Tim Worstall

Geoffrey Chaucer hath a blogge but it’s been rather in abeyance. It is now back with an excellent posting. Men who glare at stoats. Reminds me of the stunningly good piece, serpents on a shippe (I think that was the title). Enjoy in full, no extracts.

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The Times disclosed in April that a sculpture bought by the Royal Festival Hall from the trust had been made by Colin Pitchfork, who was serving life for killing two teenage girls. The centre withdrew the item, publicly apologised and said that it would “have a conversation with the Koestler Trust about future policy”. Kath [...]

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Leading libertarian Tim Worstall That’s how I’m described over at Touchstone, a blog by the TUC. I guess it’s a measure of quite how wide the ideological gap is: perhaps even the comprehension gap. That I, a classical liberal, should be described as a libertarian. For the truth is that I sign up to all [...]

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Gosh, wouldn’t the world be such a better place if those clever and selfless people who man the bureaucracy simply told us all what we may and may not do? Oh, some would worry and bleat about those outmoded concepts of individual freedom and liberty but they can be ignored: consigned to the dustbin of [...]

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NHS whistleblower ‘sacked for revealing dumped x-ray scans’ The next time you decide to dump X-ray scans, could you dump them my way please? A nice little furnace disguised as a bonfire and I can smelt the silver out of those…..if you’ve a few hundred gallons of the developing fluid even better.

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Oh yeah? Mrs Elliott, 42, had her details logged on the police national computer after she was wrongly accused by her estranged husband of signing his name on the form. She was arrested but cleared within 24 hours, and checks at the school found no evidence of wrongdoing. However, officers kept details of her arrest [...]

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Taking on Richard Murphy’s latest silliness at Comment is Free. Murphy pops up in comments with an amusing little misunderstanding of the facts.

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Sorry – but until we get rid of consumerism this just won’t happen When Cameron calls for a serious tax on advertising, the end of tax relief on advertising and restrictions on the power of the media to limit such absurd publications as the FT’s How to Spend It you’re just living in cloud cuckoo [...]

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Trying to troll around through the ONS statistics site is such a pain in the bum that I’m not even going to try. However, Ritchie highlights this report. The important graph is Figure 1. The wage share held its post-war level at between 58–60 per cent until the early 1970s and then rose to a [...]

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The pre-Victorian agony aunts and uncles could be surprisingly liberal and outspoken. Dunton once advised a woman fearing a lonely old age to get herself down to the docks when the fleet was in and hook a sex-starved sailor. Nothing simpler.

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Fancy that: The engineers, from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers (IMechE), said the government should invest in geo-engineering technologies that would either bounce sunlight back into space or soak up CO2 in the atmosphere. A real surprise, no? Mechanical engineers suggest that mechanical engineers are the solution to a problem.

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Ah, those blokes in Australia who do the Telegraph’s subbing over the internet: It is a subject that would make most parents, teenagers and teachers blush, but officials in Spain are tackling masturbation hands on, Must be fun to be 12,000 miles from the people who read what you write. Update: Well, maybe it’s not [...]

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OK, so he’s jailed: Trevor Baines, a business tycoon ranked on the Rich List alongside Eric Clapton and Phil Collins, has been jailed for laundering ”dirty money” in a multimillion-dollar Wall Street share scam. That’s not the bit that interested me. It was this name for the court on the Isle of Man: He was [...]

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Maddy Bunting again. The bit I’m now stalling on is the windows. Our Edwardian or Victorian forebears fell in love with glass (don’t get me started on the Georgians, who were even worse, but that is probably a more elitist problem today), and the acres of glass bay windows mean that our bills are paying [...]

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It was astonishing intellectual bravado – and utterly duplicitous. David Cameron has taken 15 years of thinking on the left – Naomi Klein, Not worth reading past the point that someone claims that whatever it is that Naomi Klein does is thinking really…..

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A book about sustainability and how not to screw the ecosystem. Available only in hardback edition. No one denies that development is essential for poorer nations. But in the advanced economies there is mounting evidence that ever-increasing consumption adds little to human happiness and may even impede it. More urgently, it is now clear that [...]

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MW2, on the other hand, ditches all that wussy tension and plot stuff, and just turns the explosions up to eleven. It’s Red Dawn joyfully skullfucking 300 during the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now, with Slipknot handling the tunes. Apparently that’s how a recommendation goes these days.

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A FORMER MEP who fiddled a whopping �39,000 in expenses was jailed for two years today. About right don’t you think? This bit I hadn’t known: Wise, of Leighton Buzzard, Beds, who left Ukip after the scandal, originally denied false accounting between October 14 and November 16 2004. But during his trial, and just before [...]

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Liz Jones in the Mail: But most of all I hate women who use their breasts to get ahead. You know the sort: they stand, arms crossed supportively below their bosoms, a low-cut dress revealing a cleavage that, to my mind, resembles buttocks. Err, yes, that’s actually rather the point. The existence of breasts (which [...]

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The Government is considering fresh tax breaks for Britain’s nuclear power industry that could smooth the way for the construction of a new generation of UK reactors, The Times has learnt. Whitehall insiders have told The Times that officials at the Department for Energy and Climate Change have been studying the possibility of an exemption [...]

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