15 December 2005 >> Many schools ban U.S. military recruiters from campus over objections to Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, the policy that prevents gays from serving openly in the military. Yet many of these same schools accept millions from Saudi royalty for the creation and maintenance of Middle Eastern Studies programs. Saudi Arabia, for the uninitiated, is a country where homosexuality is punishable by beheading. Why are these schools are willing to take a stand against the U.S. military but not against Saudi Arabia?

More thoughts on this at the OnTheFenceFilms.com blog:

It’s interesting that Saudi money can buy access to create permanent Islamic studies institutions—which, we can assume, won’t be terribly critical of the very donors of that money—but that American money won’t even buy the right for U.S. military recruiters to sit at a table for a few hours each semester.

15 December 2005 >> Behold: the Top Media Corrections of 2005.

15 December 2005 >> For far too long, newspaper websites have required that users register in order to read articles. Not only is it annoying for the user, it increases the chance that your inbox will become laden with spam. It also largely removes the newspaper from the global online discussion; bloggers are far less likely to point readers to a site that requires them to jump through hoops just to read an editorial or news item. On the web, if you can’t link to it, it might as well not even exist.

So I’m happy to report a welcome trend: some newspapers are seeing the light and doing away with the digital gates. Let’s hope that continues. In the meantime, for people who wish to keep their e-mail addresses private, there are other ways of crashing the gates.