Tim Worstall

Following the defeat of Egypt and other Arab armies by Israel in the 1967 war, Nasserism, a k a Arab nationalism, the abiding ideology of the day, was demolished.
Err, it was “pan-Arab nationalism” that was defeated. The idea that all Arabs should be brothers together, rather than fighting for their own national interests.

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On how bureaucracies just keep on operating.
I’ve heard (but cannot prove) that the US Post Office was delivering across the lines until 1863…..

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But 10,000 years of crooks who innovate so that they could continue to steal more efficiently eventually gave rise to what we call modern capitalism…
Hey, works for me.

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No one who opposed John Major claimed he was lying when he said that taking the pound out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism was in Britain’s best interests. We confined ourselves to the truthful charge that he had made a monumental policy blunder.
Nick Cohen.
We need a bit of clarification of that. The policy error was [...]

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So says The Guardian:
It seems we have all been guilty of defaming Neanderthal man. Research by a team based at the University of Bristol suggests that, far from being a lumbering, witless no-hoper, he was capable, 50,000 years ago, of producing forms of cosmetic adornment and even of primitive jewellery.
Primitive jewelry and odd and basic [...]

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To an extent he’s right, he over eggs it more than a tad but yes, the near genocide of the Native Americans was indeed an appalling chapter in history.
But to see it purely as a crime that “we”, the white folks, committed upon “they” the brown folks, is hugely too simplistic. Or at least, to [...]

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Entirely predictable and tedious piece at CiF saying that we really shouldn’t do that. Gotcha line:
The very definition of “genocide” was broadened by local legislation in this part of the world to include wrongful deportation, imprisonment or attempts to rid society of a certain class, thereby “legally” placing communist oppression in the same category as [...]

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People in industrialised nations are now 4in taller on average than in 1860.
Good, innit?

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see more Epic Fails

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What would have happened if….is always interesting. Yes, I too would like to know this one:
I’d like to know where Russia would be today if Kerensky had hanged Lenin and Trotsky.

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Shame about the facts:
On Monday, Berliners knocked down a wall of Styrofoam “dominoes” – more fanciful than foreboding – to commemorate the moment when East Germans began hammering their way to freedom.
The hammering was of course on the West Berlin side of the wall, not the East. Even after [...]

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Say it Brother! Tell ‘em the Truth!
The people in the crowd weren’t yelling or demanding anything. They weren’t waiting for anything to happen. They were present from sheer glee at being alive in this place at this time. They were there to experience the opposite of the existential anguish which has been the twentieth century’s [...]

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In Moby Dick, Herman Melville included a drinks list for a whaling voyage that included “550 ankers of Geneva (gin) and 10,800 barrels of beer”.
Taking a barrel to be 9 gallons that’s nearly 400 tonnes of beer.
The Essex (the ship that Melville used as his real life starting point for Moby Dick) weighed 238 [...]

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So we see a little more spin on that Mussolini story:
History remembers Benito Mussolini as a founder member of the original Axis of Evil, the Italian dictator who ruled his country with fear and forged a disastrous alliance with Nazi Germany. But a previously unknown area of Il Duce’s CV has come to light: his [...]

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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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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 the social brain [...]

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Mogg senior:
The Attorney-General had a salary of £7,000, plus fees that had amounted to £8,183 in the previous year. Judges had a salary of £5,000 a year, equal to the Prime Minister, the four Lords of Appeal had £6,000. More surprisingly bishops were very handsomely paid and archbishops were getting the [...]

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Nosemonkey nailed it:
Cheers for the messages of support. London’s grateful. And we’re going to keep our heads. Stiff upper lip and all that – wouldn’t do to get all emotional. Hardly British – and if we stop being British about it, the bastards have won. So we’ll have a few beers, make as many sick [...]

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Thirty, forty years ago, this (I assume) was a reasonably common view:
Commenting privately on the landmark 1973 Supreme Court ruling Roe vs Wade, which decriminalised abortion in the US, the then-president said he worried that access to a legal abortion could lead to “permissiveness” because “it breaks the family” but thought them justified in certain [...]

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As you know, I’ve penned the odd piece for the Times. I’m not the first of the family to appear in that august organ though.

Not sure of the date (1929 I’m told), but that’s Grandpa before he’d met Grandma. This was one of his 8 crashes…..
Not sure quite why, but a crash on the Harrow [...]

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