It's been a long time since we've had a Central Task Report. We decided to have fewer reports and more work in the Prison Ministry.

Thanks to the appearance of mimnotes.info to carry the load for MIM Notes, MIM dedicated comrades to completing some work with the lumpen. In this report we are only listing the first three statistics we usually list. However, for the past six months, prison distribution increased four-fold from its usual (=100) level prior to 911.

In crediting mimnotes.info, we can learn a general lesson, that people have to stay at their posts and do the job so that others can do other jobs. The division of labor may seem lonely, but that's the nature of our movement at this point in the imperialist countries.

The prison struggle is not sustainable at the current level or would have been sustainable at that level only two or three more months, so we have fallen back. The level we plan to fall back to will still be much higher than what it was before. What we have learned in this upsurge of prison work can serve as a basis for future advances at even higher levels. Any billionaires reading this can send us some dough and we can ramp it up right away.

In the last six months, there were no major foreign language editions of MIM Notes, only some articles and posters. Circulation of MIM Notes has stayed at the same level of just over double its pre-911 level and the time to distribution is better than ever in MIM's history. In fact, 2005 was a great year in general for MIM's distribution and influence. The on-paper influence of MIM spread into many states of the united $tates that we usually do not see huge distributions in. That includes many of the states of the South, Midwest and even some in the small Western states.

In terms of the substatistics of the web work, Chinese language continues to grow in importance. In fact, Chinese was the fourth most popular department in the whole web page by July, 2005.

As for the methodology, it is tedious work to root out the new users grabbing more than 1000 pages from MIM in a month and we only did it for July and August. For the months after that we allowed that new users not on our old blacklist might really just be new users. It's an arbitrary decision of laziness.

In the past we have taken off new heavy users each month in the belief that new robots and search engines come online each month. That seems less and less plausible. In any case, it's not a problem that influences the calculation of distinct users much, but the megabytes and files taken per month could be three times higher than we report. The figure for distinct users is difficult to calculate for different reasons.

We're getting a little lazy about this report. New readers of this should look at our old reports. People who have read these reports before and are in party circles--our message is to avoid pragmatism. As our April, 2005 report said, too many opportunists look at numbers in only a very pre-set and dogmatic way. It's simply not true that more watery organizations necessarily have more influence than MIM in any quantitative sense. As for "preaching to the converted," we still have not reached a point where the numbers stay the same for the "choir," so that whole criticism is off-base. MIM's message has been the same since its formation: pay attention to line and keep it edgy. Don't allow people to water down.

With regard to the Alexa report on a portion of MIM's web pages, Workers World passed us there again recently. It happens. We haven't had a full-time Web Minister. The only justified use of that Alexa report is to rebut totally wild accusations against MIM spread by our enemies without a bit of investigation or intelligence. The idea that MIM is irrelevant is only true in the sense that scientific communism inside imperialist country borders is totally irrelevant and the movement pathetic. We maintain indeed that MIM's per comrade requirements are the highest and that is one reason for our success.

Though MIM publishes the numbers, we don't want to hear any bragging. We have greater proletarian ambition than that. Also, there are good reasons to have small numbers--after being smashed or because a conglomeration of mushy lines formed that is bigger etc. etc. Yet in actual fact what we see here for more than the last decade is that MIM leads in readership, just as the sharper-edged parties have been more important than mushier ones in history so far. Soon it will be 20 years that the imperialist country public has chewed on MIM's line on Internet as something obviously distinct. We're not making more claims than that for these sorts of figures.

What we can also say is that MIM's harsh policy of "writing off" people is correct. There will be mistakes in writing people off, but there is also the matter of preserving quality which cannot be done by giving everyone a vote in a thoroughly parasitic country.

Larger or smaller numbers is no justification for getting basic questions wrong. What has to happen in the future is still much more important than anything we or other communist organizations have done so far, so very often calculations have to be made with regard to that future, independent of all the noise people make because of their lack of basic confidence in the international proletariat right now. That means we should confidently ignore questions of numbers at this stage if we are accurately and scientifically tapping into the international proletariat with a proletarian internationalist line.

With some projects winding down, we hope to have more time for other projects. Once again we are going to take a shot at building a more secure set of web pages to serve our users more fully. Our last attempts at secure forum building and the like ended in failure.

So once again, the big news for this report was the quadrupling of Prison Ministry distribution. By now, our reader should have an idea where we are going with the web page and its importance. We still need to quintuple our web work to reach our Five Year Plan goals. I believe we even have the necessary people at hand for the outreach and growth implied by that goal to occur. The only question is whether we will make it happen.