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Continue reading →: Bad customers and Politicians
Maybe you get bad customer service because you’re a bad customer | The Matt Walsh Blog. I love Matt Walsh’s elision of psycho customers with power-crazed politicians here. His post is addressed to a lady who barged into his fast-food queue to complain intemperately about a mistake in her order.…
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Continue reading →: Berlioz meets Tatchell
Barbican Classical Music 2013-2014 season. Last night I took a break from worrying about the death of liberty in Britain. I was at the Barbican to listen to the London Symphony Orchestra play Berlioz. I came late to live classical music but it has become my favourite artistic experience. 'Music hath…
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Continue reading →: Sticks and stones – again
BBC News – Football fans jailed for abusive Stephen Lawrence chants. Some thick young men have been given sentences of twelve and eighteen months for uttering bad words. They now block six prison places that could more usefully have been occupied by people convicted of violent crimes or even such…
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Continue reading →: Nudge nudge
BBC News – Can you persuade people not to buy stolen goods? The British authorities now seem to have placed property criminals on the ‘too difficult’ pile. The authors of a new “report” say that those who steal take so little interest in the law that they don’t even know…
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Continue reading →: Of sound and unsound money
Frexit fever reaches heart of French establishment – Telegraph Blogs. When the Euro was about to be launched a colleague and I were in Germany on business. Over drinks with our German business partners they teased us about it. In all previous such conversations with them we had been primarily…
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Continue reading →: Robber Barons; then and now
I am happy to be the source of Samizdata’s quote of the day, but my own choice today is from this 1970s lecture by Milton Friedman at the University of Utah; We had robber barons then and we have robber barons today. But there’s a big difference between the…
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Continue reading →: Religion in today’s Britain
At the O2 Arena last week, popular comedian Micky Flanagan got a roar of approval from most of his capacity audience for the following line; "I am not religious … because I AM NOT FUCKING MENTAL." He went on to make them roll in the aisles (a dangerous pastime…
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Continue reading →: Our dangerous zeitgeist
Here is a short quote from someone you have never heard of; Elise Groulx Diggs, co-chairman of the International Criminal Bar. The source for the quote is here, though I read it in the International Bar Association's dead tree magazine. Law is an amazingly transformational tool and it doesn't take…
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Continue reading →: Work, apparently, is not the answer. Is it idleness then?
BBC News – Alan Milburn says child poverty 'no longer problem of the workless and work-shy'. I am trying to stay positive in the face of a nation gone mad. I really am. I was much helped by a pleasant meal last night with a fellow-blogger and occasional commenter here…
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Continue reading →: Where are Reuters when corrupt officials cripple India?
This fawning piece lavishes praise on Indian bureaucrats – the country's 'best and brightest' – for their response to Cyclone Phailin. Perhaps they even deserve it. Yet India's potential is wilfully and systematically damaged every day by official corruption; corruption that is the key story in the world's greatest democracy.…
THE LAST DITCH
Your blogger
Tom is a retired international lawyer. He was a partner in a City of London law firm and spent almost twenty years abroad serving clients from all over the world.
Returning to London on retirement in 2011, he was dismayed to discover how much liberty had been lost in the UK while he was away.
He’s a classical liberal (libertarian, if you must) who, like his illustrious namesake, considers that
“…government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one.”
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There are many reasons they’re not passed down, Tom. The Triune code, laid out in scripture in all reputable versions…
I’ve always tried to live my life doing no wrong but life isn’t like that so you make compromised but…
Hate to tell you this, but it’s not going to end until you end it. You think people to whom…
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The Last Ditch by Tom Paine 
A little bird tweeted in my ear that it was time to come over and see how things are.