Category Archives: government

The Bottom of the Slippery Slope

Warnings about the slippery slope have been around as long as deranged thinking. As an all purpose cathartic it quickly devolved to a cliché. But no one seems to be interested in what happens when you get to its bottom, or even how you can tell that you’ve arrived at its destination. Well, I think…


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National Health Service in Trouble – Again

The UK’s NHS is now hit with a nurses strike, though only for a day. The nurses say they are overworked and underpaid. They are. They want an increase in pay of 5% above inflation. That works out to 15.7%. The independent pay board which sets their salary recommended a 4% increase.  The nurses’ pay…


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Mencken on Intelligence – A Century On

HL Mencken (1880-1956), often called the Sage of Baltimore, though Curmudgeon would have worked as well had he not been mostly right about the debased condition of his countryman as well those residing in the rest of the world. A century ago when he was in his prime there was no lack of deranged thinking…


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The Last King of America – Book Review

Biographer Andrew Roberts recently published The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III. The book is a detailed biography of the monarch who lost America. It’s so detailed that it likely contains more than some readers will care know about the King. Roberts had complete and unprecedented access to the royal archives…


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The Gordon Riots – 1780

Andrew Roberts in his biography of George III, (The Last King of America) which I’ll get to in a subsequent post, describes the Gordon Riots of 1780 as the worst catastrophe to befall London during the interval between the Great Fire in 1666 and the Blitz which began in 1940. Those who saw the disorder…


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Liberty and Honor

A reader asked me to define liberty as used in my post COVID – 2 Years and Counting. I will lean on JS Mill, Isaiah Berlin, and Frederich Hayek in the formulation that follows. Broadly assessed, liberty can be divided into two species – positive and negative. I realize this is a gigantic oversimplification, but…


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Three Army Recruitment Ads

The video below displays three recruitment ads. One for the Chinese Army, the Russian Army, and finally one for the US Army. We seem to be willing to bring a cookie cutter to an artillery fight. We are in big trouble if our ad accurately reflects the warrior ethos of the US Army. One viewer…


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Maverick – Book Review

Jason Riley is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal. His latest book, Maverick, is an intellectual biography of the economist and public intellectual Thomas Sowell. Focusing mainly on Sowell’s thinking, it presents only the bare facts of his life. Sowell has averaged about…


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Government – A Few Thoughts

Governments began as soon as humans stopped travelling in small bands and started to congregate in imobile groups which gradually transformed from villages to cities. Strongmen were the first leaders who governed according to their might. They continue to hold sway over a large swath of the planet to this day. Two and a half…


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Noise – Book Review

Noise – A Flaw in Human Judgement is a book by Daniel Kahneman, Oliver Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. The noise that is their subject is not that of honking geese or backfiring motorcycles; it’s the unwanted variability in judgement or decision making when the facts behind the decision or judgement are the same. Noise and…


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