Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Tim Blair points to another installment of the Sydney Morning Herald’s nigh-unreadable “Webdiary”, as usual containing misrepresentations of American life and law that would be uproariously funny if so many people didn’t take them so seriously. One thing that jumped out at me in the quote Blair published, apparently from someone named Karen Jackson: “And sodomy is still illegal in dozens of US states.”

Dozens? Heck, we only have fifty states in all — that’s, let’s see, four and one-sixth dozen — and the archived ACLU statistics from a year or two ago run down how many of them have had their ancient sodomy laws overturned or repealed. As of the time that that page was compiled, 26 states had repealed their sodomy laws by legislature, many of them in the 1970s. Another nine had had their sodomy laws overturned by courts. That leaves fifteen — or, er, one and a quarter dozen — three of which are listed as “status unclear” because of court rulings suggesting their sodomy laws also might no longer be valid. What ho, that gives us an even dozen, and even in those states the laws aren’t really enforced anyway.

The rest of Jackson’s ten reasons to be an anti-American aren’t much better. For example, number six on the list:

When other countries defy or ignore international treaties, they should be bombed. When the US ignores or abandons international treaties, they are asserting their rights as a sovereign nation.

A little intuition regarding what she’s talking about there demonstrates how she’s moving the goalposts. The U.S. is making the case for war against one country, Iraq, which has been covertly breaking treaties that it signed itself a decade ago for the Gulf War ceasefire, and has also been violating binding U.N. resolutions (unlike the nonbinding resolutions against Israel). Meanwhile, I can only assume that the U.S. must be being judged for not signing the ICC and Kyoto accords, rather than signing and then violating them, and for pulling out of the ABM Treaty strictly according to the withdrawal process that’s specified in the ABM Treaty. A country defiantly violating treaties it’s signed and ignoring binding U.N. resolutions is manifestly different from a country declining to sign treaties it does not like and lawfully withdrawing from another treaty — apples and oranges, Karen.

Of course, after spending all these months reading Blair’s blog, I’d never expect anyone in Margo Kingston’s orbit to check their facts before posting to the Webdiary anyway. This way, I know they’re not going to disappoint me the way one Phillip Knightley has disappointed Professor Bunyip.

THERE’S A THREAD ON LGF today about the aforementioned Canadian guy who ended up in jail in Lebanon for the crime of having once visited Israel, and although I’m usually too intimidated to take part in the LGF comments boards I was moved to post this based on something I’d read in the NYT this week:

Hey, we should cut the Lebanese a little slack and not just assume they are culturally backward. For instance, one of Lebanon’s technology companies has just created a new second-generation whisper-quiet robotic lawn mower that uses a seriously high-tech computerized guidance system to reduce the strain of yardwork (it’s hard for people who are blind or otherwise disabled) and also cuts down on pollution by using a rechargeable battery pack. A pretty impressive–

Oh wait, did I say a Lebanese company? Actually, the RoboMower RL800, profiled in yesterday’s New York Times, is made by Friendly Robotics of Kadima, Israel.

After posting that, I was thinking we should count ourselves lucky that this RoboMower article was printed in the NYT, which despite its flaws isn’t quite as off-the-wall on Israeli stuff as some news sources. Imagine if the NYT reporter had submitted the exact same story to Reuters — they would have kept his byline on it but rewritten it so it would mostly consist of:

Editorializing about how the Palestinians are suffering through no fault of their own while the Israelis lead such bourgeois lives that they have time to think up things like lawn-mowing robots
Quote from a Western “peace” activist saying the robot lawnmower is designed to run on batteries so it doesn’t consume the precious oooiiiiiiiiiiiil that Israel’s patron the U.S. needs to power its SUVs and for George W. Bush to shampoo his hair with
Quote from unidentified UN source lamenting that the Palestinian economy is being destroyed now that Israelis can have robots mow their lawn instead of hiring Palestinian kids to come to their houses in Israel and mow the lawns with their teeth and eat the grass which is the only thing Palestinian kids are allowed to eat due to the evil Israelis
Quote from an unidentified Palestinian “security officer” saying that Sharon wants to force Friendly Robotics to cut it out with the robotic lawnmowers and vacuum cleaners and start making robot tanks and robot bulldozers that he can use to run over Palestinian kids and collect their squashed innards in big storage containers to be shipped to Israeli bakeries for making Purim pastries
Statement near the end about how the reporter was unable to reach Friendly Robotics for comment on these allegations
The sentence “At least 12 Israelis and 14.7 trillion Palestinians have been killed since the latest uprising began in September 2000, although it was unclear at press time how many Palestinians had been killed by Israeli yardwork/deathsquad robots.”

THIS IS PROBABLY THE WRONG reaction to have, but when I read the Washington Post’s front-page tale of an lawyer who lost his job in June 2001 and has been working as a temp in a cubicle job since December, my thoughts were not “How sad that this fellow hasn’t been able to find a job in over a year” but “Wait a second: he learned Monday that his Level 2 interview for a prominent government job would be a ‘written assignment’ due Thursday at noon, and he didn’t start on the required six essay answers until ‘Wednesday after dinner’?” For heaven’s sake: the man is a lawyer. What exactly was stopping him from using his savings to open his own office and hang out a shingle once the first three months of looking for a job proved fruitless? Or from moving to Cleveland or Cincinnati and finding a public school teaching job? I’m not especially impressed with the “350 resumes” figure, either. That’s less than four resumes a week. What was he doing for the first year of his unemployment that he couldn’t devote himself full time to finding a new job? Even if you wanted to devote your legal unemployment full time to your golf game, there are employer-paid headhunters who will do the work for you (at the risk of losing some job opportunities at the margin when the employer doesn’t want to pay the huge headhunter fees).

RANDY BARNETT, WRITING ON The Volokh Conspiracy blog, quotes a fascinating statement from an African-American Stanford Law professor who complains that affirmative action has demeaned his accomplishments:

In the current Affirmative Action environment, blessed by our Supreme Court this past Monday, there is nothing that any American of African descent can do that can separate himself or herself from the unspoken accusation that he or she is the beneficiary of more than they deserve.

Let me illustrate my point. I am willing to bet that I am the only member of this list who feels compelled to put his standardized test scores and National Merit award on his CV. Why do I do this? For those of you who do not know me personally, it is not a matter of braggadocio. Every September I have to deal with nearly 60 prima donna first year law students whose first and only (initial) reaction to my skin color is that they have been cheated out of a “real” Contracts professor, and are stuck with an “Affirmative Action” instructor. Many of them come around when, as some “gunners” often do, they look up my CV and find that I have outscored virtually every single one of them on the test around which they have centered their lives, the LSAT.

The pain and embarrassment that Marcus Cole feels is real, and is certainly an unintended consequence of affirmative action programs.

I was moved by Mr. Cole’s words, and planned to cite them as an example of how affirmative action can hurt people it is intended to benefit.

But then I took the time to respond to Mr. Cole’s invitation to look at his CV. Note that he’s teaching at Stanford Law: US News ranks them the #2 law school in the country; I don’t know if I’d put them that high, but there’s no question that they’re in the top five, and that it’s one of the hardest places to gain admittance either as a student or a professor. Nearly all of Stanford’s faculty graduated at the top of their classes from a top-five law school; the recent hires nearly all have two or more of a Supreme Court clerkship, a substantial publication record, experience teaching at another law school, or a second graduate degree.

Mr. Cole’s LSAT scores are in the 98th percentile: above average, but hardly spectacular, and at least a quarter of the Stanford Law students do as well or better. Mr. Cole graduated Northwestern Law, a good, but not top-ten, law school in 1993, and apparently was not in the top 10% of his class, as he does not list “Order of the Coif” or honors on his resume above “Dean’s List.” He was not on the main law review at Northwestern. He had a reasonably prominent (but, again, not top tier) Eighth Circuit clerkship. When he was hired in 1997, after three years at a top Chicago law firm, his only publication was a book review in a second-tier student law journal at Northwestern, and he does not appear to have had any law school teaching experience. Mr. Cole may be an excellent teacher, and may have realized the promise that Stanford saw in him with his post-1997 work (though his publication record of five scholarly law review articles (none in top journals) in six years seems decidedly below average for a tenured Stanford Law professor). I promise you that Stanford Law will never hire a white law professor with the resume that Mr. Cole had in 1997. (When I considered entering teaching that same year with a better resume–and by better resume, I mean better law school, better GPA, better clerkship, and marginally better publication record (and even a better LSAT)–I knew that I had next to no hope of getting employment at a top thirty law school, much less a Stanford. Please note that I am not claiming that my resume is worthy of a Stanford Law professorship–it’s not, under normal circumstances.)

Mr. Cole may not be happy that he is stigmatized as a professor who was hired because of affirmative action. He may honestly believe that affirmative action makes African-Americans worse off. But he’s kidding himself if he thinks he wasn’t hired because of affirmative action. I’d say that he personally is a net winner under affirmative action policies, and that it is perfectly appropriate to point out that he wouldn’t have had the opportunity to win teaching awards at Stanford Law if that institution had applied the same hiring criteria to him that they apply to white males.

NPR’S BAGHDAD CORRESPONDENT Anne Garrels (bio) has returned home and was interviewed by NPR staple host Susan Stamberg, for Wednesday’s Morning Edition. The aired version is not quite eight minutes long, including Bob Edwards’ segue, and is a montage of bits from the interview and pieces of previous reporting from Baghdad.

Fortunately, NPR loves its website users and put together this page which contains a written variation of the aired version as well as a full 32 minutes of the interview itself, apparently unedited. At the bottom of that page, more links to audio and webpages about Garrels.

I was definitely impressed that Garrels apparently has an electrical engineering degree, since she variously ran her laptop and contraband satellite telephone off either the lightbulb outlet powered by the hotel generator, or using a car battery that she hauled down and up 11 flights for its daily recharge. You’ll have to listen to the interview to discover why she called in to NPR while naked.

Another notable thing was that the journalists in Baghdad quickly realized that the bombing was very accurate and restricted to the Government centers, nowhere near the reporters. (This apparently caused some aggravation to the home-desk anchors on the BBC, as I recall.) But their fears quickly turned to the Iraqi minders, who were always adversarial and had less and less to lose by vanishing a reporter, stealing or demanding cash or equipment.

Her tale is probably typical of the Palestine Hotel-based journalists, and the elements from it will no doubt be added to the traditional romance of the foreign correspondent lifestyle. Government minder-thugs will go up there with the waiting by the teletype machine, padding receipts, hotel-bar drunkeness, bombed-out cynicism, and trying to find a new angle on an old story.

I STUMBLED ACROSS A highly interesting bombshell report describing how the layout of central D.C. and nearby Northern Virginia areas are designed not only to show us lots of Masonic symbols but also to mirror the home habitat of the ancient astronauts who lived around the Face on Mars! Admittedly, this will largely be of interest only to fans of kooky conspiracy theories and/or to people like Max and me who are quite familiar with the geography of the area in question. (The area on Earth, I mean.) Max, can you pick out your building on those aerial photos?

Note also that an earlier site about the Masonic symbols acknowledges that Louisiana Avenue, the upper half of the Masonic “square”, wasn’t actually on the plan that L’Enfant was ostensibly using to depict the Masonic symbols; I can only assume that L’Enfant, canny Frenchman that he was, foresaw that it would be built there anyway.

The wackily distended pentagonal wheel thing centered on the Pentagon reminded me of that section in James Randi’s Flim-Flam! pointing out that the UFOlogists’ famous Betty Hill “star map” was vague enough that you could fit it to just about anything. I like how the author of the above-cited Freemasons/Martians Web page explained this away by saying the pentagonal wheel thing was intended to be viewed from the east by the great architect of the universe.

Update: In case you can’t see all the pictures on the Freemasons/Martians page because of the low Geocities bandwidth allotment, there’s another copy of the page here, and you can find all the same pictures with mostly the same descriptive text here.

AT A REMOTE AIR BASE in Hungary, the U.S. Army is busily training Iraqi exiles to help rebuild the country.

Talib, a 52-year-old Iraqi Kurd who owns a vehicle-inspection company outside San Diego, reported for duty in late January expecting to find himself among future generals and government ministers. Instead he saw an 18-year-old fellow exile slumped in a corner listening to rapper Tupac Shakur on his headphones. “At that moment I wanted to go back,” he says. “When I saw this kid I thought it’s not worth it.”

Drill sergeants quickly named the young recruit “Tupac.” Also at the camp: his older brother, known as “Three Pack,” and his beer-bellied father, dubbed “Six Pack.” (The Pentagon allowed The Wall Street Journal access to the camp and recruits last week on the condition it not report recruits’ last names.)

The Pentagon has no illusions that these volunteers, many of whom are too overweight or too old for combat, can be shaped into a credible fighting force. Although the recruits dress in green U.S. Army camouflage uniforms, the only weapons training they get is a few days of instruction on how to shoot a 9mm pistol.

Rather, the U.S. hopes the “Free Iraqi Forces” — which could number in the low thousands — will help in a potential invasion by identifying sensitive holy sites, ferrying food and shelter to displaced civilians and, eventually, advising U.S. commanders as they work with mayors, electric-plant operators and hospital administrators to stabilize and rebuild the country.

To me, this is yet another welcome signal that the U.S. is not planning to disgracefully abandon Iraq again the way it did after the first Gulf War. What’s more, I’m also hoping that all the recent press attention to the Kurdistan issue will make it more likely that we’ll avoid selling out the Kurds in exchange for Turkish cooperation. My support for the war on Iraq has been turning much more strongly on the humanitarian motivation than on the anti-WMD motivation, so I emphatically don’t want this to live up to Jim Henley’s derisive nickname “War of the Kurdish Suppression”. (Volokh conspirator Jacob Levy seems to be on the same page as me regarding this matter, and so does “Tom Paine”, which is good to see.)

ANOTHER TIM BLAIR POST notes an article by one of Margo Kingston’s Sydney Morning Herald Webdiary buddies, Malcolm Street, who darkly suggests that the real reason John Howard and Tony Blair are sticking by the U.S. is because they want access to our awesome anti-gravity technology!

For the record I am a mechanical engineer who spent over two years at a British Aerospace guided missile R&D site in the early 1980s and have continued to take a strong interest in aerospace technology. I am a member of ASRI (Australian Space Research Institute). I am not a crank.

That last sentence isn’t exactly how Nixon put it, Mal, but I’ll bet your declaration will have about the same effect.

Mal’s sources on this stuff are several back issues of the sort of aviation-enthusiast magazines whose suckerdom for predictions of the Amazing Sci-Fi Technology of the Near Future places their predictive powers only a little beyond those of sites like Above Top Secret for credibility in my book, but I guess your mileage may vary.

In other news regarding antiwar folks embracing fringe kookery, Cinderella Bloggerfeller notes an article in Spain’s La Vanguardia, written by an art professor right here in Maryland, that seems to be citing the famed Wilhelm (William) Reich in an argument that the hawks in the administration are really just sublimating their sexual frustration into military aggression. I can only presume that this means we can avoid war altogether if we figure out how to retrofit the White House and Pentagon as gigantic orgone boxes.

As I put it on Bloggerfeller’s comments: “What other ancient cranks and pseudoscientists are these guys going to exhume? Will we be hearing about how Alfred Lawson’s ‘Lawsonomy’ theories of Suction and Pressure could eliminate the need for evil oil and help usher in a society that has replaced evil capitalism with Direct Credits? Perhaps something quoting John Cleves Symmes to show there’s no need to fear a nuclear missile exchange because ICBMs would be sucked into the hole at the North Pole?”

However it turns out, at least there’ll be no shortage of things to blog out there.

Update: Lynxx Pherrett does one of his usual long and painstaking deconstructions of the evasions and misdirections in Mal’s anti-gravity theory, and Prof. Bunyip proposes that Mal has been drinking from Margo Kingston’s commode, which as you’ve probably heard is unflushed to save the world…

MICHAEL TOTTEN, WHO IS not far from me on the political spectrum, has written before about the accusation that seems to dog any Democrat or other leftish-leaning sort who expresses views anywhere to the right of, say, Katrina vanden Heuvel’s — the accusation that they are really a Rush Limbaugh type who is pretending to be a Democrat as a sort of “shtick” that they can use to get a paying audience of righties. (This isn’t too far from righties’ complaints about people like Rudy Giuliani or Linc Chafee being “RINOs”.)

The smartass lefty who writes the Daily Howler (who is usually fairer than this) has decided to stick Tammy Bruce with the Limbaugh-in-Democrat’s-clothing complaint this time out. Excerpt:

[N]o one should be surprised by Bruce’s clowning. As usual, Bruce identifies herself as a Democrat. Then she trashes College Dems and praises the conservative movement.

Bruce, of course, is a screaming fake, the most comical of all the current faux Democrats. But faux Democracy looks like a growing movement. For example, does anyone think that Zell Miller’s recent snarling reinvention makes even a lick of sense? We’d love to know the back-story to Ol’ Zell’s reinvention as a “Tammy Bruce Democrat” (and yes, we’d assume that there probably is one). Beyond that, we continue to chuckle at Susan Estrich’s work as an official “Fox Democrat.”

I’m not quite sure what I think of Tammy Bruce myself, but clearly the hunting out of heretics in the Democratic Party continues to be a popular sport among the more partisan left-leaning commentators, so much so that the phrase faux Democrat is echoed by amateur commentators all over.

If only I were a more famous blogger, maybe they would hunt me down and erase that “D” from my voter registration card too. Wouldn’t that be a hoot.

By the way, I don’t like the right’s mocking use of the phrase “Democrat Party” rather than the proper name “Democratic Party”, but I also can’t say I much like this concept of using capital-D “Democracy” in the sense the Howler does above. There’s got to be a limit on how far proper nouns can be morphologized like that, eh?