A GOOD MEMOIR FROM A FRIEND OF MILTON FRIEDMAN

I was probably the last person to go out to lunch with Milton. We met at his favorite restaurant in San Francisco, where I showed him a picture of him standing next to John Kenneth Galbraith, the premier Keynesian and welfare statist of the 20th century. Galbraith towered over the diminutive Friedman. Beneath the picture was a funny line by George Stigler: "All great economists are tall. There are two exceptions: John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman." Milton was so pleased with the photo and caption that he sent it to all his friends only two weeks before his passing.



(Left to Right above: George Stigler, Milton Friedman, John Kenneth Galbraith)

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EVALUATING THE NEW FOUNTAIN OF WISDOM FOR AMERICAN FOREIGN POLICY

From what we know so far, the Baker Commission is going to recommend that we cut troop levels in Iraq, attempt to make nicey-nice with our determined enemies in Iran and Syria, and demand Israeli concessions to serve as the deus ex machina to bring about peace in our time. In a word, oy vey!

Coming from a commission headed by James Baker, the latter recommendation is especially jarring. During his tenure as Secretary of State, I believe his most famous quote regarding Israel and the Jews was (and pardon his French), "F*ck the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway."

Whether or not Baker is an anti-Semite or merely a non-comprehending putz is a disputable but largely academic matter. A report from America's putative best minds that focuses on the six million Jews in the region rather than the one billion Muslims is fatally suspect. Of course, it's more politically expedient and just plain easier to focus on the Jews. Regardless of what idiocies the Baker Commission pukes out, our government won't have to put itself on alert for a gaggle of flying rabbis determined to terrify airliners.

More here

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JIHAD IN WEST AFRICA

Two centuries before the current American foreign policy, or before there was Zionism, or "Iraq" and "Palestine" to blame, long before "poverty" was pulled up as a root-cause, and the why-do-they-hate-us brigade not only did not exist, but would have been impossible to call into being, Muslims in West Africa were on the Jihad warpath. A Muslim cleric, or mallam, Usman dan Fodio, led a Jihad against local non-Muslim rulers from 1804 to 1810. This led to the establishment of the so-called Caliphate of Sokoto, and to the spread, enforced spread by military conquest, of Islam.

The results of that can be seen in West Africa. There one can find Christian neighborhoods that are well-tended, neat, prettified even with simple touches (a few flowers), and then the sullen, dirty, rundown areas of Muslims. The comparison is remarkable.

And everywhere Christians are under assault. They have been under assault, most famously, in Nigeria, where in 1967 the Christian Ibos, far more advanced and industrious than their Muslim overlords, rebelled and declared the independence of the State of Biafra. The proximate cause were the mass murders by Muslims of Christian Ibo all over northern Nigeria. But the Western world did nothing to help the Christian Ibo, while the Muslims -- including Egyptian pilots and planes that strafed Ibo villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers -- did provide aid.

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DEMOCRAT HATRED OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION ON SHOW

Democrats

-- have tried to prevent us from listening on terrorists' phone calls
-- have sought to stop us from properly interrogating captured terrorists
-- have tried to stop us from monitoring terrorists' financial transactions
-- have revealed the existence of secret national security programs
-- have opposed vital components of the Patriot Act
-- have sought to confer unmerited legal rights on terrorists
-- have opposed profiling to identify the terrorists in our midst
-- have impugned and demeaned our military
-- have insinuated that the president is a war criminal
-- have forced the resignation of a committed defense secretary
-- have repeatedly tried to delegitimize our war effort
-- want to quit the battlefield in the midst of war.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

An arrogant Leftist priest: "Last week, Andrew M. Greeley, the well-known liberal priest and sociologist of all things Catholic, gave a celebrity interview to his fans. Though his main interlocutor was Robert Orsi, the chairman of the religion department at Harvard, Father Greeley also took some questions from the audience.... a middle-aged woman in the back of the room asked Father Greeley about the changing face of the Catholic Church. The greatest growth in the world-wide Catholic population, she noted, has been coming for some years from new believers in South America and Africa, and the trend shows no signs of abating. What effect would this have on the church? "We will depend on them for vitality," Father Greeley predicted. "But they will continue to depend on us for the ideas." To judge by a murmuring restlessness in the crowd, more than a few audience members were surprised such a remark. It seemed--how to put it?--patronizing. Do people in the Global South have no ideas of their own? Is theirs a faith of pure emotion?"

Bush supports Georgia bid to join NATO: "President George W Bush vowed on Tuesday to maintain U.S. support for Georgia's aspiration to join the NATO alliance despite strong Russian opposition that has sparked tensions between Moscow and Tbilisi, Reuters news agency reports. Speaking just before the first NATO summit on former Soviet soil, Bush said in a speech at the University of Latvia that the alliance would keep its door open to new members and hoped to issue additional invitations at its next summit in 2008."

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS and EYE ON BRITAIN. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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