Bruce Chapman

Cofounder and Chairman of the Board of Discovery Institute

Archives

Catholics and Creation

Bruce Chapman
April 8, 2012
Franciscan University, Steubenville, Ohio, hosted a conference on Science and Faith a couple of months ago that emphasized issues now under discussion in the Catholic Church.

Private Company Could Pay Off 8 EU Nation’s Debts

Bruce Chapman
January 30, 2012
John Cook, of Seattle-based GeekWire, reports that Apple has enough cash reserves to pay off eight EU countries’ debts–if it wanted to, which, of course, it doesn’t. This story, based on an infographic from MBA Online the day before, puts Apple’s big quarter in prospective. GeekWire characterizes their revenue as “Three Yahoos, two Googles and a Microsoft”. It’s also interesting, and worth noting, that 2/3 of it is stored overseas. Here we have a company that makes trinkets, bought voluntarily by free people, produced willingly by free people. Yet even after giving billions of dollars to the governments they labor under, they still make more money than even the most irresponsible governments can lose. Consider: Governments take money from people …

Apple’s Orchard, an Act of Design Excellence

Bruce Chapman
June 9, 2011
Steve Jobs, who grew up in Cupertino, CA, has blessed his home town with a proposed new campus for Apple that is spectacular in its vision, as well as in its optimism about the company’s future. In a matter-of-fact presentation to the Cupertino City Council Jobs presented plans that were received with stolid approval, but that justified celebratory balloons and a town band. That’s because the new scheme is a design breakthrough. The new headquarters Jobs wants to build will transform land that once was apricot orchards and is now a sprawl of undistinguished high tech office buildings into a spectacular single building that will house up to 13,000 people in a kind of donut shape of glass, steel and cement with a vast interior courtyard. it also restored much of the 150 acre …

NPR Describes Way it Covers Science

Bruce Chapman
March 8, 2011
What NPR has decided is that there is only one correct side to the issue and that the critics will be heard only in the political content of the debate, not the scientific.

Facebook Helped Provoke the Egyptian Revolution; But Can it Govern?

Bruce Chapman
January 28, 2011
The revolution in Egypt is another historic product of alternative media, espeically Facebook, home to the "April 6 movement" that commemorates the brutal beating death of a young Egyptian blogger who had exposed the 2008 beating of a demonstrator in the industrial city of El-Mahalla El-Jubra. Instead of stopping the communication, the police beatings provoked a huge following. And then a revolution.

Tech Continues to Lead Israel Boom

Bruce Chapman
December 14, 2010
If the United States were growing as well as our Israeli ally, we’d be in fat city right now. The news from the little Mediterranean powerhouse just keeps looking up. GDP rose 3.8 percent last quarter, down from 4.5 percent in the previous quarter, but still very brisk. Technology stocks overwhelmingly lead the way. George Gilder’s thesis in The Israel Test is thus validated daily. Imagine a developed country that sells more to China than it …

Gilder: California’s Fall Threatens All

Bruce Chapman
November 16, 2010
Our Sr. Fellow George Gilder now commands the “most read” space on the Wall Street Journal opinion page today with “California’s Destructive Green Jobs Lobby”. The information adds nails to the coffin that voters in the Golden State have fashioned for themselves. It has been a familiar theme for Discovery News (discoverynews.org) for weeks. You might think that the California calamity opens opportunities for other states, notably nearby Washington, where voters just turned down an income tax on the wealthy (e.g., entrepreneurs, small businesses, investors in new jobs) and where the next state legislative session is not about new taxes, but major surgery on spending. Washington has energy for power-hungry computer companies and it has an outstanding employee …

Gilder Laughs at Kessler Robots

Bruce Chapman
July 30, 2010
(Note: Andy Kessler, hedge fund billionaire, meteoric success in Silicon Valley and at AT&T Bell Labs and author of four non-fiction books, has a novel out now: Grumby, a tale of the future of robotic intelligence. Gilder just read it.) by George Gilder Steve Jobs recoils in panic, pushing madly forth his inferior pods and paddles, ipups and ap-kits, Quicktunes and iTimes, before giving in to his disgrumbyment. Mark Zuckerburg wanders forlorn and friendless on Facebook, before finally matriculating at Harvard’s new Grumby school of transgendered robotics. Meg Whitman lifts weights and flees to the muscle bound beaches and bureaucracies of California politics, now entirely virtualized by Grumby. Bob Metcalfe propounds an ethereal power law of Grumbynets. Eric Schmidt gives in to …

Obama Names Tom Alberg to New National Council on Entrepreneurship

Bruce Chapman
July 16, 2010
Tom Alberg, who helped found Discovery Institute in 1990 and was president of its Board for many years (and still serves as a Director), is one of the most innovative entrepreneurs around. He knows the importance of pro-growth economic policies and is keenly aware of the dangers of the present moment. So it is with delight that I note that he has been appointed by President Obama to the prestigious new National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. The Council will operate under Commerce Secretary Gary Locke, former governor of Washington State. Alberg is a lawyer by background, who served as Sr. Vice President at McCaw Cellular when it was sold to AT&T. He was an early investor in Amazon and a founding principal in Madrona Venture Group, the Seattle-based high tech …

Gilder Was Prescient; How About Now?

Bruce Chapman
May 18, 2010
The popular Instanpundit correctly cites George Gilder for his early prediction of the Internet (what he called the Teleputer): “LIFE AFTER LIFE AFTER TELEVISION: With nearly 20 years of hindsight, the blurb for George Gilder’s book Life After Television, published in 1992, shortly before the first browser was available for consumers to access the still-nascent World Wide Web, sounds remarkably prescient: “Gilder’s thesis, written in layman’s terms, is that the United States will soon lose its rightful preeminence in the telecommunications field to foreign competitors, particularly the Japanese. Unless, that is, American business executives, legislators, judges, and consumers look beyond separate, limited, and hierarchical forms of communication such as …

FCC Power Grab Further Pummels Economy

Bruce Chapman
May 6, 2010
A sudden decision by the head of the Federal Communications Commission to accept Net Neutrality rules flies in the face of the economic arguments–and the fairness arguments–against such a departure. Hance Haney made the case earlier this week in the Seattle Times. “An open Internet where broadband providers do not block access to websites or discriminate between content or applications isn’t a vision,” he writes. “It’s a description of the unregulated Internet we already enjoy today. Those in Washington, D.C., who want to change it could stymie it instead and damage the economy.” He was speaking of the FCC. Read it all …