Verbal

As usual, your bravado is misplaced - it would be the site owners that would take most of the hit. But I see you've deleted your post. Or had it deleted for you.

Pap, just some friendly advice. Quoting articles in their entirety from behind paywalls is an open-and-shut case of breach of copyright. You might just get away with it if you had commented on the piece in your post, thereby claiming exemption under what's called "fair dealing". http://www.ipo.gov.uk/types/copy/c-other/c-exception/c-exception-review/c-exception-fairdealing.htm It's probably worth editing your post with this in mind.

Ah, then there's being wrong. I guess Fonte did. Had Clyne broken into the team while they were in the prem?

I really must do that legal training to post on here.

Interesting but useless fact: not one of the players yesterday has played for another prem club. That's aside from the no less interesting/useless fact that, as with Man U, we had five players out there from our League One days.

But our little enthusiast himself has ruled out murder - it's too "extreme". And he should know, being on the inside as he is. He's only interested in the "parents-must have-drugged-and-accidentally-killed-her-and disposed-of-her-in-collusion-with-the-Tapas-7" line, although he lacks the courage to actually say so. Or the funds to pay the defamation lawsuit. Abduction by strangers he also rules out on the absence of "physical evidence" (although he's admitted he doesn't actually know this, but it sounds nice to say it). All of which makes me think that pap is actually part of a gigantic conspiracy. The real question is: who's pulling his strings? I suspect a former goalkeeper with a fetish for the reptilian.

And they clearly didn't do that. Selective quoting of a parenthesised clause by our little enthusiast can't disguise the following key sentence (quoted with their italics and bold highlighted):

He doesn't, he's just adopting the Icke-alike default of assuming that the deep state predetermines all this. In his weird world, if some royal supports someone, that is communicated to co-conspirators in the Met and acted upon unquestioningly. If Branson does it, ditto - because now Branson is a member of the deep state. The same logic dictates that the expenses scandal never happened, the Profumo affair was pure fiction, and Jonathan Aitken was never jailed. In reality, as opposed to this self-aggrandising fantasy, the Portuguese police pursued at one point exactly the same theories about an abduction as did the British police. They also named the McCanns, but dropped them, explicitly, for lack of evidence in 2008. Similarly, the current UK police investigation is pursuing the pre-planned abduction as one line of inquiry - based, as they say, on "one reading of the evidence". So not black and white. Many, many shades of grey, as is so often the case. However, ambiguity and contradiction are simply not allowed in conspiro-world. If the Portuguese drop the line favoured by the foaming-at-the-mouth-misfits, then it MUST be because of political pressure from the Deep State. If the British police publicise another angle, then our little enthusiast - behaving like a Walter Mitty, imagining himself at the centre of all the action - declares with the certainty of an insider that he knows the "scope of the Portuguese investigation was wider". He knows no such thing, and claiming that he does is nothing less than a lie.

He has none, of course. One concern I have about all this is that one day, he will bring this site down with his so-called theories. A defamation suit will wipe Saintsweb out, and our little “enthusiast” is playing Russian roulette with the objects of his pathetic accusations. So far (and I’m no doubt missing a few), he has claimed that Lee Rigby’s family are involved in a criminal conspiracy to conceal that he’s still alive. This is defamatory. He has alternatively alleged that Lee Rigby was killed by British officialdom of some unspecified sort. This would be defamatory, except that he never even made it to first base with a credible “theory”. He has also claimed that the injured and dead men, women and children of the Boston bombing are “crisis actors”. This is defamatory of the living. And we know his claims about the McCanns are defamatory because of the huge amounts of money two newspapers have already had to pay out for claiming a weaker version of what’s he’s been suggesting on here. One other individual – the “sicko stalker” on whom our little enthusiast clearly bases all his “thinking” – is under a suspended prison sentence for his part in all this. We only need another Lord McAlpine to decide to collect on idiotic claims made on social media for this site to be gone. That it would be taken down because the ludicrous second-hand claims of such a risible individual would be very sad. I really would advise mods – and more especially the owners of this site – to watch this carefully.

Don't get too sucked into this stuff. This is David Icke territory (what else would you expect?). And don't be fooled by the source. Tony Bennett did not work for the McCanns, despite the misleading title of his "foundation". The McCanns' legal proceedings against him have been because of libel. He has also been given a suspended prison sentence over this affair, and when he was described as a "sicko" and a "stalker" by British papers the Press Complaints Commission rejected his complaint that this was unfair. In other words, this thread is being dragged back into the sicko and stalker world inhabited by our little "enthusiast" for claiming that the family of Lee Rigby, like the McCanns, are part of a criminal conspiracy. Of course, there's nothing that our enthusiast is adding to any of this guff - just regurgitating it with all the usual lack of intelligence, curiosity and common sense. This time, however, he's feeding off a rather sad desire by many on here and elsewhere to pump themselves up as wonderful parents compared to the McCanns - a point which was made ad nauseum over six years ago and really is getting a bit old now.

The McCann case is "similar" to parents who murdered their children? If you're implying that the McCanns murdered their children, please say so. If not, where are the "similarities"?

Far be it from me to appear pedantic, but it's more like cronyism. Nepotism benefits family members.

Sickening. But I suspect this information - and the experiences of those who've reported these abuses - is wasted on the thrusting Victorian pretend-"entrepreneurs" (aka southern provincial smugs) on here. The frequency with which these stories turn up suggests that job centres are under pressure to deliver a set number of sanctions per week/month (or at least I'd rather think that than believe that job centre staff, who I'm sure are decent people, relish dishing out this abuse on defenceless people).

The Telegraph and you, unsurprisingly, forget to mention that the UK's growth, like Japan's is "quantitative easing-fuelled" too. And let's be clear about what QE means in the UK. It means the Bank of England prints money in order to buy government debt (and some higher-quality private debt). This enables Cameron/Osborne to continue to run a huge budget deficit without derailing the economy. But this is really smoke and mirrors. Do it too long and inflation is sucked into the economic system - and markets get wise to it and respond accordingly, marking stocks sharply down, which are a key part of the present asset bubble. This is all very well in a desperate attempt to get reelected, but it's storing up huge problems down the line. At some point, we'll all have to pay for this...again. And with those costs will come a collapse of the unsustainable asset bubble (which is screamingly ridiculous in London right now - the house there I bought in 2011 has "made" nearly a quarter of a million pounds in just over two years) - as well as the ruin of many of the very first-time buyers now being tempted into the bubble by what is by common consensus the truly idiotic Help to Buy scheme. In the property asset bubble in particular, we're chasing our tails up, and we're about to be chasing our tails down again, with hundreds of thousands of new Help to Buy homeowners suddenly trapped in horrendous levels of negative equity. But by the time it happens, Cameron and Osborne will (they hope) be back sitting in a newly elected government, declaring the need for Austerity, Take Two. The difference is that, this time as the cuts dig ever deeper, one of the biggest consequences of QE - the transfer of even more wealth to the wealthy - will leave Britain with the most fragile grasp on the social cohesion that makes civilised life possible. Look our for London Riots Mk 2. My guess - as someone who works and lives in both London and the North - is that fault lines will now be more regional, with a fierce backlash from the North where decimated public services no longer paper over the cracks.

About three-quarters of Question Time audiences are invitees from local political parties and party-affiliated associations (like a student wing of parties if the debate is happening on a campus) and other representative bodies, with numbers carefully balanced. The remainder are offered to "the public", and these tickets are mostly taken up by people local to the recording. Letts just made an utter idiot of himself and the audience recognised that it was pretty comical brown-nosing of his editor.

Be careful what you wish for. Emigrating to the US absolutely requires that you avoid two things: getting old and getting ill. That’s aside from getting poor. 75% of all American citizens nearing retirement have less than $30,000 in their retirement (401k) accounts. Between 1991 and 2007 (just before the crisis hit), bankruptcies among the elderly increased by 150% - mostly because of unpayable medical bills. 46% of ALL bankruptcies in the US are because of unpayable medical bills. Americans spend twice as much, per person, on medical bills than any other country in the world. Between 2002 and 2011, the average cost per family of medical insurance doubled. Cancer care per patient (!) can easily top a £1 million. One case, reported by CNN last year, involved a 60-year-old suffering from difficulties in breathing and spent just a few days in intensive care. The bill was $474,000. Even going to the ER (the US version of A&E) can bankrupt you. And don’t think that insurance will protect you. It won’t. You could still be left with bills for as much as four-fifths of the total – perhaps more if you’re on a dodgy “HMO” deal. Here’s what Time magazine found in a detailed investigation in 2012: Simple lab-work done during a few days in the hospital can cost more than a car. A trip to the emergency room for chest pains that turns out to be indigestion can exceed the cost of a semester at college. Despite that, the US hospital system is rated absolutely dead last in terms of quality of care: Americans are sicker and live shorter lives than any other developed country. The last time I lived in the States, I faced a choice: take out family medical insurance at a cost of $1200 a month. Or get comparable insurance coverage by taking out an American Express medical policy that cost £240 per year, which basically covered triage costs in the US and the flight back to the NHS. This insurance policy would not have been available to me had I been a US citizen or on a Green Card. I wouldn’t become a US citizen for other reasons too – not least the way in which the legal system can bankrupt you in a heartbeat, and the ways in which the criminal justice system has dispensed with the idea of innocence by heavily penalising you for insisting on getting your day in court. As much as I enjoy working in and travelling around the US, I’ll stick to my EU passport, thanks.

As Paul Dacre, the editor of the Mail, has seen fit to raise the question of the patriotism, or lack of it, of Ed Miliband's father, what, you might wonder, did Dacre's father, Peter, do while Ralph was fighting the Nazis in the Royal Navy? He was a gossip columnist for the Sunday Express.

It's entirely possible given their earlier views that the Daily Mail hated Britain with their "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" headlines, their owner's lavish praise for Hitler, and his gimlet-eyed accusation that the "people of the blood" were responsible or communism. It's more likely though that it was merely (!) Jew-baiting. This whole affair is a wonderful demonstration of the law of unintended consequences. It has boomeranged back on the Mail spectacularly. You can tell how deeply sensitive they are to the Jew-hating undercurrents that came with the reminders of their 1930s headlines by the spokespeople they front. Dacre remains in hiding. The most public defenders of their position have been Jon Steafel and Alex Brummer. Funnily enough, I happen to have a nodding acquaintance with Steafel because I bought a house from him in Chiswick in the late 1990s. He is now what he was then - Dacre's deputy, and an all but invisible public presence at the Mail. I suspect that he and Brummer - both of whom are Jewish - have been wheeled out to mount some sort of qualified defence because of the enormous damage this is likely to do to the Mail's commercial interests in the US. Reminders of their anti-Semitism here are revelations in America. And in any business in the US, virulent Jew-hating and Hitler-loving is not a good look, no matter how many years ago it was. As I say, the wonders of unintended consequences. Oh, and on the Falklands comment: come on Lord Tender, do at least some basic ****ing research, rather than fling out an accusation in the hope that it is "true"! You seem to have had implanted the Mail template for smearing dead people.

but they DID write that Ralph Miliband "hated Britain - and it wasn't framed as an "opinion" piece, as the Mail have now admitted. Anyway, it's even more fatuous than a mere lie, and it doesn't amount to an "opinion" worthy of a Jew-hating pub bore, let alone a national newspaper. It's completely devoid of intellectual content. There is simply no connection between a socialist outlook and a "hate" towards a country. Even at the most basic level, ask yourself: who "hated Britain" more? Someone who fled the Nazis as a hated Jew and served in the RN during the war? Or a paper that sided with the Nazis against the Jews and that now flings mud at a dead Jewish refugee?

This is not and never has been an argument what "their readers" believe. It is an argument about a paper with a clear history of praising the Nazis to the skies - and with a profoundly anti-semitic owner (the grandfather, I think, of the present one) blaming Jews for communism - trying to pin a "hate" badge on a Jewish refugee who was a (anti-Stalinist) socialist. It obviously IS a lie to say that Ralph Miliband "hated Britain" for, among other things, being against the idea of monarchy. On that basis, YOU clearly "hate Britain" because you've stated here many times that you are anti-royal. Having said that, the demand for an "apology" from the Mail is absurd. The paper has a long history of this kind of thing, and the whole kerfuffle has reminded people who knew, and informed people who didn't, that there once was a paper so disgraceful and hateful that it could carry the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts". That is easily enough punishment for the paper - and no wonder the current Lord Rothermere is fretting. The Daily Mail have made complete fools of themselves.

A couple of (admittedly unlikely) IFs. If The UK voted to leave the EU (dream on, you xenophobic fantasists), and if I were then given the option of a British or EU passport, I'd happily give up the British one.

Quite so. Here, for example, is the Daily Mail's owner Lord Rothermere, writing in the paper in 1933: For the Mail, of all papers, to question Ralph Miliband's commitment is the result of either staggering hypocrisy or profound ignorance of its own sickening past. At least there is a consistency here. The Jew-hating Rothermere tended to focus his attacks on British Jews. His successors are doing just the same. Just to illustrate the point, compare these latest Mail ravings with Rothermere in 1930: There's really not much of a difference.

Then you're not talking about social tenants, despite your earlier assertion. I'm not aware of anyone receiving an actual subsidy for maintaining an empty room. Besides, it is surely for councils and housing associations to properly manage their housing stocks, rather than for publicity-concious governments to invent crowd-pleasing new and Orwellian ways to humiliate the usual objects of right-wing hate. Wouldn't it be useful - not to say equitable - to have someone who's actually on benefits to add to this thread, rather than allow it to be highjacked by the usual crowing southern smugs?

I don't undertand this. A social tenant by definition is someone who rents from a council or housing association. Besides, the best known actual abuses of accumulated benefits are in privately owned properties, not those owned by councils and housing associations who - again by definition - tend to own very 'modest' housing stock. And these abuses really have nothing to do with spare bedrooms - they're much more to do with playing the system in (for example) wealthier parts of London.

Once again, standards on Saintsweb are slipping. I see that the Fulham fans forum now has a Latin catchphrase, which I thought meant "What just happened?" but apparently is translated as: "Stand up if you still believe." They even have a thread debating the grammar of this: http://www.friendsoffulham.com/forum/index.php?topic=32114.0 What should our motto be? I'll throw "reductio ad absurdum" into the hat.