Tag Archives: culture

We’re Moving in the Right Direction

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At least on some things.  A Fox News poll, taken just after the recent Boston Marathon terrorist bombing had these results, among others (the full poll is at a link in the article).

On the question of trading some personal freedom for an increase in personal safety, Americans had this to say:

7. Would you be willing to give up some of your personal freedom in order to reduce the threat of terrorism?

Yes

No

(Don’t know)

16 Apr 13

43%

45

12

This compares with past results:

16-18 May 06

54%

36

10

10-11 Jan 06

61%

27

13

26-27 Jul 05

64%

21

15

8-9 Sep 02

61%

24

15

4-5 June 02

64%

21

15

17-18 Oct 01

71%

20

9

Those October 2001 results are just after the terrorists crashed the Twin Towers, damaged the Pentagon, and attacked (unsuccessfully, via United Airlines Flight 93) the White House.  Americans are recalling Benjamin Franklin’s remarks on that tradeoff, that without personal freedom, there is no security.  At all.

Personal Responsibility

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Richard and Melinda Armstrong, of Caldwell, said their family was camping in the Boise National Forest in September 2010 when a gust of wind blew over the dead tree.  It fell on their son, resulting in a large laceration, a compound fracture, and a puncture wound in his back that impaired his breathing.

The boy is recovering, although he may have permanent damage to a leg, and now the parents are suing the Forest Service for $1 million.

Their lawyer, Eric Rossman, has this to say about the incident:

The tree was clearly dead—had been dead for years—and was within eight feet of the fire ring, and within 48 feet of the Forest Service road.  It was an obvious hazard.

I have this to ask about the incident: “Why, then, did the Armstrongs choose to camp so close to the obviously hazardous tree?  Do they bear no responsibility for their boy’s injuries?”

It Appears to be Time

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…to walk away from Afghanistan commercially, if not militarily.  Our commercial presence flows from the mission creep that has long infested our war there—a creep from the Bush doctrine of going anywhere there are terrorists and burning them, which in the Afghan implementation meant burning al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Period.  Full stop.  That mission, following the destruction of those two terrorist organizations as viable entities in Afghanistan, unfortunately quickly morphed into nation-building, an attempt to meld widely and wildly disparate tribes and clans into an actual, unified country.

Here is an example of the failure of that mission creep and of the foolishness of allowing it.  Tamerlane Global Services, Inc, provides contracting services for the US government and is exempt from Afghan taxation.  At the time of this incident, Tamerlane was in the middle of a legal dispute in a US Federal court with an Afghan firm, Global Hub Logistics, over mutual allegations of breach of contract.  Whether impatient with the proceedings or disinterested in an anticipated outcome, or some other reason, Global Hub complained to the Afghan government, and the latter manufactured a tax dispute against Tamerlane.

And then they snatched a Tamerlane employee off the street and threw him into jail.

Tamerlane and its employee are not alone in this abuse.

Afghan companies have begun turning to the Attorney General’s Office to resolve business quarrels through criminal investigations and arrests, rather than going to arbitration, mediation or commercial courts, attorneys here said.

It took the involvement of American Congressmen to get the Tamerlane employee released from gaol, and the employee never has been charged with any crime.  His employer and attorney, Kimberley Motley, said afterward,

There’s no legal basis for this at all.

The US has over 33,000 American contractors in Afghanistan at risk of this treatment: with the employer having a dispute with an Afghan company, and the dispute not going in a direction that suits the Afghan company, the latter bellyaches and the Afghan government grabs a likely looking employee and jails him.

Ward Scott, an American commercial lawyer in Kabul:

Our firm is increasingly getting calls from Western executives fearing, with good cause, the imminent arrest of their managers in Afghanistan over commercial disputes[.]

This misbehavior has to stop, and unfortunately, the most effective way to stop it seems to be to stop dealing with Afghanistan commercially in the first place.

Gun Control…Ignorance

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…or outright dishonesty.  As one demonstration, we have a breathtakingly ignorant claim from the Congresswoman who’s pushing a gun control bill in the House of Representatives.  Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D, CO) actually said this, out loud and in public, about firearm magazines and the usefulness of banning them:

These are ammunition, they’re bullets, so the people who have those now, they’re going to shoot them, so if you ban them in the future, the number of these high-capacity magazines is going to decrease dramatically over time because the bullets will have been shot and there won’t be any more available[.]

For another demonstration, we have Barack Obama’s similarly ignorant (or, in his case, deliberately distorting) claim about the weapons used in the Sandy Hook massacre—the latest crisis this Progressive is trying not to let go to waste.  It’s interesting to note, also, that he made this remark at one of his campaign stops in in San Francisco [emphasis in the original].

…it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon—by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.

Leaving aside his arrogance in presuming—contra the 2nd Amendment—that the Federal government has authority to determine the permissible purposes for owning weapons, Obama knows two things about this: he knows that that Lanza killed his victims with a semi-automatic rifle, not a fully automatic one, and he knows the difference between a semi-automatic rifle and a fully automatic one.

Why We Protect Inventions

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The Indian Supreme Court has rejected the idea of patent protection for Novartis’ drug Glivec, saying that an active ingredient in Glivec was well-known prior to the development of the drug.  Those worthies also rejected Novartis’ argument that the innovation that deserved patent protection was their transformation of that active ingredient into a “beta crystal” form, which made it a viable treatment for cancer.

Never mind, said the Court, India doesn’t feel like patenting this and making it harder for an Indian company to profit from the foreign Novartis’ work.

Novartis isn’t alone in this strait.

India’s patent office last year ordered Germany’s Bayer AG to issue a license allowing an Indian generics company to copy its patented cancer drug Nexavar and market it at one-thirtieth the cost.

And

In November, India’s government approved caps on a third of the country’s drugs, up from 18% under a previous regime—a level of price control not seen since the 1970s.

Novartis had this on the wisdom of further investment in India:

If innovation is rewarded, there is clear business case to move forward.  If it isn’t rewarded and protected, there isn’t.

And

We’ll continue to build our business, but we will certainly be cautious in investments in R&D and innovation in India.  And until the climate for intellectual property and the ecosystem is fully in place, I don’t think any investment in R&D will take place here.

Well, NSS.  It’s time for the Indian government to figure this out, too.