Park Life

I've always been for the concepts of the EU because I feel in the next few years we need to be in an entity that big to compete with China and India as well as the "old" powers. I think an individual country would be too overshadowed. I've also always thought the idea of a larger community with similar people (fuck off Parky) to be beneficial from a social point of view and I'f like to see the ties and exchanges between countries expanded. This is the kind of wooly-deluded quasi utopian nonsense that has got us into it in the first place. I suppose trade with others was crap before we got into the EU? If you want competition than the place to start would be to ditch the 12.780 new EU regulations that strangle business and ditch the thousands of hidden beuracrats earning god knows how much for sitting on comittess and filing their nails all afternoon. ....and if you had a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty it wouldn't have gone through THAT'S WHY WE WEREN'T ALLOWED ONE IN OUR LOVELY DEMOCRACY.

You'd have to make a choice whether to join the master race or come back to Brittania's bussom.

Norway gets to protect its fishing stocks as well. I thought you lived in Germany? Do you want free movement rights within Europe or not? Being outside the "political" europe does not restrict free movement. You really should read up on this subject.....If you are interested. I'm sorry but you're wrong. Leaving the EU would restrict free movement, unless negotiated otherwise. Of course, such an arrangement would have to be reciprocal. Don't think free movement would be an issue at all. Because moving to live in the US or Australia is as easy to do as Germany? You haven't thought this through have you - have you actually noticed the seperate queues at the airport? Ah the intricacies of the airport queue. Is this going to be the basis of your argument for staying in a bancrupt over regulated and under performing Euro zone with a bunch of relaxed meditarraniean types stealing the food out of your kids mouths?? Is it!!! Well?

Germany with their healthy exports don't actually need to be in the Euro and especially a strong Euro at that. Go figure.

Well no, you're not going to convince me of anything when you seem to have either completely ignored, or cannot answer, my perfectly reasonable question of how you select what to believe and what not to. It's perfectly possible not to have a prior agenda in science and not all science is grant funded. What do you make of the work of Newton, Einstein, and Darwin? Anyway, as I suggested to Parky, technology is really just the application of science, and it works, end of story. Science is not completely incompatible with belief in the Abrahamic God only if you decide all the particularly absurd stuff is a metaphor. Which brings us back to my question, which you won't answer........... Well you either believe in God or you don't, quite simple really. I would add that whilst I do, I also don't have much faith in organised religion, which is in essence the industrialisation of faith for profit IMO. The scientists you mention are from the era before science became a truly big business, let alone the corporate monster it is today, when the quest for knowledge was more "pure" for want of a better word. Just look at some of the BIG science subjects, they are in fact just theories, not proven in fact, Big bang, Dark matter etc. There's a lot of science done to support these theories, but where's the contra-science to disprove them??. There isn't any, because once a theory gathers pace the research grants and kudos come pouring in. Best thing any scientist could come up with is a theory that sounds fucking great, could be possible, but is unprovable in fact, becasue the striving for that fact is what makes science the money machine it is. Dark matter and Big Bang, being a cases in point. As an analogy to what I'm trying to say. I'm an IT project manager, when I get into a project test phase, I don't want my test teams to tell me it works (if everyone has done their jobs right of course it fucking works!!), I want them to tell be it doesn't, I want them to try and break every single important element of the functionality, I don't want to know what's good about it, I want to know what's bad and how bad. Because when they can't, job's a good'un. I won't hear a word against funding the research into dark matter - its paying my daughters rent this summer I would have loved to have been bright enough to become an astrophysicist, or a particle physicist, but I'm relatively shit at maths. The dark matter and dark energy story is fascinating, about a million times more interesting than theology. I'd also suggest that despite what toonpack says CERN is a good example of pure science which has little or no political bias or motivation - its pure research for the sake of it and will add knowledge to the world. Its one of my biggest regrets/annoyances that physics and the sciences were taught so badly in my youth I never realised how fascinating they could be. I've taken a strong laymans interest since, but I have to confess I'm not giving her much help with her hiomework anymore You must be dead proud, thats amazing she works there. She's not working there, still a student, but her degree has paid research placement during the summer breaks. Luckily she's got the work ehtic to go with the brains. But yes I am dead proud Has she got her eyes on dark matter?

Norway gets to protect its fishing stocks as well. I thought you lived in Germany? Do you want free movement rights within Europe or not? Being outside the "political" europe does not restrict free movement. You really should read up on this subject.....If you are interested. I'm sorry but you're wrong. Leaving the EU would restrict free movement, unless negotiated otherwise. Of course, such an arrangement would have to be reciprocal. Don't think free movement would be an issue at all.

If you think that the EU countries would let us leave without a fuss then you're wrong imo. Tbh the Germans are getting a bit sick of the Eu as well. I'd have no problems with downsizing the EU to the sort of size it was during the EEC days. The reason they can't do that is that the competition on the doorstep of the EU all deregulated as it would become would be too much competition for the internal market...That's why they keep expanding it. Also why all the Polish leadership were wiped out allegedly.

Well the majority of the country backed the tories for 3 long terms, even after the miners strike. Bastard this democracy lark for the dyed in the wool socialists. People are idiots Couldnt agree more. Four legs good two legs bad.

Tbh if a British Govt said they wanted out and renaged on the Lisboa Treaty there is very little the Eu could do about it: Germany no army, Frogs too lazy the rest bancrupt.

If you think that the EU countries would let us leave without a fuss then you're wrong imo. Tbh the Germans are getting a bit sick of the Eu as well.

Norway gets to protect its fishing stocks as well. I thought you lived in Germany? Do you want free movement rights within Europe or not? Being outside the "political" europe does not restrict free movement. You really should read up on this subject.....If you are interested. He really has come up short, beginning to wonder if Renton has a bit of Greek in him.

Norway gets to protect its fishing stocks as well. I thought you lived in Germany? Do you want free movement rights within Europe or not? Mate I can live where I like...Rules don't matter to me.

MAX KAISER drags Goldman Sachs in....Classic.

Norway gets to protect its fishing stocks as well.

As I suspected this is another BANK BAILOUT BY STEALTH. A full-scale default would also hammer other debt owners, including banks elsewhere in Europe. As of the end of 2009, European banks held $193-billion of Greek government debt, with most of it on the balance sheets of French and German lenders. That could create losses that eat into bank capital, reducing their ability to lend and slowing economic growth across the region, a prospect that could force governments to aid banks yet again."

German FinMin Capitulates, Says PIIGS, Global Moral Hazard Win Submitted by Tyler Durden on 04/29/2010 10:51 -0500 Obious 101 from Reuters: German Fin Min: Crisis Largely Over In Europe and Germany German Fin Min: If Greek Budget Consolidation Succeeds, No Tax Money Will Be Lost German Fin Min: Without Consolidation In Greece We Will Have Unforeseeable Market Consequences German Fin Min: Failure With Greece Would Put Euro In Question German Fin Min: Cannot Throw Greece Out Of Eurozone It's over - the excess debt/GDP terrorists have won, and Moral Hazard is now a global phenomenon. There will be no more failures anywhere. In other words, all your stock profits will come straight from your taxes.

YAMMAS!

I was referring to him getting lynched actually. If he grows a tache and wears those leather chaps he's so fond of, he could be in trouble.

Nice to hear. Makes Brown seem even more of a prick for having a pop at her like. Hung like a Parliament.

Everything will probably be free.

There was speculation yesterday that The Sun had offered Mrs Duffy £50,000, or even £75,000 for her story. It is more probable that The Sun's offer was in the range of £25,000 to £30,000 – which must still have sounded like riches to a pensioner who has worked all her life on relatively modest wages. But Mrs Duffy turned it down. Reputedly, The Sun, which has been campaigning aggressively since last October for a Conservative victory, wanted her to attack Gordon Brown in unrestrained language and declare her support for David Cameron but, after a lifetime's allegiance to the Labour Party, she would not do it. Another rumour is that Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor who is David Cameron's link with the Murdoch empire, contacted Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of Murdoch's company, News International, to say that it would not help the Tory cause if The Sun pushed its suit too hard. Coulson's reasoning was that Labour was in such a mess after Gordon Brown's gaffe that it would pay to leave them dangling in the wind rather than give them a pretext for claiming that Mrs Duffy was party to a Tory-orchestrated media conspiracy. Even without the involvement of The Sun, the presence of a man from Bell Pottinger set off conspiracy theories. The agency was founded in 1987 by Tim Bell, Margaret Thatcher's advertising guru, who advised her through the victorious 1979 election campaign. The chairman of Bell Pottinger Public Affairs, Peter Bingle, is a Tory activist who wrote a jubilant blog yesterday, jokily suggesting: "There is a strong case for giving Gillian Duffy a peerage. She has revealed the true Gordon Brown." She turned down the money.

Kick Greece out of the euro to warn other reprobates that they face swallowing the same humiliating medicine It wasn’t very nice to liken the Greek debt crisis to the Ebola virus but, as a former Mexican finance minister, Angel Gurria knows a thing or two about contagion and financial sickness. “When you realise you have it,” he said, “you have to cut your leg off to survive.” As the head of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development was standing next to Angela Merkel, Germany’s tough-minded chancellor, at the time, his message will surely have got through. The message is that yet more promises of emergency loans to Greece, from the International Monetary Fund and the European Union, are beside the point. Loans, whether the €45 billion already agreed or the rumoured €100 billion-plus soon to come, are just palliatives. They do not stop the virus from spreading. The only way to do that is to cut the euro’s Greek leg off: in other words, to expel it from the single currency. This whole Greek tragedy must be galling to those Europeans who thought the post-Lehman recession was basically an American affair, one that showed the superiority of the continental way of doing things compared with those beastly Anglo-Saxons. Now America’s economy is rebounding strongly and it is Europe that looks like the world’s sickest continent. The European economy is weak, and a sovereign debt crisis that promises to spread from Greece to Spain, Portugal and, perhaps, Italy risks sending it back into another nasty recession. Three painful truths lie behind the problems of Greece and the dangers of contagion. None is the issue most often cited by euro-fans — that Europe’s single currency faces these problems because monetary union was not combined with political union. No form of political union in Europe could have controlled Greek spending or accounting deceptions in the past decade, or prevented the economic troubles now being seen in Portugal and Spain; nor, now, would a European political union have been better at maintaining political stability than the Greek Government itself... http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/c...icle7112208.ece

Was in a footie bar in Hamburg last week and expressed similar sentiments as the first para, much to the irritation of the Deutsche volk. ha ha

Renton the cod/faux/gay scientist.

CHARLIE BOOKER I half expected the loser to hand his shoes to Dimbleby at the end before jetting off into the sky If the leadership debates were supermarkets – which they're not – ITV's would be Tesco, Sky's would be Morrisons, and the BBC's offering would be Waitrose. The ITV debate felt like a 1990s gameshow whose rules required Alastair Stewart to bellow "Mr Clegg!", "Mr Brown!" or "Mr Cameron!" every thirty seconds; the Sky studio was a poky black cave cluttered with discarded British Airways tail fins and dwarfed by an immense Sky logo. With its mix of cavernous space and high-tech backdrops, the BBC debate resembled a cross between Songs of Praise and current Saturday night talent-show splurge Over the Rainbow: I half expected the loser to hand his shoes to Dimbleby at the end before jetting off into the sky on a rocket-powered podium. The chief topic was the economy, a subject upon which I have such a poor grasp that from my ignorant perspective all three men may as well have been debating the best way to kidnap a space wraith. Cameron proposed 'efficiency savings' which seemed to boil down to a war on unnecessary leaflets; Brown boomed that this would shrink the economy by £6bn and risk a double-dip recession. Clegg didn't care what happened as long as it was fair. He proposed some kind of cross-party economic fairness committee which, as secret fellowships go, sounds about as much fun as a cardboard-licking party. Clegg was big on fairness generally. Fairness and difference. He used so many distancing tactics – references to "these two", phrases like "there they go again", constant calls to "get beyond political point-scoring" – he may as well have thrown in a "hark at these arseholes" at the end for good measure. It's a tactic that largely works: he sometimes came across as a slightly exasperated translator sadly explaining to his fellow earthmen in the audience that these two visiting Gallifreyan dignitaries were well-meaning but essentially wrong. Brown's ears are amazing. I think they're made out of sausages. And he still can't smile properly, which is hardly surprisinggiven his ongoing luck allergy. Following the overblown 'bigotgate' media piss-fight, which saw him force-fed fistfuls of shame, it was vaguely impressive to see him standing at a podium instead of screaming on a ledge. Just as Cameron likes to shoehorn the "change" meme into every sentence (or rather did, before Cleggmania flared up), so Brown mentioned "the same old Conservative Party" so many times he began to sound like a novelty anti-Tory talking keyring. According to some polls, Cameron won, or at the very least tied with Clegg. Which is odd, because to my biased eyes, he looked hilariously worried whenever the others were talking. He often wore a face like the Fat Controller trying to wee through a Hula Hoop without splashing the sides, in fact. Perhaps that's just the expression he pulls when he's concentrating, in which case it's fair to say he'd be the first prime minister in history who could look inadvertently funny while pushing the nuclear button."