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Continue reading →: The Scouring of the Shire
I am striking a better balance now between online and offline. Having taken a blogging break after my Great American Tour, I have returned to a slimmed-down daily diet of blogs old and new, but am restricting consumption to once a day. This, and a serious attempt to get back…
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Continue reading →: Kill me. Just kill me now.
Or alternatively, head over to The Guardian's "Comment is Free" section to vote for sanity in the face of this madness. Having recently attended the Goodwood Festival of Speed and having heard reports from relatives who visited CarFest last weekend – not to mention the popularity of Top Gear with everyone…
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Continue reading →: A tale of two public pension problems
America’s Urban Distress: Why the Public Pension Problem Is Worse than You Think | Zero Hedge. The linked article is typical of two things. Firstly why I had to smile when, on my recent tour of their country, American Conservatives told me their country was turning "socialist." And secondly why…
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Continue reading →: Sticks and stones
Black worker awarded £27,000 after hearing colleague referred to as golliwog – Telegraph. I was asked at a business conference shortly after my return to the UK what had changed most during my twenty years away. I answered that the police now seem more interested in what you say…
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Continue reading →: Guest Post: Violence can make us good
In order to be "good" we must be making a choice – a choice based upon logical, higher-order thought as opposed to instinctive reaction/habit/lower level heuristic thought. Most of the time, we do not make choices – we act from habit, we react in accordance to the rules of lower-level thought.…
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Continue reading →: Guest Post: The Limits of Democracy – an (the!) answer.
Tom, Thank you for allowing me to respond. You raise a very good question; to which, fortunately, there is a very good, and simple, answer: the natural law! At the risk of acting like the dinner guest who offends his host, I fear this is why I can not support completely your…
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Continue reading →: The limits of democracy?
Oliver Wendell Holmes “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” When I studied jurisprudence at university, I was – I discovered – an American Realist. In executive summary, American Realists define law as nothing more than a prediction of what rules the courts in…
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Continue reading →: The madness of youth writ old
When I was a naive youth of sixteen years, my headmaster called my father in for a discussion. I had been suspended from school for distributing revolutionary materials on the premises. I was the Vice Chairman in Wales of a Marxist-Leninist school students organisation; an offshoot from a Maoist splinter…
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Continue reading →: Democracy, the State and Libertarianism
Democracy, the State and Libertarianism :: A Very British Dude. I commend this post to you. Jackart and I don't agree on everything – he's far too anti-automobile for us ever to be buddies – but he writes good, practical sense here. While I take the view that the state…
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Continue reading →: Missing comments – an apology
I have been looking into the complaints about missing comments and the error was mine. They were simply held up in my spam filter. Please accept my apologies. As a long-standing user of the Typepad platform, I should have been better aware of how it works. Please click on the…
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…
[…] – Tom Paine […]
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First post (in case you want to read it from the beginning)
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.