There is much to be grateful for tonight here in Washington. Our senior fellow John Wohlstetter, who is writing on nuclear proliferation, a public policy topic so old it is new again (or going to be), just held an exquisite book party to celebrate his Discovery colleague George Gilder's The Israel Test (#590 on the Amazon list, #1 on the subject of Israel). In John's apartment in the famous Watergate, looking over the Potomac at sunset, George described the inspiration of his father, who visited Germany in 1936 and vowed to come back to the U.S. and do all he could to defeat Hitler. His father did that--a mere 22 year old, but well-connected in New York society--and then enlisted as a pilot in what became the Second World War, and died.

In The Israel Test, George has written an astonishing love letter to Israel that somehow also manages to be a new treatise on his long time theme of capitalism as a system that prizes human exceptionalism. He sees the need to defend Israel and the potential for Israel truly to become again a light to the nations.

Human exceptionalism is also the theme, as it were, of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell. As George Gilder says, Meyer's book is a debate changer, the most comprehensive examination yet of the issue of Darwinism versus design. No one can claim to understand that debate without it. (The American Spectator reviewer, Dan Peterson, described himself as "Blown Away".) It's 700 on Amazon's list, and tops in at least two science categories.

Then there are all the books that have come out lately from Ben Wiker (Darwin's Myth) and Jay Richards (Money, Greed and God), among them, and hold your breath for David Berlinski's forthcoming The Deniable Darwin. Senor fellow Wesley J. Smith's current cover story in National Review, on Creeping Euthanasia, is a prelude for his new book this winter.

I add the film on the Cambrian Explosion of life forms 580 million years ago--"Darwin's Dilemma"--by Illustra Media that is just about to premier at the Oklahoma Museum of Natural History, featuring many Discovery fellows. Adolescent-acting Darwinists are trying to disrupt the opening, but their Acorn-style agitation only will add to the piquancy of the film's signal achievement. I was a guest at an early screening and conclude that it is going to be another winner.

The materialist Left is losing out.

One walks down Sixteenth Street near the White House and sees the monstrous, four story posters for "card check" and "full employment" on the lobbying organizations that now sidle up to power. One hears the stories, on the other hand, of the plain folk who showed up on the Mall in the hundreds of thousands last week to protest government health care, and one sees the cracks in our social consensus.

But that is the present. The future is in the minds--and writing--of colleagues like Gilder and Meyer, et al. In a gloomy time, they are a reason for gratitude and good cheer.