Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UK. Show all posts

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

Meeting NSA whistleblower Ed Snowden (video)


 
Intercepting the National Spying Agency
In part two of Democracy Now's extended interview, Intercept journalist Glenn Greenwald tells the inside story of meeting National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. 

Pulitzer Prize-winning Greenwald and filmmaker Laura Poitras were the journalists who first met Snowden in Hong Kong last June, going on to publish a series of disclosures in The Guardian, a venerable 190-year-old British newspaper, that exposed massive NSA surveillance to the world.

Host Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Greenwald has just come out with a new book on the Snowden leaks and their fallout, No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.

Recalling his first encounter with Snowden, Greenwald says: "The big question was: 'How are we going to know that it’s you? We know nothing about you. We don’t know how old you are, what you look like, or what your race is, or even your gender.' And [Snowden] said, 'You’ll know me because I’ll be holding in my left hand a Rubik’s cube.' And so he walked in, was holding a Rubik’s cube, came over to us, introduced himself, and that was how we met him." More

More from The Intercept
British Spies Face Legal Action Over Secret Hacking Programs
The United Kingdom’s top spy agency is facing legal action following revelations published by The Intercept about its involvement in secret efforts to hack into computers on a massive scale. Government Communications Headquarters, or GCHQ, has been accused of acting unlawfully by helping to develop National Security Agency surveillance systems capable of covertly breaking into More
British surveillance agency GCHQ secretly coveted the NSA’s vast troves of private communications and sought “unsupervised access” to its data as recently as last year, classified documents provided NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden reveal.
Der Spiegel: NSA Put Merkel on List of 122 Targeted Leaders
Secret documents newly disclosed by the German news magazine Der Spiegel on Saturday shed more light on how aggressively the National Security Agency and its British counterpart have targeted Germany for surveillance.
The NSA Has An Advice Columnist. Seriously.
An NSA official, writing under the pen name “Zelda,” has served as a Dear Abby for spies. One of her most intriguing columns responds to an NSA staffer who complains that his (or her) boss is spying on employees.

"Persepolis" or Persepolis? (video)

Eds., Wisdom Quarterly; Marjane Satrapi ("Persepolis"); Discovery.com "Persepolis"

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Ancient Persia
The remnants of a great empire
One of the most impressive settlements in the ancient world, Persepolis was destroyed and burned by invader Alexander the Great in 330 BCE. It lay forgotten for over 2,000 years. This documentary travels to modern Iran to bring Persepolis back to life and investigate the complexities of the Persian Empire that was responsible for creating this astonishing city.

The Spread of Buddhism from its origins in Afghanistan (Gandhara) and India (Magadha) to Iran, where two counter-movements arose in Zoroastrianism (Asuras, Parsis) and Islam (Muslims, Sufis) that then rolled into India and Buddhist strongholds in East and Far East Asia.
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"Persepolis," Iran
WATCH FREE: FULL FILM NOW
Religion is mostly a horrible thing. "Persepolis" is the poignant story of a young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution.
 
It is through the eyes of precocious and outspoken 9-year-old Marjane that we see a people's hopes dashed as fundamentalists take power -- fomented by the West who is enriched in the process of creating a terrorist dictatorship to rob the resources of a nation -- forcing the veil on women and imprisoning thousands.
 
Ancient India used to include modern Iran
Clever and fearless, Majrane outsmarts the "social guardians" and discovers punk rock, ABBA (pop), and Iron Maiden (heavy metal). Yet, when her uncle is senselessly executed and as bombs fall around in the capital of Tehran during the Iran-Iraq war, the daily fear that permeates life in Iran is palpable.

As she gets older, Marjane's boldness causes her parents to worry over her continued safety. So at age 14, they make the difficult decision to send her abroad to school in Austria. Vulnerable and alone in a strange Western land, she endures the typical ordeals of a teenager.

Map of Buddhist Central Asia and India
In addition, Marjane has to combat being equated with the religious fundamentalism and extremism she fled her country to escape. Over time, she gains acceptance, and even experiences love. But after high school she finds herself alone and horribly homesick.

Though it means putting on the veil and living in a tyrannical/hypocritical society, Marjane decides to return to Iran to be close to her family.
 
Like Buddhist Asokan Edict: Cyrus Cylinder
After a difficult period of adjustment, she enters art school and marries, all the while continuing to speak out against the hypocrisy she witnesses. At age 24, she realizes that while she is deeply Iranian, she cannot live in Iran.

She then makes the heartbreaking decision to leave her homeland for France, optimistic about her future, shaped indelibly by her past.
 
(LY)  Discovery: Did the oldest civilization on Earth exist in Persia?

Persepolis' Marjane Satrapi's new film "The Voices"

Wednesday, 23 April 2014

It's Shakespeare's Birthday (video)

Ashley Wells, Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; BBC; Delahoyde; Anderson; de Vere S.A.
Whoever it was who wrote these words must be remembered as world heritage (BBC)

There are tell-tale signs of the true author (de Vere Society Australia)


(BBC) William Shakespeare, the pseudonym of a British writer (likely the historical Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) and/or writers, wrote many popular and widely studied plays. They are unlocked by actors and directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company, a fantastic resource for students and teachers of Shakespeare. More
  • E-BOOK: The Hyphen, the Mask, the Daughter
  • E-BOOK: Shakespeare by Another Name (view)
  • What the world loses because of sexism as explored in Reincarnating Shakespeare’s sister: Virginia Woolf and the “uncircumscribed spirit” of fiction. The tension established between the writing subject and this vital “spirit” or “reality” has implications for the relationship between women and fiction Woolf imagines in A Room of One’s Own. For the movement of the writing subject beyond the self and towards the vital “spirit” of the “real” proves to be essential for the reincarnation of “Shakespeare’s sister,” that is, for the creation of a genuinely feminine literature (not the other SS).
  • VIDEO: Shakespeare's Restless World
    Neil MacGregor explores the world of Shakespeare and his audience through 20 objects from that turbulent period.
Edward de Vere (Oxfordian theory of authorship) rivals France's Moliere, Spain's Cervantes, Latin America's Garcia Marquez, North America's plain Jane Austin, England's Virginia Woolf, China's... well, everyone gets the picture. But who was "the Bard"? According to Dr. Delahoyde of Washington State University: 
 
The Real Shakespeare
Remembering literature (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dtvpl)
 
J. Thomas Looney [Loan-ee], an English schoolteacher early in the 20th century for whom the Stratford myth [referring to Shakespeare's alleged birthplace] seemed worse than unsatisfactory, went back to the start of the logical process. 
 
From the works themselves he constructed a list of [at least 18] traits that must have been associated with the true author:...

Looney found a perfect match in the Dictionary of National Biography when he read about Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Looney published his discovery in 1920; unfortunately, therefore, some would like to dub this the Looney theory (though his name is pronounced Loan-ee, like Roosevelt). But Freud was convinced by it; Orson Welles was; Leslie Howard, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Irons, Supreme Court judges, scholars, and more and more have been ever since.

The de Vere family, originally from France, settled in England before the Norman Conquest. In 1066, Alberic (or Aubrey) de Vere sided with William the Conqueror and afterwards was rewarded with many estates. The youngest son of William, Henry, appointed de Vere the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England -- involving duties associated with coronations.

De Vere is the Bard without getting credit.
The fourth successive Aubrey in the 1100s was created Earl of Oxford. An Earl of Oxford was a favorite of Richard II (and therefore is excised from that history play), another was given a command at the battle of Agincourt, and Earls of Oxford supported the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses in the 1400s. One accompanied Henry VII in 1485 and proved himself invaluable at Bosworth Field. More


This is clearly a mask covering a face
Lady Susan de Vere (1587-1629), Countess of Montgomery, was the producer and "Grand Possessor" of the First Folio (1623), the Collected Works of "William Shake-speare," the pen-name of her father the Elizabethan courtier, poet, and playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.
 
Considering that more shelf space in book stores and libraries is dedicated to Shakespeare, and more movies cover the subject than any other, that makes Susan de Vere the most important person in history.

Yet, she has been completely erased from the picture by the elitist snobs of the Stratford Sham Industry. Until the de Veres came along there was no book, no Wikipedia page, no documentary, and no movie about this very resourceful woman, who despite the social constraints of the time, cunningly figured out a way to send us the ultimate "message in a bottle."
 
Still unpublished before Susan de Vere’s First Folio and otherwise lost to posterity were:... More

By Another Name
Mark Anderson (shakespearebyanothername.com)
Shakespeare by Another Name (Anderson)
The debate over the true authorship of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that it was Wm. Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from [the hamlet of] Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man, who apparently owned no books and never left England, wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility.

Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford -- an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive, and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shake-speare" disguise.
 
Yes, I was wearing a mask! (DVSA)
"Shakespeare" by Another Name is the literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the story of de Vere's action-packed life -- as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer and, above all, prolific ghostwriter -- finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works.

Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere’s personal copy of the Bible (in which he underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references). More

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

Guardian: Only 1% of Snowden files published

Pat Macpherson, Ashley Wells, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly;
Americans in D.C. protest NSA spying on us after Snowden's revelations (DN!)
The NSA illegally spies on citizens, allies, and anyone it wants to, and Obama knows it.
 
Cool, he's only published 26 of 58,000 leaks.
Mr. Rusbridger said the paper had "made very selective judgements" about what to publish.
 
Only 1% of files leaked by former US intelligence analyst Edward Snowden have been published by the Guardian newspaper, its editor has told members of Parliament (MPs).
 
1984: We laugh, but this is Orwellian spying
But Mr. Alan Rusbridger told the Home Affairs Select Committee the Guardian was not a "rogue newspaper."
 
He insisted the paper's journalists were "patriots," and he hailed the UK's democracy and free press.
A government spokesman said later it still believed that publishing the material had damaged national security.
"We're not going to be put off by intimidation but nor are we going to behave recklessly” - Alan Rusbridger
I hope the ol' chaps at the NSA won't be mad
Mr. Rusbridger told MPs that senior officials in Whitehall, the US administration and the US senate's intelligence committee had told the paper "no damage" had been caused. He also said criticism about damage to national security made by intelligence chiefs at a different committee hearing last month had been "very vague and not rooted in specific stories."
 
"There are different views about this," he said. "It's impossible to assess because no one has given me specific evidence."
 
Asked by committee chairman Keith Vaz MP if he "loved this country," Mr. Rusbridger said [yes but first asserted that] he was "slightly surprised to be asked."

"We are patriots, and one of the things we are patriotic about is the nature of the democracy and the nature of a free press and the fact that one can in this country discuss and report these things," he said.
Analysis
A month ago the heads of Britain's three spy agencies used their first public appearance before parliament to launch an attack on the leaking [whistle blowing] of details about Britain and America's intelligence gathering capabilities. Today was a chance for the editor of the newspaper which published stories based on those leaked documents to make his case.

Tuesday, 26 November 2013

Comedy: Monty Python to reunite! (video)

Wisdom Quarterly; Monty Python's Flying Circus ("Life of Brian"); Mox News (MOX News)
Brilliant satirical look at Western Judeo-Christian religio-cultural foundations ("Life of Brian")

The remaining members of the troupe announce a reunion on the GMT (BBC.co.uk), and the legend will continue for world-famous British comedians. Full (Telegraph.co.uk)

Brian is mistaken for a messiah, runs to hide with yogi hermit
 
"Loretta" skit, "Life of Brian" as feminist radicals in-fight

On the extreme edge of satire: Hitler and Nazis in England

Saturday, 23 November 2013

Buddhism and Social Action

Amber Larson, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Ken Jones, "Buddhism and Social Action: An Exploration" (Paul Ingram, editor, Buddhist Society's journal The Middle Way (Vol. 54, No. 2)
WARNING: Graphic self-immolation! A harmful and condemnable act of suicide conflating Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist concepts praising martyrdom in the name of "protest" -- bringing attention to U.S. War on Vietnam abuses by a Zen Buddhist monk. This harmful idea currently modern Tibetan monastic extremists.

1.1 Buddhism and the new global society
Protester (Time/Ted Soqui/Shepard Fairey)
It is the manifest suffering (dukkha, disappointment, lack of fulfillment, unsatisfactoriness, misery) and folly (moha, delusion, wrong view, avijja ignorance) in the world that invokes humane and compassionate social action in its many different forms.

For Buddhists this situation raises fundamental and controversial questions. And here, also, Buddhism has implications of some significance for Christians, humanists, and other non-Buddhists. By "social action" we mean the many different kinds of action intended to benefit humankind.
 
These range from simple individual acts of charity, teaching, and training, organized kinds of service, "right livelihood" (nonharmful survival) in and outside the helping professions, and through various kinds of community development as well as to political activity in working for a better society.

(Nati) Burmese Theravada monks lead Saffron Revolution against dictator
 
Occupy L.A. activist (WQ)
Buddhism is a pragmatic teaching that starts from certain fundamental propositions about how we experience the world and how we act in it. It teaches that it is possible to transcend this sorrow-laden world of our experience and is concerned first and last with ways of achieving that transcendence.

What finally leads to such transcendence is what we call wisdom (paññā or prajna). The enormous literature of Buddhism is not a literature of revelation and authority. Instead, it uses ethics and meditation, philosophy and science, art and poetry to point a way to this wisdom.
 
Similarly, Buddhist writing on social action, unlike secular writings, makes finite proposals which must ultimately refer to this wisdom, but which also are arguable in terms of our common experience.
 
In the East, Buddhism developed different "schools" or "traditions," serving the experiences of different cultures, ranging from Theravada Sri Lanka through Vajrayana Tibet and Mongolia to Zen Japan. Buddhism may thus appear variously as sublime humanism, magical mysticism, poetic paradox, and much else.

"Anonymous" NSA/CIA spy
These modes of expression, however, all converge upon the fundamental teaching, the "perennial Buddhism." Drawing upon the different Asian traditions to present the teachings in an attempt to relate them to our modern industrial Western society.
 
From the evidence of the Buddha's discourses, or sutras in the "Long Discourses" (Digha Nikaya), it is clear that early Buddhists were very much concerned with the creation of social conditions favorable to the individual cultivation of Buddhist values. 

An outstanding example of this, in later times, is the remarkable "welfare state" created by the Buddhist emperor, Asoka (B.C.E. 274-236). Ven. Walpola Rahula stated the situation -- perhaps at its strongest -- when he wrote:

"Buddhism arose in India as a spiritual force against social injustices, against degrading. superstitious rites, ceremonies, and sacrifices; it denounced the tyranny of the caste system and advocated the equality of all [people]; it emancipated woman and gave her complete spiritual freedom."
- Ven. Rahula (1978)

Lula, Freedom's daughter (occupyla.org)
Buddhist scriptures indicate the general direction of Buddhist social thinking, and to that extent they are suggestive for our own times. Nevertheless it would be pedantic, and in some cases absurd, to apply directly to modern industrial society social prescriptions detailed to meet the needs of social order which flourished 2[6] centuries ago.
 
The Buddhist householder of the "Advice to Householders Discourse" (Sigalovada Sutta, DN 31) experienced a different way of life from that of a computer consultant in Tokyo or an unemployed black youth in Liverpool [England].

And the conditions which might favor their cultivation of the Middle Way must be secured by correspondingly different -- and more complex -- social, economic, and political strategies.
 
It is therefore essential to attempt to distinguish between perennial Buddhism on the one hand and, on the other hand, the specific social prescriptions attributed to the historical Buddha which related the basic, perennial teaching to the specific conditions of his day.

(Blazing Wisdom) Buddhism: Philosophy, Religion, or Science of Mind

We believe that it is unscholarly to transfer the scriptural social teaching uncritically and with careful qualification to modern societies, or to proclaim that the Buddha was a democrat and an internationalist. The modern terms "democracy" and "internationalism" did not exist in the sense in which we understand them in the emergent feudal society in which the Buddha lived.

Buddhism is ill-served in the long run by such special pleading. On the other hand, it is arguable that there are democratic and internationalist implications in the basic Buddhist teachings.
 
Wat Maha Leap, Cambodia (BokehCambodia/flickr)
In the past 200 years society in the West has undergone a more fundamental transformation than at any period since Neolithic times, whether in terms of technology or the world of ideas. And now in the East, while this complex revolution is undercutting traditional Buddhism, it is also stimulating Asian Buddhism; in the West it is creating problems and perceptions to which Buddhism seems particularly relevant.
 
Throughout its history Buddhism has been successfully reinterpreted in accordance with different cultures, while at the same time preserving its inner truths. In this way has Buddhism spread and survived.
 
The historic task of Buddhists, both East and West, in the 21st century is to interpret perennial Buddhism in terms of the needs of industrial humans in the social conditions of their time and to demonstrate its acute and urgent relevance to the ills of society.

(PS) Zucotti Park: Buddhist monk visits Occupy Wall St. protests
 
To this great and difficult enterprise Buddhists will bring their traditional boldness and humility. For certainly this is no time for clinging to dogma and defensiveness. More

Wednesday, 9 October 2013

"How to Clear Your Mind" (Allure Magazine)

Dhr. Seven, Amber Larson, Wisdom Quarterly; Andy Puddicombe (GetSomeHeadspace.com), Brooke Le Poer Trench (Allure.com, Oct. 2013 issue); ilanadonna (video)
Mind racing? Focus on something concrete -- like the sensation of touching something.
 
"Insider's Guide," p. 142 (Oct. 2013 issue)
The former Buddhist monk Puddicombe cofounded Get Some Headspace and is the author of Get Some Headspace: How Mindfulness Can Change Your Life in Ten Minutes a Day.

Everyone feels overwhelmed at some point... But what is the most profitable way to respond? We can react -- follow patterns dictated by habit, neurosis, or social conditioning. We can also respond purposefully, try a new way of coping, enter upon a mindful solution.

The thing is, we would first have to be aware. And the habit of bare awareness with clear comprehension (sati-sampajañña) is not the habit most of us have been developing. But it is the  good habit the Buddha recommended on the path to enlightenment.


Even on the path to mundane success, mindfulness is useful. There is no such thing as too much mindfulness. In the development of five crucial factors for success in meditation, there can be too much confidence (faith), there can be too much wisdom. One should temper the other. There can be too much energy, there can be too much concentration. These, too, should be balanced, one by the other. 

Definition
But the fifth, this sati, which we translate as "mindfulness" (bare awareness, thoughtless awareness, nonjudgmental awareness, vigilance, diligence, wakefulness, nondistractedness, effortless mono-tasking, nonforgetfulness, remembering to remember, childlike presence of mind or beginner's mind, etc.), cannot be overdone.
  • Mindfulness has a separate meaning with which it should not be confused. "Recollection" or active-contemplation is the "memory" or remembering/bringing to mind side of "mindfulness." It is the turning, thinking over, pensively considering or "rotating" a theme in mind. This rotation (ratiocination, cogitation) is the actual meaning of the English word "meditation." The Buddhist word we commonly translate as "meditation" is bhavana, which has the much broader meaning of cultivation, development, or literally "bringing into being." There are three other words that might better be translated as "meditation" in this older English language sense -- janeti (from jhana, getting to "absorption"), kammatthana (field to be cultivated or worked or acted upon, from kamma, karma, one's meditation subject or theme), and anussati (pondering, recollecting, contemplating, from anu = "scrutiny" + sati = "mindfulness," i.e., long consideration or "consideration all the way around"). More
One is aware-and-clear as one goes about one's day, as one sits on a meditation cushion, as one thumbs through Allure and gets to page 142. Mr. Andy Puddicombe explains the rest, showing how just 10 minutes of practice a day can change a life.


(US.Macmillan.com) A former Buddhist monk with over 10 years of teaching experience, Puddicombe has been acknowledged as the UK's foremost mindfulness meditation expert. Like so many of his students, he began his own meditation practice as an ordinary, "busy" person with everyday concerns. He has since designed a program that fits neatly into a jam-packed daily routine proving that just 10 minutes a day can make a world of difference.


Beautiful Mindfulness
Is Allure good reading? Not really.
(Allure/Lois B. Morris) Does plastic surgery actually make people happier? Yes... Ugh, actually it's hard to tell because we now cannot wipe these stupid expressions off our Botoxy faces.
Can something as simple as twisting on a faucet or spinning the wheel on an iPod have a psychological impact? Hmm, let me hold my chin and scratch my head while I think about that. 
(Allure/Kristin Sainani) Meditation and exercise help prevent colds and flu, research suggests. 
Does exposure to brightness at night affect your mind? 
A woman's mind-set while eating may influence her metabolism, surprising research has shown.
Mood News: Romance Risk
When women have romantic relationships on their mind, they're more likely to consider unhealthy ways of enhancing their appearance.
Mood News: Seeing More Clearly 
It's possible to improve your eyesight by changing your mind rather than your prescription. 
A facial can make or break your skin. Keep a few rules in mind and your skin will glow.
Scents of Self
Everyone knows fragrances [stink of chemical odorants and flavorants and pungent volatile organic compounds that harm the brain with excitotoxic effects. But did they know that...]