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February 16, 2010

Led By The Stupid And Loathsome

By Armed Liberal at 20:56

The last month or so hasn't been very good for me as a blogger...I feel like I've lost the will to write, and what has always been very easy for me (writing) suddenly became very hard.

I was mulling over why this weekend, deciding what to do, and kind of came to a conclusion about why, at least.

It's just massively depressing.

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  • jan: I thought that Alchemist (#17) had an astute point about read more
  • Clioman: It's a small thing, but if there's ONE thing that read more
  • Alchemist: Transparency of a dysfunctional mess surely is what makes us read more

January 1, 2010

Happy New Year!!

By Armed Liberal at 01:34

To everyone!!

Sorry for the hiatus...family matters (i.e. family is more important). But here's to a closing out 2009 and opening a great 2010 for all of us.

Dec_trip_05_small.JPG

And a special thought for Biggest Guy and his mates...may 2010 be smooth for them as well.
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December 16, 2009

Taking The Day off - In Support of CJ Grisham

By Armed Liberal at 08:02

From Bouhammer:
CJ.jpg
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.

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  • defenseplacements: Putting a muzzle on our service men and women does read more
  • toc3: I am not surprised by this at all. If there read more

October 26, 2009

You Have...The Plague!!

By Marc Danziger at 17:42

Well it wasn't the plague, and it wasn't the flu, but the last week kind of vanished into a blur where the only things I remember are orange juice and the ceiling of our bedroom. I wound up speaking on a panel about teh future of journalism in the world of blogs, and I need to find the name of the LA Times guy who I teed off on; my points were valid but perhaps I should have been more polite in making them. I'd use being sick and drugged as an excuse, but manners ought to hold even then.

..I'm 90% today and will work to catch up.

I did discover and release a huge bunch of comments in the comment queue - please comment or email one of us if your comment gets held up there.
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August 29, 2009

Heading to D.C.

By Armed Liberal at 23:47
I'm off to DC tonight for much of next week. I've got two draft posts I'll try and get out - one on Afghanistan, and one on Bacevitch - I'm going to try and do a post a week on "The Limits of Power" and deal with it chapter by chapter.
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July 15, 2009

Violating Your Privacy ... But For A Good Cause

By Armed Liberal at 23:30

Work will settle down soon (it better) and I hope to get back to being a blogger (one post in the queue on how blogging has changed as it's become professionalized and what that means to small fry amateurs like me).

But meanwhile, here's something to occupy your time.

Lexus is going to give a car to someone who registers on a marketing site and gets the largest number of votes from other registrants (you don't have to try for the car - you can just vote. And you can opt-out of them spamming you) - so go on over to the site and register, and then go to Captain Michael Valetta's page and vote for him.

As he puts it in his 'why me' piece:
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...
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June 12, 2009

Tech Issues

By Marc Danziger at 00:14

I just realized that commenting seems not to work...apologies, we'll look at it and get it fixed quickly.


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May 27, 2009

The Prodigal Returns

By Armed Liberal at 02:08

Sorry for the long absence; we scaled a wall at work (and now I get some more time...) and I'm just back from our annual motorcycle trip to the Sierra with a collection of friends (on my new motorcycle...).

I've got a backlog of stuff I want to write about, so please come by often and send your friends...
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March 2, 2009

RSS

By Armed Liberal at 00:00

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??

 


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  • AMac: Signing in: As Jeff mentioned above, it's a process read more
  • Jeff Medcalf: Overall, I like it. The only issue I have (and read more
  • PD Shaw: A couple of nitpicks: Signing into one of the services read more

January 29, 2009

Introducing Charles Chuman

By Charles Chuman at 03:46

I am honored that Marc Danziger invited me to blog at Winds of Change.

Please allow me introduce myself and provide a few basic ideas that will guide my contributions to this site:

I recently returned to the United States after five years in the Middle East working in media, marketing, and market research. After living through two wars in Lebanon, the war in Iraq from two perspectives (Baghdad and Kurdistan), seeing the military and technological power of both Iran and Israel and their effect on their neighbors, working under the ever-watching eyes of dictators and secret police, and seeing how quickly deserts can bloom into international luxury destinations, my opinions are shaped more by experience than by ideology.

I returned to the US to work full-time on Barack Obama's campaign in Indiana, and I am still overjoyed and flabbergasted that we managed to carry the state. David Plouffe's brilliant strategy worked, and the support of thousands of volunteers from Indiana, Illinois, around the country, and around the world helped us carry the day.


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  • maryatexitzero: When Hezbollah is no longer needed by its sponsors, it read more
  • AMac: Welcome to Winds, Mr. Chuman. Yet, Lebanon remains tumultuous, and read more
  • Joe Katzman: Welcome to the site, Charles. read more

January 27, 2009

Sorry About That...

By Armed Liberal at 16:39

We had an outage last night because I didn't do good capacity planning and we ran out of disc space (we're still almost out, but I've asked for the allocation to be upped...). As we get things sorted I'll update this post.
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November 23, 2008

Changing Winds

By Armed Liberal at 17:51

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.


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  • Joe Katzman: Fletcher's questions in #15 are excellent. read more
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