(via USS Clueless) Back from a social trip out to NYC for the weekend.   Man, I had a good time -- when I start feeling like SF is getting too small, a trip to NYC is the perfect tonic to recharge the social battery.

I've got a couple of articles Q'd up but first, Den Beste links to a great OpEd in the UK with a discussion about American vs. European notions of "conservatism":

George Bush might describe himself as a conservative, but he is embarking upon a profoundly un-conservative course of action. Indeed, nothing more starkly illustrates the divergence between American and European conservatism. On this side of the Atlantic, modern conservatism is founded on a hostility to Enlightenment political projects, which commence in grandiose plans to reconstruct human nature and end up with the scaffold and the Gulag. But America itself is an Enlightenment political project, which succeeded because the abstract ideas of intellectuals from failing European states were mediated through the political instincts of Virginian squires and New England puritans.

European conservatism is cautious, sceptical and pessimistic. American conservatives, like most other decent Americans, take as their motto the unwritten first article of their Bill of Rights: "That this year shall be better than last year, and next year shall be better than this year." To a European conservative, much of human history involves finding palliatives for insoluble problems. To American conservatives, an insoluble problem is merely a moral weakling's excuse for his cowardice (Margaret Thatcher was an American conservative, not a European one).

Great stuff.   I've put up a few blog posts about the difference between the two world views (here, here, here, and here) as well.   We need a new term to clear the air.