Verbal

No, Nick, it isn't comparable at all. Here's a pretty good description of how it really works: "In their home country – Bangladesh or the Philippines or India – these workers are told they can earn a fortune in Dubai if they pay a large upfront fee. When they arrive, their passports are taken from them, and they are told their wages are a tenth of the rate they were promised. They end up working in extremely dangerous conditions for years, just to pay back their initial debt. They are ringed-off in filthy tent-cities outside Dubai, where they sleep in weeping heat, next to open sewage. They have no way to go home. And if they try to strike for better conditions, they are beaten by the police. I met so many men in this position I stopped counting, just as the embassies were told to stop counting how many workers die in these conditions every year after they figured it topped more than 1,000 among the Indians alone. Human Rights Watch calls this system "slavery." Yet the Westerners who have flocked to Dubai brag that they "love" the city, because they don't have to pay any taxes, and they have domestic slaves to do all the hard work. They train themselves not to see the pain." http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-a-morally-bankrupt-dictatorship-built-by-slave-labour-1828754.html

Interesting Phil. No disrespect, but does this mean that Dubai might become a vaguely pleasant place to be? And that there might be fewer trapped and enslaved construction workers from South Asia? Because whenever I've passed through, the place always seemed like the gilded gates of hell. I couldn't imagine anyone with a conscience voluntarily buying up there for their place in the sun. As for the westerners losing their shirts on get-rich-quick schemes, I suspect that they aren't in sufficient numbers in themselves to spark a crisis on the scale of the sub-prime disaster in the US. And they will bear a great deal of the loss themselves - even with hyped up bank loans. The bigger losses for banks will surely be the absurd property schemes themselves - the kind that our chairman friend down the road used to buy his Ferraris. I can well imagine what you mean about Iran, by the way. I remember what Jordan was like during the years of the Iraq sanctions. A lot of people got obscenely rich, and the border was like the wild west.

West.

That's quite a nasty sentence you've got. Don't know many who've been able to recover from death.

If you really feel like being freaked out, check this out: http://www.lhcfacts.org/ I epecially like this bit of Yoda-ese, which means we'll all have to downsize a bit: “miniblack holes as are expected to be produced soon at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.” “To publicize the danger because time is running out is a big decision.” “ …after 50 months the earth to a centimeter would have shrunk. It would be nothing more there, not only no more life, there but also the earth would be… a small black hole.”

There's something far worse than all those about Plymouth and I'm struggling to think of who he is... Don't know his name. Don't know his rank.

Hello Foday.

If you can tell me the name and nationality of the pilot, I'll start to believe you. (And he wasn't Russian!)

And worst of all, had it not been for those damned socialists, you'd have learned to spell and express yourself legibly in what I can only assume is your second language.

All you're doing is wheeling out yet another tired, discredited CC denier - this time, someone who is not only bought and paid for by two Canadian oil industry lobby firms, but who lies on his CV (claiming he his a Doctor of Science in Climatology, when he is in fact a Doctor of Philosophy in Geography). As the following link points out: "It must be soul-destroying to see a long-retired geographer who rarely published during his colourless academic career and who never conducted any research in atmospheric science dismiss that effort without a shred of evidence or a hint of good conscience." http://www.desmogblog.com/dr-tim-ball-the-lie-that-just-wont-die Can't you at least give us ONE scientist who is not untrained in atmospheric chemistry, and a liar? You really can't find one credible source for whatever it is you so religiously believe?

This is quite childish. FWIW, and as I've already said, I thought some of the comments in those PRIVATE emails were injudicious, given the hysterical nature of deniers, who see conspiracies everwhere. But are you really suggesting that a few ambiguous, but still privately expressed comments, amount to a demolition of atmospheric chemistry itself? If so, St Canute, you're even flakier than I thought was possible - or, as I suspect, you're just on a colossal wind-up. Because no one can be THAT imbecilic...can they?

St George does the best impression of King Canute I've seen in ages. Very funny - although I strongly suspect he's Scooby MkII, and adopting the 'persona' of a noodlebrain sent round the bend by an incurable internet addiction to conspiracy theories, in which science is really an international Masonic cult out to hoodwink everyone to achieve its own Smersh-like aims. Good luck with your Thatcher question, badger. I suspect you won't get an answer - or if you do, it'll be that she submitted to the cult.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why even the most law-abiding resort to smuggling.

I had no idea you had republican tendencies. Welcome to the dark side! (And off with their heads - although personally I think Made Guillotine is too good for them.)

Dangerous idea to bring on here. Leave it to us lot and the country will be festooned with gallows.

Precisely.

I wish there was a smiley for a Mutley laugh.

Ten years. By which time the tories will have imploded and Labour can vote her back in. HTH.

You know, I'd really like to believe that climate change was a myth, I really would. The problem is that the deniers are such a bunch of foaming-at-the-mouth weirdos, fantasists, narcissistic attention-seekers, paranoid survivalists and politicians corrupted by greed and oil money that it makes it a tad difficult. If only there was a genuine, balanced disagreement among respected, disinterested scientists, then perhaps this would be a real debate. But it isn't - there's a broad consensus about the fundamentals, and a few leaked private emails from a group of scientists hounded by said oddities isn't going to change that. Of course, expect the paranoids to be out in force after this. But I'll be having fun just watching them work themselves into an awful screech about a global conspiracy bought into by the 'sheople' (© Charlie Brooker) and from which the foamers - and they alone - stand in Olympian and (in their eyes only) magnificent disdain.

It just goes to show you can't be too careful.

Quite. From that link: "The timing of this particular episode is probably not coincidental. But if cherry-picked out-of-context phrases from stolen personal emails is the only response to the weight of the scientific evidence for the human influence on climate change, then there probably isn’t much to it."

Some wise words on the UEA hack: "The problem is that the files and emails seem just too good to be true. A number of files seem to be smoking guns — revealing how to resist Freedom of Information Act requests for their data (which would both be scientific misconduct and actually illegal); long-term marketing plans on how to push the climate-change agenda; and discussions of how to pressure peer-reviewed journals to stop accepting papers that disagree with the “accepted” view of global warming. In other words, just what the skeptics have been suggesting for years. It seems just too neat, and we don’t have independent verification of where the files came from. Someone who is willing to hack might also be willing to create fakes. But then, the whole package is very large — 63 megabytes — and seems to be very internally consistent. Several people have already corroborated a number of the emails as being ones they wrote or received. The package also includes substantial data and computer programs, which are being explored as this is being written. The best we can say right now is that we should keep our eyes on this. If these files are eventually corroborated and verified, it is a bombshell indeed — evidence that there has been a literal conspiracy to push the anthropogenic climate change agenda far beyond the science. It will mean the end of some scientific careers, and it might even mean those careers will end in jail." http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/hacker-releases-data-implicating-cru-in-global-warming-fraud/2/

I'm sure there's nothing in this whatsoever, St George, but does the fact that Senator Inhofe has received $2,182,631 from the oil & gas industries since 1998, (according to OpenSecrets.org) have any possible bearing on his views?

It just goes to show you can't be too careful.