Just watched Jeremy Paxman interview Ann Coulter: not a very pretty spectacle, for the wrong reasons. He really did confirm everything she says about the liberal mafia media, never asking a proper question or offering any counter to, say, her views on evolution. He merely scoffed and giggled through to the end.

Anyway, found this instead, which is a nice collection of pieces saving anyone the trouble of actually buying the book (an idea I briefly flirted with

I have always found ecological metaphors compelling. When Burke argues that the state evolved over the ages, 'the happy effect of following nature, which is wisdom without reflection, and above it', I find it intuitively plausible. (Whether 'entailed inheritance' of the precise structure of society is the only means of protecting the transmission of this happy effect - and indeed whether it's actually all that happy - is a different mattter.) Burke goes on to say:

By a constitutional policy, working after the pattern of nature, we receive, we hold, we transmit our government and our privileges, in the same manner in which we enjoy and transmit our property and our lives. The institutions of policy, the goods of fortune, the gifts of Providence, and handed down, to use and from us, in the same course and order. Our political system is placed in a just correspondence and symmetry with the order of the world, and with the mode of existence decreed to a permanent body composed of transitory parts...