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January 2011

In which I disagree with Bidisha

When contemplating marriage, I always take tips from small studies by universities in America\’s conservative heartland. A survey by Brigham Young University in Utah has shown that couples who abstain from sex before marriage rate their marriages as more rewarding than those who don\’t.

What a stupid idea. What if, on the wedding night, the other party turns out to be selfish, clueless, oafish and lazy?

Well, if sex with the person you\’ve just married is the only experience of sex you\’ve ever had how do you know whether they\’re selfish, clueless, oafish or lazy about matters sexual?

But more to the point, if the only way you\’re going to get sex is to get married, then of course you\’ll think that marriage is rewarding. Sex is, after all, (even bad sex) fun.

Timmy elsewhere

Gracing the letters page of the  Telegraph:

SIR – Having read the Stern Review, the various IPCC reports and multitudes of economic papers on what to do about the entire problem, assuming we accept that there is such a problem, it is clear that the policies being recommended by those experts are: a carbon tax, or a cap-and-trade system, or subsidies to new technologies.

All of the economists say the same thing. Any one of the three are viable and whole solutions.

Cap-and-trade limits emissions; a carbon tax provides the incentive to reduce them to the needed level; and subsidies will replace emitting with non-emitting sources of energy.

So now my question: having hired Lord Stern at some expense, having analysed his recommendations at presumably greater, why is the Government now insisting at gargantuan expense in doing what Lord Stern said we should not do?

We only need to choose one of the three – rather than be charged thrice to do all of them.

Tim Worstall
Messines, Portugal

Oh do stop complaining, please

Some £470,000 was spent last year, £300,000 of which was spent on teaching fees for the children of foreign correspondents.

\”The Beeb has to keep its running costs in order to give fee-payers good value for their money.\”

It is unclear which reporters benefited from the payments or how much they received, but it is thought that about one in five of the corporation\’s 150 foreign correspondents were given funding for their children\’s education, amounting to an average of £10,000 each.

John O\’Connell, research director of the TaxPayers\’ Alliance, said: \”The only reason that licence-fee payers pay the fee is to get good quality programming.

Critics of the BBC told the Daily Mail educating the families of staff cost money that could otherwise have been used on programming.

This is pretty much standard across the public sector for people who are sent to work abroad. Military, diplomats and so on, all get it. For the British system of education is indeed different and once you\’ve stepped out of it it is very difficult indeed to step back into it.