Kasparov: The Arithmetic of Appeasement in the 21st century

Apr 5, 2016 | Politics

Writes Garry Kasparov on New threats rose as U.S. apathy became policy:

Inaction can fracture alliances. Inaction can empower dictators and provoke terrorists and enflame regional conflicts. Inaction can slaughter innocent people and create millions of refugees. We have the horrific proof in Syria, where Barack Obama’s infamous “red line” has been painted over in blood.....Social psychology documented the “bystander apathy effect” in the 1960s, a phenomenon in which the more people who witness a crisis together, the less likely any one of them is to help. Studies showed that while 70 percent of people alone will help a stranger in distress, the number drops to 40 percent when other people are in the room. Inaction is not only deadly, it’s contagious, and it applies to nations as well as to individuals.The solution to this sort of paralysis on a nation-state level is to have strong global institutions and treaties that are binding and clear. For example, an agreement between countries to guarantee mutual defense or an organization that is bound to intervene to stop a genocide. In theory, contractual commitments and shared moral obligations will override the bystander effect. In practice, the fear of taking action is so strong that the leaders of the free world find excuse after excuse to ignore their commitments and their values.These excuses range from feigned ignorance to legalistic pedantry to rhetorically reducing the national and international interests that must be protected. Hundreds of thousands slaughtered in Rwanda? We didn’t know. The Budapest Memorandum guarantees Ukrainian territorial integrity? Check the fine print, we’re technically not bound to defend them. Russian jets are crossing into Turkish territory? The North Atlantic Treaty Organization begs member nation Turkey not to invoke the mutual defense clause. Iraq and Syria are exploding into civil war? It’s a Middle Eastern problem. The civil wars are churning out terrorist groups and refugees reaching the West? It’s a European problem. Islamic State sympathizers killed 14 people in San Bernardino, the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil since 9/11? Our anti-IS strategy is the right one.Obama and his fellow neo-isolationists are well aware that few are condemned and fewer are convicted of having the power to prevent a tragedy but refusing to do so, while a single death resulting from intervention will be denounced. A quarter-million deaths, a dozen terror attacks, a million refugees, these are politically acceptable consequences of inaction, but a single casualty from action, even attempting to prevent those horrors, is considered politically unacceptable.

Biddle: Ted Cruz for President

Apr 5, 2016 | Politics

Craig Biddle at the The Objective Standard eloquently makes the case for Ted Cruz for President:

Cruz is a Christian who takes his religion (semi) seriously. And I certainly understand why people of reason distrust a politician who believes there is “a guy in the sky” to whom we owe faith and obedience. All manner of irrational and life-throttling ideas can follow (and have followed) from that fantasy.But Ted Cruz is not a theocrat. In the realm of politics, he recognizes that the U.S. Constitution takes precedence over his religion. As he puts it:

My faith is an integral part of who I am. I’m a Christian, and I’m not embarrassed to say that. I’m not going to hide that and treat it like something you can’t admit publicly. . . .But I also think that those in politics have an obligation not to wear their faith on their sleeve. There have been far too many politicians who run around behaving like they’re holier than thou. My attitude as a voter, when some politician stands up and says “I’m running because God told me to run” [a veiled reference to Marco Rubio], my reaction is “Great, when God tells me to vote for you we’ll be on the same page.”I’m not asking for your vote because of my personal faith. . . . I’m asking you to vote for me because I’ve spent a lifetime fighting to defend the Constitution and Bill of Rights, fighting to defend the American free enterprise system. And we need a leader who will stand up every day and protect the rights of everyone, whether they’re Christians or Jews or Muslims or anyone else. The Bill of Rights protects all Americans. It protects atheists. That’s the beauty of the Bill of Rights. . . . The Constitution and the Bill of Rights [embody] a unifying principle that can bring us together across faiths, across races, across ethnicities—and we need to come together behind the unifying principles that built America.

Cruz is far from flawless. But he is by far the best viable candidate running for president today.We don’t get to dream up a flawless candidate and make him real. We have to choose among the actual alternatives, or enter a protest vote, or choose not to vote. Those are our only alternatives.Given the foregoing facts, Cruz is the clear-cut best choice for America.

Trumpism is Fascism

Mar 1, 2016 | Politics

Writes Glenn Woiceshyn in the National Post:

“Trumpism” is a major transition to fascism, which opposes individual rights, which is anti-American. Aside from the Second Amendment (on guns), Trump is virtually silent on defending the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights. Instead, he wants total executive power to restrict immigration and free trade, seize private property, punish corporations that bother him, and so on. His campaign tactics are fascistic: appeal to emotion and for blind trust, demonize critics, foreigners and religious/ethnic groups, and speak in vague generalities about positive effects — “I will make America great again!” — without naming or explaining causes. Everything is about “making deals,” not protecting rights. It’s no accident that Trump likes Vladimir Putin, who also likes Trump.In his 1982 book, Ominous Parallels: The End of Freedom in America, philosopher Leonard Peikoff brilliantly demonstrated how intellectual and political trends in America were pointing toward fascsm. Trump is merely cashing in on the dumbing down of America that has been taking place for decades, where relatively few today understand what liberty means or how it caused America to be great.

Daraprim Saga and Shkreli

Feb 19, 2016 | Politics

Everyone Hates Martin Shkreli. Everyone Is Missing the Point - The New Yorker:

[W]as Shkreli’s performance actually more objectionable than that of the legislators who were performing alongside him? Elijah Cummings, of Maryland, is the ranking Democrat on the committee, and he used his allotted time to deliver a scolding. “Somebody’s paying for these drugs, and it’s the taxpayers that end up paying for some of them,” he said. “Those are our constituents.” In fact, it’s hard to figure out exactly who is paying what for Daraprim. Shkreli and Turing have claimed that hospitals and insurance companies will pay, while patients who can’t afford it will get a discount, or get it for free. And Nancy Retzlaff, Turing’s chief commercial officer, told the committee about her company’s efforts to get the drug to people who can’t afford it. The arrangement she described sounded like a hodge-podge, an ungainly combination of dizzyingly high prices, mysterious corporate bargaining, and occasional charitable acts—which is to say, it sounded not so much different from the rest of our medical system.

[...]

The Daraprim saga has as much to do with the Food and Drug Administration as with Shkreli: although the drug’s patent expired in the nineteen-fifties, the F.D.A. certification process for generic drugs is gruelling enough that, for the moment, whoever owns Daraprim has a virtual monopoly in America. (Overseas, it is much cheaper.)

Shkreli is selling a drug in America where the PATENT HAS EXPIRED -- other people cannot sell it in America, not because of Shkreli, but because of the FDA. It is cheap outside the country where there is no FDA!!!! Perhaps congress is going after the wrong entity.

One of the strangest things about the anti-Shkreli argument is that it asks us to be shocked that a medical executive is motivated by profit. And one of the strangest things about Shkreli himself is that he doesn’t seem to be motivated by profit—at least, not entirely.

Bernie The Bum Who Never Produced Anything Wants Your Money

Feb 10, 2016 | Politics

Bernie Sanders, The Bum Who Wants Your Money | Stock News & Stock Market Analysis - IBD

Sanders spent most of his life as an angry radical and agitator who never accomplished much of anything. And yet now he thinks he deserves the power to run your life and your finances — “We will raise taxes;” he confirmed Monday, “yes, we will.”

One of his first jobs was registering people for food stamps, and it was all downhill from there.

Sanders took his first bride to live in a maple sugar shack with a dirt floor, and she soon left him. Penniless, he went on unemployment. Then he had a child out of wedlock. Desperate, he tried carpentry but could barely sink a nail. “He was a shi**y carpenter,” a friend told Politico Magazine. “His carpentry was not going to support him, and didn’t.”Then he tried his hand freelancing for leftist rags, writing about “masturbation and rape” and other crudities for $50 a story. He drove around in a rusted-out, Bondo-covered VW bug with no working windshield wipers. Friends said he was “always poor” and his “electricity was turned off a lot.” They described him as a slob who kept a messy apartment — and this is what his friends had to say about him.The only thing he was good at was talking … non-stop … about socialism and how the rich were ripping everybody off. “The whole quality of life in America is based on greed,” the bitter layabout said. “I believe in the redistribution of wealth in this nation.”[...]The choice in this election is shaping up to be a very clear one. It will likely boil down to a battle between those who create and produce wealth, and those who take it and redistribute it.