Tim Worstall

If leaks to Dr Eoin Clarke’s website prove correct, That’s really not a source I would use myself. Trust me on this one.

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That’s about the heart of the story here. More than £50m of World Food Programme aid to feed the starving has ended up in the hands of a London-listed commodities trader run by billionaires, despite a pledge by the United Nations agency to buy food from “very poor farmers”. Glencore International, which buys up supplies [...]

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Seems they’re just as good with numbers over there as they are with numbers here.

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But now the annual slaughter, begun in 1967 after a local boy was bitten by an Eastern Diamondback rattlesnake (he survived), is to become “a humane event that celebrates these great native animals”. Snakes are to be borrowed from zoos, instead of hunted down, and, say organisers, the celebration will focus on “educating people about [...]

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Here, in all its glory, is a Telegraph editorial: The remarkable thing about the silk cape on show at the Victoria and Albert Museum from tomorrow is not that it took 80 people five years to make, or even that it is woven from the gossamer of 1.2 million golden orb spiders, which produce undyed [...]

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Let’s say £500,000 a year, a figure that includes bonuses, share options, pensions and benefits. Silly but brave, given that both his editor and his editor’s boss at GMG would take a pay cut under this scheme.

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Some on the left inhabit a fantasy utopia. I’m shocked, shocked I tell you.

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Now THAT’S a concealed weapon! Inmate ‘hides ten-inch revolver in rectum’… but at least it was unloaded Michael Leon Ward, 22, of Georgia, was arrested after he was found speeding in North Carolina. Police later discovered a gun in his cell that they believe was smuggled in the man’s rear. Police discovered the .38-cabibre revolver [...]

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Or buying a cup of tea at a motorway service station. (Unit price, what? Maybe 2p? Sale price? £2.75. I’m a rubbish capitalist and can’t do the sums but isn’t that something like about 20,000% profit?) No, that’s not profit, no. There’s this little thing called “overheads” that have to be paid. You know, trivial [...]

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Hands off British film, Mr Cameron A Guardian headline I thoroughly agree with. Of course the Prime Minister should have nothing to do with film. No politician should have anything to do with it. Which of course means that there will be no taxpayers’ money either. Sink or swim on your own luvvies. And the [...]

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One diplomat told The Daily Telegraph: “The BBC has to make amends, particularly to assuage the hurt sentiment of a very large number of people. “We understand the free press – they are welcome to explain and to challenge as long as it is fair and above the belt. Can this pass as acceptable journalism? [...]

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The world of politics and the relationship betweewn newspaper columnists and the politicial process were overturned this morning. In the normally staid British world, where all players on all sides are likely to have attended the same schools, the same universities, and at times shared bodily fluids, there are certain rules about how columnists should [...]

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This week Byrne was gifted the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) report, a hard-headed impact assessment of tax and benefit changes that found children hit hardest and non-working lone parents losing £2,000 a year. Half a million families with children under 5 will fall into absolute (not relative) poverty, despite all Cameron’s mendacious “social mobility” [...]

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6 Jan 2012:Editorial: Despite these straitened times an Oxford-based campaign wants volunteers to donate 10% of their earnings And what earnings do volunteers have pray?

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It did happen but it wasn’t the newspapers running it.

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David Hockney appointed Order of Merit member David Hockney, John Howard, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and Sir Tom Stoppard among new memebers to be appointed by the Queen, Buckingham Palace announced today. Err, no. The article itself has it right. Hockney has been an internationally renowned painter since he burst on to the scene in the [...]

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Whale sperm is not the cause of the sea’s saltiness, despite what you may have heard.

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Army foils coup attempt on tiny island of Guinea-Bissau Err, Guinea-Bissau ain’t an island folks. Given recent history a failed coup there is hardly news (umm, well, maybe it’s the failure that makes it so?) but to call it an island is pure ignorance. Sure, it has islands as part of it, true, but then [...]

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Richard Gott*, writing in the Guardian this week, accepted that socilaism is a “source of systemic instability, unfettered misery and industrial-scale oppression” but blamed the problem on a small number of rogue leaders. The task, it seems, is to find the few rotten apples that somehow manage to bring an entire system into disrepute. The [...]

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To reinforce British diplomats’ wilful blindness, the Foreign Office has closed half a dozen embassies in Latin America in recent years, to minimise the danger of receiving subversive opinions from foreign capitals. All part of Britain’s national decline. Erm, isn’t that in fact the flip side of the European Diplomatic Service? Replacement of individual country [...]

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