Verbal

Hang on a sec while I close this barn door...

With today's GDP figures showing growth at 0.2%, the knock-on effects from the lower-than-projected growth are that tax revenues will fall short of government predictions. So unless another raft of economy-deflating cuts are announced, the government will continue to see its spending figures rise. Osborne seems to have been chasing his tail so hard he hasn't spotted that the economy is in a nosedive.

Then you'll be booked all the way through. As someone says though - check your bag tags at check-in.

SRV's version of Hendrix Voodoo Chile is better than Little Wing in my opinion. SRV takes the guitar solo from Little Wing and creates a long instrumental from it, and it is at times brilliant. But it loses Hendrix's superb rhythm guitar work in the verses. Hendrix himself was a wonderful covers artist, and made his first, huge impression on Eric Clapton when he played a furious cover of Howlin' Wolf's Killing Floor while jamming with Cream at Westminster Poly in 1966 (!).

Football is much more about athleticism today than when Ted Bates managed - and that means a greater bias towards youth is a pretty natural consequence.

Brilliant!

Gram Parsons'/Flying Burrito Brothers' 'Wild Horses' - actually recorded before the Stones' version, although it was a Keith Richards song, heavily influenced by Parsons (if you see what I mean).

Ruined it so much that Dylan publicly said how much he admired it and changed the way he performed the song to reflect Hendrix's arrangement. Seriously, this is nuts.

No, you'll have your luggage checked through to your final destination. The only exception to this rule is the US, where transit passengers travelling to, say, Mexico or the Caribbean,and only changing planes an hour apart have to go through US Immigration, pick up physically pick up their luggage and carry it through US Customs.

What on earth gets into the heads of extreme right-wingers? The (formerly)Murdoch-sponsored right-wing loony Glenn Beck compares the victims on Utoya Island to the Hitler Youth. A pretty good indication, I think, of the deep rage experienced by borderline personalities like Beck, who are evidently barely able to constrain themselves from screaming 'Good!' at the news that left-leaning teenagers are murdered en masse. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/norway/8660986/Norway-shooting-Glenn-Beck-compares-dead-teenagers-to-Hitler-youth.html

Odd.

The same accusations in the immediate aftermath of Timothy McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma federal building in 1995. Then, of course, it turned out that he was a right-wing fanatic with numerous links to fringe organisations - and he had accomplices. I'd be surprised if this lunatic doesn't. Depressing that Breivik was such an enthusiastic supporter of the EDL, and had probably been on at least one of the EDL's customary 'marches' to beat up and terrorise Asian shopkeepers.

Or not.

I do find this thread interesting in an anthropological sort of way. First of all, if it's a serious point that we need be no better off than anyone living in the barrios in downtown Tirana, then I salute your fortitude. It's a tough life you're looking forward to. If the 'large chunk of the point' is that you think we somehow deserve to live in abject poverty, then that's just brilliant. And you never know, with the world on the latest of its economic precipices, you may get your wish. Personally and honestly, I'd rather not. In the absence of the proto-capitalists who usually swan around here pretending their window cleaning businesses are multinational corporations, I feel a little uncomfortable sounding like the defender of all things entrepreneurial - it kind of offends my long-held communistic (dune TM) beliefs. How could this happen? Is Saintsweb a ruthlessly egalitarian, Trotsky-ish cabal in disguise? If so, again, brilliant! I suppose the biggest puzzle, though, is how economics and the workings of the economy became so divorced from everyday life. I suspect one of the causes of the credit crunch is that even the bankers themselves didn't understand what they were doing, big-picture-wise. Certainly the politicians didn't. And nor, obviously did we. That four-fifths of the British economy consists of something so intangible as 'services' at least partly explains it. There's probably a reflex thought that associates services with consumerism - but it doesn't have to be that way. Consumerism is perhaps a partial consequence of aspects of the service sector (marketing/advertising/product design). But so is innovation - the kind of innovation that offers technological solutions to sometimes huge problems facing us - that brings us better and ever cheaper ways of capturing renewable energy, for example; or of making the kinds of high-tech medical advances that can tackle widespread suffering in the developing world; or creating the kind of things we also decry, like GM, which potentially has the means of alleviating the scale of crises we're currently witnessing in Somalia. Food and water supply are both going to be in desperately short supply from now - so a bit of innovation and applied technology wouldn't be a bad thing. None of this happens in a vacuum - and certainly NOT in Albania! So I guess you make your choice and live by your principles, if that's what they are. I'm not sure EasyJet goes to Albania - but good luck!

Well one reason you don't tend to hear the phrase among economic theorists is because 'physical economics' was a sub-set of Stalinist State Planning. I see no way to sensibly think of services apart from whatever 'physical economy' in this context is supposed to mean.

What on earth is the 'physical economy'? And how is that different from services? I think some basic reading in economic theory would help. I thought you might have been getting this stuff from NEF. They are a happy-clappy economics think tank, fond of coming up with things like the' happy planet index'. They are highly thought of by Gordon Brown, among others. You haven't addressed the basic flaw in this zero-growth nonsense - that it penalises the very people in the developing world it professes to support. And yes - I am most certainly saying that 'financial services' are a boon to the British economy. They are by no means unproblematic (an understatement right now), but without them over the last half a century Britain would be about as rich as Albania.

You're confusing all kinds of things here - and curiously getting lots of '+1's among people who have no idea, I suspect, of the real price they'd be asked to pay if some crackpot actually was in a position of power and could implement a zero-growth economic strategy. The relationship between resources and economic growth is by no means 1:1. About 4/5s of Britain's economy is services - and much of that has to do with intellectual property, licensing, design and financial services. Precious few non-renewable resources there - especially when you compare Britain's economy today with that, say, before the Second World War, when manufacturing dominated to roughly the same extent. I n fact, it's manufacturing where non-renewable resources tend to get hammered - and that has moved in large measure to the developing world. So what you're proposing would actually impoverish the developing world the most - exactly the opposite of what (I think) you're trying to say. Don't fall for this caveman economics; it's nonsense dressed as 'common sense'.

This is only really evidence of a government chasing its tail. As it cuts deeper, tax revenues fall with the hit taken by the economy generally. The idea, oddly bolted onto this, that growth is a zero-sum game, and that there was a finite world of resources that are distributed unequally, went out almost with the ark. It used to be the justification for the trading wars in the fifteenth century onwards: the only way to become a great power was to take someone else's wealth. The Ottoman Empire was built on this premise, as was the British Navy in Elizabethan times. Economists a couple of hundred years ago worked out that the world (and economic growth) just doesn't work like that.

I'm not sure you can therefore call him 'greatest living' so much.

So how many shooters where there on the grassy knoll, trousers?

And his 'stand against socialism', presumably. How does that work exactly? You still haven't answered how you reconcile that statement, your inane definition of socialism, the fact that Murdoch supported NewLab for more than 10 years, and that Brown was his fave PM.

Jonny Marbles. Good name for someone who seems to have mislaid them. Until a few mins before the attack, he was happily tweeting some reasonable common sense. "One gets the sense that they haven't really done the required reading ahead of their presentation. Think they may fail this module." http://twitter.com/#!/JonnieMarbles

Murdoch says the PM to whom he was closest of all was... Gordo! Clearly a very subtle 'stand against socialism'.

So how does Murdoch's decade-long support for Blair's New Labour (and some of Brown too) amount to a 'stand against socialism'?

Stand against socialism? His papers supported New Labour for more than a decade. And right now, he is Ed Miliband's most successful recruiting sergeant.