Verbal

The Mail doesn't 'wipe the floor' with the Guardian. They cater to different markets. The Mail is for angry dumbasses and The Guardian for happy, enlightened folk - speaking somewhat broadly. Unfortunately there are more of the former than the latter. Both are of the same mind, however, about Cortese's weird ban.

Nope. It seems the 'nutty muslims' have calmed the idiot down. Take the trouble to read the NYT piece...if you can. The picture with it will cause YOU to go mental.

Someone seems to be suffering from EDS - Enemy Deprivation Syndrome.

The idiot has backed down. Stunt over. http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

argumentum ad hominem. Look it up.

I wouldn't be surprised if Adkins' appointment is followed, by the end of the season, by some belt-tightening, with or without promotion. If it happens, it seems like an appointment designed to discourage the buy-it-to-fix-it thinking of the season just gone.

I don't understand this thread. We already have a new manager - Nicola 'Martin' Cortese, the evil football mogul who signalled his intentions with his last movie, The Departed.

Clue: he has a knighthood.

And who would be interested in this jury exactly?

Glasgow never gets PMs from anyone. Ever.

You're confused twice over. First, you confuse your schoolboy crush on a myopic racist with some sort of scholarship exclusive only to you. And second, you confuse my and others' repudiation of Smith as equating with having 'no knowledge of him'. Ridiculous.

This is ridiculous. I have no idea who you are, but someone has informed me of your views, such as they are. So I'll leave you to glorify Smith's pathetic and vicious myopia.

While I agree with much of the detail of your arguments, I can't help thinking that you might look back on this post as Canute might look at tides. All makes perfect sense so long as you factor out the recent record of Cortese's decision-making. Factor it back in, and I don't see, for example, a clear comparison with what happened at Norwich last season. They had just completely rebuilt their squad at great expense and then taken a seven goal beating against Colchester. They had a full-on emergency, which clearly had its source in the manager's tactical abilities (although clearly not his squad-building abilities). We're just not in that position - and in any case, the sacking of the managerial team immediately around Pardew suggests this was really a personality/power struggle, and not a football matter at all.

Harvests won't be 'nil'. As bad as things are, Pakistan is not Ethiopia, nor will the disaster make it so. Among the most valuable 'crops' are mangoes, grown especially in the most populous state, the Punjab. Mangoes, for the uninitiated, grow on trees. Rice, which grows in conditions somewhere between wet and drowning, will be affected - and that's serious. But harvests of it will not be 'nil'. Wheat production will certainly be affected more drastically. The bigger problem, though, is that the Indus Valley had a very sophisticated irrigation system - canals and dams that sent water from the Indus into the 'breadbasket' states of Punjab and Sindh. This system has been badly damaged. Aside from immediate emergencies, Aid would be better spent on repairing that, and the REAL danger here is that that won't happen. And by the way, speaking as someone who regularly travels there and has been along the route of the Indus up to the where the river is all but pure melt water from the Himalayan/Karakoram/Hindu Kush mountain ranges, Pakistan is NOT about to swept aside by extremists. People, generally speaking, hate the Taliban and Al Qaeda for all the damage they've done to lives and property.

What utter, utter nonsense. Smith was a racist. He made no bones about it himself. His war record doesn't excuse the ruthless, life-wrecking, racist brutality of his regime - the instruments of which were inherited and continued by Mugabe.

What nonsense. As one of countless examples, after UDI, Smith tried to do a deal with the Tories with an electoral system that would entrench black exclusion. 'Racial discrimination,' he said, 'may continue as long as it is justifiable and reasonable".

Talking of which...

You have discovered the secret of eternal happiness.

I think ecuk was making a point about cause and effect. Unless you take the view - espoused by the cretinous Smith - that anyone lacking white skin is innately inferior, you can't really avoid it. Which is not to say that Mugabe isn't an equally cretinous thug, of course - he just needed the conditions created by the illegal Smith regime (notably the vicious civil war and ALL that led up to it), in order to be said thug, in a position of autocratic power.

For or from?

Not always as simple as that, thankfully. The social mix of universities like mine suggests you might actually be better off (apart from financially!) sending a gifted child to state school.

Great! We'll all be better off.

Or: the unions, especially powerful ones like Unite, are accidental capitalists. Fighting to maintain pay levels are quite a useful component in a recession, paradoxically, because consumption is such an important driver out of an economic mess. If the bosses had their way en masse, they'd accidentally destroy everything. Wages everywhere would be cut to the bone, consumption would crash, and hey presto, Karl Marx was right.

Hang on a minute. An unpleasantly f*ck-free existence only knocks three months off your life? Something wrong with the methodology, I think.