American Buddhist Net

By Paul Craig Roberts

...The US has no media. But it does have a Ministry of Propaganda. Americans were programmed with days of propaganda that Islamic Iran, a member of the US-designated “axis of evil,” stole the election from the Iranian people. According to the US Ministry of Propaganda, the Iranian people are allied with the US government against the Iranian government.

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Turkish gameshow enlists imam, Greek Orthodox priest, rabbi and monk to try to convert atheists, with pilgrimage as reward

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Possession of pornography is now a criminal offense in Ukraine, Lenta.ru reports, after Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko signed a law to that effect today. Human rights activists and members of the Ukrainian artistic community had asked the president to veto the law.

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For $25,000 to $250,000, The Washington Post has offered lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to "those powerful few": Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and — at first — even the paper’s own reporters and editors.

The astonishing offer was detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he felt it was a conflict for the paper to charge for access to, as the flier says, its “health care reporting and editorial staff."

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We have known for a long time that all is not well with the Fourth Estate, but did not expect them to begin selling the silverware out the back door this soon. ABN

BEIJING— Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has called for an Internet boycott on July 1 — the anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's founding — to protest a government plan requiring all computers produced in China to contain software that blocks access to pornographic and other sites considered “unhealthy” for young people.

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The Great Australian Firewall will try blocking websites that host or sell video games not suitable for children under the age of 15.

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Web filters to censor video games

Australia's Net Filters To Target Games, Too

Black Hat USA presentation will demonstrate how the latest browser technology makes underground, private Internet communities simpler to form, more secretive

...they see this as more of an opportunity for adding legitimate and mainstream uses of darknets, such as anonymous suggestion boxes or other ways for users to express themselves anonymously without their IP addresses potentially giving them away. "Students are getting reprimanded at school because of their Facebook postings," perhaps criticizing something about school, Hoffman says. "They're being punished for free speech. Where can you freely express yourself without fear of consequences? This could be an interesting app."

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Satellite TV is replaced with the cable TV, which only broadcasts government approved programs

Since April Chinese authorities have been removing satellite TV antennas in Tibetan regions to prevent access to foreign broadcasts. The denunciation comes from the Radio Free Asia (RFA) agency, which is among the programs affected by this unusual censorship.

Local sources of Kanlho (Chinese: Gannan, in Gansu) indicate that for months now, teams of technicians are working to install cable lines for television and to remove the satellite dishes. Only government approved programs are broadcast on cable TV, while the satellite antennas make it possible to receive foreign programs such as RFA or Voice of America.

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Satellite TV is replaced with the cable TV, which only broadcasts government approved programs. Among the broadcasts criticized are those of well known agencies for the protection of rights. Resident's protests.

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The Chinese government plans to recruit tens of thousands of volunteers by the end of the year to report "lewd" content and "uncivilized" behavior on the internet.

Government-run news agency Xinhua reports volunteers will be registered under the auspices of China's Capital Civic Enhancement Committee Office (CCECO). The government will also enlist "supervision volunteers" to patrol internet cafes for vulgar content and to prevent minors from accessing the computers.

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Savvy consumers often go online for independent consumer reviews of products and services, scouring through comments from everyday Joes and Janes to help them find a gem or shun a lemon.

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...A remarkable finding was that though all participants showed significant brain activity during book-reading tasks, which correspond to language, reading, memory and visual abilities, the web-savvy group also registered activity in the areas of the brain which control decision-making and complex reasoning. With the wealth of choices available on the net, knowing how to perform the most effective searches and making decisions on what to click on, engages important cognitive circuits in the brain.

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BEIJING — The Chinese government disabled some search functions on the Chinese-language Web site of Google on Friday, saying the site was linking too often to pornographic and vulgar content.

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To those who want to censor the web, this is the company you are keeping. ABN

Glenn Greenwald

...writing what is factually true and pointing out false statements from those in political power -- is the number one sin in establishment journalism.

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On Thursday, the Washington Post confirmed it had fired liberal online columnist Dan Froomkin. On Friday, they gave a guest column to Bush war architect Paul Wolfowitz.

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And now you know why, if you had not guessed, why we rarely if ever link to the WP. ABN

SEOUL (AFP) — North Korea said Tuesday that two female US journalists whom it jailed last week for 12 years had admitted a politically motivated smear campaign against the communist state.

Official media, giving its first details of the alleged crimes, said they crossed the border illegally "for the purpose of making animation files to be used for an anti-DPRK (North Korea) smear campaign over its human rights issue."

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...To actually make all this both intelligible and convincing to someone without a background in philosophy of mind would take many thousands of words, so instead I’ll take a stab at a second-order reply, or at least observation.

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Translation: statements should be as short as possible, but no shorter. There is much to be said for this piece, but be wary of the subtext that more or less presupposes that we defer to experts in most matters. Do some research on your own health, and though it may be confusing and though you may make mistakes, you very well may also discover something your doctor does not know. Do more research and you will get better at it. Eventually, you will probably get much better at taking care of yourself than if you simply deferred to your doctor's judgment at all times. The same thing is true for most political and even philosophical subjects (many of which do have large political components). Americans generally tend to defer too much to experts or people they perceive as being experts--industry-funded medical researchers, industry-funded climatologists or other scientists, over-confident economists, courtroom experts, professional politicians, and so on. We should do our best to understand subjects in all of their complexity, but if by doing so we end up becoming passive consumers of other people's ideas, we have done ourselves much harm. In more areas than are normally acknowledged, no one knows. There are no sure answers. I say, it's your life, think for yourself, take your lumps, and keep going. Every act of deciding enriches the next. ABN

US propaganda against Iran is being disguised as ordinary news, says political activist Dr. William Wedin. He claims the US mainstream media intentionally depicts Iran as a war-like nation composed of mad mullahs.

Dr. Wedin says the presidential elections in Iran could complicate America’s aim to wage war on Iran.

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Powerful prosecutor’s efforts to suppress book virtually guarantees elevated sales

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Recent reports indicate that the Chinese government is planning to extend the reach of its Internet censorship efforts. The government's massive back-end filtering system, referred to satirically in the west as the Great Firewall of China, will soon be augmented by client-side filtering tools that the Chinese government is pressuring hardware manufacturers to ship with new computers.

The filtering software, which is called Green Dam, is designed to analyze the user's network traffic and block material that is politically sensitive or adult in nature.

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BEIJING — China is facing a storm of protest at home and abroad over new regulations requiring all personal computers sold in the country to include software that can filter out pornography and other “vulgar” content from the Internet.

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EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It's a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people's self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice.

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record.

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I have no doubt about these results, which have been shown elsewhere and which seem right intuitively. But there is an important distinction that should be made between confidence in a media figure - a TV pundit or politician - and confidence in people we know personally and well. When someone we know personally and well speaks or behaves confidently, we have many ways of assessing their state of mind. If they are given to bombast, we may simply dismiss their latest thing. If they are normally prudent or shy and suddenly start speaking with great confidence or urgency on a matter, most of us will listen carefully. We probably have an instinct that responds to a person exhibiting confidence. And among friends, this instinct often works well. In the distant past, it must have worked well among small groups of humans who probably followed not just one person all the time but whoever was most confident about where the path led, or where the fish were, etc. This instinct has been hijacked by hucksters and media personalities, who too many of us treat as reliable friends or members of our inner group. These people learn how to project an aura of confidence (almost all of them do it) that is not real, but only an act. We can see - or should see- this fakery in nearly all politicians and media personalities. This is one of the principle reasons it is dangerous to follow political or religious leaders, or any leader we do not know personally and well. ABN

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two U.S. journalists jailed by North Korea may become bargaining chips in an escalating nuclear standoff with Pyongyang, although the Obama administration hopes to keep the two issues separate.

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A reality television show based on ancient Hindu rituals is aiming to strike a blow against India’s tradition of arranged marriages.

Rakhi Sawant, a Bollywood dancer, actress and television host, has refused a union brokered by her parents. Instead, she has promised to find the perfect man herself — with the aid of a prime time TV series.

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Aidan Monaghan

Science has established the presence of high-tech explosives (apparently manufactured by the U.S. government) in the WTC dust.

And the media remains silent.

Meanwhile, unverifiable audio tapes of a man missing for years materialize periodically and are presented as reality.

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New photos obtained by Press TV have revealed alleged sexual harassment and rape of Iraqi prisoners at US-run Abu Ghraib detention center by American soldiers.

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These photos have not been confirmed as authentic, but descriptions from credible sources have confirmed that there are photos like these. Readers can make up their own minds on this. The simplest and most honest way to determine if they are fakes or what the real photos do or do not contain is to release them to the public. The Catholic church is still reeling from a sort of similar scandal that they tried to hide in sort of similar ways. UPDATE: The photos from the link above are probably fake, but as such they show how toxic this issue is and how difficult - probably impossible - it will be to keep it buried. People can just keep releasing fake photos to keep the issue in the news. The following story has more on the issue and links (on page 2) to photos that were definitely taken of US prisoners: The Pentagon is denying the facts: Photographs of Abu Ghraib torture are even more sexually explicit than first reported. ABN

By Stephen Lendman

At a time of corporate dominated media, a free and open Internet is democracy’s last chance to preserve our First Amendment rights without which all others are threatened. Activists call it Net Neutrality. Media scholar Robert McChesney says without it “the Internet would start to look like cable TV (with a) handful of massive companies (controlling) content” enough to have veto power over what’s allowed and what it costs. Progressive web sites and writers would be marginalized or suppressed, and content systematically filtered or banned.

Media reform activists have drawn a line in the sand. Net Neutrality must be defended at all costs. Preserving a viable, independent, free and open Internet (and the media overall) is essential to a functioning democracy, but the forces aligned against it are formidable, daunting, relentless, and reprehensible. Some past challenges suggest future ones ahead.

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Good piece, well-worth reading. We might add that whenever members of Congress vote for these repressive "laws," they are violating their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution. ABN

...Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.

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