List of films the PRODOS Film Society (Melbourne, Australia) will be including in its 2010 programme: HERE (2 MB PDF file)
The PRODOS Film Society is a member of the Federation of Victorian Film Societies. Our constitution is HERE.
Our purpose is to present and study movies that promote and explore free market thinking, capitalist ideals, the history of ideas, the life and work of creative heroes.
At the new Celebrate Capitalism ™ website, I’ve added notes on the 3 Broad Goals of the campaign:
http://celebratecapitalism.com/our3broadaims
Over the next few days I’ll be writing about the 4 Guidelines of the campaign.
Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been working on further upgrades to …
Further to my earlier notes, and after several months of careful consideration and consultation I have now determined that in his advocacy of racialist (note: I do not use the term “racist”) views and policies, Mikko Ellilä at his blog MikkoEllila.ThinkerToThinker.com isin breach of THINKER TO THINKER™ policies and principles, and incompatible with Capitalist Ideals,and that I will be disabling his blog within seven days.
Some of the blogs and forums which have been following the Mikko Ellila issue …
I’ve now completed myanalysis of the issues raised my Mikko Ellilä in his article, Society Consists of People.
My post is titled:
Are Blacks genetically LOWER in intelligence and HIGHER in psychopathy than Whites?
I’ve spent about 100 hours researching and writing for this study and believe it tackles the major issues fairly, objectively, and comprehensively.
My article does not directly refer to Mikko’s post, however it does tackle its main arguments.
As well as reaching a conclusionon the views that Mikko has presented, I’ve alsoprovided my conclusion regarding whether or not Mikko’s post is compatible with the positions and policies of THINKER TO THINKER:
I further conclude that any direct or indirect advocacy of the above racialist positions (please note I do not refer to them as “racist”) is incompatible with Capitalist Ideals such as free markets, individual rights, liberty, equality before the law, creative thinking, volition/free will.
Please note: Myanalysis distinguishes between racism and racialism.I do not treat these two termsas either having the same meaning or having the same moral stature.
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Update Monday June 18
Clarification:
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Some of the blogs and forums which have been following the Mikko Ellila issue …
Notice for tonight’s DISCOVER CAPITALISM meeting in Melbourne, Australia, with guest speaker, Steven Shamrak
UNDERSTANDING ZIONISM
Speaker: Steven Shamrak
Some of the issues we’ll explore include …
I’m setting up a new service that will allow you tocreate and deliveryour own email newsletters.
It willbe available forFREEtoCelebrate Capitalism project leaders, THINKER TO THINKER bloggers, and supporters of Capitalist Ideals.
Plans are to have it ready over the next 10 days.
The SNEWPI system is now online and functioning but needs a few more administrative functions added to it which Davide Villani and I are now finalising.Also needed aresome minor aesthetic fixes.
This web system @ http://snewpi.com has been set up to allow those working within PRODOS projects which have a strict NON Endorsement policy to create links to NON endorsed websites.
SNEWPI has been integrated with the MYprodos membership management system.
Australia Day – January the 26th – is the official launch date each yearfor the worldwide Celebrate Capitalism campaign.
So, it is with great pleasure that I hereby now launch the worldwide campaigning towards Capitalism Day which this year will by on Sunday June 03 2007 and invite the world to stand up for freedom, creativity, and prosperity.
The main focus of the campaign is to help organise educational and festive events for Capitalism Day.
When the campaign first went international, each participating city had a Chief Coordinator, referred to as a C1.
As the Founder and Global Coordinator of the campaign I worked with each C1 to help organize an effective campaign that kept within the (quite strict) Celebrate Capitalism guidelines.
Anyone wanting to participate in a city’s campaign needed to work under that city’s C1. Each city had a single C1.
Recently, this was changed.
There is now no longer a single Coordinator per city. The Chief Coordinator position no longer exist.
Instead, anyone wanting to organize a festive event in their city can apply to become a Creative Project Leader- aCPL.
There are several reasons behind this change.
One is that I felt it was important to keep the campaign de-centralized in order to reduce the likelihood ofany particular group or ideology fromachieving exclusivity or dominancein any city, or across the campaign in general.I want the campaign to remain grassroots. The reality of organizations and movements is that if they’re not careful they can be hijacked by particular groups or factions. We can see how prevalent this is across the anti-capitalist campaigns of the world. But that’s not so surprising since anti-capitalists tend to be mindless twits.
Another equally important reason is to encourage the widest diversity of types of events, including allowing organizations and clubs to organize Capitalism Day events. The earlier approach explicitly excluded any group from flying its own colors alongside Celebrate Capitalism.
With the new approach, a group is able to run a Capitalism Day event just for its members, if it wants. Of course, the Non-Endorsement Guideline (also known as the one-way street principle) still applies. i.e. Although a group may endorse the Celebrate Capitalism campaign, it needs to make it clear that the campaign does not endorse any group.
With the new approach, a city can have any number of CPL’s and they do NOT have to work together. CPLs can run completely independent events. Of course it’s nice when CPLs can work together at some level, but this is neither required nor particularly encouraged.
At last the new PRODOS serverappears to beworking.
Straight after the mail systemwithin the server was fixed, we found a problem in its control panel – a java memory leak – that was causing it to crash, sometimes 3 times per day.
The new server (actually, I’m running two servers now) have more than twice the space and twice the bandwidth of what was available before. That means it’ll be possible to archive a couple of hundred SOLID VOX podcast shows (each show uses about 1 MB per minute) and offer some more free web services and tools for Celebrate Capitalism supporters.
The bad news: Unfortunately, the new hosting service that all the sites and web systems have been moved to can’t handle the mailman script which ran the prodoscope.com mailing lists.
My colleague, Davide, is temporarily hosting all those lists on his own server, but they’re going to have to be discontinued soon.
The good news: I’ve been testing and comparing some new mailing list management scripts and plan, in the next week, to create a new free newsletter/mailing list service for Celebrate Capitalism project leaders, Thinker TO Thinker bloggers, and other supporters.
This will allow registered users to create their own, quite snappy email newsletters and run their own newsletter service.
More news about this over the next week! 
The MYprodos membership management system is finally completed.
It’s located at MYprodos.com and will allow members of all PRODOS projects to join or leave projects, and to update any of the details (such as email address, city, etc.) which affect their project subscriptions.
I’ve been working on getting this system built for about two years and have worked with 3 different coders/programmers on it.
The chap who finally succeeded in building it with me was a brilliant young Italian coder, Davide Villani. And what a marvellous job he’s done!
Now I’ve got the massive task of adding several thousand subscribers to the new system.
One of the biggest reasons for building this system was to be able to coordinate the expansion of the Celebrate Capitalism™ campaign.
Since 2001, International Capitalism Day™ has been celebrated in over 200 cities in 43 countries.
But my goal is “1,000 festivals in a 1,000 cities”.
Managing a project of such magnitude would be impossible without a system such as MYprodos.com. In fact trying to keep up with “just” the current 200+ cities has proved a nightmare over the last few years.
Background: I created the first, informal Capitalism Day™ in 1984. By 1999 it had crystalized to include the world’s first ever Ayn Rand Film Festival held here in Melbourne, Australia, where I screened We The Living, The Fountainhead, and Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life.
By 2001 Capitalism Day™ was formalised as a worldwide campaign which has been growing steadily year by year, with wonderful, positive Project Leaders working to promote free thinking and free markets across the globe.
What a month it’s been. Back-to-back disasters and emergencies all around: computer, server, financial, family, health, death, you name it.
Way behind on email correspondence and project updates.
Oh well, such is life sometimes.
Today, everything looks rosy, the gods are smiling, and we’re back in business!
Yippee!!
I’ve delivered the first batch of specifications for the new MYprodos membership management system to my coder/programmer to look over.
The MYprodos system will allow anyone who is registered to any PRODOS project to easily manage their membership details (new email address, joining or leaving a project, etc.)
I’ve been working on this system for over a year. An earlier version was built some time ago, but I felt it was too awkward to use and didn’t have enough flexibility. So I’ve come up with a completely new approach that I hope can be built and tested over the next few weeks.
Over the next couple of days I hope to complete the specs for the PRODOS Project application forms which will be integrated into the MYprodos system and will send them through to the programmer to evaluate.
Last night at DISCOVER CAPITALISM ™ in Melbourne, we studied:
Victor Hanson‘s essay: “Anti-Anti-Americanism – Dealing with the crazy world after Iraq”
click here to read it
… AND …
Thomas Sowell’s essay: “Cultural Diversity – A World View”
click here to read it
The mailing system has been fixed and, according to the tests I’ve run so far, seems to be working normally again.
Over the last few days emails from the following sources have been permanently lost.
Please re-send or re-apply, if you have used any of the following:
As you can see, the losses has been extensive.
The problem seems to have been caused by a mass spam attack which may have included a virus attack, which masqueraded as if coming from the PRODOS server.
This resulted in the PRODOS IP address being temporarily blacklisted/blocked. It has now been unblocked.
Thanks to Davide Villani for his assistance with this issue.
Until now, I’ve restricted this blog to project updates only – with no commentary or opinion articles.
I will now begin including commentary and opinion articles.
A couple of days ago I was interviewed by Triple J radio.
I have set up and am test running a project management system to be used across most PRODOS Institute projects and campaigns.
[Later note: Tests so far indicate that the new system works well.]