UPDATE: The Huffington Post has published a piece on the Associated Press report that Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are filing for disability benefits at a historic rate. As of this writing, there are already 618 comments (with 34 more pending). I realize that many of our readers would not “be caught dead” visiting the HuffPost. However, I would recommend that you take a chance this Memorial Day and venture...

Back in September 2009, when the Navy was seriously considering allowing women to serve aboard its nuclear submarines, I posted an article titled, “Should Women Serve on Submarines?” and, at the end, asked, “What do you think?” With a couple of exceptions, most of the readers saw no problem with this change in policy or had some reasonable, practical reasons for opposing women serving on our submarines. One...

Back in September 2009, when the Navy was seriously considering allowing women to serve aboard its nuclear submarines, I posted an article titled, “Should Women Serve on Submarines?” and, at the end, asked, “What do you think?” With a couple of exceptions, most of the readers saw no problem with this change in policy or had some reasonable, practical reasons for opposing women serving on our submarines. One...

Soon we won’t need hypodermic needles. This device delivers a high-velocity jet of liquid that breaches the skin at the speed of sound: [T]he MIT team, led by Ian Hunter, the George N. Hatsopoulos Professor of Mechanical Engineering, has engineered a jet-injection system that delivers a range of doses to variable depths in a highly controlled manner. The design is built around a mechanism called a Lorentz-force...

The New York Times has an interesting and, I am sure, controversial opinion piece, which from the beginning (Title: “G.O.P. Nightmare Charts”) to its conclusion (see below) suggests that present trends “do not bode well for Republicans.” All sarcasm aside and keeping in mind that the Times is called a “liberal newspaper” and worse, that it is written in “a place for opinionated...

The hidden history of WWII, and more recently Kosovo is gravely mis-stated. I collect images of those who tried to survive in near impossible circumstances of no food, not even a bandage, no privacy for their bodies, no ability to speak out without literally being shot to death on the spot. And even NOT speaking out, being taken to a mass grave site and shot anyway. Let us pray for all those of our world who...

A 19-year-old woman is raped in her home late at night by an intruder. She calls the police. No one answers. She leaves a message. No one returns her call. No one follows up. One in three women like her “have been raped or have experienced an attempted rape,” says the New York Times. According to a survey, the rate of sexual violence in rural villages like the one where the above-mentioned rape took place...

I collect and look at black and white photos, garage sale cast offs, collections of oddities of our world that someone chose to immortalize in what used to be called ‘film.’ This is a photo of two men piling spent howitzer shells at a sandbagged gun emplacement at Song Be. On the back of the photo is writ: Song Be, less than a hundred miles from Siagon, near the Cambodian border… US 1st infantry. What...

Isn’t it obvious? This study finds 96% of restaurant entrees exceed USDA limits: [R]esearchers looked at the nutritional content of 30,923 menu items, including those from children’s menus, from 245 brands of restaurants. They found that 96% of them failed to meet recommendations for the combination of calories, sodium, fat and saturated fat set by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The restaurants...

What would the founding father of Time have made of the magazine’s breast-feeding Mother’s Day cover? The model for it, a 26-year-old woman, reacts to the uproar about the photo with her three-year-old son to observe that breast-feeding advocates “are actually upset” because it doesn’t “show the nurturing side to attachment parenting. This isn’t how we breastfeed at home. “It’s more of a cradling,...

Should College Football Be Abolished? Tyrades! By Danny Tyree Does Buzz Bissinger score a touchdown with you, or do you find him personally foul? The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist (author of the 1988 bestseller and cautionary tale “Friday Night Lights”) has stirred up quite a firestorm with a recent Wall Street Journal article declaring “Why College Football Should Be Banned.” Yes,...

Manny Francisco, Manila, The Phillippines This copyrighted cartoon is licensed to run on TMV. Unauthorized reproduction prohibited.

(Photo by Sgt. Michael S. Cifuentes) A large color photo on the front page of the May 2 Stars and Stripes caught my attention and stirred my emotions. The photo was of members of the Marines and Air Force sitting volleyball teams in action during the 2012 Warrior Games at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. Except for the fact that the players sit while...

Before I became a senior editor with Bloomberg Financial News where my work revolved around business and economic issues, I spent years writing about the environment. This background has given me a rather interesting focus — an ability to see some important similarities in the ways the natural world and the world of economics operate. From this perspective, it’s clear to me why Mitt Romney should not...

Based on this column from China’s state mouthpiece, the Global Times, Beijing seems oblivious to how heroes are made. Why is it that Chen Guangcheng, who began as a local activist battling forced abortion and sterilization, has become a worldwide concern? Whether Beijing is willfully ignoring the obvious, or just seeking to discredit a brave man standing up for his principles, this article by columnist Shan...

Given the two candidates for the U.S. presidency, what do Europeans and in this case, Germans, have to look forward to? According to Die Welt columnist Alan Posener, “The good news for Europeans is also the bad news: it won’t make much of a difference who wins.” To put it another way, American leadership as Europeans have come to expect it is over – and weary-sounding Germans will have...

Tongue in tanned cheek, John Boehner explains his escalating criticism of Barack Obama: “The president is getting … bad advice. Somebody needed to help him out, so I thought I would.” Actually, Boehner has it backward. For haters of government bailouts, Republicans in general are doing a nifty job of saving the President from his biggest mistakes in office. In 2009, instead of going all out on...

From “Mad Men,” we know a media target is a demographic group who wants and needs the same thing or can be conned into thinking they do. Now, a brief hospital stay conjures up a bizarre new target audience of the old, the maimed and the chronically ill that ad men have in their sights.  The future is grim, if you can believe where advertisers are placing their bets on the bed-bound who watch...

I admit it. I’ve been having a lot of trouble understanding this family values thing. I knew it had something to do with gun ownership and undermining environmental regulations, of course. But its larger meaning had alluded me until this past week, when the family value-loving House of Representatives finally made the term’s meaning crystal clear to us all. To fund government subsidies for student...