Layer 350 . . . Mexico, Drugs, Revolution, Britain, Smashing the State, The Pope, Religion, SEN and Patience

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It's real autumn - tomatoes continuing to ripen, chilli peppers, sunflower seeds harvesting, apples, pears and damsons from friends' trees, etc.

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Someone on the radio said he'd learnt the secret of happiness from a food container: Stand Upright in a Cool Place.

Two challenges here. How to stand upright. Finding a cool place to make your stand.

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Continuing with thoughts about Mexico and revolutionaries -

Mexico's modern revolutionaries

As Mexico marks its 1810 and 1910 uprisings, 2010's upheaval is likely to be about drugs, not politics

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/sep/12/mexico-revolution-drugs-uprising

This week sees the 200th anniversary of Mexico's war of separation from Spain; in addition, 20 November marks the centennial of Mexico's landmark revolution, the first mass uprising of the underclass in the Americas. The coincidence of centennials has given breath to the hypothesis that Mexico explodes every 100 years in social upheaval, and some leftists are eagerly expecting renewed fireworks in 2010. Indeed, conditions are ripe for revolution here: 70% of Mexico's 103 million population teeter on and around the poverty line.

Revolutions don't happen unless the working class is angry. Electricity workers recently mounted a mass hunger strike (they lasted 90 days) in the main plaza of Mexico City to protest at the loss of their jobs to privatisation.

Today full-scale urban warfare rages on the streets of Juárez – over 1,800 citizens have been slain in the first eight months of the year in firefights between drug gangs and the Mexican military. Car bombs detonate on downtown streets and the mansions of the wealthy are looted and torched. Narco-commandos attack police stations and army barracks, carrying off artillery, and prisoners are broken out of jails much as they were by revolutionaries a century ago.

The Mexican military and the US North Command – for which Mexico is the southern security perimeter – have long expected the narco-gangs and leftist revolutionary bands to coalesce. But revolutionaries in their armchairs complain that revolutions must have ideologies and display class allegiances: this narco-insurrection seems to be all about barbaric killing and taking power, not the liberation of the working class.

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The drugs issue is hotting up. Even The Economist is running major features on the arguments in favour of following Portugal and decriminalising drugs. Portugal now has one of the lowest levels of drug use in Europe, according to The Economist.

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Meanwhile, back in Britain, it seems it's the government itself that wants to start a revolution:

Yes, the coalition wants to smash the state. That's good

The misery of cuts will grind the government down unless it boldly declares the ideology behind its spending plans

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/12/coalition-smash-state-cuts-ideology

This is an ideological government with a plan for a smaller, less centralised and more liberal state. The left dreads the obvious fact that spending cuts are central to this plan – and they are. The left senses that the government is staging a cultural revolution against social democracy – and it is. The coalition does not want to make mild adjustments to the old order. It intends to smash it.

To say that cuts are being forced by necessity and nothing more, is to imply that when fatter times return ministers will reverse them. Nobody who knows the leaderships of this coalition believes that. Much of what the government must do to balance the books it would have wanted to do even if they were in balance.

The point of reducing spending is to change the state, not just spend less.

There's a kamikaze spirit in this government's soul. Ministers seem strangely pacified by the prospect of their possible political doom. New Labour feared unpopularity so much it became timid. This government has written unpopularity into the script. This has freed it to do things it would never have risked in fiscal peacetime. It is why change seems reckless and fast. The coalition feels a revolutionary duty to be brave. It should be proud of that.

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HOWEVER . . .

Financial markets are still ruled by instant gratification

Two years after the collapse of Lehman Bros, it's hard to find much sign of the fundamental reforms we were promised

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2010/sep/13/economics-recession-globalisation-rebalancing-reform

The crisis exposed the structural weaknesses of the bubble years and policymakers said what they always say at this point in the economic cycle: never again. Faced with evidence of the fragility of globalisation, they announced that the system required fundamental reform. At this juncture, it is appropriate to assess how they have been getting on.

The Demand for Immediate Gratification.

Andrew Haldane, Bank of England executive director for financial stability, said recently in Beijing that rapid gains in economic growth in the modern age were accounted for by patience: investing for tomorrow meant sacrifice today.

"Studies have shown that happy people save more and spend less," he argued. "Happy people also take longer to make decisions and expect a longer life. In short, they are patient. These patterns are connected and reinforcing."

But patience does not always triumph. When impatience takes control, we save less and borrow more. We take snap decisions, thinking little about long-term consequences. This sort of behaviour, as Haldane noted, reaches its apotheosis in the financial markets. "Most traders' brains harbour the impatience gene. Often they harbour little else."

So, it would be a real sign of progress if there was evidence that the gods of the financial markets were re-learning the virtue of patience, thus setting an example to mortals. The sad fact is nothing has changed. The business-as-usual mindset makes the case for reform even more compelling.

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Simon Hattenstone's interview with Sinead O'Connor is well worth a read. It seems she's a total believer in God and Jesus, but hates the Pope, who arrives here tomorrow, and the whole of the Christian hierarchy of priests and bishops.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/sep/10/sinead-oconnor-pope-visit

Sinead O'Connor: 'The Vatican is a nest of devils'

When she tore up the pope's picture as a protest against child abuse, people thought she was loopy. But Sinead O'Connor – former pop star, priest, newly married mother of four – won't say 'I told you so'

She says, apart from her children, her ordination is her greatest achievement. "I am proud that I did listen to that voice inside me rather than be intimidated by men telling me you can't be a priest. One ought to be more concerned in obeying what the Holy Spirit inspires you to feel rather than what a bunch of men in fucking dresses are telling you to do or not do."

I'm still trying to work out her position – she loves God, but despises Catholicism? She shakes her head. "No, what I think is wrong is that the people running the show are misrepresenting what Catholicism actually is ... what I'm talking about is the highest echelons of the Vatican't as I call it."

"The way they've behaved just in the last 20 years, over this issue of sexual abuse, shows they don't give a shit. They feel untouchable. And to me it seems they don't believe in God at all. Because if you did believe you couldn't stand in front of that spirit covering up and moving priests and doctoring reports to psychiatrists and not telling them there was a suspicion of abuse, you just couldn't do that."

"OK, the abusive priests have been dealt with and that's very important, but now what has to be dealt with is the criminality of the cover-up." She says it has to go to the very top – after all in 2001, Pope Benedict, as Cardinal Ratzinger, issued an updated edict instructing the world's bishops to silence all abuse allegations or risk being thrown out of the church. "The Vatican is a nest of devils and a haven for criminals. It's evil, the very top of the toppermost is evil."

O'Connor is clear what has to happen – those responsible have to go. "And when all the those guys stand down we should take back the church for us." Would she like to see a democratically elected pope? "Do we need a fucking pope? Why do we need a pope? Christ doesn't need a representative. Ten years from now the church will be nothing resembling what it has been."

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Also on the subject of the Pope and religion:

The pope's priestly model: a rabid, self-harming tyrant

The Catholic priesthood needs radical reform. Yet Benedict looks to a cleric who banned dancing and whipped himself nightly

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/sep/10/pope-benedict-xvi-catholicism

What has the pope done about the crisis? What he hasn't done is to initiate reforms based on inquiries into the culture of the total clerical crisis. His solution to the complex problems of clericalism is to ask seminarians and priests to emulate a French priest called Jean Vianney, who died 150 years ago.

Last year Benedict was on the verge of proclaiming Vianney as the patron saint of parish priests, the model for a purer, healthier, irreproachable priesthood. In a scolding letter to the Irish clergy earlier this year, the pope asserted that following the life of Vianney would redeem Ireland's disgraced, abusing clergy. At every opportunity he has promoted Vianney as exemplary.

The promotion of Vianney seems to me the most backward-looking of this pope's initiatives, which include bringing back the Latin mass, routinely denouncing homosexuality, and declaring the ordination of women a great sin.

What is the holy father thinking of, promoting this self-harming, narrow-minded tyrant as a solution to the problems of paedophile priests? Even by a mild interpretation, we should infer that priests must turn parishes into spiritual ghettoes where all secular influences are banned. Masochistic displacement activity, the punishing of the flesh, is proposed as a substitute for personal maturity and integrity.

In other words - spiritual intelligence.

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Special Educational Needs in the press today, and on the 'Today' programme this morning:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/14/special-education-needs-school-young

'Special' education comes in many different guises

Some school students need extra support to liberate them from the constraints with which their world tries to strap them down

Young people in our schools, particularly challenging inner-city schools, do need special educational provision to liberate them from the constraints with which their world attempts to strap them down.

Schools have a duty to provide these young people with the tools to enable them to break free from these constraints, to drive up self esteem, aspiration and expectation, and to take their rightful place at the table of learning.

Schools and teachers cannot do this alone. It is a multi-agency agenda of skilled professionals working alongside the most committed, hardworking, diligent and skilful teachers that can create this climate of success.

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Layer 295 . . . Bunting, Bankers and the Financial Doomsday Machine

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The Casino

I've been working on a metaphor, and a way of explaining the way in which our economy has gone from being a workshop to being a casino, and it goes like this.

Imagine a merchant bank is holding a large stash of cash which it can either invest in building a factory that will make useful things and yield modest profits over many years, OR it can use that stash to build a casino, in which other merchant bankers from around the world can come and place bets. The City of London, which is the name of this particular merchant bank, made a choice to build and operate the casino, and also spent all its profits on placing bets there itself, having decided that low-risk low-returns manufacturing was just too boring and too unprofitable to bother with. They wanted big bucks and they wanted them instantly.

Some of the players who came to the casino did well, and others did badly. Goldman Sachs and Barclays did well; Lehman Brothers, RBS and HBoS did very badly indeed.

The owner of the casino was always a winner, and always made big profits, as long as it could pay for the upkeep of the casino. But instead of saving some money in reserves 'just in case', it decided to borrow money at low rates of interest whenever it needed to pay utility bills etc - in order that it could keep on placing big bets and winning big. But there came a day when it needed to pay some large bills and suddenly found that no-one was lending money any more on account of the collapse of a massive worldwide pyramid-selling (Ponzi) scheme, which had gone completely belly up. Nobody trusted anybody else not to go broke, so no-one was willing to lend money.

The big banks that gambled in the casino ran out of money for the same reasons.

The casino owners had three choices - either declare themselves bankrupt, put the casino up for sale, or go cap in hand to the government to borrow the huge amounts of money they now needed to stay solvent.

The government was a very stupid government and was also very afraid of the casino owners and their mafia friends, who had been been keeping the government sweet with some tidy sums in taxes and lots of friendly back-slapping.

The government could, and should, have used that moment to buy the casino for a very small sum of money, in the name of its citizens, but instead it smiled at the bankers and told them that of course they could have as much money as they wanted or needed, at very low rates of interest, even though the government then had to go and borrow the money elsewhere at high rates of interest, which looked likely to become even higher as time passed. And from then on it was business as usual. The only losers were the people the government was supposed to be serving - us - who were then responsible for paying off the trillions that the government had loaned on behalf of the casino owners and players.

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I know for sure that Madeleine Bunting is an admirer of Naomi Klein and has read all her work on Disaster Capitalism because I saw Madeleine introduce Naomi on the stage of the QE Hall on the South Bank at the time of the publication of The Shock Doctrine - one of the all-time key books on economics, finance and capitalism. If anyone still hasn't read it, then they're not really bothered about what's been fucking up the planet, and who's really responsible for it, these past 30 years. Bear in mind that The Shock Doctrine appeared in print just before the shit actually hit the fan a couple of years ago.

Madeleine's columns in the Guardian continue to put the spotlight on the really important issues we need to deal with as a matter of urgency.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/may/02/banking-reform-election-agenda

Finance is responsible for this savage new era. But it's off the electoral agenda

The economic future will be painful, yet the public and their leaders show no appetite for wrestling the financial leviathan responsible

We had one small question on bankers' bonuses in Thursday's economic debate and some halfhearted discussion of banking reform before moving on to a subject that arouses far more passion – immigration. Bankers' bonuses are the very least of it – the relatively insignificant tip of an iceberg – a radical restructuring is urgently necessary, argues Better Banking, the New Economics Foundation's manifesto published last week in a bid to try to get this issue on to the agenda. But the conclusion is clear; there is no great anger or appetite in the British public or their leaders for a wrestling with the leviathan financial system which is sucking the lifeblood from our political economy. That time may come but right now, all that everyone wants is for everything to go back to the way it was in 2007: booming property prices, rising debt levels. Faced with an irritating problem of dry rot, the homeowner is resolving just to patch up the visible bits and pretend the rafters are not crumbling and the ceiling is not going to fall in.

If you think that is a bit of hyperbole, read the Financial Times's Martin Wolf on the "financial doomsday machine", or the head of the Financial Services Authority Adair Turner's thoughtful speech in March, when he concluded: "We need to challenge radically some of the assumptions of the last 30 years", which have been "deep-rooted drivers of financial instability". Wolf is no leftie, but he declared recently that "a large part of the activity of the financial sector seems to be a machine to transfer income and wealth from outsiders to insiders while increasing the fragility of the economy as a whole". Just in case you were wondering who the outsiders are, it's you and me – our pensions, our savings, our mortgages, feeding this bloodsucker.

You might have thought that the treatment meted out to Greece, Portugal and Spain in the bond markets would have prompted more questions about how the financial system works. All the more so since this is the nightmare scenario that George Osborne has been dangling in front of the electorate. Who are these credit ratings agencies who are plunging the continent into crisis?

But no, the irony is that while we are immersed in an electoral process which is all about bringing those in power to account, the unaccountable financial system that is responsible for the painful years which lie ahead – of unprecedented cuts and the political conflict that will result – goes largely unchallenged. Politicians are left ignominiously to beg or reproach these credit ratings agencies – as both Portugal and Brussels did last week. (Agencies now described by economist Paul Krugman as "deeply corrupt", still wielding huge power despite a track record on Enron and sub-prime which has revealed an appalling lack of judgment.)

You might have thought that the spellbinding moment of Goldman Sachs executives fumbling through their files to find answers in the US Senate hearings might have prompted more outrage at the duplicity and self-serving corruption entrenched in the financial system. As Turner admitted a year ago, "British citizens will be burdened for many years with either higher taxes or cuts in public services – because of an economic crisis ... cooked up in trading rooms where ... many people earned annual bonuses equal to a lifetime's earnings of some of those now suffering the consequences."

The gross injustice of it is one reason for anger, but there is another, even more important. David Harvey, author of The Enigma of Capital, was in the UK last week on a timely promotional tour; his central thesis is that capitalism is inherently crisis-ridden, and that its crises mutate rapidly. Eighteen months ago we had a debt crisis of the financial sector, now we have a public sector debt crisis spreading across Europe. That has prompted a political crisis across the eurozone, and particularly in Germany and Greece; voters in the former are incandescent about lending their money, while in the latter it is rapidly becoming a crisis of the state itself as the unions declare a general strike for this Wednesday, and protesters had to be dispersed with teargas over the weekend. Average Greek incomes have dropped 20% with low- and middle-income earners worst affected.

The political fallout of crisis-ridden capitalism in the 1930s was precisely what politicians and policymakers wanted to prevent as they constructed the postwar Bretton Woods financial system: slow and steady were its primary requirements, and between 1945 and the mid-70s it led to better average levels of growth than the boom and bust cycles of the more volatile decades which followed. The great poison of lightly regulated capitalism is as much about volatility as it is about inequality; it is so destructive of the social fabric, ratcheting up unemployment, destroying neighbourhoods, provoking tensions which feed into political extremism and violence.

But for the last 30 years such insights were marginalised by efficient market theory which argued that left to themselves, markets were self-equilibrating and stable. This was pure fantasy, yet it seduced politicians and electorates, who got the illusion of economic growth they needed, while the fantasy generated millions which poured into the pockets of an elite.

Curiously, the one group who really understood the fantasy were those who were peddling it. The US Senate investigation into credit ratings agencies has just released a mountain of documents which reveal a mind-boggling insouciance. One internal email at Standard & Poor's in December 2006 read: "Ratings agencies continue to create an even bigger monster – the CDO [collateralised debt obligation] market. Let's hope we are all wealthy and retired by the time this house of cards falters." And indeed many of them are; profitability at the agencies soared in the early years of this decade.

This election is a kind of lull before the storm. While excited discussions consider the potential for electoral reform, the real story of the next few years will be the savage dismantling of social democracy and a new era of industrial strife organised via Twitter. Then there will be plenty of public anger, but the bankers and financial analysts will have got what they wanted – wealthy retirements and fortunes salted away in the country homes from which they survey the wreckage.

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Layer 132 Green Custard, the Death of Industry and Ghost Towns.

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Springwatch 6 - - Green. Shoots. And Leaves.

Throwing a cup of green custard over Mandleson was an ugly, violent thing to do, and the young woman who did it no doubt felt very angry with him. It’s not the way to go, though. We need to show that as much as we may loathe him we’re capable of non-violent, Gandhian protest, in order not to allow him any opportunity to gain the high moral ground. Strange, though, how the assailant, having carried out her assault, was allowed to simply walk away.

A few trees here and there now in blossom, and a few beginning to show signs of green leaves.

Coventry City playing at their Ricoh stadium today - against Chelsea in the F.A. Cup quarter final. Sky-Bluecollar Motown UK versus the Oligarchs. Next stop the semi, at Wembley. Drogba has just scored, but no matter - we were one down in ’87 at Wembley.

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Billy Bragg had an excellent piece in the paper yesterday.

With 25 years' hindsight, Maggie's bitter victory over the striking miners unleashed forces that led directly to this economic crisis.

There is a bitter irony in the fact that the Bank of England chose the 25th anniversary of the beginning of the miners' strike to fire off its weapon of last resort in an attempt to damp down the conflagration currently sweeping through global capitalism. The wry smile that passes across the lips of those who opposed the naked selfishness at the heart of the Thatcherite experiment will be mirrored by the disconcerted frowns of those who, having wholeheartedly embraced the free market, never thought that it would lead to this. Like Frankenstein's monster, Thatcherism has turned on its creators.

Is there anybody out there willing to stand up – on this, of all days – and raise a toast to the willful destruction of our manufacturing industry and its replacement by the financial services sector? Yes, there were unions who were resistant to change, but whoever came up with the idea that the solution to this problem was to import cars rather than make them ourselves sacrificed more than just the entire engineering skills base.

The forces that Margaret Thatcher unleashed in order to defeat the NUM destroyed whole communities before leeching into our society. Untamed by successive governments, these same forces now threaten to devour us all.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/05/miners-strike-thatcherism-billy-bragg

Coincidentally (see below) Billy was born in the borough of Barking & Dagenham.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Billy_Bragg

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The Other Motown UK.

There was a documentary on BBC4 this week called Ford’s Dagenham Dream which told the story of the phenomenal success of Ford of Britain during the period when Ford was designing and producing Anglias, Zephyrs, Zodiacs, Cortinas, Granadas, Escorts and Capris.

My very first car was a 3-speed Anglia, (slow, very slow and please get up this hill you crap little car), bought for less than £100 by parents who were keen to see me off the Lambretta and travelling in something ‘safer’. Definitely a lot slower. I had special permission to park it in the staff car park when I was in the sixth form. I can’t imagine that happening these days.

I learned to drive at 17, and my dad used to take me out for extra practice in his 6-seat Ford Zephyr automatic, which felt huge compared to the Vauxhall Viva of the driving school, in which I had 5 lessons.

Dad later moved on to a Cortina. Right at the end of the sixties Ford produced the Mark I Capri, which seemed incredibly cool and glamorous in its day. One of my uncles bought one, and it remains in the family to this day. My son, who’s no lover of cars, has definite designs on it.

The point of the documentary was that the massive sprawl of Dagenham is now a ghost town, and Ford has moved most of its production to places where there’s a more docile, and cheaper, labour force.

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Coventry was the other British town that was built almost entirely on the motor industry, and the manufacturing and engineering skills of its people.

Coventry was the home of Jaguar, Daimler, Triumph, Standard, Hillman, Humber, Singer and Alvis - all great marques in their day. There was also a massive Massey-Ferguson factory, where members of my family worked for decades.

I also had uncles and aunts who worked in factories like Wickman making machine tools, in foundries, and in factories belonging to GEC, making electrical goods and components.

Unlike in Germany and France, where industrial management was professional and based on solid engineering expertise, boardrooms of the large manufacturers in Britain were dominated by toffs and marketing wallahs, snake-oil salesmen and friends of the Chairman. The kind of people who subsequently went into banking.

Industrial relations were based on all-out conflict rather than partnership. Management tried to screw the workers, and the unions were prepared to use strike action in disputes over the length and frequency of tea breaks.

The original innovative and creative giants who founded the motor industry were gradually replaced by the kinds of idiots who authorised the production of complete rubbish like the Marina and the Allegro, which pretty much put paid to car production by Morris in Oxford and Austin in Longbridge. Engineering and financial disasters.

MG, Rover, Wolseley, Jensen and Aston-Martin, even Bentley and Rolls Royce, were also allowed to flounder and die for lack of investment and expertise - their brand names eventually bought for a song by much smarter operators.

Much the same story applies to the motorcycle industry in England, and in particular the BSA company in Birmingham and Triumph in Meriden.

In the longer term our government, acting on behalf of we, the people, would give hefty bribes to the likes of Nissan and Honda to set up manufacturing in places like Sunderland and Swindon, and teach workers there how to bolt together vehicles like the ‘Bluebird’ and the ‘Avensis’, using components, engines, gearboxes and drivetrains designed and built in Japan.

The ultimate irony was giving huge government subsidies to BMW, a company that designed and built many of the aeroplanes which flattened wartime Coventry, to assemble the revived Mini in the Midlands. Tragic, and pathetic, all of it.

Thatcher, of course, knew nothing about and cared nothing about manufacturing and industry, or the people who had created and sustained it. She hated the working classes and their trade unions. Her family background was in shopkeeping. Buy cheap and sell dear - the ultimate expression of capitalism, and the driving logic of ‘the market’, profiteering and exploitation.

We needed Thatch to teach us that greed is good, that mining, manufacturing and engineering are unimportant, and that the City, the financiers and the oligarchs are the masters of the universe. Having learnt these things from the dear old fool, we’re now having to deal with the consequences. Up the City!

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The Specials were quite a phenomenon when they started producing music in Coventry back in 1977/78 for Gerry Dammers’ Two-Tone label. They were the Arctic Monkeys of their day - original, dynamic, ‘political’, authentic, and in complete commercial control of their affairs, determined not to be exploited by the music moguls in that London.

For a while they were incredibly popular, and highly influential on the music scene. Their music was a brilliant synthesis of styles that blended rock with Caribbean influences, and was performed by an eclectic mix of black and white musicians.

Their best-known and best-selling record was Ghost Town, released in 1981 - an atmospheric and eerie musical rendition of what it felt like to live in a city that was run-down, impoverished and largely devoid of people, work and cultural life. That record, written by Dammers, spoke for the working and non-working people of Coventry, and elsewhere.

Shops are now closing down in city centres all over the country at an unprecedented rate. People are being thrown out of work or put on part-week working in this country as well as America, and around the world, at a rate never seen by the present generation of young people, if indeed by most of us.

If it wasn’t for the quick reaction of governments, and their ability to spend public money by the billion and trillion in order to guarantee the viability of the banks and other major financial institutions, then millions of people would have lost all their savings and millions of companies would have gone bust, with unimaginable consequences for employment and wellbeing. Capitalism would have destroyed civilised life on this planet as we know it, let alone destroyed particular mining villages, manufacturing towns and industrial cities.

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This week the Coventry Telegraph had a report on the re-formation of The Specials for a stadium show at the football ground (The Ricoh!) and a subsequent tour. Jerry Dammers, the founder member, keyboard player and main songwriter is quoted as saying the other members of the band have decided to go it alone without him, to exclude him, for various reasons to do with petty jealousy, rivalry and Gerry’s continuing purism and political idealism.

Ironically The Specials effectively broke up just after Ghost Town when the lead singer Terry Hall and his two dopy mates left the band to go it alone as The Fun Boy Three (!) - a wretched little outfit if ever there was one, and an obvious reaction to Dammers’ serious intent, political commitment and activism.

So the people who walked out on The Specials now want to claim they ARE The Specials! The fools should reform as the Less-Than Fun Boy Three. Or Four. Or Five.

It’s as though the Beatles got back together without Lennon, or the Stones without Keith Richards or Santana without Carlos. It also brings to mind the deluded Roger Waters trying to stop Pink Floyd continuing to perform after he left, on the grounds that he was effectively the heart and soul of the band, since he’d been the main songwriter. As if! And the posturing front man Terry Hall wasn’t even a songwriter or a musician!

Why are humans so fundamentally vain, egocentric, stupid and pathetic? Green custard on the lot of them. Whoops!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Specials

My word of the week - Non-attachment.

My word for next week, and every week - Enlightenment.
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