One of the Ten Key Values of the Greens is Community-based Economics. My friend Tian invested his GWB "economic stimulus" check in a pair of custom made shoes. He posted a photo essay here. http://tian.greens.org/MountainView/My/Nook/NewShoes.shtml

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Bruce Perens is running for the board of the Open Source Initiative. OSI is one of the principal guardians of software and information freedom. Its board is tilted towards companies that profit from open source products they control. Bruce will balance that tilt by representing us. He did a damn good job as leader of the Debian organization.

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Yahoo Mail has been refusing messages from the commercial server which hosts twenty GP-US mailing lists. Nobody knows why. It's disrupting GP-US business. Yahoo Mail users who try to ask Yahoo what's up discover there is no customer support for a "free" commercial email account. Well, duh. The GP-US forum managers asked me to suggest some alternatives.

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Last summer I retired the computer "petra-k" which had been serving greens.org and about a hundred other domains. If computers collect positive karma, this one has a lot. It even got reincarnated.

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Every newspaper article about Ralph Nader since 2000 mentions the imaginary Spoiler Effect, at least in passing. "Everybody knows" Nader caused the Bush administration. Of course it's a lie, but the argument is hard to make simple. I'm trying to squish it down to bumper sticker size. Here's a comment for the SF Chronic.

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Microsoft Corporation is trying to buy Yahoo Incorporated. If it succeeds, it will own email service to about half of North American progressive activists. Due to progressives' inexplicable preference for Yahoo Groups, it will own most electronic forums for and about progressive organizing.

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Someone reported on GDI-FreeSpeech that some Green's web form "didn't work."

It doesn't help Steve (or his web engineer) to say "it didn't work." It doesn't help you. It doesn't help the spectators who might benefit from your exchange with Steve. Nobody knows what you tried, or what you expected, or what happened instead.

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Kent Mesplay asked for policy advice about the current "star wars" weapons proposal.

"Missile shields" are an economic, technological, and foreign policy disaster.

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Most Greens are fairly new to email. Not only did they miss the orientation, but they've never known a mailbox without spam. Hardly any of us have used Usenet News. Over half of us use corporate "free" email which is provided to deliver advertisements and collect consumer information for data mining, and have never known professional email, but don't realize how bad the service we've chosen is.

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OVC demonstrated a new version of its paper ballots-of-record voting system in San Luis Obispo yesterday.

Local newspaper story: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/news/local/story/244784.html
OVC email announcement:
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/cgi-bin/dada/mail.cgi/archive/ovcann...

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A pointless and destructive battle rages between a handful of narcissistic screamers and the people trying to keep the GP-US mailing lists usable.

The screamers insist that they cannot communicate in a professional tone, and any request to do so is an attempt to "censor" them. Meanwhile, they bully and intimidate normal people from speaking their minds.

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Some well-meaning boob sent me one of those "action alert, forward this to all your friends" type messages. Except, he didn't really send it to me, he sent it to mailman-owner@cagreens.org. D'oh!

He did just about everything wrong, and managed to score 8.6 in Spamassassin. I could have forwarded the thing to Hotmail and Telstra and got his accounts terminated. Spamming is illegal in Australia. But I felt sorry for him.

Hi Bill, I appreciate what you're doing. You're making some mistakes. I hope you'll appreciate some advice.

1. Careless address harvesting.

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I run a GNU Mailman list for GP-US' International Committee. This morning a message came through with "***SPAM***" in its subject line. Spamassassin gave it a 9.0. That subject line alteration occurs at 8.3.

The message contains a complete copy of an essay from blackagendareport.com questioning the veracity and motives of the "Save Darfur" media blitz. It's a perspective that needs to be heard.

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Yesterday the local and network broadcast television "news" shows led with "black Friday" stories. It's the biggest day of the year for US retailers. "Black" refers to black ink, that is, making a profit.

I was surprised to hear the San Francisco TV and radio "news" stations mention Buy Nothing Day in their coverage. They were surprisingly sympathetic. That is, they didn't apply the "what a bunch of nutballs" slant used against most protest movements.

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Longer version of something I posted in a meta-discussion.

The common sense test is "Is this message really what people expected when they signed up for this list?" Not "Is this issue really really important?" The place where you need to use your best judgement is, "Am I posting this here because it really is the business of this list, or am I exploiting this list to reach more people because my topic is so 'important'?"

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