This is fairly strange.

Meg Whitman, Republican canidate for CA governor who has spent $125 million of her own money on the race (beating out Bloomberg in NYC), started a foundation in 2007 which has given out most of its money to the Environmental Defense Fund (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman)

The EDF sponsored the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006.

Meg Whitman says she'll suspend the act on her first day.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman

I think Students for a Free Culture is about as new of a new student movement as you can get!

I'm stealing the term from "new social movement" - which really dates back to the seventies so I added a second "new" to it.

The open source movement has been around for a relatively long time, however it looks like it will reach into mainstream culture by transforming itself into a Transparency movement that addresses the need to open up our culture and institutions of power, while maintaining our right to privacy.

We have over 80 users of our Energy Justice Community Map project and the website is picking up speed!

If you care about the planet and the people who live on it, you might consider getting involved in the grassroots movement to stop global warming and the pollution caused by power plants and dirty waste facilities.

While governments fail to take anywhere near sufficient action, my guess is that in 10-20 years we are going to see tens of thousands of people blockading and occupying power plants. It might look like the return of the Civil Rights movement or something totally different.

Autralian 2010 election - they have a very weird system of preferential voting for the Senate which is somewhat proportional. Downside is that parties can make deals allotting their extra votes to other parties - if voters don't set their own preferences. Here you can see the Australian National/Liberal (aka conservative) party narrowly beat the Fishing and Lifestyle party for the last seat in Queensland with the help of votes from the Sex Party.

http://www.abc.net.au/elections/federal/2010/guide/sqld-results.htm

We do not know what a non-Neutral Internet would look like. It might
actually benefit most activist or nonprofit organizations. Here is how that *might* happen...

With a lot of help from someone on the Mailman Developers email list I was able to get Mailman to work with a MySQL database!

This is awesome because Mailman is the leading free mailing list choice. I would have switched to sympa, but it would have meant resetting our server - as cPanel does not work with sympa (as it cannot use the postfix program to handle mail). Mailman seems to have slightly better features than Sympa, and I'm hoping that when Mailman 3 comes out (in 2-3 years??? It is in alpha now), that we can switch to that.

I went to the US Social Forum this past week in Detroit along with the Energy Justice Network.

It was nice to see so many people and to get a taste of the industrial (and labor) spirit that defines Detroit.

BP, in the news for the big oil spill, is planning a billion dollar facility in California to use Petroleum Coke to make Hydrogen and store 90% of the carbon (will it leak?).

Hydrogen is not a power source - is a storage system. Somehow hydrogen has a great reputation, when it is generally created using dirty fossil fuels (or nuclear power).

Their proposal pretends that dirty fossil fuels can be clean, relies upon untested carbon storage technology, is government subsidized, and is more expensive than renewable alternatives (like wind).

This is my first take on mapping income near the Detroit Incinerator.
They are going to have a big protest of the facility during the US Social Forum.