Tim Worstall

Umm, nationalist, socialist, elected, ex-army……what else?

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Defence charities have snubbed the News of the World by refusing to accept millions of pounds in donations in protest at the alleged hacking of dead soldiers’ families’ phones. Pecunia non olet. Actually, worse than fools. Some limbless squaddies will now not get their bionic limbs because the non-injured middle class twats who run the [...]

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Probation officers are spending three quarters of their time filling in forms rather than dealing directly with newly released prisoners, an official report published today has found. And this in the week that HMRC said it had run out of paper to send tax demands out…….

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What is Search Engine Optimisation? It’s the writing of a headline so that Google will pick it up. SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is a marketing technique for making a web page appear more frequently above others in a list of results from a search engine. Usually followed by a sub-head which repeats the terms [...]

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Boris Johnson has urged the Chancellor George Osborne to cut National Insurance to boost economic growth after official figures showed the economy stagnating. No, really, this is perfect Keynesian economics. Keynes himself even said so: I am converted to your proposal…for varying rates of contributions in good and bad times. (June 16, 1942). Keynes, Collected [...]

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Norwegian killer probably insane, his lawyer says There’s a certain obvious truth to the claim, too. “Your client claims he murdered 90 people because he’s one of the new Knights Templar?” “Correct M’Lud”. “I take it that “raving nutter” is not a medical diagnosis?” “Not normally M’Lud, no, however….”

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Here and here.

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Eh? What the US needs at this point is someone willing to advocate a return to the economic institutions that made America great – 90 per cent top marginal tax rates, strong trade unions, weak banks and imprisonment for malefactors of great wealth. There’s two things wrong with this idea. 1) It’s necessary to show [...]

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I think it’s serious. Thank goodness we’re going to build on the Green Belt, eh?

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The demise of statecraft goes hand in hand with the rise of neoliberalism, and its creed that whatever can be done by the private sector should. The political implications of that belief were best summed up by Ronald Reagan in his quip that the nine most terrifying words in the English language were: “I’m from [...]

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Hoo, boy, has this bloke got the wrong end of the stick: Today, internet dating has become more or less accepted as a way of forming relationships. There has been some criticism, but it has usually been of the functional and operational kind, regarding subscription costs or users providing false pictures or information. There has [...]

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GDP statistics benchmark “us” against other countries No, they don’t. We don’t report GDP as “UK GDP is 98.5% of French GDP” or any other such comparison. What we actually do is add up all of the market economic activity in the UK, adjust for government and foreign trade, then produce a number. There is [...]

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The biggest shake up in the planning system for 50 years will allow sprawling out of town developments on the green belt, campaigners have warned. About bloody time too. The green belt is nothing more than a subsidy to those who own land inside it. And yes, we ought to be digging out the structures [...]

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Can music lovers enjoy Wagner’s art in spite of his anti-Semitism? No. Nothing to do with the anti-semitism mind, it’s the “music”. Appalling, dreary stuff. No one who loved music could ernjoy it: Wagner is something to be endured.

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see more dog and puppy pictures

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Yer Wha? Means-testing — reducing benefits for wealthier Americans — isn’t equally bad, but it’s still poor policy. It’s true that Medicare expenses could be reduced by requiring high-income Americans to pay higher premiums, higher co-payments, etc. But why not simply raise taxes on high incomes instead? This would have the great virtue of not [...]

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I think this is rather cute really. Fourth, reform of the banking sector is needed to prevent finance “crowding out” the other sectors of the economy. For manufacturing to become relatively stronger, the City needs to become relatively weaker, but that won’t happen if the response to the financial crisis is pusillanimous. So, we’ve an [...]

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The warming of the Arctic is releasing toxic chemicals that had been trapped in the ice and cold water, scientists have discovered. The researchers warn that the amount of the poisons in the polar region is unknown and their release could “undermine global efforts to reduce environmental and human exposure to them”. The chemicals seeping [...]

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Thought this was interesting: WWF, which is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, makes about $500m a year from donations and corporate endorsements So the World Wildlife Fund gets $500 million a year in income. Difficult to really place an “enterprise value” on something which doesn’t avowedly make profits but that sort of turnover would [...]

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When Paraguayan president Fernando Lugo was treated in Brazil for lymphatic cancer, the world barely noticed. When Dilma Rousseff suffered a lymphoma in 2009, it did not prevent her from winning Brazil’s presidential election the next year. But Hugo Chávez‘s recent illness has caused turmoil both within Venezuela and abroad. Because the other two were [...]

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