Why, asks Chris Dillow, do we consider Milton Friedman a man of the Right? Dillow was thinking of such things as the earned-income tax credit and his opposition to conscription, but the question requires some unpacking. I don’t believe, for example, that his concern with liberty is incompatible with the Left. Neither is it impossible…
Read More Friedman: a man of two halvesThis is very bad news from Baghdad, via perfect.co.uk, but note some details. For a start, a neat primer on modern urban warfare: On Saturday, the Web site displayed a recipe for civil war. It recommended protecting Sunni neighborhoods by “spreading snipers on the roof of buildings,” planting roadside bombs at neighborhood entrances and distributing…
Read More 1239. 7018. 4766. Now start a warJ.D> Henderson chez Intel Dump writes that General Abizaid should be relieved of his command. But first, he says, he respects Abizaid for the courage he showed in his past career. Fair enough. But there is some historical evidence that extremely brave generals are a bad idea. Consider the British experience – we brought several…
Read More Bravery doesn’t exclude stupidityIt’s been a weird political week, no? There was “Loyalist” (scarequotes included because my definition of loyalty doesn’t include shooting fellow citizens, constables & c) nutbag Michael Stone’s public freakout-cum-terrorist attack on Stormont. I haven’t laughed as much in years – seriously, ten years ago this would have meant blood in the streets, all 39…
Read More Anarchy in the UK!There seems to be an increasing belief around that we’re still in Iraq because the UK/USA leaders can’t bring themselves to book a loss, as Ezra Klein puts it over at Tapped. David Kurtz at TPM argues similarly that Bush thinks the only way the US can be defeated is if it chooses to leave…
Read More Enron and IraqZiff-Davis Baseline carries a huge report on exactly why the NHS National Programme for IT is a disaster. (Thanks, Charles.) First of all, a reiteration of a past point: they mention as one of the few successes the N3 tranche of the project, which turns out to be the deployment of DSL lines to GP…
Read More HOWNOTTO build a computer systemThe great Israeli historian Martin van Creveld argued, years ago, that the occupation must end because of the “power of the weak”, that eventually the degree of violence that would be needed to maintain it would destroy Israeli moral cohesion. It seems someone on the other side has read him. Within the last month we’ve…
Read More Van Creveld in GazaThe Bath University RepRap project (to build a rapid-prototyping tool that can make copies of itself) is coming on with all due speed, and I especially like their latest test part, a natty Linux penguin. Which is fitting for a project that’s all open-source. Back when they got started, Phil Hunt of Cabalamat Journal posed…
Read More The Hunt questionThere’s been plenty of debunking aimed at the Weekly Standard‘s claim that more US troops in Iraq always means less violence, but I haven’t seen this point. Stuntz argues that 18,000 more troops were deployed between November, 2004 and February, 2005, and the butcher’s bill fell. Well, it would. November, 2004 was the peak of…
Read More GoalpostsChristmas is coming, so it must be time to start raking over old quarrels and scratching at old wounds. The Ministry has at Torygraph hack Con Coughlin, among other things because of this WMD furphy from December, 2003. I remember it well. The weapons were supposedly WMD-tastic warheads for RPGs, which is incredibly silly, and…
Read More Risible claims