Yearly Archives: 2007

Today’s Downsizer-Dispatch . . .::::::Please bring this item to the attention of concerned friends . . .::::::Progress on REAL ID Act::::::Things are looking more-and-more likely for repeal of the REAL ID Act. The Maine legislature got the ball rolling, and now as many as 34 others states are threatening to pile on.

Downsize DC Conference Call – February 11, 2007

Today’s Downsizer-Dispatch . . .::::::Please bring this item to the attention of concerned friends . . .::::::You hear it all the time: no good outcome is possible in Iraq. ::::::By saying this over-and-over again we are fostering a state of mind that psychologist Martin Seligman calls “learned helplessness.” Here’s what Wikipedia says about learned helplessness . . .:::

“Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human or animal has learned to believe that it is helpless. It thinks that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result it will stay passive when the situation is unpleasant or harmful and damaging.”

::::::This describes Congress and the American public almost perfectly. ::::::Congress is debating how to remain passive about the problem in Iraq. One side says “let’s continue exactly as we are with few changes,” while the other side says “let’s continue exactly as we are with just a small surge of troops used in a slightly different way.” ::::::Neither side seems to recognize that a massive problem that is massively resistant to current attempts at a solution requires a massively different approach.

Downsize DC Conference Call – January 28 (& February 4), 2007

Sorry. I’m behind schedule in posting these radio shows. I really need to do better. ::::::Anyway, here is the January 21 episode of the Downsize DC Conference Call, sponsored by DownsizeDC.org, Gun Owners of America, and the Marijuana Policy Project. ::::::My topics were announced here: :::http://www.downsizedc.org/blog/2007/jan/21/weekend_at_bernies::::::This episode is attached, below, in mp3 format. ::::::As you can tell from this link, this was supposed to be the “Weekend at Bernie’s” episode. But less than 10 seconds before my intro started to play, we had a power surge. The breaker at my radio desk clicked off. I jumped, ran down two flights of stairs, and punched the breaker. Then, I ran up two flights of steps, plugged my phone back in, called the network back in Minnesota, where my engineer/producer Jared had just figured out something was wrong. He had just begun playing Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” ::::::Jared reconnected me. Checked to see if I was there. And the show went on. I was breathless (and you can hear it) during the entire first segment of the show. Of course, that didn’t slow me down! But you can feel free to refer to this as “The Wall” episode. ::: :::During the program I promised to post the following information on the blog, so here it is…

Is this the end?

Today’s Downsizer-Dispatch…:::Today, we have a shocking but true story and a media announcement.

The story below is true. If the United States Department of Agriculture behaves like this now, we can only imagine how much worse it will get under the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). You can tell Congress to stop NAIS by clicking here.

It was a good deal . . . 

In June, 2005 Darol Dickinson of the Dickinson Cattle Co. in Barnesville, Ohio was given the opportunity to purchase 472 Texas Longhorn cattle from a retiring producer in Oklahoma. The herd was allowed to stay at the Oklahoma ranch for up to a year, and Dickinson had begun selling the cattle to buyers across the U.S. In January, 2006 a cow named Rosey Barb was sold to a man in Dundee, Ohio.

Then in August, the man in Ohio was visited by a USDA investigator. What was the problem?

Good news!

DC Downsizers, we’ve run into a serious problem and we need your help. 

During January, we sent some chills down people’s spines when I wrote that we had gotten a low level of feedback in response to a particular Dispatch. We got messages from concerned supporters. Was something seriously wrong?

As it turns out, there was. We were working with one arm tied behind our back for most of January.

Last month was a very good month in so many ways.

* We broke our monthly record for messages to Congress.

* We broke the January record for number of newly registered DC Downsizers.

* Compared to the months of 2006, January, 2007 would’ve been our forth best month for recruiting new DC Downsizers.

* We achieved our monthly budget of $14,000 in just nine days — faster than any month last year.

It was a good thing too because right after that, something went wrong. Donor response plummeted. Requests for your feedback (via feedback at DownsizeDC dot org) received a much lower response than normal.

And we started to watch our email subscription list shrink. So far, it has shrunk nearly 7,000. We hadn’t been purging closed email addresses from our list for a few months because we were using a new delivery system and just didn’t have the feature in place yet. When we turned it on, some shrinkage was expected, but not nearly as much as we actually had.

The last couple of weeks have been a nightmare. Why? Because America Online (AOL) has blacklisted us.

The result, in actual AOL addresses and related fall-out (like through Netscape addresses, which AOL owns as well) has been a loss of roughly 3,000 subscribers. But there’s a real possibility the actual damage is closer to 5,000, or possibly even 6,000 subscribers.

On top of that, anyone attempting to sign up with our system using an AOL or AOL-related address couldn’t confirm their registration. That means they didn’t get subscribed to our list at all.

NOTE: This blog entry is a supplement to our February 5 Downsizer-Dispatch message which can be found above (the Dispatch will be posted after this entry so we can’t link to it here).::::::In an earlier blog item in November we told you how a hacker attacked a minor vulnerability in our “Tell-a-friend” mechanism. It was fixed almost instantly. We won’t rehash that story. You can read it for yourself.::::::We’ve been blacklisted by AOL. All we were told was that we had a “compromised script.” We don’t know the specific nature of the compromised script, but the November Tell-a-friend hack was our first appearance on the AOL blacklist and we’ve had problems with that company ever since. We’ve been in a kind of “off and on” situation with them — more off than on — but it was mostly a minor, occasional annoyance. Each time that we would end up on the list, we’d wait 24 to 36 hours, and the problem would go away. ::::::That ceased to be the case, starting in about mid-January. Now we’re just plain “on” the AOL blacklist, and we’re having a very hard time getting off!::::::To make matters worse,