Here to there

I want to get this blogger thing working properly, and I am posting this as a test. Last night the whole damned thing shut down and I lost my last (long essay) which I had to feed up in pieces. When I try to send a post of any length, I get weird "LONG POST ERROR" codes, and the post simply disappears.

Iranian Culture War update: This is an interview with some leading Iranian opposition leaders.

A sample:

the problem that we now face is that these regimes--by that, I mean Iran, China, and so forth--have an object lesson in what not to do, that is, they've seen what happened in 1989 in Eastern Europe. And they have no intention of going down that road.

Given the brutality of the Iranian regime, which clearly exceeds the Shah's, I'd be surprised if it were to collapse quickly. Nevertheless, population trends are clearly not on the side of the mullahs. If they were smart, they'd cede power now rather than face what is sure to be a bloody uprising. But whether that happens in five or ten years is anyone's guess.

I'd also like to say that, while I devoutly wish that the mullahs are toppled, it's not clear to me that a new Iranian government would be all that friendly to the U.S. or Israel.

(End test! Now I get to see whether this feeds through.)