Michael Fumento

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.

As America Sleeps, China Conquers Latin America

Bucaramanga, Colombia--Step aside, EU! China is set to become Latin America's second-largest trading partner in two years. And 13 years later it will be king of the hill according to the journal China Policy Review. Yes, having locked up Asia and Africa, the ever-hungry Chinese dragon is salivating over what the U.S. at least used to consider its "back yard." (You know, the Monroe Doctrine and all that.)

Ebola Hysteria Redux

We're now witnessing the worst Ebola epidemic ever. It's spun "out of control," warns one of the world's most influential newspapers. What's not to be afraid of? Well, Ebola.

No Prisoner Exchange, Merely a Massive Gamble

Now that the outrage over the prisoner exchange of one POW whom by all accounts wasn't worth a rusty Taliban AK-47 for perhaps THE five most evil and potentially destructive Taliban is dying down a little, maybe we can relax and see the truth for what it is. It was NOT a prisoner exchange.

Few Options to Aid Venezuelan People

Two crises: Ukraine and Venezuela. Both heartbreaking and, unfortunately, intractable. Yet even as American pundits are practically chiding Pres. Obama for not going to war with a huge nuclear-armed country over Ukraine, Venezuela is almost ignored.

Gutting US Military Threatens World Peace

The best war is that avoided, because the good guys have convinced the bad guys they cannot win. Israelis have learned that and you would think Americans would have, too. But the newly-announced U.S. defense budget, plus dramatic spending cuts even before, plus those in the works under a congressional automatic sequestration plan, show otherwise. The U.S. now faces a "hollow military," even as the world and Israel must face the end of the "Pax Americana."

Global-warming ‘proof’ is evaporating

The 2013 hurricane season just ended as one of the five quietest years since 1960. But don’t expect anyone who pointed to last year’s hurricanes as “proof” of the need to act against global warming to apologize; the warmists don’t work that way.

Autism Fraud Just the Tip of the Iceberg

"A deliberate fraud." That's what the British Medical Journal, one of the world's most prestigious periodicals, has just written of the study that kicked off the current anti-vaccine movement. It's "clear evidence of falsification of data should now close the door on this damaging vaccine scare" it said in a heavily documented editorial.

In Black and White, the Toyota Hysteria Exemplified

It's not "live!" It's not even "In color!" And there's no sound. But it's quite stunning. A surveillance video just posted by Fox Chicago News Online shows a 2006 Toyota Corolla backing out of a parking space and striking a car. The Corolla then shoots forward and slams into another vehicle, knocking it aside. Next the car swerves, presumably in an effort to avoid a strip mall, and crashes into a brick wall. The driver, Leon Przybylowski, died of his injuries later that day.

Vaccines and the Supremes

Every injured person deserves his or her day in court, right? Wrong. Throughout the civilized world, the national sport is soccer; here it's litigation. We need certain restrictions just to keep from having more courthouses than gas stations.

Geron’s Human Embryonic Stem Cell Experiment a “Scam”

"First Patient Treated With Stem Cells ," blares one headline. "First Patient Treated in Stem Cell Study ," shouts another. They're bogus. It was actually the first human trial using embryonic stem cells, or ESCs. Their Cinderella stepsister, adult stem cells, or ASCs, have already seen thousands of human clinical trials and are treating scores of diseases.