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"

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ELSEWHERE

Prisoner abuse: An interesting comment from a reader: "As a Viet Nam Vet of the U.S. Army 25th Infantry Division (Cu Chi, Vietnam 1967), perhaps I can put the war prisoner abuse media events currently swirling around the Bush Administration into perspective. I was a Spec/4 Medic in Vietnam assigned to work with the 25th Medical Battalion psychiatrist. I assisted in medicating and evacuating by helicopter "psychiatric casualties" of the war. This entailed flying into fire fights to pick up the wounded, including wounded enemy NVA soldiers. It was usual for the South Vietnamese ARVN soldiers to strip the enemy soldiers naked and cut their gonads off, then call in U.S. medical personnel to evacuate them as a prisoner. To my knowledge this practice was never covered by the media. To state the obvious: War is brutal. The media scenes the American public are now seeing on TV and the Net pale in comparison to the daily events in Vietnam, let alone what went on in Cambodia after the war with Pol Pot.

I have not so far said anything about the prisoner mistreatment scandal in Iraq but Bleeding Brain sums it up pretty well, I think. And Dick McDonald is irate at the way the media have treated it. And Matthew Cowie is one of many who have noted that one of the humiliated Iraqis still wants to come to America!

And yet the "feminists" stay silent: "Jihadists, like all totalitarians, oppose many kinds of freedom. What makes them unique, however, is their particular hatred of freedom for women. They prize their traditional prerogatives that allow them to keep their women barefoot in the kitchen as illiterate economic and sexual slaves." Most feminist activists don't give a damn about women, in other words. They just use women to excuse their hatred of their own society. Like Greenie activists, they are just another flavour of Leftism. If they really cared about women, they would be backing GWB to the hilt.

Fascinating. It seems that Canada is like Australia in that it is common for very religious people there to be on the Left as well as on the Right: "Devout Liberal MPs are appalled by their party's attempt to demonize the Conservatives as a bunch of extreme religious zealots". I have commented on the relationship between conservatism and Christianity at some length here.

The Leftist hatred of McDonald's is just another example of Leftist jealousy of other people's success. There is a short summary of how unreasonable it is to attack McDonald's here. What nobody seems to mention is that what McDonald's sells is just a minor variation on a standard Western diet of beef, bread, salad and potatoes. If that is bad for you we are all doomed. Funny that average lifespans are always getting longer in the West, though!

From Chris Brand: "According to environmentaloons, the human male's asthetic preference for women having the hourglass shape is due to `conditioning'. But new research published in Proceedings of the Royal Society found that wasp-waisted women were 30% higher in the hormone oestradiol and would thus have double or treble the normal chance of conceiving during any one menstrual cycle" Another blow to the constant Leftist claim that everything about us is the product of our environment rather than of biology. Here or here are links to the academic article Chris mentions.

Some things that governments do you couldn't make up: Germany has passed a law to say that legal brothels must train apprentice whores! No doubt the usual 5 years of training will be necessary before they can do it.

What has the EU got in common with Robert Mugabe? A lot. As the case of Hans-Martin Tillack shows. They are using their police to intimidate an exposer of their corruption.

There is a review here of a new book: How Democracies Lose Small Wars: State, Society, and the Failures of France in Algeria, Israel in Lebanon, and the United States in Vietnam

For more postings, see GREENIE WATCH and POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH. Mirror sites here and here

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The Left have always wanted more spent on welfare and made "Fascism" a swear-word. President Bush deposed a brutal Fascist dictator and sponsored a big expansion of welfare. But instead of being admired by the Left, he is hated with a passion. What does that tell you about the Left? It tells you that they have no principles at all: That everything they have ever claimed to stand for is fake.

All politicians seek power but conservatives bring with them a genuine concern for the welfare of their country. Leftists bring only their hate-filled Stalinist hearts and their pretend compassion

Comments? Email me or here. If there are no recent posts here blame Blogger.com and visit my mirror site here or here. My Home Page is here or here.

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