Starring Ed Harris
Had a great briefing today from an Undersecretary of the United Nations about a recent mission in Liberia; he discussed our nation's history with that fractious West African nation, how it came into existence, how Mr. Firestone made a killing (and saved our bacon in WWII) having planted rubber tree plants there when Japan invaded the British and French rubber plantations in Malaysia and IndoChina, how Liberia made the Guinness Book of World Records for corruption in the 1930s when the president was elected with 232,000 votes when only 15,000 people were registered, and how the country has become so delapidatious that it doesn't even register on some global charts of poverty.
Our Thursday lectures are the best part of my AFIT experience, when academics takes a back seat to professional development and leadership perspectives. Makes it feel like Air Command and Staff College, which is what this program is aspiring to be anyway.
The good news is that we learned who this year's speakers are going to be for the Wright Brothers Lecture Series in June the week before graduation. Like last year (see June 10 2005 entry), it's going to be a two-day gathering of legends from World War II, Vietnam (POW Col George "Bud" Day, whose son I worked with in Turkey, coincidentally), the Space Program (Gene Krantz, the Mission Director at NASA for years, but famously during the Apollo XIII mission), and more recent leadership (recently retired AF Chief of Staff Gen John Jumper, which is appropriate, since it was his idea to send more people to AFIT to get their degrees).
I was so stoked I volunteered to be on the WBLS committee, though on the "communications" panel doing Audio/Visual, advertising stuff, rather than Protocol or Escort duty, since I'm so shy.
Our Thursday lectures are the best part of my AFIT experience, when academics takes a back seat to professional development and leadership perspectives. Makes it feel like Air Command and Staff College, which is what this program is aspiring to be anyway.
The good news is that we learned who this year's speakers are going to be for the Wright Brothers Lecture Series in June the week before graduation. Like last year (see June 10 2005 entry), it's going to be a two-day gathering of legends from World War II, Vietnam (POW Col George "Bud" Day, whose son I worked with in Turkey, coincidentally), the Space Program (Gene Krantz, the Mission Director at NASA for years, but famously during the Apollo XIII mission), and more recent leadership (recently retired AF Chief of Staff Gen John Jumper, which is appropriate, since it was his idea to send more people to AFIT to get their degrees).
I was so stoked I volunteered to be on the WBLS committee, though on the "communications" panel doing Audio/Visual, advertising stuff, rather than Protocol or Escort duty, since I'm so shy.
posted by Dan at 7:50 PM
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