American Buddhist Net

Jul 8, 2008

On July 1, Xian opened three newly-built ancient relics parks to the public free of charge. The three parks are the Tang Dynasty City Wall Relics Park, the Tang Dynasty Ci'en Temple Relics Park and Qujiangchi Relics Park.

Located near the Gaoxin Fourth Road, the Tang Dynasty City Wall Relics Park is a long corridor about 2.2 miles long and 100-meter wide. Displaying the Tang poems and calligraphy by stone carvings, the park is a nice place for visitors to savor the brilliant art and culture of the Tang Dynasty (618-907).

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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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It'd be worth your while to read the Wikipedia entry on Tuol Sleng, both as a lesson in 20th-century Cambodian history and also in light of the current issue of government-sanctioned torture in American politics. Recall the recent revelation that torture techniques used at Guantanamo (and God knows where else!) are actually based on a 1950's Chinese communist manual for eliciting false confessions from detainees.

I had the good (?) fortune several years ago of visiting Tuol Sleng. The building is stark; it has been left as the Vietnamese found it in 1979. Sans corpses, of course. After just a few minutes of wandering the halls and looking at the pre- and post-execution photographs on the walls, I was crying like a baby outside on the grass. Robyn
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Friday, 04 July 2008
by Lyria Eastley

Veteran Cambodian painter Vann Nath opened his art gallery at the Kith Eng Restaurant in Phnom Penh to the public on July 1, unveiling paintings documenting his time at Tuol Sleng, the notorious Khmer Rouge prison.

...Nath was captured by the Khmer Rouge and taken to Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, in December 1977. He was saved from almost certain execution in February 1978 after being commissioned to paint portraits of Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot.

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Excellent piece, both for understanding the history of US mass media and for the kinds of forces that are now threatening a free, open, and "neutral" internet. This essay is short, clear, and straight to the point. ABN
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02 July 2008
by Bruce Dixon

The US broadcast media regime, in which greedy, amoral corporations enjoy completely free monopoly licenses to run their highly profitable businesses upon the scarce public property that is the broadcast spectrum is usually presented to us as the only “natural” and sensible media order. It is, we've all been told, the benign and logical outcome of democratic give and take and rigorous competition in a free marketplace. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

Most Americans, right up to and including doctorate-level media scholars don't know that as late as the mid 1920's over forty percent of the more than 500 radio stations across the US were in the hands of not for profit, noncommercial broadcasters.

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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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Andrew Bossone in Cairo
for National Geographic News
July 2, 2008

A well-preserved mud-brick settlement in southern Egypt is providing a rare glimpse into nearly 3,000 years of ancient Egyptian daily life, archaeologists announced Tuesday. (See photos.)

The Tell Edfu site includes a public town center that was used for collecting taxes, conducting business, recording accounting, and writing documents.

The discovery paints a picture of a relatively advanced system of society during ancient times, with commerce playing an intricate part of daily Egyptian life, according to the University of Chicago and the Egyptian Supreme Council on Antiquities.

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By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: July 6, 2008

JERUSALEM — A three-foot-tall tablet with 87 lines of Hebrew that scholars believe dates from the decades just before the birth of Jesus is causing a quiet stir in biblical and archaeological circles, especially because it may speak of a messiah who will rise from the dead after three days.

If such a messianic description really is there, it will contribute to a developing re-evaluation of both popular and scholarly views of Jesus, since it suggests that the story of his death and resurrection was not unique but part of a recognized Jewish tradition at the time.

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By ROBERT TURNBULL
Published: July 6, 2008

SIEM REAP, Cambodia — There is no question that Angkor and its famed temples are among the world’s archaeological treasures, providing a window into the Cambodian dynasty that flourished there from the ninth century to the 15th century. But tourists who flock to the site in northwestern Cambodia say something is missing; few artifacts remain to help them imagine the customs and rituals of the ancient empire.

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By Charles J. Hanley and Jae-Soon Chang, The Associated Press

Published: July 04, 2008 11:20 PM ET

SEOUL The American colonel, troubled by what he was hearing, tried to stall at first. But the declassified record shows he finally told his South Korean counterpart it "would be permitted" to machine-gun 3,500 political prisoners, to keep them from joining approaching enemy forces.

In the early days of the Korean War, other American officers observed, photographed and confidentially reported on such wholesale executions by their South Korean ally, a secretive slaughter believed to have killed 100,000 or more leftists and supposed sympathizers, usually without charge or trial, in a few weeks in mid-1950.

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By the way, the lower-case "u" of "united" in the third bold line below is not a mistake. That's how they thought back then. America was a "union" of States, and no one thought of this "union" as being principally a national entity--the "United States"--as we now do today. ABN
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The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
In CONGRESS, July 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America,

When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

By Chris Carola, Associated Press Writer
ALBANY, N.Y. — Wish "Yankee Doodle" a happy 250th birthday. Maybe.

The original lyrics to one of America's best-known songs, one associated with the American Revolution, were actually written a couple decades earlier during the French and Indian War, although an exact date has eluded historians. Some peg the year as 1755, when the war's first major battles were fought, or 1756.

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Thu Jul 3, 2008

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - Archeologists are opening a cave sealed for more than 30 years deep beneath a Mexican pyramid to look for clues about the mysterious collapse of one of ancient civilization's largest cities.

The soaring Teotihuacan stone pyramids, now a major tourist site about an hour outside Mexico City, were discovered by the ancient Aztecs around 1500 AD, not long before the arrival of Spanish explorers to Mexico.

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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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Every schoolchild knows the story, but most of it is wrong

By Justin Ewers
Posted June 27, 2008

...Even if Revere wasn't the lone savior of Longfellow's poem, there's no doubt he and his fellow riders were the critical spark that ignited the Revolution. When British troops marched into Lexington that morning, the first shots of the war were fired, leaving eight colonists dead. Thanks to the riders' efforts, militias from all over the countryside were mobilized to take their revenge, driving the British all the way back to Boston. "The Die was cast," John Adams would later write, "the Rubicon crossed." The Revolutionary War had begun. It would take a bit longer for the same to be true of the legend of Paul Revere.

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July 3, 2008
By Thomas H. Maugh

After years of searching, archaeologists have identified and excavated the boyhood home of George Washington, site of such legendary -- if perhaps apocryphal -- events as chopping down the cherry tree and throwing a coin across the Rappahannock River.

The find indicates that the Washington family lived in a spacious eight-room home -- a sign that the family was well-off for its day -- and provides new information about George's childhood, a period that has remained largely obscured in the mists of history.

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SOME PERTINENT FACTS PRESENTED BY AN EXPERT.

The Cost of Curing the Leaves Both on and off the Stalk Contrasted.

Capt. W. H. Snow, in Danville Tobacco Journal.
24 September 1890

Few men will be prepared to believe when told all the evils that can be traced directly to the pernicious and wasteful way of curing tobacco on the stalk. We have said before and here repeat that to the foolish system of curing on the stalk can be traced nearly all the unsound or funked tobacco found on our markets; a vast and useless consumption of fuel; the building of countless numbers of curing barns, and the waste of at least one-third of the entire crop that is grown in our fields. It causes the construction of the huge prize houses, with all the redrying paraphernalia that cost vast sums of money and adds to one's insurance and expenses in countless ways.

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"Christianity became disfigured when it went to the West. I'm sorry to have to say that, but that is my view."

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“My name is surrounded with such hate and fear that no one can judge what is true and what is false, what is history, and what is myth.”
– Baron Roman Fedorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, 1921

June 30th, 2008

“In Mongolia, there was a legend of the warrior prince, Beltis-Van. Noted for his ferocity and cruelty, he spilled “floods of human blood before he found his death in the mountains of Uliasutay.” His slayers interred the corpses of the Prince and his followers deep in earth, covered the graves with heavy stones, and added “incantations and exorcism lest their spirits again break out, carrying death and destruction.” These measures, it was prophesied, would bind the terrible spirits until human blood once more fell upon the site.

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By Paul Rincon
Science reporter, BBC News

At 7:17am on 30 June 1908, an immense explosion tore through the forest of central Siberia.

Some 80 million trees were flattened over an area of 2,000 square km (800 square miles) near the Tunguska River.

The blast was 1,000 times more powerful than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and generated a shock wave that knocked people to the ground 60km from the epicentre.

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Well-worth reading in full. ABN
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As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 30, 2008

To understand this extraordinary development, historians might want to look back at the 1980s and examine the Iran-Contra scandal’s “lost chapter,” a narrative describing how Ronald Reagan’s administration brought CIA tactics to bear domestically to reshape the way Americans perceived the world.

That chapter – which we are publishing here for the first time – was “lost” because Republicans on the congressional Iran-Contra investigation waged a rear-guard fight that traded elimination of the chapter’s key findings for the votes of three moderate GOP senators, giving the final report a patina of bipartisanship.

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Thirty years after his murder we may finally get to know the truth about Aldo Moro, says Robert Fox

June 30, 2008

Thirty years ago this Sunday, the Italian statesman Aldo Moro was seized by the Red Brigades and eight weeks later his body was dumped in downtown Rome. It was the most spectacular assassination by the Red Brigades and the most significant killing of a leader in Europe during the entire Cold War.

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Sun, Jun. 29, 2008
BY SCOTT WUERZ

Terror and misery were all around them, but it was the job of a small group of nuns from a tiny town near Red Bud to bring comfort and religion while China was a battleground.

In 1933, nuns from the Adorers of the Blood of Christ's Ruma Province answered Pope Pius XI's call for missionaries to spread the word of God around the world. Their job was to go to Japanese-held regions of China to help incredibly poor Chinese civilians survive. Although they were on a mission of mercy, they soon found themselves held in a military concentration camp along with political prisoners and captured Chinese soldiers.

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A Russian curator says she's developed a foolproof method of determining whether a piece of art was made before or after 1945 as a way of sniffing out fake paintings.

Elena Basner told The Art Newspaper that she has developed a method in collaboration with Russian scientists based on the idea that man-made nuclear explosions from the 1940s to 1960s released isotopes into the environment.

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June 29, 2008

A Thai court has temporarily blocked the government from supporting Cambodia's bid to have an 11th century temple near the Thai border declared a world landmark.

It ordered Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej's administration to halt support for Cambodia's application to Unesco for the Preah Vihear temple to be designated a World Heritage Site.

A small amount of territory adjacent to the temple remains in dispute, and critics claim co-operation with Cambodia over the site application would jeopardise Thai claims to it.

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