Ben Stein had some comments in the American Spectator.

Basically, the sad truth is that Hollywood does not think of itself as part of America, and so, to Hollywood, the war to save freedom from Islamic terrorists is happening to someone else. It does not concern them except insofar as it offers occasion to mock or criticize George Bush. They live in dreamland and cannot be gracious enough to thank the men and women who pay with their lives for the stars’ ability to live in dreamland. This is shameful.

The idea that it is brave to stand up for gays in Hollywood, to stand up against Joe McCarthy in Hollywood (fifty years after his death), to say that rich white people are bad, that oil companies are evil — this is nonsense. All of these are mainstream ideas in Hollywood, always have been, always will be. For the people who made movies denouncing Big Oil, worshiping gays, mocking the rich to think of themselves as brave — this is pathetic, childish narcissism.

The brave guy in Hollywood will be the one who says that this is a fabulously great country where we treat gays, blacks, and everyone else as equal. The courageous writer in Hollywood will be the one who says the oil companies do their best in a very hostile world to bring us energy cheaply and efficiently and with a minimum of corruption. The producer who really has guts will be the one who says that Wall Street, despite its flaws, has done the best job of democratizing wealth ever in the history of mankind.

No doubt the men and women who came to the Oscars in gowns that cost more than an Army Sergeant makes in a year, in limousines with champagne in the back seat, think they are working class heroes to attack America — which has made it all possible for them. They are not. They would be heroes if they said that Moslem extremists are the worst threat to human decency since Hitler and Stalin. But someone might yell at them or even attack them with a knife if they said that, so they never will.

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I avoided watching the Awards show, but yesterday I read a comment by Ann Coulter noting that the award for Best Original Song went to a number titled It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp. (I won’t quote it. You can read click the link and read the lyrics if you like.)

Anybody willing to take seriously the aesthetic judgements, political opinions, and moral perspective of a community prepared to treat the expression of the point of view of a practitioner of that particular occupation as suitable entertainment fare, let alone the subject of an award for excellence, is obviously some kind of an idiot.

(Non-Yalies, please excuse the New Haven trivia. I feel obligated to post it for friends and classmates. This kind of post is bound to come along once in a while, I’m afraid.)

This week’s New Yorker mentions a project by Leslie Kuo (Y ’03) consisting of cards depicting local New Haven characters.

Reading all this made me heave a sigh, as I can remember (and miss) a lot of people who flourished long before Ms. Kuo’s time: the elderly Italian peddler with the ancient green truck who used to sell balloons, penants, and programs on football weekends; Johnny of Johnny’s Pipe Center (at the corner of Chapel & College) who blended the best pipe tobacco in the universe; Reverdy Whitlock and (long ago) Epraim Eliot, beloved used book-dealers; Bob Muller of Merwin’s; the ubiquitous Bill Dodson; Brother John; and a host of New Haven personalities now… forgotten with the rest.

Popular Science (I didn’t know that it was still being published) tells us how to preserve a snowflake in superglue. Cool.

Hat tip to Frank Dobbs.

Mike Reed has a web-site devoted to a gallery of the types of belligerents infesting Internet discussion forums. I recognize myself in more than one of his specimens, and my regular correspondents in many others.

Some right-wing angry alumni (who can’t be all that conservative, since I don’t know them), are proposing a new form of protest over the presence at Yale of special student Sayed Rahmatulah Hashemi, former spokesman for the Taliban.

Clint Taylor ’96 and Debbie Bookstabber ’00 report receiving the idea by email:

One email stood out from the rest — “I won’t give Yale one red cent this year, but maybe I will give them a red fingernail instead!”

She was referring to the Taliban’s policy of pulling the fingernails off of Afghani women who dared to wear fingernail polish. Some of these women even had their thumbs sliced off as punishment. To date, Mr. Rahmatullah has not apologized or taken responsibility for his support of this brutal regime, though he told the Times he wished he’d been “a little bit softer” in his advocacy.

If you’d like to show your outrage at Yale’s decision to admit the Taliban’s spokeman, join us in “giving Yale the finger.” It would be disgusting— not to mention really painful — to mail your own fingernails, but you can buy glamorous, decadent, shameless-hussy-scarlet press-on nails (ask for “nail tips”) from any drug store or beauty shop. They’re cheap; a box costs about $5.00. (Caution to Harvard-educated readers: do not eat the press-on nails. Sure, they look tasty, but they will make you sick.)

Send them to Yale’s Office of Development, along with a polite (or not-so-polite) letter explaining what you think of their decision to admit Rahmatullah:

Yale University
Office of Development
P.O. Box 2038
New Haven, CT 06521-2038

What’s more, you can also send a nice red fake nail or ten to Yale’s President, Richard Levin, at:

President Richard C. Levin
Woodbridge Hall
Yale University
New Haven Connecticut 06520

Well, that will certainly show them.

I bought a share of Berkshire Hathaway’s B stock back in 2000, and allowed it to sit around in my portfolio as a mascot until very recently. It did increase in value almost 70% over more than five years, but Nucor (one of Karen’s picks) has done about as well in one year, and Nucor pays a dividend. True, Berkshire treated me better than JDSU, Pacific Century Cyberworks, or Global Crossing did back in the tech wreck. But my investing philosophy has developed since then, and Berkshire Hathaway neither performed well, nor met my investment criteria. After five years, I had also gotten tired of Warren Buffett’s hype. So I sold that share.

John Markham, in his column in MSN Money today, IMHO, hit the Buffet nail right on the head.

Oh, lords of the market, let this be the last straw. The last paean from the pious. The last time we must see simpering reporters, Rotarians and retirees blow kisses to a man once celebrated as the Oracle of Omaha but now best described as the Natterer of Nebraska.Surely there was a time when Warren Buffett was a chief executive worth studying, and even investing alongside. But it sure seems like that time is long past, particularly in contrast to a couple of similar, but much better, conglomerateurs that I’ll introduce you to in a moment…

..Buffett released the fiscal 2005 earnings report of his holding company, Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A), on Saturday, as well as an annual report and 22-page chairman’s letter.

And when you get past all the juvenile humor, unseemly criticism of rivals, self-promotion and homilies, you are left with one impression: This is one heck of a way to disguise the fact that — outside of an accounting gain — earnings were down 29% in 2005. And that shares turned in a fifth-straight year of underwhelming performance in the only metric that investors truly care about: the advance of the price.

Did I say the stock price is all that matters? Gosh, that seems so craven. I am so sorry to bring it up. But that is what investors are paying him for, isn’t it? To boost earnings in a way that encourages new buyers to be more aggressive than sellers, making the price go up?

That is why we buy most stocks. But Berkshire Hathaway is more a cult than a security.

Just read the 2005 report, and you will see that it is largely filled with boasts that the chairman has goosed book value by slapping together an insurance, retail, media and construction conglomerate that looks more like something the cat dragged in than a streamlined earnings machine.

Needless to say, I strongly agree. Buffett has declined to pay dividends, arguing for years that he can do a better job of investing Berkshire stockholders’ profits than they can. The record of the last five years proves that he can’t.

ISN# 049 – 8 pages – Detainee: W (Detainee has two names. He admits that one is an alias.) (Arabic name, origin unclear, somewhere “with harder and stronger weapons” than at Al Farouq and where 30,000 Americans visit evey year and “go about having fun.” Has been in Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and Afghanistan.)

Reasons for Detention:

There are no official statements in this transcript. Detainee admits that he went to Afghanistan from Saudi Arabia for a job consisting of “preparations” (for armed defense). He did not need small arms training. He was already familiar with them, as they are common in his homeland. He was at Al Farouq for two weeks. He had a rifle. He left the camp with a group, after 11 September 2001, and went to Khost, where after three months he was injured by the accidental explosion of a grenade in the possession of another person. He was seriously injured, stayed in two hospitals, and had several operations. He admits to having previously been in Palestine, and to being familiar with the use of the Kalashnikov, the M-16, and grenades.

Detainee’s position:

Denies that he desired to become a jihadi. There were Americans he could have attacked in his hometown, if he wanted to attack Americans. He went to the Al Farouq camp, looking for work. He was there, but did not train there. You should not judge someone as an enemy combatant, just because he went to Afghanistan or attended the camp in Al Farouq. He went there because he needed a job.

JDZ Conclusions:

It is impossible to answer many of the questions we are trying to resolve with respect to a case like this one where we only have a transcript of one hearing. It is not a very good defense. He obviously trained with Al Qaeda, and bore arms against the Coalition. His history is not revealed clearly, but the alias and his past presence in Palestine certainly provoke further suspicion. I certainly would not release him.

ISN# 055 – 10 pages – Detainee: M (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee traveled from his home in Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, via Kuwait and Pakistan, in March 2001. He was trained at the Al Farouq camp in the use of the AK-47 and rocket propelled grenades. Detainee carried a rifle, and engaged in military operations against both the Northern Alliance and US forces. Detainee retreated from the battlefield to Pakistan, where he surrendered as part of a group of thirty men to Pakistani forces.

Detainee’s position:

Detainee says he was at Al Farouq and trained with rifle and pistol, but not RPG. He says that he had been recruited in Saudi Arabia by Saleh al Harbi to be trained at Al Farouq. His intention, he says, was to fight in Chechnya. He denies fighting against both the US and the Northern Alliance. He says he left Al Farouq, prior to September 11, 2001, because of a quarrel with a trainer named Abu Haruya. He says he went to Kabul, and did not participate in the war, then left Kabul to travel to Pakistan via Khost in the company of fellow residents of the same house in Kabul. He denies membership in Al Qaeda or the Taliban.

JDZ Conclusions:

After reading a few of these, one senses a pattern. An effort is made to deny being a combatant against US or Coalition forces, but many of these detainees still fail to deny travelling to Afghanistan for training at the Al Qaeda facility ar Al Farouq. This detainee simply claims that he had made a personal farewell to arms conveniently just in time to avoid incurring responsibility for participating in the fighting against the US or its allies. The circumstances of his surrender in Pakistan contradict his story that he was travelling with a random group of housemates. It would have needed to have been a large house to accomodate 30 insurgents. We do not have a detailed account of the arrest of his group in Pakistan, but the US record states that the group of 30 surrendered to Pakistani forces. The use of the term “surrender” suggests strongly that the group was carrying arms. Mere post-defeat-and-capture claims of innocence of hostile intentions toward the United States are insufficient to exculpate known attendance at a terrorist training camp.  I would not release him.

I have a lot of books. Only part of our library is here in California, but it is still a lot of books by normal people’s standards, and a sufficient quantity to make moving something of an ordeal. My personal opinion is that real estate prices in the Bay area are as demented as the local politics, and I don’t have any real desire to buy the sort of house persons who are not Larry Ellison can afford, so we’ve been renting. Our first house had major electrical issues (the computers in the office reverted to UPS backup power whenever the pool vacuum came on), and the landlord would not invest in better power, so we moved.

I was walking through the old dump, doing some final clean up, and found casually discarded on the floor one miniature book. It was a 1991 facsimile reprint of Antoni Swach’s tiny Polish Armorial of 1705, only 3 3/4″ (95 mm.) by 2 1/4″ (55 mm.) in size. The Swach was small enough that the Mexican movers obviously did not think it could possible be a real book, or of any value at all, and just swept it to the floor when emptying its shelf. I was deeply annoyed, and was (at that particular moment) thirsting for Mexican blood on a scale reminiscent of Sam Houston at the Battle of San Jacinto.

But miniature books, as the Wall Street Journal tells us today, come a lot smaller than my Antoni Swach, and are frequently lost.

The one on the left is less than one
millimeter square.

Poor little Rahmatullah was mercilessly pursued around the Yale campus by Sean Hannity playing paparazzi last week. And John Fund, in the Journal, also still refuses to bury the Khyber knife, dredging up hostile memories and furnishing them up with all the trimmings:

Last week I described Mr. Rahmatullah’s remarkable visit to The Wall Street Journal’s offices in the spring of 2001. After a meeting in which he defended the Taliban’s treatment of women and said he hadn’t seen any evidence that their “guest” Osama bin Laden was a terrorist, I felt I had looked into the face of evil.

I walked Mr. Rahmatullah out. I will never forget how he stopped at a picture window and stared up at the World Trade Center, which terrorists had failed to destroy in 1993. When I finally pried him away, I couldn’t help but think, He must have been thinking about the one that got away.

Ouch! A bit harsh, perhaps. I’m as much in favor of giving those complacent liberal Yale administrators a dose of mau-mau’ing from the Right from time to time as the next man, but we must not allow ourselves to get carried away into irrationality, as if we were, well… leftist.

We do need to look at the facts. The Taliban regime, though ultimately proving highly objectionable and decidedly ungrateful, did emerge originally from the ranks of allies of the United States against the Soviet Occupation. So Taliban ties were not (originally, at least) ipso facto anti-American. Ramahtullah was kind of an ersatz diplomat, really, not a meaningful official of the noxious government. He was a junior Afghan State Department officer, who was essentially allowed to assume the title of ambassador-at-large, and go abroad on a trip paid for by overseas sponsors (like that nice Mr. Hoover) to act as a spokesman for the regime, which undoubtedly had a serious shortage of English-speaking personnel or PR resources.

Rahmatullah took some barbarous positions during his 2001 visit, but he was (a) young, and (b) a barbarian, after all. I agree with Mr. Fund that Rahmatullah’s views were deplorable, but if Mr. Fund were as well acquainted as I am with the kinds of views which used to be popular among my contemporaries at Yale during our own domestic Taliban’s period of ascendancy during the War in Vietnam era, he wouldn’t think Rahmatullah as bad as he does. Who knows? Perhaps, like so many fiery revolutionaries I used to know, Rahmatullah will, in the end, wind up a dentist in Cleveland, or a stock broker in Houston, and a Republican.

It is, of course, untrue, that Rahmatullah is usurping a seat at some Yale dining hall table, which ought to have gone to a highly qualified American, who was turned down by Yale, and who therefore had to settle for Harvard. Rahmatullah was admitted as a supernumerary special student, and will have to perform academically before Yale will graciously consider allowing him to become a candidate for a degree. They won’t consequently admit one fewer person next year. Nor are they giving him a scholarship. His tuition is being paid by a foundation, so Rahmatullah is really currently a minor profit center for the university.

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Clinton W. Taylor, Y’96, mocks the administration’s gesture at ecumenicism, in the American Spectator, with gusto:

Yale’s then-Dean of Undergraduate Admissions, Richard Shaw (for whom I worked as an undergraduate, and who at that time seemed like a nice man with no indications of incipient lunacy) told the New York Times Magazine that “another foreigner of Rahmatullah’s caliber” applied to Yale the year before, but “we lost him to Harvard,” and “I didn’t want that to happen again.” So that’s what happened to Baghdad Bob!

He claims that he “was flipping through a copy of the Yale Glee Club’s newest sheet music the other day, and…detected a few changes in the words of the old traditional songs:”

RAHMATULLAH
(Formerly “Boola, Boola!”)

Rahmatullah, Rahmatullah,
Mullah Omar’s speaking through ya,
When they blew up
The Bamyan Buddhas
Did you holler Boola Boola?

DHIMMI YALE
(Formerly “Bulldog! Bulldog! Eli Yale!”)

Burqa! Burqa! Get your gals
Behind the veil…
Burqa! Burqa! In-fi-dels
Are going to burn in hell…
Oh, when Jews and Christians step o’er the line
We’ll behead those we don’t impale
Burqa! Burqa! Enslave each frau…
Dhimmi Yale!

BRIGHT SCIMITARS
(Formerly “Bright College Years”)

(Talib)
Bright sci-mi-tars, both swift and sharp
Keep women cow’ring ‘neath a tarp
We’ll stone the sluts in Woolsey Hall,
Then crush the gays beneath a wall…
(Student Chorus)
The Taliban is here, you see
And primitive barbarity
Is peachy kee-e-een at Yale today
Jihad’s apologists are here to stay.
(Talib)
The skulls and bones of those we’ve killed,
The seas of guiltless blood we’ve spilled,
Those Buddhas that we bombed to scrap,
Are excused by multicultural crap…
(Student Chorus)
So let us strive that ever we
More tolerant of Jihad be
For, just like all of us, the Taliban
Has suffered uh-uh-under Dubya’s hand!

ISN# 507 – 8 pages – Detainee: (Unnamed) (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee travelled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan, via Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, and Pakistan in July 2001. The detainee’s name was found on a list of trust accounts for Al Qaeda mujehidin captured in raids on Al Qaeda safe houses in Pakistan between 11 September 2002 and 1 March 2003. The detainee participated in military operations against the United States or its coalition partners. The detainee fled to Zubair Centre in Tora Bora in November 2001 where he was wounded in an air strike. The detainee was captured by coalition forces while convalescing at an unknown location.

Detainee’s position:

Detainee worked as a driver in Saudi Arabia, driving female teachers from his city to the next city. Detainee says that he went to Afghanistan as a tourist, and to study religion with Jamaayat al Tabliq (Islamic Missionary Society, often an Al Qaeda front), and because he is afflicted “with magic and demons or magic and the devil,” and if someone from Jamaayat al Tabliq read the Koran over him, the demon would be cast out. He originally intended to go to Afghanistan for two or three weeks, depending on whether he was enjoying his stay. He met some members of Jamaayat al Tabliq at a mosque in Pakistan, and travelled with them. He was robbed by the Afghans, who took his passport, watch, wallet, and shoes, and held him prisoner for a month, before turning him over to the Americans. He says elsewhere that he never fought,and resolved to surrender to the Americans himself in order to avoid being killed.

JDZ Conclusions:

It seems remarkable how much Saudi tourism was underway in Afghanistan just at the time of the US invasion. I had never known of Afghanistan’s need for Islamic missionary activity, or its particular suitability as a site for exorcism of personal demons. “Who, me? I’m not a foreign jihadi. I’m just another tourist from Saudi Arabia with no passport, as I too was robbed by the Afghans.” One begins to suspect that the US tribunals get a bit tired of hearing the tourist robbed by the Afghans line. No, I don’t believe him, and I would not release him.

ISN# 245 – 19 pages – Detainee: S (Saudi)

Reasons for Detention:

Detainee is associated with Al Qaeda. He travelled from Saudi Arabia to Afghanistan via Quetta, Pakistan. He spent 9 months in Afghanistan, receiving training at the Al Qaeda Camp at Al Farouk. He participated in military operations against the Coalition, carrying a rifle.

Detainee’s position:

The detainee played games at length, demanding a new personal representative, complaining he had been mistranslated, but refusing to answer questions or identify specifically where he thought he had been inaccurately quoted. He did not apparently retract the statements:

I was trained at Al Farouq on the Kalashnikov rifle. I did carry a weapon, but not in battle. A lot of people went to the mountains. I was given a a weapon to protect myself and five others. Each person had to guard the group of people for one hour. We were in a burrow approximately the size of this room.

Although he refused to clarify his position on which earlier statements he desired to deny, he still apparently intended to try to distinquish carrying a rifle in the mountains from bearing arms on the battlefield. He simply declined to answer a direct question as to whether he participated in military operations at Tora Bora.

JDZ Conclusions:

He is obviously a jihadi, who travelled to Aghanistan to fight the Coalition. He was trained by Al Qaeda. One infers from his refusal to deny it that he was indeed at Tora Bora. At the time of this hearing, he was still arrogant and obviously held his captors in contempt. He made repeated cynical (and naive) efforts to exploit Western due process and respect for a defendant’s rights to try to frustrate the operation of the tribunal. I would not release him.