The Privileged Planet Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards, 444 pages, Regnery Publishing, Washington, D.C., 2004; ISBN 0-89526-065-4; hardcover, $27.95. Is there life elsewhere in the universe? The Privileged Planet gives a new spin to the argument that conditions on Earth are essentially unique. Authors Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay W. Richards suggest Earth was designed for scientific discovery. They introduce Read More ›
Original Article On Feb. 24-25, Microsoft Corp. hosted a major conference on transportation and technology in Redmond. The first day focused on “breaking gridlock with technology,” and the second day on “dealing with a rising tide of freight.” Lead organizers of the event were Bruce Agnew of the Cascadia Center and John Niles of Global Telematics. In a debriefing on Read More ›
Original article Should California give its citizens a right to die? Earlier this month, Assembly members Patty Berg, D-Eureka, and Lloyd Levine, D-Van Nuys (Los Angeles County), introduced a bill that would allow terminally ill, mentally competent adults with less than six months to live to end their own lives legally. It is patterned after Oregon’s voter-approved law, which went Read More ›
Original Article Intelligent design, which holds that only an unspecified superior intellect can account for the complexity of life forms, is increasingly appearing in science forums and journals as an alternative to evolution theory. Evolution has been widely accepted in scientific circles ever since Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species revolutionised biological sciences 145 years ago. But the new theory’s support Read More ›
On Nov. 18, in a speech given at the Finance Ministry in Vienna, Austria, the very highly regarded European economist and first woman president of the Mont Pelerin Society, Professor Victoria Curzon Price, called for eliminating the corporate income tax. There, in the center of socialist Europe, was not only the call to get rid of this destructive tax, but Read More ›
Darwinism, Design, and Public Education by John Angus Campbell and Stephen Meyer, eds. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2003. 634 pages, five appendices, glossary. Paperback; $27.95. ISBN: 0-87013-675-5. This book, part of MSU’s Rhetoric and Public Affairs Series, is a collection of twenty-six essays dealing with the controversy engendered by the push to teach Intelligent Design (ID) alongside Read More ›
Original Article There’s hope for those caught in daily congestion — if we make the necessary hard decisions. A conference last week, sponsored by Microsoft and the Cascadia Center at Discovery Institute, a private, nonprofit public policy group, attracted 200 local and national transportation experts to Redmond. While participants didn’t pull any punches about the problem, there are ways to Read More ›
Since the 1976 presidential election, the Democrats have not received more than 50 percent of the popular vote. Most organisms, except for very primitive ones, usually modify their behavior after repeated failure in order to survive. Much has been written about why the Democrats continue to fail in the polls. But as an economist, I have been particularly struck by Read More ›
Even before the Nov. 2 election, when I cast my first presidential vote as a naturalized American, I was a man of faith. No, not that kind of faith every pundit seems to be writing about these days — I don’t even attend church or any other house of worship. I mean that I had faith President Bush would be Read More ›