The membership of this club is restricted to a handful of powerful men who determine daily the interest rate, the availability of credit, and the money supply of the banks in their own countries. They include the governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve, the Bank of England, the Bank of Japan, the Swiss National Bank, and the German Bundesbank. The club controls a bank with a $40 billion kitty in cash, government securities, and gold that constitutes about one tenth of the world's available foreign exchange. The profits earned just from renting out its hoard of gold (second only to that of Fort Knox in value) are more than sufficient to pay for the expenses of the entire organization. And the unabashed purpose of its elite monthly meetings is to coordinate and, if possible, to control all monetary activities in the industrialized world.

LONDON/NEW YORK (Reuters) - More than six million demonstrators turned out across the world on Saturday in a wave of protest supporting international leaders in urging the United States not to rush into a war against Iraq.

From Canberra to Cape Town, from Karachi to Chicago, people from all walks of life took to the streets to pillory President Bush as a bloodthirsty warmonger in the biggest demonstration of 'people power' since the Vietnam War.

The largest outcry against war occurred in the European countries whose leaders have vocally supported Bush's position at the United Nations....

Virtually without dissent, the House conferees accepted a bipartisan Senate provision written by Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican, and Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, stipulating that the program cannot be used against American citizens. The conferees also agreed to end research on the program — in effect shutting it down — in 90 days unless the Pentagon submits a detailed report on the program's cost, goals, impact on civil liberties and prospects for success against terrorists. What this means, in effect, is that if the program continues at all, it will be as a low-intensity research project under close Congressional supervision.

Question: "What proof do you have that Iraq has Weapons of Mass Destruction?"

Colin Powell: "We kept the receipts."

"Do you think government could be run better?

Then how could you not blog right now?

Blogs are a combination of Revolutionary musket, Martin Luther's theses, Poor Richard's Almanack, and Paul Revere's ride.

How could you not seize a musket when offered, or hold the nail and mallet and pound your broadside onto the Wittenberg church door?

How could you not turn the crank on Ben Franklin's printing press, or swing up onto Paul Revere's horse?

Blog. Blog to your family, and blog in the communities where you hold thought leadership. Tell the world it must change, and how you think it should.

The tools of change are at hand today -- they're simple, and Revolutionary, right now. I happen to be a toolsmith, and I'm working with everything I've got to make them more powerful and more widespread, as are many others. But the time to start is now.

Blog. Blog now. Tell the world it must change, and how you think it should."

"Individuals need to rise up and sieze the power they have always had and been urged to forget. Beyond voting, we need to organize and actively debate everything, from the sidewalks in our home towns to the bills before Congress and the ad hoc rulings from the executive branch. We need a parallel government that forces the attention of politicians back to the people and away from the monied interests.

Why would this work? Because politicians go where the power is and money is merely a proxy for power and time (because you can buy people's time or their attention through broadcast media). An active populace, a Jacksonian revival, with a thousand Lincolns spinning homely leadership, and a thousand Dr. Kings igniting our indignation toward arbitrary exercises of power by something called "the majority" would erase the proxy power of lobbyists and career representatives of big contributors and drive the return of an American dialog.

We should use the connections to establish parallel governments at every level, until the governments adopt the dialog by default, which they will do, because American government is still by people and for people at its roots. There are good people in government, and a lot of snails and weasels, too. Give the dedicated civil servant and the earnest legislator a constituency and they can change things in weeks, even days. Decisions can and will be made based on the will of the people through informed and open debate."

"Think about it. France and Germany have put five centuries of wars behind them, including two devastating world wars, to form a new union with shared currency and desires to forge a broad common foreign policy. Such a step is revolutionary among ancient nation-state rivals with different cultures.

But it doesn't stop there. The European Union is a remarkable experiment - the first time in history when states have been willing to give up real hunks of their own national sovereignty in order to join a new civilizational project. Turks, Bulgarians and Latvians are begging to pay the considerable admission fee to be let in.

The reigning premises of the Union are that states must be truly democratic, they must protect human rights and civil liberties, and that war among its members should be an unthinkable option. These states see themselves as a gradually expanding community, acquiring ever new members and geographical spread - but only after they meet strict criteria. They aspire to form a new force in the world - and are well on the way. This is the first time we have witnessed the emergence of an "empire" built on consensus and common desire rather than power and conquest - hardly the stuff of the "Old Europe."

It is America that represents the "Old World." This is not a pejorative aspersion. The United States now sees itself as the benign hegemon - or policeman - of the world, undercutting any and all efforts by potential rivals, friendly or not, to cast a shadow over overwhelming U.S. power."

"Despite heavy advertising and PR greenwash, despite a cozy relationship with the White House, Monsanto's image, profits, and credibility have plunged. Its aggressive bullying on Frankenfoods, its patents on the Terminator gene, its attempt to buy out seed companies and monopolize seed stocks, and its persecution of hundreds of North American farmers for the "crime" of seed-saving, has made Monsanto one of the most hated corporations on Earth.

Monsanto will likely soon be broken up, with its parts sold off to the highest bidder. The New York Times reported 1/14/03, that 'With its stock price low, Monsanto is considered a takeover target. by investment banks. and could be bought and sold off in pieces.'"

"Took part in a thought-provoking phone conference this evening with Joi Ito, Clay Shirky, Ross Mayfield, Peter Kaminski, Liz Lawley, and Gen Kanai. We talked about emergence in weblogs (is there any? how do we see it?) and its possible impact on democratic processes (could it happen? how?). We plan to follow up on this, with other phone conferences (ask Joi if you want to join us) and complements such as the Emergent Democracy channel."

" Innovation is inefficient. More often than not, it is undisciplined, contrarian, and iconoclastic; and it nourishes itself with confusion and contradiction. In short, being innovative flies in the face of what almost all parents want for their children, most CEOs want for their companies, and heads of states want for their countries. And innovative people are a pain in the ass. [...]

One of the basics of a good system of innovation is diversity. In some ways, the stronger the culture (national, institutional, generational, or other), the less likely it is to harbor innovative thinking. Common and deep-seated beliefs, widespread norms, and behavior and performance standards are enemies of new ideas. Any society that prides itself on being harmonious and homogeneous is very unlikely to catalyze idiosyncratic thinking. Suppression of innovation need not be overt. It can be simply a matter of people’s walking around in tacit agreement and full comfort with the status quo. [...]

Our biggest challenge in stimulating a creative culture is finding ways to encourage multiple points of views. Many engineering deadlocks have been broken by people who are not engineers at all. This is simply because perspective is more important than IQ. The irony is that perspective will not get kids into college, nor does it help them thrive there. Academia rewards depth. Expertise is bred by experts who work with their own kind."

"It's not very big at all. I picked it up - you can pick it up with one hand. Took it out actually on a sidewalk. This device gathered, very passively, less than one watt of power from the environment - I won't say how it was done, I'm not allowed to at this point - and the machine started up. It generated hundreds of watts of power in usable form. We hooked this up ourselves, so there was no mystery about it. We even selected the things to hook up to this thing. It ran a 300-watt light bulb, a 100-watt light bulb, a stereo and an oscillating fan with an electric motor, all at the same time with literally no artificial manmade input of power."

• Drunken frat boy drives country into ditch.
  
• Bush/Cheney: Malice in Blunderland
  
• Who would Jesus bomb?
  
• War begins with 'Dubya'.
  
• Bush is proof that empty warheads can be dangerous.
  
• Let's bomb Texas, they have oil too.
  
• How did our oil get under their sand?
  
• Daddy, can I start the war now?
  
• 1000 points of light and one dim bulb.
  
• Sacrifice our SUV's, not our children.
  
• Preemptive impeachment.
  
• Frodo has failed, Bush has the ring.
  
• Look, I'll pay more for gas!
  

Only two days after Colin Powell made his presentation to the U.N. Security Council, the evidence he provided is unraveling. Through interviews with experts, intelligence sources, and an examination of the physical evidence, reporters are piecing together facts that refute all of his major claims.

" When I think about the times when I have felt most creative, most alive, most energized I think about times when I've connected with other people. A lot of times it's when I've been in a group that is in the zone. That zone is sometimes called high performance, excellence, or high productivity. I bet everyone can think of experiences you've had with groups like this.

I've always been fascinated by the dynamics of these great groups. What is it about the relationships, the context, the environment, the task, the leadership, the facilitation, and all the other factors that makes the difference? What if we could live and work like this more of the time? What can we do as a member of any group we're in to turn up the dial on the energy, passion, and fun? What do people with sponsorship, leadership, and other key roles need to do to create the conditions for these groups to grow and thrive?"

Inherently Bridging Exclusive Quality Proposition Channel

Upwardly Configured Interactive Paradigm Empowerment Option

Operationally Value-Added Movement Differentiation Decision

Business2.com reports that while many corporations have monitoring tools and restrictions on Internet usages for non-work related activities, these can have negative effects on the productivity of the workplace. The report notes that people have to take days off from work to deal with personal business that could have been done in a few minutes or hours from a work net connection, and that employee morale is generally down when net controls are in place. A related study suggests employees spend more time doing work from home than playing at work.

"Two nights ago, Bush's speechwriter was on The Daily Show, the Jon Stewart fake news program that's funny because it blurts out the truth. The speechwriter explained with glee how he came up with the phrase 'Axis of Evil'. He originally wrote 'Axis of Hatred', but his boss (not Bush) took one look at it and said, "No, it's the 'Axis of Evil'", repeating it a few times aloud to see how it sounds.

This constituted the debate over whether these countries actually are evil and the effect classifying them as such would have. A couple of lobes short of The West Wing, eh?"

"...Now, however, George W. Bush has made it clear that all I need to do is run out of patience, and then I can wade in and do whatever I want!"

"Contrary to expectations, urban landscapes are some of the most interesting ecologies. The variety of landscapes and microclimates (roads, parks, gardens, rail, canals, industries), the intense flow of exotic materials for commerce and gardening, and continual disturbance, all contribute towards many opportunities for nature. Due to such variety, cities are often more biologically diverse than the surrounding countryside. Nature is astoundingly creative, and keen to exploit subtle convoluted chance.

Nature continues to happen, in more astounding forms, even within our most artificial environments. Some bizarre relations of humans and nature from The Ecology of Urban Habitats

• The overall result is that urbanized areas, despite a large reduction in the total vegetation cover, support a higher number of species than the surrounding countryside. [p. 11]
• .. tropical fauna and flora occurs in certain canals where water used to cool machinery is discharged. Thermal pollution of the River Don by the steel industry has enabled wild figs to colonize its banks, [p. 118]
• In fact all industry, as it gets tidied up, becomes less interesting for wildlife. The very features that allow a rich flora and fuana to survive - the squalor, rubbish, old buildings and machinery, derelict huts, rotting dumps, ineffiecient handling - are becoming unacceptable to management [p. 122]
• [Oxford ragwort] A native of Southern Italy, was cultivated in the Oxford Botanical Garden for over a hundred years before it eventually escaped (1794) and soon reported as plentiful on almost every wall in the town. About 1879 it reached the Great Western Railway system where the plumed seed engaged in a new form of dispersal, being carried along in the vortex of air behind express trains, or even inside them [p. 139]
• the reasons for caraway being limited to railway verges in Scotland ... caraway cake topped with fresh seeds was pocketed at post-funeral teas ... on the way home they tried to eat it, gave up and threw it out of the window [p. 142]
• A more subtle effect of dogs can be observed on the base of street trees against which they urinate. This area, known as the canine zone, carries a different epiphytic flora to the rest of the trunk. [p. 162]
• Starlings were successfully introduced into New York in 1890-91 as part of a project to establish in the States all the plants and animals mentioned by Shakespeare. [p. 171]
• .. [an] experiment took place in Germany during the Third Reich when exotics [foreign plants] became enemies of the state and for a short time naturalistic planting flourished ... [p. 184]"

On April 20, 1967, the unmanned lunar lander Surveyor 3 landed near Oceanus Procellarum on the surface of the moon. One of the things aboard was a television camera. Two-and-a-half years later, on November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan L. Bean recovered the camera. When NASA scientists examined it back on Earth they were surprised to find specimens of Streptococcus mitis that were still alive. Because of the precautions the astronauts had taken, NASA could be sure that the germs were inside the camera when it was retrieved, so they must have been there before the Surveyor 3 was launched. These bacteria had survived for 31 months in the vacuum of the moon's atmosphere. Perhaps NASA shouldn't have been surprised, because there are other bacteria that thrive under near-vacuum pressure on the earth today. Anyway, we now know that the vacuum of space is not a fatal problem for bacteria.

Biologists Raœl Cano and Monica Borucki had extracted bacterial spores from bees preserved in amber in Costa Rica. Amber is tree-sap that hardens and persists as a fossil. This amber had entrapped some bees and then hardened between 25 and 40 million years ago. Bacteria living in the bees' digestive tracts had recognized a problem and turned themselves into spores. When placed in a suitable culture, the spores came right back to life.