SOME RECENT ARTICLES UP ON ICJS

Letter to Palestinians
View from the other side
Two Rallies
BBC refuses to hand over evidence on Islamics to Police
How The United Nation's Neutrality Props Up Evil Regimes
Nazifying Israel returns to haunt the Labor Party
THE ONLINE BIOS OF IRAQ'S Suicidology
Rushdie speaks out against Islamic extremism
American anti-terror fatwa falls short
ABC's culture of contempt

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ELSEWHERE

I have just put up here an email from a reader in the Houston petroleum industry. He explains exactly how and why there were huge traffic jams and gasoline shortages in the recent evacuation of Houston before hurricane Rita.

A libertarian defence of the Iraq intervention: "The fact remains that there were reasons to believe Saddam had WMDs -- wherever they may be today. Whether they were buried in the sand or moved (with the help of the Russian military) elsewhere is not known by the West. But even if there were never any WMDs at all -- which is nonsense -- the Bush Administration still had moral and legal justification for its action there. What about the "international community" you ask? Well, if by "international community" is meant the corrupt United Nations, then it should not be forgot that Saddam Hussein was in violation of several UN resolutions as well as the terms of the cease fire. So, any way you want to look at it -- basic classical liberal or libertarian principles or international law -- the Bush Administration has as much right as anyone to overthrow Saddam and his regime"

Mark Latham, who led the Australian Labor Party into their great defeat in the 2004 Federal election, has recently put on a huge tantrum blaming everybody but himself. But even a stopped clock is right twice a day and he did manage some pretty conservative words of wisdom in a recent speech to university students, explaining his retirement from politics. Especially apt was his last sentence. "The sane, rational choice: If you are a young, idealistic person, don't get involved in organised politics. Contribute to your community, your neighbourhood, your immediate circle of trust and support. This is the best way forward for a better society."

Foreign aid is futile: "Foreign aid was invented in 1948 with President Truman's Four Point Program. In almost six decades, some 2.3 trillion dollars have been dished out worldwide to poor countries by rich ones-about half the cost of World War II! In that time, not a single country has significantly reduced poverty as a result of foreign aid. If we examine U.S. foreign aid in the last decade, we find that there is no relation between these transfers and the reduction of poverty. In Egypt, extreme poverty as a percentage of the population has remained the same despite the money given to that country, the second biggest beneficiary of U.S. largesse. China, while receiving two thousand times less aid than Egypt, reduced extreme poverty by half. Bolivia, one of the eleven biggest recipients of U.S. assistance, has managed to double the percentage of people living in extreme poverty.... But the causes of the wealth of nations are well known: open economies and secure property rights. The countries that are moving in that direction are reducing poverty; those that are not are getting worse. (On average, the first type of countries reduced poverty from 60 to 19 percent of the population in the last three decades, while the second type has managed only a twelve percent reduction.)...."

Why am I not surprised by this? "The California Department of Transportation is poised to buy $7 million worth of new trucks and trailers to help control highway stormwater pollution, even though it already owns similar equipment that sits idle because there aren't enough workers to operate it. The Department of Finance has approved a Caltrans proposal to buy 12 "Super Sucker" vacuum excavator trucks for $6.5 million. They clear highway stormwater drains of sediment and debris. The proposal also includes plans to buy a dozen hydroseeder trailers, devices that spread grass seed, water and mulch, for $540,000, state documents show. But Caltrans now owns 30 vacuum trucks and eight hydroseeder trailers across the state, and documents show the equipment often sits unused for weeks."

This didn't happen, of course: "The police department said Thursday it is investigating a dozen officers in connection with looting during the lawlessness that engulfed the city after Hurricane Katrina. News reports in the aftermath of the storm put officers at the scene of some of the heaviest looting, at the Wal-Mart in the Lower Garden District. Some witnesses, including a Times-Picayune reporter, said police were taking items from shelves."

Global warming didn't generate storms: "USA TODAY is right: Activists who blame Katrina on global warming may gain short-term publicity, but risk losing long-term credibility. The increasing frequency of hurricane activity in the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico since 1995 is due to a natural, multidecadal shift in the Atlantic Ocean thermohaline circulation (THC), the oceanic 'conveyor belt' that pulls warm water from the tropics northward to the British Isles."

Carnival of Cordite (gun blog roundup) is up again.

For more postings, see EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Mirror sites here, here, here, here and here. And on Social Security see Dick McDonald

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Practically all policies advocated by the Left create poverty. Leftists get the government to waste vast slabs of the country's labour-force on bureaucracy and paperwork and so load the burden of providing most useful goods and services onto fewer and fewer people. So fewer useful goods and services are produced to go around. That is no accident. The Left love the poor. The Left need the poor so that they can feel good by patronizing and "helping" them. So they do their best to create as many poor people as possible.

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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