Thirty-Six Years Ago Today, Richard Nixon Saved Israel—but Got No Credit

History that escaped the media circus at the time...

James Piereson writes in The New Criterion

Conservatism in America deploys the principles of tradition, reason, and orderly change in defense of liberal institutions—the Constitution, representative government, liberty and equal rights, the rule of law.

Rules of Mark

in no particular order:



one must focus on the secondary or the intermediate to accomplish the primary



paradox is the crux of every issue



morality dictates theology

(more to follow as addendum)

5 albums that shaped me before age 20

John Wesley Harding by Bob Dylan

To Our Children's Children's Children by the Moody Blues

Nashville Skyline by Bob Dylan

Meet the Beatles by the Beatles 1964

The Ventures

Bonfire of the Trivialities

Charles Krauthammer on bailout bonuses.

Niall Ferguson interview: "There Will Be Blood"

This interview fleshes out in some detail what one of the foremost thinkers is predicting in the next few years, world-wide.

There will be blood, in the sense that a crisis of this magnitude is bound to increase political as well as economic [conflict]. It is bound to destabilize some countries. It will cause civil wars to break out, that have been dormant. It will topple governments that were moderate and bring in governments that are extreme. These things are pretty predictable. The question is whether the general destabilization, the return of, if you like, political risk, ultimately leads to something really big in the realm of geopolitics. That seems a less certain outcome. We've already talked about why China and the United States are in an embrace they don't dare end. If Russia is looking for trouble the way Mr. Putin seems to be, I still have some doubt as to whether it can really make this trouble, because of the weakness of the Russian economy. It's hard to imagine Russia invading Ukraine without weakening its economic plight. They're desperately trying to prevent the ruble from falling off a cliff. They're spending all their reserves to prop it up. It's hardly going to help if they do another Georgia.”
“I was more struck Putin's bluster than his potential to bite, when he spoke at Davos. But he made a really good point, which I keep coming back to. In his speech, he said crises like this will encourage governments to engage in foreign policy aggression. I don't think he was talking about himself, but he might have been. It's true, one of the things historically that we see, and also when we go back to 30s, but also to the depressions 1870s and 1880s, weak regimes will often resort to a more aggressive foreign policy, to try to bolster their position. It's legitimacy that you can gain without economic disparity – playing the nationalist card. I wouldn't be surprised to see some of that in the year ahead. It's just that I don't see it producing anything comparable with 1914 or 1939. It's kind of hard to envisage a world war. Even when most pessimistic, I struggle to see how that would work, because the U.S., for all its difficulties in the financial world, is so overwhelmingly dominant in the military world.

I think the IMF has been consistently wrong in its projections year after year. Most projections are wrong, because they're based on models that don't really correspond to the real world. If anything good comes of crisis, I hope it will be to discredit these ridiculous models that people rely on, and a return to something more like a historical understanding about the way the world works.” “I mean most of these models, including, I'm told, the one that policy makers here use, don't really have enough data to be illuminating … You're going to end up assuming that this recession is going to end up like other recessions, and the other recessions didn't last that long, so this one won't last so long. But of course this isn't a recession. This is something really quite different in character from anything we've experienced in the postwar era. That's why these projections give positive numbers for 2010. That's the default setting. And it just seems to me ostrich-like, to bury one's head in the sand and assume this has to end this year because, well, that's what recessions do.

Kevin Kelly

innovation is more important than price because price is a derivative of innovation.

Rush

The response from Rush. He's never been a legend in my mind, but he's a great infotainer. He doesn't live up to his own hype in my mind, but I have no problem with his hyping, because it's half tongue-in-cheek, half self-fulfilling and half on target. He's iconoclastic and a good antidote to the liberal group-think ooze that masquerades as conventional wisdom.

Vertical Politics

the politics of solutions, not ideology, attributed by Mike Volpe at the Provocateur to Mike Huckabee. For example, the fair tax. Worth looking into.

In his book, Do the Right Thing, Mike Huckabee talked about the concepts of vertical and horizontal politics. Horizontal politics is when solutions to policy are figured out based on ideology. In other words, whatever is the issue, the individual tries to figure out how their ideology should deal with the issue. Vertical politics is when someone just tries to figure out what the solution is and doesn't worry about how that applies to ideology. Huckabee made the point that most voters want people that solve problems. They aren't ideological and so they aren't as impressed with ideological solutions. Explain to someone how a policy will help them and that is the person they will vote for.

Ready, set, go

Now where was I? Oh yes, seemingly random links, posts, thoughts to share....


Warren Buffet weighs in on the economic outlook:
http://pajamasmedia.com/instapundit/71649/



I watched CPAC for a coupla hours last night. Ron Paul, Wayne LaPierre, Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh.



Pundita picked up my link to an article about Pope Benedict XVI in the Dec 2008 issue of Asia Times Online by Spengler discussing economics and localism. All of which ties into my current interest in GK Chesterton's distributism.
http://pundita.blogspot.com/2009/02/president-barack-obamas-speech-to-us.html