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This article, published by The Seattle Times, references a study done by Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center:

According to a study published by the Cascadia Center of the Discovery Institute, Metro in 1988 studied passenger-ferry service on Lake Washington but concluded that the service would be too slow to compete with buses, that it would be hard to build ferry terminals and that the market was questionable.

YOU PROBABLY DIDN’T HEAR ABOUT IT, since it received such little media coverage, but last week, by a nearly 3-1 vote, the United Nations General Assembly urged the world to “prohibit all forms of human cloning inasmuch as they are incompatible with human dignity and the protection of human life.” True, “The United Nations Declaration on Human Cloning,” is not Read More ›

Publishers Weekly published a review of Discovery Institute Senior Fellow George Gilder’s book The Silicon Eye.

Known for weaving engrossing stories from material knotted with numbing complexity, Gilder (Telecosm; Microcosm) delves once again into the world of high-tech business, this time focusing on the company Foveon and its efforts to develop a device that will allow digital machines to see as the human eye does. “Computers can perform instantaneous calculus… and search the entire contents of the Library of Congress in a disk-drive database,” he writes. “But they cannot see. Even today, recognizing a face glimpsed in a crowd across an airport lobby, two human eyes can do more image processing than all the supercomputers in the world put together.” The book traces a circuitous path in its investigation of Foveon’s “silicon eye” — leading through discussions of the magnetic codes on paper checks and of notebook computer touchpads — but Gilder is a competent, eloquent guide.

Gamal al-Alusi was born to Iraqi exiles in Germany and grew up in Hamburg. One of his longtime German friends described Gamal as an intelligent young man who liked to play basketball and take flying lessons. He was also social and humorous, and served as a peacemaker among his friends.

Like other teenagers, he sneaked around with his girlfriends behind his traditional parents and had future plans that changed from week to week. As is also fashionable among many European youths, his political views during early years were characterized by the friend as being “radical” and even “anti-American.”

Nevertheless, Gamal apparently felt having a “normal” job in Germany would not give him the satisfaction of having done something meaningful with his life. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, he left Germany and went to Iraq with his father, Mithal al-Alusi, an Iraqi native who had been a vocal critic of the Ba’ath regime.

The United Nations fancies itself a vehicle that reduces global poverty and increases economic wellbeing. But, in fact, the U.N. advocates policies that will do the opposite. U.N. reports and committees issue a steady stream of demands for tax increases. Most would fall on Americans and citizens of other very successful countries, with revenues given to the U.N. and leaders Read More ›

IF ACADEMY AWARDS were given for the greatest lost opportunity, Million Dollar Baby would have won them, too. As anyone who has been paying attention to the ruckus mounted ably and righteously by the disability rights community must now know, the movie climaxes with Frankie, Clint Eastwood’s character, euthanizing the once indomitable Maggie, his boxing protégé, played by Hillary Swank. Read More ›

This article, published by The Seattle Times, mentions Discovery Institute’s Cascadia Center:

Last year, the Cascadia Center at the Discovery Institute convened the Transportation Working Group (TWG), chaired by former Boeing executive and chairman of Gov. Gary Locke’s Blue Ribbon Commission on Transportation, Doug Beighle.

This group of 39 citizens from business, labor, environment and civic groups met over several months to study and formulate shared recommendations. It strongly recommended a consolidated regional governance structure and linked that recommendation to the need for some way to raise money regionally that would be available for all modes of travel, and not just limited to one or another use.

How much lower is your real income because of excessive regulation? And how much higher is unemployment because of too much regulation? Economists have been trying to answer these questions for the last several decades. Great strides have been made, and now Steve Entin, former Treasury official and president of the Institute for Research in the Economics of Taxation (IRET), Read More ›