It’s today that the workmen come to drill a hole in the rock ledge of the mountaintop for that satellite Internet antenna.

We did visit the new house yesterday. It’s perched on the first ridge of the Appalachians. The mountaintop is quite narrow, and one can see into both Virginia and West Virginia even from the first floor of the house. It was cold up there. We are going to get snowed in for sure this winter.

The previous owners left us a John Deere lawn tractor with a snow plow attachment. But there are two problems: I have no idea how to attach it, and I can see no way to get that tractor with plow attached through either of two fence gates into the driveway to plow.

We have arrived in Virginia, but are currently camped out at a hotel near Washington, awaiting the arrival of the movers later this week. Blogging will be sparse for a few days, as the hotel wireless connection is not entirely reliable, and there are many errands.

A work crew arrives tomorrow AM at our Blue Ridge house to drill a base in the ledge rock for our satellite Internet antenna.

We have left our California house, and are currently camped at a hotel, preparing to depart very early tomorrow for Virginia. I will be away from my keyboard after this evening until late tomorrow.

They’re loading the trucks. I still have a PC, and have not yet moved to a hotel. We fly east Saturday. When we arrive, we’ll be camping in a hotel for about a week while the moving vans cross the continent.

I may lose my PC later today, and have to work on a laptop.

It’s awful moving, but at least I don’t have to pay attention to the election results right now.

Heavy packing day today. Movers arrive to pack books tomorrow. Our plane leaves next Saturday. I’ll be working from a hotel for several days after our arrival, waiting for the moving vans to cross the continent.

Postings will be a bit lighter than usual for the next two weeks, as we are packing in preparation for a move from the Bay area of California to Loudoun County, Virginia. I will share more details of our schedule later.

I’ve never actually lived south of the Mason-Dixon line before. I grew up in Pennsylvania, attended college and resided for many years in Connecticut. It will be nice to move to a red state for a change.

The Never Yet Melted Blog was started October 29, 2005. Current statistics are: a total of 1800 posts, visitors from 176 countries, more than 26,000 unique visitors this month, and 800 blog links (by Technorati’s count). Our thanks to the many generous bloggers who linked our new and obscure effort, and to all our readers around the world.

I was obliged to restore the databases to a point a couple of days back. I will have to put two days’ postings back manually. Operations will thereafter, hopefully, return to normal.

Thank you for your patience.

A lot of blogs have their origin in other blogs. My understanding is that Gates of Vienna is the progeny of Belmont Club. YARGB is the offspring of Roger L. Simon. This blog is really the offspring of political arguments on my college class listserv (which you can’t get, unless you were in my original college class). I still waste my time arguing over there, and I thought I might import some of my arguments.

A college professor classmate of mine opined today:

Osama is winning. I don’t know how to make it plainer. He’s winning not because there are Democrats in Congress but because the policy executed by the Bush administration has produced adverse results.

I replied indignantly (more or less – some editing is being done for more formal publication):

If one applied the principles of the liberals historically, the USA must have lost every war in history, since any action on our part always angered the enemy and provoked him to resist. Our acting at all always proved a blunder which merely confirmed his worst opinion of us, and inspired new enemies to rally to his side. Every wild Indian, every British redcoat, every Southern rebel, every Philippine Insurrectionary, and every Prussian grenadier we killed always inspired revenge, and caused two more volunteers to join the ranks of our opponents. We repeatedly made the mistake of invading the territories of our enemies, thus inevitably recruiting even more allies to their side. American excesses, like Sullivan’s Raid on the Iroquois homeland, Sherman’s March to Sea, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, always hardened the enemy’s resolve and ensured our inevitable defeat. And that’s why we’re all weaving Iroquois baskets, being ruled by the British Parliament, and lamenting the loss of the Southern Confederacy, while we struggle to learn better Japanese in order to converse with our conquerors.

Blogging is very light this weekend as the management has been attending the San Francisco Token Kai.

The Never Yet Melted blog has been out of action since Thursday afternoon, when a SQL database error occurred.

Unfortunately, tools for repairing the SQL database at my host service are not accessible by customers, and are managed remotely by a subdivision or subcontractor of the hosting company, who is roughly as accessible as your average divinity. You can pray (i.e., send an email), but that doesn’t mean God answers.

I have learned a few things, and will try to avoid a recurrence. My apologies to readers who came here only to meet the dreaded SQL Error 127.

My wife’s Thinkpad has expired, so I will have to let her borrow my computer for much of today.

The management has come down with a bit of a cold, so postings will be slow today. We plan to nap.

Charles Johnson at Little Green Footballs yesterday illuminated the impact of Google’s shameful surrender to censorship at the behest of the Communist government of China by linking

tiananmen – Google Image Search.

AND

tiananmen – Google Image Search in China.

When I visited Little Green Footballs earlier today, and attempted to compare Google image search results, clicking on the China-version link resulted in my browser being automatically redirected to the US version. I found it impossible to access the censored China version.

US url: http://images.google.com/images?q=tiananmen

China url: http://images.google.cn/images?q=tiananmen
——————————————————————————————————
RETRACTION

I leapt to the conclusion that Google had deliberately arranged to preclude US viewers from accessing the China-censored-version of the Tiananmen Image Search, but my wife informed me that the China url worked on her PC.

I found, looking into the matter further, that the url worked in Firefox on my own PC. Subsequent reports from other people tell me that the url works inconsistently in MS Explorer on other machines. It is not possible for me to identify the causes, but it seems most likely that these varying results are occasioned simply by the interactions of different software, and are not the result of any deliberate action by Google.

I am sufficiently in a foul humor today about the left that I could be persuaded to gleefully anesthetize the lot of them, and drop them all out of airplanes into the Pacific. I’m planning to blog sparingly, and on non-political matters for a bit until my temper improves.

When we commented yesterday negatively on the Supreme Court decision in Gonzales, et. al. v. Oregon, we must confess that we had not yet gotten around to reading the actual decision. Nor were we familiar with the specifics of the Oregon law. Its title, the Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA), had precisely the ring of liberal double-speak to it, and we had leapt (understandably, we would argue) to the conclusion that the act basically encompassed oldsters going to the doctor’s office to be treated in the manner of the veterinarian putting to sleep the family cat. The reality was clearly quite different.

(The Supreme Court decision states:)

The Oregon Death With Dignity Act (ODWDA) exempts from civil or criminal liability state-licensed physicians who, in compliance with ODWDA’s specific safeguards, dispense or prescribe a lethal dose of drugs upon the request of a terminally ill patient.

Since our own position is really that any rational adult ought to be able to buy, and use, any medication or consciousness-altering item he desires without a prescription, it is clear that we failed to recognize initially the curious occurrence of the court’s liberal majority arriving at a perfectly correct decision.

Justice Scalia seems to have suffered from the same knee-jerk reaction we did initially, which was joined by Justices Roberts and Thomas. But Clarence Thomas additionally wrote a separate dissent, commenting sarcastically:

I agree with limiting the applications of the CSA [Controlled Substances Act] in a manner consistent with the principles of federalism and our constitutional structure. Raich, supra, at _ (THOMAS, J., dissenting); cf. Whitman, supra, at 486—487 (THOMAS, J., concurring) (noting constitutional concerns with broad delegations of authority to administrative agencies). But that is now water over the dam. The relevance of such considerations was at its zenith in Raich, when we considered whether the CSA could be applied to the intrastate possession of a controlled substance consistent with the limited federal powers enumerated by the Constitution. Such considerations have little, if any, relevance where, as here, we are merely presented with a question of statutory interpretation, and not the extent of constitutionally permissible federal power. This is particularly true where, as here, we are interpreting broad, straightforward language within a statutory framework that a majority of this Court has concluded is so comprehensive that it necessarily nullifies the States’ “ ‘traditional . . . powers . . . to protect the health, safety, and welfare of their citizens.’ ? Raich, supra, at _, n. 38 (slip op., at 27, n. 38). The Court’s reliance upon the constitutional principles that it rejected in Raich—albeit under the guise of statutory interpretation—is perplexing to say the least. Accordingly, I respectfully dissent.

In other words, Thomas still thinks the Constitution ought to preclude such Federal intrusions, but the since the Court already decided otherwise in Raich, what can he do but dissent from the tortured reasoning used to achieve a different result this time?
——————————————————————————————————
I was just telling my wife: I can remember being wrong once before. I think it was in 1954…

I spoke briefly this morning on BBC radio, in my capacity as author of the Never Yet Melted blog, deploring Rep. Murtha’s proposal for American withdrawal from Iraq, and disputing the contention of members of a selection of other multi-national pundits and journalists that a majority of Iraqis were opposed to the current US role in establishing democracy in Iraq.

If my comments proposing war-duration internment camps for US subversives forty miles south of Barstow, presidential-appointment of Pope Benedict as the Islamo-extremist desired Caliph, and the immediate bombing of Hanoi (Better late, than never!) were not too off-putting (only kidding!), and an invitation of this sort is ever renewed, I will try to alert readers.

This blog will be three weeks old tomorrow; it was started October 29th.

I had been gloating over finding a few dozen hits per diem, many from actual strangers, and considering that real progress, until Jonah Goldberg over at National Review Online linked a fairly frivolous posting responding to some moonbat who calls himself “Hunter” on Daily Kos, and I found four thousand hits this morning.

A hearty welcome to all our new visitors. Please look in again from time to time. I believe I can promise some rational observations from the political Right, and some links providing passing amusement.

As you can see, we have repaired the files broken during installation, and we have the software running properly. No more individual shooting-the-Indian postings.

We ask our readers (both of them!) to please bear with us for a bit, as we experiment with formatting choices. I dislike unnecessary change myself, and I was already getting used to the default format. It is not without its virtues, but that particular format is very unoriginal and generic, and lacks some needed features. I think we can do better. But feel free to comment or complain.

Blog commenced, 29 October 2005. The author is just beginning to learn to use the software and build the site.