A bunch of people have linked to this, so I’ll jump on the bandwagon: Business Week has a long article about the rising importance of blogging in today’s business environment. Says the mag, Blogs Will Change Your Business.

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up…or catch you later.

Read it all. Best line:

Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They’re a prerequisite.

And, I might add, so is blog advertising.

Yale professor David Gelernter writes in the LA Times what the blogosphere has been saying literally for years, that the Republican party is the “spiritual heirs” of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This is serious business. If you agree that President Bush has no automatic right to call himself Lincoln’s successor just because they are both “Republicans,” then Democrats have no automatic right to FDR’s mantle either. The Democrats and Republicans switched roles while no one was looking.

Either the good professor is repeating what is now conventional wisdom or he thinks he made a deep insight. And he may have, but it’s sort of late. I wrote in December 2003,

The Republican party under G. W. Bush today bears a much greater resemblance to the Democrats under F. D. Roosevelt than it does to any previous Republican administration.

I doubt I was the first commentator to point that out. Gelernter doesn’t dwell on this, though; his article’s interest is elsewhere. But he does say that the “Big Switch” explains a lot of the political dynamic in Washington today. I agree. But as I observed almost a year and a half ago, I rejoin that the Big Switch,

… is not an improvement not because I excoriate Roosevelt or his administration’s record. Like any other administration, it has its successes and failures; it’s legacy probably springs more from the fact that FDR was elected four times, keeping his programs alive much longer than they might have lived had he stopped at two terms.

Whatever FDR’s faults or virtues, there’s no denying that he was a big-government activist. In fact, “big-government activist” is redundant; by its very nature, big government must be activist, else it would not have become big to begin with.

More than anything else, big-government activism is the New Deal’s legacy, and IMO, has come to define the governing philosophy of both parties today.

Is Bush a “big-government conservative?” Only if you think the term is not self contradictory.

Pieter at Peaktalk writes how Benedict XVI has reignited interest in the “values” debate in Europe. He’s written how the secular-right should work with the new pope in restoring Europe’s moral strength, and how eroding values have an impact on education in Europe.

Pair his entries with the Washington Times’ three-part series, “Faithless: God Under Fire in the Public Square.”

Part I: Religion under a secular assault
Part II: Why Bush threatens secularism
Part III: Believers aim to ‘reclaim’ America

Thanks to scientists, tens of millions of Americans will soon be relieved of a terrible malady.

The commander in chief of US European Command is also the Supreme Commander, Allied Powers Europe, the military boss of NATO. That gentleman is United States Marine Gen. James Jones. The CINC of US Strategic Command is a Marine Gen. James E. Cartwright.

Now President Bush has nominated Marine Gen. Peter Pace to be the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff after Air Force Gen. Richard Myers retires in September.

Pace will be the first Marine to hold the top job. He is presently the vice-chairman of the JCS. Of course, I knew the Marine Corps would ascend relative to the other services way back in October.

James Joyner and Phillip Carter debate whether the military draft should be reinstituted. Phil says yes, James says no. It’s here. Personally, I think James wins, but I have to admit my existing bias against the draft.

I have posted recently about my digital camera decisions, including a review of the Kodak DX7440 digicam I bought last weekend. I also mentioned at the end of this post the higher-line DX7590 that had me drooling, since it has all the features of the 7440 plus 10x zoom instead of 4X and five megapixels intead of four.

One level down from the 7590 is the DX6490. It retains the 10X optical zoom but gives up the extra 16 “scene” settings both the 7440 and the 7590 have. It keeps portrait, sport, nightshot and PASM modes and, like the 7590, features a high-resolution, through-the-lens, electronic viewfinder (EVF) rather than the 7440’s optical, 87-percent-coverage viewfinder. All three cameras have diopter-focus adjustment of the viewfinder and a 2.2-inch, high-resolution LCD on the back panel and a shuttle dial for adjusting exposure variable in all shooting modes.

Okay, this is a little embarrassing: Sunday night I bought a DX6490, you know, like two days after I bought the 7440. Details on how and why I did it are a little unclear at this point but I assure you I was not under the influence of any substances, spells or incantations. It just sorta, you see, happened, which is exactly the kind of explanation I have never accepted from my kids. The new(er) camera came by UPS Wednesday.

But I am not sorry. My wife will probably wind up using the 7440; she’s never used a digicam before and is probably ready to move on from her ancient Olympus 35mm point-and-shoot.

I explained yesterday why I found the cameras’ “burst of six” mode very useful for the sports photography I do for my son’s track and field team. Yesterday afternoon he competed in Vanderbilt University’s “Great Eight” invitational for the top eight high-school athletes in each event in Middle Tennessee. (Thomas, a junior, competes in discus and shot-put, and I am proud to report that placed third in each, beaten in both events by seniors.)

Taking advantage of HP’s Image Zone Plus software and free online albuming, I have posted eight shots that showcase the image quality of the DX6490. All photos were taken at 4MP resolution and “auto” setting. (I used sport setting for most of the others, but not these.) The linked page is a thumbnail page, click on the thumbnail for a larger view and click on it for a full-screen view. (All photos copyright © Donald Sensing, 2005, other use prohibited.)

I took the 4X-zoom 7440 camera also, but only took three shots with it. I quickly found that once you’ve used ultrazoom you don’t want to go back!

One feature of both the -90 cameras that I like is that the flash is off unless you manually open it. They meter the flash automatically, and warn-light you if flash is needed, but will not pop it open for you. Since both my kids who still live at home are competitive swimmers, this is a great feature. Swim-meet rules prohibit flash photography at the starts because it dazzles off the water and degenerates the swimmers’ depth perception. I’ve been yelled at a couple of times because my old camera’s flash auto fired when I thought I’d turned it off.

Both the -90 cameras also have auto-sleep for the LCD (after one minute) and the EVF (15 seconds) to save power. The EVFs have auto-eye-detect and will turn back on when you raise the camera to your eye. The LCD will awake when you press any button or push the zoom control. Very, very neat and very useful.

In both cameras, the LCD and the EVF display what the photo will actually be because the images for both at through-the-lens, just like an SLR camera. I quickly came to appreciate that feature, too. I am pretty much through with a photo when I press the shutter release. I want to compose through the viewfinder and be done with it. I dislike manipulating images on the computer, even though I know how (and for which Picasa is a great free program, btw).

Doggone it, I still want the 7590 - but not as much as before . . .

Update: BTW, Kodak has a $50 rebate on the DX7590.

Services are a key

Mao Tse-Tung once wrote that guerrillas - or “insurgents” as they are called nowadays - are like fish in a lake. To an observer all fish look alike as they swim in the water. For guerrillas, the lake is the people among whom the guerrillas live and strike. Ideally, the people support the guerrillas with manpower, resources and shelter. Less ideally, they simply do not oppose the guerrillas. And if the people oppose the guerrillas, then the guerrillas must strike fear into the people to gain at least minimal material support. Fear is inflicted by assassinations, bombings and other terrorist acts. The guerrillas must protect their identities above all, amplifying the people’s fear because no one knows who is a terrorist and who is not.

Mao said defeating guerrillas is done by drying up the lake. If the counter-insurgency forces can make the people decide to overcome their fear and ally with the government, then the insurgents’ freedom to act and operate is steadily reduced as more and more people act on their allegiance.

Over the decades, counter-insurgency experts have learned that defeating insurgencies requires fine calibrations of applying penalties to the people for supporting guerrillas or staying neutral, and rewarding them for allying with the government. American forces in Iraq were maybe a little slow to identify just what incentives the Iraqi people needed to guide them into drying up the terrorists’ lake, but now things seem to be proceeding well. The LA Times ran a piece by Max Boot on how US Army officers shed their orientation towards major armor engagements and focused on winning the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people as a key means of defeating the insurgency.

Last week at Ft. Hood in Texas, on a tour of military bases organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, I heard a colonel in the 1st Cavalry Division explain one training approach. The 1st Cavalry, which garrisoned Baghdad from March 2004 to March 2005, is an armored force designed to fight other tank armies. In order to figure out how to run a modern metropolis, officers spent time with Austin city officials before they deployed. They also rode along with electrical, water, sewage and garbage workers. Applying what they learned, the 1st Cavalry troops discovered that the more they improved municipal service in Baghdad, the less likely residents were to cooperate with insurgents. Thanks to their efforts, the Iraqi capital is significantly more peaceful today than it was a year ago.

It’s striking that one of the complaints Osama bin Laden made against the non-Islamist governments of Arab countries was that they fail to provide such services to the people. In 1996, for example, bin Laden said,

“The ordinary man knows that [Saudi Arabia] is the largest oil producer in the world, yet at the same time he is suffering from taxes and bad services.”

This observation sheds light on OBL’s strategic incompetence. He has always considered the Arab ummah, or Muslims masses, as his natural ally. He has said over periods of years that his main tactic in Saudi Arabia (his principal strategic target) was to bring forth conditions that would cause either of two things. First, the ruling Saudi royals to convert in both word and deed to bin Laden’s form of Islamism and institute strict sharia law throughout the land, or second for the people to arise in righteous, religious indignation and overthrow the corrupt Saudi regime.

But OBL never demonstrated to the Saudis or anyone else how they would actually be better of under Islamism than they are now. In fact, he proved quite the opposite: in the several years he and the Islamist Taliban ruled Afghanistan, the Afghan people sufered from bad services and a personally corrupt regime (not to mention a murderous regime, of course).

If OBL and co. had really been interested in winning the hearts and minds of the ummah,
they would have used Afghanistan as a proof-of-concept base to garner admiration from the ummah. But they didn’t even try.

Instead, OBL and the Taliban revealed the true face of Islamism - government of the many by the few, for the benefit of the few. Far from improving the quality of lives for the Afghan men and women, they coupled ordinary governmental ineptitude with fascisti regulation and enforcement of the minutiae of daily living. Islamism proved to be no shining light on a hill, beckoning the ummah to shake off their temporal masters. There was only a downside for the people to change regimes in Saudi Arabia.

Iraq under Saddam was literally a secular version of Islamist fanaticism. Replace Afghanistan’s cult of Quran with a cult of Saddam and that was Iraq. Perhaps it was even worse, since Saddam’s security apparatus was even more comprehensive and ruthless than the Taliban’s. Civil services under Saddam were not much better than they are now and in fact services in many parts of Iraq now are enormously better than they ever were under Saddam. That’s drying up the lake in which the Iraqi insurgencies swim - and note the plural, “insurgencies.” There’s more than one, and that’s the topic of an upcoming post.

UD: I’ve added this post to James Joyner’s Friday linkfest.