Verbal

As someone who's made films about 9/11 and the aftermath, I can tell you that the people whose lives have been most directly affected by events that day are extremely unhappy about the paranoic fantasies of the conspiracy theorists. To give a couple of straightforward examples, I've interviewed the wife of the captain of American Airlines 11 (the plane that hit the north Tower) and the husband of two flight attendants who managed to make detailed calls to the ground as AA11 headed towards the Twin Towers. The film itself was denounced by a number of conspiracy loonies as a 'Zionist psyops operation' (partly because we were the first to tell the story of Daniel Lewin), and the relatives rubbished because in the weird world that is the conspiracy fantasist, no planes hit the Towers, or if they did, they were empty and remote-controlled. The fantasists account for the missing crew and passengers by claiming they were offloaded at Area 51 and executed by the Bush administration. Or some variant on this rubbish. But the relatives themselves, who've had far more access to secret information than anyone outside official circles, this is hurtful garbage. It devalues and diminishes their lost husbands and wives, some of whom - even on AA11 - put up as much resistance as they could in the circumstances and paid for it with their lives.

This sounds like another one of your 'stories'.

Of course, there are many 'high earners' who are not entrepreneurs. But the flannel over the last few days has been that the 50p rate is killing off at source the entrepreneurs setting up small innovative companies that will drive the country out of recession - which is nonsense. What it is, in reality, is a bit of hypocritical special-pleading by extremely wealthy commentators, professional, higher civil servants, and banking and other corporate executives to contribute much less to digging this country out of a hole. The special pleading, in other words, comes from precisely some of those deeply implicated in creating this mess in the first place. What kind of 'entrepreneurs' are these?

I heard the author of this, Richard Murphy, on Radio 4 yesterday, making a property 'entrepreneur' look silly. Murphy talks a lot of sense.

The weirdest thing about those who argue that 'entrepreneurs' are being deterred in some way by the 50p tax on income is the assumption that these same entrepreneurs are salary slaves. They're not - the idea is ridiculous. They own companies, and are rewarded through corporate status in a number of ways - being paid dividends, paying corporation tax at MUCH lower levels, etc., etc.

Exactly so. No surprise that the Met higher-ups continue on the face of it to be staggeringly stupid.

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.