BatChainPuller

Good post - agree with all that, particularly the part about f******l. I think a lot of the medal winners in this Olympics demonstrate a vast gulf in class and work ethic between themselves and the spoilt prima donnas who are paid multiples of what the athletes get. I'm hoping for a backlash against the rot that is stinking out f******l. Gotta love Foster and Crams commentaries - informative, enthusiastic, from people who are clearly heavily involved in developing and promoting the sport. By comparison f******l has Lawro and Lineker.

Football 365 : West Ham deny Carroll deal | News

Thought the opening ceremony was superb entertainment - Danny Boyle and his team played a blinder. My expectations were fairly low, hardened old cynic that I am, and seeing the Hobbiton set at the beginning made me wonder how bad this was actually going to be. First time I've seen one of these big set piece events actually portray a Britain that I know and recognise. Normally we get some sort of Downton Abbey/ Brideshead Revisited pastiche bollocks that plays to the worst stereotypes of this country. Antithesis to the Chinese orchestrated big budget stuff that we couldn't hope to compete with. Read a spot-on Danny Boyle quote about the opening ceremony reflecting a country that's trying to find its place in the world. Brilliant start and has really warmed me up to the whole event.

This. The Drogba comparison making be taking it a bit far, but I think Carroll has a lot of potential to develop. We've taken the pain of him adjusting to life at LFC - just when we're starting to get the benefits we're letting him go. Sends a fairly terrible message to the rest of the squad - even if you get your head down, work at your game and start to make an impact you're not safe because nowadays we're a selling club who may get rid of you to buy some mediocre 'prospect'.

Have to agree - I fear that through her thoughtless actions she has irreparably damaged the image of lingerie models.

Bren Gun

Totally agree - Lawrenson is absolutely appalling - painfully unfunny and parrots every clicheed predictable line going. Hansen just bland beyond belief - contributes nothing of value. Dread to think what that pair are being paid.

It worked for FDR and Attlee, maybe it'll work for Ed.

Ah of course, excuse my usual naivety. I can see now that the real underlying cause of the double-dip recession is that the flood of cash to top execs was temporarily interrupted. Doh!

Business as usual for the fat cats - whilst the average private sector pay rise is currently running at 3% the bosses are awarding themselves 12% +. Research clearly demonstrates that there is absolutely no correlation between executive pay and profitability in FTSE 100 companies. Executive pay among FTSE firms keeps soaring, survey reports | Business | The Guardian Manifest/MM&K survey shows under 'remuneration awarded' measure, executive pay rises in 25 FTSE 100 firms topped 41% Jill Treanor and Simon Neville guardian.co.uk, Monday 11 June 2012 23.03 BST The soaraway pace of boardroom pay is highlighted in a survey on Tuesday, which shows the bosses of FTSE 100 companies enjoyed an average 12% rise in their take home pay last year, while their employees barely received any pay increases. Bob Diamond, chief executive of Barclays, is named as the highest paid chief executive of any FTSE 100 company in 2011 under a new methodology designed to replicate rules being introduced by the government that requires companies to publish one overall figure for executive pay. Diamond had £20.9m of "realisable remuneration", which includes salary and any long-term bonuses that have vested during the year as well as any share options that could be cashed in. Second highest paid director is Sir Martin Sorrell, chief executive of media and advertising company WPP, who on the same measure received £11.6m. The survey by corporate governance expert Manifest and pay consultants MM&K is released as WPP braces for a defeat of its remuneration report over Sorrell's pay package at Wednesday's annual meeting in Dublin. If the WPP remuneration report is defeated – largely over a 30% rise in salary for Sorrell to £1.3m – it would mark a record year for defeats of pay plans since the vote was first introduced nearly 10 years ago. The annual meeting season for the 2011 financial year currently underway has been dubbed the "shareholder spring" as five remuneration reports have been voted down, matching 2009. Six would be a record. The country's biggest water supplier, Thames Water, became the latest company to face a backlash over its pay after handing its chief executive an annual bonus which is nearly as big as his salary, sparking union anger. Martin Baggs was paid £418,359 on top of his £425,000 basic pay despite presiding over a hosepipe ban, a drop in profits, and falling customer satisfaction. He will also be in line for hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of shares in the next four years under a long-term incentive plan. Gary Smith, national officer of the GMB union, which represents water workers, said: "This is a classic case of reward for failure. It is an absolute outrage." The Manifest/MM&K survey highlights the huge differences in complex pay deals across FTSE 100 companies made up of salaries, one-year bonuses and payout from long-term plans spanning three or five years. Using a measure of "remuneration awarded" – salary, any cash, benefits and the expected value of deferred bonuses and share options – the survey found that the median increase in chief executive pay in FTSE 100 companies was 10% but in more than 25 of these companies the rise was greater than 41%. Employees at FTSE 100 companies got mean average rises of 1%. "Shareholders are enraged, the survey results are likely to increase their state of agitation," the report said. The average remuneration awarded to chief executives across the FTSE 100 was £4.8m, while the average of the "remuneration receivable" was £4.2m, The survey provided details of the top 10 highest paid executives on the basis of the "remuneration receivable" measure, all of whom received at least double the £4.2m average. After Diamond and Sorrell, the next highest paid boss was David Brennan, who quit Astra Zeneca, with £11.3m and Andrew Witty, chief executive of pharmaceutical group GlaxoSmithKline, who received £10.7m. It is not yet clear what elements of pay the business secretary, Vince Cable, will demand is included in the "single figure" that he wants companies to produce for boardroom executives to avoid confusion about the pay of top bosses through multi-pay plans spread over a number of years. Some companies have tried to pre-empt the official requirement by publishing their "single figure" and the survey has embraced one that it believes could be used and was adopted by Legal & General in its annual report this year. The survey said that the rise in pay was driven by increases in deferred bonuses and longer-term incentive awards as salaries alone rose by a smaller amount, 2.5%. Cable has been credited with encouraging the "shareholder spring" through consultation on executive pay but is now facing criticism from Labour over signalling a reversal on annual binding votes on pay. The current votes are advisory and can be ignored by companies and while this vote was to remain, Cable had considered a separate annual binding vote on future pay deals. He is now considering whether such binding votes will take place every three years. A decision is expected by the end of the month. Top 10 highest paid chief executives Bob Diamond, Barclays £20.9m Sir Martin Sorrell, WPP £11.6m David Brennan, AstraZeneca £11.3m Sir Andrew Witty, Glaxo £10.7m Marius Kloppers, BHP Billiton £9.8m Peter Voser, Shell £9.7m Sir Frank Chapman, BG £9.6m Michael Spencer, ICAP £9.3m** Samir Brikho, Amec £8.9m Dame Marjorie Scardino, Pearson £8.9m Includes salaries, bonuses and any share options that could be cashed in during the year **Previous year Source: Manifest/MM&K

And this thread stinks worse than the Krakow my arse.

Gotta love Google Ads - an ad for gastric bands appeared when I clicked on it ! - sneaky fuckers must have hacked into my online grocery shop.

The facts are clear. This cruel austerity experiment has failed | Will Hutton | Comment is free | The Observer While the human cost of economic stupidity is all too visible, the world's leaders are paralysed by their dogma Last week was an awesome warning of where go-it-alone austerity can lead. It produced some brutal evidence of where we end up when we place finance above economy and society. The markets are now betting not just on the break-up of the euro but on the arrival of a new economic dark age. The world economy is edging nearer to the abyss, and policymakers, none more than in Britain, are paralysed by the stupidities of their home-spun economics. Yanis Varoufakis, ex-speechwriter for former Greek prime minister George Papandreou and now an economics professor in the US, said last week: "There is precisely zero chance of austerity working. It is the same as thinking you can escape from gravity by waving your arms up and down." It could hardly be more sobering. Money has flooded out of Spain, Greece and the peripheral European economies. Signs of the crisis range from Athen's soup kitchens to Spain's crowds of indignados protesting in the streets against austerity and a broken capitalism. Youth unemployment is sky-high. Less visible is the avalanche of money flowing into hoped-for safe havens in the US, Germany and even Britain. The last time the British government could sell government bonds at interest rates as low as today's was in the early 1700s. George Osborne and his acolytes proclaim this as a triumph of the government's economic policies. They are gravely mistaken. Rather it portends fears that the international economic order may collapse because if so many countries are simultaneously pursuing austerity, where's growth to come from? Virtually everywhere you look there are signs of a weakening world economy. At home, manufacturing suffered its biggest plunge for three years, and this in an economy already suffering its longest depression since the 19th century. American jobs growth is petering out. Unemployment in Europe averages 11%. Even China witnessed a sharp fall away in factory activity in May. Yet none of this should be a surprise. We live in the aftermath of one of the biggest financial and intellectual mistakes ever made. For a generation the world, with the London/New York financial axis at its heart, surrendered to the specious theory that lending and financial contracts could grow many times faster than the underlying economy. There was a blind belief that in a free market banks could not make mistakes. Free markets didn't make mistakes – only clumsy bureaucratic states made economic mistakes. Or so they said. Financial alchemists, guided by the maxims of free market fundamentalism, could make no such errors. Except that they did. The result was the financial crisis of 2008. Had governments not underwritten their overstretched banks with trillions of dollars, euros and pounds, an even worse global slump would have ensued. But while the banks could continue trading, the hundreds of trillions of loans and financial contracts they had made did not go away. And because governments had guaranteed their deposits, as in Ireland, or had to inject capital into them as Spain has been doing all last week, this private bank debt has steadily become public debt. Here is a classic case where all the gains were privatised, and all the losses were socialised. It was the much-maligned state that had to step in and clear up the mess left behind by the private sector. The free market wasn't so free after all – in fact it proved astonishingly expensive for the public purse. People across Europe still pay the price. This is no solution. Overstretched banks have become more cautious about lending new cash; and even strong banks are caught up in the backwash because if they step into the breach they could fall into a vortex of falling property prices and declining economic activity, becoming weak in turn. So as banks stand aside from their crucial function of generating credit, governments and central banks must step in to generate the demand that has now disappeared. But they have not done so to a sufficient degree. Part of the problem is that the more bank debt that governments guarantee, the less room for manoeuvre they feel they have – especially as their stagnating economies forces up welfare spending and depresses tax revenues. But the larger problem is intellectual. The dominant ideology of the day – from the same roots that delivered the crisis – forbids it. A consensus stretching from US Republicans through to Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats via George Osborne's Treasury continues to claim that the state is the source of economic bad. The state threatens enterprise, invites damaging taxation, and is the root cause of spreading inflation. The state must balance the books just as the private sector must. This is not just an economic but a moral necessity, they argue. Living within one's means rather than "maxing" out on debt appeals to American, British and German individualistic Protestantism. Inflation is even more a sign of moral degradation: it means reneging on promises, rewarding spendthrifts and penalising savers. We had the good years. Now we must take our medicine. The public and private sectors must retrench simultaneously worldwide. Enterprise and free markets will do the rest. The "march of the makers" will step in to fill the void left by public austerity measures. This is a first-order moral and economic mistake. Human beings need each other for mutual support. In economic terms this means that no individual, either as a person or a company, can manage existential risk by themselves. That risk needs to be shared and mitigated otherwise the risk is not accepted. There would be no enterprise or innovation – the risks of failure too great. That is why there is a role for both private and public sectors. It is governments who provide the means through which we express our social obligations and pool our risks. This is the heart of Keynesian economics – a different set of moral and economic propositions than those which prevail. Today we can see an almost laboratory experiment on a global scale of why Keynes was right and his detractors wrong. There is no doubt what Keynes would advocate now: a government-sponsored increase in demand co-ordinated across as many countries as possible and an acceptance of a temporary but closely managed increase in inflation to reduce the real value of debt. The enormous legacy of private debt – whether in Britain, Germany, Spain, the US or Greece – and the fiendishly complicated way so many of the loans have been organised and distributed around the world financial system cannot be easily unwound. Sir Philip Hampton, chair of RBS, warned this week it might take a generation for RBS investors to recover their money. The choice is thus stark. To commit to decades of economic stagnation, the break-up of the eurozone, the risk of trade protection and autarchic economic policies, the dismantling of the west's social contracts, the imposition of high unemployment and the political fallout that will follow. Or to change course. The technical means are relatively simple. Governments must replace targets for inflation with targets for the growth of prices and growth of output combined. Central banks should inject money into their financial systems by offering to buy new bank loans made to support new investment, new innovation or new infrastructure – helped by partial government guarantees. Governments also need to increase demand. They can do this directly – with targeted and time-limited tax cuts or spending increases. They can also move indirectly, taxing the rich more aggressively and re-allocating the proceeds in tax cuts to those on middle incomes and lower who tend to spend more – along the lines that both presidents Obama and Hollande have proposed. There is also a case for a financial transactions tax – both to raise crucial revenue and to cap the growth and frenetic speed of financial transactions. Finance has become too powerful. It needs constraining. Will any of this happen? The west is at a cross-roads, and although such proposals will be fiercely opposed by the British, German and American right they need to be beaten back. After all, it is their ideas that have brought us to this pass. It is not too fanciful to argue that the future of western capitalism depends upon how this argument plays out – and how quickly, if at all, there is a change of course

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Prometheus lauded by stoner critics

All good stuff - from the 3 year old for cocktails to the 7 year old which is excellent. My favourite rum at the moment though is Flor De Cana Nicaraguan rum - the 4 year old gold is like nectar, can't wait to try the 7 year old/ 12 year old.

Excellent piece on Radio 4 stats programme about the complete lack of evidence in Beecroft 'Report' - amongst OECD countries only the US has less legal regulation of the labour market. Some studies actually suggest the complete opposite of Beecroft - countries with more legal protection of workers have higher employment. BBC - BBC Radio 4 Programmes - More or Less, Would firing staff 'at will' boost the economy? Excellent programme - shatters some myths about 'lazy' Greece too - for example Greek workers on average work 40% more hours than German workers.

Thank god someone caught it. This is now in my summer wardrobe: Joy Division Oven Gloves Half Man Half Biscuit Funny tshirts, Custom t-shirts, Cool tee shirts, Adult t shirts - Stolli Clothing

And many of those living independently in supported housing are having services slashed too. Many are being 'reassessed' - surprise, surprise the assessment finds that people no longer require services. They are the ultimate soft targets - people with little or no economic leverage or influence and advocacy services have been cut to ribbons. You can tell an awful lot about a country by looking at how it treats its citizens who have a learning disability.

I grow a lot of stuff in pound shop containers on the patio. Apart from tomatoes and peppers (need a long growing season I find) I've also had success with climbing cucumbers (I got right to the top with no oxygen) - one of those vegetables that you discover actually has a taste, in contrast to the supermarket polystyrene. Carrots are another one that come as a revelation and well worth the effort - top tip is to mix some sand with the compost. Also climbing beans like mangetout - these cost a couple of quid for a small packet in Sainsbury's.

+1, Dennis Hopper scares the fuck out of me.

Interesting piece - nails a number of tired myths that are regularly trotted out including about benefits:

Rotterdam was the port I was thinking of, to be fair.

A portly blindfolded Johnny Barnes gives Downing a lesson in how to take a pen.

Nabila Ramdani: François Hollande will strike fear into the hearts of the rich - Commentators - Opinion - The Independent France will be waking up today to its first Socialist President for 17 years – and bracing for radical change. There are all kinds of reasons why one might fear a François Hollande presidency, especially if you are a prosperous French person. The 57-year-old Socialist has openly admitted that he "does not like the rich" and declared that "my real enemy is the world of finance". This means taxing the wealthy by up to 75 per cent, curtailing the activities of Paris as a centre for financial dealing, and ploughing millions into creating more civil service jobs. Add an explicit threat to renegotiate the euro pact to replace austerity with "growth-creating" spending, and you have one of the most vehemently left-wing programmes in recent history. German Chancellor Angela Merkel – the woman at the centre of the Franco-German economic powerhouse which has dominated Europe – was at one stage even threatening to campaign for her conservative ally, Nicolas Sarkozy, against Mr Hollande. Caution is justified, though one thing Mr Hollande will not repeat is the disastrous tax-and-spend policies introduced by France's last Socialist President, François Mitterrand, in 1981. He was soon forced into a humiliating U-turn, and into sharing power with the right as the Communists quit his cabinet in protest. In contrast, Mr Hollande will focus on solving the euro crisis and reversing a Gallic economic decline widely blamed on a failed capitalist system, and particularly a rotten banking sector. Just as pertinently, he will seek to heal divides caused by five years of the most unpopular head of state in post-war history. Mr Sarkozy continually stigmatised perceived undesirables, from France's six-million-strong Muslim community to Roma Travellers, whom his administration regularly deported. The diminutive conservative has claimed Mr Hollande is an incompetent "liar" who will "bankrupt France", but the caricature of an untrustworthy leftist is wide of the mark. Mr Hollande is an Enarque – a product of ENA (L'École Nationale d'Administration) France's elite "rulers' academy". He came seventh in his year, above former conservative Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, and is by no means the grey, provincial local government apparatchik his detractors claim. Mr Hollande styles himself as a "social democrat" and not as any kind of revolutionary. "I want to initiate a change in society in the long term," is how he put it earlier this month, as he outlined a programme which was far more pragmatic than ideological. Mr Hollande's commitment to equality is evident in his promise to introduce parity between men and women in his cabinet, and create a ministry of women's rights. Efforts will also be made to promote equal pay between the sexes. He will bring under-represented minorities into government, and work to make the Republic more egalitarian. Managing France is a near-impossible task at the best of times, and the current warnings of economic chaos and social disorder are no worse than those levelled at Mr Sarkozy five years ago. François Hollande is going to have an extremely rough time, but he should not be written off as easily as some would like.