The San Jose Mercury News carries the full Associated Press story on the recent opening of the 21-mile Loetschberg Base Tunnel. Billed as the world’s longest land tunnel, it is a trainway built through the Alps to ease road congestion and deliver skiers twice as quickly from south of Bern to the gateway town of Visp near the Zermatt and Read More ›
A new report by the Congressional Research Service notes that traffic congestion has reached crisis proportions in some places. But, the report notes, not everyone agrees that congestion is a major national problem warranting a federal government response. Because congestion tends to be geographically concentrated in major metropolitan areas, past Congressional action has tended to favor a predominantly state and Read More ›
George Gilder talks about technologies in terms of abundances and scarcities. At the public policy conference held mid-April by Seattle’s Discovery Institute and themed “Re-igniting the Tech Economy,” the man who wrote the law that “Bandwidth grows three times faster than computing power,” took time out to theorize the entrepreneur’s role in technology’s evolutionary process. According to Gilder, a Discovery Read More ›
Protest groups that trashed Seattle during the WTO meetings last December have now tried violently to disrupt the Republican Convention in Philadelphia. Plans are underway for still bigger civil disturbances at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles. An International Monetary Fund meeting in Prague in September is slated for yet another riot. But there still has been no public recognition Read More ›
The satirist Tom Wolfe coined the term “radical chic” to characterize the way certain stylish New Yorkers in the 1960s fawned over, and financed, law-breaking groups like the Black Panthers. Just as the New Left attempted a “baby-boomer” imitation of real revolutionaries from still earlier eras, something like a Brand New Left is attempting to be born during the World Read More ›
You finally find yourself wanting to help out Charlie Chong; not vote for him, necessarily, just help him make the mayor’s race more interesting by tying together the obviously disconnected strings of his campaign. The avowedly “populous” cause almost always wins elections in Seattle and nothing sells better than those old salted chestnuts, “neighborhood values.” So Chong’s single theme of Read More ›
He was a restless young attorney who was also a frustrated architect and planner. On Sunday afternoons in the late 60’s he used to recruit his wife and a friend (me, on some occasions) to drive around Seattle looking at any new buildings going up. He would complain about the lack of good planning in town and sketch in the Read More ›
Could jaywalking contribute to a climate of lawlessness? Could public drunkeness? When a former mental patient wielding a sword on a downtown street can tie up traffic and the police for 11 hours, as happened recently in Seattle, can we see any relevance to our laws on involuntary treatment? The answer is “yes” to all these questions. Increasingly, law enforcement Read More ›
As Hawaii is blessed with beautiful weather, Seattle enjoys an abundant efflorescence of technology innovation. We hear about it every day, but few understand where it came from. Bill Gates Jr. (the prominent attorney, not his still more prominent son), knows we didn’t exactly deserve the blessings of our Silicon Forest, but he is eager that we take care to Read More ›
When you get a copy of the Seattle Arts Commission’s Directory of Public Art, you will see listings of statues to Christopher Columbus, Leif Erikson and Dr. Jose Rizal, the hero of the Philippines. But we barely manage one statue and a copper bust of Chief Seattle and a mere artistic “silhouette” for the local pioneers Arthur Denny and David Read More ›