"Holy macaroni. Why is the official news agency of the People's Republic of China posting a whole bunch of nude body-painting? Have they lost all their little gray Mao suits over at Xinhua? What gives? A couple of these pics are Veruschka Lehndorff art-shots from the mid-1980s. Some official Chinese web-guy has been collecting these things. What could this be about?"

We are a nation of 210 million people reigned by peace and wide access to work. In the last 16 years we have presented significant improvements in income distribution, the rich and poor gap, in balanced geographical occupation and access to education, culture and health.

We are a nation without misery in which education is a priority. A country in which there is a high life expectancy, oriented by sustainable development. We are a country which is able to develop widely accessible technologies. We are a nation with more safety, more justice and with an increasing feeling of social responsibility.

Today, our human relations are based on respect of the elderly and children; we have more time with our families, we are guided by confidence and ethics in our commitments. Equal opportunities are provided and we are recognized in the world by our culture of peace, as a country that has taken a leadership role in the Latin American continent, due to solidarity, full and sovereign international integration.

We are the biggest world production of food, based on a sustainable agriculture that conciliates different forms of production organization. There are no land conflicts. 20 to 30 million people live in "rural towns" producing with more added value.

We utilize our environment assets with preserving actions. Alternative energies are applied. Our cities are clean, non polliuted, with more green spaces accessble to the whole population. Science & Technology research efforts interrelate the private and the public sectors. Small businesses have assured access to the most advanced technologies.

Our participatory and collaborative culture has favored innovation and competitiviness of our products, as well as a Brasilian management style. Every Brasilian is a citizen. The public interest prevails over private interests. The State is controlled by society. Political representation is legitimate and the public administration is guided by morality and effectiveness.

"We are training revolutionaries -- not by indoctrinating them with dogma but by exposing them to a process in which sharing culture rather than hoarding it is the norm," said Joline Blais, a professor of new media at the University of Maine and Still Water co-director.

"It's all about imagining a society where sharing is productive rather than destructive, where cooperation becomes more powerful than competition," Blais said.

BAGHDAD (Plausible News Service) -- The apparent arrest of Saddam Hussein brought a traumatic chapter in the millennia-long history of Mesopotamia to an end earlier today, with immediate and wide-ranging effects being felt throughout the country. Flowers spontaneously erupted across vast stretches of Iraqi desert. Power and water service were restored to millions of Iraqi homes, some of which have never had it in the first place.

"My cable is working again! I can get Bravo channel now! They must have arrested Saddam!" cried a jubilant Walid al-Jibra, dancing in the street in front of his formerly bombed-out store, which was found miraculously restored moments after the announcement. Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis alike were seen joyfully embracing in Basra, while a number of children previously thought to have been killed during the invasion were found to be alive and perfectly healthy. Hospitals reported increases in stocks of medicines, "but hey, we don't need them anyway, half our patients just got up and walked away," according to one staffer.

A statement released by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden acknowledged the defeat for the radical Islamic movement signified by the Saddam arrest.

"Oh well, we might as well just hang it up, as you say," said the emaciated terrorist leader on a video broadcast by al-Jazeera television shortly after the arrest announcement. "This just shows that you can't mess around with the ol' US of A."

Troops met the news with relief. "Well, I am sure enough glad that's all over with," said Sgt. Paul Tarbabe of Tuskeegee, as he began packing his gear for the return home. "Just in time, too -- we oughta all be able to get back home for Christmas now. I've got a six-month-old daughter to meet!"

Donald Rumsfeld and senior Pentagon officials have indicated that with Saddam out of the picture, "our work here is finished," as Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told a press briefing at the Pentagon early this morning. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other officials, for whom the planning and execution of the Iraq operation has been an obsession for years, intend to retire next week and "set up a think tank in Samoa or someplace like that," Wolfowitz said.

The forecast for Baghdad for today and the foreseeable future is sunny, with bright blue skies, a few fluffy white clouds, warm but comfortable temperatures, and copious birdsong.

"Currently the internet is very centralized. People say it isn't, but all the main functions, the DNS servers, and the main pipes all go thru major carriers and companies pipelines. The protocols for this network are governed by ICANN and soon possibly the UN itself. More and more people are getting online thru large cable and telco carriers, making access all the more centralized and controlled by the biggest players. All this is adequately described in the Digital Imprimatur above. There are good and bad reasons for the lockdown, but it still will be that - a lockdown. And there is probably little any one of us can do to stop it's inevitable occurence.

However, what is to stop you, me or anyone else from setting up our own seperate but parallel adhoc local network in our neighboorhoods?

Nothing.

Using very cheap off-the shelf hardware available at radio shack anyone will soon be able to build a GNU Radio that will be able to communicate with anyone else's GNU Radio. These radios will be general purpose wireless computing devices that communicate over the open airwaves. Regulated or not, these devices will flourish underground rapidly as there power to connect and network become apparent. It's only a matter of time before a general purpose GNU Radio ends up in the hands of anyone who wants to get one. While the internet gets more locked down, Microsoft implements strong DRM, and even more ominious lockdowns are put in place along the network itself, more and more hobbiest will be computing and communicating with these handheld units and modified laptops and other devices. The chips running from them will also be modified, cheap and out of control. Certainly they will not be as powerful as the latest Intel or AMD processors with all the DRM built into them, but they will function as general purpose devices without any of those restrictions. Their range could easily extend beyond a mile, and I also suspect you'll start seeing people add rogue (maybe at some point illegal) solar powered repeaters and routers on mountains tops to help one commuity of GNU users communicate with another community."

DC- What is Core Group Theory all about?

AK- Most employees, even senior executives, find their organization does not behave the way they expect it to. Certainly the organization does not do the things it espouses to do. Organizations are unpredictable. They sometimes seem frustrating. This is because we don't understand what purpose they are really trying to serve.

Organizations are actually a kind of complex living system —which move in the aggregate direction set by all the people, top to bottom, who are making decisions at their levels. Core Group Theory says that, when you put all these decisions together, the net result is that the organization exists to serve some group of “key insiders” who are prominent within it.

When you make a decision you may say to yourself, "Is this going to fit with so-and-so’s priorities?" or "I don’t want to be the one to walk into so-and-so’s office and tell him." It is the perceived interests of this core group that actually drives most decision-making.

Freedom requires responsibility. And yet how many of us are truly willing to take responsibility for our own freedom, for our own lives? How many of us, for example, take true and total responsibility for something as basic and fundamental as our own food, for that essential connection to the earth that sustains our very lives? The vast majority of us depend totally upon Power and its Economic System to provide that for us. We eschew any caring for, or connection to, the land. We’re unwilling to make the effort it would take to produce our own food. We literally refuse to get our hands dirty. We, by and large, much prefer immersing ourselves in the infinite greed of the marketplace and the ease and comforts of “civilized” life it provides – for our cars and our oil furnaces, our roads and our televisions, for our fresh strawberries and pomegranates delivered fresh in the dead of winter. Most of us have lived this way for so long that, like teenagers living off their parents, we simply take for granted the effort, the networks and organizations, that bring those things to us. Just as they don’t really understand what it takes to keep the lights on and put food on the table, we have little if any idea about where food or electricity comes from or how they got here – little if any idea about what, exactly, it took to achieve and maintain this state of being, this level of ease and comfort. And then, wanting the comforts but lacking both true knowledge of (and any responsibility for) them, we complain like spoiled teenagers about the necessary restrictions the System requires of our minds and our lives.

We are born into a vast room whose walls consist of a thousand doors of possibility. Each door is flung open to the world outside, and the room is filled with light and noise. We close some of the doors deliberately, sometimes with fear, sometimes with calm certainty. Others seem to close by themselves, some so quietly that we do not even notice.

- Terry Teachout

"I have come to believe that new understandings of cooperation and collective action are emerging in a dozen different fields, with implications far beyond the "technologies of cooperation" that enable smart mobs. I am embarking on a project with The Institute for the Future to map and catalyze a broad interdisciplinary study of cooperation and collective action. This PDF (a preprint from IFTF's latest Ten Year Forecast) highlights some of the issues near and dear to smartmobbers, but also looks beyond the horizons of the work I did in Smart Mobs to sketch out the broader landscape we are beginning to explore. This is an ambitious project and we are looking for foundation or angel funding or corporate funding. If you are an angel or a foundation or a corporation who understands what we are getting at, contact me for a more detailed proposal.

Commons foster innovation. Consider the Internet: at its core, it’s a public good. Anyone who follows the technical protocols can use it. But it’s also a source of commercial innovation and wealth. Tim Berners-Lee did not have to ask permission or pay a fee to launch the World Wide Web. The founders of Amazon and Yahoo! became billionaires through their use of the Internet commons to create new kinds of private property.

The literature of science is also a commons. Once the law of gravity or the antibiotic property of penicillin mold was discovered, people were free to open ski resorts or start pharmaceutical companies. But Newton’s equation and Fleming’s discovery entered the public domain—to benefit humankind and enable others to build on their discoveries for both private and public interest. control the emerging innovation commons.

Large content distributors have stretched copyright laws into territory that formerly was held in the public domain. Broadband carriers are seeking permission to control the content of the data that moves through their parts of the Internet. Incumbent license holders in the TV and radio frequencies are encouraging the Federal Communications Commission to maintain 1920s-style regulation over the new wireless spectrum (although treating it as a commons instead of private property could potentially enable millions more broadcasters than today—with much more innovative programming and services)."

From Webster's (www.websters.com)

Democracy

1. Government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives.

2. A political or social unit that has such a government.

3. The common people, considered as the primary source of political power.

4. Majority rule.

5. The principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.

Plutocracy

1. A form of government in which the supreme power is lodged in the hands of the wealthy classes; government by the rich; also, a controlling or influential class of rich men.

2. A political system governed by the wealthy people

You decide ?

The scientists used tremors from earthquakes to probe the inside of the planet just as sound waves allow doctors to look inside a mother's. The technique, a greatly refined version of earlier efforts, produced a surprisingly sharp image and yielded the first direct measurements of giant spouts of heat, called mantle plumes, that emanate from deep within the planet.

Mantle plumes are believed to cause island chains, such as the Hawaiian Islands and Iceland, when the Earth's crust passes over the column of heat. Although accepted by most scientists, the existence of mantle plumes has been fiercely contested by a minority of researchers in recent years.

Messages will be projected almost instantly by a laser beam on mountains and buildings in Mumbai (Marine Drive), Rio de Janeiro (Ipanema Beach), New York (UN building) and lake Geneva's "Jet d'eau"(water fountain).

Message jockeys (editors based at swissinfo) will view the incoming messages in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Hindi, Portuguese, and Spanish and pass them on within seconds to the projectors. Commercial, sexist or racist messages, or those containing personal insults will not be projected. A message archive will store all the sent messages.

Blogging Is...

1. A form of unedited, authentic self-expression
2. An instant publishing tool
3. An online journal with freshly updated content
4. Amateur journalism
5. Something that will revolutionize the Web (think RSS feeds)
6. A way to create community with your voters, er... readers (think 2,200 comments posted to the Dean for America blog in one day)
7. An alternative to mainstream media (think InstaPundit by Glenn Reynolds and TalkingPointsMemo by Joshua Micah Marshall)
8. A tool to teach students how to write
9. A new way to communicate with customers (think Ray Ozzie, CEO of Groove Networks)
10. A new form of knowledge management inside big companies
11. A way for a bunch of navel-gazers to communicate with one another
12. Something to keep you occupied when you’re unemployed (more people than care to admit fit into this category… have you noticed?)
13. A way to think and write in short paragraphs instead of a long essay (which no one has time to read anyway)
14. Your email to everyone, as A-list blogger Doc Searls puts it (i.e., a way to stay in touch with family and friends)
15. A silly word that’s fun to say (“Gotta go blog now….”)
16. A way of writing with a distinct voice and personality (think Halley Suitt)
17. Something to talk about at cocktail parties (“I blogged Seth Godin and he blogged me back...”)
18. A URL to add to your resume (as in TokyoTim, my 23-year-old son, who’s working as an English teacher in Japan for a year)
19. Something else to do with your mobile phone... think audio blogging and moblogging
20. Something you don’t want your mother to read: what my mother says about blogging

What are weblogs? Regularly-updated websites that typically combine some mix of first-person commentary, web links, images, and news clips, and present the blend in reverse chronological order. Some are solo journals -- personal diaries open to the world; websites that function like ultra-low-budget reality TV shows where aspiring exhibitionists can document every personal detail of daily life, from boyfriends to phone bills to what they ate for breakfast. Other blogs are like collaborative online magazines that feature multiple editorial voices. Blogs can be produced by anonymous individuals with no professional writing experience just as easily as they can by career journalists or celebrity technopundits.

"Je t'aime
oh, oui je t'aime!
moi non plus
oh, mon amour...
comme la vague irrésolu
je vais je vais et je viens
entre tes reins
et je
me retiens-je t'aime je t'aime
oh, oui je t'aime !
moi non plus
oh mon amour...
tu es la vague, moi l'île nue
tu va et tu viens
entre mes reins
tu vas et tu viens
entre mes reins
et je
te rejoins- je t'aime je t'aime
moi non plus
oh, mon amour..."

"I love women as an object, the beautiful women, the mannequins, the models. This is the inner painter in me. I never tell them I love them. Je t'aime... moi non plus (I love you... me neither) expresses erotism overcoming sentimentalism… So many songs about romantic and sentimental love, encounters, discoveries, jealousy, illusions, desillusions, betrayals, remorses, hatred, etc... Then why not devote a song to a sort of love much more current these days: physical love? "Je t'aime" isn't an obscene song, it's very reasonable to me, and fills this gap. Its explanation is that girls say "I love you" during sex, and the man with their ridiculous virility doesn't believe them. They think the girls only say it as a result of enjoyment, of pleasure. I guess I believe the girls, or maybe that's a result of my fear. But that's also an aesthetic step, a search of absoluteness"