Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Good on you Fred for hitching to Paris all those years ago ,must have been a very different experience from today , I did the same when i was a kid although in the US .

Take cynics advice , if you were once a lad of adventure try to live a bit rather than droning on ,although i suppose we all get older and kind of lose some of our original free thinking .

One of my daughters hitch hiked around USA and into Canada and another around Australia for 3-4 month periods they were in their twenties.

They enjoyed themselves.

I think my wife lost weight.

-===-==-=-

Politics and hypocrisy has always interested me and those who know me also know that I have always challenged "false" beliefs. Often with tongue in cheek, as my grandson says "Oh Gramps hmmmmmh".

But with a shower which is "governing" at the moment and incidentals like Manuel around, somebody needs to challenge them!

Otherwise their delusions, or beliefs may become another religion!

From FT.com

June 9, 2015 12:41 pm
Greeks chose poverty, let them have their way
Francesco Giavazzi

It is clear that citizens have no appetite for modernising society, writes Francesco Giavazzi

For more than five years, Greece has been Europe’s biggest concern. Instead of focusing on employment, or immigration, or the challenge of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the continent’s attention has been on a country that represents 1.8 per cent of the eurozone’s economic output. It would be interesting to calculate how many hours Angela Merkel has dedicated to Athens in the past five years. Imagine President Barack Obama taking part in high-level talks for months on end, where little was on the agenda except the state of Tennessee. That, in effect, is what Europe’s heads of government have been doing.

In these five years the world has changed. China and India are undergoing profound transformations. The jihadis of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isis) represents a new and serious threats to the west, as does Mr Putin’s revanchism. But European leaders, instead of devoting their summits to the question of how to best defend our economic and military interests, agonise over what to do about Greece.

Five years of negotiations that have achieved virtually nothing (the few reforms that had been adopted, like a small reduction in the inflated number of public sector employees, have since been reversed by the Syriza-led coalition). It is pretty clear that the Greeks have no appetite for modernising their society. They worry too little about an economy ruined by patronage.

Europeans, too, have made mistakes. Since Athens joined the monetary union, we have lent Greece €400bn, 1.7 times the country’s gross domestic product in 2013. It is time for a reality check: they will never be repaid. And it is an illusion to imagine, as the Finns sometimes do, that we could receive compensation in kind by acquiring a few Greek islands. The age when the British empire would do that is, luckily, over. Bygones are bygones. The sooner we accept this and forget those loans the better.

If the Greeks do not want to modernise, we should accept it. By a large majority, they have voted for a government that, six months after the election, remains vastly popular. Its popularity with the electorate signals a wish to remain a nation with a per-capita income half that of Ireland, less than that of Slovenia. In a few years it will be overtaken by Chile. I only hope that no one in Athens dreams that debt forgiveness and Grexit offer an alternative path to growth.

Without economic and social reforms, Greece will remain a relatively poor country. But it is not for the rest of Europe to impose reforms on Greece. It should merely make crystal clear that without serious reforms, new official loans are over. The only way for Athens to borrow will be to convince the markets that it will pay its own bills. No more EU guarantees, explicit or otherwise.

We should ask ourselves whether it is really so important to keep Greece inside the EU. (Barring a treaty change, leaving the euro entails leaving the EU.) The criterion should not be the protection of our credit: that is gone, like it or not. Nor should it be the risk that there might be a run on the euro because of contagion: thanks to the actions of the European Central Bank, monetary union today is resilient enough to withstand Grexit.

European leaders should stop treating the Greek problem as if it were merely a financial issue. It goes to the heart of European integration. That project has undoubtedly accelerated as a result of monetary union (just think of the decision to remove bank supervision from national control).

But the euro cannot be a substitute for further political integration. Indeed, without such integration, the euro cannot survive — and today, Greece stands in the way of it.

The writer is professor of economics at Bocconi University in Milan.

IS SALMOND THE SON OF THE DEVIL EVIL IS WHOLE FAMILY ARE EVIL

marK it looks like Cameron was voted in on is lies
we voted conservative to vote to get out of the eu
and migrants must not be allowed to vote

no MrT, you voted for a referendum and that is exactly what you'll get and assuredly you would not have done under labour

i'm unsure of the definition of migrants in this context but i don't see how anyone without uk citizenship could be allowed to vote, any more than a uk citizen working in eu would be allowed to vote in that country's elections

As evidence mounts that Cameron and his allies have decided there will be a Yes vote to stay in the EU, I smell a cynical stitch-up, writes STEPHEN GLOVER

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3116227/As-evidence-mounts-Cameron-allies-decided-Yes-vote-stay-EU-smell-cynical-stitch-writes-STEPHEN-GLOVER.html#ixzz3cZyJjWrJ
Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

DC was always going to campaign to stay in and never made any real secret of it
however, he retained the potential threat of uk voting to exit if there were no half-way decent concessions
treaty changes were never a feasible option, or at least not in the short term

labour wouldn't have given you any choice at all, not ukip nor snp

at least you now have the choice of voting to exit, and if you and your pals win the day so be it, and vice versa

=========

PS i would scarcely put forward the mail as a purveyor of sensible, objective or even accurate journalism

Manuel,

The referendum is a waste of tax payers' money for party political reasons.

I want a referendum on fox hunting before 2016!

I beginning to think you are an old bull, you certainly produce enough -=-=-===!

MPs have just voted for the EU referendum in the scond reading with 544 in favour to only 53 against. What a change of heart by a lot of people and a couple of parties. It is now off to the committee stage.

https://youtu.be/r7QbmlPrTCk

For Manuel!

.

Interesting c+P from other side:

Labour’s next leader must challenge Tories’ poisonous myths 9/06/2015

Here’s Kevin Maguire, writing in the Daily Mirror:

Labour’s next leader will become trapped in a maze of Tory lies unless he or she challenges a string of poisonous myths.
I badgered Ed Miliband for years in this column to prove spending by the last Labour Government didn’t trigger the 2008 global financial collapse.
The national debt was a smaller proportion of GDP before the banking crisis than Labour had inherited from the Conservatives in 1997.
Failing to regulate the spivs and speculators was the catastrophic error, not reviving the NHS or putting money into workers’ pay packets.
Economists knew it, the Bank of England governor knew it and so too did David Cameron and George Osborne – but the Tory duo ­cynically pinned the blame for the crisis on Labour’s spending plans.

The problem is, of course, that many of the politicians who now claim to represent Labour values are quite happy to let this Tory lie go unchallenged.

Those of us who know the facts have been telling everybody we can for the last five years and more, but we simply don’t have the mass media clout needed to get the message across.

People like the right-wing Labour leadership candidates (everyone apart from Jeremy Corbyn) and Harriet Harman can’t be bothered to correct a ‘big lie’ that has been repeated so often that people now believe it automatically.

They’ve got their Parliamentary seats and pensions; they’re doing quite all right out of all this, thank you very much.

Maguire makes some more useful points, which are well worth repeating, if you have ignorant friends:

The whole welfare debate is skewed when we wrongly think £24 in every £100 of the social security budget is fiddled. In reality, it’s just 70p.
The Department of Work and Pensions pumps out these tales to justify deep cuts. The £1.2 billion a year benefit fraud is pennies next to a great tax robbery soaring to as high as £120 billion.
Yet the Treasury and HMRC prefer cosy private deals with wealthy dodgers while what crooked US socialite Leona Helmsley referred to as the “little people” are thrown to the hounds.

And how about this:

It isn’t just the economic debate that’s distorted by myths. Immigrants pay in more than they take off the system.
Only reactionaries and racists benefit when it’s thought 24% of the population are recent migrants when it’s 13%.
Standing up for decent values requires politicians to tell hard truths and never pander to prejudices.

That’s not going to happen in a Labour Party led by Burnham, Cooper, Creagh or Kendall, then.

fred if you represent the lab voters then the uk has been saved from simpleton dimwits stupid thick shitheads .

does this about sum you up

what is the view of Socialist Worker?

David Miliband: Ed Miliband victory would have defied laws of political gravity
Former foreign secretary says his worst fears were confirmed when his brother led Labour to a devastating general election defeat


By Emily Gosden8:31AM BST 10 Jun 2015
David Miliband feared that Labour was "courting disaster" for years under his brother's leadership because it would have defied the "laws of political gravity" to win on his left-wing and risky agenda.
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In his strongest criticism yet of Ed Miliband's tenure, the former foreign secretary said that all his "worst fears were confirmed" when Labour suffered its devastating electoral defeat and claimed the party was deluded for running away from Blairite policies.
In an interview with The Times, Mr Miliband said: "I had spent the previous two or three weeks wondering whether in fact I was wrong to believe that you couldn't suspend the laws of political gravity because the polls obviously suggested that things were close, but ... the politics of our offer and our positioning made me very fearful of the consequences, and that was borne out."
Mr Miliband, who lost out to his younger brother in the 2010 Labour leadership election, said that its array of left-wing policies such as rent controls and the energy price freeze were together "unpopular" and that the party "needed to be more centrist".

"You don't want to be the risk in politics, and you doubly don't want to be the risk if you are the opposition," he said.
Mr Miliband stood down as an MP in 2013 and moved to America to run the International Rescue Committee charity in New York.
Despite criticising the policies his brother pursued Mr Miliband said: "I don’t want him to be hurt and I don’t want him to be vilified."
He said the defeat had been "doubly painful" because it was his brother and there was "no consolation in any sense of vindication" because he cared about the country the Labour party.

Mr Miliband said Labour lost because "people perceived us to have gone back on the New Labour settlement".
"We should liberate ourselves from the delusion that running away from three election victories is a route to success," he said. "It's 50 years since Labour won a majority at a general election without Tony as leader. It's important to have this in mind."
Mr Miliband refused to rule out a return to frontline UK politics and has already announced plans for a major speech in London in October, just weeks after the new Labour leader is due to be appointed.
He told the newspaper he was committed to his job in New York but was taking "some time to think" about what he did next.
He declined to say which candidate he was backing in the Labour leadership contest.

Probably opposite to the Blue Telegraph and Mail and other neo-con, or fascist right winged toilet paper.