California voters say a hefty NO to higher taxes and other ingenious schemes designed to prop up its bloated public sector. Excellent. The other day I heard a UK trade union official talk sensibly about a package of recommended shorter hours and pay-cuts for a few months to help a car […]
I had an interesting chat today with a former FCO colleague about the slow evolution of FCO attitudes to expenses, which no doubt has echoes in much of the rest of government. When I joined the FCO we diplomats on foreign postings had various allowances, calculated laboriously to try to […]
Here (h/t Instapundit) is an analysis of why US trains are slower now than they were decades ago: The aforementioned Montreal Limited, for example, circa 1942, would pull out of New York’s Grand Central Station at 11:15 p.m., arriving at Montreal’s (now defunct) Windsor Station at 8:25 a.m., a little […]
The most persuasive argument for me against capital punishment is the risk of the state executing a person quite innocent of the charges laid against her/him. Surely too ghastly to contemplate, even if that means we all have to live with greater risk of being murdered: we have to hope […]
The Fraud Act 2006 contains a number of excellent provisions which help us in the current case: (a) section 2 (fraud by false representation) (b) section 3 (fraud by failing to disclose information), and (c) section 4 (fraud by abuse of position) The abuse of expenses by sundry Cabinet Ministers […]
Some titles and some writers draw you to read the texts concerned, as moths mesmerised by the bright flame flit to their doom. Who is going to walk past Goodbye to the suburban porn star by Mark Steyn? Not, methinks, you. If only for his gallop through the Carry On films: Carry On Nurse, […]
This story of awesome feline squalour (plus one dog) reminded me of Nick Lowe’s song Marie Provost: She was a winner, who became the doggie’s dinner The Wikipedia account of the real Marie Prevost is here, claiming that her dachshund Maxie had not eaten her but nipped at her legs after […]
Yesterday while prowling through the fields near where we live I saw two dogs far from their owners chase and bring down a small deer. What I learned from this episode is that the gruesome wildlife programmes which we sometimes see on TV are dumbed down for our entertainment. It […]
As if by magic following my previous post, John Redwood asks some questions: If the bankers who did the lending were greedy and wrong, weren’t the shareholders in the banks similarly guilty as they were happy to receive the dividends from all that excessive lending? Didn’t that include most people […]
