Tim Worstall

Just a little note on how events can be described, the way in which attitudes can be changed by the language employed.

But Shell has in recent years been selling off much of its solar business while its rival oil group BP - under new chief executive, Tony Hayward - has also talked about selling part […]

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The B.
Obligatory Olivier fo St George’s Day. Also, praise where praise is due, getting aviation taxation right.

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At The Business.
French holidays, the Engineers’ Guide to Cats and well, there’s another one that might come up in a little bit.

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Well, yes, it would be interesting to find it here first….
But this calculation isn’t as bleak as you might think:

The chances of finding intelligent alien beings on other Earth-like planets are tiny new research has concluded.
The likelihood were are not alone and intelligent life has evolved is just 0.01 per cent on each suitable planet […]

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Here.
Gets some good cracks in but shows alarming signs of both intelligence and self-knowledge, so easily distinguishable from the original.

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Hi, we thought you might be interested in checking out these interviews with Richard Geer and Robert Thurman … In a new XXXXXX interview, Richard Geer shares thoughts on autonomy and religious freedom for Tibet.

Umm, you mean Richad Gere?
Not the most appealing or incentivising of emails….

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The Bearded Wonder announces that he’s emigrating to Mars:
In the years to come, we’ll be sending up a series of spaceships carrying (along with the supplies and tools needed to build the new colony) what eventually will be hundreds of Mars colonists, or Virgle Pioneers — myself among them.
Sadly, this joke expires at 12 noon […]

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Or should it be Dick Murphy?

Unlike the TPA, the TJN works in the real world. We talk to real politicians, from the Conservatives, Lib Dems and across the Labour perspective. We do not deal outside the limits of credibility. But facing real issues makes it so much harder to get coverage.
But I’ll trade fewer press […]

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I must say this is an excellent phrase:

All powerful aspirants to 24/7 silverback jobs do it at the expense of their family.

Quite excellent.
However, it does rather make a mockery of those claims that women are unfairly done by in the system in that they don’t get their "fair share" of those 24/ silverback jobs. We […]

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The use of lotteries to award school places has been criticised as it emerged the first random selection scheme resulted in fewer children getting places at their preferred secondary this year.

Sigh.
That, of course, is the point, For some of those children might be the evil spawn of the middle class, attempting to choose the education […]

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Shite.
Whatever this browser is doing(this is a post from the laptop) it insists on zooming in and out and it will not show me the url line.
Sigh, money wasted once again. The hardware seems fine.
Bleedin awful software.
Update. On reflection that’s all a bit harsh. There may or may not be anything wrong with the […]

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Here.

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Peter Hain has made history: his is the first British ministerial scalp to have been claimed by a blogger. Kudos, as the Americans say, to Guido Fawkes, who first sighted his tomahawk at the Hain campaign 12 months ago when he posted Hain’s campaign strategy.

Dan Hannan: Telegraph comment pages.

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Gordon Brown and Tony Blair have been ordered by the information watchdog to disclose details of their expenses in a move which could lead to nearly all MPs’ spending broken down for publication.
These are test cases: as we know this information is not routinely released, but someone has asked under an FoI request, for the […]

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Naughty boy Willem, naughty boy:

P.S. For those who have noticed, I am indeed trying out ‘yo’ as a replacement for he/she/it, him, her, and ‘yo’s’ for his/her/its.  It’s the only hope for George W. Bush to leave a positive legacy in any area of life.

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So, erm, did Donald Fagen ever go back to his old school?
Has he gone back to Annandale before California tumbles into the sea?

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Only a fifth of doctors believe that a national electronic system for storing patients’ records will be secure, a poll for The Times has shown.
More than three quarters are either “not confident” that data will be safe or “very worried” that data will leak once the £20 billion National Programme for IT (NPfIT) is running. […]

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Lightning strike on the phone lines again. No broadband, on GPRS. So I’ll have to concentrate on "work" rather than fun.

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So they lose more data:

Miss Kelly was informed about the latest data loss - which experts say could expose millions to the threat of identity fraud - on Nov 28.
Yet she admitted the fiasco only last night, on the eve of MPs’ Christmas break.

Amazing that, isn’t it? The timing of the admission? Perhaps they don’t […]

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Speaking of embarrassments, the Spice Girls have managed to imbue their long-awaited comeback with all the glamour and class of a hurried crap in a service station toilet by whoring themselves out to Tesco. The first instalment, in which the Girl Power quartet try to hide from each other while shopping for presents, represents a […]

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