What a difference a decade can make. Had Ridley Scott’s film Kingdom of Heaven — which portrays the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem in the 12th century between the second and third crusade — come out ten years ago, the film and its message would have looked very different and far less plausible than it looks now. The Scott film leaves you with a
Everyone knows the rule: drink no liquor before noon. How insufferable such advice is! It has caused morning drinkers to hide their habits, deny them when confronted, and otherwise feel like they are doing something wrong or immoral or socially intolerable, a combination which leads to other forms of pathology. It is time for them to stand up and
You know why so many men walk around with sloppy hair? We hate haircuts. You have to drive there to get one, which represents decline, because if you know about Figaro from Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” the barber came to your home (but then he also pulled out your teeth and passed on furtive notes arranging encounters of various sort, etc.). In
There’s a sense these days that anyone would favor a pie over a cake, and I think I know why. Pies don’t tempt household cooks to scrimp on ingredients. That’s why pies generally taste better. If it’s apples, it’s apples, and most people don’t think a half a cup of sugar in something is “too much.” So it is for lemon and blueberry and a host of
When Murray N. Rothbard (born 1926) died on January 7, 1995, ten years ago this day, he merited a headlined obituary in the New York Times , and many other tributes in that first sad and shocking week. Later a book appeared, and also special issues of journals and tributes of every sort. His memorial service in New York brought together people who
Pundits and bloggers are addicted to decrying the supposed cell-phone addiction of Americans. ( 1 , 2 , 3 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 , and 11 ). Calls for government to do something about it can’t be far behind, especially considering the other claims that cell phones give us tumors, gut our memories, and jackhammer our brains. There are even
A lesser known episode of “The Jetsons” speaks directly to our current plight: the relentless but eternally floundering attempt to militarize a bourgeois society that is more interested in consumption and leisure than serving a mythical national ethos. Let’s first review the setting. The Jetsons is a cartoon made by Hanna-Barbera from 1962–1963
In a classic case of News of the Weird, President Bush gave a press conference the other day to announce yet another central plan to deal with yet another disaster — this time an impending disaster, or so he claimed. It seems that some birds are catching a flu called Avian Influenza or, more commonly, the bird flu. It causes ruffled feathers and
A death in the family is always hard, but three in three weeks is especially difficult for children, even though it only involved pets. First it was the green tree frog discovered at the local car repair shop and taken home to be cared for. “Sticky” lived two months, long enough for the kids to become very attached. One day we found him dead in
Everyone has heard something described as a Rube Goldberg machine, and most of us know what this means: some crazy convoluted way of accomplishing a task that would otherwise be quite simple. That’s how Webster’s defines it. The phase most often applies to overly complicated software but it was also applied to the Clinton health care plan and
What is the Mises Institute?
The Mises Institute is a non-profit organization that exists to promote teaching and research in the Austrian School of economics, individual freedom, honest history, and international peace, in the tradition of Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard.
Non-political, non-partisan, and non-PC, we advocate a radical shift in the intellectual climate, away from statism and toward a private property order. We believe that our foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sellout, and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural, and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.