Verbal

But do you not find it at least mildly ironic that the crudely magic wand to DISGUISE higher public spending - placing it 'off the books' - was a TORY (Major/Lamont) invention? Just as Thatcher's (or more strictly Howe's and Lawson's) little innovation was to disguise RAISING the overall tax burden, and shifting it onto the poor with MASSIVE increases in indirect taxation? For all Brown's faults, I would rather he was there than dear, dumb Norman Lamont, who, caught in the headlights of Black Wednesday, blew £27bn in government reserves trying and completely failing to prop up the pound as it moved swiftly to the ERM exit. And for all of the horror in 2008 of unimaginable quantities of public money being shovelled into propping up banks whose behaviour was by wide acknowledgement disgraceful, at least the bailout WORKED, in the sense that we are all still here, and there remains an even chance that the funds thrown at them will eventually be recovered. God help us had Osborne been in charge then. All the Tories have are smoke and mirrors - not very good ones, of course, but good enough to fool the gullible and the venal.

Exactly. As Bunuel famously said: 'God and Country are an unbeatable team; together they break all records for oppression and bloodshed.'

This is pathetic. So you would happily watch people starve to death - happy in the knowledge (such as it is) that their deaths and suffering would make your life more comfortable. This place occasionally hits a low in moral turpitude - but you really win a prize. It's also ignorant. The country with the highest population in the world isn't one that's going to fall victim to starvation anytime soon. In fact, it's the one that will very soon crush you and the dominance of the West in general - as it has many of the countries you THINK you're talking about.

I suspect there may be something in this. Gray should go, clearly. (Hell, even TDD - no lover of women - agrees!). But the way his offences have been leaked and broadcast suggests some degree of corporate malice and revenge directed at Gray for raising the issue of phone-tapping. He was just an idiot for giving them such an easy, oafish target.

Well nor is Mars! If you've gone through all the trouble of going there, you're probably going to go to bits where water (ice) is available, especially if you're colonising it. There is plenty of speculation, incidentally, that there are substantial quantities of subsurface water on Mars - and some evidence of this from the photographs and samples of recent landers.

Fresh water, yes.

Stop benefits for people with almost 10,000 posts.

How on earth could you EVER know this?

Debatable. It all looks to be going the way EVERYONE but you seems to have expected. At least you seem to have calmed down a tiny bit since last night, when you gave a convincing impression of coking up on an industrial scale. From your spelling, it looked like you were so desperate to get whatever spilled on to your computer you were hoovering up the keys. Either that or you were having an 'episode'.

Trust you to come in under the radar.

How will you ever know? Really, give up, you're even worse than Turdish at being the internet Billy Big ********.

Give up dune. You are useless at this as in all else.

But his thread made sense.

This is silly. Why is there never a Mod around when you need one?

Has the ability to read now floated away as well?

It's not sarcasm.

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.