On Wednesday 16 December 2009, many milblogs - including Bouhammer, This Ain't Hell, From My Position, Blackfive, Miss Ladybug, Boston Maggie, Grim's Hall, and those participating in the Wednesday Hero program - are going silent for the day. Some are choosing to go silent for a longer period of time. [Winds will be dark for the day - note that our server is set to Zulu time, so we'll be dark from 0800 on the 16th to 0800 on the 17th.]
The reason for this is two-fold. First, milblogs are facing an increasingly hostile environment from within the military. While senior leadership has embraced blogging and social media, many field grade officers and senior NCOs do not embrace the concept. From general apathy in not wanting to deal with the issue to outright hositility to it, many commands are not only failing to support such activities, but are aggressively acting against active duty milbloggers, milspouses, and others. The number of such incidents appears to be growing, with milbloggers receiving reprimands, verbal and written, not only for their activities but those of spouses and supporters.
The catalyst has been the treatment of milblogger C.J. Grisham of A Soldier's Perspective. C.J. has earned accolades and respect, from the White House on down for his honest, and sometimes blunt, discussion of issues - particularly PTSD. In the last few months, C.J. has seen an issue with a local school taken to his command who failed to back him, and has even seen his effort to deal with PTSD, and lead his men in same by example, used against him as a part of this. Ultimately, C.J. has had to sell his blog to help raise funds for his defense in this matter.
I fly Blackhawks for a living for the U.S. Army. Its a pretty sweet job, I admit, but not without its drawbacks including time in Iraq and Kuwait away from my family. My 1997 Toyota Camry with 126k miles is another unfortunate drawback. I'd sure love to leave next time knowing that my wife and our two kids are trouble-free and driving in luxury!Go gettum...
I just realized that commenting seems not to work...apologies, we'll look at it and get it fixed quickly.
So a few people mentioned that we'd broken their RSS feeds when we upgraded.
True, and sorry about that - I'm not sure what we could have done (although I welcome people using this as a teaching moment and telling me in the comments).
But we've dropped from over 900 sbscribers in Bloglines to 2 today (including me). So you may want to consider resubscribing, using the url on the bottom of the lefthand column.
By the way - what do people think of the changes??
The look is still a little cluttered and messy (we'll work on that), but in terms of function??
Winds of Change mission statement 2.0:
What challenges will face the U.S., the West, the rest of the world that aren't being discussed everywhere every day?
What opportunities exist - to these challenges or the widely discussed ones - that should be pursued?
What isn't being talked about in the chattering class that should be? Winds should be a place where questions that are slightly off-center can be asked, and where answers that aren't obvious should be proposed.
For the next four years, we're going to hear endless partisan chatter from people who care a lot about it in publications and on sites where that is the focus. Winds isn't one of those sites, and "impeaching Obama" or "destroying the GOP" aren't going to be core topics here.
The goal for Winds, as I see it, is to be a place for interesting conversation about issues that possibly shows them in a new light.
Note that interesting conversation comes first; that means respectful engagement with the rest of us.
To that end, we're working on Winds 2.0 which I hope will launch in early December (my attention and time are the throttling issues). I hope we'll have an interesting lineup of writers (a lot of whom are people you se here today) and I truly hope that those of you who have participated will continue to do so, and will step up and occasionally author a piece here.
There will be some new rules - we'll require registration from commenters - and, I hope, some new ideas.
Since I only have a limited about of bandwidth to devote to Winds, it will have to be split between blogging and managing the changeover. So both will get less than I'd like.
If you have author privileges at Winds today, please read this, think about it a bit, and drop me a note that sets out your interest in participating and some of the ideas you'd like to bring to the table.
While Winds isn't a hugely popular blog, it’s got a pretty respectable level of traffic, and I'd like to see if we can find some smaller, interesting bloggers and reach out to them about joining us here - either by moving here, or by using it like Totten does as a way to put interesting posts out into the world and pull more people to his blog. So what new voices are out there that we ought to reach out to?
My goal is to port the site to the new platform (which will be MT 4.2 based) by the 1st week in December, then spend December establishing the lineup of authors and start the new year with a refurbished set of digs (and maybe Diggs) for all of us.
