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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” Read More ›

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.

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From the Oregonian, Frontier’s inexperience is a concern, Jenks said. But if Verizon doesn’t want to be here, perhaps Oregon will be better off. “Sometimes,” he said, “it’s to your advantage to get rid of an owner who doesn’t want to own something.” Who wouldn’t want to own something that makes a profit, unless… it doesn’t make a profit? Oregon’s problem is that it has driven the profit out of the telephone business, so the industry’s innovation leader — Verizon — is getting out. Nationwide, Verizon is investing $28 billion in fiber to the home, but it needs to earn a competitive return on investment. That isn’t possible in Oregon, which aims to align the price consumers pay for communications Read More ›

Great commentary from Bret Swanson: Microsoft decided in 2008 to build 20 new data centers at a cost of $1 billion each. This was a dramatic commitment to the cloud. Conceived by Bill Gates’s successor, Ray Ozzie, the global platform would serve up a new generation of Web-based Office applications dubbed Azure. It would connect video gamers on its Xbox Live network. And it would host Microsoft’s Hotmail and search applications. The new Bing search engine earned quick acclaim for relevant searches and better-than-Google pre-packaged details about popular health, transportation, location and news items. But with just 8.4% of the market, Microsoft’s $20 billion infrastructure commitment would be massively underutilized. Meanwhile, Yahoo, which still leads in news, sports and finance Read More ›

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 behavior.

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 Read More ›

The Israel Test will be published Jul. 22. The following is an excerpt: The central issue in international politics, dividing the world into two fractious armies, is the tiny state of Israel. The prime issue is not a global war of civilizations between the West and Islam or a split between Arabs and Jews. These conflicts are real and salient, but they obscure the deeper moral and ideological war. The real issue is between the rule of law and the rule of leveler egalitarianism, between creative excellence and covetous “fairness,” between admiration of achievement versus envy and resentment of it. Israel defines a line of demarcation. On one side, marshaled at the United Nations and in universities around the globe, Read More ›

(Reprinted from The Gilder Friday Letter.) Have you ever wondered why, in our time, it is the Left that leads the attack on Israel? After reading “The Israel Test” you will never wonder again. George Gilder brilliantly shows that Israel is the ultimate test dividing those who really stand with Capitalist Democracy from those who always blame America and Israel first. Obscured by the usual media coverage of the “war-torn” Middle East are Israel’s rarely celebrated feats of commercial, scientific, and technological creativity. In “The Israel Test” Gilder documents Israel’s transformation into a hi-tech powerhouse, profiling the top companies and entrepreneurs that are making Israel into Silicon Valley’s greatest rival–and ally–and shows how the world’s leading-edge technologies increasingly feature “Israel Read More ›

President Obama intends to nominate Mignon L. Clyburn to the Federal Communications Commission. Clyburn is a good pick. She has been a member of the Public Service Commission of South Carolina since 1998. She chaired the South Carolina commission from 2002 to 2004, is a past chair of the Southeastern Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners and is a respected leader in the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC). She is trained in economics and has a reputation for thoughtfulness. The remaining question is who ought to be the Republican nominee to fill the seat vacated by former chairman Kevin J. Martin (a soon-to-be-vacant seat held by Republican Robert M. McDowell will also need to be filled). By law, two Read More ›

Read about it first at Discovery Institute’s Russia Blog – by Charles Ganske and Mike Averko. Click here to read the post.