23 Years

It was 23 years ago this month that I began blogging here. In the early years, I blogged almost daily, primarily about the Iraq War and other dimensions of US foreign policy. I worked in occasional pieces about baseball or presidential politics. 

Not everything I wrote for the internet ended up on these webpages because I also blogged for many years at Duck of Minerva, though it's been more than 10 years since I posted anything there. For awhile I had a climate change column at e-IR, but I cannot figure out how to access those pieces even though many turn up on search engines. Weird. Oh, also, I was briefly a guest blogger at Lawyers, Guns, & Money many years ago. 

Today, I rarely post. When I do, the lion's share of pieces are recurring annual posts about films or books, with some posts about my fantasy baseball teams or personal travel. Occasionally I might post about my research, especially when I present it at a conference or when it finds its way to print. 

Every fall I think about the anniversary of the blog and there's really nothing special about 23 years. It just seemed worth mentioning. 

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Mastadon?

Anyone who has followed the Twitter meltdown in recent days knows that many academics are turning to substitute social media outlets. It's not a social media comparison, but I keep thinking about how quickly Enron melted into nothing.  Readers may recall the fate of other once-popular social media such as Myspace or Friendster.

As a precaution against the destruction of Twitter, I opened a Mastadon account (RodgerPayne@c.im) but have not posted any content to-date. Obviously that could change at any moment. 

It's also possible I could change servers as the setup was a bit confusing and many of the servers other academics recommended for scholars are not taking on new users -- or there's a waiting list and I wanted to set up something right away.

Who knows? 



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My best blog post ever

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Thank you FCC.



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Scholar Social Networks and Copyright.

Credit: Mike Seyfang on Flickr.

I recently joined ResearchGate, a social network for scholars. Its stated mission "is to connect researchers and make it easy for them to share and access scientific output, knowledge, and expertise. On ResearchGate they find what they need to advance their research." I previously joined Academia.edu, which kind of looks like Facebook for scholars. The link to my home page has been in the right-hand sidebar for some years. Many of my recent conference papers have been uploaded to that site.

Since joining ResearchGate, I've been bombarded with requests to upload copies of my published articles (and books). Unfortunately, as most scholars know, I do not own the copyright to these works. They were typically transferred as a condition of publication when the pieces were originally accepted.

There are exceptions. For example, a coauthored piece on the biological weapons taboo was published in a security journal produced by the U.S. military. Since the publication is produced by the government, no third party holds the copyright. I also published a piece on "The Geopolitics of Global Climate Change" in Sustain Magazine, which is published locally by the Kentucky Institute for the Environment and Sustainable Development. Their back issues are open access. My article begins on p. 9, immediately following a piece by NASA's Jim Hansen.

I've been checking and some of the commercial publishing companies allow me to upload a pdf to my personal or departmental website, so long as I meet several conditions. Cambridge University Press allows this, for instance, though at least one copyright in a Cambridge journal belongs to the American Political Science Association because the article is published in one of their organizational journals.

Unfortunately, I do not have direct control over my departmental webpage.  Thus, I'm planning to upload files to Google Drive and then post direct links here at the blog. This is my primary personal website and I've already had various links in the right-hand column that can ultimately lead you to my work. I'll probably start a page today and add links and necessary information as I check copyrights.



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Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

New Look

Readers probably noticed the new banner and other minor blog updates -- the former made fairly easily thanks to Picmonkey. Once again, the photos are courtesy of government websites, so should not involve any copyright issues:

• Obama with beer
• Kansas Jayhawk
• KC Royals Blue October 2014
• Comedy-Tragedy Masks
• Earth

The last update occurred in 2010. 


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For 140 character IR and foreign policy talk, follow me on twitter.

Or for basketball, baseball, movies or other stuff, follow this personal twitter account.

Updates

I've been a blogger deadbeat, but here's what's been happening:

1. The 10 year anniversary of this blog passed without fanfare. My first post was September 3, 2003, though I later assigned an August date to a post that provided my biographical information.

2. I've been writing the latest paper for my Comedy of Global Politics book project: "Reading the Global War on Terror as Comedy." I'll be presenting it this Saturday morning in DC at the ISSS-ISAC annual meeting. I discuss comedic and satirical narratives and frame key early elements of the GWOT around them.

3. Saturday night, I attended "Bang, Bang You're Dead" at YPAS. My youngest daughter Cate has a key part in the production. She was fantastic in the moving play about a high school mass shooting.

BTW, a group of YPAS students plans to attend the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland next summer and they are looking for financial assistance to cover expenses. Eat at Impellizzeri's pizza in the Highlands tonight and this YPAS project receives 10% of the revenues.

4. Finally, I wish to express my condolences to the family and friends of local financial entrepreneur George Emont. His son Jacob is a close friend of my daughter Claire and his recent death is a genuine tragedy.


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Tag word cloud

I removed the names John and Robert because they were distorting the image:

Personal notes

In part, I've been silent here because since August 4 my family celebrated two birthdays, made a long weekend trip to Tulsa, and then hosted my wife's mother.

Additionally, I've been unpacking my office -- the entire building got new carpeting and most rooms on my floor received new furniture. All my books and files were packed from the first week of June through late July. While unpacking, I've been recycling lots of really old paper and boxing unwanted books for donations, trade or sale. Anyone want some issues of the American Political Science Review from the 1970s?

Unpacking, I've been listening to a lot of internet radio on my PC, including my Whiskeytown radio station on Pandora. Feel free to check it out.

In any case, don't look for a lot of blogging until Labor Day. I have to complete the syllabi for my two classes, finish a book chapter -- and teach classes. That's right, we begin August 23. Ugh.


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New banner, etc.

Regular readers probably noticed the new color scheme and banner -- the latter made fairly easily thanks to Picnik. Once again, all the photos are courtesy of the U.S. government, so should not involve any copyright issues:

Baseballs (with presidential signature)

Earth

Mushroom cloud

Obama-Clinton

If you are looking for new content, I blogged about Journolist ("Identifying Groupthink") over at Duck of Minerva.


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Blog upkeep.

I discovered yesterday that my archives do not seem to include my earliest posts from September 2003. A handful or so are missing.

In trying to figure out what went wrong, I've been applying titles to those posts -- inserting them on a title line that Blogger was not providing at that time. I figure as I save the new title, Blogger will now tell me if there's a technical problem with an individual post. Nothing so far, however.

In any case, I linked yesterday to a deficit piece I wrote in my first week of blogging that wasn't showing up. I had to find it through the "edit posts" section of Blogger. Hmmmm.

I wonder if other posts are missing from the archives for different months?


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Duck

January 15, I posted, "The 'war on terror' is over" at Duck of Minerva. British Foreign Secretary David Miliband recently made the case in a speech in Mumbai -- I discuss his arguments.

On January 10, I blogged about "NGOs as 'New Colonialists,'" a charge levied by several writers in a Foreign Policy piece.

Regular readers have probably noticed that this site rarely now has foreign policy or international relations content. That's intentional. Though I started blogging here in 2003,primarily about the US in Iraq, the Duck of Minerva group IR blog seems like a more logical place for those posts. Frankly, that site gets 8 or 10 times as many readers on a daily basis and that kind of content is precisely what they are seeking.

As a result, my less frequent domestic politics material remains on this blog, along with more personal material (including baseball). I do try to signal new Duck posts here and will keep doing that. The links may appear days after the original.

Thanks for reading.


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New banner

I'm not 100% happy with the new banner, but the old one had to go -- pictures of Tony Blair and Don Rumsfeld just didn't feel all that relevant anymore.

The original photos are all from government websites:

• Baseballs (with presidential signature)
• Osama bin Laden
• George W. Bush and John McCain (with cake)
• Earth
• Iraq map
• Mushroom Cloud
• Barack Obama
• Condi Rice

Feel free to play around with alternatives. I'm looking at roughly 600 by 100 pixels.

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I dislike Ike

Sunday, Louisville was hit by very high winds that knocked out electrical power for more than 300,000 people in the Louisville area in the early afternoon. My home has now been without power for about 4 days. Given the damage in the neighborhood and on the street, my family may not have power for several more days. The power company and city government say that some people are going to be without power for 10 to 14 days.

That explains the light blogging. The University has its own coal-fired power plant and did not lose power for any appreciable time. I suspect that many of the lines are buried as there were plenty of downed tree branches and gutters across campus.

For the community, part of the problem is that hundreds of local workers had traveled to Texas to help with the aftermath of Ike. The weather people were only forecasting 30 to 40 mph winds in this area -- not realizing we would actually have Ike-related gusts of 60 and 70 mph.

It's a disaster. More than a 2.5 million people were also without power in Ohio.


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Blog maintenance

I've been fooling around with the blog's format a bit in my spare time (read: when I should be grading). Soon, I hope to provide an accessible list of post labels that will make it easier to search the archives. Blogger makes an easy-to-use widget available, but I'm afraid of switching from my html template to the "new blogger" layout function. I made the switch for another blog and lost virtually all my personalizations.

On this blog, that would mean a lot of lost work -- especially links (blogrolls).

In any case, while playing around I discovered that Blogger offers a service to consolidate the RSS feed source. After entering the feedburner address, my reader count jumped from single digits to about 70. After more than four years of blogging, I certainly hope that this is a more accurate count of my readership. I can't believe that the lower number has registered for such a long time....sigh.

With enough time, I may also change the blog banner. Donald Rumsfeld and Tony Blair are much less important public figures now than they used to be. Plus, all the photos are really small.

Informed reader advice on any of these matters would be much appreciated.

What else could I do to improve the blog?


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More Duck

Since the Duck of Minerva receives about four times as many reader hits per day as this blog does, then I'm going to be posting most international relations material there.

Today, I posted "Bush on WW 3" concerning his latest statements about the Iranian nuclear program.

Monday, October 15, I blogged "UNAMI Report on Iraq: Dire, Grave Crises." The post discusses the 11th report on the human rights situation in Iraq issued by the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq (UNAMI).

I'll continue posting here on a variety of topics, including politics, especially as the presidential race unfolds. Discussions of film, baseball, local Louisville matters and many other topics will be found on this blog as well.


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