South Park's Al Gore explains the danger of Manbearpig
The news is filtering out, but growing, that someone "hacked" the U.K global climate science computers and put up emails that suggest a conspiracy to promote global warming against the evidence. Or was it a leak in disguise?
Regardless, there [...] 
Talk to everyone you know and find out how many are investing in new businesses, new technologies, new equipment. Not many. Those who are investing are mostly in fields that are being revolutionized as part of sectoral technological change. Amazon.com does well, a start-up in traffic data, [...] 
Conservatives are lining up some fine arguments against the strange health care beast being shepherded through Congress this season. Oddly, however, as the public as a whole turns against the Obama Administration on health care and other issues, the critics have neglected the young adult constituency [...] 
Two trends of Russian government policy seem to be shifting, as witnessed by President Medvedev's major address today in Moscow. The first is the tendency in recent years for government to punish those individuals and companies deemed guilty of economic misbehavior. Now, it seems, the Kremlin is [...] 
Amendment co-author Bart Stupak
Most coverage of the U.S. House vote late last night adopting the Pelosi health care bill ignored or downplayed the successful last minute amendment to prohibit use of federal health care funds to perform abortions. The consequences would seem to reach beyond the Hyde [...] 
Usually it is productive for left and right to get together on a common reform; but, not always. Instead of getting the best of both perspectives, you can get the worst of both. That is what happened in the early 70s when liberals who wanted to free [...] 
Patrick McDonald, whose regular job is with the Elections Division of the Washington Secretary of State's office, is a member of a 200 member Washington National Guard unit that just returned from a second tour of duty in Iraq--helping train elections officials and providing logistics for its [...] 
Electric vehicles on display at "Beyond Oil" 2009. From left to right, the Ford Focus, RAV 4 and Tesla Roadster. Mike Wussow/Cascadia Center of Discovery Institute
If you walked by Microsoft’s Executive Conference Center late last week and saw more than one dozen cars lined-up on display outside [...] 
Catholics and other Christians probably don't care what anyone says about them anymore, given the relative lack of outrage over Richard Dawkins' comments in The Washington Post this week. (See blog post below). So who will notice what Christopher Hitchens just unloaded on the Dennis Miller show [...] 
Bibi Netanyahu
Israeli prowess in technology is the subject that started George Gilder on the path to writing The Israel Test, and it is the subject also that Gilder will emphasize in the upcoming Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 20009 conference in Tarrytown, New York November 10-12.
In Israel last week [...]
Benjamin Netanyahu
Israeli prowess in technology is the subject that started George Gilder on the path to writing The Israel Test, and it is the subject also that Gilder will emphasize in the upcoming Gilder/Forbes Telecosm 20009 conference in Tarrytown, New York November 10-12.
In Israel last week [...] 
You do not have to be a statistician (I'm not) to appreciate the work of someone like Carl Bialik who writes the Numbers Guy column for the Wall Street Journal. When I served at the Census Bureau during the Reagan Administration I privately urged the Journal editors' [...]
You do not have to be a statistician (I'm not) to appreciate the work of someone like Carl Bialik who writes the Numbers Guy column for the Wall Street Journal. When I served at the Census Bureau during the Reagan Administration I privately urged the Journal editors' [...] 
It is a remarkable, but largely unremarked history: the Pullman Porters of America's legendary passenger rail past. A short article in the AARP Bulletin's November/December issue connects to a longer site online and a five minute film by Seattlite Thomas H. Gray on one of the [...]
It is a remarkable, but largely unremarked history: the Pullman Porters of America's legendary passenger rail past. A short article in the AARP Bulletin's November/December issue connects to a longer site online and a five minute film by Seattlite Thomas H. Gray on one of the [...] 
Be careful what you sign!
The Ninth Circuit Court, in an extremely terse opinion, has reversed a lower court ruling that the Washington State Secretary of State could not release the names of people who signed Referendum 71, the proposal to roll back recognition of homosexual unions.
My [...] 
Those who say that President Obama has achieved nothing in foreign policy are wrong. He has achieved the Nobel Peace Prize. That's something.
In the real world, however, we are left with terrible indecision on Iran, North Korea and Afghanistan. (On Israel, we are left with a terrible [...] 
The destruction of language proceeds apace with the planned creation of yet another "czar" in the Obama Administration, this time a "manufacturing czar".
The idea is preposterous. What is meant is that someone will appear on the White House staff roster who effectively has the power to [...] 
Discovery Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith has the cover story this week in National Review, "The Creeping Culture of Euthanasia." If you suppose that this is a side issue, think again. Despite all the keening denials, the health care legislation being discussed in Congress absolutely sets the nation [...] 
If you are like me, you will enjoy this video of a phenomenal American character and the curious phenomenon of culture he has created. Ephemeral art on the beaches of California are glorious expressions of individuality, causing us to ruminate on the transitory nature of this [...] 
How many intellectuals and media conveyers will defend free speech and the importance of an unfettered debate of ideas? Fewer and fewer. We are witnessing in America a kind of academic French Revolution, where leading opinion is fratricidal, enraged, fanatical--and then overthrown to make room for a [...] 
by Mathias Brucker
All smiles in the CDU
This month may see one of the world's most important elections for the year. Germans will decide on September 27 whether their country--by far the largest economy of Europe--will get a relatively conservative government (with lower taxes and spending and support [...] 
Peter Singer speaks for rationing of health care, especially at the end of life, and it has become a quiet cause of many on the Left who support expanded government health care. There has to be control of costs at some point under that system, and the [...] 
The news from the election in Afghanistan, as was true in 2005 in Iraq, is not accurately reflected in the major media reports. As in Iraq, the Western media mainly are interested (as one reporter told me when I was in Baghdad) in explosions and blood. Here [...] 
The release of Abdel al-Megahi, the Lockerbie bomber, to Libya--where he was given a hero's welcome--may just be the beginning of another damaging scandal for the Labor Party in the U.K.
At first it looked like a naive good-will gesture to Muammar Gaddafi, who, instead of welcoming [...] 
More and more it seems like we are living in Orwell’s 1984 where words have ceased to have their ordinary meaning. Yet another example of this occurred recently when President Obama, in conference call with religious leaders, called healthcare reform a “moral obligation” and accused those [...] 
Wesley J. Smith had the same reaction I did when the President identified the Netherlands as a country the United States should emulate in the provision of health care. That country has gone farther down the euthanasia path than any other. [...] 
Bob was a gloriously flawed, constantly seeking child of God who will be followed on his path by many prayers of those who knew him. In the history or our time he was a writer whose scrupulous honesty and rigorous fairness illuminated one "crisis" and "scandal" after [...] 
Some commentators are indignant over the charge that "the public option", and, indeed, the bulk of the ideas loosely aggregated in the House and Senate as "health reform", would lead to rationing. It infuriates them also that the bill is criticized for end-of-life counseling for senior citizens. [...] 
Will President Obama really start over on health care and try to work as the bi-partisan he promised to be? Or is his reported retreat from the public option only tactical? This will be an interested week, and to start it properly you should read the [...] 
In National Review, our colleague Yuri Mamchur describes the Russian resort to bartering these days.
Could such a thing work in the USA? Probably not. On the other hand, here is a story idea for some reader who also happens to have a job as a [...] 
The Wall Street Journal suggests bluntly what people in the pharmaceutical industry should have been asking for weeks: In the process of selling out on Health Care, has Big Pharma been sold out?
Or has Big Pharma just sold out the public that counts on its ever-burgeoning [...] 
Whenever anyone complains about a provision they think is in the proposed health care reform, they are told that the bill isn't even written yet (except in the House). But then why the furious rush to get something passed right away?
Even backers of President Obama are beginning' [...] 
Ben Stein probably thought he could do his work on the film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed and not himself endure the kind of personal attacks that, in the film, he defended Darwin critics against. In fact, what he found was that Darwinism is at the root of [...] 
Thursday night, as I left a garage in downtown Seattle after dinner, I found I had a flat rear left tire on my car. I called Triple A. The truck arrived in 15 minutes and the driver changed my tire in another five. Friday morning on the [...] 
Designated High-Speed Rail Corridors Source: Federal Railroad Administration
High-Speed Rail: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
BY Ray Chambers, Cascadia Center
Washington, D.C.--As big campaign ideas cross the Potomac River and seep into the halls of power, all that is sometimes left is a faint memory -- [...] 
Journalist Anna Politkovskaya, killed in 2006 in what appeared to be a contract murder.
Political killings have declined in recent years in Russia, but still tend to blot Russia's image in the filed of human rights. Several recent contract murders have been tied to Chechnyan politics, where complex [...] 
If there is no domestic constituency that is offended, a gaffe is not treated as a gaffe. But Vice President Joe Biden's snarky remarks about Russia fall into the gaffe category anyhow. What is the point? [...] 
Sam Harris has a piece in The New York Times suggesting that Francis Collins' Christian views render him unsuited to serve as head of the National Institutes of Health. That is so, says Harris, even though Collins is a devoted Darwinist. Clearly Harris would like a' [...] 
Iran is now more isolated than at any time in over three years as the International Atomic Energy Agency Board of Governors, meeting in Vienna, 
The assertion that Obamacare will lead to lower costs fortunately is not believed by most Americans.
Former U.S. Senator Slade Gorton, a Board Member of Discovery Institute, 
One reads over Jim Baker's
Western fears that Russia may use its dominance in gas production and distribution to influence political decisions in Europe are dealt another blow with 
Ross Douthat's
Slim Pickens rides a missile down in Dr. Strangelove
Discovery Senior Fellow John Wohlstetter, author of The Long War Ahead, is working increasingly on the topic of nuclear proliferation. 
The Joint Committee on Taxation was asked by Sen. Orrin Hatch to figure out who will bear the brunt of the cost of the Baucus bill just passed in committee. 