Melançon Enterprises • a multidivision multinational since 1980

Wars are not won buying ammunition from the enemy

Thirty-six, thirty-seven million dollars has a way of making a point. If we're lucky, one point will be that a thirty-million dollar advantage spent spreading slander and disinformation can only almost sway thirty percent of an electorate away from voting for what they want and believe.

Research the hell out of the costs born by society due to the way McDonald's does business:
- unhealthy food, cost of health care, lost productivity
- trash produced
- environmental destruction where cows graze, such as Amazon destruction
- loss/degredation of the local water table due to the parking lot
- contribution to global warming due to traffic
- underpayment of employees

One or two volunteers stand outside each of the 15,000 McDonald's 24/7 (or quickly learn when the busiest times are) and cheerfully ask people to pay a tax on their purchase to reflect its true cost.

This is the sort of thing where we want to be able to comment and say: PWGD.

http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/egypt-technology.html

We need to wage war strategically against the institutions at war with our rights to justice and liberty. An obvious case study for interests sharply and actively at odds with our common interest, that is getting some ink recently, is the brothers who currently own Koch Industries. (To be fair, the Koches are much more on the attack against economic and environmental justice than the more common perceptions of liberty; in the foundations they fund, at least, there's some internally coherent commitment to libertarian principles.)

Stephen Cataldo's idea.

Proposed names:
Dinner Theory
Dinner Discussions

I am not a gamer, this is not the perspective that i'm coming from at all, but key parts of Jane McGonigal's vision unites well with the aims of Visions Unite.

Specifically:

• Always being able to give a person something they, personally, can do
• Making the possible believable.
• Achieving that epic win after great individual effort and collaboration with others.

All of those mean connecting people (both into smaller dream teams of compatible, complementary talents and into a large number of supporters).

I'm more interested in bringing what makes games satisfying to self-organizing to make things better, than to making games a vehicle to saving the world, which is the direction she goes in, but please, watch:

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/799

[Original (not edited for space) proposal to the 2010 US Social Forum in Detroit.]

Self-rule in any group or society needs a democratic system of
communication, in which sending and receiving information is free and open
to all. Equal power, let alone equal participation, cannot be approached
without this equal access. A transparent way for people to filter for the
most important messages can prove an essential tool in working together for
a better world.

As tweeted: on equinox, marking 7 years of war on Iraq, walked with 20 people to remind town we're occupying a couple countries and ruining lives.

From the common where the vigil always is to the army labs. No blockade, no action. Police facilitating our crossing at intersections.

And media representation - somehow i ended up talking to the press about PWGD and Visions Unite!

Well, here's an e-mail i just wrote on the topic:

Walked in a commemoration and protest of seven years of war on Iraq, from

Sent to MJ Petroni of http://causeit.org

Confirming our talk scheduled in two and one-half hours from now, with an important proviso - if this is a for-fee consult, and i am quite aware that consulting is exactly what people pay you for, i will need to beg off for now or do a deferred payment.

One large, slow-paying client means no expenses until i know i can get money to all the people i already have commitments to-- as in yesterday i canceled dealer maintenance on a ten-year-old Honda Insight hybrid.

ACORN makes a sobering case study for the goal of a large organized base of people including the excluded and disadvantaged.

Quoting from http://www.metrotimes.com/news/story.asp?id=14767

Lansing organizer Guzman says she first learned about the group the way most people did back in the 1980s.

"Someone came and knocked on my door and asked me to become involved," she recalls. The issue then was an effort to keep a neighborhood school from being closed.