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

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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.

Gerard Baker, writing in the London Times, suggests that it’s time to start facing up to reality and becoming prepared to do what is necessary:

If Iran gets safely and unmolested to nuclear status, it will be a threshold moment in the history of the world, up there with the Bolshevik Revolution and the coming of Hitler. What the country itself may do with those weapons, given its pledges, its recent history and its strategic objectives with regard to the US, Israel and their allies, is well known. We can reasonably assume that the refusal of the current Iranian leadership to accept the Holocaust as historical fact is simply a recognition of their own plans to redefine the notion as soon as they get a chance (“Now this is what we call a holocaust”). But this threat is only, incredibly, a relatively small part of the problem.

If Iran goes nuclear, it will demonstrate conclusively that even the world’s greatest superpower, unrivalled militarily, under a leadership of proven willingness to take bold military steps, could not stop a country as destabilising as Iran from achieving its nuclear ambitions.

No country in a region that is so riven by religious and ethnic hatreds will feel safe from the new regional superpower. No country in the region will be confident that the US and its allies will be able or willing to protect them from a nuclear strike by Iran. Nor will any regional power fear that the US and its allies will act to prevent them from emulating Iran. Say hello to a nuclear Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia.

Iran, of course, secure now behind its nuclear wall, will surely step up its campaign of terror around the world. It will become even more of a magnet and haven for terrorists. The terror training grounds of Afghanistan were always vulnerable if the West had the resolve. Protected by a nuclear-missile-owning state, Iranian camps will become impregnable.

And the kind of society we live in and cherish in the West, a long way from Tehran or Damascus, will change beyond recognition. We balk now at intrusive government measures to tap our phones or stop us saying incendiary things in mosques. Imagine how much more our freedoms will be curtailed if our governments fear we are just one telephone call or e-mail, one plane journey or truckload away from another Hiroshima.

Something short of military action may yet prevail on Iran. Perhaps sanctions will turn their leadership from its doomsday ambitions. Perhaps Russia can somehow be persuaded to give them an incentive to think again. But we can’t count on this optimistic scenario now. And so we must ready ourselves for what may be the unthinkable necessity.

Because in the end, preparation for war, by which I mean not military feasibility planning, or political and diplomatic manoeuvres but a psychological readiness, a personal willingness on all our parts to bear the terrible burdens that it will surely impose, may be our last real chance to ensure that we can avoid one.

I’ve watched most of two seasons of 24. The show relies on the kinds of coincidences of which Victorian novelists were overly fond, and the plots can be predictable: somebody is always going to kidnap Jack’s nearest and dearest — there’s always a mole in the CTU — Jack is always going off the reservation. And plot twists used to escalate viewer tension can be absolutely absurd: Jack once refuses to let a dying man take his place on a suicide mission, because he isn’t sure that chap will do the job perfectly in his impaired health. We must be 110% safe, you know. Jack survives anyway, of course.

But if you watch a few sequentially, and start getting concerned about that ticking bomb and the fate of the hostages, and begin rooting for Jack Bauer to begin delivering some good old fashioned American justice, they can become addictive. The body counts are impressive, and sooner or later Jack is going to interogate some deserving terrorist. One morning I’m going to run into Glenn Reynolds burbling happily about the release of the however-many-seasons-there-are set on DVD, and I will be a goner and Amazon will be a little richer.

The Listkeeper commenting on Polipundit supplies a list of facts about Jack Bauer:

(An excerpt)

5) Jack Bauer once forgot where he put his keys. He then spent the next half-hour torturing himself until he gave up the location of the keys.
6) Jack Bauer got Hellen Keller to talk.
7) Jack Bauer killed 93 people in just 4 days time. Wait, that is a real fact.
8) Jack Bauer was never addicted to heroin. Heroin was addicted to Jack Bauer.
9) 1.6 billion Chinese are angry with Jack Bauer. Sounds like a fair fight.

Hat tip to Tom Maguire who titled the whole list I Need a Hero.

Stephen Green has some fun reflecting on democrat electoral prospects.

In the space of 48 hours, the three top Democrats for 2008 proved themselves to have all the staying power of a nervous virgin on the set of a porn shoot.

If this is how the Democrats play when not much seems to be going well for Bush, then they’re toast. It’s too soon to predict exactly what will happen in 2008. But if today is any indication, then I can make a confident prediction about this year’s midterm election: The Republicans will gain a seat or two in the Senate, and at the very least hold even in the House.

Year Six of any administration is usually poison for the party. If we had something like a loyal opposition in this country, that would be as true in 2006 as it was in 1986.

But it isn’t. And it won’t be. Mark my words.

Let’s see, how does it go?

“Bush lied, people died.” “We made a mistake.” “We now know there were no Iraqi WMDs.” The left has assidulously erected an imaginary alternative reality for itself, in which (just like anthropogenic Global Warming) the unlikely thesis that “Saddam had no WMD” has been elevated to the level of an accepted fact. These days, it’s even easy to find Republicans who happen to read the MSM or watch television too much, and who have consequently succumbed to accepting this on the basis of the endless repetition of the same Big Lie.

It’s been obvious enough all along, I would argue. Saddam moved his entire air force to the territory of his former adversary Iran, rather than lose it to US attacks during the first Gulf War. The precedent for cross-border withdrawal to safe asylum of precious Iraqi weapons is all too clear.

And I’m not the only one aware of all this, as we reported here in December, Israeli Lieutenant General Moshe Yaalon, former chief of staff of the Israeli Defense Force, told the New York Sun over dinner in New York that Saddam spirited his chemical weapons out of the country on the eve of the war. “He transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria. No one went to Syria to find [them].”

And today the same New York Sun, reports that Iraqi former top military advisor to Saddam Hussein and second-in-command of the Iraqi Air Force, General Georges Sada reveals his own knowledge of the transfer of chemical WMD in his new book, Saddam’s Secrets.

two Iraqi Airways Boeings were converted to cargo planes by removing the seats, Mr. Sada said. Then Special Republican Guard brigades loaded materials onto the planes, he said, including “yellow barrels with skull and crossbones on each barrel.” The pilots said there was also a ground convoy of trucks.

The flights – 56 in total, Mr. Sada said – attracted little notice because they were thought to be civilian flights providing relief from Iraq to Syria, which had suffered a flood after a dam collapse in June of 2002.

“Saddam realized, this time, the Americans are coming,” Mr. Sada said. “They handed over the weapons of mass destruction to the Syrians.”

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I thought I was early on this one, but I find that Rick Moran has already responded at length, and is collecting comments by the Blogospheric Right.

The streets of the United States may not be paved with gold, but the America culture of complaint can be awfully lucrative.

Two Salvadoran illegal immigrants found themselves confronted in 2003, upon making their way informally into the United States, by pistol-wielding Casey Nethercott, a member of Ranch Rescue, a right-wing volunteer group trying to protect private property along the Southwestern US border from incursions by illegal aliens.

Fatima del Socorro Leiva Medina and Edwin Alfredo Mancia Gonzales accused Nethercott of pistol-whipping them, and he was acquitted of the charge, but (thanks to the intervention of the Southern Poverty Law Center) the lucky Salvadorans get to stay in the United States as “crime victims,” and they are also now property owners.

A Cochise County judge awarded the pair ownership of Mr. Nethercott’s 70 acre ranch near Bisbee, Arizona, when Nethercott, now serving a five year term in Texas for illegal possession of that pistol (having had some sort of previous conviction), failed to contest their lawsuit asking for $500,000 in damages. It appears that no legal do-gooding organization was assisting Mr. Nethercott.

AP — KLTV

Loralee Wright with Ambergris

The Australian Wright family, in the course of a fishing trip were walking on a beach near Streaky Bay on South Australia’s west coast, when they found a peculiar large object, which they eventually decided to take home. Research on the Internet, and a visit to a matine biologist, in the course of the next few weeks etablished that they had found a 14.75 kg (that’s 32.5 lbs to Americans) lump of Ambergris, a rare and valuable natural substance cast up by sperm whales, and used in the manufacture of perfumes worth $20-65 a gram. The beach souvenir is thought be worth as much as $295,000.

Indian Express — ABC West Coast

The best can be the enemy of the good. I’m sure that we all appreciate N.Z.’s contributions at the Truth Laid Bear, but efforts at making the system fiddle-proof, which began late last year have produced paralysis for about a month now. Most bloggers experienced dizzying evolutionary regresssion, followed by an inexplicable return to something which looked a like one’s old position in the Great Chain of Being, but the link count seems to have remained broken. My own precious small number of links from Glenn Reynolds and Power Line stayed missing, and what Technorati counts as around 200 comes out as 119.

N.Z. ought to figure that however you change the rules, you can never eliminate the game, as Larry the Liquidator (played by Danny DeVito) observed in the 1991 film Other People’s Money. There are a lot of bloggers out there, and whatever method of automated link measuring is used to keep score, some people will get obsessive about scoring, and someone’s ingenuity will find a way to game the system for extra links. C’est la guerre. Who cares? Most of us are content to inch our way up the ladder without unbecoming haste. On the whole, I bet most of us would be content to see TTLB operating normally. My advice is: just put it back the way it was.

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PJM may not yet have replaced the New York Times as the news source of record, but it’s time to get over the carping and hysteria. PJM is, at this, point, not bad. I read it. Over time it improves. Someday it may be hot stuff; and, who knows? maybe Frank J. will get his yacht in the end, but please let’s all the rest of us be good sports about the whole thing.

For God’s sake, kindly pull the plug on the pathetic PJM Death Pool, which is itself seriously moribund. Time to finish it off.

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Podcasting.

I understand the impulse. The thought of doing one myself, interviewing a celebrity, crossed my own vainglorious mind just the other day. But I concluded upon reflection that it’s a bad idea. There are some bloggers I like, Ann Althouse and Glenn Reynolds, for instance, who do podcasts. I’d love to hear what they have to say, but podcasts are just too slow, too time-consuming. Most of us read a lot faster than anyone can talk.

I wonder: Do you suppose it would be possible to use voice recognition software to capture and produce transcripts of podcasts by eminent blog personalities, which might then be posted as texts for the I’d-rather-be-reading crowd? A choice would be nice.

Linked by Professor Bainbridge. Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

I’m a Ferrari 360 Modena!

You’ve got it all. Power, passion, precision, and style. You’re sensuous, exotic, and temperamental. Sure, you’re expensive and high-maintenance, but you’re worth it.
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I think most of my friends would say I’m really a Morgan three-wheeler of pre-war vintage.

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.

Just yesterday, I dropped in on YARGB, and found a posting by Seneca the Younger linking Tyler Cowen‘s survey of recordings of Don Giovanni.

Having my own very decided opinions on the subject ï¼u02c6though our household has never really recovered from the trauma associated with the transition from LP recordings to CDs, and we abandoned any effort to stay courant years ago)ï¼u0152I was quite interested in reading what someone (inevitably) younger and more in touch with developments in recent years, would have to say. I was particularly interested in seeing which versions made the list.

I was very pleased to see that Mr. Cowen was well informed, and basically sound. I thought his opinions came close to being spot on, but I differ with him on a small number of points:

The Klemperer Magic Flute is a version of serious merit, and I think it deserves a high rank among versions of that opera, but it is the historic late 1930s Beecham recording, the first, which remains the best.

In the first place, Sir Thomas Beecham was one of the two greatest conducter interpreters of Mozart of the last century, the other being Bruno Walther. Beecham’s lucid and precise rationalism is equally appropriate to Mozart as Walther’s warm Romanticism. And Beecham’s conducting was accompanied in the historic first recording by an impossible-to-equal group of singers. Gerhard Hüsch is the best of all possible Papagenos. Helge Rosvaenge, Tiana Lemnitz, and Erna Berger were all also extraordinary performers of legendary stature. Klemperer is pretty much at his best in his version, but I’m afraid Thomas Beecham’s best day is a lot better than Otto Klemperer’s best day. Walter Berry is a fine singer, but Hüsch is a demigod.

Cowen correctly identifies the best Giovanni as the Fürtwangler 1953 Salzburg Festspiele recording, with Cesare Siepi, Elisabeth Schwartzkopf, Walter Berry, Otto Edelmann, Elizabeth Grümmer, and Raffaele Arie, but he is somewhat agnostic about the best choice among Fürtwangler Salzburg recordings of different years. I know two of them well. The 1953 was available long ago (via Discophile on St. Mark’s Place) on the luxury pirate BJR label. The 1954 could be gotten on the humble Everest label. Cowen’s friends are right: Fürtwangler was better in the 1953 recording, bringing a completely passionate identification to the music, resulting in an emphatically right momentum.

Best of all, Mr. Cowen’s Amazon link went to a page on which this magnificent recording was accompanied by a review written for Amazon by Jeff Lipscomb of Sacramento, California. Jeff Lipscomb is a find. He is a superb reviewer working on the basis of a serious listening background with excellent taste. I have not yet had time to read all 30 pages of Lipscomb reviews, but I know already that my music collection and Amazon’s bottom line will both soon be richer for these.

Yesterday, surfing around the Blogosphere, I found that Stop the ACLU (from a perspective on the political Right) is listing Best New Blogs of 2005.

Meanwhile, Wampum (from a perspective decidedly on the Left) is posting the first voting round for the 2005 Koufax Awards: (some (120+/-) Blogs Most Deserving of Wider Recognition.

Opinions differ. I do like many of the blogs on Stop the ACLU‘s list myself, but there is one truly exceptional new blog, clearly deserving of wider recognition, which I have decided to name Never Yet Melted’s Best New Blog of 2005.

YARGB (Yet Another Really Great Blog) – Flares into Darkness, founded September 16, 2005, combines that great title with a superb selection of postings provided by an extremely talented group of twenty-four (!) contributors. Despite YARGB‘s being hardly older than this blog, once I discovered its existence, I soon found it as reliable in quality as the members of the select group of blogs I bookmarked long ago under the label: “Essential Blogs.” I try to avoid parasitically linking material from exactly the same blogs day after day, but I have found I can count on finding at least one item I like well enough to link just about everyday on YARGB.