 2, 2008
Written by Alisa Harris

Women from the busted polygamist sect in Texas are turning their publicity to profit. They’ve started a website selling “quality, handmade, modest, affordable” clothing in their own Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (FLDS) style. They report “a flood of interest.”

Their clothing choices —- pompadour hair, long dresses in pastel colors, capacious sleeves — attracted fascination earlier this year. Project Runway’s Tim Gunn demanded, “Who’s talking about their crimes against fashion?” The Associated Press called their clothes a fashion statement for modesty, conformity, unity and femininity.

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Human Rights Defender Released from Prison, but Whereabouts Unknown

July 3, 2008

The Vietnamese authorities should immediately lift any restrictions on the liberty of Buddhist monk Tim Sakhorn, who was released from prison in Vietnam on June 28, 2008, Human Rights Watch said today. Sakhorn’s whereabouts are unknown. He was last seen in the company of government officials.

On June 30, 2007, authorities in Cambodia arrested and defrocked Sakhorn and sent him to Vietnam. On November 8, 2007, a criminal court in An Giang province sentenced Sakhorn to one year of imprisonment on charges of “undermining national unity” under article 87 of Vietnam’s penal code. Sakhorn reportedly had no legal representation during his trial. Human Rights Watch said that the politically motivated prosecution of Sakhorn was a thinly veiled attempt by the Vietnamese and Cambodian governments to stop peaceful dissent by the Khmer Krom minority in both countries.

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July 3, 2008
By NORIMITSU ONISHI

NIBUTANI, Japan — The Ainu had lived on Japan’s northernmost island for centuries, calling their home Ainu Mosir, or Land of Human Beings. Here, they had fished, hunted, worshiped nature and established a culture that yielded “Yukar,” an oral poem of Homeric length.

But just as with America’s expansion West, the Japanese pushed north in the late 19th century in the first sign of their imperialist ambitions. Japanese settlers decimated the Ainu population, seized their land and renamed it Hokkaido, or North Sea Road.

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Aaron Delwiche

Propaganda can be as blatant as a swastika or as subtle as a joke. Its persuasive techniques are regularly applied by politicians, advertisers, journalists, radio personalities, and others who are interested in influencing human behavior. Propagandistic messages can be used to accomplish positive social ends, as in campaigns to reduce drunk driving, but they are also used to win elections and to sell malt liquor.

"Every day we are bombarded with one persuasive communication after another. These appeals persuade not through the give-and-take of argument and debate, but through the manipulation of symbols and of our most basic human emotions. For better or worse, ours is an age of propaganda." (Pratkanis and Aronson, 1991).

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Families Adopt Monkeys as Surrogate Children

July 1, 2008
By DAVID MUIR, JIM DUBREUIL and TRACIE HUNTE

Empty nesters looking to relive all the fun of raising children without reliving the turbulent teens are adopting some of our closest relatives: monkeys.

Families are dressing up capuchins, feeding them at the family dinner table and treating them like any other member of the family. They're called monkids.

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Some of my Califriends don't concern themselves at all with different states and regions but simply divide up the country into "warm" and "too cold". California (meaning Southern California, with a capital S) is "warm" and most everywhere else is "too cold", so they don't ever leave. The gardeners among them chuckle when I talk of things like the "last frost date". Robyn
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Tue July 1, 2008
By: Sam P.

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