Tim Worstall

This is interesting: Pakistan wicketkeeper Zulqarnain Haider seeking asylum in Britain after fleeing Dubai Pakistan wicketkeeper Zulqarnain Haider plans to seek political asylum in Britain after fleeing the team amid alleged threats for defying a match-fixing conspiracy. I’m not entirely sure that the political asylum rules are quite flexible enough to protect someone who defied [...]

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In a highly critical report, the Public Accounts Committee warned that the Government and rail industry would fail to provide the extra seats needed to keep up with soaring demand for rail travel. OK. We’ve a system with huge fixed costs working at close to (and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear, at [...]

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Government ministers also benefit from their own special tax loopholes, including reliefs when using official chauffeur-driven cars and using some grace-and-favour homes. Enjoyable though it would be to see the Boy Dave paying income tax on the implicit rent of Number 10 and Chequers, it won’t happen. (Chequers for the obvious reason that it’s actually [...]

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Crown Prince Rupprecht of Bavaria: The following year he told King George V at a lunch in London that he considered the Nazi leader to be insane. A rather better response from the Jacobite Pretender than the Edward VIII we actually got. Not all royals are useless either: The couple had three children: two daughters [...]

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Two headlines: Weather forecasts should include Australian style updates on water shortages Weather forecasts should include reports on the state of local rivers and reservoirs, conservationists have suggested, as a way of making people save water. Fortnight of rain to fall in 24 hours Two weeks’ worth of rain will fall in 24 hours from [...]

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El Reg. Yet more on rare earths.

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Perhaps not: Let’s hope this coming winter is less of a trial than the last; its impact – the coldest in 30 years – is only now being realised, with a 10% increase in the local birth-rate during September and October. My siblings were born in Oct and Dec. Myself, in March….in Devon. Was summer [...]

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Why not start shouting that these long term unemployed who will be forced to work do something like Roosevelt’s WPA? And, given what you’re all already shouting about, why not make it a Green WPA? After all, you keep telling us that every house in the country needs lagging and insulating. The government’s seemingly suggesting [...]

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Large swaths of southern England will become off limits to housing benefit recipients in a little more than a decade because of the government’s proposed plans to cut welfare bills – triggering a huge migration of the poor to the north – according to a study by housing experts. The work, by the Chartered Institute [...]

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A study of 900 primary school pupils in Norway found that fat children ate healthy foods – such as fruit, vegetables, fish, and brown bread, as well as low-calorie cheese and yoghurt – more frequently than their normal-weight peers. The research suggested that a good diet without exercise would not be enough to prevent weight [...]

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This book looks at the ways in which The Matrix Trilogy adapts Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation, and in doing so creates its own distinctive philosophical position. Where previous work in the field has presented the trilogy as a simple ‘beginner’s guide’ to philosophy, this study offers a new methodology for inter-relating philosophy and film [...]

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You know, all these wonderful people beginning their screams about what Duncan Smith is going to force the long term unemployed to do? I wonder what the Labour Peer and one of the country’s pre-eminent labour economists might say about this? Ah, here he is from 2001: These ideas make one focus on the intense [...]

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The state here is offering a conditional offer of reduced benefits in the future as consideration for a current obligation to work without choice on projects that will be run by private contractors for profit with, no doubt the threefold aims of: a) Undermining market rates of pay for similar work; b) Providing profit opportunity [...]

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About Abu Hamza’s house being done up by the council: But a spokes-woman for the TaxPayers’ ­Alliance said: “Taxpayers will be ­incensed to hear that thousands are ­being spent on this hate preacher’s home while ordinary families struggle for cash. “It’s bad enough that the British ­public may be stuck with this venomous ­character for [...]

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Dr. Farley, the city’s health commissioner, exercises seven days a week, loves his vegetables and has never smoked a cigarette. He has barely a ripple of fat and has run 15 marathons over the past 34 years, His actions? He has urged what he calls curve shifting, an overhaul of human behavior toward healthier living. [...]

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We appear to have, purely through this blog, have now sold 1% of the entire printing. And three weeks to go yet before release! Woo Hoo!

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At the ASI. Increased productivity is the name of the game: but increasing the productivity of which tasks is the most important?

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(No, not from me). Yet at no point does Fry entertain the notion that women may not be seeking anonymous sexual encounters in public places because of fears for their own safety. Fry’s observation on the dearth of sexual adventuring among women takes no account of rape, sexual assault or any fear of sexual violence. [...]

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Several years ago, my friend Annie Maw was thrown from her horse, Lily, and was paralysed from the waist down. She spent the next nine months in the Duke of Cornwall spinal unit in Salisbury. Her medical care, she says, was faultless but she had two complaints. The TVs were positioned in such a way [...]

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“If we can’t deliver free drugs to poor people, I don’t think there is much else we can do in international health,” he said. Yes, it’s the planners and bureaucrats again. The drug companies are offering billions of doses, for free, of the drugs that cure/treat various tropical and poor world diseases. And yet those bureaucrats [...]

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