Verbal

It makes you mad? Does it really? So how does it feel to be so successfully manipulated into having the reaction you have had by the amateur provocateur that is Anjem Choudray? Not too great, I'd guess.

Similes and alliteration at 5.20 on a Sunday morning? You must be a journo writing in his sleep. So I think we're agreed: some big money signings are good and some are bad, although not in such a precise ratio that you can express it in a succinct equation. (And Turkish wonders why I don't often post on here...)

Either you didn't look at that clip or you approve of such 'freedom of speech'.

Even by your lazy standards, this is poor stuff. But in case you need to see an example of the EDL exercising its free speech, take a look at this.http://www.twitpic.com/5exbfg

En-Ra-Ha

Someting? Very gangsta, Your Honour.

There's a kind of apples-and-oranges element to you argument Lord T. The so-called 'Flynn effect' provides a much better and more rigorous explanation for the perceived improvements in GCSE over time. James Flynn, a psychologist, wanted to know why IQ scores in the US seemed to do the same thing that GCSEs have been doing - even though the tests barely changed. Could it really be that people were getting smarter? Actually, no. They were improving their cognitive skills, because populations were (are) adapting to a more cognitively demanding, technologically sophisticated, more white-collare society. This has very real consequences in the US, where the death penalty cannot be carried out against people below a certain IQ score. The problem was that pople ith clear educational/psychological problems were, like everyone else, getting higher and higher scores. So Flynn proposed 're-normalising' IQ tests - basically refreshing them every so often, so that they reflect these changes, and don't send people unfairly (!) to the gas chamber. Similarly with GCSE. If you compare a GCE paper in the fifties with a GCSE equivalent now, the former will consist of questions that require a great deal of rote learning, while the latter is more cognitively challenging. Now believe it or not, GCES marks ARE re-normalised frequently, but it remains a question as to whether they are keeping up with the growing levels of cognitive ability in modern societies. There's also evidence that the limits to cognitive growth have been reached and are starting to plateau in the West (but are continuing to increase greatly in developing countries). The upshot of which is that whatever weaknesses that previously would have been cured by rote learning (like good spelling for example!), if you simply transplant someone with great GCEs from the fifties into a group of modern-day GCSE students, the 50s time-travellers would sink like a stone against their younger competitors, better adapted to a more cognitively demanding world. Or to boil it down still further - it's complicated, and the old reactionary argument about '...in my day' should be set aside.

No, he means bachelorettes, surely.

Sorry, I couldn't get past this without laughing my head off.

Dammit dune - just go and LOOK FFS.

Steve Jobs has stepped down for health reasons as CEO of Apple. No real surprise, but is this the end of Apple's crushing superiority? Will the must-have electronic baubles like iPad and Macbook Air lose their edge? (PC owners may post but will probably be limited by their poorer keyboard skills.)

Do you mean Filipenko? Ilipenko is a boxer, apparently.

Blackpool are 'swooping' for him, according to the Grauniad, so this could all be academic.

And now it seems Coulson has broken ethics rules in the House of Commons, by not declaring in the register the income and benefits received from NI while employed by Tory HQ. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/aug/24/andy-coulson-news-international-payments

So this would be the 'non-story', would it, that's been on the front pages of newspapers across the political spectrum, from the Mirror and the Guardian to the Mail and the Telegraph? Funny, how so many newspaper editors could have got so much wrong, when all they needed to do was consult ever-so-'umble Gemmel, who'd have put them right with his tale of how he's exactly like Coulson, no different, no story - how the lowly G had also led a media company campaign to manipulate British politics, then joined the party that had benefitted, dissembled about his continuing financial links to his 'previous' (in strong inverted commas) employer, whose key interests he then pursued through other means, while continuing to take a central part in a criminal conspiracy. The Tory Central Office flat-earthers of public morality, of which you seem to be pleading unpaid membership, will continue to wail about this 'non-story', while all the time hoping against hope that Coulson doesn't wind up in jail (any bets on that one?) and drag a political party back into the morass of corruption.

The problem with this is that the one thing that interrupts the flow of oil the most is civil war. So on this argument, it would be against Europe's interests to destabilise Gaddafi. But when did Europe ever manage to do anything by way of an aggressive foreign policy?

You only have 'investments' in that brilliant company that discovered water off the Falkland Islands. Stop pretending you're some investment magnate sweeping his invisible hand across international events. It's silly.

Maybe so, but in your ever-so-'umble position, you were not. I suspect, moving from a media group who had interfered routinely in the political process, manipulating politicians and hacking murder victims' phones, and into the most influential non-elected position in the Conservative Party. Capiche, Uriah?

Okay, so not puffed but confused.

None of this though alters the fact that the director of communications for the Conservative Party was driving around in a car provided by News International, who were also picking up his medical bills, all arranged as part of a 'generous' financial agreement offered by senior executives who were all aware of the 'For Neville' email and the implications of this for Coulson.

I know, I know. Kiss of death. Still, I bet they're puffed.

Leicester losing to the mighty Bury. Can't be bad...

Could you at least try to stay on the subject, DP, rather than impose this winding-road diatribe on us? And by the way, no 'hush money' settlement is legal if it is to conceal a criminal offence (or a whole raft of them as seems to be the case here).

I don't think anyone in the higher echelons of NI were in any doubt as to his complicity, um. That's what the 'For Neville' email is all about.

But it seems unlikely to have been a severance payment in any conventional sense of the term. Coulson had resigned from NI precisely because of the trial that sent Mulcaire and Goodman to jail on his watch. Just as both Mulcaire and Goodman have been made - or in Goodman's case promised - large after-the-event payments essentially as hush money (to keep quiet about the wider scandal inside NI) Coulson's payments should be seen in this light. They are in this sense clearly income. Interesting, though, isn't it, that Yelland and Neill should resign from NI and receive nothing (as is usual), and yet there was no stain on their reputation, only for Coulson to resign in disgrace and receive a king's ransom, staggered over a payment period so long that it could only be perceived as continuing income?