Tim Worstall

Jeebus.

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How did this spaz ever get to be chairman of the FSA? “I think some of it is socially useless activity,” he said, referring to the complex financial instruments that have largely been blamed for triggering the biggest global financial crisis in decades. I think Big Brother on TV is socially useless but that doesn’t [...]

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A both odd and endearing figure. It’s worth reading “A Blueprint for Survival” (it’s out there on the net if you cannot find a paperback version). Yes, lots of it is wrong but it was one of the first places (outside of the academic literature like Pigou etc) where we see the essential point: that [...]

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D’ye think it might? The day after his death? The two phrases he would have desperately hoped would not be his epitaph? 1. ted kennedy 2. mary jo kopechne 3. chappaquiddick 4. mass lottery 5. ronnie spector

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1. ted kennedy 2. edward kennedy 3. senator kennedy 4. chappaquiddick 5. mary jo kopechne Had to happen, eh?

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“I’ve not been to a same sex civil wedding before but it certainly ended with a bang bigger than the average weddings.” Wedding guest after the bride at a wedding used her stiletto to attack the bouncer.

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Hey, lefties, boycott away. You are, after all, only making your preferences known by the way that you spend your money. You know, that market shtick thing, the thing which we froth-mouthed righties insist we should all enjoy all the time. Maybe you’d like to return the favour sometime? You know, let us make our [...]

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A teenager who needs a liver transplant because of his binge drinking left his hospital bed to go to the pub across the road……Staff at the Moate Inn said that Mr Anderson had been wearing hospital gown and slippers, and had intravenous drip needles in his arms. Err, what can one say?

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The Midlands might be undergoing something of a minor cultural renaissance – with Sven-Goran Eriksson taking over at Notts County, three local teams in the Premier League and even the Coventry band the Specials touring again to loud acclaim. But for local people, it seems that this is not enough to command their loyalty. Given [...]

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The statistics from Moneyfacts show that the average two-year fixed rate mortgage climbed to 5.18 per cent while swap rates – which lenders use to help price their fixed rate mortgages – stood at 2.04 per cent on Tuesday. It brings the margin between the cost of bank lending and average fixed rates to 3.14 [...]

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Sexy shop assistants a turn-off An awkward two ton prehistoric beast that grew to the size of a small car had a secret weapon – a spiked club tail that it could use like a medieval mace to kill predators. Telegraph front page online.

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We’re ruled by incompetents: People selling adult videos, including pornography, to children are to escape prosecution after the discovery of a Whitehall blunder that means that the 1984 law regulating the video industry was never enacted. The disclosure that for 25 years the Act governing the classification and sale of videos, video games and now [...]

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But what does it matter to those who died what Stalinism developed into? What does it matter to the dead and their families whether they were starved for being kulaks, shot for writing “nationalist” literature, thus impeding inevitable progress to socialist utopia, or killed for being Slavs and resisting the Nazis, thus making way for [...]

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Ambrose E-P tells us that China is going to restrict its exports of rare earth metals. A draft report by China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has called for a total ban on foreign shipments of terbium, dysprosium, yttrium, thulium, and lutetium. Other metals such as neodymium, europium, cerium, and lanthanum will be restricted [...]

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Professor Tim Lang is one of our own government’s advisors on food security. Here’s what he had to say about Britons farming parts of the Ukraine. “I feel sorry for Ukraine, here it is, it was colonised by the Russians, it was the grain basket for many, many years, it went downhill and now it [...]

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Here.

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Jeez (from WSJ front page). Critics say Goldman Sachs gives key trading tips only to its own traders and favored clients, hurting others who aren’t given the opportunity to profit from the information. Aren’t Goldman Sachs just such complete bastards? You know, using proprietary information in a proprietory manner?

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JANET STREET-PORTER: A glass ceiling? It’s reinforced b****y concrete! So says a woman who has risen to the very tippy toppy of our society without any noticeable talent or skill…. Although, to be fair, she did shag for a time one of Sigue Sigue Sputnik which has to count for something or other. Not much, [...]

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Staff at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission have been advised to use ‘miserable day’ instead of ‘black day’. The Commission claims that certain words carry a ‘hierarchical valuation of skin colour’. Look, it’s one thing to be so hopelessly PC as to invite the ridicule these people are going to get. It’s quite another [...]

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The Mahdi has just discovered that humans are collaborative, social beings. Heigh ho…. So after this trembling step in the right direction she manages to fall over, flat on her face: Are human beings self-interested creatures or are they collaborative? The right’s argument for market capitalism is rooted in the former but the research on [...]

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