If I Were King

As the Republican presidential campaigns stagger to what seems to be the inevitable conclusion, the subject of Mitt Romney’s religion is being handled reasonably quietly, considering how different Mormon beliefs are from those of other faiths, how important religion is to most people, and how skittish most people are about talking about it outside our homes and churches. (If you wear “the collar” it’s allowed, of course, but if you don’t get paid to talk about religion, most people expect you to refrain.)

Two specific things do pop up on the margins: Is Mormonism a Cult? Are Mormons Christian? The answer to both is no.

To the first question, there are two answers, depending on your proximity to the historical churches. Tom Wolfe once noted that, “A cult is a religion with no political power.” In other words, a cult is any religion too removed from the mainstream, too small, and just too weird. The Mormons have long since passed this point, there are too many of them and they’ve been around too long. They disavowed their commitment to polygamy which was the focus of most opposition in the early days of the sect. By that hazy popular definition, they would have been seen as a cult at one time but not today.

From a religious standpoint the answer is also no. There have been cults in the Christian faith for ages, and still are. Within this context a cult is a group of people that invests a human being with some god-like qualities. For example, the cult of Mary has been part of Roman Catholic tradition for centuries, as was the cult of Christopher, but in 1969 the church withdrew Christopher’s place among the saints (along with many others) and moved to eliminate his cult. If the members of a group adore and idolize a human being, it’s nearing a cult. If they pray to a human being, it’s absolutely a cult. Although there are figures in Mormon history that are treated with reverence for their part in the development of the faith, Mormons do not pray to them. It’s more akin to the way many Americans feel about George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.

The second question (Are Mormons Christian?) has been raised, loudly be a small number of evangelicals, and is readily answered. Given the wide variation among Christian sects, what is a Christian, anyway? It turns out this is very simple; the Christian church needs to define that in order to educate children and train ministers. The First Council of Nicea met in 325 to put this in a simple form, and the First Council of Constantinople met in 381 and made some clarifying edits. The Nicene Creed defines the faith of the Christian churches. It is trinitarian, Jesus is truly God and was present from the beginning (“before all worlds”), as is the Holy Spirit. The various unitarian sects (including Jews, Muslims, Mormons, Unitarian Universalists, and various deists) deny the divinity of Jesus and the separate existence of the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to study the various Christian sects to figure out what the core is, it’s already been done. Mormons, like the others mentioned, believe that Jesus of Nazareth was a good man and a prophet, but they deny his divinity. They do not accept the fundamental creed of the Christian faith.

Note that this is not to say that there isn’t much within Mormonism that is truly admirable, such as their strong commitment to family and community and the fact that citizens that work hard generally cause the community to prosper. Like any other sect there are a few problems as well. If I Were King, the question I would ask is, will this person strive to be a good president? Or is he out to be a Mormon evangelist in the office? For several reasons I will not be supporting Mitt Romney, but his faith is not among them.

The United Nations Security Council met at New York City yesterday to consider a proposal by the Arab League to challenge the attacks against the people of Syria, according to The New York Times. The measure passed 13 to 2, except that the two were Russia and China, both of which vetoed the resolution on the grounds that it was a potential violation of Syria’s sovereignty. What could the other nations have been thinking of?

Let me put this as clearly as possible: overriding the sovereignty of members who are acting badly is the entire point.

If a sovereign nations takes actions that fail to meet the standards of the majority of other nations, those nations can meet and discuss ways and means of correcting the problem. At that point the misbehaving nation will have its sovereignty curtailed. This is a new concept, available to the community of nations since 1945. Before then, when a nation acted outside the bounds of international tolerance, one or more other nations would invade, probably ending the miscreant’s sovereignty absolutely. Then a group of other nations would meet and discuss the ways and means of carving up the offending country to their benefit.

If I were King I would have lost patience with Bashar al-Assad and his cozy dynasty. Hillary Clinton was absolutely correct when she said, “The endgame in the absence of us acting together as the international community, I fear, is civil war.”

Libya’s new democratic government, as confused as it is based on the fact that most Libyans have lived under a dictator for their entire lives, needs help, and it needs it now. France has recognized the new government, the US should as well.

But more importantly, while it would be a major mistake for the US to send troops on the ground, we should immediately make the entire country a no-fly zone, as we have in the past. Contrary to what the White House might say, this is simply not a big or a risky proposition. We don’t need to bomb their air defenses, we just need to have an AWACS on duty and a few electronic-warfare planes to scramble their targeting and control system.

If I Were King, the first AWACS would be on station before the sun rose.

Scott Walker, a Republican recently elected governor of Wisconsin, has gone on the offensive against the unions that represent most state workers. He demanded that the employees pay more for their health and pension benefits, and the unions apparently are willing to accommodate the governor, taking about a 7% cut in pay. Walker also is demanding an end to the ability of the unions to negotiate terms of their contracts with the state, and on this the unions are standing firm. For decades, the contracts between public employees and their employers have been negotiated collectively, with unions arrayed against government agencies and school boards.

I’m not sure he’s right, but Walker claims that the current financial situation is an emergency. Of course, he caused a great deal of it by reducing certain business taxes, but we can set that aside for the moment. Whether emergent or not, it’s hard to see how this should affect the process of negotiating future contracts. But let’s give the new kid a shot here, he hasn’t had the opportunity to destroy any large organizations before, let’s not stand in his way. If I Were King, I’d decree that he should go right ahead and eliminate collective bargaining. Let’s start with the school teachers. For next school year, each parent will have to negotiate with each teacher who will be instructing his child. Republicans should love this: the best teachers, or at least the most popular, will have standing-room-only class loads and take home staggering sums of money.

As to the governor’s salary for next year? His choice: Negotiate with a registered voter chosen at random, or negotiate with me.

Reasonable and intelligent people in the Islamic world continue to make themselves heard. Alas, too many of them are getting shot in Libya. I don’t think there are many that fail to understand what a dangerous and irrational man Colonel Qadaffi is. It’s important for all the world that he not be allowed to prevail, if he does regain full power over Libya he can be counted on to identify and kill those who have rejecting him. There are things that need to be done.

1. The protesters need to write a constitution and elect a parliament, or whatever structure they choose. They need to legitimately declare the existence of a government of Libya apart from Qadaffi’s regime. The first draft doesn’t need to be great literature, nor does it need to cover every possible contingency, it just needs to establish a credible government based on the needs of the populace.

2. As the lawful government, they can establish security over the oil fields and receive the income that is, by rights, due to the people of Libya.

3. The new government should join other voices in demanding that the assets of Qadaffi, his family, his inner circle, and the old regime be frozen by international banks.

4. All nations should refuse additional sales of military materiel to the old regime, although it can be expected that there is no shortage of bullets at Tripoli.

5. Blockade Tripoli harbor and cut off the roads, other than defectors getting out. Tripoli is in the far northwest corner of the country, the rest of the country can carry on without it. In time the barriers between Libya and the dictator’s remaining force will cordon off only a few blocks.

In other words, cut Qadaffi off from the rest of the world. His mercenaries won’t fight if they can’t be paid. His regular forces will defect as food supplies dwindle. Eventually there will be one old crazed man with a small coterie of irredeemable thugs. And the day will come when even they will surrender to face trial.

Okay, that’s not a headline you’re likely to see anywhere else this year. Be patient. You might recall that AOL bought Time-Warner in 2000, expecting to make staggering amounts of money off the synergies that TW’s broad pool of content and AOL’s huge on-line market would bring. Somewhat more recently (December 2009), and without any media observer I’m aware of noticing the logical problem inherent in the story, Time-Warner spun off AOL. That is to say, the subsidiary gave the parent-company turkey away to the stockholders. (Reminds me of the McDonnell Douglas takeover of Boeing, another disaster but one that may have a happy ending.)

Now, exactly what is AOL? We all know what it was, the mass-market internet-with-training-wheels for the turn of the century. The system so easy to use that if you had fifteen bucks a month and a computer, you could get online. More importantly, you could get your mother online and not have to walk her through such complexities as having a connection, a browser, and an e-mail client, each with its own desktop icon. (Yes, I can sneer, I set my mother up with an actual Windows NT system and taught her to use it.) In 2003, AOL crested at 26.7 million subscribers, now they’re down to 3.85 million. They claim display advertising sales is their real strength, but their ad revenue fell 26% last year, when pretty much any site that actually sold ads held steady or made decent gains. (Overall industry results? Up 17% per eMarketer.)

Even AOL’s peak wasn’t really a peak, it was the slow-growing backwater of new users that wasn’t yet ready for the real internet, so isolated from the primary market that it kept growing three years after the dot.bomb implosion. That year AOL Time Warner recognized a $99 billion loss based on writing off the absurd goodwill acquired in buying AOL. Then AOL’s paid-subscription walled-garden business model cratered. Imagine Ford after the peak years of the Model T, if they hadn’t actually made other cars. (Actually, Ford wasn’t ready for the drop either, but they had Henry Ford while AOL had Steve Case. Enough said.)

Huffington, who had the sense to get almost the entire deal in cash, now has the chance to carry on with building her content-based empire. She’ll be able to pick through the bits and pieces of the current AOL, supporting the strong properties and letting the weak sisters wither away. And when the last pieces of the old AOL have no more value at all, she’ll be the one in charge when the remants are swept out. There may even be one last piece that is still called “AOL”, allowing us to see the headline I proposed.

I know nothing about muscular dystrophy, but for Carrie Salberg it means that she breathes only with a ventilator and speaks only with an additional piece of gear. To say this makes travel difficult is to say that the Pacific is damp. The Air Carrier Access Act says, since 1986, that the airlines have to accommodate her and her equipment, assuming that her equipment passes certain standards that make it safe for operation in flight.

According to “Airline bumps disabled traveler” (Minneapolis Star-Trib, yesterday, by Lora Pabst), Compass Airlines refused to allow Ms Salberg to board a flight home to Minneapolis from New Orleans on 13 January. Actually, she boarded but was then ejected from the direct flight she had paid extra for. She made it home on another flight via Atlanta, five hours late. (Compass is a “Delta Connections” partner airline.)

This isn’t the universal experience. When flying to New Orleans she was treated well, in fact she was given an upgrade to First Class. But in 2009, 178 disabled travelers were denied boarding, so it isn’t unique.

The story relates that a new regulation in 2009 calls for the issuance of labels to apply to equipment like this so that airlines don’t have to decide on a case-by-case basis which equipment is safe. I don’t find it surprising that nobody has actually had the labels printed, it’s unclear whether that was the responsibility of DOT, FAA, or FDA, but it hasn’t happened.

Ms Salberg travels with two nurses, it’s obviously not possible for someone in a wheelchair to manage an additional hundredweight of equipment and batteries. Delta’s first response was to give each of them a $50 flight voucher for their “inconvenience”. After the Star-Trib contacted them, they became more reasonable, providing $900 in vouchers and refunding the $340/person cost of the flight.

It turns out that the manuals on the Compass Airlines plane were outdated. Delta’s assertion that this oversight was “isolated” does not strike me as being helpful or responsive. The airlines are responsible for making sure that current documentation is available where needed. I’ve had enough connection with Boeing over the years to know that they take this very seriously. Who dropped the ball here? Did Delta not take this particular airplane seriously? Or do they not take disabled passengers seriously?

If I Were King, those labels would get printed, there certainly was something else done in the responsible department that was less important than this. The maintenance records for the operator would be audited to make sure that updated documentation was, in fact, getting to ground crews and flight crews in a timely manner. And though a pilot should be entitled to refuse to carry breathing gear made of rusty welding tanks, garden hose, and duct tape, questions regarding purpose-built medical equipment traveling with a disabled person should always be resolved in favor of the traveler.

Despite a couple of notable exceptions, specifically the French and Iranian revolutions, as a lover of freedom it’s thrilling to see events develop in Egypt. My thoughts are with the long-repressed people of that ancient land, my hopes are that they craft a new, stronger republic. I trust that Egypt’s mature foreign policy of recent decades isn’t just Mubarek’s Realpolitik, but that it will be continued by the government that takes its place.

Yes, things went all wrong in Iran, with the revolution promptly coopted by a coterie of vicious old men addled with religious fundamentalism. (I don’t care what religion it is, fundamentalism addles its adherents.) But I don’t believe that such a stance is inherent in an Islamic people breaking free from despotism. Egyptian parents know they want decent jobs, decent infrastructure, decent services, and decent education. While there are those in Islam that want nothing more than to build mind-narrowing madrassas, and every religion does need to train priests and theologians, the public knows full well that the education needed is in communications, engineering, medicine, law, and a host of other fields that allow graduates to be productive in a modern world. Government needs to keep the peace and deliver the mail. Even the Muslim Brotherhood understands this.

If I Were King, I’d take Mubarak aside and point out the obvious: Having failed to build the secure modern society that Egypt deserves, it’s time for him to walk away and let someone else pick up the challenge. I’m sure that safe transportation for Mubarek and his family is available from numerous nations. And he should make the call to turn the internet connections back on before he starts packing.

If I Were King, I’d meet with the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood and make the point that although set back by three decades of oppression, Egypt needs to continue as a mature member of the international community, that the Brotherhood needs religious freedom and a voice in society proportionate to their numbers, but not religious law.

If I Were King, I’d encourage the leaders of the protesters to continue their “hug a soldier” campaign to build relationships with the military, but also to immediately attempt to get control of the looting and other criminal activity that is taking advantage of the absence of the existing police force. (Whether there is any possible rehabilitation for Mubarak’s current security forces is another matter.)

If I Were King, I’d take Dr ElBaradei aside and suggest he look into the concept of regency. As regent for two years, forswearing a permanent role in government, he could use his reputation to start the process of building a new state based on the values of the Egyptian people. He’s obviously smart enough to do more in two years than Maliki has done in Iraq.

And to all, I wish you well. A chance like this comes rarely to any society, don’t screw it up.

The Department of Agriculture has announced its approval for unrestricted commercial cultivation of genetically modified alfalfa, according to “U.S. Approves Genetically Modified Alfalfa” by  Andrew Pollack in The New York Times. Unlike some, I’m not convinced that GM crops are a bad thing. There had been a proposal to restrict the areas in which this crop could be grown to protect traditional strains from contamination from wind-carried pollen. Again, I’m not overwhelmed by the problem. Organic farmers don’t use Roundup (glyphosphate) on their crops and thus don’t need Monsanto’s Roundup-Ready seed, nor would they benefit from it.

What I am convinced of is that there exists a huge problem in Monsanto’s approach to their Roundup-Ready GM seed, specifically the way they have defended their intellectual property. Anyone who uses any of their GM seeds is bound by contract to not save any of the crop to use as seed for the following year. While this seems fundamentally unsound, farmers have traditionally processed a portion of each year’s crop to plant the following year. In every farming community, at least one supplier has operated a seed cleaning operation to process those seeds, presumably treating them with any necessary fungicide and ensuring they were properly dried. It’s a fundamental part of historical farming, the essence of sustainability.

Monsanto is entitled to make a complete replacement of their seed a condition of their sales contracts, and farmers are entitled to sign those contracts. However, Monsanto goes well beyond this. When their crops are grown, pollen blows off those fields into the fields of farmers that have not chosen to grow GM crops, and the resulting seed inevitably contains some that contains the glyphosphate-tolerant gene. Monsanto sends agents out, takes samples, and sues farmers who attempt to plant the seeds they have grown themselves if the gene is found. They have forced hundreds of suppliers to discontinue seed cleaning operations.

Some provision should have been made so that organic-certified farmers would be protected from the encroachment, as selling their crops as “organic” becomes impossible once genes from the GM crop has contaminated it. This is regrettable, one hopes that the farmers themselves will decide to not plant the expensive Monsanto product in enough areas that untainted seed continues to be available. Monsanto should be responsible for the additional expenses needed by farmers who choose to continue with the traditional product.

The very idea of patenting a gene still causes me some difficulty, but it’s currently the law and I don’t resist it. However, the law is running exactly the wrong direction on enforcing this. If I Were King, farmers who innocently ended up with the Monsanto gene in their seed would absolutely have the right to plant it the following spring. I would be tempted to consider Monsanto’s suits against such farmers to be frivolous and malicious and order that the farmers be granted at least three times their legal expenses and lost time spent in defending themselves.

The Department of Energy has announced that the Tevatron at Fermilab late this year. The idea is that the Large Hadron Collider is coming on line and promises more power and greater range of research opportunities. This is, intellectually, on the same plane as eschewing adult supervision of deep-water oil drilling.

Yes, the LHC will run at seven times the power of the Tevatron. Some day. Possibly in 2012, but maybe not. 2012 is the year they’re going to shut the LHC down to address the problems that have kept it from reaching its full potential. This does not necessarily mean that 2012 is the year they’ll turn it back on.

In addition, although there are certainly research projects that really need the higher levels of power, some 1,200 physicists are currently doing experiments on the Tevatron. The LHC is only one collider. Being much larger, it’s very likely that it will actually take longer to switch over from one experiment to another, which means if we only have one collider, while we can do higher-energy research on the LHC we may be stuck with less total research. And of the many projects that don’t require that level of power, it would make far more sense to run the Tevatron flat out while the LHC is running at a higher power level, rather than using the LHC at fractional power levels.

Do I need to mention that with the Tevatron retired and the LHC down for repairs, there will be a period next year in which none of the physicists will be able to do their research? Good.

What about the fact that the LHC consumes so much electrical power that it will not be able to operate year-round? There’s only so much snow in the Alps.

I don’t know what it cost to build the Tevatron, but I doubt that reaching .98 terevolts came cheap. As long as we’ve made the investment, continuing to operate the accelerator as long as maintenance costs are reasonable is the right course. If we have research to do, shutting down what has been the most productive lab in that subject area for the last two decades is simply wrong.

If I Were King, there would be no question of trying to balance the nations huge budget with the nickels and dimes in Fermilab’s piggy bank.