ERK! Blogger.com is going to be "down" tomorrow while they install some "improvements". Someone needs to tell them: "If it aint broke, don't fix it". After the last lot of improvements nobody could post for most of two days. So check my mirror sites if I seem suddenly to have fallen strangely silent. My only "consolation" for blogger.com's frequent problems is that the various other sites that I use all seem to have periodic problems too. I think most of the MT enthusiasts have found the same. The only reliable system is a redundant one -- which is why I put up mirror sites.




CONSERVATIVE THINKING

The genius of Edmund Burke: "After two centuries, there remains no better analysis of the first two years of the French Revolution than Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).... Had the English ministry and his fellow Parliamentarians followed his advice in the 1770s, they would never have driven the Americans to revolt and hence lost their most valuable colonies in the world. Had the French, they would have been spared the Terror, total war, and Napoleon".

Russell Kirk : "Scholars who call themselves "Kirkians" or "traditionalist conservatives" tend to have severe reservations not only about the present Republican administration but also about some of the dominant strains in conservative policymaking, whether libertarian or neoconservative.... What Kirk extracted from Burke's thought -- and found embodied in the work of British and American figures as diverse as John Adams, Benjamin Disraeli, and T.S. Eliot -- was a strong sense that tradition and order were the bedrock of any political system able to provide a real measure of freedom... "The individual is foolish," wrote Kirk in The Conservative Mind, "but the species is wise." We have inherited from the past "the instruments which the wisdom of the species employs to safeguard man against his own passions and appetites... "The Kirkian tradition is in the minority within modern conservatism," says Mr. Cheek. "It is skeptical of foreign entanglements. It believes in the minimalist state, but believes that the government does have a role. Kirk had some skepticism about capitalism, which puts him at odds with the libertarians"

****************************