zenpundit.com

There will be blog posts this weekend after last week’s slowdown. Right now, however I have a question: Is anyone having problems connecting to zenpundit.com using iE ? Firefox seems ok.

Thanks!

This is hilarious. From David Axe writing for Danger Room:

Army Blogging = Horror Story Waiting to Happen?

….While some soldiers’ blogs may be questionable, they are the ones who understand the Internet and the power it has. … Turning loose senior Army officials who do not understand the impact of the Internet is a treasure trove for those who mean us harm!

I am a consultant to a major Army command that supplies soldiers with everything they need — and the command with one of the biggest IT footprints in the Army, if not the [entire] Department of Defense. I have seen first-hand what havoc those in positions of authority can wreak when they post on the Internet, or attempt to use technology without understanding it. Information on troop movements, supply levels, diagrams of weapons systems, chemical munitions, you name it, has been posted to the likes of YouTube and Flickr, and hosted on unprotected and unsecured .COMs. All in a misguided attempt to look “hip” or “cool” or “net savvy.” …

Give a senior service official a BlackBerry and I can guarantee he will transmit sensitive and sometimes classified information on it without thinking. He will use the Bluetooth headset and the built-in phone to talk about sensitive topics without a care in the world as to who is listening. I have lost count of how many times we have had to collect all of the BlackBerries we issue and purge them due to sensitive or classified information being sent on them. The BlackBerry is one of the greatest weapons system in the terrorists’ inventory, and we supply the bullets!

An op-ed piece with an evening deadline.  I will return to normal blogging when finished.

UPDATE:

Whoa! That took a lot longer than I had anticipated. Dang – I’m rusty! LOL! I’ll post a link here when and if it runs.

Prior to blogging, I was a pretty fair writer of formal papers, academic listserv discourse, letters to the editor and op-ed kinds of writing. Getting into gear as a blogger gradually killed those activities off and as blogging-style writing puts a higher premium on speed, insight and relevance than on grammatical precision, polish and elegance, I found getting through this assignment tough going at first. Much like putting on a suit from a few years ago – not everything fits quite right. At least first.

Very good for my brain though and it gave me a chance to shift my perspective and reflect a little more deeply on how I was writing and not just the substance of what I was writing about. Clarity matters. Words matter. A tight limit on word count disciplines a writer to be more concise, more economical with their prose. I cut at least a quarter from the first draft and put in only half of the points from my notes that I had thought were important. They all weren’t. In retrospect, some were only mildly interesting or gratuitous and would have distracted the reader. A good lesson here for me to make an effort to try my hand at op-eds more frequently, if only to keep myself sharp.

For the readers out there who are bloggers – how has blogging affected your writing ?

My favorite part of the dual ZP-Chicago Boyz deluge were the anonymous proxy visits in the sitemeter on the issue of House rules on internet use. Good Lord – who do they think is watching for them ?

Things are winding down for me – finally! Will soon be cranking up posting here and at the three other sites (Chicago Boyz, Progressive Historians and CTLab) with which I’m associated.