My wife and I briefly visited China two years ago, as part of a cruise that started in Hong Kong and ended in Beijing. We spent a day in Shanghai and 4 days in Beijing. We had been to Hong Kong twice before and had been tremendously impressed by it. But we didn’t expect very much in mainland China. In fact, when the ship stopped in Seoul, Korea, I stocked up on American candy bars, thinking that we would have to live off them during our days in China. We were very pleasantly surprised by what we actually saw.

The Feketians continue to bombard us with their guru’s rehashed ‘real bills’ fallacy and now seem to think Murray Rothbard was some kind of frustrated gauleiter, as you can read here!

PS All you Gold-bug webmasters out there, please note that ‘real bills doctrine’ is just one more form of inflationism and so hardly in your best interests to promote so avidly!

In Iraq, much public support for the invasion was lost when American television vividly depicted life in Baghdad after its fall. American soldiers gleefully watched widespread acts of looting, vandalism, and sabotage of public and private property. They watched when the national museum of Iraq, which housed some of the finest treasures of the ancient world, was looted. All over the world the friends of the private property order were saddened by the spectacle of willful destruction.

The Economist magazine’s ranking of business schools lists, for the first time ever, a non-American institution at the top. The University of Navarre’s IESE Business School bumped Northwestern University from the number one ranking because of its particularly strong performance in the areas of opening new career opportunities and in starting salaries. (Note: Harvard and Penn were no longer in the top ten.)

The whole tenor of the Bush’s administration’s energy policy sounds creepier every day. Now we have Bush telling us that if we can avoid going “on a trip that’s not essential, that would be helpful.” This is his proposal on how “we can all pitch in.” As the New York Times points out, this is reversal from past administration statements. How far Bush is willing to take this will be determined by events.

In 1922, as the Weimar hyperinflation was raging all about him, Fritz Lang’s iconic film “Dr. Mabuse—der Spieler“ very much captured the Zeitgeist of those dreadful days.