Verbal

Again, Lord T - where? The flaw is surely with UKIP. Here's Farage on the subject during the local elections: The 'flat rate' claim is a hang-over from Farage's dodgy predecessor, and Farage himself has no actual clue. So why should I or anyone else make any assumptions about tax allowances? Or perhaps, Lord T, you're a closet UKIP policymaker yourself. If so, do tell us: What IS the tax allowance to be on someone earning £15,000 under UKIP's non-existent policy? But you'll have to find something that at least makes a half-hearted attempt to be up-to-date. The 'proposal' on their website talks about corporation tax and refers to the 'current rate' as 28%. Unlike you Lord T, I pay CT, and that figure is complete nonsense. The proposal says not one word about VAT except some vague comment about abolishing it and replacing it with a local sales tax 'at the same rate' of 17.5%. Don't these people actually pay VAT, or can they just not manage a calculator? Just for your information, assuming you're as badly informed as UKIP 'policy' makers, VAT on most things in the UK is 20%. If this is 'your' party, it really is the befuddled leading the befuddled, wouldn't you agree? So go away and do a little thinking, then come back and present a nice coherent picture of what this mysterious policy actually is. But It'll be a tall order. Here's an indication of how hard it'll be, from a member of the Institute of Fiscal Studies:

You're trivialising this - not looking, or wanting to look, at the underlying reality. One of the reasons employers are able in many cases to pay such low wages is because of the nominally progressive effects of the tax allowance system. Simply abolishing it and replacing everything with a flat rate, as UKIP appears to want to do (although who knows; they're a comedy party) would have one effect beyond all others - to hand a large slice of the poor's income to the well-off. Still what do you expect? This is not a party of protest, but one whose supporters - over 70% longterm Tory voters; over 70% over 50 years old - are intent on doing nothing more than sitting on their hands in a huge harumph until someone comes along who pleases them. It's wonderfully self-defeating, of course. Just as the Republicans were undone by demographics in the US, and will continue to be so as they are forced to over-represent a shrinking, unappealing rump of white, right-wing voters, so the Tories are being pulled in the same direction by the UKIP brain-freeze. After UKIP, Cameron's attempts at modernisation are dead, and a party that hasn't won a general election outright in more than two decades will continue to slide into another iteration of uselessness.

Not a flaw in my argument, Lord T - a flaw in UKIP's back-of-a-fag-packet policy-making. Of course, if you factor in tax allowances, that makes the proposal even more bonkers. Even so, it doesn't alter the simple fact that a flat rate would be a massive redistribution of wealth away from the working poor to the well-off.

If you are low-paid, earning say £15,000, your net income (after tax and NI) is presently £13,019. Apply UKIP's flat rate 25% all-in and that falls to £11,250 If you are relatively well paid, earning, say, £70,000, your net income is presently £47,564 Apply UKIP's flat rate and your net income rises to £52,500. The gap widens the more income you make. In other words, UKIP's "proposal" is for a massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.

To claim that 'pretty much everything that Kennedy stood for was in ruins' after his assassination is patently untrue. His civil rights policies were all pushed through - notably the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, both of which had been hotly opposed by many of his own party in the South. Johnson widened the social reach of Kennedy's call for change with his Great Society program. These were HUGE changes. Another Kennedy legacy, of course, was what became the Apollo program. (PLEASE don't tell me you believe the moon landings didn't actually happen. I'm going to assume you're not that absurd). As for the Tonkin incident, this gets pulled out and played like a stuck record every time someone wants to claim that false flags are routine within the US. Apart from the obvious point that the Gulf of Tonkin is not part of the American mainland (!), it wasn't a false-flag operation at all, but something much more complex. Try reading (I know, it's a lot to ask) McMaster's Dereliction of Duty on this. The incident itself was much more 'fog of war' (including phantom radar readings and poorly trained radar ops), but the real deception was by MacNamara and Johnson, who used the incident as a pretext for removing Congressional oversight into the US's involvement in Vietnam. There was no pre-planned false-flag conspiracy - but an overwhelming amount of hubris and manipulation by an overweening political elite, combined with bureaucratic paralysis among the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Well it doesn't provide any kind of motive for the idiotic false-flag conspiracy theory parroted on here. Pap is convinced the Americans killed their own. Again. Because that's what Obama does - he wakes up in the morning and says: Let's go kill us some Americans. (Pap, you should understand, has hitched his wagon to the far-right fantasists in the US). So it's another kind of conspiracy theory. There are some straightforward problems of geopolitical fact. The State Department has never labelled Chechen Islamist/separatists as 'freedom fighters' - not least because so many of the most violent Jihadis encountered in other hotspots in the world like Afghanistan have been Chechen. If the Russians were clever enough to set up a 'Chechen' outrage on US soil, they would hardly then shop their supposed agent to the US authorities months and years in advance. And finally, Russia's strategic interest in Assad's Syria is far greater than any discomfort (which is very, very little, if at all) that Putin may feel about human rights in Chechnya. There is nothing to trade.

Hopefully as an antidote to the sleaziness of pap's false-flag obsession, I thought this article in the New York Times, on some of the 260 victims of the bombings, brought some much needed perspective. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/health/for-boston-bombing-victims-a-long-painful-road-to-recovery.html?hp&_r=0 There are 14 amputees, including the six-year-old sister of Martin Richard, the eight-year-old whose life the bombers wiped out by placing the explosive so close to him. Reading about the terrible struggles they all face to recover from this induces a real sense of 'there but for the grace of God...'

Thank you for your replies, Pap. They are interesting, because in at least the attempt to be honest (not wholly successful, unfortunately), you have undermined everything you’ve tried to argue on this thread. Your admission that you can find not a single documented example of a ‘false flag’ operation conducted by US authorities against innocent US citizens on US soil is astonishing. Every major public tragedy in the US since 9/11 has attracted the malign attention of conspiracy theorists like you. And at the very core of every conspiracy theory’s claims about these tragedies is that they are ‘false flag’ operations conducted by forces of the government against its own citizenry. So the list of US ‘false flag’ attacks would include but not be limited to: 9/11, Virginia Tech, Aurora, Sandy Hook, and now the Boston marathon. But don’t you find it even a little bit odd that, while in the entire history of the United States no one has ever documented a single proven instance of a domestic ‘false flag’ operation, you and your co-conspiracy theorists have been claiming virtually every US public tragedy over the last twelve years as ‘false flag’? Of course, you try to deflect from this admission that there are no actual documented false flag on US soil with either a dishonest or ignorant disclaimer, in which you haul out – guess what? – yet another conspiracy theory: The reason we don’t have documented confirmation of false flag ops in the US is because the manipulative elites controlling the world media have withheld information about them. But do you really think that Rupert Murdoch, et al, places guards outside the Public Records Office in Kew, or the Library of Congress in Washington, preventing the legions of academics, independent historians, think tank analysts, etc. etc., from entering the buildings and combing through newly released documentation? Do you honestly believe that only big media corporations can make Freedom of Information requests in the US or here? When media corporations become interested in something that originated in public records, it’s usually well after an academic or independent writer has produced a book or published an article about it. This kind of independent sifting through government documents by historians is the reason we know about the one instance when the US came closest to committing false-flag acts on US soil – with Operation Northwoods in 1962, a CIA draft plan to commit acts of ‘perceived terrorism’ in order to blame the Cubans. The plan, which was quite dreadful, was vetoed by President Kennedy. It never happened. Of course, false flag ops have been conducted by the US in other countries, and by other countries. But nothing – zero – by the US in the US. Which is quite something when you consider some of the dark times American civil liberties have been through, from the Red Scare and McCarthyism in the early- to mid-50s, to the horrendous abuses under Nixon from 1968 until his resignation, under threat of impeachment, in 1974. As low as my opinion is of you, not as a person but as a conspiracy theorist, I really didn’t expect you to continue to argue that Jeff Bauman and Nick Vogt are one and the same. You ask how I know how to contact them. This suggests you haven’t opened that link I sent you, fundraising for Bauman’s medical bills. And here’s a Facebook contact for Nick Vogt (how bad an internet sleuth are you?!): http://en-gb.facebook.com/pages/Nick-Vogt-Family/178392405583759 But in case you haven’t got the message, this sickening denial of the reality of suffering should be a source of great shame to you - assuming you don't lack an empathy gene. It is off the narcissistic scale to put the gratification you get from conspiracy theories above the acknowledgement of the suffering of the victims. And I once again ask that you send a donation and apology to Jeff Bauman’s fundraising site. As for your claim that I’m not arguing anything but just attacking you personally, can I just say that I’m not remotely interested in you personally – I’m arguing against you as a cook-cutter conspiracy theorist. Actually, you’re not even really that, but a kind of unwitting (or witless?) knock-off of one. The real ones in the US include scumbags of the far-right like Alex Jones, survivalists, racists who are FREAKED by the presence of a black man in the White House, virulent anti-Semites still peddling the Protocols of Zion, and Tea Party dimwits who think that ANY government is bad government. That you, with your ill-thought-out but essentially harmless mélange of left-ish, centre-ish, utopian-ish views should find yourself associated with that bunch of utter crap should have given you pause for thought. But, like all dutiful conspiracy theorists, you plough on and keep the false-flag faith. Before you once again try to parrot the conspiracy theorist’s article of faith that those who oppose them are ‘sheeple’, let me say that even by the standards of city police departments in the US, the BPD are pretty poor. We’ll hear lots of stories in the coming days and weeks about their rank incompetence, trigger-happy demeanour, misrepresentations, and so on. You’ll no doubt bolt them onto your false-flag crap, but there are and will be plenty of balanced people prepared to criticize the police’s actions that day. Finally, just some helpful advice – learn to be a little less thin-skinned. You have a habit of obsessively responding to each and every little detail of a perceived insult, as if your neatly constructed, rather narcissistic view of yourself, won’t allow nay-sayers. The Boston bombings weren’t all about you. You do realise that, right?

That’s not what VW asked you and you damn well know it. He asked you whether you had any respect at all for the victims – the dead and the injured – of the Boston bombings. Your evasive answer is little short of disgusting. The only “victim” you can bring yourself to mention – in a way that I, at least, find highly disturbing – is Tamerlan Tsarneav. I’m going to try once more to get some answers from you to three simple questions: 1. Can you provide just one single instance – just one! – of a documented ‘false flag’ operation directed by US authorities at innocent US civilians on US soil? You have plenty of ammunition, potentially, if you care to look. You’re ignorant about such things, as you clearly believe, bizarrely, that the US post 9/11 is as bad as it’s been for civil liberties. So I’ll help you: try reading the Church Committee report, commissioned in the disastrous aftermath of the Nixon administration, Watergate and Vietnam. The FBI under J Edgar Hoover was among the worst offenders in trampling people’s civil rights. Despite all this, I challenge you to find anywhere the kind of ‘false flag’ outrages you appear to believe happens almost routinely in the US. 2. Are you anti-Semitic? I have to ask this bluntly, because I’ve asked you twice now without a response. The reason I ask is that you posted one link in particular, which you appear to set great store by, which contains some viciously anti-Semitic sentiments. Furthermore, anti-Semitism is the prototypical conspiracy theory, so it’s no surprise that it finds its way repeatedly into conspiracy claims about public tragedies in the US. Is this the kind of thing you believe in? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Protocols_of_the_Elders_of_Zion 3. Do you still believe that Jeff Bauman is Lt. Nick Vogt? And that Vogt/Bauman is a “crisis actor”? If you do, have the courage of your pathetic convictions and write directly to both families about your accusations. They are both easy to contact, and can equally easily be emailed. If you wish to withdraw your earlier, sickening suggestion that Bauman was play-acting, please do make a donation and an apology to the link I provided earlier. Here it is again: http://www.gofundme.com/BucksforBauman On the subject of Marshall Law, I notice you made this quite dreadful post a little earlier. You were posing earlier in the thread about your ‘concern’ about the slide into marshall law – but that was just an act, wasn’t it? From your latest post, you have as much understanding of marshall law as a tree. Let me help you out with some personal experiences. When I was in Syria, I stayed at a hotel called the Sham Palace in Hama. The place was empty and had the atmosphere of a darkened morgue. I asked a Syrian the next day what the story was with the hotel. He told me (somewhat nervously) that underneath the hotel was a vast mass grave containing all the victims of the 1982 uprising against Assad. As an act of revenge, Assad insisted on building a luxury hotel on top of the bodies as an enduring insult to the families of those who dared question his authority. There were up to 30,000 bodies – as many people as would fit into St Mary’s – buried in the foundations of the hotel. Just outside a rundown hotel in Dili, East Timor, and while the Indonesians were still maintaining their iron grip on the (half of an) island, was a quay. I’d already been warned about its backstory, and was told to be circumspect while the Indonesian military lurked nearby. Just after the Indonesians invaded in 1975, they lined up key Timorese figures – magistrates, judges, politicians – and ordered them to sit on the wall of the quay. They were then shot in the back, on by one. The single gunshots were not designed to kill them but to propel them into the water, where they were torn apart by sharks. I wonder how these two examples compare with yours on Tekken 2? And would you accept that the one-day lockdown in Boston was hardly comparable? Anyway – three simple questions. Can I have three simple answers please? And if they could display a modicum of maturity, that would be great. Many thanks.

He won't answer you, VW, because he'll end up saying something that even he, deep down, might acknowledge is utterly crass. How can you have respect for the dead and injured when there were no dead and injured? They were all "crisis actors"; the whole thing was a set-up; and the Tsarnaevs were patsies. You're right to wonder about how it's possible to be so uninterested in the terrible consequences for these people. I would have thought that no one who's seen the awful pictures of Jeff Bauman and the others immediately after the bomb would be other than shocked and moved by their awful plight. But then I would have thought wrong: there were some keyboard warriors whose psyches seem to have become so warped that they look at human suffering with little more than a dismissive snarl. Remember that Tamerlan Tsarneav was also a conspiracy theorist.

This post is one of the very few times on this thread where you've actually bothered to address criticisms of your particular enthusiasm for, among other things, calling the victims of the Boston bombing actors - or implying that they are. It’s a breathtakingly poor effort. Your reference to Gladio is utterly beside the point (and just for clarification, it had nothing to do with the FBI, despite your very odd implication that they organised it). Gladio is also unnecessarily obscure. There are far more glaring examples of US (not NATO) intervention in other countries’ domestic affairs – including the overthrow of Mossadeq in Iran in in 1953, , the overthrow of Allende in Chile in 1974, the support of the murderous right-wing ‘Contra’ gangs in Nicaragua 198-89. And so on and so on. These, however, have absolutely nothing to do with so-called ‘false flag’ or domestic covert action. And, like Gladio, they have absolutely nothing to do what the FBI does or doesn’t do in the US. Can you actually produce an example of a false flag operation carried out on US soil? Leave side all this useless, irrelevant guff about Gladio. And while I’m asking some simple questions: Can you confirm that you’re happy about the virulent anti-Semitism contained in the links you’ve posted on here? Can you confirm that you still maintain that the badly injured Jeff Bauman is Lt. Nick Vogt, who stepped on an IED in Afhanistan and had both his legs blown off. (If not, by way of an apology you can donate to Bauman’s hospital bills fund here: http://www.gofundme.com/BucksforBauman Give generously.) Can you confirm that you are continuing to maintain that thousands upon thousands of people in competing government agencies have been able to cooperate in ways they’ve never managed before? What are their motives? And why has no one blown the whistle on what would be a truly heinous, even treacherous act? Since you place the following in quotation marks – “a government would never do this” – can you say who exactly said any such thing on this thread? Something else I notice about your posts. With Tim, for example, you respond to all of his criticisms with an absurd *****liness about a non-existent personal attack on what counts for your integrity. You never address his substantive points. With Viking Warrior and Ottawa, you brush aside their inconvenient expertise with barely a mention and move on to the next absurd claim. With me, for what it’s worth, I can’t recall a single occasion on this thread where you’ve bothered to address my criticisms – again, it’s reworked into what seems to me a rather narcissistic whine about my ‘insults’, and how you’re so open about who you are (As Tim says, who gives a flying? And in any case, I haven’t a clue who you are). So which is it? Do you lack the courage to respond to actual criticisms? Or do you lack the capacity? I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume it’s the latter. It fits better with your astonishing naivete. Your hopeless argument that the US is descending into marshall law makes me wonder if (a) you have a passport and (b) you’ve ever actually used it. I’ve spent time in a number of countries during marshall law, including Pakistan under Zia and Musharraf, Chile under Pinochet, East Timor under the Indonesians, Syria and under the older Assad. If you had spent any time in countries like these, at those times, you’d really have a brutal, ugly sense of what marshall law means. The US, for all that we may be concerned about the Patriot Act, is NOT a military or paramilitary dictatorship, for heaven’s sake! You’re also a little, shall we say, lacking in the ways of the world if you think this is the first time civil liberties in the US or the UK have been under threat – or even if it’s the most serious. They were arguably much more under threat in the 1970s and 80s, during the IRA campaigns here (you probably have no memory or even knowledge of what happened then, despite your supposed proximity to the source of the trouble). The Thatcher government produced rafts of civil-liberty-threatening legislation, most of which, fortunately, were eventually rolled back. And civil liberties were under constant threat during the Nixon administration. I think my message to you, delivered with genuine concern, is try growing up. Apply a bit more maturity in your thinking about this. The irony is you think you are being ‘open minded’ and yet conversing with you is like conversing with a religious convert, or someone with whom I don’t share a common language. You latch on to every little nugget of feverish internet speculation, and slot it in to your vastly implausible larger picture stolen from The Matrix. You give credence to the juvenile and obsessive ramblings of other keyboard warriors, and evidently don’t stop to think, for one minute, that the actual trial will consist of forensic evidence, biometric data, witness statements, unseen video evidence, details about the construction of the bombs which are linked to where, exactly they were built, etc, etc. In any case, I look forward to your answers.

Exactly so, Tim. Here's a choice example from the link about the Boston marathon "actors" (including the badly injured Jeff Bauman) which pap posted on here so enthusiastically: If pap is happy to be associated with vicious anti-Semitic ranters like this, then that, as they say, is his problem - and a big one. But that kind of ugly response is found in all of these crazy theories. When you look beyond the deathly detail of the hopelessly ignorant nay-saying, what lurks there is a threatening, bullying far-right lunatic fringe.

Well, look at it like this. You're in Liverpool. Go along to the next gathering of the families of the 96 and try telling them that they are all "crisis actors" - that Hillsborough was simply "staged" by the Thatcher government to bring in draconian changes in law to criminalise football fans. No one really died. They've all been spirited way to safe houses. Anne Williams worked for private security contractors who were part of the Black Ops conspiracy. She may not even be dead now. Oh, and make sure you go into that meeting with a copy of The Sun rolled up under your arm. That's the local equivalent of what you're doing to the victims of the Boston bombing. Of course, no one really notices you outside of a small football forum - but you're one of a large number of keyboard super-sleuths stamping their feet, demanding that they are given they're due for seeing through the evil State-sponsored machinations of every single public tragedy. By the way, I'm still struggling to make sense of your claim that the "Anonymous" nonsense was "inconvenient". My point was, on the balance of probabilities and understood, I think, by reasonable people, that it was written by an overheated conspiracy theorist, rather like yourself (except read like it was written by a 14-year-old), and that it was a piece of characteristically self-important, look-at-me-I've-cracked- the-case rubbish. It was, of course, utterly predictable that something was about to give in the hunt for the bombers. Nothing in that email was remotely credible, and only the foolish would give it credibility - the kind of people who think 'The Craft' were really the bombers, that crowds suddenly disappeared (good grief! How ignorant a 'theory' that is!) and that Jeff Bauman was really a wounded soldier from the Afghan war. Anyway, do let us know how the meeting with the 96 families goes.

You clearly have no idea either about blast-related trauma or bleeding out. You should listen to VW - he actually has experience of dealing with both. And with that, I'm out of this discussion, which is now, frankly, bizarre. Pap: with your lack of judgement and perspective, you've crossed a boundary of good taste, and while the victims fortunately won't read any of this crass nonsense, it's insulting to them. I'm just waiting for you to follow this to the logical conclusion and accuse those in the pictures of being "crisis actors" like the victims, and their families, of Sandy Hook. All, so goes the impression, for your personal gratification. The extent to which you appear (evidently not just to me) to revel in this is...well, the word that comes to mind is slimy.

Again, your retailing of paranoid theories are obscuring far more important issues – and again, it’s a reason you should perhaps be a little more circumspect and, frankly, a little less simple-minded about this.. So why not drop the whispered conceit that the two brothers were ‘framed’, ‘set up’ or otherwise implicated as unfortunate innocents? Anyone with a modicum of common sense can see that the brothers were, on the balance of probabilities, likely to have been involved in the marathon bombings, in the murder of the campus cop, in the carjacking, in the car chase, in hurling IEDs onto the streets, and in the head-to-head shoot-out with the cops which resulted in the older brother’s death and the flight of the younger one, now wounded, to the bilge tanks of a hauled-up boat. As I said a little earlier, if all this bears a similarity with anything in the US, it’s the Columbine attacks. It so happens that this is something I know a little about, having recorded interviews with many of those involved. The two shooters, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, killed in a ruthless, sociopathic way – and in the endless search for ‘motives’ in the aftermath, this is about as good as it got: that Harris was a manipulative sociopath and Klebold, though popular at school, was an easily manipulated accomplice. Harris and Klebold, like (I suspect) the Tsarneav brothers, built pipe bombs and acquired guns and ammunition, and planned to go out in a blaze of narcissistic glory. (They succeeded – just take a look at YouTube, and the long lines of mass-murderer wannabes declaring their unbridled admiration for the killers). I’d put good money on the prediction that the brothers had no ‘network’ of Chechen controllers, no clear ideological commitment to bringing the US to its knees, and no religious zeal over and above the banal references to their Muslim antecedents. Naturally, at least one of them indulged in conspiracy theories about 9/11 (a warning to you perhaps?) – but that was about it. An open trial would hear the evidence for all this, one way or the other. So the point is this: the Republican Right is exerting enormous pressure on the Obama administration to declare the Boston bombing an ‘act of terrorism’ (which Obama, after some hesitation has already done), to withhold the reading of Miranda rights (the right to remain silent; and again this has already happened although it could easily be reversed), and to declare the surviving brother an ‘enemy combatant’ (which has not yet happened). Aside from the very important civil rights issue, this tactic will only serve to obstruct a fair and open trial. And for people to have faith in justice it must be done and be seen to be done. Although the Columbine killers succeeded in their wish to go out in a blaze of bullets, no one has ever labelled that massacre as an act of terror – nor have they labelled the Sandy Hook killings or Aurora massacre as such (and in both, the body count was much higher). So if you want to wind up into a fit of pique, do it for the right reason. Why not be a small voice, at least, in demanding Tsarneav’s right to a trial in which the federal government has to make its case to a jury in open court. As I said earlier, the most irritating thing about conspiracy theorists is that they give the authorities an easy ride. They are the true patsies in all this, because while the conspiracy theorists fiddle with their inane, self-important and often repellently cruel crap, Rome burns. Or look at it another way. Look at the company you keep. One of the most fashionable conspiracy theories at the moment is that Sandy Hook was a fake, that the grieving parents and surviving children of the attack are ‘crisis actors’, and that the whole thing was staged to enable Obama to tighten gun laws in the US. Who advocates this theory? The truly lunatic fringe of the NRA and far-right extremists like Alex Jones. http://illuminutti.com/2013/01/10/meet-the-sandy-hook-truthers/ http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/false-flag-alex-jones-boston-marathon-bombing-family-231742713.html After reading these links, don’t you feel like you should take a shower?

Pap, you may or may not be paranoid, but you certainly lack perspective, and you're also prone to naivete. The '19-year-old bloke' you refer will go on trial, at the very least, for the murder of an eight-year-old boy and the terrible maiming of his sister, his mother, and many other bystanders whose extremities were ripped to pieces by IEDs filled with the kind of shrapnel with one sole intention: to cause as much pain and human misery as possible. This '19-year-old bloke' will also, no doubt, go on trial for his alleged part in the murder of a young campus cop, apparently shot in cold blood as he sat in his car, and the wounding of a transit cop in a ferocious firefight that included the hurling of IEDs and grenades from the car. Your naivete, it seems to me, stems from two things: your hopeless belief that the world is binary - filled, on the one hand, by those who typically reject the wilder fantasies of conspiracy theorists, and who are, ipso facto, unquestioning champions of the goodness of governments, while the fantasists themselves are accorded a privileged status of 'evidence' and 'truth' precisely because of their fantasies; the other, rather more curious, naivete is that you, as an avowed left-of-centre individual, are signing up to conspiracy theories advanced by a viscerally right-wing, paranoid and in some cases racist fringe in American politics - the kind of fringe that denies 9/11 principally on the grounds that dumb Arabs could not have committed it, and denies the validity of Obama's presidency because he is a Marxist, Muslim fundamentalist foreigner, or, in short, Black. Your endorsement of the claims in the article on the 'Craft' is a model of naive nonsense. By endorsing it, you presumably endorse its specific claims - notably that 'the media' has 'censored' the presence of privately contracted security, when a much more likely explanation is that it is hardly worthy of mention; and, worse, that the fact that the 'Craft' personnel are carrying rucksacks renders these rucksacks indistinguishable from the ones that contained the IEDs. Or in short: the Craft killed and maimed in the marathon bombings. Remember some of the damage your co-conspiracy theorists have done just in the last few days. Here are a few choice examples. The family of a missing student from Brown University in Rhode Island, Sunil Tripathi, had to take down internet appeals calling for information about his fate, because he was named by Reddit as the younger of the two bombing suspects. Mike Mulugeta, a young black man, was also named by Reddit as the older of the bombers. A Morrocan-American student, Salah Eddin Barhoum was fingered by Reddit as the 'bag man' of the two bombers. Pictures were posted of him in his distinctly blue tracksuit top, carrying a sports bag across his shoulder. Astonishingly, the Reddit sleuths claimed that other pictures showed Barhoum without his bag - implying that he had planted his bomb - and yet anyone with half-decent eyesight can see the bag's shoulder strap still in place. Barhoum had to run, terrified, to the nearest police station to clear himself. The 'Saudi man'. Actually this was someone injured by the bombers. A false story gained momentum on the internet that he was a suspect, and the fanatical right-winger Glenn Beck took to the airwaves to claim he was being deported. None of this was true. The 'running away man'. Internet sleuths identified a young man, his clothes in shred, running away from one of the bomb scenes - which is, hardly, on the race of it, a surprising thing to do. but the claim was that he was the bomber fleeing. Fortunately no one ever put a name to him, so he has not suffered. The 'roof man.' Photos were latched onto of a man watching the marathon from a rooftop - again, hardly a surprising or even remotely suspicious thing to do. Yet his photo led to speculation that he was the orchestra conductor of the attack. Built into your stance is the assumption that unless the authorities release all and every piece of information that relates to their inquiry, they are somehow part of a massive Matrix-like inter-governmental conspiracy. You will surely have to concede, though, that placing all inquiries leads into the public domain is both absurd and damaging - not least of the principle of jury trials. This does NOT mean that accepting this argument means that you're a kind of sheep-like idiot who believe everything someone in power or authority says. On the contrary, an informed, critical citizenry is a crucial part of modern democracy, and an important bulwark against the abuse of power. Conspiracy theorists, on the other hand, let those in power off easily because the wilder theorists' claims are for the most part, and for all the appeal to 'evidence', merely falling for a characteristic kind of what psychologists call confirmation bias. They end up in a world of complete, and circular fantasy. So be an informed critic by all means. But don't think the best way of doing that is quoting David ****ing Icke. In the meantime, let's just see how the trial pans out.

This photo essay of the older brother Tamerlan (suspect no1, now dead), gives a curious insight - clearly someone interested in combat skills of various kinds. His Chechen background notwithstanding, this sounds more and more like a Columbine analogue rather than an act of international terrorism. The younger brother in particular is acting like a replica of Dylan Klebold - well liked, but easily led into the worst excesses of movie-glam violence. http://johanneshirn.photoshelter.com/gallery/Will-Box-For-Passport/G0000VQW7v6xWA7o/

Apparently the bombers are from Chechnya and have been in the US for about a year. One - suspect 2 - has been named as Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, of Cambridge, MA. This will no doubt not change US right-wing conspiracy fantasists' and pap's view that they are more likely to be patsies set by 'The Government'.

I suppose some feeble-minded planks are going to give credence to this. http://www.fromthetrenchesworldreport.com/warning-laws-are-being-written-to-screw-you/41206/

I get easily confused when trying to work out the hierarchies of non-league football. Can anyone tell me what league they'd be in if they were to repeat this brilliant performance of three (almost) successive relegations?

I think the subtext of this thread is the worry that we've just had the first of several Steve Kean moments. There WILL be protest chants tomorrow, no question. This WILL grow if Cortese is wrong, both about NA's dreadful sacking and about this appointment. No pleading for calm on here is going to stop it. Personally, I hope to hell Cortese has pulled off some sort of master stroke, because the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.

I'm not sure who you're quoting, and there may well be free parking in Putney, which is not in the H&F catchment. All I'm saying, as someone who lives by Craven Cottage, is that parking is free in the very nearby Crabtree Estate (use Google Maps to locate), which, using graffito's directions, is actually to the LEFT of Fulham Palace Road (coming from the Putney Bridge direction). It is a very pleasant five-minute walk to the ground from the estate, and driving in and out on match days is a piece of cake. To Saint Garrett, the Crabtree is on the same side of the river as Craven Cottage - just a bit closer to Hammersmith Bridge. To Steve G, you're right about Hammersmith station - and it's actually a much quieter route to walk on match days than from Putney. Just come out of Hammersmith Tube by the A4 overpass and walk down Fulham Palace Road until you get to the cemetery and then turn right. You'll hit the ground after another three or four minutes' walk. And to trousers, hi! See you in the neutral zone?

Just to correct some flawed information on here, parking restrictions throughout Hammersmith and Fulham are lifted on Boxing Day, with the exception of the zones immediately around the ground. So parking on the Crabtree Estate (Zone T), for example, will be permissible. Getting in a couple of hours (or less) ahead of kick-off will guarantee you a space, and it's only five minutes' walk to the ground. Plus the best gastropub in the area, The Crabtree, is just around the corner. Those with their personal chauffeurs can dine at the also nearby River Cafe. Here's the official announcement from H&F Council: Boxing Day - Wednesday 26th December, 2012 Usual parking restrictions and charges apply in Zones CC & G. Match day parking restrictions will also apply in Zones X & Y due to a home game at Fulham FC. Parking is free in resident/business permit and pay and display bays in all other parking zones throughout Hammersmith and Fulham. Other parking restrictions (including yellow lines, disabled bays, pedestrian crossing zig-zag markings, bus stops, doctors' bays and diplomatic parking bays) also still apply.

Brilliant!

Brilliant!