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Last night, I was reading “Sleeping Beauty” to my little girl. It seems a bad witch puts a curse on the royal baby such that before she turns 16, she will prick her finger on a spinning wheel and die. The book then says, as if it is a completely normal thing to do, that the King orders all spinning wheels in the kingdom to be destroyed. We are

Now the  Commerce Department says the  economy shrank by 0.5% in the 3rd quarter of 2000, fully 6 months before the  NBER says the recession began (the previous data having said that the GDP increased throughout the year). But because NBER uses monthly data, it is not expected to revise its business cycle tracking dates. Of course there are

The other day I found myself in an antique/junk store staring at a huge old iron kettle, and I wondered out loud how many one could feed using that for soup. A man next to me, who looked to be in his 70s, said: that’s not for soup; that’s for rendering hog fat! He went on: when he was a kid in West Texas, they would slaughter the hog, put the fat

Only 1.8 percent of civil cases go to trial in federal court,  reports the NYT . Good news: it represents the abandonment of a failed state system of justice. Bad news: it represents the institutionalization of a system of mass blackmailing backed by legal force.

“The only difference is that Saddam would kill you in private, where the Americans will kill you in public,” Mohammd Saleh, a 39-year old building contractor in Baghdad, tells the  Washington Post  . This item and many others are linked at Antiwar.com . Also  Jacob Hornberger and  Jim Lobe have excellent pieces on the history of US dealings with

Interesting price chart from  CNN :   

Lew Rockwell’s book— Speaking of Liberty —is eliciting very flattering commentary from readers of all sorts—and it occurs to us that these comments would be very useful in promoting the book. Some of these comments, then, are printed below. But so that Mises.org is not said to be guilty of puffery, the comment section of this blog is working so

If you like it, please take it (made by Chad Parish on the staff here). The code (without spaces) is: < a href=”http://mises.org” target=”_blank” > < img src=”/sites/default/files/banner_rotator.gif” width=”468” height=”60” border=”0” > < /a

Here is a great story (from The Economist) about entrepreneurial risk, Steve Jobs, the rivalry between Jobs and Eisner, and Jobs’ decision to divorce Pixar from Disney. An excerpt: “Their reason is Pixar’s pool of talent, starting with John Lasseter, a former Disney animator. Mr Jobs’s experience of dealing with computer programmers, says a media

Former Marxist Guerilla, Now Big-Time Bogota Capitalist Developer (NYT). “Building peace is much harder than making war.”