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Seattle Skyline

Go Grow Somewhere Else

Microsoft recently announced an unprecedented three-year, $500 million investment to spur housing development across the Puget Sound region. Since 2011, strong economic growth in the Seattle metro area has boosted overall jobs by 21 percent, but the housing stock has expanded only 13 percent, leading to a massive increase in rental and home prices. It’s a problem reaching crisis levels in all West Coast tech cities. Read More ›
Martin Luther King

King Helped Nation Fulfill its Spiritual Destiny

Martin Luther King Day is unique among American holidays in that it honors the one American who delivered the fulfillment of a core value expressed in the country’s founding Declaration of Independence in 1776. The Declaration’s self-evident truth “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Read More ›

FBI Masthead

The Deep State Digs Deeper

As we approach Martin Luther King Day, it seems timely to reflect on King’s statement from a Birmingham jail in 1963 that “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Arguably, the greatest injustice and worst crime against the democratic republic of the United States is for an elite cadre to engineer and attempt to carry out a coup that Read More ›

Alaska Way Viaduct
overpass off of the Alaska Way Viaduct in Seattle

Technology, Transportation, and the Tunnel

The work of Discovery Institute’s ACES Northwest Network was recently featured in this Seattle Times article, authored by project co-chairs Tom Alberg and Bryan Mistele.  The article highlights our efforts to advance autonomous, connected, electric and shared (ACES) vehicle technologies in the Pacific Northwest—especially during the so-called ‘Period of Maximum Constraint’ following the impending closure of the Alaskan Way Viaduct.  Read More ›

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Photo by zhang dayong on Unsplash

Is Society Now Adopting the Values of ‘Blade Runner’?

“Blade Runner” may be the most influential science fiction movie of my lifetime.  The 1982 film starred a terrific Harrison Ford as a world-weary detective assigned to find a terrorist cell of artificially intelligent cyborgs with super human capacities. Led by Rutger Hauer, the cyborgs have traveled to earth from space colonies in a desperate attempt to force their designer Read More ›

Supreme Court Motto

The Federal Bureaucracy in Check

Congress, despite many chances, has not been willing to take responsibility for checking “the administrative state,” as the aggrandizing bureaucratic power of federal agencies has come to be known. Arrival of a Democratic House makes it still less likely that Capitol Hill will resist the continued expansion of federal rules and regulations. As executive, President Trump has tried to slow Read More ›

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Seattle viaduct at dusk

Transportation Technology Can Deliver Us From Viaduct-Closure Gridlock

Seattle is facing a dire transportation crisis with the Jan. 11 closing of the viaduct, politely dubbed the “Period of Maximum Constraint” (POMC). While commuters, employers and school officials are busy making contingency plans, why not take advantage of this moment to tackle some of our traffic congestion problems with creative solutions that might not be possible in normal times. Read More ›
Photo by iam_os

Caesar’s Wife and the Politics of Destruction

Senate Democrats wrote President Trump Wednesday asking him to withdraw Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination. It’s reminiscent of the old saying that in a position of public trust, one must be “like Caesar’s wife, above reproach.” Yet no one is above reproach. Neither was Caesar’s wife. Read More ›

A Gruesome Plan

The Hippocratic Oath is dead. “Do no harm” medicine is fast becoming extinct. Contemporary health care is increasingly under the sway of a utilitarian bioethics that makes the elimination of suffering the prime directive—to the detriment of traditional standards of medical morality that deem all human life equally worthy of care and protection. The prestigious New England Journal of Medicine has been …

Photo by Reza Rostampisheh

Sage Against the Machine

‘I rarely have an urge to whisper,” says George Gilder — loudly — as he settles onto a divan by the window of his Times Square hotel room. I’d asked him to speak as audibly as possible into my recording device, and his response, while literal, could also serve as a metaphor: Nothing Mr. Gilder says or writes is ever Read More ›