Eideard

Yoga is practiced by about 15 million people in the United States, for reasons almost as numerous — from the physical benefits mapped in brain scans to the less tangible rewards that New Age journals call spiritual centering. Religion, for the most part, has nothing to do with it.

But a group of Indian-Americans has ignited a surprisingly fierce debate in the gentle world of yoga by mounting a campaign to acquaint Westerners with the faith that it says underlies every single yoga style followed in gyms, ashrams and spas: Hinduism.

The campaign, labeled “Take Back Yoga,” does not ask yoga devotees to become Hindu, or instructors to teach more about Hinduism. The small but increasingly influential group behind it, the Hindu American Foundation, suggests only that people become more aware of yoga’s debt to the faith’s ancient traditions.

That suggestion, modest though it may seem, has drawn a flurry of strong reactions from figures far apart on the religious spectrum. Dr. Deepak Chopra, the New Age writer, has dismissed the campaign as a jumble of faulty history and Hindu nationalism. R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has said he agrees that yoga is Hindu — and cited that as evidence that the practice imperiled the souls of Christians who engage in it.

The question at the core of the debate — who owns yoga? — has become an enduring topic of chatter in yoga Web forums, Hindu American newspapers and journals catering to the many consumers of what is now a multibillion-dollar yoga industry.

RTFA. To me, the best that religions can offer is guidance to the spirit of charity that lies at the [oft-forgotten] roots of most. I never worked construction projects with Habitat for Humanity because the inevitable prayer sessions were a distraction from the task at hand; but, I would be the last to deny the good performed by such groups.

Ownership of the brand more often comes down to conflict, armed or otherwise, over who owns which patch of ideology, ritual or a chunk of land and livelihood. The article provides beaucoup details. All pretty silly.

Liu Bolin’s amazing camouflage artwork

At first glance, this may look like a photograph of shelves in a supermarket. But look more closely and you may see a man painstakingly painted to blend in with the colourful background. Chinese artist Liu Bolin has become world renowned for his camouflage art. Liu uses a team of two assistants to paint the camouflage onto him to make him invisible, and each photograph can take up to ten hours to set up. In some cases, Liu has his assistants paint his body and then he remains extremely still until an unsuspecting passer-by happens to walk past.

Click on the photo to see a photo gallery of his work.

A Japanese thief, who describes himself as a gentleman cat burglar, has written a popular book giving tips on how to carry out burglaries.

Futabasha Publishing claims that a first print run of 10,000 copies of “Occupation, Thief; Annual income, Y30 million” has almost run out in the 10 days since publication.

Hajime Karasuyama – the pen name of the career burglar – claims to have developed the uncanny ability to guess just where the occupant of any home will have stashed the cash and valuables and provides tips on how to gain access to a locked property and then get away again without leaving any signs.

Karasuyama says he earns around £270,000 a year from burglary…

Karasuyama provides details on how he is able to pick any lock at will and the way to silently use a glass cutter on a window. He also reveals that placing a jeweller’s magnifying eye-piece against a door peep-hole reverses the view and enables him to look inside the house, while he recommends investing in a new hybrid car for going on “jobs” because they have engines that are very quiet and do not attract attention.

Karasuyama also reminisces about some of the best heists of his career, including the time he hired a chauffeur to drive to one address and boldly walking up to the front door dressed in a business suit and brazenly picked the lock.

“I didn’t want to get arrested by the police, so I thought of a way that would make me appear less conspicuous,” he told the magazine.

The editor of the book says, “This book is not targeted at people who might want to become a burglar but more at home-owners who want to know how a thief thinks and how they can better protect their home.”

I guess there should be a follow-on publication on how the Japanese parliament does business on a daily basis. So the Japanese might be better prepared to fire many of the crooks running their government. Probably as true in Japan as it is in the United States.

Visitors to dozens of Web sites purportedly linked to illegal file sharing and counterfeit goods were greeted by this message.

The U.S. government has launched a major crackdown on online copyright infringement, seizing dozens of sites linked to illegal file sharing and counterfeit goods.

Torrent sites that link to illegal copies of music and movie files and sites that sell counterfeit goods were seized this week by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Department of Homeland Security. Visitors to such sites as Torrent-finder.com, 2009jerseys.com, and Dvdcollects.com found that their usual sites had been replaced by a message that said, “This domain name has been seized by ICE–Homeland Security Investigations, pursuant to a seizure warrant issued by a United States District Court…”

The seizures came after a Senate committee unanimously approved a controversial proposal earlier this month that would allow the government to pull the plug on Web sites accused of aiding piracy. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) allows a Web site’s domain to be seized if it “has no demonstrable, commercially significant purpose or use other than” offering or providing access to unauthorized copies of copyrighted works.

The bill hasn’t been voted into law, however.

The proposal has garnered support from dozens of the largest content companies, including video game maker Activision, media firms NBC Universal and Viacom, and the Motion Picture Association of America and Recording Industry Association of America lobbying groups. However, critics such as…civil liberties groups say the COICA could balkanize the Internet, jeopardize free speech rights, and endanger legitimate Web sites.

Slimeballs like the MPAA aren’t deserving of anymore support than their forerunners in the RIAA. But, geeks who go out of their way to break archaic laws in the name of freedom are more than likely to get busted – in this land of liberty. It’s Congress and the courts who get to define what is liberty and what isn’t.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

A Somali-born teenager attempting to detonate what he believed was a car bomb in a packed downtown Portland Christmas tree lighting ceremony on Friday night was arrested by authorities, who had spent nearly six months tracking him and setting up a sting operation, officials in Oregon said.

The bomb in a van parked off the Pioneer Courthouse Square was a fake — planted by F.B.I. agents at the culmination of the elaborate sting — but “the threat was very real,” said Arthur Balizan, Special Agent in Charge of the F.B.I. in Oregon, who identified the suspect as Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old naturalized citizen.

“Our investigation shows that Mohamud was absolutely committed to carrying out an attack on a very grand scale,” Mr. Balizan said in a statement released by the Department of Justice.

He added: “At the same time, I want to reassure the people of this community that, at every turn, we denied him the ability to actually carry out the attack.”

The foiled plot was just the latest jarring terrorist attempt aimed at mass gatherings in the United States, including an attempted car bombing in Times Square this past May. In that case, a Pakistani-born American citizen was arrested and pleaded guilty…

Mr. Mohamud, a sophomore at Oregon State in Corvallis, Ore., had been planning for more than a year to cause mass harm to a large and unsuspecting gathering of people — including children — in their own element, according to the affidavit…

“I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured,” Mr. Mohamud said to undercover agents, according to the affidavit.

RTFA. Archetypical example of a fanatic willing to murder indiscriminately in the name of his ideology.

He deserves a fair trial – and no mercy if found guilty as charged.

UPDATE: Here’s a lengthier, more detailed follow-on article.

A man stands near the crowned head of a statue of Jesus being built in Swiebodzin, 110 km west of Poznan, western Poland, November 4, 2010. The statue, whose body is 33 metres high, is expected to be completed in November.

It’s being erected as a tourist attraction holy monument.

For almost 1,000 years, Lincoln Cathedral has been a sanctuary of peace and spiritual contemplation for the inhabitants of the historic county town.

But the tranquility of the medieval streets surrounding the cathedral is being shattered by binge drinking yobs, who shout obscenities and indulge in “vulgar” behaviour on Friday and Saturday nights, according to a senior churchman.

Canon Alan Nugent, the subdean of Lincoln Cathedral, said the “crude” lifestyle of loutish drinkers had replaced Christian values as the defining influence on modern Britain.

He said he was particularly troubled by the spectacle of inebriated young women who “demean themselves” in public…

“By contrast you can sit in an Italian city of an evening with no fear of drunken yobs.”

Canon Nugent dismissed the suggestion that the English have adopted vulgarity as an “ideology”.

“I suspect the reason is much simpler,” he said. “Christianity no longer has significant influence on the way people behave.

“The deliberate attempt to remove the Christian faith from the national life – or at least seriously to marginalise it – which I have witnessed time and again during the period of my ministry, has succeeded.

“In its place a style of society – very crude, very unattractive – has emerged, which demonstrates itself so often in vulgar behaviour.”

There are occasional moments when I think the conservative scribes of the 4th Estate as managed in the UK really are poking fun at the most out-of-date members of their clan. This article, after all, is one long, strung-out straight line begging for a smartass retort, sentence after sentence.

Life is more complex than that – and blaming someone else for your organizational irrelevance isn’t especially productive.

The tile drainage systems in upper Mississippi farmlands — from southwest Minnesota to across Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio — are the biggest contributors of nitrogen runoff into the Gulf of Mexico, reports a Cornell/University of Illinois-Urbana study.

Nitrogen runoff has been identified as a major contributor to dead zones in the Gulf, where nitrogen fertilizes algae and causes it to bloom, which in turn, depletes oxygen from the water and suffocates other life forms over thousands of square miles each summer.

Tile drainage has greatly increased yields in fertile soils since the 1800s where there once were wetlands. The systems consist of burying perforated pipes under the soil and draining them into canals. When such fields are fertilized, more nitrogen runs off into the Mississippi River watershed, according to the study…

To reduce such runoff, solutions include installing wetlands in areas where tiles drain to biofilter the water and fertilizing fields in the spring instead of the fall. Also, “we know that we are losing nitrogen in the period between cash crops when nothing is growing in the field,” said Laurie Drinkwater. “If we plant winter cover crops and diversify crop rotations, nitrogen losses could be reduced quite a lot.” A 2006 study by Drinkwater’s research group found that, on average, cover crops reduced nitrogen leaching by 70 percent.

Drinkwater added that policymakers need to increase incentives that reward environmentally beneficial farming practices. Currently, direct payments to farmers focus on production outcomes and do not sufficiently emphasize environmental stewardship, she added.

Ain’t she polite?

I’d be hard-pressed to think of any avenue of money between the government and productive enterprise – agricultural, industrial or otherwise – that cared for little else other than profit.

Mujahedeen guerrillas on a captured Russian T-55 tank, 1987

The Soviet Union couldn’t win in Afghanistan, and now the United States has something in common with that futile campaign: nine years, 50 days.

On Friday, the U.S.-led coalition will have been fighting in this South Asian country for as long as the Soviets did in their humbling attempt to build up a socialist state. The two invasions had different goals — and dramatically different body counts — but whether they have significantly different outcomes remains to be seen.

What started out as a quick war on Oct. 7, 2001, by the U.S. and its allies to wipe out al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and the Taliban has instead turned into a long and slogging campaign. Now about 100,000 NATO troops are fighting a burgeoning insurgency while trying to support and cultivate a nascent democracy.

A Pentagon-led assessment released earlier this week described the progress made since the United States injected 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan earlier this year – as fragile.

RTFA for predictable statements from our generals. You know what you will hear from our politicians.

Generally, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, our elected officials can’t pass up a good war during their administration. Or a bad one. Or one that never should have been.

Second-hand tobacco smoke kills upwards of 600,000 people every year, nearly a third of them children, according to a global assessment in The Lancet, a British medical journal.

The findings, released on Friday in the first ever global study, indicate that unlike “lifestyle” diseases, which stem largely from individual choice, the victims of passive smoking pay the ultimate price for the health-wrecking behaviour of others, especially family members.

Among non-smokers worldwide, 40 per cent of children, 35 per cent of women and 33 percent of men were exposed to second-hand smoke in 2004, the most recent year for which data was available across the 192 countries examined.

In addition to 5.1 million deaths caused by active smoking, the final death toll from tobacco for 2004 was more than 5.7 million people, the study concluded.

Nearly half of the passive-smoking deaths occurred in women, with the rest divided almost equally between children and men, according to the study.

RTFA.

Even posting an article like this means I have to crank up the software that removes comment spam. The tobacco industry is only matched by the gun industry when it comes to trying to squash dissent and criticism.