Michael Hiteshew

1. Jan Bussey’s photo blog, Cascade Exposures, features her photos from in and around Seattle. Lots of great macro lens images. She keeps a few albums at the bottom of her page but most of her photos never make it there. Just page through her archives. Jan’s not a professional, though she certainly has the technique of one.

2. One of my daughters and I visited the Udvar-Hazy Center at Dulles Airport about three months ago. If you really like aircraft, you should drop by. It’s not quite as impressive, either architecturally or in terms of content, as the National Air Space Museum in Washington, DC. Udvar-Hazy is sort of a branch office, a place to display some of the artifacts they have no room for at the main building.

Perhaps the single most important artifact on display at Udvar-Hazy is the fully restored Enola Gay. This, of course, is the plane that dropped the worlds first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. In an amazing display of technological development a person can stand, as we did, and see a 1930’s era biplane hanging from the ceiling rafters, then adjacent to it and sitting on the floor, mid-1940’s technology in a Boeing B-29 – which in itself was an amazing leap forward technologically from the biplane – and adjacent to that an early 1960’s era SR-71 Blackbird. To this day, an SR-71 looks like something that flew in from the future. I stumbled onto a great photo gallery of Udvar-Hazy at Curious Lee.

3. Finally, a small album of photos I took in and around San Diego harbor a few years back.

Enjoy!

The Christian Science Monitor has a primer. I took the interactive Are you a neocon? quiz and it thinks I’m a Realist. In general, I’d agree with that. Except I also believe that ethics do have a place in policy decisions.

I was a little disturbed that the CSM felt it necessary to point out which neocons are Jews. What’s that all about?, I asked myself. Did they point out which members were Christians or Buddhists or atheists or agnostic? I came up with three possibilities:

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There’s an interesting article by Elinor Burkett in The Chronicle Review about her experiences as a Fulbright Professor teaching a journalism class in Kyrgistan and the hostility and misinformation she was faced with overcoming.

Over the past three years, I have often wondered how I would have explained such suspicion if I had arrived in Kyrgyzstan after September 11, 2001. Would I have simply assumed that the hostility was a result of the United States’ bombing of Afghanistan or its invasion of Iraq?

Nathan, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan, comments on her experiences in The Argus.

And you’d be asking the wrong question. There’s a very strong temptation to treat Central Asia as “like Afghanistan” or “like the Middle East.” Sure, it’s Muslim, but if you want to understand the structure of the society the Central Asians, especially urban ones, grow up in, look to the Soviet Union.

What is the role of the SecDef? For one, to define a vision for the DOD; a roadmap to the future, a strategic plan. In this, Secretary Rumsfeld has provided the vision of ‘transformation’. In short, it’s a plan to make the armed forces lighter, more quickly and easily deployable, and simultaneously, more lethal. Laudable goals. Hence, we have the cancellation of the Crusader, a behemoth of a self propelled howitzer. Too big, too heavy. We also have the promotion of the Stryker armored vehicle. It fits into the network-centric warfare scheme of the future quite nicely. So far, so good.

Finally, on the ‘vision’ thing, we have the light-mobile force concept. Special forces types, acting with forward air controllers, use combined arms techniques to leverage modern telecom capablities and precision weapons synergistically. They’re ‘force multipliers’, as Rummy likes to say. The war in Afghanistan was a demonstration, if you will, of how light forces can bring precision firepower to bear to create battlefield effects formerly reserved for heavy armored divisions. Again, no quibbles.

That brings us to the SecDef’s other primary duty, the strategy and management of warfare. And that brings us to Iraq.

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Presidents have little effect on the economy.

That isn’t me speaking, that’s every professional economist who’s ever remarked on the subject. At best, they can influence things like federal spending, tax policy and trade policy. That’s about it. So why did the USA enjoy an economic boom in the 90’s under Bill Clinton and a recession under George Bush?

In the 1980’s a revolution swept through American business. The following were a few key changes.

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