Degrade ISIS's Capabilities, Avoid Mission Creep
Christopher A. Preble
In a primetime address Wednesday evening, President Obama will announce that he will authorize U.S. airstrikes in Syria as part of his larger strategy to degrade and destroy ISIS. This represents a marked escalation of U.S. action against the notorious group that now controls large swathes of northern Iraq and Syria. According to the New York Times, the president’s strategy will be “a long-term campaign far more complex than the targeted strikes the United States has used against Al Qaeda in Yemen, Paki...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - September 10, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Christopher A. Preble Source Type: blogs
Coping with the Legacy of Arab Socialism
Dalibor Rohac
Countries of the Arab Spring suffer from many economic, social, and political ills. At their center lies the unfortunate legacy of Arab Socialism, which established itself in the region during the 1950s and 1960s. One of its features, besides the ideology of Pan-Arabism and international ‘non-alignment,’ was an emphasis on government ownership and industrial planning. Far from generating prosperity and economic growth, these policies resulted in large, vastly inefficient government-operated sectors in several Arab economies. My new Cato Policy Analysis provides a sense of the magnitude of the problem and...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - August 25, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Dalibor Rohac Source Type: blogs
Drones Risk Putting US on 'Slippery Slope' to Perpetual War
Benjamin H. Friedman
As the New York Times reports, the Stimson Center today released a report warning that “the Obama administration’s embrace of targeted killings using armed drones risks putting the United States on a ‘slippery slope’ into perpetual war.” The Washington Post, the Guardian and Vox all lead their articles on the report with that warning.
The slippery slope point probably isn’t new to most readers. But it’s worth focusing on here, both because the argument is often misstated or misunderstood, and because, in this case, I helped make it. The report’s task force, co-chaired by reti...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - June 26, 2014 Category: American Health Authors: Benjamin H. Friedman Source Type: blogs
Lessons from the Aga Khan in Canada
One of the world's great leaders is not the head of a national government. He is the leader of a religious faith. The Aga Khan is the spiritual head of the Ismaili Muslims, a Shia sect reaching back to the days of the Prophet Mohamed. In this role, and through the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN), he has addressed issues of the elimination of poverty, access to education, and social peace in a pluralist environment. He was recently recognized for this and other accomplishments by being invited to address the Canadian Parliament.The speech is a remarkable exposition of the potential power of pluralism...
Source: Running a hospital - March 3, 2014 Category: Health Managers Source Type: blogs
Freedom of Thought Under Siege Around the Globe: When You are Not Free to Not Believe
Doug Bandow
Much of the world has just celebrated the most sacred Christian holiday, yet persecution of Christians has never been fiercer, especially in the Middle East. Other faiths also suffer varying degrees of persecution.
Nonbelievers also often are mistreated. The lack of religious belief is less likely to be punished by communist and former communist regimes. But such systems penalize almost all independent thought.
Moreover, atheists and other freethinkers are at special risk in theocratic and especially aggressively Muslim states. The International Humanist and Ethical Union re...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 31, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs
Time to Leave Afghanistan
Doug Bandow
The longest war in American history drags on, with Washington a captive of purposeless inertia. The Obama administration should bring all U.S. forces home from Afghanistan and turn the conflict over to the Afghans.
After Afghan-based terrorists orchestrated the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration had little choice but to make an example of the Taliban regime as well as target al-Qaeda.
But the lesson that governments which allow terrorist attacks on America lose power was delivered 12 long years ago. The Bush administration soon switched to nation-building in Central Asia.
President Bar...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 4, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Doug Bandow Source Type: blogs
More Terrorism Isn’t Necessarily More Danger
Benjamin H. Friedman
Diane Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Mike Rogers (R-Mich) made news Sunday when they both insisted on CNN that the terrorist threat to Americans has grown in the last couple of years. Feinstein’s evidence: “The statistics indicate that, the fatalities are way up.” Rogers agrees and argues that al Qaeda has been “metastasizing” into more groups that engage in smaller attacks.
It’s true that global terror attacks and fatalities increased in 2011 and 2012, according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. And, several new jihadist groups have emerged of lat...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - December 4, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Benjamin H. Friedman Source Type: blogs
The Iraq Quagmire Beckons Again
Ted Galen Carpenter
While media attention has focused on such matters as the Obama Care roll-out fiasco and the civil war in Syria, developments in Iraq are becoming increasingly ominous. Sectarian violence there has reached levels not seen since the chaotic days of 2006-2007. Some 7,000 people have perished so far in 2013, and the total for October alone was just shy of 1,000. Since Iraq’s population is a mere 25 million, a comparable death toll in the United States would be nearly 13,000 for October and nearly 90,000 for the current calendar year. As I note in a recent article in Gulan, Iraq is now in the throes of a ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - November 4, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Ted Galen Carpenter Source Type: blogs
The Unpersuasive Case for the NSA Call Dragnet's Effectiveness
Julian Sanchez
Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal ($) defending the NSA’s bulk call records database as a “vital” counterterrorism tool. While this wouldn’t make the program legal even if true, it also seems clear that the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has relied, rather uncritically, on the government’s assertions of “necessity” to draw the strained conclusion that every American’s phone records are “relevant” to FBI counterterrorism investigations. It’s thus worth pointing out how extraordinarily weak the case for t...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - October 15, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: Julian Sanchez Source Type: blogs
Easy Come, Easy Go? A Viagra Overdose And An Amputated Penis
Easy come, easy go? For years, there have been warnings – official and otherwise – not to take too many little blue impotence pills called Viagra at one time. Why? A long-lasting erection can occur and that is no way to go through life. In fact, it makes doing ordinary tasks difficult, to say the least. But one man in Gigante, Colombia, learned this the hard way (pun intended). He had his penis amputated.
A 66-year-old unnamed man reportedly overdosed deliberately in order to impress his new girlfriend, but wound up with an inflamed and fractured penis that was showing signs of gangrene after experiencing an erection f...
Source: Pharmalot - September 23, 2013 Category: Pharma Commentators Authors: esilverman Source Type: blogs
The Falling Leaves of Arabic Communism
The papers of both novels started to come in my hands as I turn them and the two books ended like trees in autumn, devoid of their fallen yellow leaves. The first novel was bought from Algeria, the second form Iraq. Both about a life of a communist. Both written by a communist. An ex-communist?Both main characters are ill. In the Algerian novel he had paranoid delusions and spending the time in a mental hospital, the Iraqi novel he had paraplegia, spending the time in a wheelchair. Both are men who are taken care by a European woman. Selene, the French, takes care of the Algerian anonymous protagonist, and Maria, that nurs...
Source: psychiatry for all - September 8, 2013 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs
Drones to Drop AEDs, Not Bombs
Drones are becoming an everyday part of life not only in Pakistan and Yemen anymore, but instead of killing and maiming, peeping and spying, they can be used to save lives. When someone is having a cardiac arrhythmia, getting an automatic external defibrillator (AED) to the person as quickly as possible really can be a difference between life and death. But AEDs are usually only found in high pedestrian traffic areas like airports and sports stadiums. Flying in an AED from the rooftop of a building in the area can help solve the problem.
The questionably named Defikopter was conceptualized and developed by the non-profit D...
Source: Medgadget - August 28, 2013 Category: Technology Consultants Authors: Editors Tags: Emergency Medicine Military Medicine Source Type: blogs
Thought experiment
You might have noticed that the response of the U.S. and U.K. governments to the antics (is that the right word?) of Edward Snowden has been astonishingly clumsy and has only gone to reinforce the narrative he wanted to tell -- of governments out of control, undemocratic, and arrogating power. Forcing down the plane of the democratically elected president of a member state of the Organization of American States, with which we are and always have been at peace, based on a completely false assumption, was really, really stupid. Detaining a Brazilian subject who is merely transiting through your airport, for nine hours, on no...
Source: Stayin' Alive - August 22, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Source Type: blogs
An Evening with the TechGirls
Last year, I was awarded a grant from the Case Foundation through Finding Fearless, an online competition to search for fearless change makers in communities around the United States. Finding Fearless is just one example of how the Case Foundation unites the principles of entrepreneurship, innovation and technology to identify, test, prove and scale ideas and models to create exponential impact. As part of the support offered by the Case Foundation to its grantees, I met Alana Ramo, an emerging woman in technology on their social innovation team. Recently, Alana and I had the opportunity to meet some truly inspiring yo...
Source: Disruptive Women in Health Care - July 31, 2013 Category: Health Medicine and Bioethics Commentators Authors: dw at disruptivewomen.net Tags: Global Health HIT/Health Gaming Innovation Technology Young Adults Source Type: blogs
