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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Disclosure: My dad grew up at Carnation, Washington, a company town for one of the major dairy companies, so I tend to be on the side of the dairy farmers. I have no use for milk, but there aren’t many cheeses I don’t enjoy, I do like cream in soups, and along with Julia Child, butter is my favorite ingredient. On the flip side, I detest agriculture subsidies, which the dairy industry gets a lot of. I’m also solidly opposed to the prescription drug system in which doctors and pharmacists have the monopoly on deciding what drugs can be taken, but note that if there is one class of drugs where I see a public interest in controlling drug use, that one class would be antibiotics. And I’m always in favor of more information.

So here’s the kerfuffle: The FDA currently tests loads of milk for four to six common antibiotics. If the tests shows that the drugs have entered the milk, the entire load has to be destroyed. The FDA, based on results of testing on dairy cattle sent to slaughter, wants to test for two dozen other antibiotics, as well as flunixin, a common pain killer and anti-inflammatory used in the industry. However, the tests aren’t instant like the current simpler ones are, they can take a week.

The industry is frightened by the prospect of holding that milk until the test results are known (they obviously can’t actually do this, no dairy has the facilities to segregate and safely store that much milk), or that after processing the test results will lead to recalls of the product. At least one cooperative dairy has announced that it will not accept milk that has been sampled for the additional tests, and it’s likely that other processors will take the same stance.

Are these people as smart as the cows? They would clearly prefer to process milk with no idea what the level of drug contamination is than to consider the possibility that there might be a problem to address. I doubt that the FDA is guiltless here, it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that the rules require destroying the product if those traces are present. Zero-tolerance rules are much beloved by the mindless, a group that is often involved in government.

The question of antibiotics entering the food stream is important, and it would be a most excellent thing to understand the situation, monitor any trends, set standards, develop best practices in the industry, and finally establish go/no-go rules. But none of those things can be done without the result of the tests.

If I Were King I would have no power to increase the intelligence of stubborn farmers and bureaucrats. I could, however, insist that the tests be performed and the information recorded, charted, and analyzed. I could, and obviously would have to, declare that the results of these additional tests would not result in the destruction of any milk until everybody, on both sides of this issue, knew what the hell they were doing.