American Buddhist Net

A new mathematical model indicates that dust devils, water spouts, tornadoes, hurricanes and cyclones are all born of the same mechanism and will intensify as climate change warms the Earth's surface.

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Mainly a recap of recent events, but still well-worth reading in full. As we see it, nation states today cannot function without participation from citizens, including Buddhist clergy. The keys to Buddhist participation in politics and social movements should be wisdom, truth, positive effective action, compassion, and balance. It is our hope that the American Buddhist community will deservedly come to be seen as one of the wisest and most effective communities in the country. ABN
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Jul 9, 2008
By Megawati Wijaya

SINGAPORE - From Sri Lanka to South Korea, from Tibet to Myanmar, Asia's Buddhist clergy are in unprecedented numbers exerting their moral authority onto politics, abandoning their detachment from worldly events and giving rise to what at least one academic has referred to as a region-wide "angry monk syndrome".

...The recent surge in monk-led political ferment, usually towards the aim of giving voice to the often silent majority, seems to signal a political reawakening of Asia's Buddhist clergy. Well-organized and in most instances peacefully executed, the protests have provided a resounding reaffirmation to the Sangha's social relevance in modern times. It is also a potentially profound political trend, in that monks tend to speak out on behalf of the politically oppressed and economically downtrodden.

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* Patrick Wintour and Patrick Barkham
* The Guardian,
* Tuesday July 8, 2008

As the food crisis began to bite, the rumblings of discontent grew louder. Finally, after a day of discussing food shortages and soaring prices, the famished stomachs of the G8 leaders could bear it no longer.

The most powerful bellies in the world were last night compelled to stave off the great Hokkaido Hunger by fortifying themselves with an eight-course, 19-dish dinner prepared by 25 chefs. This multi-pronged attack was launched after earlier emergency lunch measures - four courses washed down with Château-Grillet 2005 - had failed to quell appetites enlarged by agonising over feeding the world's poor.

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Every year across the world a forest area the size of England, about 32m acres, is destroyed or degraded.

07/07/08

About 40,000 hectares - roughly 150 square miles - are logged or burned to make way for agriculture or grazing on a daily basis.

In the past 60 years greed, wanton destruction and exploitation has seen about 50 per cent of the world's rainforests disappear.

Millions of hectares of rainforest in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Brazil and Africa containing a vast diversity of plants and animals have now been replaced by agricultural crops such as palm oil and soya.

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07/05/2008

Tokyo (AsiaNews) - About 50 visitors and 100 Japanese participated at the "summit of religious leaders for the G8", the meeting that for three years has been gathering representatives of the various faiths in view of the summit of political leaders from the major powers, and has become one of the main assemblies on the calendar of interreligious dialogue. The stated aim is that of giving a spiritual face to a summit that, although it is political, deals with topics fundamentally concerning the human heart.

From June 27-29, representatives and leaders from the main religions of the world met in Osaka and Kyoto, in view of the summit of the Group of Eight, which will be held at Lake Toyako (Hokkaido) from July 7-9, in order to send it a joint declaration.

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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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Check the paragraph in bold below. Hundreds of millions are suffering, many dying, but the report has been held back to avoid embarrassing Bush? Why does this one person have so much power that such basic information as this is kept from the world? ABN
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# Aditya Chakrabortty
# The Guardian,
# Friday July 4, 2008

Biofuels have forced global food prices up by 75% - far more than previously estimated - according to a confidential World Bank report obtained by the Guardian.

The damning unpublished assessment is based on the most detailed analysis of the crisis so far, carried out by an internationally-respected economist at global financial body.

The figure emphatically contradicts the US government's claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3% to food-price rises. It will add to pressure on governments in Washington and across Europe, which have turned to plant-derived fuels to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and reduce their dependence on imported oil.

Senior development sources believe the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush.

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WHO survey of 17 countries finds that we have the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use.

Bruce Mirken, AlterNet. Posted July 2, 2008.

The United States has some of the world's most punitive drug policies and has led the cheering section for tough "war on drugs" policies worldwide, but a new international study suggests that those policies have been a crashing failure. A World Health Organization survey of 17 countries, conducted by some of the world's leading substance abuse researchers, found that we have the highest rates of marijuana and cocaine use.

The numbers are startling. In the United States, 42.4 percent admitted having used marijuana. The only other nation that came close was New Zealand, another bastion of get-tough policies, at 41.9 percent. No one else was even close. The results for cocaine use were similar, with the United States leading the world by a large margin.

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By James G. Neuger

July 3 (Bloomberg) -- When President George W. Bush went to his first Group of Eight summit in 2001, a dominant issue was the dollar -- the strong dollar, that is. The U.S. currency was on a record-setting streak, and the free-marketeering president wasn't going to stand in the way.

On the eve of Bush's last G-8 appearance, the dollar's gyrations are again in the crossfire. This time, it is a weak currency, upended by slumping growth, a housing recession and record gas prices, that is gnawing away at the world economy.

The dollar's 41 percent drop against the euro during Bush's term writes the economic epitaph of an administration that set out to restore American preeminence. Instead, Bush heads to Japan next week for his final international summit with diminished leverage as Russian and Chinese influence grows.

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By Jeremy van Loon

July 1 (Bloomberg) -- Penguin colonies are collapsing because global warming, pollution and over-fishing are damaging their ocean habitat in the southern hemisphere, a researcher at the University of Washington said.

Penguins are serving as a ``canary in the coal mine,'' and their declining numbers are evidence that people are altering the animals' environment, said Dee Boersma, a biology professor at the Seattle-based university, in a preview of the study that will be published in the July/August edition of the U.S. journal BioScience.

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Nicely written essay. ABN
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Austin Dacey

We often hear that some new scientific discovery has confirmed ancient religious teaching. It now appears that this hearkening back has gone full circle, and modern religion is coming around to ancient secular wisdom.

At the recent "Seeds of Compassion" event in Seattle, the Dalai Lama spoke of three paths to compassion and moral development in children: the theistic path of the Abrahamic faiths, the non-theistic religious path of Buddhism, and the "secular, scientific" approach. Surrounded by brain researchers and empirical psychologists, he recommended this secular way as the most promising. For some time he has held that if any tenet of Buddhism contradicts contemporary science, science must trump.

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* David HIrst
* June 30, 2008

IMAGINE the Reserve Bank of Australia, concerned that its friends in the city of Sydney (but perhaps Melbourne) who, having wallowed in wealth all their adult lives, were no longer gainfully employable and their wildly extravagant lifestyles were in danger, and, having the powers to intervene in the market, decided to do just that on their behalf.

Imagine them offering to enter the market and buy shares that would prop up the foolish gambles of the bankers, gambles they had encouraged them, until recently, to take by providing them with cheap money.

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BY ROSSLYN BEEBY, SCIENCE AND ENVIRONMENT REPORTER
25/06/2008 7:09:00

The world's coastal oceans are in crisis, with oxygen-starved ''dead zones'' increasing by a third in just two years as global temperatures increase with climate change, according to the International Whaling Commission's latest scientific report.

Dead zones, caused by over-enrichment of waters by nutrients from run-off, sewerage and warming waters, represent ''the worst-case scenario for coastal biodiversity'' and are the ''severest form'' of ocean habitat degradation, the report says.

The number of ocean dead zones has grown from 44 areas reported in 1995 to more than 400, with some of the worst oxygen-starved areas extending over 22,000sqkm.

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Margaret Munro , Canwest News Service
Published: Wednesday, June 25, 2008

The Arctic seabed is as explosive geologically as it is politically judging by the "fountains" of gas and molten lava that have been blasting out of underwater volcanoes near the North Pole.

"Explosive volatile discharge has clearly been a widespread, and ongoing, process," according to an international team that sent unmanned probes to the strange fiery world beneath the Arctic ice.

...The scientists say the heat released by the explosions is not contributing to the melting of the Arctic ice, but Sohn says the huge volumes of CO2 gas that belched out of the undersea volcanoes likely contributed to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. How much, he couldn't say.

There are no volcanoes exploding in the area right now, but they scientists say there appears to still be a lot happening on the sea floor. "I had the impression this whole central volcano area was oozing warm fluid," says Henrietta Edmonds of the University of Texas, who was on the expedition tracking the plumes of warm waters rising from the spreading ridge. She says they point to the presence of "gushing black smokers" as well as microbial and other forms of life that can thrive in scalding, mineral-rich waters that percolates out of spreading ridges.

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http://bahai-library.com/personal/jw/other.pubs/nagarjuna/

Jonah Winters

Bachelor's Thesis
Advisor Kees Bolle

Reed College, 1994

http://www.buddhanet.net/pdf_file/upanisa_sutta.pdf
http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/wheel277.html

Tucked away in the Samyutta Nikaya among the "connected sayings on causality" (Nidanasamyutta) is a short formalized text entitled the Upanisa Sutta, the "Discourse on Supporting Conditions." Though at first glance hardly conspicuous among the many interesting suttas in this collection, this little discourse turns out upon repeated examination to be of tremendous doctrinal importance. Its great significance derives from the striking juxtaposition it makes of two applications of "dependent arising" (paticcasamuppada), the principle of conditionality which lies at the heart of the Buddha's doctrine. The first application is the usual one, setting forth the causal sequence responsible for the origination of samsaric suffering. Apart from a slight change it is identical with the twelve-factored formulation recurring throughout the Pali canon. The change — the substitution of "suffering" for "aging-and-death" as the last member of the series — becomes the lead for the second application of dependent arising. This application, occurring only sporadically in the Pali canon, allows the same principle of conditionality to structure the path leading to deliverance from suffering.

http://www.conspiracyarchive.com/NWO/Ascendancy.htm

As antiquity gave way to modern history, the religious power structure shifted to an autocracy of the knowable, or a 'scientific dictatorship.' Subtly and swiftly, the ruling class seized control of science and used it as an 'epistemological weapon' against the masses. This article will show that the history and background of this 'scientific dictatorship' is a conspiracy, created and micro-managed by the historical tide of Darwinism, which has its foundations in Freemasonry.

The Epistemological Cartel

In The Architecture of Modern Political Power, Daniel Pouzzner outlines the tactics employed by the elite to maintain their dominance. Among them is: 'Ostensible control over the knowable, by marketing institutionally accredited science as the only path to true understanding' (Pouzzner, 75). Thus, the ruling class endeavors to discourage independent reason while exercising illusory power over human knowledge. This tactic of control through knowledge suppression and selective dissemination is reiterated in the anonymously authored document Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars

June 27, 2008
Mike Harvey and Jonathan Richards

Q&A: What do the new domains mean for me?

A new era in the way websites are named was ushered in yesterday when the governing body for internet domain names announced a massive liberalisation.

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By Joel Hruska | Published: June 25, 2008 - 06:35PM CT

Stopbadware.org has released its May, 2008 report (PDF) on badware hosting and the geographical locations from which badware originates. The organization drew its data from Google's "Safe Browsing" initiative, which maintains a database of websites that attempt to phish personal information from users who visit. As of May, Google had recorded some 213,575 individual websites, which StopBadware then mapped to IP addresses. This data was then cross-referenced to determine the IP block's country of origin.

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http://www.accesstoinsight.org/ptf/dhamma/adinava/index.html

The drawbacks of sensuality

Not even if it rained gold coins
would we have our fill
of sensual pleasures.
'Stressful,
they give little enjoyment' —
knowing this, the wise one
finds no delight
even in heavenly sensual pleasures.
He is one who delights
in the ending of craving,
a disciple of the Rightly
Self-Awakened One.

— Dhp 186

By Michael Erard Email 06.23.08

The targeted offenses: IF YOU ARE STOLEN, CALL THE POLICE AT ONCE. PLEASE OMNIVOROUSLY PUT THE WASTE IN GARBAGE CAN. DEFORMED MAN LAVATORY. For the past 18 months, teams of language police have been scouring Beijing on a mission to wipe out all such traces of bad English signage before the Olympics come to town in August. They're the type of goofy transgressions that we in the English homelands love to poke fun at, devoting entire Web sites to so-called Chinglish. (By the way, that last phrase means "handicapped bathroom.")

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June 22, 2008

Rajan Zed, prominent Hindu leader, after watching on Friday, has given a worldwide boycott call for Hollywood movie “The Love Guru” by Hindus and other religious people because it lampoons Hinduism and Hindu concepts and uses Hindu terms frivolously.

Jun 19 03:25 PM US/Eastern
By STEPHEN OHLEMACHER
Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON (AP) - The world's population will reach 7 billion in 2012, even as the global community struggles to satisfy its appetite for natural resources, according to a new government projection.

There are 6.7 billion people in the world today. The United States ranks third, with 304 million, behind China and India, according to projections released Thursday by the Census Bureau.

The world's population surpassed 6 billion in 1999, meaning it will take only 13 years to add a billion people.

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by Marlowe Hood 2 hours, 22 minutes ago

PARIS (AFP) - The world's oceans have warmed 50 percent faster over the last 40 years than previously thought due to climate change, Australian and US climate researchers reported Wednesday.

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It’s been a little more than a year since a wave of botnets temporarily disabled Estonia’s government Web sites in an incident that may well go down in history as the cyber attack heard ‘round the world.

Lauri Almann, Estonia’s Undersecretary of Defense, was part of the response team faced with the challenge of defending against the attacks. In the year that has passed, much has been learned by Almann and others about the nature of the attacks. Almann was in Washington recently to discuss those lessons—and what needs to be done to guard against future attacks.

GCN chief editor, Wyatt Kash, spoke with Almann about the attacks and the technology measures Estonia is taking to prepare for what he believes could be an even more debilitating attack the next time.

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