The Dalai Lama was making a presentation at the University of Michigan, and was asked by a graduate student studying sustainability "What is your advice to help us maintain hope given the magnitude of the challenge?"

After explaining that the people all across the world have become more aware of environmental concerns in recent decades, and have organized around environmental concerns into Green Parties across the globe, he asks if there is a Green Party here. The audience chuckles, and the Dalai Lama says "If you have a Green Party, I want to join." I know! Amazing, right?

If you care to watch, the video is posted at Green News and Opinion.

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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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I wrote a while back about a book I had read called "How the right used new and alternative media to seize control" or something similar. In the book he describes the combination of self-published books, magazines and newsletters created and distributed by conservatives who couldn't get the time of day from the corporate media.

I believe we can and should follow their example. Blogs are one example of how we are doing this.

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Hello all!

I am working on constructing a Wikipedia portal on Green Politics. I hope to use the portal as a way to spread information about the Greens and Green politics, establish a Green presence on Wikipedia, and hopefully serve as a vessel to create more Green content. If you have worked on Wikipedia before, or are interested in getting involved with the project, please feel free to stop by the portal and contribute. The address is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Green_Politics.

Thanks for your time!

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I feel demoralized. I feel very much like throwing in the towel on the Green Party as an institution in this state (California) and nationally. I have given serious consideration to simply resigning and re-registering as a "Decline To State" voter. I have even given consideration to contacting the Secretary of State and finding out what the process of founding a new political party would be, a "Sane Green Party" of some sort...

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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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Blogs are great--when people use them, post to them, keep them active. They reveal very clearly, however, when nothing's going on in a local party, and, I think, can end up acting as an actual deterrent to activism via the Green Party if they aren't kept up. We've got this problem in Alaska. Both our website and our blogs are mostly defunct. I'm working with Cameron Spitzer to get the GPAK website back on line (I've been having trouble with software), but we've had functional blogs for a while (courtesy Blogger), yet they aren't getting used.

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The Los Angeles Times has a feature they call "Blowback." They will accept a 700-word op-ed article to be posted on their official web site. It is not the same thing as an op-ed printed in the nespaper, of course (for that you have to be a big shot with a Ph.D. repeating clichés everybody has heard a thousand times already). Nevertheless, it is the Los Angeles Times, one of the half-dozen largest circulation newspapers in the United States. Last week the Times ran a pathetic editorial pleading with California's Republican congressional delegation to support the reauthorization of SCHIP. Of course, all but one of the GOP wingnuts voted to sustain Bush's veto. Saturday they posted my op-ed response. They even identified me as a "contributor to Green Commons, a site dedicated to "promoting the visibility and growth of the Green Party of the United States."

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The last time I posted here I was blasted with angry responses from a man, so I'll try again.

:-)

There is a blog called Green Party Peace Network which has been generating interest from folks in State Green Parties who work on peace and justice issues in their states.

This will hopefully be the catalyst to connect all Greens working on these issues.

Check it out.

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Hurricane Katrina slammed into New Orleans, Louisiana two years ago. And (for about fifteen minutes) Democrats, Republicans, and the So-Called Liberal Media actually had a serious discussion about class and race in America. In the coming days we shall read and hear a lot of self-serving partisan poppycock from liberal Democrats that everything that happened in New Orleans was the fault of Bush Republicans. In point of fact, the New Orleans inner-city Democratic Party Machine was up to its neck in cronyism and incompetence long before it was up to its neck in floodwaters.

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More subscribers to cagreens.org, greens.org, and gp-us.org mailing lists use Yahoo Mail than use any other email service provider.

Our subscribers post to over a hundred of these mailing lists through Yahoo Mail's web site. Those postings usually contain a few hundred characters of message that the subscriber actually wrote, and *tens of thousands* of characters of Yahoo advertising and formatting. The actual message is often less than 5% of the total bulk.

That is, when you send Yahoo Mail, you're sending tons of crap.

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The GPUS website home page has a new banner "ad" that promotes the Green Party support for a single-payer health care plan in the US -- something none of the Republican or Democratic party candidates are calling for, but which the American people support. The site's action page (which you *do* have bookmarked, right?) features a call for Medicare style coverage for all. The form letter is here, or scribble your own.

This is the kind of pro-active organizing that can only benefit our party's outreach efforts, at a time when the two major parties are simply not listening to the people.

Thanks, national, and more like this, please.

Consider this an open thread*.

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In the GP-US Media Committee we have a fantastic initiative on the table for attracting Green Bloggers to the 2008 Green Party Nominating Convention. A guerrilla marketing strategy in the finest progressive political tradition, the idea is to draw a healthy number of Green Bloggers to come, participate and do live blogging.

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