Somebody took some typical Chinese restaurant menus and ran the radicals through a translating program, one very much like Google’s language tools or Alta Vista’s Babelfish, producing predictably comedic results.

The government has finally begun to release unclassified documents captured in Iraq. link

Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard played a conspicuous role in bringing pressure for their release. 3/20

Michelle Malkin is collecting coverage of this emerging news event.

The Afar Triangle, the sand-colored section to the north of the Horn of Africa, is separating from the African Continent as the result of the movement of different tectonic plates at speeds so fast that crevices in the ground may be seen opening and spreading. Scientists are enjoying a rare opportunity to see geological processes operating at a readily observable speed.

Daily Illini student Editor-in-Chief Acton Gorton was fired yesterday by the Illini Media Company board of directors, after “a thorough review, a report by a student task force of senior members of the staff, and a hearing” found that Gorton violated Daily Illini policies about “thoughtful discussion of and preparation for the publication of inflammatory material.” Gorton published the Danish Jyllands-Posten cartoons on February 9th.

The board, made up of University of Illinois students and faculty, voted unanimously to fire Gorton. Opinions Editor Chuck Prochaska, who was also suspended on February 14th, was reinstated, but decline to return to the paper.

Earlier posting.

It’s not going to be necessary for the sons of the Prophet to attack Evansville. The local authorities have already accepted their status as dhimmis (subjugated members of an inferior culture and faith) and are prepared to enforce Sharia (Islamic law) voluntarily.

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Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

Bullied by the European Union into conformity with contemporary political shibboleths, the tiny (formerly) self-governing island of Sark voted grudgingly to replace its 450 year old system of rule by landowners, originally negotiated with Queen Elizabeth, into a conventional modern democracy. USATODAY — Telegraph.

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Hat tip to Matthew MacLean.

Hayek’s ROAD TO SERFDOM in five minutes.

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Hat tip to Alex Tabarrok via Barcepundit.

Tasteless-and-talentless-and-communist cartoonist Ted Rall (whose dreadful work unfortunately appears in many SF-area independent papers) went panhandling to the readers of his blog to fund a lawsuit against Ann Coulter for alluding to him in a joke. Coulter, in the course of a speech to a Republican PAC, reportedly quipped:

Iran is soliciting cartoons on the Holocaust. So far, only Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau, and the NY Times have made submissions.

Rall had better think twice. I feel quite sure that Ann Coulter could easily beat the little weasel, if it ever came to a fight.

This year’s Academy Awards were destined, it was believed by many, to deliver an important symbolic victory for the forces of progress over Middle America. An exceptionally talented director had taken a sad little story by a fine writer, a story of capricious fate producing human tragedy beneath the indifferent sky of a hard land, and with the magic of cinematography, transformed it into a Gay Pride Manifesto.

The Academy’s award for Best Picture was unquestionably going to a leftwing “message picture,” but the gloating of the Hollywood Homintern evidently reached a sufficiently shrill falsetto pitch that it apparently produced a backlash within the ranks of even Tinseltown’s politically correct voters. Brokeback Mountain was denied the final accolade, and Annie Proulx has responded with a meltdown in the Guardian.

The people connected with Brokeback Mountain, including me, hoped that, having been nominated for eight Academy awards, it would get Best Picture as it had at the funny, lively Independent Spirit awards the day before. (If you are looking for smart judging based on merit, skip the Academy Awards next year and pay attention to the Independent Spirit choices.) We should have known conservative heffalump academy voters would have rather different ideas of what was stirring contemporary culture. Roughly 6,000 film industry voters, most in the Los Angeles area, many living cloistered lives behind wrought-iron gates or in deluxe rest-homes, out of touch not only with the shifting larger culture and the yeasty ferment that is America these days, but also out of touch with their own segregated city, decide which films are good. And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash – excuse me – Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline. Next year we can look to the awards for controversial themes on the punishment of adulterers with a branding iron in the shape of the letter A, runaway slaves, and the debate over free silver…

..For those who call this little piece a Sour Grapes Rant, play it as it lays.

There has been an increasing volume of criticism in recent years of the strange double-standard of contemporary American universities in which diversity consisting of the presence on campus of representatives of recognized victim groups is esteemed as of essential educational value, but diversity of faculty political opinion is conspicuous by its absence, and not valued at all.

Adam Liptak, in yesterday’s Times, has a great deal of fun noting the astonishing unanimity of law professors from prestigious schools on the right of American universities receiving money from the federal government to exclude military recruiters. Last Monday’s Supreme Court decision in Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic and Institutional Rights produced a highly embarassing rebuke.

Hundreds of law professors at the nation’s finest law schools, representing the all-but-unanimous views of the legal academy, filed a series of briefs last year on one side of a Supreme Court case. On Web sites and in lecture halls, the professors spoke out about the case, which they called a crucial test for gay rights and free speech.

Marshalling their collective intellectual firepower and moral outrage, the professors, from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere, made it sound obvious: Universities should be allowed, they said, to take government money but oppose the military’s policies on homosexuality by restricting military recruiting on campus.

On Monday, the best minds in the legal business struck out. The vote was 8-to-0 against them — a shutout, a rout, a humiliation. It is one thing for liberal academics to fail to persuade conservative justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. But the law professors did not produce so much as a sympathetic word from liberal justices like Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David H. Souter and John Paul Stevens. (The newest justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr., did not participate.)And if the result was not embarrassing enough, there was also the tone of the court’s unanimous decision, written by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. In patient cadences, the kind you use in addressing a slightly dull child, the chief justice explained that law students would not assume that their schools supported the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy if they saw military recruiters on campus.

So traumatic was the unanimous SCOTUS decision that, already, a variety of theories accounting for the discrepancy of opinion have been articulated:

There is the reactionary Supreme Court hypothesis. William N. Eskridge Jr., a Yale law professor who helped shape the losing side’s arguments, said the defeat demonstrates the “ridiculously obvious” point that the Supreme Court is “a justificatory instrument” for military policy.

Then there is the clueless law professor theory.

Peter H. Schuck, a Yale law professor who thought the law schools’ legal position was misguided, said that many professors were so indignant about the military’s treatment of gay men and women and so scornful of the military itself that their judgment became clouded.

“There is often a feeling that if something is morally wrong it must be legally wrong and that clever arguments can bring those two things into alignment,” Professor Schuck said.

The elite law schools have for decades been overwhelmingly liberal, Professor Schuck said, and that may have blinded professors to problems with their arguments. Only one law school brief, organized by members of the faculty of George Mason University School of Law, supported the military.

“If you put together a Vietnam legacy, a gay rights ideology, the idea that courts can solve all problems and the legal academy’s echo chamber, you get this result, ” said Joseph Zengerle, an adjunct professor at George Mason who helped write the brief.

We’ll vote for the latter. Uniformity of opinion allowed to thrive too long insulated from challenge inevitably breeds subjectivity and self indulgence.

Yale and special student Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, former Taliban ambassador, have doubtless been hoping the controversy created by that February 26th New York Times Magazine feature article would finally subside, but John Fund of the Wall Street Journal today is continuing his personal jihad, moving on to playing gotcha! with the Yale administration over a heated email.

Beyond a single vague 144-word statement (later expanded to 281 words, including a defense of Yale’s not hosting a ROTC program), Yale won’t let anyone comment officially, citing student privacy issues and hoping they can keep silent and last out the storm. But unofficially, some Yale administrators are privately trashing critics. One even anonymously sent scathing emails to two critics calling them “retarded” and “disgusting.”

That official–Alexis Surovov, assistant director of giving at Yale Law School–did talk to me. Last Wednesday, Mr. Surovov sent an angry email from a Columbia University account to Clinton Taylor and Debbie Bookstaber, two young Yale grads who are so frustrated at their alma mater’s refusal to answer questions about Mr. Rahmatullah that they’ve launched a protest. Called NailYale, it focuses on the Taliban’s barbaric treatment of women, which extended to yanking out the fingernails of those who wore nail polish. In a column on TownHall.com, they urged alumni “not give one red cent this year, but instead send Yale a red press-on fingernail.”

Mr. Surovov, a Yale alumnus who has worked in its development office for three years and is on the board of the Yale Club of New Haven, wrote Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber at their private email addresses with the subject heading: “Y [sic] do you hate Yale.” Here is his email in its entirety: “What is wrong with you? Are you retarded? This is the most disgraceful alumni article that I have ever read in my life. You failed to mention that you’ve never contributed to the Yale Alumni Fund in your life. But to suggest that others follow your negative example is disgusting.”

Intrigued that someone had looked up his wife’s giving record, David Bookstaber, a Yale computer science graduate, used Columbia’s publicly accessible IT account database to trace the anonymous email. The trail led straight to Mr. Surovov’s Yale office. On Thursday Mr. Taylor phoned Mr. Suvarov, who told him he was angry because the furor over the Taliban official was hurting fund raising and could lower Yale’s rankings in the next U.S. News & World Report college survey. He also accused Mr. Taylor and Ms. Bookstaber of “terrorist tactics,” which when challenged he amended to “terror tactics.”

Tsk tsk.

John mentions, in conclusion, that he also spoke to someone sensible:

A former Yale admissions official told me Mr. Rahmatullah’s acceptance into the special student program normally would give him a clear advantage when he applies for the full-degree program next month. “Now that their stealth admission of a Taliban official is public after eight months, the best thing Yale can do now is suggest he ‘study abroad’ next year,” he told me. “Otherwise, they risk losing all credibility if they keep letting him study there while flatly refusing to explain their decision to anyone.”

Precisely right. Pack young Rahmatullah off to Oxford or Cambridge for a year where he can improve his haberdashery, and acquire a touch of polish, and then let him slink back to New Haven quietly when enough time has gone by for that Times’ article to have been forgotten.

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Earlier posts.

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Mr. Justin Cox, one of the contributors to Opinion Work Product, which seems to be a two man blog originating at Yale Law School, posted a comment to a recent Rahmatullah posting here in which he rebuked me, saying that “the debate regarding Hashemi is far more nuanced and complex than you are letting on.” And advising me that, for a fairer treatment of the issue, I should run, not walk, over to Opinion Work Product to get the straight dope.

I looked at them, and thought their contents were less witty, and no more balanced, than my own postings, but I do thank Mr. Cox for bringing them, and his blog, to my attention. Mr. Cox supplied five links, which may very well be of interest to all true Rahmatullah controversy devotees.

Japanese video

Fragmentary selections of the contents of captured Iraqi tapes featuring Saddam’s pre-war conversations and plans have been appearing bit by bit for some time now, shedding light on what the dictator and his senior advisors were actually thinking and planning. But, the New York Times today has all the answers.

Apparently, the Times has gained acesss to a secret history prepared by the US military in April 2005, titled “Iraqi Perspectives on Operation Iraqi Freedom, Major Combat Operations.” An unclassified version of the study is to be made public soon. Not altogether surprisingly, according to the Times, this study confirms every key liberal meme about the war.

Saddam was far more concerned about the dangers of a Shiite uprising, or a domestic coup, than a US invasion, says the Times.

Mr. Hussein did take some steps to avoid provoking war, though. While diplomatic efforts by France, Germany and Russia were under way to avert war, he rejected proposals to mine the Persian Gulf, fearing that the Bush administration would use such an action as an excuse to strike, the Joint Forces Command study noted.

In December 2002, he told his top commanders that Iraq did not possess unconventional arms, like nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, according to the Iraq Survey Group, a task force established by the C.I.A. to investigate what happened to Iraq’s weapons programs. Mr. Hussein wanted his officers to know they could not rely on poison gas or germ weapons if war broke out. The disclosure that the cupboard was bare, Mr. Aziz said, sent morale plummeting.

To ensure that Iraq would pass scrutiny by United Nations arms inspectors, Mr. Hussein ordered that they be given the access that they wanted. And he ordered a crash effort to scrub the country so the inspectors would not discover any vestiges of old unconventional weapons, no small concern in a nation that had once amassed an arsenal of chemical weapons, biological agents and Scud missiles, the Iraq survey group report said.

Mr. Hussein’s compliance was not complete, though. Iraq’s declarations to the United Nations covering what stocks of illicit weapons it had possessed and how it had disposed of them were old and had gaps. And Mr. Hussein would not allow his weapons scientists to leave the country, where United Nations officials could interview them outside the government’s control.

Seeking to deter Iran and even enemies at home, the Iraqi dictator’s goal was to cooperate with the inspectors while preserving some ambiguity about its unconventional weapons — a strategy General Hamdani, the Republican Guard commander, later dubbed in a television interview “deterrence by doubt.”

That strategy led to mutual misperception. When Secretary of State Colin L. Powell addressed the Security Council in February 2003, he offered evidence from photographs and intercepted communications that the Iraqis were rushing to sanitize suspected weapons sites. Mr. Hussein’s efforts to remove any residue from old unconventional weapons programs were viewed by the Americans as efforts to hide the weapons. The very steps the Iraqi government was taking to reduce the prospect of war were used against it, increasing the odds of a military confrontation.

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Isn’t it pretty to think so, if you happen to be a liberal and an administration adversary, who has been peddling the no WMDs line ever since seeing Michael Moore’s movie.

The problem is that believing all this requires ignoring the factual precedent of the evacuation abroad of the entire Iraqi air force prior to the First Gulf War to avoid the capture or destruction of an especially prized military asset, and it requires dismissing reports at the time of the US invasion of large convoys departing in the direction of Syria, along with more recent statements by the former Israeli Chief of Staff General Yaalon and former second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force General Sada on the transfer of Iraqi chemical weapons to Syria.

But even more difficult are the required intellectual acrobatics necessary to reconcile the intrinsically conflicting notions of Saddam desperately trying to avoid war by a “crash effort” at compliance with WMD disarmament, while at the same time fecklessly steering his regime into full-scale conflict with the United States by a continued charade of WMD possession, and (unmentioned by the Times) resistance to inspections.

One wonders why the same analysis isn’t also being applied to Iran and North Korea. Maybe they both really have no nuclear weapons programs underway at all either, and are just bluffing, too. Isn’t that an inevitable theoretical next step?