Senior Fellow George Gilder has shot a little arrow into the Obama Administration plans for “net neutrality”. The Tuesday Wall Street Journal carries George’s attack. The author of Life After Television, Microcosm and Telecosm, among others, has been trying hard to make the point that the very cutting edge of our economy is high technology and its abundant success is the product of freedom from government over-regulation. Obama and Co., he says, hope to change that. Net neutrality is Orwellian. It is further evidence of America’s careening drive into a planned economy–and …
The government expansionists have had their eyes on the Internet ever since Al Gore claims he invented it. Of course, the Feds’ DARPA did help birth the Internet, but there is no reason why Washington now should imitate the Iranian mullahs or the Chinese and start restricting access and imposing financial or technical controls. It is not just because the technology is new that it has made such a huge contribution to our economy; it’s also because the new technology has been relatively unfettered by the government. The whole subject of federal regulation re-emerges in a major way in coming weeks. Watch this space. Meanwhile, Mark Landsbaum of the Orange County Register (in a column that I missed when it first came out) is among those trying to sound the alarm about losing …
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution has a great article on the future of telecommunications in the state. The article prominently features Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder. Click here to …
When it comes to technology, entrepreneur Jonathan Medved told George Gilder’s Telecosm 2009 conference in Tarrytown, New York this week, Israel is the world’s “startup nation,” now eclipsing everyone else in the world (even the U.S. on a per capita basis). There was great enthusiasm for Medved and other speakers at this year’s Gilder show, which was built around The Israel Test, George’s new book. A video greeting from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened the conference. On “Street Insider” at CNBC TV later, Jonathan Medved also <a href="http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=1327103451&play=1 “>described the remarkable prominence of Israel in green technologies, including desalinization, geo-thermal power …
Recent decisions at Google are having an impact on people who try to manage transportation issues related to traffic flow, according to Bryan Mistele (a new Board Member of Discovery …
George Gilder’s new book, The Israel Test, is starting to get around. We ourselves have already filled over 1,000 book orders in house. (Actually, we recommend that purchasers go to Amazon.com to order. For both orders you can still come to us.) Mona Charen had a terrific column a few days ago on George’s appearance at the AEI. David Pryce Jones has a fine article out in the National Review, and The American has published a long excerpt of the book. The growing buzz may have somthing to do with the fact that there really is an Israel test going on right now in international affairs. We definitely are on the case — led by George. The Israel Test just got some press at two more publications, The New York Post and Canada’s The Globe and Mail, the country’s …
John Wohlstetter is prejudiced in his praise of The Israel Test; he’s a friend of the author, George Gilder. Of course, a review by an author’s friend has never happened anywhere else, has it? Regardless, John is a friend and colleague of mine, too, and I know what he does when he disapproves of a friend’s views: he goes silent. This article in The American Spectator is, in fact, a very good introduction to the George Gilder’s book. The best lines are these, at the end: Israel could be the economic engine for the entire Mideast. This is the new Israel, no longer a financial ward of America. It is this Israel that most Americans know not of. “Israel Inside” would be a great slogan for an ad campaign educating Americans about the new Israel, and its …
Authoritarian regimes from China to Iran have made it their business to try to control what their peoples can see or do on the internet. It is usually about politics. Now Turkey joins the pack, even while its leader quips about how easy it is to thwart the government’s censorship efforts. In this useful article from Radio Free Europe, Claire Berlinski wonders how Turkey thinks it is going to get into the European Union when it employs such …
What George W. Bush named “The Axis of Evil” included Iraq, North Korea and Iran. Iraq is relatively, if perhaps deceptively, quiet, but Iran is “hot” and North Korea seems bent on getting into our faces whether we want to see them there or not. This AP story by Lolita Baldor should push the federal government–as well as the private sector–to greater defensive action. Computer security is national security, and in that light it is worth noting that cyber attacks have increased almost three fold in three years. This is the kind of story that, in retrospect, may be seen as a lot more significant than what is daily emphasized in most of our hedonistic, anesthetized media. Both hardware and software defenses are being evaluated and, in some cases, mounted …
The answer, George Gilder tells me, may be hedge funds. The disappearance of Lehman Brothers and the transformation of Morgan and Goldman Sachs into heavily regulated commercial banks presents an opportunity for entrepreneurial risk taking by someone else. Such as hedge funds. New technologies make it possible for them to stay in touch with clients and handle trades quickly. The turmoil in the markets world-wide disagregates the economy and makes new entitites possible. Dispossessed “animal spirits” will surely find a new home. It is worth pausing here to recall that Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac helped over several decades to get home ownership up to 70 percent in this country. Very good, up to a point. They were distinguished by one advantage, government guaranteed money, and …
David Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion: Atheism and its Scientific Pretensions (reviewed brilliantly by George Gilder in the new National Review) is just arriving in book stores, while in Paris an entirely different, and also invaluable, book, Origines (Origins), has been published this week in French by Saint-Simon. Read the rest …
The quadrennial international convention of the Methodist Church, meeting in Fort Worth, today adopted an historic and detailed resolution deploring the legacy of Darwinian eugenics that saw its 20th century extreme expression in the theories of Adolf Hitler. Yes, that would be the Nazi ideology that the Darwinists of today–and major media–pretend sprang on the world fresh from the head of Hitler, wholly unconnected to the history of Darwin’s theory, Francis Galton and Ernst Haeckel. For the ten minutes it spent on this topic, the current film Expelled, starring Ben Stein, has been the target of unstinting left wing media attack and revisionist history. The Methodists’ resolution–adopted by a vote of 836 to 28–apologizes for the …
It does not seem that Arthur Caplan, the toast of MSNBC, has even seen the film Expelled, his representations of it are so uninformed. Yet he is prepared to charge in public that Ben Stein is a “Holocaust denier,” someone whose name should be forever “a source of scorn.” Would this be same Ben Stein who takes his Expelled audience through Dachau to show them where the Holocaust took place? Some denier! So Caplan is smearing Stein, that is all there is to it. He distorts the message of the movie and then attacks it as a straw man. He probably should add to his list of scorn targets David Berlinski, Richard Weikart (also in the film) and a host of historians who have written about the Nazi era (See these articles). Darwin himself didn’t cause …
David Klinghoffer nails the Darwinists’ noisome effort to deny Darwinism’s influence on Nazi ideology in today’s National Review Online. He knocks down the straw man arguments they employ–the pretense that the film is mainly or even substantially about this topic, or that the film blames the bulk of the Nazi enterprise on Darwin or that the film calls today’s Darwinists Nazis. But mainly he simply marshals the historians. (The very best current history, of course, is Darwin to Hitler, by Richard Weikart of Cal State.) It is appalling to see a snarling movie review like that of Stephen Whitty of Newhouse News Service today. He seems he didn’t bother to see the film. He writes sarcastically that he “thought evolution had something to do with …
From Dinesh D’Souza on AOLNews.com: In Ben Stein’s new film “Expelled,” there is a great scene where Richard Dawkins is going on about how evolution explains everything. This is part of Dawkins’ grand claim, which echoes through several of his books, that evolution by itself has refuted the argument from design. The argument from design hold that the design of the universe and of life are most likely the product of an intelligent designer. Dawkins thinks that Darwin has disproven this argument… To read more, click …
From Dave Berg at National Review: I like rebels, especially ones who go against type. Take Ben Stein in his latest film, Expelled, which comes out this Friday. Dressed in a sport coat, tie, and tennis shoes, he’s not who you expect — the deadpan, monotone-voiced but ever-likable teacher he portrays in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Wonder Years.Stein retains his characteristic deadpan affect, but this time he’s playing himself — a deceptively erudite and well-educated interviewer, who is passionately skeptical of evolutionary biology and its leading proponents. To read more, click …
From Edward Douglas at Comingsoon.net: Summary:The filmmakers’ intentions are kept deliberately vague–is this about free speech or about teaching religion in the classroom?–but it’s a surprisingly entertaining and informative doc that at least tries to address the debate over intelligent design from another angle.Story:Ben Stein takes a look at intelligent design and how scientists and teachers who’ve dared to address it have come under attack from the scientific community using Darwin’s theories of evolution. To read more, click …
Brent Bozell III’s column at Townhall says he was invited to preview Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, the Ben Stein film that screens for the public at a reported 1000 theaters this weekend. “I went into the screening bored,” he writes. “I came out of it stunned.” This makes a point that needs underscoring. Anybody who is bothered by the malign conformity of contemporary politics and culture in academia and the media should be paying attention to the evolution debate. It isn’t marginal. It’s central. The refusal to allow debate and the reckless determination to punish dissent aren’t limited to the sciences, but they are crucially present there. Materialist science is being allowed to define all reality far too often and, as Stein …
The Darwinists claim that anyone who cites historical works in defense of the proposition that Darwin’s theory influenced Nazi ideology is “quote mining.” As usual, that is a cover-up. So is the straw man argument that the film Expelled is trying to blame poor old Darwin for the Holocaust or to claim that Darwinism originated anti-Semitism or that Darwinism was the sole source of Nazi ideology. Any such straw man intentionally exaggerates the message of the one segment of Expelled where the Nazi ideology of eugenics and race is explored. Another straw man is the pretense that the film tries to stigmatize as Nazi-prone any contemporary Darwinist. Not so. The attempt here is to smear the film’s star, Ben Stein, by putting words in his mouth. And please …