Diary: Rob's Blog: A Wedding, an Outage, the dollar, a candidate worth supporting, changing the world & OpEdNews

The only problem was the rabbi-- the bigges schmuck I've ever seen. He made a joke at the bride's expense (sounds like Dubya and the blind reporter) and then gave a pathetic sermon that seemed like he took a collection of anecdotes from some book of speaking anecdotes for rabbis. But that didn't stop the wedding from being amazing. And it was nice to see my grown kids on the dance floor. I must confess, they got to see where they got their dancing talents-- me!! I can't stand line dances or dances with any kind of structure. It reminds me of marching with military cadence. But I like to move rhythmically and can let go of my inhibitions and have fun doing it. Afterwards, I was having a conversation about ADD-- "attention deficit disorder," which I've been told I have by a number of psychologists who have dealt with me and the conference I run on neurofeedback. I recommended Thom Hartmann's (Air America Radio host) book, The Edison Gene, which describes his model, that people with ADD are line hunters in a farmer's world. Hunters have characteristics like people with ADD, but for hunters, the characteristics provide survival and success skills. For example, hunters can hyperfocus, like ADDers, when they are on the trail of their prey. But they are easily distracted by sounds, smells or sites that confront them in the forest. This is an important ability, since it can save their life or help find a better prey target. But it's not very helpful for farmers, who do the same thing every day. And schools were developed for farmer children-- designed to create pliable, obedient soldiers and factory workers-- but they aren't very compatible with hunter children. Matter of fact, schools weren't always this way, with 30-40 kids in a classroom. Up until the last one or two hundred years, they were more like one on one tutors or one room school houses, or yeshivas, where people studied in one corner, held high energy debates in other areas, or learned one on one. This new model, which requires silent, mindless listening and note-taking is a new phenomenon. John Taylor Gatto, best teacher of the year in NY state, has written about it. Fortunately, with internet education, home schooling (not for religious reasons) and alternative schools, things are starting to change. I also pointed out that there are plenty of jobs that afford opportunities for ADDers to use their hunter skills, like publishers, journalists, detectives, mechanics, software programmers, emergency room physicians, sales people, psychologists, inventors, politicians... There are different kinds of ADD. I tend to be distractable, but not hyperactive. I get the feeling that Democrats tend to be the distractable types. Republican ADDers tend to be the more hyperactive ones. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. I'll be posting this newsletter as a blog. Log on to give your thoughts. (A.L. in particular) Support a Democratic Congressional Candidate with a great Chance of Winning I got a notification that DFA is running a contest to identify who it should support this fall. The congressional candidate for my district, Patrick Murphy, is one of the finalists. He's running agains Mike Fitzpatrick, who is another Republican rubber stamper-- one who has been given a pass a few times, when his vote didn't matter, to vote against the Bush agenda. He's still been there on every important Bush victory. Fitzpatrick is vulnerable. It's his first race as an incumbent. Murphy has built an awesome campaign team and has a great chance of winning in this county that Kerry won. If you have a few minutes, go here and cast your vote for Patrick Murphy. I'll be working on his campaign until November. Our Plunging Dollar The wedding I attended was in Canada. A year ago, the exchange rate was about US$.65 for a Canadian dollar. Now it's US$.95 for a Canadian dollar. There's only one reason for this. The Bush/Republican leadership has decreased the value of the dollar massively, and it is going to get worse. Canada is a major supplier for the US. The "Bush Tax" on us does not come from the government. It comes in a thousand other ways-- higher prices for imports, for gas, for school, for college, more items privatized. The lower taxes lie is one of the worst the Republicans tell. Short Shutdown of OpEdNews After months of problems with our website hosting company, with far too many outages, where the site would lock up, not load or give error messages, like "database not found" or half the screen showing up, but not the rest, we are moving the site to a new hosting company. There's no guarantee this one will be better, but we're hoping it will make a huge difference. While we are making the move, you may find the site appears to be down or not available. That will mean we are in the middle of the move. This could happen this evening or tomorrow evening. Paying the Bills at OpEdNews Our primary source of income to pay our bills is reader support. The move to a new server cost us a one year payment in advance. And we have our usual costs that come up about every two weeks. If you haven't made a contribution to support OpEdNews yet, but you know in your heart that you value and appreciate the work we're doing, please do it now. Please think about the progressive candidates and causes we support. Consider the right wing abuses we bring to light that you don't see anywhere else, or that you don't see covered as well anywhere else. So, please make a contribution today. Can OpEdNews Change the World? At the recent Take Back America conference, we really wowed some of the speakers, some of the bigtime politicians with our website's unique capabilities, with the poll results our polls provided. Remember, OpEdNews was the first progressive media site to ever commission a poll. And we've done two so far. Our results are being used by advocacy groups all over the US. We know because people came up to us at Take Back America and told us. Our website is evolving into a unique software program that does things no othe blog, no other news site does, and soon, it will be doing things that only the biggest social networking sites, like myspace, do. We're adding those features because we are SURE that they will empower progressive organizations and individuals, and they will take the idea of WRITING and journalism to a new level. I can't be sure how that will affect the world. But I know that when humanity started writing, it produces enormous, massive changes in human civilization and culture. Here are a few fascinating books that explore how the human mind actually changed the way it functions, processes information and interacts with its environment, because of introduction of writing and introduction of printing. Orality and Literacy by Walter Ong, This classic work explores the vast differences between oral and literate cultures and offers a brilliantly lucid account of the intellectual, literary and social effects of writing, print and electronic technology The Alphabet Versus the Goddess by Leonard Shlain: "Literacy has promoted the subjugation of women by men throughout all but the very recent history of the West," writes Leonard Shlain. "Misogyny and patriarchy rise and fall with the fortunes of the alphabetic written word." That's a pretty audacious claim, one that The Alphabet Versus the Goddess provides extensive historical and cultural correlations to support..." I don't think that OpEdNews will singlehandedly foment another cultural revolution, but we're going to do our damnedest to enable the printed word to regain some of the power it has lost to the televised message. I believe that the way to do it is to get more and more people READING. Myspace-- the largest of the social networking websites-- has over 80 million users now, many of them young people who don't vote. By creating a hybrid media/social networking site, I hope to turn OpEdNews into a place where people who might not ordinarily be readers will come, where some of the ideas will rub off. Someone asked me why I am still spending most of the income from OpEdNews on programming. We already do pretty much everything most news sites do, and more than most progressive news sites. It's because I have a vision of ways OpEdNews will reach out to people who do not ordinarily read the news, people who have the potential to wake up. I want to make OpEdNews so "sticky" that people come back, that people need to come back to it on a regular basis. Here's what OpEdNews already does and will be doing to facilitate this: already working- Interconnection of content. Click on an article and you see subjects, locales and writer links you can explore to see more by the same writer, on the same subject or locale. -Coming soon:- demographic compatibility. If you enable your demographic info, you'll be able to see areas you are in agreement with writers, bloggers and commenters who you read. You'll be able to check out their already working- home pages for writers, bloggers, users, where you can see bios, links to other sites, personal diaries, comments, articles -Coming soon- a lot more info on home pages-- schools attended, former employers, clubs, organizations, fraternities and sororities, favorite books, quotations, music, food, candidates, heroes. already working: action pages created specifically for a given article or blog diary. Yes, you can create an action page just for the article or blog you write. It empowers and enables your readers to easily contact their congressional legislators and or local daily paper. -Coming soon- action pages for your causes, for groups, and a tab on your home page listing the action pages you've created. already working: comment functions for articles and blog diaries so the writer of the article or diary is notified when comments are placed on their submission. This keeps the writer in the loop. Comments can be submitted in different colors with different backgrounds, to nonverbally express the mood of the commenter. -Coming soon: notification to commenters that comments have been responded to -Coming soon: icons enabling commenters or readers to rate articles or diaries for (icon in parentheses) energizing to action (lightning bolt,) heart (heart,) creativity (light bulb,) newsworthiness (exclamation point,) intelligence (head). -Coming soon: polling. This will be a major feature that lets you vote on issues. Your vote will be recorded and polls that you vote on will be listed on your home page. -Coming soon: privacy controls; we're going to be basing many of our features on users' willingness to reveal personal information-- positions on issues, age, gender, etc. Our rule will be simple ISYM-YSMY "I show you mine-- You show me yours" This ISYM-YSMY (remember it by "I sim why smy") will be the basis for how you get access to information. Currently, there are about two google references to it on English language websites. Let's see what effect upon the google version of the English language we produce. -Coming soon: Group support functions; We want to enable progressive groups to literally use OpEdNews as a place to build their own websites and then tap the power of OpEdnews as a content management system, so groups can create powerful websites without needing to spend a fortune on web programmers or hosting. We are strugging with the idea of creating a new site, with a new name, that more reflects our goal of creating a site that supports a "we the people" approach to activism. already working: News syndication boxes on hundreds of other websites -Coming soon: new interactive news syndication boxes which bring the reach of OpEdNews to the hundreds of sites syndicating it, with polls, compatibility, reciprocal links, customized content based on subject, locale and group and ad revenues for syndication hosts. -Coming soon- article and diary stats for writers and bloggers -Coming soon- top articles, top diaries, for the week, month, top subjects, -Coming soon-- dozens of pages of single line descriptions of ways the site will continue to grow and evolve. We are keeping some secrets, until the features are up and running. You won't be disappointed. We just want to change the world. Please, we can't do it without you. Make today the day you financially support opednews. Thanks, Rob Kall