January 24, 2008 archive

Hi everyone,

While I’m busy setting up the farm I was hoping that one or two volunteers could step up to do some basic things for Docudharma.  They are very easy to do. I’ll be gone for about a month with only quick visits to see how traffic is doing and catch up with events.

1. Ping Technorati when a new story appears on the front page.  Just go to http://technorati.com/ping/ and enter https://www.docudharma.com exactly as you see it here w/ no www or trailing slash.  That will let technorati know we’ve updated the site and they’ll share our headlines with the other bloggers.  Just do it when you can as long as we are getting a few fresh pings a day we’ll be fine.

We are registered with most active blog indexes so if you see another place to ping us go ahead and do it.

Sphere and Blogburst work automatically so there is no need to ping them.

2. Search for smaller search engines and political directories and add Docudharma to the list.  Just check to make sure we aren’t already listed and only apply to places that are free and do not require a reciprocal link or link back to their site.  We won’t gain much direct traffic from these links but they help our rankings on Google and other search engines.

3. The following tags have their own feeds, consider using them in your essays:

impeachment, how to, politics, women’s issues, healthcare, sports, activism, dharmazine, Iraq, solar, GLBT, science, immigration and literature.  I’ll be doing more development with the feeds when I get back.

That’s about it, otherwise keep doing what you are doing and thanks for helping.

This is no jibe against folks who are passionately involved with the candidates of their choice in the Democratic primaries.  Frankly, I wish the present environment of our 2008 national elections were worthy of this amazing committed passion.

This isn’t even a jibe against the candidates themselves.

This is, however, a jibe at the 2008 elections.

There are folks who say it might just damned well be better if we stay home and let Republicans have their way with America.  I understand the reasoning behind it, I do .  And if our world were solely mechanical and mathematical and the heart had no place in it, I might even agree with this logic.

Trouble is, those folks calling for this strategy won’t be the ones suffering and most likely dying as a consequence.  And although it’s argued it is ultimately noble to be careless with folks’ lives that might just be blown away no matter what we do (both here and around the world), I’d just as soon avoid lending my hand to that endeavor.  If I were one of those vulnerable folks who reside at the bottom of the ladder to be considered for sacrifice, I’d be a little annoyed that my life was not even being considered in this equation.  I dunno, most folks, no matter how miserable, don’t want to die.  It seems to be something we all have in common.

So I’ll vote for the Democrat and I’ll vote in the primary.  I’m not a damned fool.  But no, for me, the heart of America is being broken by this reality, by there being virtually no opposition to these criminals who walk the halls of power in government and commerce, and it’s not even about political party at this point.  It’s just about regular Americans, not angels or devils, but flawed folks, as are we all, who are being shown nothing to aim at, feeling no genuine confidence.  Because no matter what our candidates say, our present national conversation is being held against a backdrop of criminal acts being committed the entire time, lawbreaking of such breathtaking arrogance and abuse of power that it renders all “national conversation” absurd.