Blog status update

I see this blog, which I’ve rarely visited for months, still has some readers.  That’s good to see.  Unfortunately — and with apologies to interested parties who’ve expected posts I promised long ago — I’ve been off-track and low-on-steam for quite a while.  But I’ve not lost any interest in TIMN or STA, and I intend to resume my efforts here before long.

My backlog of intentions still includes: a post on Michel Bauwens’ concept of the “partner state” (soon?), a post comparing my TIMN and his P2P views (later), and a post about future implications of TIMN for political philosophy and ideology — not to mention lots of other matters.  I also intend to reiterate some TIMN- and STA-related notions I’ve left at other sites these past months:  e.g., on complexity vs. complicatedness in analyzing why societies collapse (contra Tainter); on analyzing networks as a general vs. specific form of organization (lately, à la Mueller); on dignity and democracy as motivations behind the Arab Spring; on the difficulty of reforming regimes that institute monstrous hybrids (term from Jacobs); and on trends in Mexico and Cuba. 

In addition, I really should get around to reading and reviewing a string of books — e.g., by Tilly, Martin, Fukuyama — that bear on TIMN.  I also wish to get to writings that bear on STA in general, and the mindsets of jihadis and millenarians in particular.  But that may be too much to expect right now.

In any case, the purpose of this post is not to lay out an agenda but just to signal that this blog remains active and still has potential.   

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I see that during my absence the blog’s formatting has gone a bit awry.  In particular, some font sizes and styles have changed.  I’ll try to correct that — I've already fixed one thing — so as to make posts more readable, but some technicalities may elude me at this point. 

Also, as noted at the end of my last post last year, the blog became a target of spam comments and spurious backlinks.  I altered the settings to disallow backlinks, hide past ones, and require comment moderation.  I’m keeping those settings in place, though I like receiving pertinent comments and links. 

Finally, I see that a re-feed of most (all?) my past posts spewed forth a few weeks ago, without any prompting by me.  This may indicate something else is technically amiss.  But perhaps it is just an episodic peculiarity of Google’s blogspot domain, since I also received re-feeds of past posts from several other blogs I follow at about the same time — all of them from blogspot.com urls.

Onward.