American Buddhist Net

July 16, 2008 9:00 AM
Updated: July 16, 2008 9:51 AM

Friends and family will gather at Falconshead Grill.

One week after receiving word of her death, Joel Berry, accompanied by friends, sorts through photos, videos and belongings of Diana O’Brien at the home they shared near Cusheon Lake on Salt Spring Island.

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Times Colonist
Published: Tuesday, July 15, 2008

It's understandable that the Victoria modelling agency that sent Diana O'Brien to Shanghai should need time to deal with the shock of her death and seek answers before responding to public and family concerns.

But Barbara Coultish Talent and Model Management has remained silent for a week as questions have mounted about O'Brien's work in Shanghai, her accommodations and the Chinese agency that was supposed to be providing her with work. The answers are important, for others in the modelling business and for O'Brien's friends and family.

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Modeling executive questions vetting of dead model's Chinese agency

June 26, 2008, 5:33 PM by Marni Soupcoff
Karen Selick

There’s been plenty of discussion lately about the harmful consequences of censorship — the extra publicity that hate speech gets when prosecuted, the chilling of legitimate debate and the dangers of slippery slopes.

However, I think a case can be made that allowing the publication of repugnant remarks about minority groups might actually have positive benefits for society.

When the Supreme Court of Canada pronounced Canada’s censorship laws constitutional in 1990, they argued that hate speech “contributes little to the aspirations of Canadians or Canada in the quest for truth, the promotion of individual self-development or the protection and fostering of a vibrant democracy where the participation of all individuals is accepted and encouraged.”

I think the court showed a lack of imagination: Hate speech can indeed contribute to fulfilling these desirable goals.

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A migrant worker has been charged, but the timing of the confession was fortuitous

Miro Cernetig, Vancouver Sun
Published: Monday, July 14, 2008

Everyone loves a nice, neat wrap-up to a murder mystery, Agatha-Christie style. But don't buy, just yet, the one we're getting from Shanghai, where the murder of Diana O'Brien has supposedly been solved.

What's been offered up so far by an elite unit of Shanghai's police is this: An 18-year-old migrant worker named Chen Jun was set on robbing O'Brien, an aspiring model from Saltspring Island who had been in China less than two weeks.

With that on his mind, Chen entered the foreigner's apartment to carry out the crime but found she resisted his attempt to snatch her laptop and cash. In the ensuing struggle, he inflicted mortal wounds.

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O'Brien's friends are right to be skeptical as the facts of the story given by police do not seem credible. If anyone has more information, please send it to us. ABN
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Maria Cootauco
Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008

Friends of Diana O'Brien's in Saltspring Island will gather this weekend to remember the B.C. model who was slain in Shanghai on Monday.

The memorial comes just days after Chinese police arrested and extracted a confession from an 18-year-old suspect.

According to reports, Chen Jun was apprehended in Xuancheng City in Anhui Province, west of Shanghai.

But O'Brien's friends are skeptical.

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Bad things can and do happen to foreigners in China. This sad story might at least serve as a lesson for others. The police have arrested someone who has admitted committing the crime, but honestly, who knows what really happened? ABN
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A foreign model's death spotlights an industry with few regulations.

By Cara Anna
The Associated Press

SHANGHAI, China — In the two short weeks the 22-year-old Canadian model was in China, she found only disappointment, and then a violent death during a robbery.

The seemingly random murder so soon before the Olympic Games has shocked a city that prides itself as China's most modern. It also has raised questions about a freewheeling fashion scene that lures young foreigners — who find some job requests require no posing for the camera.

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Panel issues warning for products with nanomaterials, saying tiny substances in everything from sunscreen to diesel fuel may be toxic

MARTIN MITTELSTAEDT
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
July 10, 2008 at 6:41 AM EDT

A blue-ribbon scientific panel has waved a yellow flag in front of a rapidly expanding number of products containing nanomaterials, cautioning that the tiny substances might be able to penetrate cells and interfere with biological processes.

The warning is contained in a report from the Council of Canadian Academies that will be released publicly today. It is one of the most authoritative to date in this country about the risks of engineered nanomaterials, which companies are adding to products ranging from sunscreens to diesel fuels.

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Psychopaths are attracted to positions of power. It seems pretty likely to me - in fact, it seems downright OBVIOUS - that the very top levels of the American political power structure are inhabited by psychopaths.

The point is - and Dr. Hare, on whose research the article below is based, makes this abundantly clear - you cannot apply a normal model of human behavior to these people. They are not simply good-at-their-core, ultimately well-meaning but philosophically misguided people who just need to learn how to sympathize with others. You can't give them "a hug, a puppy dog, and a musical instrument and they're all going to be okay." No. They have no consciences. They enjoy the suffering they inflict on others. Or at least it doesn't bother them. Robyn
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By Robert Hercz

...The most startling finding to emerge from Hare's work is that the popular image of the psychopath as a remorseless, smiling killer -- Paul Bernardo, Clifford Olson, John Wayne Gacy -- while not wrong, is incomplete. Yes, almost all serial killers, and most of Canada's dangerous offenders, are psychopaths, but violent criminals are just a tiny fraction of the psychopaths around us. Hare estimates that 1 percent of the population -- 300,000 people in Canada -- are psychopaths.

He calls them "subclinical" psychopaths. They're the charming predators who, unable to form real emotional bonds, find and use vulnerable women for sex and money (and inevitably abandon them). They're the con men like Christophe Rocancourt, and they're the stockbrokers and promoters who caused Forbes magazine to call the Vancouver Stock Exchange (now part of the Canadian Venture Exchange) the scam capital of the world. (Hare has said that if he couldn't study psychopaths in prisons, the Vancouver Stock Exchange would have been his second choice.) A significant proportion of persistent wife beaters, and people who have unprotected sex despite carrying the AIDS virus, are psychopaths. Psychopaths can be found in legislatures, hospitals, and used-car lots. They're your neighbour, your boss, and your blind date. Because they have no conscience, they're natural predators. If you didn't have a conscience, you'd be one too.

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What is happening right now is big ISPs and big content providers are merging their businesses. Soon TV and film will all come over the internet and there will be deliberate misrepresentations of basic issues--bandwidth, copyrights, appropriate content, etc.--designed to confuse consumers to ceding first amendment rights to the big corporations. Do you trust Congress or the FCC to help you? I don't. The weakness of all of the corporate arguments is the simple fact that the internet is working wonderfully well without their control. ABN
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By Mike Finch

A net-neutrality activist group has uncovered plans for the demise of the free Internet by 2010 in Canada. By 2012, the group says, the trend will be global.

Bell Canada and TELUS, Canada’s two largest Internet service providers (ISPs), will begin charging per-site fees on most Internet sites, reports anonymous sources within TELUS.

...“By 2012 ISPs all over the globe will reduce Internet access to a TV-like subscription model, only offering access to a small standard amount of commercial sites and require extra fees for every other site you visit. These ‘other’ sites would then lose all their exposure and eventually shut down, resulting in what could be seen as the end of the Internet,” Leysen said.

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Canada's most famous literary export is being feted around the world

Maria Kubacki

...The Japanese, known for their fanatical devotion to all things Anne, are also going big with festivities -- hardly surprising in a country where you can buy your very own Green Gables house and where an Anne of Green Gables theme park called Canadian World opened in 1990.

There's an Anne musical in Tokyo in September, as well as a travelling Anne exhibition and a slew of new Anne-related books.

Japanese fans are also expected to flock to P.E.I. for the centenary. They make up only about one per cent of all visitors to the Island, but 85 per cent of them visit Anne sites. Between two and four times the usual number of Japanese tourists are expected this year, according to Tourism PEI.

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by Cory Doctorow, June 25, 2008 8:17 PM | permalink

Bell Canada has been forced by the CRTC (Canadian telco regulator) to reveal exactly how congested its network is. This follows revelations that Bell has been slowing down P2P traffic -- even traffic on its wholesale customers' networks, so no matter who you buy your DSL from, Bel gets to ruin your P2P experience.

The confidential documents show that, basically, Bell just doesn't have a substantial congestion problem -- in fact, backbone congestion has been going down.

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New Democratic Party Deputy House Leader Libby Davies delivers a Parliamentary Petition in Canada's House of Commons during Routine Proceedings at 1:10 pm on June 10, 2008.

Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Roman Catholic diocese of Antigonish, N.S., is facing a class-action lawsuit from people who say they were sexually abused by priests who operated under the protection of the church over several decades.

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This is a letter about "hate speech" laws in Canada. One might add that government today, especially in the US, is little more than a slimy, revolving-door, corporate-administrative sleaze and power monster that suffocates or kills almost everything that gets near it. The right work of government is to protect the people from all enemies, domestic or foreign, to control corporate greed, and to curb its own excesses through the process of checks and balances. Having failed in virtually all ways to honorably discharge any of its fundamental duties, this government is the last entity in the world that should be allowed to violate the Constitution and rob us of even more of our fundamental rights. ABN
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To the Editor:

Burnaby, British Columbia
June 12, 2008

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Is "hate speech" really a problem? Or is it a foot in the door for even more censorship? We already have plenty of laws restricting speech--slander, libel, threats, etc. We do not need "hate speech" laws and neither does Canada or Europe. They are an obvious step backward. ABN
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June 16, 2008
By Patrick J. Buchanan

Freedom of the press is on trial in Canada.

The trial is before a court with the Orwellian title of the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal. The accused are Maclean's magazine and author Mark Steyn. The crime: In mocking and biting tones, they wrote that Islam threatens Western values.

Had Steyn written that, given the Crusades, colonial atrocities in Africa and the slave trade, Christianity had been on balance a curse, he would not be in the dock. In the United States, these charges would have been tossed out by any federal judge, who would have admonished the plaintiffs that, here in America, we have a First Amendment.

The United States, however, is an isolated exception, as Western nations seek to impose wider restrictions on what has come to be called "hate speech."

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Banning Steyn: The road to hell is in Canada.

Posted by Patrick

Saturday, 21 June 2008: Montreal 9/11 Truth Presents David Ray Griffin, professor, author, and lead researcher of the 9/11 cover-up.

Come hear what the media won’t tell you in a lecture chaired by Michel Chossudovsky, Canadian economist and head of the Centre for Research on Globalization

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I dislike it as much as the next girl when I hear people spewing mindless, hateful invective. Especially when it's directed at me, which admittedly isn't often but has happened.

Consider also: Had we had "hate speech" laws in 2001, there is good reason to fear that any questioning of the official story of 9/11 would have been branded as "hate speech." Robyn
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June 11, 2008

A couple of years ago, a Canadian magazine published an article arguing that the rise of Islam threatened Western values. The article's tone was mocking and biting, but it said nothing that conservative magazines and blogs in the United States did not say every day without fear of legal reprisal.

Things are different here. The magazine is on trial.

Under Canadian law, there is a serious argument that the article contained hate speech and that its publisher, Maclean's magazine, the nation's leading newsweekly, should be forbidden from saying similar things, forced to publish a rebuttal and made to compensate Muslims for injuring their "dignity, feelings and self respect."

...Steyn, the author of the Maclean's article, said the court proceeding illustrated some important distinctions. "The problem with so-called hate speech laws is that they're not about facts," he said in a telephone interview. "They're about feelings."

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06/10/2008
By KWOK WONG

Toronto police are hoping free slushies will help break the ice with the city's youth.

This summer, whenever police see youngsters doing a good deed -- anything from volunteering at events to wearing bicycle helmets -- they'll issue a "ticket" for a free Froster from Mac's.

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05/06/2008

Montreal - Singer Leonard Cohen kicks off his first world tour on Friday in 15 years with a Toronto gig, marking the return of the poet who converted to Buddhism during his absence from the limelight.

...Since departing the scene in the early 1990s, Cohen has lived ascetically at a monastery in Mount Baldy in California, where he was ordained a Rinzai Zen Buddhist monk and took the name Jikhan, meaning "silence".

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May 27, 2008
By Jonathan Montpetit

MONTREAL — Canadian women are being asked to volunteer their undergarments in an international effort to shame Myanmar’s ruling junta into giving citizens greater access to humanitarian aid and human rights.

Organizers launched the Canadian edition of the Panties for Peace! campaign today with a call for women to send their underwear to the Myanmar embassy in Ottawa.

The campaign plays off regional superstitions that contact with women’s panties can sap a man’s power.

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Very clear and well-worth viewing. See also our interview with Graeme MacQueen here: Creativity Of The Religious Impulse: Interview with Graeme MacQueen, Buddhist scholar and a 9/11 researcher. ABN
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52 min - May 25, 2008

Professor Graeme MacQueen lecture at the University of Waterloo, introduced By Richard B. Lee, March 19, 2008.

Comedians to help celebrate Beth Israel Synagogue’s anniversary

Monday, May 26, 2008
By ANDREA NEMETZ

...On Wednesday at 8 p.m. Rabbi Bob Alper, who calls himself "the only practicing clergyman doing standup comedy . . . intentionally," and Azhar Usman, a regular on the Allah Made Me Funny Comedy Tour, will unite audience members of all races and religions in laughter.

Alper, who holds a doctorate from Princeton Theological Seminary, says being a rabbi is good preparation for standup — "I’ve had 40 years of performing in front of hostile audiences," he jokes. The 63-year-old adds that humour always infused his rabbinical practice.

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Monday, May 26, 2008
Father Raymond J. De Souza

Now we know what Quebec Premier Jean Charest was doing during the delay in making the Bouchard-Taylor Report public. He was searching for a way to prevent the report from being dead-on-arrival, which is what would have happened had headlines read: "Crucifixes out, hijab in." Charest accomplished that with his speedy unanimous resolution to keep the crucifix in the National Assembly -- quite a feat, given that a mere 18 months ago, then-leader of the opposition, Andre Boisclair, was calling for its removal.

...In point of fact, experience teaches that such neutrality is not neutral at all. It strips public life of all religious signs and symbols in the name of neutrality. The report itself reveals this when it uses the terms "neutral state" and "secular state" interchangeably. If the state is secular, how can it be neutral between religion and non-religion?

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By MATT HIGGINS
Published: May 24, 2008

He has spent two decades and nearly $20 million in a quest to fly to the upper reaches of the atmosphere with a helium balloon, just so he can jump back to earth again. Now, Michel Fournier says, he is ready at last.

Depending on the weather, Fournier, a 64-year-old retired French army officer, will attempt what he is calling Le Grand Saut (The Great Leap) on Sunday from the plains of northern Saskatchewan.

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The Device is provocative, but the sculptor did not intend to be a contrarian

Saturday, May 24, 2008
Douglas Todd

The upside-down church at Coal Harbour is the most provocative public sculpture I've ever seen.

Visually, I love how the church's powerful diagonal lines and flash of red contrast with the endless grey-green verticals of Vancouver's increasingly monotonous skyrises. The sculpture shouts: "I'm having fun and a bit of mischief. You're welcome to respond."

Titled Device to Root Out Evil, the inverted church is, to borrow that over-used journalistic word, controversial. Which is positive, since this supposedly urbane city needs to be talking about something more meaningful than the ever-disappointing Canucks and absurd real estate prices.

...Vancouverites should welcome the Device because so much public art in Vancouver and other parts of the world is safe and pretty.

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