Michael Fumento

The Paris Agreement Had No Teeth

The Paris agreement had no teeth. It was voluntary. Double voluntary, in fact. Nations could choose their reduction levels and there was no enforcement mechanism. Nevertheless, the U.S. withdrawal has prompted warnings of environmental catastrophe, with David Gergen calling it “one of the most shameful acts” in America’s history.

Gunshot, not Lethal Injections, Is Most Humane

Lethal injection executions, back in the news, just aren't working. For a variety of reasons. While they are bloodless (so is strangulation, starvation, and being broken on the wheel), it appears they often are not painless. They most certainly are not quick, sometimes taking hours. They arguably violate the Hippocratic Oath in having a doctor perform them, yet you hardly want an amateur to perform them. And drug companies don't want their products associated with causing death. Go figure!

How the United Passenger Suckered Us

You've been snookered folks! By that poor elderly doctor who was involuntarily dragged from his seat, had his face smashed in, and was beaten unconscious by the evil airport security at the behest of United Airlines. Because there's no evidence any of that was true. It was in fact a premeditated temper tantrum gone viral, comprising one 69-year-old Vietnamese-American David Dao, a medical doctor who lost his license, planning a lawsuit from the moment United first politely asked him to give up his seat.

A Peace Prize for Aiding and Abetting the World's Largest Drug Cartel?

There have been some curious recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize such as terrorist Yasser Arafat. Yet somehow it's managed to lower its prestige even further with its award to Colombian President John Manuel Santos for his efforts in negotiating a "peace accord" to end "a half-century war with communist guerrillas."

The Weighty Issue of Body Armor and Women in Combat

The highly emotional debate over whether women should be allowed in combat positions in the U.S. military is back. The latest firefight was prompted when the only female officer enrolled in the Marine Corps' Infantry Officer Course dropped out after failing to complete two conditioning hikes, according to Corps' Training and Education Command. As a result, "There are no female officers enrolled or slated to attend" the course. Hillary Clinton, of course, supports it, because she's a "huge supporter of women being able to break whatever glass ceilings are holding them back." But so, alas, does Donald Trump.

The Media's Harmful Flossing Follies

Toss the floss! Turns out dental flossing is barely useful, even worthless perhaps. So reported the Associated Press (AP) and subsequently more than 150 news outlets, including such as the Washington Post ("The Shaky Evidence for Flossing") and New York Times's more powerful "Feeling Guilty about Not Flossing? Maybe there's No Need."

Major League Baseball Throws a Spitball at Puerto Rico

It's a common theme of mine that the American spirit is growing steadily weaker. One way in which we see that is the propensity to become hysterical at the least provocation, the proverbial elephant afraid of the mouse. Witness the ongoing hysteria over the mosquito-borne Zika virus.

We Cannot Afford “Free” Wind and Solar Energy

While driving the mostly empty and flat 1,000 miles from Houston to Colorado Springs recently, I noticed something I hadn’t seen much just a few years ago --lots of wind farms dotting the landscape, but none anywhere near even small population centers. And another funny thing, though: Invariably, many of the turbines weren’t moving and one of the largest appeared to have about 100 turbines, yet I counted just three in action.

Oh Zika, Where Is Thy Sting? (Not in the US or Canada)

The buzz is that everyone is at risk for contracting the mosquito-borne Zika virus. Why not? Since the successful effort to “democratize” HIV/AIDS in the 1980s as a threat to everyone, everywhere, every major disease outbreak has been presented as a worldwide threat. (Ebola’s gotten that treatment three times now.)

The Latest Car Hysteria--Diesel VWs

We're under assault by a Teutonic Terror. About half a million US diesel cars and 11 million worldwide sold by Volkswagen AG, including VWs, Audis, Seats, and Škodas, appear to have software that tricks emissions tests. Actual emissions are "40 times higher" we're told. And people are dying.

Our Enemies’ Dream: An Equal Opportunity Military

Surprise! A study released by the Marine Corps shows that all male units greatly outperformed mixed gender units in just about every capacity. The women performed their tasks more slowly, fired weapons with less accuracy, and sustained far more injuries during training than their male counterparts. Male Marines with no formal infantry training outperformed infantry-trained women on each weapons system! Nevertheless, unless Congress intervenes the military must start integrating women into combat units in January.

Memorial Day and What We Should be Remembering

It's Memorial Day in America. Time to celebrate spring with barbecues and the first trip to the beach. Solemnity is essentially forbidden. Except among we "brave few," as Shakespeare famously put it in Henry V, "We band of brothers." Ask a veteran what combat is like and you'll get as many different answers as there are vets. Still, the clichés hold true: "All your senses are heightened;" "It's a mixture of fear and excitement;" "It's the most alive you'll ever feel;" and yes, Winston Churchill's famous declaration that "nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result." After being the proverbial ducks in a shooting gallery in one particularly vicious ambush in Iraq, the men I was with and I began laughing hysterically upon reaching safety.

Ramadi and Obama's Phony Air War Against ISIS

"The Cemetery of the Americans." That's what graffiti said in the western Iraq city of Ramadi when I first embedded there in 2006. Indeed, my two journalist predecessors in Camp Corregidor were both shot be snipers. Within weeks the first SEAL to die in Iraq would be killed, another mortally wounded. My own Public Affairs officer was killed, and later the first SEAL to win the Medal of Honor in Iraq would die there. It was the hardest-fought battle of the war, but we won.

Ramadi and Obama's Phony Air War Against ISIS

The Obama Administration continues to show complete incompetence in dealing with ISIS. Case in point: It's decided that Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province in western Iraq, is expendable -- thereby showing it understands nothing about the value of the city or even its own capacity to defend it.

A car crash, a coma, and a miracle

Good Friday, April 17, 1992: I’d just started a great job at Investor’s Business Daily in Los Angeles, and two weeks earlier I’d purchased the car of my dreams, a beautiful, blue Toyota MR2 Turbo. To me, at least, it looked like a small Ferrari. It was fast and sleek. I was taking my girlfriend, Mary, who had just recently followed me out from Denver, where we’d met, to see a city she’d always dreamed of visiting: San Francisco.

Making a Killing off a Killing

Hysteria became Lee's get out of jail free card. Hysteria that was probably avoidable if the government had made the least effort to clear up media-promoted misconceptions.

Death of the Ebola Epidemic and the Lessons Unlearned

"It was impossible to predict the decline in the Ebola caseload last September, when the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggested a worst-case scenario of 1.4 million victims in West Africa." That from the Washington Post, January 18, in an article on Ebola treatment centers standing empty even as new ones are being built. Fewer than 22,000 cases have been reported and new cases are approaching zero.

No Polite Way to Say it, We Were Lied to on Ebola

The current Ebola outbreak is "the most severe, acute health emergency seen in modern times," Ian Smith, the World Health Organization's executive director, announced at a mid-October press conference.

Those You Leave Behind in Combat Whom You Can't Leave Behind

It's Veterans Day in America, yet there are progressively fewer to venerate. Most of the World War II generation is gone and even the older Vietnam vets are reaching average life expectancy. Relatively few Americans have served in Iraq or Afghanistan, and most of them never saw battle. Yet even as explaining combat to a civilian is like describing the sky to somebody blind from birth, we "brave few," as Shakespeare famously put it in Henry V, feel compelled to try anyway.

The Ebola "Monster" is Peaking; the Real Ones Are Not

In a sense, everything you need to know about the veracity of those nightmarish Ebola epidemic projections was summarized in the October 14 press conference held by the World Health Organization's (WHO) Ebola head, Bruce Aylward. He said:

• currently there were about a thousand new cases a week;
• it's "too early to say" whether "the epidemic [is] slowing down" [emphasis added] or there's "exponential growth," and;
• "we anticipate that the number of cases occurring per week by [December] is going to be somewhere between five and 10 thousand."

Whoa, Nelly! Even as he says it's possible the growth in new cases is declining, he predicts a five to 10-fold explosion within weeks.