Jinn of Current Events

According to Reuters, in strongly worded remarks before an audience of newspaper editors and publishers, President Bush stressed that Iran must heed demands to abandon its nuclear weapons program. It would be intolerable to peace and stability in the Middle East if they get a nuclear weapon, particularly since their stated objective is the destruction of Israel, Bush said. The development of a nuclear weapon in Iran is intolerable. And a program is intolerable. Otherwise they will be dealt with, starting through the United Nations.

I think the UN path (IAEA under Islamist El Baradei) is already failing, as it did against Iraq. Iran is the heart of Islamofascism, and must be defeated. 

Virginia Postrel: Two million people a year, most of them little kids, are dying because of the West's anti-DDT superstition. Two...million...people...a...year. Roger Bate: Most people would consider the June 1972 ban of DDT by the Environmental Protection Agency the beginning of the end for widespread use of the insecticide, the most effective anti-malaria pesticide still in existence. For his role in promulgating the [arbitrary] ban in the face of a contrary finding by the EPA hearing, then Administrator William Ruckelshaus has become almost a hate figure amongst the anti-malaria community. Now it appears though that the hate figure should actually be then President Richard Nixon...

See also: Deadly infectious diseases (2003-May-03) 

My friend Victor Manta is a stamp collector, with a major interest in Art on Stamps. Another aspect of Victor's life is that he managed to escape with his family from Communist Romania in 1983.

Victor has created Communism on Postal Stamps, a website that speaks about the life in [Communist] countries, their leaders, the enslavement of millions of people, the methods used in said enslavement and the tricks used by Communist leaders to conceal their techniques. We will try to present the human tragedies that are hidden behind the happy faces of workers, peasants and intellectuals that are so often displayed, and also to decipher what hides behind the seriousness, confidence and wisdom of communist leaders and philosophers. The stamps issued during those dark, not so distant times, tell us some of those many stories, and we will try to reveal them in this first attempt on the philatelic Web.

Victor was born at the end of WWII in USSR, and moved with his Communist parents to Romania in 1956, where he lived until 1983: It was the reality of life under the dictators Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceausescu ... that opened my eyes about what was actually happening around me. After a hard, long and dangerous fight with the Romanian authorities, I was finally able to emigrate, and I established myself, with my family, in free Switzerland. Here I got access to as much information as I could, and I was profoundly influenced by Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and then by the works of Ayn Rand, Frederic Bastiat, Arthur Koestler, Ludwig von Mises, Jean-François Revel, to cite some of them. Thanks to them and to several others, my site isn't related to the hatred that I experienced 20 years ago against the Communist regime, but to my deep philosophical convictions about freedom that I have built up thanks to all these thinkers.