Pasties, Chocolate Oranges, Chicken, And Now Sugar Puffs

by Dick Puddlecote https://feedproxy.google.com/~r/DickPuddlecote/~3/GsecV2UL3lg/pasties-chocolate-oranges-chicken-and.html Pasties, Chocolate Oranges, Chicken, And Now Sugar Puffs A week is a long time in politics? Ha! Try a few hours, Harold. The title above didn’t include any cereals when I penned it as a draft last night, but then this turned up on the BBC early today. Labour has urged the government to consider introducing legal limits on sugar, salt and fat content in food. Shadow health secretary Andy Burnham said current voluntary agreements with the food industry were not working and the obesity problem was worsening, First of all, it’s not worsening, dickhead, try reading the ONS stats we…

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Slavery Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Formulation

by Roderick Long https://c4ss.org/content/16025 Slavery Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Formulation Slavery Contracts and Inalienable Rights: A Formulation was originally published in the Winter 1994-95 issue of Formulations by the Free Nation Foundation, written by Roderick T. Long. Liberty vs. Self-Ownership? Libertarianism stands for maximum individual liberty — and thus against any kind of slavery. Yet libertarianism also stands for self-ownership; and what I own, I have a right to sell. Apparently, then, libertarianism countenances the legitimacy of selling oneself into slavery, and enforcing the slavery contract against those who change their minds. Thus it seems that the ideals of self-ownership and sanctity of contract can come into conflict with the ideal of maximum liberty…

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The New Joy of Gay Sex

From Free Life, Issue 19, November 1993 ISSN: 0260 5112 The New Joy of Gay Sex Dr Charles Silverstein and Edmund White The Gay Men’s Press, London, 1993, 220 pp., £16.95 (ISBN 0 85449 214 3) Reviewed by Sean Gabb I did think of turning this review into a plea for the toleration of sexual differences. But where homosexuals are concerned, I suspect I am about a decade too late. I will not claim that they have today no justified grievances. The criminal and civil law of this country embodies a mass of prejudice which ranges from the petty to the viciously destructive. Even so, the argument for removing that prejudice has been largely won …

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Briefly in Praise of Edward Gibbon

by Sean Gabb from 2000 It may have been observed that no issue of Free Life appeared between last October and January. The blame for this lapse is entirely mine, but the reason is Edward Gibbon. I opened the first volume of his Decline and Fall one Sunday afternoon in September, and closed the last volume early in December. During this time, almost every moment not reserved to earning a living or to the cares of married life was given up to reading Gibbon. I read him on railway trains and in the gaps between lectures. I read him in bed and once very furtively in the Church of St Mary le …

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Mars as it may once have been

Note: I dream of Mars several times a year. It’s always a bleak place, of dark shadows and a surface like the upper slopes of Mount Etna. Life, when present, is generally small and exo-skeletal. Otherwise, I often wander through vast cryogenic labyrinths underground, where the power has long since failed and the occupants have become shrivelled husks. I doubt these new pictures will find their way into my dream world – indeed, I like things the way they are – but they are interesting. SIG Filed under: Liberty

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Welcome to Russia: Putin Grants Citizenship to Depardieu

  President Vladimir Putin has signed a decree granting Russian citizenship to French film star and tax exile Gerard Depardieu, who is renouncing his French citizenship to search for an easier tax climate outside of his native country. Academy Award-nominated Depardieu is a regular in Moscow. The actor made headlines across the world when he announced in late December that “Putin has already sent me a passport!” The statement was a joke, but it soon became reality. The day after the announcement, Putin told a press conference that the French bon vivant was a welcome guest in Russia: “If Gerard Depardieu really wants to have Russian …

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Is Capitalism Just Fraud?

By David J. Webb Located as I am in “rip-off Britain”, it is a worthy question indeed whether capitalism is, in the final analysis, just fraud. Businesses should try to sell their goods for the maximum price in the market—doesn’t that make it likely that the free market is just a conduit for deception? Libertarians are generally left with vague comments along the lines of caveat emptor that ignore the fact that good value and good service are hard to find in the market, whoever one buys from. So I think the question apposite and worth considering. Take the example of Chinese fake pharmaceuticals. I suppose you could say it is a case of caveat emptor—you should know that the drugs that you purchase…

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