Tim Worstall

Sooo, apparently, getting married in one of Saddam’s old palaces does in fact increase fertility. Interesting who you meet through blogging, eh?  

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At the GI. Viewing trade restrictions through the competition lens.

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At the B. Supermarkets can be so nasty, can’t they? And, is Gordo ignorant or simply stupid?

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Luton causes atheism. Odd really, because you’d think a vision of a suburban hell would rather increase belief in a deity or two if only to avoid all eternity there.

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As Gordon Brown moves to consolidate the cannabis trade further under the control of organized crime,….

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The Governor who debriefed us told us that he had been responsible for Jeffrey Archer while he was at the Bay. "Quite the most obnoxious prisoner I have ever dealt with" he said "Kept trying to tell me how to do my job".

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Mother speaks out: “What are these novels where nothing ever happens?” she says. “This individual, who alas! came out of my tummy, is a liar, an impostor, a parasite and especially, especially, a little upstart ready to do anything for fortune and fame,” Mrs Ceccaldi, 83, writes in L’Innocente, an autobiography. The onslaught on the [...]

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A controversial plan to increase pay rates for prisoners while ministers are being deluged by the row over the 10p tax rate abolition was scrapped yesterday on the direct orders of Gordon Brown. The Prime Minister intervened to overrule the Prison Service Management Board after learning that it had given the go-ahead to increasing the [...]

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Bloody right: The moral and practical case for controlling a market that has defied suppression for a third of a century is overwhelming. Drugs such as cannabis, cocaine and heroin must somehow be distributed within the ambit of legal and medical regulation, as they were to an extent before 1971 and are slowly being elsewhere. [...]

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Yes, I know it’s a loan phrase into English from some Johnny Foreigner lingo: Any handouts came from a spirit of noblesse oblige, a kind of enlightened paternalism, rather than from any sense of obligation or entitlement. But reallly….what in hell does she think the noblesse bit means if not a sense of obligation?

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I hear he”s doing much better now: The fact that Laidlaw, a generous philanthropist, has recently recovered from prostrate cancer and a heart attack only makes his sexual zeal all the more admirable. Knocked him flat that illness did, good to see he’s recovering.

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I, like many others, have wondered whether we could just get shot of this whole Olympics thing. In 1970 Denver was awarded the 1976 Winter Olympics. By 1972 the estimated costs had trebled (a smaller increase than we have already seen for 2012). As the US is a democracy, the people of Denver were allowed [...]

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Which brings us to Boris Johnson. It is perhaps a kindness to some of you, who remember his genial outings on this page over many years, to advise that those of a sensitive disposition, who harbour affection for the Conservative candidate, might do better to switch off now. Mr Johnson is not a politician. He [...]

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Jeff Randall discovers the principal/agent problem in banking. But here’s the rub: Hoare & Co is no ordinary bank. It is wholly owned by Hoare family members and is financed entirely by them on an unlimited liability basis. They are on the hook for every penny, which helps to explain the bank’s statement: "We have [...]

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A Conservative MP claimed yesterday that thousands of under-age children, including his own daughter, were giving false information in order to sign up to social networking sites. Shocker, isn’t it? Next they’ll be telling us that kids try to buy tabs and booze. One possible response to the claim is, so, Mr. Whittingdale, why did [...]

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Is Sir Salman: "It’s strange, given that I’ve been married four times, but I actually don’t think marriage is necessary," Sir Salman told the writer Kathy Lette in an interview for Elle magazine. "Girls like it, especially if they’ve never been married before – it’s the dress. Girls want a wedding, they don’t want a [...]

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By this talk of falling house prices in general. Perhaps that’s too strong: I can’t see that any of the various indexes give us an accurate picture. UK house prices are now falling year-on-year for the first time in more than a decade, the Nationwide Building Society warned today. We’ve all seen the stories that [...]

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The B. It ain’t privatisation George and yes, they’ve got oodles, but not the oodles and oodles necessary to actually be important.

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You know, this makes so much damn sense it’s amazing that no one thought of doing this before. If we think (as many do) that the actinides and  above become stable near or around element 120, then instead of sweating buckets trying to make them, why not go and look and see if there are [...]

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