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.

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.

It was a very last minute sort of thing. The invitation arrived by email, which I only got to while the program was already underway, and my emailed apology, along with contact information, for too-late response (Pacific Time Zone) produced a phone call from the BBC, and a speedy connection to the program.

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.