American Buddhist Net

...Cryptome, a separate secret-spilling site, has speculated that the file may have been posted as insurance in case something happens to the WikiLeaks website or to the organization’s founder, Julian Assange.

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There you go, Oliver Stone apologized for suggesting that the Jewish lobby controls Washington's foreign policy and that Hitler's actions should be put into context.

In fact, Stone’s apology confirms Stone’s argument.

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From The Religious Affiliation of Director Oliver Stone: Oliver Stone describes himself as a practicing Buddhist. Specifically, he has said he follows the Tibetan branch of Buddhism. He was not born into Buddhism, but adopted the faith as an adult. Oliver Stone's father was a Jewish American stock broker. His mother was a French Catholic. Neither of Stone's parents were particularly religious. In fact, they raised him in neither Judaism nor Catholicism. Stone was raised as an Episcopalian, and regularly attended Episcopalian church services and Sunday School as a youth. He thought of himself as a Protestant, but describes himself as not particularly religious while growing up. UPDATE: Here is more on this silly flap. Haim Saban to CBS: Cancel Oliver Stone's Showtime Series. If you recall, Saban was written up in the New Yorker just a couple of months ago: His greatest concern, [Saban] says, is to protect Israel, by strengthening the United States-Israel relationship. At a conference last fall in Israel, Saban described his formula. His 'three ways to be influential in American politics,' he said, were: make donations to political parties, establish think tanks, and control media outlets." Which is basically what Stone said. The Saban article, which contains the quote just above, can be found here: The Influencer: An entertainment mogul sets his sights on foreign policy. Also, I truly wonder why so many are so passionate about "protecting" Israel. Israel is one of the most protected countries in the world. Their military can take any potential rival easily. They have some 300 nuclear bombs plus the certainty that the USA will be there in a heartbeat if anything ever happens. UPDATE 2: How Jewish is Hollywood? ABN

by Chris Floyd

"I am shocked -- shocked! -- to find gambling is going on in here" -- Captain Renault at the gaming tables in Casablanca.

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This video is not as slick as viewers may be used to, but it is worth watching. Horstel, whose segment starts at 3:30, is not a native speaker of English, but his comments are well-worth considering. He claims the material is "soft" and thus this was probably a controlled leak. As we mentioned when this story first broke, it is really suspicious that the main thing and the first thing the New York Times took from the material is Pakistani double-dealing. As mentioned, this really looks like part of a trend we have seen since Obama first entered office to malign and destabilize Pakistan. The big game for a long time has seemed to be destabilization in Central Asia for strategic purposes and this new material, on closer analysis, does seem to support that conclusion. We have also seen a good many reports, at a slightly quicker pace than usual, about how war with Iran is all but inevitable. Is Wikileaks a front or is it just being used? Is it being used? I don't know, but this kind of material must be considered in more ways than one, especially when it does not seem to have all that much that is new to anyone paying attention. I still think that Wikileaks is very much worth following and do not want to diminish any good effects that may flow from this latest release, but there is big money and powerful players stalking the land, so buyer beware. As the days go by, I am sure we will have more detailed analyses from which to draw our conclusions. ABN

Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington's foreign policy for years.

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This sort of thing should always be pointed out, and reacted to. Many users will probably reconsider their participation on Facebook if the company does not change its policy. There are many subtle ways that our consensus reality is constructed and held together. This is just one of them. But even this smallish way of influencing the public contributes to the increasing irrationality of our society. In Buddhist terms, it increases the delusive nature of our shared "reality," and thus leads to suffering. ABN

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A trove of military documents made public on Sunday by an organization called WikiLeaks reflects deep suspicions among American officials that Pakistan’s military spy service has for years guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants.

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This has only just come to my attention, so I cannot fully assess it right now. Two things come to mind, though: 1) these leaks are looking a lot like a pretext for more war; since Obama came to office we have seen many moves directed toward destabilizing Pakistan; now this; 2) WikiLeaks could easily be a US secret op; I am not saying it is, but it could be. Here is the Guardian's write up of this story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs ABN

A new study has been making the rounds, concluding that only 0.3% of all files available on BitTorrent are confirmed to be ‘legal’. The results of the study were promoted by anti-piracy outfit AFACT and have been picked up by several news outlets, including Ars Technica and ZDNet, who all failed to see that the report is bogus.

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It’s a wonderful world we live in where really cool math is starting to get the same fanfare as a Hollywood movie. Thiago Costa, a computer graphics expert with some considerable skill, has released a teaser trailer for his new Lagao Multiphysics 1.0 engine. The program handles all sorts of difficult physical simulations including high friction materials, incompressible fluids, elasticity, and plasticity. But all that seems less important than how cool it looks in action. This thing rocks. Check out the teaser trailer for Lagao Multiphysics 1.0 in the video below. Don’t miss the fantastic bunny explosions at 0:38.

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The federal government has censored approximately 90 per cent of a secret document outlining its controversial plans to snoop on Australians' web surfing, obtained under freedom of information (FoI) laws, out of fear the document could cause "premature unnecessary debate".

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NEW YORK--John Young was one of Wikileaks' early founders. Now he's one of the organization's more prominent critics.

Young, a 74-year-old architect who lives in Manhattan, publishes a document-leaking Web site called Cryptome.org that predates Wikileaks by over a decade. He's drawn fire from Microsoft after posting leaked internal documents about police requests, irked the U.K. government for disclosing the names of possible spies, and annoyed Homeland Security by disclosing a review of Democratic National Convention security measures.

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..."Maybe they are thinking that if internet users have some porn to look at, then they won't pay so much attention to political matters," Anti said.

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It's starting to look like Capricorn One over at BP. In addition to a photo of the oil spill crisis command center that BP faked on their Web site, an astute reader found yet another photo of the crisis response that has been faked by BP. This one is of the "top kill" effort to stop the spill a month or so ago. Above and below are parts of the photo that show that BP, yet again, inserted a fake screen behind its employees to make them look busier, or something.

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The Swedish Pirate Party, who are at the forefront of anti-copyright lobbying in Sweden, are planning to shake up the country’s ISP market. After taking over the supply of bandwidth to The Pirate Bay, Piratpartiet will now partner in the launch of Pirate ISP, a new broadband service that will offer anonymity to customers and provide financial support to the Party.

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Less than three weeks after the Times paywall went up, data shows a massive decline in web traffic

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UPDATE: The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP's Web site. That would suggest, at least one possibility is, that BP took an old photo and Photoshopped new pictures of the oil spill over it, to make it look "new." More on this at the end of the post.

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The metadata on the date of this photo could have an innocent explanation, but be sure to check out the photos and explanation on the linked page. It's a fake. More BS from BP. ABN

My sources say that not only is nobody subscribing to the website, but subscribers to the paper itself--who have free access to the site--are not going beyond the registration page. It's an empty world.

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BEIJING — When viewers tuned into China’s most popular dating show this spring, they saw beautiful women, brutal rejections and plenty of money worshiping, as when a female contestant was asked by a possible date whether she would like to go for a bicycle ride.

“I’d rather sit and cry in the back of a BMW,” she said.

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A U.S. Congressman has introduced a resolution that would protect citizens who videotape cops in public from getting arrested on state wiretapping charges.

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I would go one step further and pay citizens who provide video or photo evidence of police misbehavior. The signature case for this in my mind is the Oscar Grant shooting in the BART station. We only have the facts on that due to cell phone videos made by onlookers. And we know, as well, that the first thing the cops on the scene did was run around trying to confiscate those same cell phones. A main goal of police work should be encouraging respect for the police and the law, not fear through abuse and intimidation. I think this point is obvious to many fine law enforcement officers, whose services we do appreciate, but apparently not to all. ABN

Oxford, England (CNN) -- WikiLeaks.org, the website that released secret video of a U.S. airstrike in Iraq that killed a dozen civilians, is "getting an enormous quantity of whistle-blower disclosures of high caliber," the site's founder, Julian Assange, said Friday in a rare public appearance here.

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After the U.S. Government took action against several sites connected to movie streaming recently, nerves are jangling over the possibility that this is just the beginning of a wider crackdown. Now it appears that a free blogging platform has been taken down by its hosting provider on orders from the U.S. authorities on grounds of “a history of abuse”. More than 73,000 blogs are out of action as a result.

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Dozens of blogs by some of China's most outspoken users have been abruptly shut down while popular Twitter-like services appear to be the newest target in government efforts to control social networking.

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'No [ISP] can block, interfere with, discriminate, hinder, nor restrict the right of any Internet user of using, send, receive or offer any content, application, or legitimate service through the Internet, as well as any activity or legitimate use conducted through the Internet.'

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