The conventional landing gear equipped single engine aircraft is trickier to fly under normal operations, requiring exacting attention to wind corrections and drift in order to prevent the back end racing towards the front. Land in a crab, and sideloads kick the center of gravity out beyond the main wheels, while gyroscopic precession as the tail rises or plants subtly imparts yaw that, left un-countered, could result in a ground loop. Which – I am told – is nothing like as fun as an “air” loop.

But there are certain advantages as well:

The pilot of a single-engine Cessna who made an emergency landing on a Virginia Beach, Va., baseball field was uninjured, a fire department official says.

The nature of the emergency was not specified, but the plane overturned upon landing, Fire Department Battalion Chief Kenneth Pravetz told the Norfolk (Va.) Virginian-Pilot…

A witness said the plane made no sound as it descended on the baseball field at Cape Henry Collegiate School.

“It really didn’t have a sound,” said Anthony Checchio, who was playing tennis nearby. “It just came out of nowhere.”

The tailwheel aircraft, properly flown in glider mode, has a much lower propensity towards flipping over on its back in the event of an off-airport landing.

So, the political world has got itself all tied up in knots. The proximate cause is the woeful state of the national economy, the pocket book issues that are likely to result in an anti-incumbent backlash come November:

A tide of national unhappiness and disenchantment with Washington has been building all year and proving a threat to incumbents of both parties, as illustrated by the primary defeats of Republican Sens. Robert Bennett of Utah and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska by upstarts within their own party. But the sour mood is a particular problem for Democrats because they are in control of both the White House and Congress, and the few springtime signs that the economy might have significantly improved by Election Day have been snuffed out.

Indeed, the most striking finding in the new survey is the indication of a deep slide in economic confidence. Only 26% of those surveyed think the economy is going to get better in the next year, down markedly from 47% a year ago.

In the same vein, the share who think the country is generally on the wrong track now stands at 61%, up from 48% a year ago. Perhaps most telling for Democrats, approval of President Barack Obama’s handling of the economy has slipped to 39%.

That reading, said Republican pollster William McInturff, who co-directs the Journal/NBC News survey with Democrat Peter Hart, was “a huge danger sign” for Democrats.

Red meat to the red state set, but for my own part I’d be happier if I though that the rising majority of the House (probably) and the Senate (potentially) had an alternate theory of government to test. Tea party victories here or there may have convinced a few RINOs to guard their right flanks more carefully, but the movement is seen as more of a nuisance that’s just too gosh darn white to have any national impact.

Just saying “no” to federal profligacy is a start, but it’s not a solution to the problem of massive, club-footed governmental intrusion into the private space: If Ronald Reagan couldn’t shutter the federal Department of Education, there’s no one out there that now can. And anyone who really believes that a new House majority will unwind the president’s health care reform, raise your hands.

It is perhaps an indication of the diminished trade space in Washington that the president proposes another $50 billion worth of stimulus money, this time on such “shovel ready” projects as growth sustaining infrastructure. And if you’d thought you’d heard the term “shovel ready” within the last year or so, yes – you have. It didn’t work:

Enter Stimulus II, the $814 billion plan that was also supposed to make up for lost private demand. It too was a combination of one-time tax rebates and spending, mostly on social programs like Medicaid rather than on “shovel-read projects.” Mr. Summers promised this would have a 1.5 “multiplier” effect on GDP growth, and White House economists Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein famously predicted the spending would keep the jobless rate below 8%.

All during this time, the Federal Reserve was also feeding the economy with unprecedented monetary stimulus, cutting its benchmark interest rate to near zero and expanding its balance sheet by more than $2 trillion by purchasing mortgage-backed securities and other assets…

The recovery seems to have begun in summer 2009, with GDP growth hitting 5% in the fourth quarter on the backs of an inventory rebound and expansion overseas. But U.S. growth has since decelerated, to a mere 1.6% in the second quarter, and the jobless rate is 9.6% after three consecutive months of job losses. The economy is growing, but far too slowly to restore broad-based prosperity.

In sum, never before has government spent so much and intervened so directly in credit allocation to spur growth, yet the results have been mediocre at best. In return for adding nearly $3 trillion in federal debt in two years, we still have 14.9 million unemployed.

Off-year elections tend to punish parties in power, but with the House all but written off and the Senate up for grabs, this November’s election will inevitably seen as a reflection upon the president and his policies. And he’s taking it personally:

(President Obama) deployed many of his usual lines about how Republicans are to blame for the country’s economic problems, and singled out — without mentioning him by name — would-be House Speaker John Boehner.

The Ohio Republican, Obama said, had opposed Democratic efforts to provide state aid to save the jobs of public employees and the closing of a tax loophole that encouraged companies to send jobs overseas.

More telling, Obama offered an aside that spoke to his diminished state and captured the mood of a president and party under assault.

“They talk about me like a dog,” Obama said of his political opponents. “That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true.”

Which is, to my ears anyway, an unusually thin-skinned observation to make off the cuff for the leader of the free world; punching down to express personal resentment in the hopes of engendering sympathy? Or just a good example of another reason to focus on the teleprompter stay on script? I’m trying hard to think of those words coming out of the mouth of any other president in our history, and failing.

A sustainable recovery will begin when legions of small companies survey their markets and come to the conclusion that marginal investments in additional employees will come with identifiable increases in profit opportunity. For every dollar an employee earns in wages, he has to bring at least two in value, by the time you’ve factored in health care costs, benefits overhead and the taxes on the employers profits.

Across the country, millions of employers are looking at their spreadsheets and risk calculations and just not seeing the upside to hiring. Nothing being talked about in Washington seems likely to change that, and the government’s hunger for new revenues seems, if anything, more likely to sour the job market further.

Things fall apart.

The Iranian judiciary stayed the execution by stoning of convicted adulteress Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani during the holy month of Ramadan. But that didn’t stop them for lashing her another 99 times.

Her crime this time is that a UK newspaper printed a photograph of an unveiled woman, and mis-identified her as Ashtiani. The newspaper later apologized. The Iranian judiciary has not.

No word was available about the punishment received by Ms. Ashtiani’s co-conspirators in the adultery.

Yeah, we can work with these folks.

The perspicacious reader will have noted that apart from one (quite nice, I thought) post yesterday, your humble scribe has been celebrating Labor Day weekend by mostly staying off the net. Sure, there was a Citabria flight on Friday, like there normally is. No, there were no dogfights to be had this weekend, leaving us sadly short of Indian software engineers burbling and gasping in the trunk. Which gave us the opportunity, Saturday, Sunday and today for to whack the wee white ba’ around the Elysian fields of MCAS Miramar’s golf course. Which, although for the most of you, that’s as much golf blogging as you’d like to read, your host will point out that while familiarity may indeed breed contempt, in my case it bred absurdity: I shot an 81 on Saturday, an 82 Sunday and a merciless 96 today on account of a vicious case of the shanks that appeared from nowhere on the fifth hole and which could not be tamed until the 17th, not if it were ever so and it’s been ten year at least since I’ve broken 90 in the wrong direction.

I’d like to share with you reflections of the quite times I spent with my beautiful daughters over the holiday weekend, only they both have driver’s licenses and access to cars, and Friday their allowances dropped, which gave them means, motive and opportunity to seek their entertainments largely elsewhere. I did receive SMS texts on my cellular device reassuring me that they continue to in fact exist, and look with keen anticipation towards personally verifying that assertion.

Spent some goodly time reading too. Actual books, I mean. Which was a charming little divertissment from the daily dose of the outrage machine.

Son Number One has successfully navigated the treacherous rocks and shoals of a suddenly crucial phase of Aviation Preflight Indoctrination, the academics phase. With the need to maintain a 94 point average to avoid being cut it was much more a test of determination that it had been back in my day, and my hat is off to him, evidence that he is to the gradual perfectibility of man.

Haven’t much of a clue what awaits me in the coming week, apart from the fact that all of it will undoubtedly be critically important and due yesterday. Still haven’t determined finally whether I really want to head to Reno on Thursday for the 2010 Tailhook convention. I’ve seen that show so many times before and know precisely how it ends. For the now, my batteries are as charged as they get, I suppose. I hope yours are too.

Back to it then.

–

Submissions from the ether:

Occasional reader Thomas reminds us of the videography embedded at this sight, commemorating Charles Lindberg’s flight across the Atlantic.

Robert warns us of the perils of obsession: 62 years building replicas of the Royal Navy out of matchsticks is, to my way of thinking, 61 years, 11 months, 29 days (give or take) and 23 hours too many.

Jason shows us what those darn kids are doing with my FA-18 these days. Airshows, pah. No one who volunteers to do them should be permitted, says I. In my most curmudgeonly.

Speaking of airshows, Peter K. sends us two YouTube videos including one showing 16 Spitfires – actual Spitfires – flying at an airshow at Duxford, here and other vintage machines here. Which is an entirely different thing than some darn kid dancing with my best girl.

I think that’ll do it for now.

Most of us studied Euclidean geometry in high school, the mathematical system of measuring relationships in a flat space. Euclid’s fifth postulate is taken to be axiomatic, even tautological – for any given line in space, there is exactly one parallel line that never intersects. Non-Euclidean geometry differs, postulating – depending upon the variant – infinite numbers of parallel lines that never intersect (hyperbolic), or the intersection of parallel lines (elliptical). Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometries are internally consistent, logically provable and valuable, yet they are mutually incomprehensible. Both exist, yet at a fundamental level, each obliterates the existence of the other.

Andrew Bacevich argues for a re-definition of our foreign policy geometry. The Boston University professor has certainly paid his dues to national security. He graduated from West Point, served as an infantry officer in Viet Nam and spent 23 years in uniform before becoming an academic. He lost his son in combat in Iraq.

Bacevich’s most recent book, “Washington Rules,” is reviewed by Gary J. Bass, Princeton professor of international relations, in the New York Times. In it, Bacevich rails against “60 years of militarism” in US foreign policy:

From Harry S. Truman’s presidency to today, Bacevich argues, Americans have trumpeted the credo that they alone must “lead, save, liberate and ultimately transform the world.” That crusading mission is implemented by what Bacevich caustically calls “the sacred trinity”: “U.S. military power, the Pentagon’s global footprint and an American penchant for intervention.” This threatening posture might have made some sense in 1945, he says, but it is catastrophic today. It relegates America to “a condition of permanent national security crisis.”

Bacevich has two main targets in his sights. The first are the commissars of the national security establishment, who perpetuate these “Washington rules” of global dominance. By Washington, he means not just the federal government, but also a host of satraps who gain power, cash or prestige from this perpetual state of emergency: defense contractors, corporations, big banks, interest groups, think tanks, universities, television networks and The New York Times. He complains that an unthinking Washington consensus on global belligerence is just as strong among mainstream Democrats as among mainstream Republicans. Those who step outside this monolithic view, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, are quickly dismissed as crackpots, Bacevich says. This leaves no serious checks or balances against the overweening national security state.

Bacevich’s second target is the sleepwalking American public. He says that they notice foreign policy only in the depths of a disaster that, like Vietnam or Iraq, is too colossal to ignore. As he puts it, “The citizens of the United States have essentially forfeited any capacity to ask first-order questions about the fundamentals of national security policy.”

It is possible to imagine a world that did not involve the US shouldering the burden of facing aggressive, international communism as Europe rebuilt itself from the ashes of yet another destructive war. Possible to envision a Korea unified under the benevolence of Kim Il Sung. Possible to think of a Pacific Rim where the advance towards representative democracy and free markets was not enabled generally by the sacrifice of nearly 60,000 American lives in Viet Nam specifically. Possible to live with the consequences of Bosnian genocide, or Saddam’s unchecked expansion of power into Kuwait and beyond. It is possible to conjecture that without the kind of military support that prevented the state of Israel and all of its citizens being pushed into the sea, the terrorist attacks of 9/11 might never have happened, rendering the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq unnecessary, even implausible.

Each of these points on the geo-political time line forms it’s own precise kind of geometry. The Cold War armament and its policy partner, the Marshall Plan, enabled the rise of a liberal, democratic Europe at peace with itself, but left the United States as virtually the only free world military power with the ability to act at will. Over 60 decades, our national leadership, and the “sleepwalking public” who placed them atop government, were unified that in the consensus that power to act in the face of evil implied the responsibility to do so.

US policy since World War II has indeed aggressively inserted itself not merely where others feared to tread, but where they were unable to. National security calculus directed actions abroad when they seemed likely to extend the freedom, suppress tyranny, enable market-driven prosperity and prevent the more massive losses of life attendant to general, industrial scale warfare – especially when such destruction might in time be visited upon our own shores. The nation’s leadership in the immediate aftermath of World War II, and up to George H. W. Bush, had personally witnessed that destruction, and had no interest seeing it come home.

As Europe tended to its social schemes while often struggling to find 2% of its GDP to dedicate to national defense, America shouldered an increasingly large burden of defending and extending freedom abroad. Not merely because of the fact that relative peace and general prosperity was good for business. But also because it was the right thing to do. Indeed, 800,000 Rwandans and 400,000 Sudanese bear mute testimony to the fact that there is no “other America” to step in and act when America declines to. The Pax Americana – however imperfect it may be – has undeniable coincided with the greatest increase in human prosperity and quality of life in human history over the shortest period of time. In this case, it is at least plausible to suggest that correlation does equal causation. Pax Americana is at least in part the capability to globally project the kind of military power that is enabled by the world’s most economically prosperous nation – to most of the world, no armed conflict can take place anywhere without American power, or at least American consent. Absent that power, and the willingness to use it when necessary, other nations will be forced to redeploy productive assets from their economies to their own self-defense, regional bullies and hegemons will arise, and inevitably, destabilizing conflicts will occur whose consequences might not be foreseeable. See also, Sarajevo (1914).

Professor Bacevich, according to Bass, is “is less interested in foreign policy here (he offers only cursory remarks about the objectives and capabilities of countries like China, Russia, North Korea and Iran) than in the way he thinks militarism has corrupted America.” Recognizing and ameliorating that corruption would require an alternate, entirely plausible geo-political geometry for the last 60 years. It is a geometry in which his only son might very well still be alive. But the world generally, and America particularly, would be a very different place than it is today; the two visions, while internally consistent, are mutually exclusive. Whether that kind of foreign policy, and that kind of world would be better or worse is, I suppose, open to question.

But unlike Professor Bacevich, and by tacit endorsement, Professor Bass, I am not so sure that the citizens of the United States have forfeited the right to ask that question.