As a recent series of articles in Salon has made clear, payola is alive and well in the music business. But urban radio remains a world apart, the Wild Wild West of the music industry. In the world of white pop and rock radio, virtually everything on the air is bought and paid for, but in an increasingly corporatized way, with the money going to the station's budget. In urban radio, by contrast, the cash still goes into the personal bank accounts of powerful programmers and consultants, sources say.

The United States has refused to sign up to an international agreement designed to enforce a ban on the use of biological weapons.

Washington's representative to the United Nations-sponsored talks in Geneva said the US was unable to support the draft accord - the result of years of debate - because it would not achieve its goals and would hurt American interests.

• Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women
• Convention on the Rights of the Child (the USA and Somalia are the only two countries who refuse to sign)
• International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights
• Kyoto Climate Accord
• International Mine Ban Treaty (banning antipersonnel landmines)
• The Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty

At Any Cost : How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election by Bill Sammon (Hardcover)

Betty Woo's comments: containing only cryptography, methodology, theory, algorythms.

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The Prayer of Jabez : Breaking Through to the Blessed Life (The Breakthrough Series : Little Books, Big Change) by Bruce H. Wilkinson (Hardcover - November 2000)

Betty Woo's comments: filled with sex, drugs, rock and roll, and conspiracies aplenty

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The Illuminatus Trilogy : The Eye in the Pyramid, the Golden Apple & Leviathan by Robert Shea, et al (Paperback)

Betty Woo's comments: a truly definitive gardening reference

Would like to say that it is absolute insanity here...but really its getting to b e quite common. The anti-capitalist fight has certainly stepped up a notch (concerning western activist summit hopping). Streets are filled with debry and fire. Roving bands of riot cops from the centre clash with thousands of activists back and forth all over the city. There is confirmation now that one person has died in the fights (by being hit by police vans charging crowds at high speed) and another is waiting to be confirmed. Tear gas is everywhere, over a hundred thousand people are taking to the streets all over the city. When one gathering of several thousand is scattered or one decides to leave, you can find 10,000 more just a few streets over, gaining space on the police. No one has made it through the red zone, but that doesn't quite matter. Its a war against the state and its soldiers down here. (as i right this i hear someone beside me confirming photos of a person being shot by the military police....reports of 72 wounded)

When I first went, in the early days, I found people who thought of themselves as very rich and literally said so. They very proudly served their own food and played their own music and wore their own clothes. I came to a particularly beautiful village in the early days, and just out of curiosity I asked a young man to show me the poorest house in the village, and he thought for a minute and then he said, "We don't have any poor houses." Eight years later, I heard the same young man saying to a tourist, "Oh, if you could only help us Ladakhis - we're so poor." Within eight years his self-image had changed dramatically, literally from one extreme to the other, because of the contact with western tourists and the sense that this other way of life was one of complete luxury and leisure and incredible wealth.

Our culture is incredibly seductive around the world, because technological development has transformed our way of life, and we seldom use our bodies to do work. We sit, we write on paper, we push a few buttons, but we use a lot of energy to make sure we don't use our bodies. We've gone to such an extreme that we now suffer from that. What the Ladakhis saw was this way of life in which it looked like we never work, because to people in countries where this development hasn't taken place, our sitting around looks like just having a good time. If I've been working all day in Ladakh writing letters, and I haven't been able to go outside, and I have a headache, and I'm exhausted, and I say to the Ladakhi family where I stay, "Oh, I'm so tired, I've worked so hard", they laugh and think that I'm trying to make a joke, because to them it looks like I was doing nothing, and they were the ones who were out working.

It's a two-way misunderstanding and an imbalance, in that we look at people of the third world, and we see them lifting and carrying things and walking, doing a lot of physical work, and we tend to think, "Oh, that's terrible, constant drudgery." The fact is that there are many benefits to that physical work and that actually - I see this especially with young children - they benefit in terms of using their bodies and running through the fields. But the end result is that for the vast majority of the third world, and even to some extent within the industrialized countries, the rural populations look at the city populations with a misunderstanding of what our way of life entails.

If we are mindful when we start our car, we will know how to use it properly. When we are driving, we tend to think of arriving, and we sacrifice the journey for the sake of the arrival. But life is to be found in the present moment, not in the future. In fact, we may suffer more after we arrive at our destination. If we have to talk of a destination, what about our final destination, the graveyard? We do not want to go in the direction of death; we want to go in the direction of life. But where is life? Life can be found only in the present moment. Therefore, each mile we drive, each step we take, has to bring us into the present moment. This is the practice of mindfulness.

"Would you feel the same way with soda?" a more uptownish brunette excitedly asks her bandanna'd friend. "No!" She raises her glass. "I feel alive!" And with that, the two heartily clink glasses.

A few people at the bar turn to check them out, briefly, before looking away again. They probably have no idea they've just laid eyes on the secret agents of capitalism, paid shills for a bottled-water company, hired by a small but rapidly growing marketing firm called Big Fat Inc., that claims to have perfected undercover marketing.

Tom: Heinrich Zimmer said "The best truths cannot be spoken. . . "

Joseph: "And the second best are misunderstood."

Tom: Then you added something to that.

Joseph: The third best is the usual conversation - science, history, sociology.

Tom: Why do people confuse these?

Joseph: Because the imagery that has to be used in order to tell what can't be told, symbolic imagery, is then understood or interpreted not symbolically but factually, empirically. It's a natural thing, but that's the whole problem with Western religion. All of the symbols are interpreted as if they were historical references. They're not. And if they are, then so what?

There seems to be a greater gap in these people I find myself surrounded with. A hole that they cannot fill, and don't even seem to realize exists. It's not the great works they'll never read, the theories and quotes and stories of writers they'll never understand; in the long run, I suppose those don't matter much either. There seems to be a quality of humanity that's lacking. It strikes me that they don't understand anything serious about the other five billion people they coexist with. They do enough to get by, and somehow they find this acceptable. I wouldn't pretend that I do understand. I would, however, assert that I'm interested, even fascinated, by human nature and its reflections in the people I see. Their reflections are windows that I stare at; in my wonder, something slowly comes into focus as I watch, and I begin to discern my eyes, my nose, my chin. I come into focus as I observe, and the thousands of me that roam the waking world quietly align and fall into place. I focus: me. "Awake, arise, or be for ever fall'n," Milton whispers to me.

• Finished a new track entitled "Release Form" which will appear on tbtmo's Vibon 2 compilation CD.
• Finished a remix of Mall's "High and Outside" which will appear on another tbtmo CD release.
• Currently working on a Team Techno full length CD release (again for tbtmo (thanks Rob)).
• Started working on material for an all new (dancefloor oriented) live set. Stay tuned!

Whenever I become discouraged (which is on alternate Tuesdays, between three and four) I lift my spirits by remembering: The artists are on our side! I mean those poets and painters, singers and musicians, novelists and playwrights who speak to the world in a way that is impervious to assault because they wage the battle for justice in a sphere which is unreachable by the dullness of ordinary political discourse.

Designer labels and fast cars may be the dream of millions, but craving material possessions can cause depression and anger, research released on Tuesday showed.

Australian academics found a positive correlation between materialism -- or an ``excessive concern'' for material things -- and negative psychological phenomena.

The advocates of globalization would argue that free and open trade and an expansion of commercial relationships and activities of all kinds are the keys to a brighter future for all. The flaw in this premise lies in the misguided assumption that commerce spurs culture when, in fact, the exact opposite is more often the case.

The new cultural activists would argue that there is not an example in history where people first create commercial relations and then establish a culture. Commerce and government are secondary, not primary, institutions. They are derivative of the culture, not the progenitors of it. People first establish a common language, agreed-upon codes of behavior and a shared sense of purpose--to wit, social capital. Only when cultures are well developed is there enough social trust to support commercial and governmental institutions.

Although we still use pencils, brushes, and musical instruments, our artistic pursuits are becoming increasingly intertwined with the use of digital technology. Are we affecting our creative capabilities when we use all this increasingly complex machinery? And does digital technology help us generate ideas, or merely execute them?

terrorist of emotion
rescuing people from
luxuries of goodness
and reason
self righteous ones!
life is chaos
as it should be
stop pretending like there's such thing as safety and stability
they don't exist
set the bomb, set the explosion
set it in a way that can't be predicted
shock is the terrorist's highest weapon
rescue people from boredom
rescue them from their schedules
jazz and earthquakes, and all sorts of movements of currency
break out of all sorts of bonds
long live actions of freedom and coincidence