Tim Worstall

Project Acumen is yet another investigation into trafficking into the sex industry. It’s what led to the stories of there being 12,000 trafficked women last week. Seems that there are some problems with these numbers. Like, y’know, they’re bollocks? ….then you’re trafficked. Because that’s what the protocol says. Now it doesn’t say that in Westminster [...]

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Our intrepid campaigner against tax avoidance: you know, working the tax laws to your own benefit? Lovely series of articles in which Ritchie seems to be advocating: Turn your nanny into a personal services company and save £2, 530 a year. Use the stakeholder pension to save up to 20% of income that you won’t [...]

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On the subject of mountaintop removal mining: For their part, instead of preaching financial ruin, the coal companies need to develop ways to mine this coal without blasting the tops off mountains and fouling the waters below. Thing is, we know how to do that. It’s called underground mining. And it kills people. So, whadda [...]

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The Venezuelan Observatory of Violence, a nongovernmental organization, created after the Chavez government stopped publishing murder rates around 2003, is considered to have the most reliable data on crime and violence. When Chavez took office in 1999 there were 4,550 homicides, while last year there were at least 16,000 homicides, the group said.said that in [...]

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But the fact that Kennedy has not dealt with the problems that so bedeviled his time in charge of the party There are other ways of putting it of course.

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At the ASI. On Goodhart’s Law.

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I honestly can’t remember meeting a more gentle, modest and courteous man. Or laughing so much. For a comedian it’s the second sentence that is important. But that Ken Dodd also merits the first sentence is, in he larger sheme of things, perhaps more important.

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The American blogosphere does throw up some oddities. Pammycakes for example.

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This is the second time in a couple of weeks that the Telegraph has used a photo of my flat to illustrate an article on house prices. Do they know something I don’t?

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Muslims Have Split Views of Islamic Center Because the idea that 1.5 billion people have varying views is news, right?

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Jeepers: Green is a brilliantly successful British entrepreneur, but his family tax arrangements are very complicated and he would not get elected to the kind of Tory club to which David Cameron once belonged. Err, yes, OK, I think that it’s probably true that the Bullingdon Club probably wouldn’t elect some Jew in the rag [...]

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It’s quite lovely to see Johann meeting some numbers he doesn’t understand. Perhaps we shouldn’t be too hard on him for of course we all do this. Stray off the reservation of our own knowledge base and end up misunderstanding the technicalities of what the numbers mean. Not note or even realise that there are [...]

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In the current election you’[ve got a choice between someone born in Wales and someone born in London to be your new PM. So why the fuss over the idea that the Head of State wasn’t born in Oz? You seem happy enough with the idea that you’ve got to import Brits to rule over [...]

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A huge garbage patch of floating plastic in the North Atlantic Ocean has been documented by scientists for the first time. Buy one of those oil skimming ships, adapt it to recover solids instead of just liquids, and then run it, repeatedlty, through these gyres where such plastic accumulates.

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One of those numbers that we don’t really know all that much about is the number of Teh Gays there are. No one has actually gone around everyone in the country and asked how they prefer to have their gonads fondled: Tab A to Slot A, Tab to Tab or Slot to Slot. So we [...]

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Oooooh, horrors! Despite receiving billions of pounds in taxpayer support during the credit crisis, high street lenders are refusing to pass on the full benefit of historically low interest rates to customers, figures show. Instead, they have used the cheap cost of borrowing to drastically increase their profit margins. Bastard Bankers! Hang them! Hang them! [...]

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It’s for a deodorant which is a different meaning to the one I’m used to.

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Essential attributes • An undergraduate degree of 2:1 or above • Experience of writing, including features and interviewing • Excellent spelling and grammar • Experience of subbing • Experience of online journalism • Ability to write in a descriptive but concise style • A solid knowledge of British politics • Ability to grasp concepts quickly [...]

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Most people operate under the golden mean, defined by Aristotle as “you can take the piss, but you can’t take the piss too much.”

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Looks like we’ve got the numpties writing the reports again: UP to 12,000 women have been smuggled into Britain and forced to work as prostitutes earning hundreds of millions of pounds for organised crime gangs, reveals a new study. Sigh. Being smuggled into the country is one thing. Working in the sex trade is another. [...]

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