Verbal

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But they'll never run out of wind.

Then my apologies - you're a lot younger than I thought.

Did you give up arithmetic at the age of 5?

Give an example - an actual example.

How about doing a bit if research - learning something! - before knee-jerking? For example, London is the powerhouse of the British economy, yet only 2.8% of its GDP is manufacturing. That, to me, is staggering. What any decent economist will tell you is that root cause of the decline is disinvestment by an investment banking system that saw far easier profits in 'assets' and various forms of currency dealing and speculation. The kinds of strategic thinking that, say, informs the German investment model are completely absent here. In Germany, incidentally, the unions have more power than here. Union rights are weaker in the UK than of any of the other major economies, including the US. A rise in wages does not 'force up the cost of living' in such a mechanistic way. Cuts in wages will force up the cost of living much more directly. Rises, on the other hand, can and do stimulate growth, and ultimately distinguish advanced economies from, say, Albania. Or to put it another way, if unions hadn't been, in your words, 'greedy', the rights and income you enjoy would not be a fraction of what they are now. Or maybe you'd prefer Albania.

Personally, I'd trust Andy's judgement on this over yours - you give the impression of learning less about other places the more you travel to them. And why don't you cut out the boring attempt at bullying - it's by definition laughably juvenile to call someone 'the most pompous teenager ever'.

Again, sick. 'Tried and tested methods" where you imagine flesh fizzing etc.

Throwing money at the problem always solves it.

Fulham were going nowhere in particular with Hughes - nor were Man City. He just doesn't seem a 'next level' sort of manager, especially with clubs controlled by absurdly wealthy foreign owners.

So you think it's perfectly normal to dream up inventive ways to kill people? If so, you really have taken something of a break from reality.

You sound like another slightly more infamous Austrian, who also revelled in how to maximise distress during judicial murder. Finding ghoulish ways to kill people really is the way to self-disqualify your own views.

At the risk of encouraging you from becoming my barely literate cyberstalker, you really haven't addressed the points I made.

It's not a subject for you to concern yourself with - unless you revel in the 'freedom' to label people however you wish, regardless of any offence caused. Besides, I've just offered an explanation as to why it's offensive. Care to actually reply as opposed to blowing a reactionary gasket?

Once again, I can use the same argument against you: we should stop using Londoners' tax payments to subsidise provincial English education, health care, etc. Sounds okay, right?

'Half-caste' is certainly offensive to all mixed-race people I know (including within my own family). It is insulting because it harks back to a time and place when the word 'caste' was used to reinforce the idea that races should not mix (the anti. It's actually a term that originates in the American South, and was used, ironically, by dominant white communities AND minority black communities to stigmatise mixed-race people. In films, the classic example is Dorothy Dandridge, who was actually cast (so to speak) in 'half-caste' roles in a way that conformed to Hollywood stereotypes of mixed-race people as genetically and invariably 'confused' and 'neither one thing nor the other' - as rootless and lost. In law, the 'Half-Caste Act of 1869' in Australia, for example, gave the government the right to forcibly remove mixed-race children from their Aboriginal parents. The law was not repealed until 1970. Similar laws existed in the southern US. So Barney: I'm amazed that you can say you work with other ethnic communities and yet don't know that the word is sensitive in any way.

Warnock, surprisingly. I've forgotten the story as to why...

No, you're not the only one. It's pretty sick.

Yarm isn't really a suburb; it's a rather nice village/small town with a spectacular hotel and very good private school. Amazing that such a pleasant place is so close to somewhere so awful.

So once the English have got shot of the Scots, can we Londoners claim independence from the rest of you sponging gits?

pap, meet Glasgow.

Hardly. His dad was the noted Marxist political scientist Ralph Miliband ('The State in Capitalist Society', if you're interested in one of his bestsellers). The Milibands all went to comprehensive schools.

Excuse me?

Strong liquidity, wherever it arise, does not lead inexorably to a bubble. That bubble was created by too-clever-by-half bankers who sliced-and-diced sub-prime mortgages into derivatives to conceal their essential worthlessness, and then sold on in an ever ascending pyramid. All this within the US, with banks in Europe rushing in to the supposed gold rush for fear of losing out. And all of this was done under the watchful eye (!) of the Fed, whose higher echelons were utterly dominated by precisely the same bankers who oversaw the bubble in the first place.

This is actually one of the key reasons why some states in the US are moving towards abolition: the cost of administering a system which allows appeals against death sentence is more prohibitive than that of a life-sentence regimen - and this in a country where 'life means life'.