Counting the High Cost of Obama's Libya, Syria Debacles | Cato Institute

Counting the High Cost of Obama's Libya, Syria Debacles | Cato Institute: "As political scientist Alan J. Kuperman recently explained, NATO intervention “increased the duration of Libya’s civil war by about six times and its death toll by at least seven times, while also exacerbating human rights abuses, humanitarian suffering, Islamic radicalism, and weapons proliferation in Libya and its neighbors.”

In a new article in the journal International Security, Kuperman tallies up the meager benefits and considerable costs: “Human rights conditions in post-intervention Libya,” which according to Human Rights Watch include abuses “ ‘so widespread and systematic that they may amount to crimes against humanity,’ are considerably worse than in the decade preceding the war.”

The Washington Post’s recent look at Libya two years after the revolution describes a hellscape “governed” by hundreds of armed militias, where “even minor disputes escalate into frequent gun violence on the streets.”"

"thousands of portable surface-to-air missiles, useful for shooting down civilian aircraft, have been “privatized,” with some possibly in the hands of terrorists.

Outside Libya’s borders, Kuperman notes, “the most obvious negative impact has been in Mali,” where Tuareg soldiers with Moammar Gadhafi’s former security forces fled with their weapons and sparked an insurgency in the country’s north."

"hopes for outside aid encourage risk-seeking behavior by those expecting rescue.

“When NATO started bombing Libyan forces in March 2011,” Kuperman writes, “Syria’s uprising was mainly nonviolent and its government’s response — although criminally disproportionate — was relatively circumscribed.

But after Gadhafi’s fall, “in the summer of 2011, Syria’s uprising turned violent,” with “a fifteenfold increase in the killing rate” by 2013."

Politics: HR 2300: Yes, there is a Republican plan to replace ObamaCare | Best of Cain

Politics: HR 2300: Yes, there is a Republican plan to replace ObamaCare | Best of Cain: "Even during the ObamaCare debate, there were any number of Republican proposals. The most significant one at the moment was recently introduced in the House of Representatives by U.S. Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia), a doctor who is the lead sponsor of HR 2300. He calls it Empowering Patients First.

The basics of the bill are these:

It extends tax deductions for health insurance to those who buy as individuals, thus eliminating the perverse incentive that favored employer-purchased insurance.
It gives patients true portability by making them the owners of their insurance – not their employers.
It gives doctors the real power to make treatment decisions, not insurance companies or the government.
It reforms medical liability laws and thus saves money by reducing the practice of defensive medicine."

How Europe's Economy Is Being Devastated by Global Warming Orthodoxy | Cato Institute

How Europe's Economy Is Being Devastated by Global Warming Orthodoxy | Cato Institute: " The German government has arranged for renewable energy producers to sell the power grid their electricity at more than 6 times the wholesale electricity market rate."

"The most bizarre case involves an offshore German wind farm about nine miles from the North Sea Island of Borkum, where diesel engines make the blades spin."

“More than one third of Germany’s wind turbines are located in the eastern part of the nation where this large concentration of generating capacity regularly overloads the region’s power grid, threatening blackouts. In some extreme cases, the region produces three to four times the total amount of electricity actually being consumed, placing a strain on the eastern German grid. System engineers have to intervene every other day to maintain network stability.”

"Austria imports nuclear power from the Czech Republic to pump water uphill, then lets it flow downhill through turbines, generating hydropower for Germany"