Bøger udgivet af Encounter Books

In this book, George Gilder asserts that widespread antagonism toward the current state of Israel springs from, like anti-Semitism everywhere, envy of superior accomplishment. Israel's sudden rise as a world capitalist and technological power, he argues, stems in part from the Jewish "culture of mind" and in part from Judaism itself, which, "perhaps more than any other religion, favors capitalist activity and provides a rigorous moral framework for it." Critics of Israel--in the U.S., in the surrounding countries of the Middle East and in Western European nations that are facing socialist decline--have failed the "Israel Test" because they seek to tear down this country's success rather than emulate it. America's ability and desire to defend Israel will define our future survival as a nation: "If Israel is destroyed," he says, "capitalist Europe will likely die as well, and America, as the epitome of productive and creative capitalism spurred by Jews, will be in jeopardy.

In this firsthand account, David Bernhardt, 53rd Secretary of the United States Department of the Interior, describes how he witnessed firsthand the administrative state's transformation from a collection of departments under the command of the President into a sprawling and unaccountable bureaucracy."Resistance" to the Trump presidency within the civil service drew media attention, but it was only part of a larger problem: a federal bureaucracy that often goes its own way, contrary to the policies of elected leadership. In this insider's account, David L. Bernhardt reveals how the bureaucratic swamp really operates and how unaccountable power has been concentrated deep within the administrative state, resulting in dysfunction.Executive agencies were created to implement legislation and presidential directives, yet career civil servants use them to advance their own agendas instead. Congress often writes laws broadly, letting subject-matter experts at administrative agencies fill in the details with regulations. Then, agency employees sometimes substitute their own policy preferences for actual statutory or regulatory language. They may also fail to appreciate that their authority is delegated from an official who answers to the president. Bernhardt gives examples of federal employees undermining the administration's policies simply by refusing to work on a task, slow-walking it, or doing a subpar job.Administrative agencies have further gained power through judicial deference to an agency's own interpretation of a statute when its enforcement action is challenged. Courts essentially abdicate their role of interpreting the law, leaving citizens with little recourse against penalties or prohibitions. Both legislative and judicial powers have thus been shifted to the executive branch, where they are exercised without adequate political oversight.Drawing on his experiences working under two administrations, Bernhardt explains how President Trump's enabling leadership showed a path for reining in the administrative state. He calls on political leadership to turn off autopilot and take control of their agencies, and on Congress and the judiciary to assert their constitutional authority, before an unaccountable federal bureaucracy destroys the Founders' vision of government by consent of the governed.

A Short History of Relations Between Peoples traces how the cultural attitudes that different peoples and nations had toward each other have undergone a profound and positive change during the last 500 years.For most of recorded history, neighboring countries, tribes, and peoples everywhere in the world regarded each other with apprehension--when not outright fear and loathing. Tribal or racial attitudes were virtually universal, no one group being much better or worse in this respect than any other--and for good reason given the conditions of life before the modern era. But in the last 500 years, relations between different peoples have undergone a slow but profound change. In this book, John Ellis explains how a confluence of discoveries, inventions, explorations, as well as social and political changes gave birth to a new attitude, one expressed succinctly in the Latin phrase: gens una sumus--we are all one people. This sentiment has by now become a modern orthodoxy, however inconsistently or even hypocritically it may sometimes be espoused. Ellis tells the story of how the transition happened, setting out the crucial stages in its progress as well as the key events that moved it forward, and identifying the individuals and groups that brought about the eventual dominance of this new outlook. This is a compelling story in its own right, but it is also a useful inoculation against the destructive ideas of today's race hustlers. An accurate grasp of how this crucial change happened contradicts everything that they want us to believe. Ideologies such asCritical Race Theory and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion have everything touching on race and racism completely backwards. The villains of their ignorant version of history are really the heroes. In explaining how the historical record makes nonsense of CRT, Ellis's book amounts to the most fundamental and complete refutation of that pernicious ideology.

"Many people have the wrong idea about China-they see all the strengths and few of the weaknesses. I'm writing this book to correct that misperception. China is racing to displace the United States as the world's dominant economic and military power. After three decades of unprecedented economic growth, China appointed Xi Jinping as its leader in 2013. After taking the reins, Xi decided it was time to put China in what he believes is its rightful place: First. Xi is doing everything in his power to make this happen, from the Made in China 2025 to his Belt and Road Initiative, both of which aim to center global trade and thus power around China. However, Xi Jinping's goals may not ultimately come to fruition because China is much more fragile than it outwardly appears. There are breaking points-MaxTrendsª-which pose serious challenges to the future Xi is dreaming of. Examples of MaxTrendsª are disturbing demographic trends in China, widespread corruption, the accelerating global arms race, the real estate crisis, the fractured global supply chain, and the Taiwan conflict. If the United States and other Western democracies want to blunt Xi's ambitions, they must take aggressive steps now. These steps include continuing to out-innovate China technologically, doubling down on a blue ocean strategy, aggressively countering Chinese cyber attacks, embracing multinational organizations, and making Africa a much higher priority. China and the United States find themselves in the middle of a true race to the top, and who will win depends on how each country responds to the MaxTrendsª affecting it"--

This spirited book traces the roots of liberalism through the noblest traditions, virtues, institutions and longings embedded in Western culture."Are conservatives the only liberals left? F.H. Buckley's intriguing and intelligent book demystifies the confusion surrounding the real meaning of liberalism. His is a compelling argument and a great book that conservatives and genuine liberals should read."--Frank Furedi author of The War Against The Past: Why The West Must Fight For Its HistoryLiberalism is under attack from both left and right, but anti-liberals have failed to understand how the tradition defines our idea of civic virtue. Liberalism is not an ideology that stands above our practices and judges them, but a practice itself, an inheritance of virtues, institutions, customs, and longings embedded in our culture and passed on through our memories and stories of moral heroes. In this book, Buckley explains how we learned magnanimity from the Code of Chivalry and to avoid brutishness from the Code of the Gentleman; how, through the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the novels of Charles Dickens, kindness became a liberal virtue; how the republican virtue of the Founders can be traced back to fourteenth century Sienese merchants. From the stories that comprise the Western Tradition of liberalism, we learned the civic virtues that are the efficient secret of American constitutional government. The anti-liberal cult of wokeness has attempted to cancel this tradition, but it will not long survive. It offers a creed of sin without absolution, of guilt without soul-easing joys, of frowns without laughter. It rejects the West's high culture and offers nothing in its place. Without learning, art, industry, or anything that might attract a person, its emptiness will soon be seen by all, and liberalism will continue to inspire the civic virtues of our culture.

"The melting pot metaphor has been the prevailing ideal for integrating new citizens throughout most of America's history. Yet contemporary elites often reject it as antiquated or even racist and advocate replacing it with multiculturalism. This book informs the debate over multiculturalism and the melting pot with an essential international and historical perspective. It evaluates how the melting pot and multicultural models have worked out in other societies around the world over 2,500 years of history: it provides a multicultural look at the melting pot and multiculturalism"--

In fewer than two-hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins.This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume's inductive skepticism to Karl Popper's outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend's summation that "anything goes" when it comes to defining or describing science. With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that make absurd arguments seem reasonable, and regular displays of wit, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought. Stove's views are entirely consistent with the origins of scientific inference and logic, as well as modern advances in probability theory, and yet he remains largely unnoticed by most of the academic world. From Stove's insider-outsider perspective, the train wreck that is academically accepted philosophy of science and "science studies" is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining subject of study.Scientific Irrationalism is the perfect place to begin any examination of what science is--and what it is not.

"In his debut poetry collection, The Nature of Things Fragile, Peter Vertacnik depicts a world fraught with vulnerability and loss. Utilizing a wide range of both received and nonce poetic forms, including sonnets, villanelles, triolets, a sestina, epigrams, blank verse, and word-count, he confronts the illnesses and deaths of loved ones, both recent and long past ("Face Value," "Odd Elegy," "Trace,"); the memories of old houses and towns left behind ("Departure," Sugar Beets," "Mourning Doves"); and the vanishing of once-ubiquitous analog particulars ("Apology to Candles," "Dial Tone," "In Praise of Blank Cassettes"). It is indeed a book of elegies, but one that also celebrates the people, places, and things it laments, preserving their names and details while laying them to rest"--

"A long essay on China's increasing bellicosity in Asia and the world"--

Joyce Milton's fascinating narrative begins in the early 1960s with psychologist Abraham Maslow's prediction that psychologists would soon seize control of values from religion and be able to create an ideal society made up of self-actualized men and women. Maslow became the prophet of the new humanistic psychology movement. Its leading practitioner was Carl Rogers, the California human potential guru who used encounter groups to teach people to get in touch with the dark impulses of their true selves. And the marketer-in-chief was Harvard's Timothy Leary, who saw LSD as a tool for helping in the task of deconstructing the Judeo-Calvinist worldview. The Road to Malpsychia gives us intriguing portraits of these patriarchs of the new secular order. Milton also shows what happened when Maslow disciples Abbie Hoffman and Betty Friedan applied Maslow's teachings to political activism and feminism, and when educators too eagerly adopted the principle that children must develop intrinsic knowledge, free from authoritarian influences and the tyranny of facts. Impatient with human limitations, anxious to put the self at the center of the universe, the humanistic movement was momentarily triumphant. But instead of becoming, in Maslow's phrase, fully human, the questing selves built a culture of narcissism; the new values were revealed as clichés in disguise; and the new gospel of self-esteem devolved into psychobabble. The Road to Malpsychia charts the rise and fall of one of the most significant cultural movements of our time. It is a story filled with character and anecdote and also with daunting implications for the secular souls left stranded by the failure of what Maslow once called the religion of human nature.

"After the Civil War, pioneers in the women's rights movement, women's medical education, and in public-private charitable partnerships joined forces to reduce the incidence of abortion in America. Alumni of the abolitionist movement, the analyses they applied to abortion resembled their earlier critiques of slavery"--

When COVID-19 erupted from Wuhan, China under mysterious circumstances, the Communist Party of China covered up its existence for as long as possible. It is now apparent that there is more to COVID than what the authorities wish for us to know. Biohacked: China’s Race to Control Life details the decades-long pursuit by the Chinese Communists to dominate the biotechnology industry—to control the very building blocks of life on Earth—to further their political control at home and their supremacy abroad. More appalling than the egregious cover-up that China’s rulers engaged in with COVID-19 is the fact that Western scientists, pharmaceutical companies, and research labs have contributed to China’s rapid (and dangerous) growth in the biotech industry—so much so that China, not the United States, may become the seat of the biotechnology industry. The Chinese leadership believes that biotechnology is a critical industry for the Communist Party to achieve its goal of becoming the world’s dominant superpower by 2049. In China’s biotech sector, truly macabre practices are being developed, from ambitious cloning programs to the creation of potential pathogens that China’s military plans to use in “specific genetic attacks” against Beijing’s growing list of political enemies.To stop the threat, author Brandon J. Weichert proposes the world’s nations create a comprehensive set of treaties for regulating biotechnology research and development. Further, Weichert calls for Washington to slow the transfer of advanced biotechnology knowledge and funding from the United States to China using means like the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Unless an all-of-government (and society) approach is taken to curbing irresponsible biotech development in China, then another—deadlier—COVID-19-like pandemic could be at hand.

Peter Wood argues against the flawed interpretation of history found in the New York Times’ 1619 Project and asserts that the true origins of American self-government were enshrined in the Mayflower Compact in 1620."1620 is a dispassionate, clear reminder that the best in America’s past is still America’s best future." —Amity Shlaes, chair, Calvin Coolidge Presidential Foundation"Peter Wood’s pushback against the 1619 Project is at once sharp, illuminating, entertaining, and profound." —Stanley Kurtz, senior fellow, Ethics and Public Policy CenterWhen and where was America founded? Was it in Virginia in 1619, when a pirate ship landed a group of captive Africans at Jamestown? So asserted the New York Times in August 2019 when it announced its 1619 Project. The Times set out to transform history by tracing American institutions, culture, and prosperity to that pirate ship and the exploitation of African Americans that followed. A controversy erupted, with historians pushing back against what they say is a false narrative conjured out of racial grievance.This book sums up what the critics have said and argues that the proper starting point for the American story is 1620, with the signing of the Mayflower Compact aboard ship before the Pilgrims set foot in the Massachusetts wilderness. A nation as complex as ours, of course, has many starting points, most notably the Declaration of Independence in 1776. But the quintessential ideas of American self-government and ordered liberty grew from the deliberate actions of the Mayflower immigrants in 1620.Schools across the country have already adopted the Times’ radical revision of history as part of their curricula. The stakes are high. Should children be taught that our nation is a four-hundred-year-old system of racist oppression? Or should they learn that what has always made America exceptional is our pursuit of liberty and justice for all?

"The U.S. and China are locked in a tech struggle that will determine the course of our era. America is already behind in critical areas. Gordon G. Chang outlines what has happened and what must be done"--

"Liberal education, if it does not discover how to speak to society in ways our culture understands, and if it cannot make its virtues apparent to the democracy in which we live, will make itself smaller and smaller, lose the audience it wishes to hold, and die by diminishment. The liberal arts are dying because most Americans don't see the point of them. They don't get why anyone would study literature or history or the classics-or, more contemporarily, feminist criticism, whiteness studies, or the literature of postcolonial states-when they can get an engineering or a business degree. Americans have two serious concerns regarding the value of a liberal arts education: first, the personal good of a liberal education, its value to the future life of the student, which is no longer as evident as it once was; and second, that except for academic ideologues on the left who passionately believe the liberal arts can be used to bludgeon students to become "social justice" activists, we more old-fashioned instructors are so frightened of speaking the language of usefulness and relevance that we come across less as citizens helping to promote the wider good and more as cloistered, inward-looking intellectuals. If we have the capacity and the will to be of real use to society, we have hidden it under a bushel. My point is that the liberal arts are, at their best, not only of immense value-let's even say of "use"-to each of us as individuals, but also to America at large. Part of the greatness of the Founders was that they were much more hesitant than we are to believe that liberal education could not be useful or that other forms of education could not be liberal. If Jefferson could think of a fully educated man as one who understands farming and philosophy, if he had no trouble moving from classical studies to writing a tract upon which a nation would be built, why are we Americans today so rigid in our separation of the theoretical from the practical, the scholarly from the civic?"--