I read the news today, oh boy

I’ve mostly given up on Sunday papers. True, some of them sometimes carry interesting pieces, which is why you leave them on the kitchen table thinking, “Must read that later...” until there’s a foot-high pile you have to lug out to the blue bin for recycling.
A couple of weeks ago, though, I bought the Tribune after hearing on Sam Smyth that Suzanne Breen had another Northern story of the sort mainstream media steer clear of – not subbed and shaped to suit the needs of Stormont.
When I worked for it, the Trib was a not-bad paper. But seemingly it’s been going downhill since.
A David Kenny was angry at Emmet Stagg urging the legalisation of cannabis. Cannabis users, reckoned Kenny, “run the risk of becoming psychotic...The number of teens presenting with mental health problems rose 22%... after the UK downgraded cannabis.”
Note the conflation of psychosis with mental health problems generally, making the argument which followed utterly meaningless.
The most reliable survey of available evidence, by Dr. R. D. Newcome of Liverpool University, concluded simply: “There was no support for the claim that cannabis use can cause psychosis.”
Nor, incidentally, is there any evidence that cannabis today is significantly stronger than cannabis a decade or two or three ago. Cannabis produced indoors is richer in THC than outdoor varieties. Always has been. But, as recently confirmed by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction: “The natural variation in the THC content between and within samples of herbal cannabis or cannabis resin at any one time and place far exceeds any long-term changes that may have occurred.”

The same edition of the Tribune carried a paeon of praise to Peter Sutherland. Teachers and doctors have proven themselves “ridiculous”, reckoned a chap called Shane Coleman. But Sutherland’s analysis of the economy was nothing short of “sublime”.
Sutherland – ex-European commissioner, now chairman of both Goldman Sachs and BP – had welcomed the plummeting of pay levels in the Republic by seven to eight percent. Drive living standards down even further, pronounced the fat parasite, and “the Irish economy should emerge from the recession in a highly competitive position”.
In Europe from 1985 to 1989, Sutherland was a fanatical advocate of leaving financial decisions to the market. Goldman Sachs, which he moved on to, embodied the same buccaneering philosophy. Which resulted in it losing incalculable sums on greed-fuelled property lending – $3.1bn on mortgage investments last year alone.
It reacted by begging the US Government to bail it out, and became one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Bush regime’s $700bn banksters’ bonanza.
Treasury Secretary Poulson was a former Goldman Sachs executive.
Senate backing for the bail-out wasn’t hindered by Goldman Sachs donations to Democratic Senate leader Henry Reid and Republican leader Mitchell McConnell. Plus $691,930 to Barack Obama, $208,395 to John McCain and $14,800 to Joe Biden.
Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs Group operates three subsidiaries in Bermuda, five in Mauritius and 15 in the Cayman Islands.
As for BP, its record in recent years has included: a refinery explosion in Texas City which killed 15; two major oil spills at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska: vast clearances of the Brazilian rainforest; payment to Colombian paramilitaries to harass and murder trade unionists and campaigners for indigenous rights; etc.
A case pending before the Federal Court in Chicago alleges that “a wholly owned subsidiary of BP...with the knowledge, advice and consent of senior management” illegally cornered 88 percent of the US market in propane with a view to inflating the price and making massive profits.
And still the company chairman never gives over about the need for free-market competition and the evils of State regulation.
Sutherland is also one of the non-executive directors of the Royal Bank of Scotland, who approved Fred Goodwin’s £700,000 a year pension following the disastrous property spree which saw British tax-payers stumping up £20bn to save RBS from collapse.
Is there a single individual emerging from the rubble of the global economy with less entitlement to respect than this pin-striped bin-bag of blubber?
But Coleman tells us, with all the critical acuity of an arena of toddlers cheering Barney the Dinosaur, that “Sutherland is the man”.
For fuck’s sake.

If you can measure a gig by the volume of pleasure per audience member, Iain Archer at Sandino’s was easily the event of the year.
I told him afterwards it was brilliant more didn’t show up. A bigger audience would have diluted the sense of privilege each of the 11 of us felt.
He’d played a packed O2 with Snow Patrol the day before, the Odyssey the following night. It must have felt eerie as we pulled up the sofas front of stage. But he did us so proud we snuggled home, hugging ourselves.
Ran right through To The Pine Roots, from ‘The Acrobat’ to ‘The Nightwatchman’, sat on the arm of our chair for ‘Streamer On A Kite’. A beautiful, generous, gentle, reflective, exciting, entrancing evening. We might hold an annual reunion.

And So I Watch You From Afar will spark each of your brain-cells individually into new life. No lyrics, like string quartets everywhere. Chunks of sound thudding onto your ears to leave a lovely tingle. The sound is more subversive than they ever seem in interviews, which is all as it should be. I’m off to catch them at Mason’s. If I don’t come back, pay no attention.