If I Were King

During his recent campaign for the Texas governor’s mansion, Kinky Friedman was asked for his stance on the death penalty. His answer was pretty sensible for a politician in the American state most active in executions: “I am not anti-death penalty, but I’m damned sure anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed.” That makes sense, given the human longing for revenge and the simple fact that you can’t release a wrongly-convicted felon after lethal injection. But it doesn’t satisfy one crucial logical element.

Thomas Jefferson, among many other wise and sensible things, said “It is strangely absurd to suppose that a million of human beings, collected together, are not under the same moral laws which bind each of them separately.”. In the history of government I see three sources of power. First is simply the power of power, the logic of the absolute dictator. Second is the divine right of kings, in which earthly rulers were presumed to have been granted power over their subjects by a god. And finally come the democratic forms, first appearing in pure form in the United States, in which the source of power and authority is the will of the governed.

In other words, the power of a republican government comes only from the citizens. As an American citizen has no authority to take life outside constrained circumstances, such as self defense, he can’t delegate that authority to the central government. He doesn’t have it to delegate. It necessarily follows that the government has no such authority.

The power of a community, including a republican state, to defend itself is, on the other hand, a power that can be delegated by the people. An individual may defend his bodily self, his family, and his home. It follows that the individuals comprising a community can delegate that power to the community. The rules of war have been evolving over human history and formally enumerated as Jus Ad Bellum and Jus In Bello starting with Augustine of Hippo in the fifth century.

But for a community to decide, even with all the trappings of Miranda warnings, formal charges, grand juries, skilled representation of the accused, and a verdict of peers, that a person should be killed by agents of the state? It’s simply not logically possible.

It’s not always easy to be a devout Christian in an increasingly-secular world, but the worst of it doesn’t come from agnostics, or even the believers who just don’t feel moved to participate regularly in worship. I say grace before eating at McDonald’s and openly cross myself afterward, without attracting hostility. The hard part of it is that those who see me as Christian can’t help trying to reconcile that image with the image of some of the Lord’s spectacular fools. Yesterday, the day after a devastating earthquake in Haiti, the most spectacular fool was one Pat Robertson, who has a show called The 700 Club that appears on CNN.

On his broadcast yesterday, Robertson delivered this absurdity:

And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh, you know Napoleon the third and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story, and so the Devil said OK it’s a deal. And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since they’ve been cursed by one thing after the other.”

His broadcasting operation, CBN, doesn’t seem to be bothered by this. They admit it in this release, and they have the video online. (My system wouldn’t play it, but that’s okay, it’s all over the place, including right here.

Now it happens that a voodoo priest named Dutty Boukman performed a ceremony in August of 1791 which precipitated the start of the revolution, which lasted until 1804. I’ve not seen any accounts that include the number of people involved, but as it wasn’t broadcast we can assume that there were a half million Haitian slaves that had nothing to do with this, other than sharing the desire to end their slavery. I’ve not seen any account that suggests that Satan attended, nor that he clearly committed himself to a deal. We do know that Napoleon III was captured in battle, and the monarchy he led was dissolved on 4 September 1870. He was the last Napoleon to have anything to do with the government of France, and he died on 9 January 1873. Robertson’s pact with the devil didn’t take place until over twenty years after the last Napoleon left power.

I suppose it’s a waste of time to point out that earthquakes are the result of tectonic motion in the rigid structure immediately below the surface of this liquid-centered globe we live on. That’s not covered in the only book Robertson really accepts, my telling him the details of how the planet God created works would be lost on him.

It’s hard to admit to being a Christian when there are “Christian” embarrassments of this magnitude spewing their nonsense on national television. I want to make one thing clear: Pat Robertson doesn’t speak for me. I seriously doubt that he speaks for Jesus Christ. If he does, he has managed to find a Jesus that isn’t present in the Gospel I’ve read. Never mind that he has the historical scholarship of a third grader and the intellectual capacity of cauliflower.

Google’s challenge to China yesterday was big news here, barely a whisper in China. According to Andrew Jacobs in Google’s Threat Echoed Everywhere, Except China in today’s NYT, the Great Firewall hid almost every trace of the uproar from the Chinese public. Imagine that! They even censor news about their censorship, about which nobody is in the dark.

I’ve greatly admired Google since the day my Kiwi friend Bruce Hoult suggested trying it as a replacement for an aging Alta Vista. My search behavior comes close to monogamy, although I’ve occasionally dallied with others. I predominantly used the home-town favorite, WebCrawler, for ages, then was lured by better results at Alta Vista, and finally Google. Google’s product was good, but so was their soul as far as I could tell. They rose above the grasping machinations of Redmond’s empire (and their bloated MSN portal), they were never tacky like AOL or Yahoo!; they didn’t need to play any game but doing their job well every day, and it seemed like they didn’t particularly want to. “Don’t be Evil”, said the corporate mission statement, and it wasn’t hard to believe.

Every once in a while, however, word came out that they had caved in to some stupid request from the US government to hand over search data, just like the DoJ-frightened Microsoft and the ever-clueless AOL. Somehow they managed to redeem themselves, at least to a small degree, by being a bit less accommodating then the other search engines. But it really worried me whenever I heard of their Chinese operations. When they setup shop there four years ago, they did so under an agreement to censor certain subjects on google.cn. As Victoria used to say, “We are not amused” by such things. In fact, I was disgusted and disappointed.

It’s one thing to fall in with the US government, it has to work within certain limits. It is also recently run by those that aren’t exactly mental giants, recalling a president that obviously didn’t delight in reading and left the impression that he didn’t know how. The Chinese are not limited by any legal restraint, any historical sense of decency in power, and they’re not stupid. Neither China nor the rest of the world are well served by an amoral regime that is unchecked by anyone.

Yesterday, Google announced “A new approach to China” on their official blog. Finally motivated by a series of attacks against their systems last month, Google has “decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn”. It’s a tough call whether the people of China are better off with a censored Google or none at all, in the short term. In the long term, however, it’s definitely in the interest of the people of China that their government not be allowed to pretend that it is a legitimate and mature member of the community of modern nations.

It’s a risky bet. China has gotten their way until now, and the other companies that have gone along with the statist thugs in Beijing (Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Cisco spring to mind, but there are dozens of other co-conspirators to censorship in the world’s largest country) may all decide to take advantage of Google’s absence. It won’t even slightly surprise me if they do. On the other hand, I would be delighted to learn that Ballmer is abashed at the comparative venality of coöperating and steps up to join them. Google has more to lose here than anyone else, and they’re willing to make the bet.

They’re are worse things than censorship, slavery and murder for example. But those are illegal and we don’t need anybody to take a stand against them. Censorship is profoundly evil and damaging, and we need champions to continue to highlight it. Thank you Google!

According to Obama Weighs Tax on Banks to Cut Deficit in today’s New York Times, the Obama administration is considering a significant tax on large banks to help close the current deficit. Needless to say, the banks aren’t exactly thrilled at the prospect, pointing out that most of them have already paid back their bailouts. While true, this amply demonstrates that the big players in the financial system still don’t get it, not that we were holding our breaths expecting them to. Leaving aside the obvious fact that government does not always tax based on direct relationships, if they did we would see taxes on the poor to pay for poverty relief, the major element here is that the costs of the irresponsibility of the financial institutions do not start and end with the costs of directly keeping those institutions afloat. One suspects that the bailouts for the banks and brokerages represent a tiny fraction of the damage that was done. Even when the US Treasury has been made whole, the American people won’t have been. If a tax on the financial industry can help cover some of the other costs of the recent economic crisis it will be a good step; if the administration conjures up some way to structure the tax so it eliminates the high-risk strategies that got us in this mess, that’s better.

The New York Times yesterday ran an item in their “Bits” blog titled “The Gap Between Google and Rivals May Be Smaller Than You Think“. The author, Miguel Helft, missed the boat by a mile. Twice.

First he asserted “With a combined 28 percent of the American search market, Yahoo and Microsoft could double their usage and still trail Google, which accounts for 65 percent of the market.”. Now, I’d like to find out what schools he attended and make sure they were stripped of their accreditation. I’m not talking about any college he went to, I’m talking about his grade school here. The market to which he refers is made up of a number of players, some big and some small, but the total market share of all the players will always be 100%. Period. Can’t be changed. Assuming that the market share of all the small players remains at 7%, which seems likely, if the Microsoft/Google alliance ran their share up to 56% they would be the dominant power because Google could only possibly have 37% share. Anyone who can’t add two-digit numbers up to 100, or doesn’t know that 100 is as far as percentages can go, should not be allowed out of grade school. And on the off chance that the Times still has editors, whoever passed this column for publication needs to head back to fifth grade as well, at least for arithmetic.

Helft then heads off into areas that are less-obviously absurd. He reports that Microsoft/Yahoo actually has pretty good market penetration, that 73% of all searchers use their service at least occasionally. (Google’s penetration is 84%.) But clearly what’s important is the number of searches, as every search presents the opportunity to display ads. Helft quotes Eli Goodman of comScore asserting “The challenge will be to create a search experience compelling enough to convert lighter searchers into regular searchers which is generally easier than converting new users,” which Helft obviously agrees with. That is patently absurd, although admittedly not arithmetically absurd. This is much like saying that all Miller needs to do to grow is turn the women who occasionally drink one of that company’s insipid products into heavy beer drinkers. The people who occasionally perform a search are the ones that aren’t particularly serious about their internet experience. They have one browser window open, and their home page is whatever somebody setup for them when they got their computer, and that’s where they run their occasional searches. (This was the crowd that made AOL huge.) Serious users have multiple tabs open in their browsers and probably rarely even see their home pages, or set them to Google so they wouldn’t have to wait for MSN to load. These are the users who flocked to WebCrawler in 1994, were using DEC’s AltaVista by the summer of ’95, tried Dogpile in ’96 (and weren’t impressed), and flocked to Google in ’98.

Although occasional searchers can be expected to gradually get more comfortable with searching, and therefore do more of it, they aren’t likely to become serious searchers. It’s a different mindset. While I appreciate the 1700 hits to my Julia Child quotes page that Bing sent in a nine-hour period last week, I’m more impressed by Google’s steady traffic. But the only way for Bing, or any other search engine, to achieve large volumes of searches is for them to become a good tool for the serious searcher. It’s possible, Bing returns pretty good results. It’s far more likely than Miller ever coming up with products that would compete with Rogue or Bridgeport for my beer money!

I did some work at Yelm, Washington last year, and had the chance to catch a burger at the grill on the golf course. The “Blue Chip Burger” was definitely in the top half dozen burgers of my experience, with Maytag blue cheese, bacon, mushrooms, and sautéed onions. Definitely a three or four napkin burger.

Now I’m building them a website. It will be fairly basic, mostly because the folks at the restaurant don’t seem to have time for peripheral stuff like marketing. It took me a full month to get them to send me the PDF of the menu. They have some images to use for backgrounds on the website, I hope it won’t take another month to get the files because the menus are just floating on a white background now, which isn’t the look I’m going for to say the least. But the descriptions and prices should be correct.

I’m not normally much into sports bars, but Clark’s Bar and Grill is probably worth visiting if there isn’t a big game on! If I Were King I’d insist they open one here at Freeland.

Michael Jackson died at his rented Los Angeles home on Thursday afternoon. It doesn’t make me happy when anyone dies, particularly if they’re younger than I am. Death is a normal part of life, but any individual death is an upsetting experience and I wish that everyone might be spared from death in their families that comes before the appointed three score and ten years.

Still, I’m not really mourning the loss of Jackson. Not because of his celebrity, or his bizarre life choices, or the possibility that the child-molestation charges were actually valid. The problem is the number of messages I’m seeing about how he was the greatest musician since Elvis. I assume they mean since the time of Elvis, because I hardly see Elvis as having a major place in the pantheon of music.

Jackson was one hell of a showman, right up there with Elvis and Liberace. But as far as I can tell, none of them contributed much to the music. (Dance steps and costuming are something else.) If I Were King I’d have time to put together a more comprehensive list, possibly find some subjects who could add a few names from genres I’m not particularly familiar with. These aren’t all artists I enjoy particularly, and all the artists I enjoy aren’t on this list. It’s just a list of musicians in my lifetime that have had significant influence on the music of our time. Few of these sold albums at the rate that Jackson or Presley did, but that’s not my litmus test of a great musician.

Ian Anderson, Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Chuck Berry, David Bowie, Jimmy Buffett, Johnny Cash, Eric Clapton, David Crosby, Patsy Cline, Judy Collins, Alice Cooper, Chick Corea, Ray Davies, Miles Davis, Fats Domino, Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia, Jimi Hendrix, Buddy Holly, Ian Hunter, Mahalia Jackson, Mick Jagger, Elton John, Quincy Jones, B. B. King, Carole King, John Lennon, Taj Mahal, Graham Nash, Willy Nelson, Bob Marley, Paul McCartney, Thelonious Monk, Odetta, Roy Orbison, Robert Plant, Todd Rundgren, Carlos Santana, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Phil Spector, Stephen Stills, Sting, Pete Townshend, Mary Travers, Stanley Turrentine, Jerry Jeff Walker, Hank Williams, Ann and Nancy Wilson, Steve Winwood, Neil Young, and Frank Zappa,

In an article in today’s New York Times entitled Iran Stepping Up Effort to Quell Election Protest today, Nazila Fathi and Michael Slackman said, “The nation’s leadership cast anyone refusing to accept the results of the race as an enemy of the state.” I can live with that.  I cannot accept the election results released earlier this month, there’s no way I can even believe them. I am proud to be a declared enemy of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

I’m not sufficiently informed on Iranian politics to know if Mir Hussein Moussavi is really a huge step forward over the raving, intransigent incumbent, but the people of Iran certainly think so. I’m not certain that the US should take a strong position in support of Moussavi, the risks of appearing to meddle in local affairs are too great. But when the electorate knows the results are fraudulent, because they’re the ones that cast the ballots, the government that refuses to honor the actual ballots cast loses all legitimacy.

They are, in essence, no longer a government but a gang of thugs wearing uniforms. The police forces dispatched by such a government have no moral standing, and that includes the vicious Basij militia, only moreso.

The one thing I believe the US government should do, and I would welcome all other legitimate governments to do the same, is to identify every internet project that assists users in getting past government censorship online and providing cash, technical support, and backup equipment to make sure that there is enough bandwidth for all those that need to communicate when the authorities try to block it.

I also think the Iranians disappointed in the outcome of this election should simply arrest the police. There may be a lot of Basij terrorists (a more apt term than “militia”, I suggest), but their numbers have to be small in comparison to the population. No matter how well armed and macho any individual Basiji might be, with three or four Persian women clinging to his back he’s going to go down. Strip him of his weapons, tie his hands behind his back, and stash him in a warehouse somewhere.

With a quarter of the cops taken out of service, the rest will be cowering in the station houses or burning their uniforms and denying they’d ever heard of the units that issued them. The current government would be gone within days.

If I Were King it would be grossly offensive to me if my security forces were treated in such a way, but it would be my first obligation to rule in such a way that it would never be necessary.