What is the IQ of the American commentariat?

I'd guess about 105.

Exhibit A:

Reagan and revenue - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog:

... Is it really possible that all the triumphant declarations that the Reagan tax cuts led to a revenue boom — declarations that you see in highly respectable places — are based on nothing but a failure to make the most elementary corrections for inflation and population growth? Yes, it is. I know we’re supposed to pretend that we’re having a serious discussion in this country; but the truth is that we aren’t....

The Algebraist and the religion of the eternal simulation

Update 6/8/13: I've finished rereading this book. Enough time had passed that, given my memory, it was somewhat new again. Perhaps I remembered enough to make the twists easier to follow. I know I read it more slowly and carefully.

I liked this book when I first read it, but I didn't like it enough. This is a brilliant book -- it just needs to be read slowly. Probably more than once. Iain M Banks is well represented in my mind-expanding books collection. So I expected there would be more to The Algebraist than meets the eye.

And so there is.

Yes, it's not the equal of Feersum Endjinn. Yes, it can be read as a well done variant of the standard space opera; even the the little twist in the epilogue won't surprise Banks fans. And yes, I must admit, the plot doesn't hold together as well as it might (see update) ...

Only Banks, however, would embed an extended, serious and satirical, reply to Bostrum's simulation thesis in the midst of a space opera (see also a NYT article from last summer). [1]

First, a bit of background. Briefly, Bostrum uses routine statistical reasoning to assert that it is overwhelmingly likely that "we" (meaning at least you and I) exist in a form of computer simulation. David Brin has argued that the improbable success of George Bush suggests he's the alpha and omega of the simulation, but this theory is not universally accepted.

It's fun stuff. Variants of this thesis have been well explored by several authors in the mind-expanding books collection, but Banks has the most explicitly philosophical exposition.

Banks imagines that "the Simulation" thesis has become the basis for a pan-Galactic "faith", called The Truth. It's a relition with some resemblance to various millenialist cults and low brow Buddhist sects seeking salvation by chanting the name of the Buddah... (Emphases mine, the text below may not be completely accurate [2])

The Algebraist [1]

...The Truth was the presumptuous name of the religion, the faith that lay behind reality. It arose from the belief that what appeared to be real life must in fact - according to some piously invoked statistical certitudes - be a simulation being run within some prodigious computational substrate in a greater and more encompassing reality beyond. This was a thought that had, in some form, crossed the minds of most people and all civilizations. However, everybody quickly or eventually came round to the idea that a difference that made no difference wasn't a difference to be much bothered about, and one might as well get on with (what appeared to be) life. 

The Truth went a stage further, holding that this was difference that could be made to make a difference. What was necessary was for people truly to believe in their hearts, in their souls, in their minds, that they really were in a vast simulation. They had to reflect upon this, to keep it at the forefront of their thoughts at all times and they had to gather together on occasion, with all due ceremony and solemnity, to express this belief. And they must evangelise, they must convert everybody they possibly could to this view, because - and this was the whole point - once a sufficient proportion of people within the simulation came to acknowledge that it was a simulation, the value of the simulation to those who had set it up would disappear and the whole thing would collapse. 

If they were all part of some vast experiment, then the fact that those on whom the experiment was being conducted had guessed the truth would mean that its value would be lost. If they were some plaything, then again, that they had guessed this meant they ought to be acknowledged, even - perhaps - rewarded. If they were being tested in some way, then this was the test being passed, this was a positive result, again possibly deserving a reward. If they had been undergoing punishment for some transgression in the greater world, then this ought to constitute cause for rehabilitation. 

It was not possible to know what proportion of the simulated population would be required to bring things to a halt (it might be fifty percent, it might be rather smaller or greater), but as long as the numbers of the enlightened kept increasing, the universe would be constantly coming closer to the epiphany, and the revelation could come at any point. 

The Truth claimed with some degree of justification to be the ultimate religion, the final faith, the last of all churches... 

...It could also claim a degree of universality that the others could not. All other major religions were either specific to their originating species, could be traced back to a single species - often a single subset of that species - or were consciously developed amalgams, syntheses, of a group of sufficiently similar religions of disparate origin... 

... The Truth could even claim to be not a religion at all, where such a claim might endear it to those not naturally religious by nature. It could be seen more as a philosophy, even as a scientific postulate backed by unshakeably firm statistical likelihood. 

There were some potentially unfortunate consequences implicit in a profound belief in the Truth. One was that there was a possibility that when the simulation ended, all the people being simulated would cease to exist entirely. The sim might be turned off and everybody within the substrate running it would die. There might be no promotion, no release, no return to a bigger and better and finer outside: there might just be the ultimate mass extinction...

Personally my experience with, and indirect knowledge of, mortal life makes the "punishment" thesis particularly plausible. On the other hand maybe we're just contaminants in the culture dish, or a forgotten version 0.7a of the simulation that's been left to to run on some obsolete hardware.

It's good fun to imagine variations of the theme of "what's the simulation being run for", though by now I think the topic has been pretty well explored. [3]

Oh, I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention that the simulation theory is one answer to the Fermi Paradox (see also); we are alone because the "purpose" of the simulation requires it. Not coincidentally Deism has the same answer to the Fermi Pardox (God only wanted us); an inexplicable omnipotent deity or an alien uber-geek are but two sides of the same coin. Indeed, one might even speculate that the Fermi Paradox is a bit of circumstantial evidence for the aforementioned coin.

Thanks Iain, please do keep up the good work.

- fn -

[1] The ninth page of "Four: Events during Wartime" in my paperback edition.
[2] Perhaps you imagine I typed in that long excerpt. Of course not. I Googled on some key words and found it had been typed for me. Hmm. Seems a bit too easy. What other clues could be on that site .... (cue music).
[3] One of my favorite variations came in a book from, I think, Greg Egan (also on the list). In that book Egan pummeled the meme from several directions. In one exercise a simulation is created with an intentional inconsistency; the laws of physics of the simulation are so absurd that it is truly impossible to create a self-consistent "theory of everything". The inhabitants will be crushed by absurdity, and perhaps forced to recognize their universe cannot be "real". Alas, the simulants are smarter than expected, and through staggering brilliance they resolve the paradox. Their breakthrough makes their simulation self-consistent, severs the newly independent universe from the (recursive) simulation that it was hosted within, and condemns some of their uber-geek deities to eternal damnation. [Update 6/16/09: The book is Greg Egan's Permutation City.]

PS. The Amazon reviews say this book is outside of Banks "Culture" universe, but it could be read as the pre-history of something that might become a kin to "the Culture".

Update 1/18/07: On first posting I wrote that the plot didn't seem to hold together all that well. I was particularly thinking of certain aspects of the ending. On reflection, I think that's still true of the resolution of one subplot. On the main plot, however, I now think I'd underestimated Mr. Banks. I should have remembered from his prior work that there's always a hidden agenda to be uncovered. The peculiar course of Fassin Taak's condition does make sense in the context of the schemes that operate between the pages.

Use the name your enemies would give one of their causes

I liked Krugman's aside in a post written on a different topic:

Bush tax cut mythology - Paul Krugman - Op-Ed Columnist - New York Times Blog

...If we ever have legislation decreeing death of the first-born, it will be named MPAPRA, the Motherhood Patriotism and Apple Pie Reconcilation Act, or something like that...

I posted previously about the brilliant name given the organization that has quietly transformed the medical knowledge industry. The lesson is clear: when you want something to be accepted in the face of a powerful opposition, use the name that your opposition would choose for some cause they like (which need not be in any way related to your own cause).

Republicans pioneered this technique, but, at long last, naive Dems have at last caught on. Now the titles of most legislation are largely unrelated to the content, but they sound vaguely uplifting to all.

Want to build bicycle paths? Call your organization the Coalition for Automative Rights (CAR). Can't fail.

I don't think Orwell anticipated this. It's really post-Orwellian.

MacFlop

My MacWorld predictions were far more interesting than what Apple produced.

Dull.

Blech.

Update 1/17: One of my favorite Mac sites, Daring Fireball, captures the mood of the OS X geekbase (slightly censored):

Daring Fireball: Keynote Roundup

...But so now Time Capsule is here, and there’s no word from Apple about backing up to hard drives attached to base stations. Which in turn is leading to the suspicion that perhaps the reason hard drive/base station Time Machine backups were pulled from Leopard was to make the feature exclusive to Apple’s own Time Capsule hardware. Check the comment thread on this article at Macworld to see some angry customers — people who bought hard drives and base stations in advance of Leopard specifically in anticipation of this feature.

Again, I think Time Capsule is a great idea and a great product. But if Apple has pulled support for hard drive/base station backups to eliminate Time Capsule competition, that’s ******, pure and simple. To be clear, though, it’s still an “if” at this point...

Personally I'd like to see Apple's share price fall about 20%. Very few companies can resist the intoxicating power of a constantly rising share price, just as few people can resist the effect of uninterrupted success. Arrogance is inevitable. It's a sign of Apple's new reputation that even supportive geeks like DF are ready to suspect the worst.

If we can amplify the "boring MacWorld" meme enough to drop the share price, we might end up with a chastened Apple. It's a much better company when it's been (temporarily) humbled ...

Duct tape and warts: how the HECK does it work?

Duct tape as a wart treatment is not alternative medicine.

Really. It's been studied a few times ... (emphasis mine):

Duct Tape More Effective than Cryotherapy for Warts - February 1, 2003 - American Family Physician (KARL E. MILLER, M.D.)

Focht DR III, et al. The efficacy of duct tape vs cryotherapy in the treatment of verruca vulgaris (the common wart). Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med October 2002;156:971-4.

Common warts (verruca vulgaris) are a common problem among patients who present in family physicians' offices. Although a significant number of warts will spontaneously resolve over two years, patients frequently request treatment to clear their skin of the lesions. Treatments such as cryotherapy, acid preparations, laser therapy, heat, and tape occlusion have been used in the management of warts, with cure rates ranging from 32 to 93 percent. However, most of these therapies are expensive, painful, or labor intensive. A few small, nonrandomized trials have studied the use of tape occlusion in wart treatment, with one study reporting cure rates of approximately 80 percent. Focht and associates compared the effectiveness of cryotherapy with duct tape applied to common warts.

The study was a prospective, randomized controlled trial with two treatment arms. Participants were patients three to 22 years of age who had viral warts and presented to a military clinic. Participants were randomized to receive cryotherapy or occlusive therapy with duct tape. Cryotherapy consisted of 10-second applications of liquid nitrogen to each wart every two to three weeks for a maximum of six treatments. The other group applied small pieces of duct tape to each wart. They were instructed to leave the tape in place for six days and were taught how to re-apply tape if it fell off. At the end of the sixth day, the patients removed the duct tape, soaked the wart in water, and gently debrided it with an emery board or pumice stone. The tape was left off overnight, then re-applied for another six days. This pattern was repeated for two months or until the wart resolved. Warts that did not resolve were measured. The main outcome measured was complete resolution of the wart.

In patients treated with duct tape, 85 percent of the warts completely resolved, compared with 60 percent in the cryotherapy group. These results were statistically significant. Resolution of warts treated with duct tape usually occurred within the first 28 days of therapy. If there was no response within the first two weeks, the warts were unlikely to respond to a longer course of therapy. The main adverse outcomes with duct-tape therapy were difficulty keeping the tape on the wart and minor skin irritation. The main adverse effect in the cryotherapy group was mild to severe pain at the freeze site during and after the treatment.

The authors conclude that duct tape occlusive therapy is more effective than cryotherapy in the treatment of common warts. They also state that duct tape therapy is less expensive and has fewer adverse effects than cryotherapy.

This business of treating warts in children with duct tape has been around for at least 16 years, but I've never really believed in it.

It's just so weird.

Then my 8yo developed a quite impressive toe wart. A flowering exuberant growth. It bugged him, but there was absolutely no way he was going to have it incinerated or freeze-burned. No friggin' way.

So we tried the weird duct tape treatment. An old silver roll.

Over the next few days, when we reapplied the tape, the wart started to look sickly. It's vessels appeared dusky, as though they were occluding. Then the entire toe started to appear mildly inflamed - swollen and red.

The next evening my son proudly displayed an impressive crater where the wart had been. It had fallen off. Within a few days the crater was gone, though I think there's some warty material remaining. (We're reapplying the tape.)

Ok, so there are skeptics, and if it does work then it's probably limited to children and adolescents with good immune systems. In these cases the immune system is perfectly capable of clobbering a wart, but first it has to recognize it as foreign.

So, how could it possibly work?

There, PubMed failed me. I couldn't find any interest in how this thing might work.

Doesn't that display a certain lack of imagination? Viral warts have many of the properties of tumors, and of course immune tolerance and rejection is important. Heck, apoptosis is still somewhat fashionable. Isn't anyone interested in how this treatment actually works?

I suspect this one runs into three problems:

1. It's so weird that most researchers don't believe it works.
   
2. If it works they figure this is some kind of "mind over immunology" thing, and there's no tenure in chasing that one.
3. Duct tape is cheap.
   

We need a bored tenured faculty person with an animal lab to study this in animals. If we found that duct tape cured animal warts we'd then be able to figure out what it's doing.

Update 8/31/08: The comments are interesting. I particularly like the suggestion a few degree change in local temperature might be enough to impact the wart/body war, though it's fair to mention that plantar warts thrive in a pretty warm environment.

Can't check-in online? Try finding a codeshare.

I'm doing a four day round trip to Manchester, UK for a family obligation. Rough travel, but if my back holds out I should be ok.

I'm paying for the flight, so thanks to Kayak I'm on some obscure discount airline that cost less than half of what NWA wanted. bmi wouldn't let me check-in online however. Not only that, but I couldn't figure out how the heck to find them at my local airport. They're pretty low profile.

Google saved me, of course. I entered the flight number into Google, and flightstats.com told me the Chicaog hop is a United code share. Emily then suggested I try online check-in through United, and, unexpectedly, it worked.

In fact, United claims I'm checked-in to Manchester through the BMI flight; I won't rely on that however.

Two good techniques. First, in an era where airlines are increasingly virtual, Google can help figure out which desk to visit. Secondly, the online check-in may work better with the true carrier than with the name on the itinerary.

Stross dissects cell phone schemes: lessons in pricing strategy

In an ideal world, mobile phone contracts and pricing would be freely accessible. In that world a few people would figure out the best deals, and would publicize them on ad supported web sites.

In that utopia phone companies wouldn't be able to pay pricing games.

In the real world mobile phone contracts are top secret. I tried to get just one from Sprint a year ago -- not possible.

Cell phone companies also change their new plans and pricing schemes every few weeks, so anyone trying to decrypt them will be foiled.

This is what's known as an asymmetric business relationship. They have immense resources to game us, and we can't really play in their league. All we can do is save up our enmity for the phone companies, waiting for the day Google takes 'em down.

In the meantime, geeks like Charles Stross occasionally try to figure out today'sgame played by Vodafone in the UK (where handsets are more switchable than here):

Charlie's Diary: Marketing Musings

... the sweet spot on Vodafone's tariff curve (in the Anytime business packages) seems to be Anytime 500 on a 18 month contract. (By the time you hit Anytime 500 on 12 month contract, costs are beginning to rise; and anything less than Anytime 500 on the 18 month contract is in the "soak the trend-follower" category.)

And there's my second point: 12 month tariffs are weighted on the assumption that you're a trend-follower and may be part of the general customer churn. They invariably have a much higher total cost of ownership than the 18 month tariffs...

... the total cost of a twelve month contract costs nearly 90% of the price of an eighteen month contract. If you take the twelve month contract and stay on it for eighteen months, you'd be paying a whisker under £800. The mark-up for going for a short contract is huge; they're counting on your natural reluctance to be locked in for an extra six months to lead you to pay hugely over the odds.

(Want a twelve month contract? You might as well buy an eighteen month contract — if you decide to switch telco, the break-even point is thirteen months. At that point you might as well buy a new phone, set call divert on your old number, take the old sim out and cut it up so you can't run up any additional charges, and get going: you're still ahead of the game. The system is loaded insofar as it relies on customers fixating on the contract lock-in period and not realizing that they can "buy themselves out" at any point by cutting up a SIM and making a note on their calendar to remind them to close the account when the lock-in expires. And on most people not running the total cost of ownership through a spreasheet before they buy.)..

...The TCO per minute for a phone purchased on the superficially cheap-looking Talk 75 tariff turns out to be two and a half times higher than the TCO per minute for Talk 200, and a ridiculous seven times higher than on Talk 500...

I don't have anywhere near the patience to play this game here, but I think the mid-length contract and mid-range phone ideas might be a good rule of thumb to follow.

John's MacWorld predictions

The TUAW Macworld 2008 Keynote Predictions - The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) collection is pretty good. Inspired by that list, here's mine:

• Home server: Microsoft's Home Server is a very good idea. Apple can do the same thing incorporating backup (including remote backup), video downloads and media library, and using 10.5 remote access (so it's headless). It will include streaming wireless audio/hd video and come with matching peripherals. I might actually buy this. (After I wrote this I see Christina of TUAW had it too.)
• iPhone 16 GB. Maybe they fix the headphone connector too. I am planning to buy this.
• ultraportable laptop (of course)
• video downloads (of course)
• bluetooth peripherals for iPhone (keyboard, etc)
• Aperture update: they could do this at the upcoming camera show. If Apple doesn't update Aperture in a big way it's toast.
• Way out: Adobe acquisition (per Cringely). (Actually this is more under - weirdest possible surprise)

The only one on this list that's not been widely predicted is the Home media server and, of course, the Adobe acquisition.

The Motorola ROKR and the Apple iPhone

Wired has a must-read summary of the birth of the iPhone.

The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry

... It was a late morning in the fall of 2006. Almost a year earlier, Steve Jobs had tasked about 200 of Apple's top engineers with creating the iPhone. Yet here, in Apple's boardroom, it was clear that the prototype was still a disaster...

It's no surprise to read that months before the release date the iPhone was a disaster. My guess is that Apple's taking so long to add my "must have" features because the thing is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. It usually takes at least a year to dig out from a hole like that, so maybe they'll have a stable environment by this summer.

One of the most delicious parts is a sidebar comparing the Motorola ROKR vs. the iPhone

...Apple has created two music phones. The ROKR, made with Motorola in 2005, respected the traditional relationships between manufacturers and carriers. The iPhone, released last summer, completely overturned them....

Supposedly Jobs thought the RAZR was a sign that Motorola could build a good phone. As a RAZR owner, I'm surprised. I thought Jobs was smarter than that.

Anyway, he learned another lesson, and he must have staff who understood that the Motorola RAZR is very ugly software in a pretty shell.

China: the new driver with the 1.4 trillion dollar car

In this month's Atlantic James Fallows writes about China's 1.4 trillion US dollar financial reserves. The management of those reserves played a key role in his 2005 warning of American disaster.

It's a timely review, though he might have mentioned the parallels to Saudi Arabia's foreign reserve accumulations 1970s. The part that caught my attention came towards the end

The $1.4 Trillion Question

....The fair reason for concern is, again, the transparency problem. Twice in the past year, China has in nonfinancial ways demonstrated the ripples that a nontransparent policy creates. Last January, its military intentionally shot down one of its own satellites, filling orbital paths with debris. The exercise greatly alarmed the U.S. military, because of what seemed to be an implied threat to America’s crucial space sensors. For several days, the Chinese government said nothing at all about the test, and nearly a year later, foreign analysts still debate whether it was a deliberate provocation, the result of a misunderstanding, or a freelance effort by the military. In November, China denied a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier, the Kitty Hawk, routine permission to dock in Hong Kong for Thanksgiving, even though many Navy families had gone there for a reunion. In each case, the most ominous aspect is that outsiders could not really be sure what the Chinese leadership had in mind. Were these deliberate taunts or shows of strength? The results of factional feuding within the leadership? Simple miscalculations? In the absence of clear official explanations no one really knew, and many assumed the worst...

Bush's America has not been a paragon of reasoned action. It's reasonable to assume that China, now newly in command of vast financial power, might be similarly impulsive and unpredictable.

No wonder Moody's, a disgraced financial rating agency, whines about the difficulty of assessing risk in the new world. They have a point, even though they're trying to distract attention from their internal corruption.

Bike boxes: if they work, we want them

Three children have hammered my bike commuting habits, but I'll be back one day. In the days when I did commute, I learned the hard way to beware the driver turning right. I was hit at least once in my youth; drivers simply don't see bicyclists waiting by the right curb at a stop light.

The trick was to get out in front. For me that was to the left side of the right lane - nudging into the pedestrian crosswalk. Cars could turn to my right, but I was blocking the front. When the light changed I pulled out fast and then went right, so they could pass me -- but they couldn't avoid seeing me and there was no way to turn right into me.

In Portland two bicyclists died recently, supposedly because they didn't follow that practice (though I find it hard to believe a racer wouldn't do that, so maybe there was more to that story). Now Portland has changed intersections to ensure bicyclists take a visible position:

Portland, Ore., Acts to Protect Cyclists - New York Times:

... By allowing cyclists to wait in front of motorized traffic, the bike boxes are intended chiefly to reduce the risk of “right hook” collisions, the kind most frequently reported in Portland, in which a driver makes a right turn without seeing a cyclist who is in his path. Drivers will not be allowed to pass through the bike box to turn right on a red light, although many right hooks now occur after the light has turned green, when traffic quickly accelerates.

Right hooks were what killed the two cyclists in October, a college student and a bike racer hit by large trucks. The drivers say they did not see them...

I'm not sure how that will work -- drivers will be irritated if they can't turn right. An irritated driver is a dangerous driver. If the experiment does work I hope we adopt it in the Twin Cities.

The two edged sword cuts Maureen Dowd

Ooooh. This is good.

Jon Swift: The Crying of Maureen Dowd

When New York Times reporters walked into their offices last night, people were clustering around one office to watch what they thought they would never see: Maureen Dowd with the unmistakable look of tears in her eyes...

Maureen Dowd long ago traded integrity for popularity; she's a sad demonstration of both wasted talent and the lowly state of the American "elite". Today's Dowd dump is a typically annoying, and intensely personal, rip on Hillary Clinton's ocular discharge.

I had nothing useful to say about the column, but the infamous conservative* writer Jon Swift did a lovely job of sword inversion. Read Dowd first, then read Swift.

* Ok. So with a pen name like "Swift" certain self-descriptions may be suspect.

Update: That was it?!

Hilary is the new Al. I might become a fan ...

EJ Dionne, in praising Obama, makes Clinton more appealing ...

E. J. Dionne Jr. - A Candidacy's Prose and Cons - washingtonpost.com

...There is a certain melancholy in watching Clinton do battle. Obviously aware that the bottom is falling out from under her, she choked up Monday during her last day of campaigning here. By way of proving her tenacity and the depth of her policy knowledge, she has subjected herself to unremitting rounds of questions from voters about every issue from health care to global warming.

Clinton knows her stuff and would pass the most rigorous test available under any "No Policy Left Behind" program for politicians. If we chose a president by examination rather than election, she would win. In Hampton on Sunday night, Maggie Wood Hassan, a prominent state senator, said of Clinton's savvy on health care: "There isn't a single piece of the puzzle she hasn't figured out." True, but voters right now are not thinking about intricate puzzles....

We know Hilary has been been brought low because Gloria Steinem is saying her problems are gender related. (I couldn't make myself read the Steinem article. For Hilary I imagine it adds insult to injury.)

Obama entertains. Hilary is smart, passionate, ambitious, knowledgeable. America is bored. America wants someone fun. Gore Hilary is no fun.

Yes, Hilary is the new Al.

I like Al. I remember what happened the last time America had too many drinks and decided to go for a wild fling with the fun fighter pilot.

I'm starting to get over the pain of "Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton". Mind you, that's a huge hurdle, but Bill isn't being much of a factor these days. If Hilary were to change her name to Rodham I could be a supporter. (I liked President Bill Clinton, it's the hereditary aristocracy part I don't care for.)

Ah well, we have two very good Democratic candidates and one wild card who could be anything from disappointing to great. It could be a lot worse. America isn't about to go into rehab, so I'll support whichever Dem the process delivers.

PS. Emily senses the hidden hand of Karl Rove behind the cult of Obama ...

Update 1/9/08: James Fallows has a nice post expanding on this theme. I must be channeling the gestalt!

Irving Kristol and the NYT OpEd conspiracy

James Fallows reveals our plans...

James Fallows (January 07, 2008) - The NYT introduces a wordsmith

... Perhaps this is more proof of a cunning, leftist NYT master plot? Bringing in a conservative who will demonstrate that conservatives have little interesting to say? Inquiring minds want to know. But only time will tell...

We tested the waters with David Brooks. Could we really get away making an articulate but mockable propagandist the NYT spokesperson for the GOP?

It worked; even the GOP was pleased. Perfect. Now for Phase II. Compared to Kristol even Brooks is semi-sentient.

The Trilateral Commission is pleased. Our plan for the rehabilitation of the GOP is proceeding smoothly.

Mormonism in the GOP - a NYT Magazine discussion

Romney, alas, is going down. I really hoped he'd get the nomination, because he would give the GOP the time out of power needed for reform.

He is, after all, running for the party that, has a traditional Christian core. If you believe in a harsh God who gates Paradise, then you care about theological rigor. Mormonism is way beyond the theological tolerance range of conservative Protestantism -- or even less conservative Catholicism. (No-one has dared ask what Pope whatshisname thinks of Mormonism.) From their perspective a vote for Romney is vote for Hell -- only an atheist or Muslim could be worse.

This seems to be hard for many commentators to understand. They assume Romney's vulnerability is based in traditional bigotry. That may be so, but most pundits really don't spend enough time studying theology. I'm as agnostic as they get (functional atheist, philosophical agnostic), but I like studying religion. For religious conservatives, details matter.

Consider the Trinity. Compared to thousand year battles over the relationship of God to the Holy Spirit Mormonism is a whole 'nother kettle of fish.

A sympathetic NYT Magazine article provides us with the an informed rationalist perspective that still sort of misses the point:

Mitt Romney - Mormonism - Mormons - Presidential Election of 2008 - Politics - Elections - New York Times

.... Still, even among those who respect Mormons personally, it is still common to hear Mormonism’s tenets dismissed as ridiculous. This attitude is logically indefensible insofar as Mormonism is being compared with other world religions. There is nothing inherently less plausible about God’s revealing himself to an upstate New York farmer in the early years of the Republic than to the pharaoh’s changeling grandson in ancient Egypt. But what is driving the tendency to discount Joseph Smith’s revelations is not that they seem less reasonable than those of Moses; it is that the book containing them is so new. When it comes to prophecy, antiquity breeds authenticity. Events in the distant past, we tend to think, occurred in sacred, mythic time. Not so revelations received during the presidencies of James Monroe or Andrew Jackson...

Well, yes, to a secular humanist all of these revelations are equally respectable -- but to a fundamentalist believer there's a rather huge difference.

As in an eternity of Hellfire.

That's rather a meaningful distinction!