Caring 90's provoked anarchist voices such as "anti-consumerism" or "anti-capitalism" around the world. These cries and call-to-arms of the new activists are now challenged by consumerism society like Japan which has been brought up seriously sick in Sales and Marketing. Maybe they are interested in stimulus of the anarchist aggressiveness. But is it powerful enough to change their everyday life? We propose a future corporate design. This is not a management, nor business plan. We should start with fundamental questions such as: "What working means to us?", "What is working for money?"

Today, corporations spend millions on public relations campaigns to "crystallize public opinion," often in an effort to convince the public that harmful things are actually good for us. Sometimes the companies start by bending the minds of our elected representatives.

This is the first part of a series. In part one, we'll focus on the ways in which corporations and their public relations mind-shapers worked to destroy the Clinton health care plan. Today forty-four million Americans, about one in five people, have no health coverage, and many people cannot afford needed pharmaceutical drugs. Most Americans probably wonder why, despite repeatedly broken campaign promises, Congress never does anything to improve the health care system.

• Finished a new track (to be uploaded shortly).
• Taught myself how to use SoftStep.
• Started reading Steppenwolf.
• Went on a long walk (in sandals, ouch) and washed my feet in a river.
• Practiced with Team Techno.
• Updated my Wishlist.
• Cleaned the house a bit.
• Talked to an old friend.
• Updated my resume.
• Ate some yummy sushi.
• Slept a lot.
• Been overwhelmed with too much stuff to read online.

Larry Causey figured he couldn't afford cancer treatment in a hospital, so he went to a place where it's free: jail.

Causey, 57, called the FBI and told them he was about to rob the post office in West Monroe, La. At the post office, he handed a note to a teller demanding money, then left empty-handed and sat in his car until officers arrested him.

"Larry's very sick, so getting arrested made him very happy," said Jay Nolen, Causey's lawyer.

Causey's medical case may be extreme, but his story isn't uncommon. While statistics aren't available, sheriffs nationwide say they're also arresting people willing to trade their freedom for a free visit to the doctor.

The ease and speed with which citizens get information in the digital era expands democracy, he argues, but the Internet simultaneously makes it all too easy to customize media experiences, narrowing readers' minds and souls.

"Democracy requires at least two things: that people have common spaces where they can share experiences some of the time, and that people have unanticipated, un-chosen exposures to ideas and other people," Sunstein, 46, said recently in the dining room of a busy SoHo hotel.

Traditionally, streets and parks served as the architectural foundations of democratic republics, said Sunstein. In those "public forums," different types of citizens were bound to rub up against one another. In many large cities people still encounter strangers and unconventional ideas, especially on street corners, said Sunstein. Those experiences help people understand each other and better enable them to work together on common tasks, such as participating in the experiment of self-government.

I get these silly (?) chop wood carry water type fantasies every once in a while. You know, live in quiet solitude, enjoying simple pleasures, be patient, make things. But then I notice the pile of dishes in my sink. Run water, wash dishes. Excepting the solitude part (which, who knows, may be necessary) I could do all that here or anywhere. Enjoy simple pleasures, be patient, make things. Sweep the floor, keep the kitchen spotless and derive limitless satisfaction from making her tea or discovering a new melody or learning a new word.

The Semantic Web will bring structure to the meaningful content of Web pages, creating an environment where software agents roaming from page to page can readily carry out sophisticated tasks for users. ...

The Semantic Web is not a separate Web but an extension of the current one, in which information is given well-defined meaning, better enabling computers and people to work in cooperation. The first steps in weaving the Semantic Web into the structure of the existing Web are already under way. In the near future, these developments will usher in significant new functionality as machines become much better able to process and "understand" the data that they merely display at present.

The chemical, beef and poultry industries are waging an intense campaign to delay further an Environmental Protection Agency study showing that consumption of animal fat and dairy products containing traces of dioxin can cause cancer in humans.

Human reality is socially constructed. That is, most of the "facts" that determine our daily lives are socially constructed facts, which are true as long as enough people believe them to be true. The right to own property, the right to not be murdered, indeed the right to continue to live at all; all of these are socially constructed rights, which are true only as long as enough of us believe in them.

American society has created for itself a Mobius-like reality by privileging capital, or property rights, above all else. This has granted corporations the power to purchase the reality that best suits them, and corporations in turn recreate the reality that privileges money. Communities -- places, real or virtual, where people speak directly to each other, without corporate mediation -- are the only hope we have to reassert control over our own reality, and place it back in the hands of people, instead of the fictional entities we call corporations.

It takes 25 minutes to turn a live steer into steak at the modern slaughterhouse where Ramon Moreno works. For 20 years, his post was "second-legger," a job that entails cutting hocks off carcasses as they whirl past at a rate of 309 an hour.

The cattle were supposed to be dead before they got to Moreno. But too often they weren't.

"They blink. They make noises," he said softly. "The head moves, the eyes are wide and looking around."

Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. "They die," said Moreno, "piece by piece."

Under a 23-year-old federal law, slaughtered cattle and hogs first must be "stunned" -- rendered insensible to pain -- with a blow to the head or an electric shock. But at overtaxed plants, the law is sometimes broken, with cruel consequences for animals as well as workers. Enforcement records, interviews, videos and worker affidavits describe repeated violations of the Humane Slaughter Act at dozens of slaughterhouses, ranging from the smallest, custom butcheries to modern, automated establishments such as the sprawling IBP Inc. plant here where Moreno works.

Thinking a lot about the general versus the specific. The general: the abstract, categories, the vague ways in which we dice up the world into generalities. This is not the tree that confronts me now, it is just one of a class of trees. I do not see you, I see a person, I see someone I desire, someone I am bored by, someone I hate. We turn things into qualities, and we lose their specificity, their particularity, their uniqueness in themselves.

On the other hand, when we think about our lives we often fall into the trap of trying to micromanage our existence, trying to control all the details, far into the future, or at least those details that we imagine are crucial to our well-being. We become obsessed with the best way to get ahead in the current office imbroglio, or how to win the affection of this person, or... But perhaps there is something to be said for stepping back from this control freak position: to let our choosing faculty relax in its tendency to try to determine the outcome, but rather just monitor the overall feeling, the color and tenor of the energy of our lives --- and in this way, oddly, to give the details of the world the space to come forward to greet us in all their glory. In other words, we can fade the control freak back, and let the world in its specific, concrete way present itself and become itself.

One day after the Miami Herald published a story that prompted national headlines about George W. Bush being the real winner in Florida, the newspaper effectively recanted. ..

Yet, Wednesday's misleading "Bush Won" story -- pushed by the Herald and its recount partner USA Today -- was widely embraced by the national press corps and applauded by Bush partisans in the White House. The new Herald story, entitled "Recounts Could Have Given Gore the Edge," received only a fraction of the national attention.

I only got the reference to this background image and didn't see where it was used on the site, but Pepsi's Australian site seems to have some subtly, um, titillating graphics to help seduce you into drinking their overly sweet fizzy swill. (Check to the right and slightly below the logo.)

Consider following that little voice in your head because it's telling you what you're supposed to be doing, not how to build a sustainable revenue model. The world's economies have been built by working men and millionaires alike, but the color of the world has been built on the backs of dreamers, visionaries, creators and artists... both groups have found success because they found what truly drove them, whether commerce or creation. I'm suggesting that the key to happiness might be found in isolating the conviction to be who you truly are and stand behind it with all of the conviction and honor that you can muster, because when it's all said and done, that's really all you have. The BMW, the stock options, the big house, the designer shoes… they're nothing without soul.

The world is abuzz - thanks to a huge spew of press releases - about a "philanthropic" effort to "cure cancer". Just download the screen saver, which will cheerfully suck up your spare cycles and get to work eliminating the evil scourge - actually, doing a brute-force chemical interaction model which is one teeny-tiny part of the overall effort to fight cancer. What they forgot to mention was that running the client primarily benefits a for-profit company in Austin, TX which wants to sell your CPU cycles to the highest bidder in exchange for some nice beads.

Some of the stories you missed: The bombing of the Chinese embassy in the former Yugoslavia may not have been an accident. The United States could have stopped genocide in Rwanda. An independent study found that genetically modified foods cause serious health problems in rats. And multinational companies are fighting to commodify the world's water supply.

Those items are all on Project Censored's 25th annual list of the year's most underreported news stories.

Nanoloop is not sample based, but gives full access to the built-in features of the sound chips (like the various noise-"colors") and the software-synthesizer. The softsynth makes intense use of the writable harware-wavetable and the possibilty of quick frequency changes, so no complete wave forms but only control signals need to be processed. Through this hardware orientated hybrid-method, real time editing and complex synthesis becomes possible. All manipulations are performed real-time, there is no "rendering time". Compared to GB sample playback, sound quality is even better because there is no digital distortion by low sampling frequency and bit depth. The whole concept is dedicated to techno-style electronic music, in favor of quick and clear editing, nanoloop misses classic musical accompaniing features like they can often be found in other pocket music devices.

AMERICAN warships were ordered to steam towards Chinese territory last night as the row over a downed US spy plane deteriorated into a stand-off reminiscent of the Cold War.

Pleasure is a human right, and like all rights, it needs to be defended. The last centuries have shown the disastrous witchhunts that can result from the punishment of pleasure. But the right to pleasure is not just one of many human rights, it may be the most important one. Neurological and cross-cultural research has proven that children who are deprived of this right become violent and aggressive. Pleasure is the key to the human value system. The failure to protect it may lead us into another Dark Age of irrationalism and violence. It's already late. We need to defend the right to pleasure before it's too late.

From their food, Americans are exposed to 22 times the suggested maximum level of dioxin, says a new study. The study says levels of dioxin — among the most toxic substances on Earth — remain high in the U.S. food supply although they have declined in the environment...

Meat and dairy products are considered the biggest sources. Dioxins concentrate in animal fat, and the best way to avoid them is to eat more fruits and vegetables...

Dioxins are a family of 219 toxic chemicals found in the environment mostly as a byproduct of industrial processes such as smelting, bleaching of paper pulp and manufacturing of some herbicides or pesticides.

Burning of plastics and toxic waste at high temperatures by medical waste incinerators or kilns can also produce dioxins.

Contained in Agent Orange, dioxins are a toxic chemical known for causing various forms of cancer.

In the end, what is the ethical distinction between a Brazilian who sells a homeless child to organ peddlers and an American who already has a TV and upgrades to a better one — knowing that the money could be donated to an organization that would use it to save the lives of kids in need?