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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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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Barack Obama says: "The press has been focused, almost, you know, maniacally, on the issue of race." Meanwhile, a chorus of self-serving, neurotic black intellectuals who supposedly love Brother Barack, bleat: "Let's talk about race!"

No. Let's not.

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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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The business conservatives are screaming for a corporate income tax cut. They claim that the tax rate that US corporations must pay is far higher than their overseas competitors. They are right...kind of. Some are screaming for the rate to be dropped to 25%. We should publicly agree and take it to the extreme by calling for the rate to be cut to 0%.

The Green Party ought to apply a surprising jujitsu move by coming out strongly in favor of the complete elimination of corporate income taxation. After you lift your jaw up off the floor, hear me out.

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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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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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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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[img_assist|nid=866|title=Polar Fashion|desc=|link=none|align=left|width=640|height=225]
The Oliver Report is a new environmental web comic that is designed to educate while taking the edge off of the green movement. Check it out! http://oliverreport.com

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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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This is rich. See below a downright hysterical editorial from the Los Angeles Daily News (our little imitation New York Daily News). The gist of the piece is that Los Angeles Establishment politics sucks, is hopelessly corrupt on account of "the unions, the developers and the other special interests that call the shots." They say "it's going to take something radical to change it." Most of the article is full of praise for the Valley secession campaign that failed a few years ago. This is bogus because having two corrupt governments instead of one is not going to change a damned thing (though it might create new opportunities for Orange County-style Republican crooks favored by Daily News "conservatives"). I post the text here in its entirety as a textbook example of how the MSM is incapable of "thinking outside the box" even while ranting and foaming about "radical" change.

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Is faith in Adam Smith's "Invisible hand of the market" part of Green ideology? Anarchists and liberals over on Yahoogroups' GDI-freespeech seem to think so. Radicals disagree. I guess that makes me a radical. Forwarding my essay from there.

I believe markets are inherently exploitative. The problem is that "free markets" are a transitory phenomenon. They only exist during the period of instability that follows invention of some disruptive technology. In logic design, we call something like that "metastable."

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Democratic Sen. Barack Obama raised an estimated $3 million at a fund-raiser hosted by TV mogul, Oprah Winfrey last week. See below a description by Varsha Rao posted over the weekend on The Huffington Post. It is such a disgusting, nauseating celebration of capitalist wealth and celebrity it's enough to take your breath away. By the way, it is a measure of the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of my fellow African-Americans that I have not found a single criticism of this decadent display on the usual Black-oriented web sites or blogs. Break out your handkerchiefs when you read the part where Oprah "with emotion" told the glitterati she feels "blessed to be living the dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. made possible."

Dear Friends: This is about as far as you can get from South Central Los Angeles or Brooklyn or Southside Chicago.

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