Queen of SQL statements. _Pray for us_.
Empress of Emacs. _Pray for us_.
Sacred Heart of Search and Replace. _Pray for us_.
Defender of Write Permissions. _Pray for us_.
Patron of Manually Edited Dump Files. _Pray for us_.
Savior of unexpectedly small Disk Quotas. _Pray for us_.
Shepherd of Lost Posts. _Pray for us_.
Protector of Hapless Administrators. _Pray for us_.
Scourge of Wholly Inadequate Import/Export Formats. _Pray for us_.
Mother of all the Bloggers. _Pray for us_.

I think we’re back. Fresh — or at least unrotted — permalinks and all. Thank you, thank you to everyone who commented in the now-destroyed post where I wailed about the problem. The solution was to get an SQL dump of the database from the old server and read it in to the new database. Not as easy as it might have been, because the old server had old blogs, with old hard-linked archive sources and all the rest of it. But I think it worked.

My sincere apologies to fellow-posters and commenters whose recent contributions got deleted in the course of the database restoration. I guess I revealed myself to be a utilitarian at root: five or six posts and their comments were sacrificed on behalf of about two thousand posts and their permalinks. Moral: Do not put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists.[1]

So, as predicted in my Don't Upgrade post, I’ve just spent an unconscionable amount of time (I am about to start paying off large debts to my wife and daughter) getting us back to where we were last week. But now we are where we were last week, but on new servers. To switch religions momentarily, Oy.

fn1. Alternative moral for high-ranking Pentagon officials: By all means put me in charge of interrogating suspected terrorists, because I will lose them.

If you’ve spent any time around the blogosphere, or looking at thinktank websites, you’ll be aware that the following [professed] opinions tend to go together:

• widespread ownership of guns saves lives
• tobacco smoke is harmless (if not to smokers then to anyone who breathes it second-hand)
• global warming is a myth

There’s not too much mystery about this. The kinds of characteristics that would encourage the adoption of any one of these beliefs (make your own list) obviously encourage the others. What’s surprising to me is how frequently these opinions are correlated with support for Microsoft, and, more particularly, denunciation of open-source software.

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Sounds as if agreement has been reached on a draft EU constitution. That was the easy part – now they have to steer it through referendums in the UK and elsewhere. No agreement, however on a new Commission President. More on this as proper news starts to leak out …

At “The Right Coast,” Maimon Schwarzschild cheers on the victory of the UKIP party. Apparently, it’s a heavy blow against the project of an United Europe, which, as we all know, emphasizes “anti-Americanism, and thinly veiled anti-semitism.” This is something that’s becoming increasingly common – US based conservatives (although note that Schwarzschild is a UK transplant to San Diego) finding some common ground with the European far right’s hostility to the EU. It’s a big mistake. Josh Chafetz describes the UKIP’s leadership as “a collection of racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes.” Although the UKIP has tried to maintain a more respectable public profile than, say, the BNP, it has certainly had a scattering of anti-Semites and nordicists in prominent party positions in the past. The European far right doesn’t emphasize anti-Semitism as much as it used to – it has increasingly switched its attentions from Jews to Muslims and other immigrants. And the UKIP is no stranger to anti-Muslim and Arab racism; in Robert Kilroy-Silk’s own words, Muslims

are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be – and proud and happy to be so.

Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt – when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.

Jacek Kuron, one of the heroes of the postwar eastern Europe and a man of the left , despite and against Stalinism, is dead. There are obits in the New York Times , the Guardian , the Telegraph , The Scotsman , from the BBC , and in many other places.

Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser and UKIP spin-doctor was on the BBC’s flagship discussion programme, Question Time, last night. Very many of his utterances were outright falsehoods (though plain ignorance of British and European politics was evidently a good part of the explanation). Amazingly, he explained the problem of high house prices in the UK [only some parts of which actually have high house prices!] was caused by the British government having lost control of immigration to the EU [false], with the result that people were pouring in and bidding up the price of a scarce resource! Supply and demand, QED! I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that this idiot is credited as the “genius” behind Ewekip’s recent success or that he was once employed by a Democratic American President!

UPDATE: Chris Brooke links to a Mirror hatchet job on of Ewekip’s celebrity MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk.

UPDATE UPDATE: this is a restored post from Google’s cache.

Cory Doctorow has been at Microsoft research, telling them why Digital Rights Management is a bad thing. It’s a great rant – I’ll be assigning it in my classes. Via BoingBoing.

But don’t panic! This is a sub-etha move. A behind-the-scenes move. A the-audience-noticed-nothing move. In other words, a New Host Provider move. So from your point of view, gentle readers, we are where we’ve always been. Very soon entering https://www.crookedtimber.org in your browser will bring you to our new server. In a day or two it’ll be like nothing happened, but you may have some difficulty connecting to our new server while the Domain Name transfer is happening. To get your new-server CT fix in the short term, follow this link. But as I say, in the next 12-24 hours the url https://www.crookedtimber.org will begin pointing to the new site, and everything will be as it was, only spiffier in an ineffable, new host provider sort of way.

I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.

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Steadfastly ignoring our own good advice, Crooked Timber is moving to a new host provider, with all the potential headaches that entails. I’m doing the transfer now, so comments posted here from now on will not be imported to the new server. Please hold yer thoughts for a few hours.

Once the move is done, we’ll transfer the Doman Name registration to our new hosts, and https://www.crookedtimber.org will point to the new servers. The process of “DNS propagation”, where the big internet servers tell the little ones about the new location, may take a little while. Thanks for bearing with us.

Nelly, who checks George R.R. Martin’s website pretty much every day, tells me that after almost 6 months’ silence, George is getting impatient with his impatient readers.

“I will say, just to set some rumors straight, that I am not dead, I am not dying, I am not in ill health, I have not forgotten about my readers, and I am not lounging in my hot tub drinking chilled wine with hot babes in bikinis (though I’d like to be). I have been working on this bloody book almost every bloody day (okay, except for Sundays during football season and the two days of the NFL draft) for more years than I care to contemplate, writing, rewriting, revising, and writing again, trying to make FEAST a feast in truth.”

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The heads of government of the various EU member states are meeting together this evening to discuss, among other things, who should replace Romano Prodi as President of the European Commission. It’s an important decision – but there isn’t a clear front-runner. For what it’s worth, my estimate of the various candidates’ chances of getting the nod.

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Howl, howl, howl, howl.

UPDATE: Mark Kleiman might point out that this is a pretty good summary of Rumsfeld’s behavior as well. Who am I to argue? What kind of an outfit illegally orders that a prisoner be held off the books for over a year, and then forgets to interrogate him?

ANOTHER, NON-SNARKY UPDATE: Interesting point from Michael Froomkin:

People like me, who have been highly dubious about the US acceding to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court due to the real and troubling encroachment on our traditional conception of national sovereignty are really going to have to think long and hard about changing sides on this one, or at least accepting jurisdiction with regards to some of our treaty obligations. The last few months argue strongly that the US cannot always be relied on to observe its international law obligations as much as I would have thought and hoped.

I doubt that too many people will join Professor Froomkin in thinking long and hard, but these revelations will have the unfortunate effect of changing the terms of the debate. As Anne Applebaum* points out, it’s hard to see how those in power have sufficient incentives to follow stories as thoroughly as they deserve.

* corrected; thanks to Russell Arben Fox

Thanks to Tyler Cowen, over at Volokh , I came across Jason Brennan's list of movies with philosophical themes . It’s a good list , though a bit lacking in non-American content. Possible additions? There’s already been some blogospheric discussion of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and Christine Korsgaard’s claim that it illustrates Kant on revolutions (scroll down comments). Strictly Ballroom arguably deals with freedom, existentialism, and revolution. Rashomon is about the epistemology of testimony. Dr Strangelove covers the ethics of war and peace and some issues in game theory (remember the doomsday machine?). Suggestions?

UPDATE: I see Matthew Yglesias is also discussing this.