Tonight we note with sadness the passing of photographer Evelyn Hofer, who although not nearly as well known as some of the prominent photographers of her day, was widely regarded as one of the greatest photographic artists of the 20th century. I did not know Ms. Hofer well, though I met her on a couple of occasions, and she attended my wedding in 1982. She was, however, a very close friend of my mother-in-law Lily Renée Phillips (who is a gifted artist in her own right). Several of Evelyn H... Read Full Story

President Obama gave a speech today at Fort Hood. You can read the transcript here. In his remarks he referred to Nidal Hasan’s murderous rampage as “incomprehensible”. To him it may actually be, which is in itself a harrowing thought. For most of the rest of us, it is anything but. Those who indeed cannot, or for political reasons will not, comprehend it in terms of the factually obvious have labored mightily to create an exculpatory narrative. Dorothy Rabinowitz, writing... Read Full Story

One of the strongest talking points of those who want a government-run medical care system is that we simply cannot afford the high and rising costs of medical care under the current system. First of all, what we can afford has absolutely nothing to do with the cost of producing anything. We will either pay those costs or not get the benefits. Moreover, if we cannot afford the quantity and quality of medical care that we want now, the government has no miraculous way of enabling us to afford ... Read Full Story

For those of you who were puzzled by the sudden withdrawal of challenger Abdullah Abdullah from the runoff election in Afghanistan the other day, the Asia Times has the answer: he did so under U.S. pressure, as part of a complex deal brokered by our Secretary of State during her recent visit to Pakistan. Mr. Abdullah was considered by Islamabad to be a potential ally of India, and in order for the U.S. to strengthen its ties with the Pakistani army and the ISI, he had to go. The agreement a... Read Full Story

The Taliban in Afghanistan now operate in more than 220 of the 400 districts in Afghanistan, compared to fewer than 30 five years ago. A new Pakistani Taliban movement has sustained insurgency in the Pakistan border regions and spread terror east of the Indus River boundary and threatened to carry it to India. Iran and North Korea have continued to proliferate weapons of mass destruction and their delivery systems. Lebanon has no government. Most Central Asian states have returned to the Ru... Read Full Story

Our former Lieutenant Governor, Betsey McCaughey, offers a brief survey of some of the just-passed House healthcare bill’s salient points. Here. Read Full Story

In a recent post we mentioned that some of the boffins at CERN had begun to suggest, apparently seriously, that the problems that have dogged the development of the latest generation of high-energy particle colliders — first the Superconducting Supercollider here in the US, and more recently CERN’s Large Hadron Collider — might actually be the result of some causal interference reaching backward in time to prevent some sort of Earth-shattering disaster. The LHC has been... Read Full Story

The topic of the day is obviously the massacre at Fort Hood. The news agencies have rather a hot potato in the essential fact of this story, namely that an apparently radicalized Muslim, a member of our own armed forces, launched a murderous attack upon servicemen who were about to be deployed to fight fundamentalist Muslims. There will of course be those who will present the accused as nothing more than an angry, disaffected, garden-variety “mucker” — we must respect Isl... Read Full Story

On the front page of today’s Times is a story I’m surprised I hadn’t heard about before. It seems that the Iraqi security forces are using a bomb-detection gizmo that seems, quite obviously, to be nothing more than an expensive, tarted-up divining rod. The gadget in question is called the ADE 651, and the Iraqis have bought at least 1,500 of them, despite their costing tens of thousands of dollars apiece. They are made by a British outfit called ATSC (currently their site ... Read Full Story

With a hat tip to my friend and former employer Bob Wyman, here’s a clever way to get people to take the stairs. Read Full Story