Verbal

I wonder if repetition works with you. It's not sarcasm.

That's it. Nothing else.

It's not sarcasm. Humour is one of an apparently infinite number of things you have yet to grasp.

It's just occurred to me that this is a pretty consistent thread running through your posts - a curious desire to humiliate university graduates...'bring them down to earth'. I spent some time at Google's HQ in Mountain View a couple of years ago, and it's really striking how quickly they promote the brightest and the best, and give everyone the chance to excel, while appearing to have an awful lot of fun doing it. One 22 year old Harvard Computer Science graduate I met had an idea about sourcing green energy in a company that uses VAST quantities of it. Because it was her idea, she was put in charge of it - and the $100,000,000 budget that went with it. Others were similarly promoted to develop their own ideas. For Google, graduates, with their well trained minds, were incredibly valuable, and as far as I know, it's impossible to get a meaningful job there without a degree of some sort, and to have excelled in it. In Britain, on the other hand, we have far too many low-grade employers who look at a graduate and think: I'll teach him/her - let them get a taste of the REAL world. Such employers then go on to waste the talent right under their noses. Such is the rabid anti-intellectual culture of British business. Until many of the country's businesses cure themselves of their (literally) dimwitted obsession with putting down bright people, we'll be saddled with a business culture that is third rate, and that has no chance whatsoever to compete with graduate-heavy business cultures in America, China, the Tiger economies....and pretty much anywhere else. Which - to bring this back to the thread - is why I'm happy to see Johnson gone. He plainly wasn't up to the job of mastering the complexities of being Shadow Chancellor. Johnson was lauded by many precisely because he was a postie, which would have been fine had he any idea what he was talking about. Ed Balls is an intellectually tough-minded politician. He may have other many other failings, but I doubt he'll fail to grasp the brief.

Oh dear Johnny, you're a bubbling boil of rage. Calm down, take a deep breath. Of course degrees don't confer a monopoly on wisdom. As your own experience testifies: you spent three years doing a business studies degree and yet you still don't understand the term 'manufacturing'. The 'snobbery' as you call it is directed at those (singular) who are truly ignorant no matter HOW you measure it - by degrees, common sense, evidence of any neural activity whatsoever, etc - and combine ignorance with a vicious little streak that sees nothing but heroics in the brutal mindlessness of the white supremacists he slobbishly adores. With these 'qualifications' does our ideologically diseased little creep pretend to tell us that he alone knows what's good for 'our' children.

The 'fact' that you can talk so unreflexively about facts demonstrates you utter shallowness. You could say: 'Iraq was invaded in 2003', but on your reasoning, no context as to why could ever be given for fear of polluting their minds - on the grounds that accounts of the causes of the war - the intentions of the American military, the economic objectives, etc, etc - are all the subject to one kind of dispute or other. If you limit 'facts' to only those events that no one could possibly dispute, you end up with a world described by a series of meaningless statements. You couldn't even present 'the world is round' as a fact because there are people who dispute it. And the children in turn - because their views have to be 'private' - are prohibited from testing their arguments and conclusions against others. Only in your tiny little bedroom world does any of what you say make sense.

Quite. Coulson demonstrates his uselessness even in resignation. For all Alastair Campbell's many faults, at least he could get his calculations right.

Could you expand on the dodgy needs?

My guess: I used to think it was a lack of serviceable synapses, but I'm now convinced it's the perfect storm: OCD and Tourettes Syndrome.

I'm not sure Jones can pot.

No, he will. trousers is the exception to the rule - the honourable Tory. That is, if he's not too busy fiddling his tax return.

Behind Osborne's reptilian, patrician features, and Cameron's emollient manner lies a two-man team hell-bent on out-Thatchering Thatcher. Thatcher Mark 1 almost imploded on its first outing, and needed a war to rescue her after she and Howe ladled on the indirect tax burden so heavily that a 'tax-cutting' Tory junta actually increased the tax burden on all but the wealthy - to levels far higher than Labour, until 1979, would have dared. After Blair's murderous misadventures, I doubt that Cameron will be able to pick a fight with some minor dictator in order to boost his poll ratings when it all goes the way of the pear by about this time next year.

No. Personal reasons means exactly that - it's personal.

Good appointment. Ed Balls is right. As unpopular as his message is now, cutting too fast will damage the economy massively. We only think otherwise because we have been convinced by voodoo economics that countries are like households when it comes to debt.

Head, nail, bruised thumb, etc.

Exactly. The beginning of the end has come so soon!

Of course, Saddam came through the 'first one' STILL in power. Not only that, he survived well enough that, thanks to the 'coalition' leaving him where he was, he was able to go on a murderous rampage against the Shai in the South - AFTER the Bush Snr encouraged the Shia to rise up. Of course, when they did, the 'coalition' was nowhere to be seen and Saddam's henchmen murdered at will. The sense of betrayal felt by the Shia against the West is still powerfully strong today.

I doubt very many of them at all. You have no idea how angry so many people were who opposed the war. The sense of betrayal was palpable. Sadly, I suspect many felt they were safe in eventually moving their votes to the Lib Dems (although from the actual results of the last election, not THAT many). National politics can stuff you sometimes.

Since I'm also quoted, I wasn't thinking of what happened in the mother of all Parliaments. More the million plus demo and the campaigns to stop it before it started. Again, I don't know why 'the left' or the 'centre' gets equated with what happens in WC1.

Ooh, you got two out four of my least favourites. Have you worked out the silly Lloyds card reader for business accounts yet? Or tried to get the bank to explain it?

So the people whose beliefs you share are expected to be corrupt. Surely a sign that your beliefs need some serious revision - but it'll presumably take some Scrooge-like conversion to do it, since you seem to hold on to them with such irrational tenacity. As for your point about Labour and Iraq, I never fail to be amazed that the Right try to beat Left and liberal opinion with this. The opposition to the war was at its most vociferous among the centre and centre-left. Personally, I'd certainly be happy to see Blair hauled up in The Hague and charged as a war criminal - if nothing else as a warning to all those who would consider throwing in their lot with loopy neo-con administrations in the US.

Have another go. Maybe it'll make sense next time.

Next time they won't even find that. Perhaps they could rename themselves dune, as in a desert of nothingness except for the odd hillock.

Would that be in your opinion? Or is there a universe somewhere out there where everything you say makes sense?

My guess is that a flat rate tax will increase your tax burden.