Vincent Vega

Haha, never change Tony.

Just heard that Bowie has died. Fucking devastated, a true legend.

Seeing loads of people in the know speculating he’s going to call it a day in January once we’re done with the EU transition period.

My mate also tested positive, but his only symptoms are loss of taste and smell and a slight feeling of a cold. His missus however is now in Warrington hospital with pneumonia. She’s not in the best shape having gone through cancer treatment and being overweight, but she simply wouldn’t be in hospital if she hadn’t caught the virus, so those saying we should just crack on are being a bit callous in my opinion.

This makes for slightly hopeful reading.

I distinctly remember the toys being thrown out the pram in spectacular style by several posters on here after that Spurs 4-1 beating at Wembley in October 2017. Plenty of people voicing their doubts and a few saying Klopp wasn’t the man.

Wowser

Dan Rather is boss on Twitter.

She’s a complete dickhead. I think if someone showed her The Bottom Inspectors from Viz she’d think it was a great idea. Thing is she'd end up being sent to a bottom correction facility herself for having a ridiculous comedy arse.

My mate’s missus has tested positive for Covid. My mate himself had a test on Saturday and is awaiting the result, but it sounds like he’s got it as he’s lost his taste and smell. My mate will hopefully be fine as he’s in decent shape, but I’m worried for his missus as she had treatment for breast cancer last year and it wiped her out, and her immune system is shot, plus she’s a bit of a heifer.

Hospitals in Birmingham reportedly filling up with patients too.

Good opinion piece in The Guardian today on this theme. The Tories aren't incompetent on the economy – they know exactly what they are doing David Edgerton This Brexiter government is pursuing its political goal, whatever the economic cost. Its predecessors did the same “There is no alternative” was the mantra of British politics from the 1980s to the very recent past. To bring about change it was necessary to unleash enterprise, or globalisation, or technology. Politics was about staying out of the economy, and coping with the social consequences. But there always was an alternative – it is just that the loudest voices denied it. As Adam Tooze has noted, the state never left the economy, it just changed its role, and its visibility. Since the 1980s the economy has been actively reshaped by a series of political-economic decisions by successive activist governments. Over the years, the aims of British political-economic policy have changed. Once, the main concerns were the national rate of growth, the national balance of trade, reducing inequalities within the boundaries of the nation, and strengthening the nation compared with others. Since the 1980s, and by these measures, things have not got better. Neither under Thatcher nor under New Labour, let alone more recently, did the UK achieve the rates of GDP growth of the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1980s the balance of trade has stayed systematically worse than in the 1950s or 1960s. In relation to goods it is at the previously unthinkable level of -6% of GDP. Nor has the acquiescence to the supposed necessities of economic realism transformed the UK’s relative position. The levels of efficiency of the British economy are still lower than those of France and Germany, to roughly the same extent as in the 1970s. The UK manufactures less than Italy and France, and a third of what Germany does. Germany exports much more outside the EU than the UK, and, deliciously, its exports to the Canzuk countries (the fantasy potential British superpower of the dimmest Brexiters: Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK) are twice UK levels. The English north is poorer than the regions that used to make up communist East Germany, and the north-east is poorer than the poorest German province. Nor has the new post-national economy thrown up transforming British entrepreneurs and firms. Where are the world-beating British firms to replace the supposedly dozy giants of past? There was lots of talk of startups and venture capital and all the rest. But after 40 years, where are the results? When pressed for examples of great entrepreneurs, I get given the same tedious list of an operator of airlines and railways, a maker of vacuum cleaners, a pizza chain owner and the designer of Apple phones. And then there is ARM (which makes the crucial chips used in Apple phones and elsewhere, which was sold to the Japanese Softbank in 2016) – indeed a successful firm, but one with origins in the despised 1970s, perhaps the last moment of serious British creativity. Note too that British R&D was higher as a proportion of GDP in the 1970s than it is today. It was higher still in the early 1960s. The object of political-economic policy since the 1980s has not been to make a better British national economy. It has been directed at changing the balance of power in the country, to open the economy up to the world, essentially to make the rich richer and more powerful. The Thatcher revolution was fundamentally a rulers’ revolt. While inequality of all kinds was driven down by policy in the 1940s, 50s and 60s, it was pushed back up by policy from the 1980s. Similarly regional disparities, which had been huge before 1939, were reduced after the war. In the post-war years the state transformed infrastructure, from electricity to the telephone, from gas to housing, to an astonishing degree. Since the 1980s these public assets have been privatised, handed over to a new class of rentier capitalist to sweat and to extract monopolistic rents. In 1954 the economist W Arthur Lewis published his theory of the dual economy, to describe the economic problem of underdeveloped countries, with a mass of workers who would work for very little, and a small rich sector, which liked it that way. The US economic historian Peter Temin has cheekily applied that model to the recent history of the US, where the mass of wages have been stagnant since the 1970s, the rich have got richer and the old middle class has shrunk. On a lesser scale something similar has been done to the UK. We now have the enclave economy of London with its rich professionals, with offshoots elsewhere, and for much of the rest of the country effectively a low-wage, low-productivity economy, where the minimum wage is often a maximum too. As Temin noted in the US, the hyper-rich control politics. This too has happened here. Indeed, as Peter Geoghegan shows, the Brexiteer-Thatcherites are the local British branch of US culture warriors, climate deniers and haters of the EU. Brexit has exposed the political nature of the economy. But don’t be fooled into believing that the Brexiters will reverse the policies of the last 40 years. They are not economic nationalists, nor do they care about economic sovereignty or about rebuilding the nation. They are not Lexiters in disguise, rediscovering the 1970s Brexiter nationalist politics of Tony Benn. They are radical Thatcherites, who have to believe that the British economy has been turned into a world-beating one by Thatcher’s policies. They have to deny the painful reality they are handing out contracts not to world-beating British firms but to shipping lines without ships, PPE suppliers without PPE, to crony, not creative, capitalists. But don’t be fooled either by critics’ talk of their incompetence or lack of ideas. They know what they are doing, and are succeeding. Their aim is to further change the economy, even at the expense of growth. Like Margaret Thatcher’s indifference to the waste of unemployment, and the 2010 coalition’s lack of concern about the ways in which austerity caused the economy to stagnate, the Brexit hit will in their view be a price worth paying. It’s the politics, stupid. It always has been. •David Edgerton is the author of The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: a Twentieth-Century History

Did he time it to cause maximum embarrassment to Trump in the run up to the election? Surely that can be the only reason?

This has been planned all along, why else did those ERG extremists get on board with Johnson’s deal? The DUP even played their part by being all outraged about it. I even think they’re willing to try and cancel devolution and tell the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish to suck it up.

Rage are the best live band I’ve seen.

The Dude knows.

We’ll retain it you bunch of misgobs.

Mostly places I’m terrified of visiting. Buenos Aires Rio de Janeiro Mexico City San Jose Montevideo Beirut Jerusalem Cairo Tunis Casablanca Miami New Orleans El Paso I was meant to visit somewhere on my list (Bilbao) in April but this virus shite got in the way.

Black Crowes are a fucking brilliant rock n roll band. This is simply magnificent.

I like Nirvana but just this one track is better than anything they were able to muster.

I thought Brian Reade’s piece in the Mirror today was a good representation of my current views. Liverpool owners must trust Jurgen Klopp in transfer market to make club 'sustainable' FSG have stuck to prudent approach amid the Covid-19 fallout - but they must take risks now that Klopp has got them back on their perch, and that may include signing Thiago and Sarr Paul Konchesky has been looking back on his move to Liverpool 10 years ago and feels that “being a London boy” might explain why he bombed. A label which didn’t really affect Paul Walsh, Michael Thomas, Paul Ince, Glen Johnson, Joe Gomez or others. Maybe a more telling reason was that, performance-wise, Konchesky made Liverpool’s second-worst left-back signing, Julian Dicks, look like Carlos Alberto. He wasn’t the lone failure in Roy Hodgson’s only summer as Liverpool manager. Joe Cole, Christian Poulsen, Brad Jones, Milan Jovanovic, Danny Wilson, Raul Meireles and Jonjo Shelvey also arrived and made as little impact as the man who signed them. It’s why FSG, the owners who came in and sacked Hodgson, have been determined to operate a prudent strategy ever since - which is taken personally by many thousands on social media who annually fixate on a player and demand he’s signed. Two years ago it was Nabil Fekir, last year Pepe. Looking back, it’s fair to say neither were missed. This year it’s Bayern Munich’s Thiago Alcantara, and with only Kostas Tsimikas brought in as Andy Robertson’s back-up, with the money received from Dejan Lovren’s sale, the Twitter fumes are toxic. Especially as all their rivals, including Everton, are waving around the cheque book. But maybe this time they have a point. Liverpool haven’t made any major signings for two years and of the outfield team that lost the 2018 Champions League final, only Joe Gomez has come in for Lovren and Fabinho for James Milner. The rest, with the possible exception of Gini Wijnaldum, have been automatic choices when fit. That’s a lot of games between them. And little variation in style - leading to a feeling that tactically the squad needs more flexibility and some high-quality fresh legs. Klopp appears to agree with that. Whenever he’s been asked about transfer plans he has hinted that he’d like to bring in players but is operating on a different financial level to his nearest rivals. Which rankles with some fans, who point out Liverpool have reached two Champions League finals and won the Premier League in the last three seasons. New CEO Billy Hogan’s opening message was that the club “is about trying to create a business that is sustainable". But is it sustainable to ask the same small squad which racked up 196 points over two seasons in the world’s toughest league, to hit the same phenomenal levels again, without an injection of quality? FSG are right to point out they’re taking a big hit with Covid and can’t gamble with the future. But which club isn’t? And when you have a man like Jurgen Klopp at the helm for the next four years, is backing his judgement in the market that much of a gamble? I think Liverpool will spend. There’s a long way to go in this transfer window and as the deadline approaches there will be demand for the likes of Harry Wilson, Marco Grujic and Xherdan Shakiri, which could bring in a minimum £50million. Wijnaldum could also engineer an exit to Barcelona. If that doesn’t raise enough cash to plug the gaps in the squad, FSG would be wise to stump up the cash. Because Klopp needs cover in central defence, a new point of attack from midfield, which would be Alcantara, and an alternative striker, possibly Ismaila Sarr or Adama Traore. This isn’t 2010, and the manager isn’t Roy Hodgson. Looking at Klopp’s track record, they can feel confident the players he covets will deliver. It’s admirable that Hogan’s priority is a sustainable business model. But having got back on their perch after 30 years, surely the main thing they need to sustain is keeping the team at number one. The rest will follow. With Manchester City strengthening an already formidable squad, and possibly bringing in Lionel Messi, it would only take the slightest drop in standards to fall off that perch again.

Second family.........fuck off.