| Tuesday, April
21, 2009
The New York Times is calling for the end of the US Air Force.
Unfortunately, there's a lot more in the plan. See
http://www.nytimes.com/
2009/04/21/opinion/21kane.html
The plan also ends the volunteer military, and the promotion
system that has to some extent (not entirely, of course) mitigated the Iron
Law of Bureaucracy. Whether this is a trial balloon pr just a pundit's
musing is not clear to me.
Now one can make a case for universal military service as
necessary in a Republic, but what is proposed is not that at all. A
"national service" program is something else entirely.
As to up or out, this needs a lot of discussion.
The real question, though, is the purpose of the military,
which depends entirely on just where we are going. The World Policeman needs
an entirely different military force from the Old Republic.
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Regarding learning on line, I have this correspondence that
I found interesting:
The fastest way to reveal and illustrate
academic-bureaucratic gatekeeper obstructionism is trying to use "Library"
functions online. I've hit numerous LOC computer catalogs and indexes that
say "only accessible at the LOC".
If these people had their way the internet would
still be restricted to .edu, .mil and .gov, with special exceptions for
their lotus eater foundation buddies at .org.
This is one place where Newt really disappointed me.
In the mid-90s he made a big deal about cracking open the
government-academic complex's Internet Iron Curtain. Instead they created
new profit centers. i.e. the National Technical Information Service
charging $40 & up for existing pdfs of public domain government research
reports that probably cost 0.5 cent to deliver now. The Department of
Commerce has been a particularly egregious offender.
The reader continues (after an irrelevant answer from me):
This library iron curtain appeared at precisely the
moment I was studying Fick's 1st & 2d Laws of diffusion. The examples used
are from metallurgy & heat treating. As an aside, I had no idea metal heat
treating results were so hyper-sensitive to time & temperature until I
started doing the math.
Which is about as far as possible from where Dr.
Adolf Fick (inventor of contact lenses) was as a physiologist when he did
his work on diffusion physics. A classic example of how discoveries in one
field of science can have the most profound effects in very distant
fields. In many cases not even foreseeable by the discoverer himself.
And a good reason to knock down as many knowledge
access barriers as possible, such as the ones the librarians are still
maintaining.
For me personally I can see this technical library
problem will reappear again in future courses. And I won't always be
conveniently going up to DC where I can use the Library of Congress. I
have to explore other solutions that are a bit more localized.
No doubt committee chairmen under the influence of
Evil Counselors impeded Newt's vision. Lots of publishing and research
businesses are 100% based on reselling their ready access to government
archives and libraries in DC.
I still think Newt could have invested more time and
political capital into the subject. Especially compared to impeaching Bill
over Monica. It's just the sort of thing that helps break up that
unhealthy concentration of power in DC.
But the GOP overall doesn't behave that way when
they achieve power.
It is pretty clear that a number of institutions have
managed to become gate keepers, and that there will be vigorous opposition
to any movement toward ending those rent-seeking positions.
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