Tag: tv

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Bono and Bob on the G8…

here it is.

What on earth are they thinking???

” ‘We’ve pulled this off,’ said U2 frontman Bono.

He and Geldof praised the Group of Eight summit for pledging to double aid to Africa to $50 billion, saying the move will save the lives of hundreds of thousands of people who would have died of poverty, malaria or
AIDS.

‘The world spoke and the politicians listened,’ Bono said.”

and

“Geldof, creator of the Live 8 concerts, said: ‘The summit in Gleneagles is a qualified triumph.’ Appearing alongside Bono at a news conference held at the close of the summit, he said: ‘A great justice has been done.’ “

Oh shit, why do these people conspire to make me look like a miserable whinging git? Everyone has come out and said the G8 produced very little of note. The 50 billion is fine – it’s 50 billion, not to be sneezed at – but it’s way too little and it won’t be protected by trade reform and debt cancellation.

Before the summit Bono and Bob were both calling for the three points of the MPH campaign – trade reform, debt relief and aid. Only the aid element has been touched with any effectiveness.

Maybe I’ll just go back to writing about my solo gigs, it’s less depressing than all this stuff.

The MPH campaign goes on, more pressure is needed. What isn’t needed is Bono and Bob telling the G8 what superstars they are. ‘A great justice has been done.’ – no it hasn’t!!!

I really really hope I’m misjudging this, that they know something I don’t about making things happen. I’ve no problem with pragmatic compromise to get a result, and if they honestly can get the bastards to move faster and further by chumming up to them, then great, I’ll sit here and whinge to my few hundred readers while they change the world, but right now, it’s looking like they’ve got too close and can’t tell it like it is.

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MPH Response to the G8

here’s the Make Poverty History campaign’s damning response to the G8 – despite them being pretty close to the government in the run-up to the G8, they’ve not pulled too many punches in their cricitism.

Has anyone seen a full statement from Bono and Bob? I saw a soundbite bit on the TV last night with them spouting some crap about it being ‘the beginning of the end for poverty’, to paraphrase Churchill, but I want to see a full statement before blogging about them talking bollocks…

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explosion mayhem in London

Good lord, the shit has really hit the fan in central London. Bombs going off on tube trains and buses – loads of them! I’ve not heard word that anyone I know is hurt or involved as yet (The Small Person is working from home today). To keep up to date with events, keep an eye on the BBC News frontpage – it’s being updated fairly frequently at the moment.

This post on the Guardian newsblog is being updated every few minutes as well, so is worth keeping open and refreshing.

Or, if you’re in the UK, just put the TV on! (EDIT 12.43 – actually, give up on the TV coverage, it’s crap speculative nonsense)

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The illusion of the MPH campaign.

The march at the weekend in Edinburgh was there to try and convince the G8 to change trade laws to favour the poor, to attempt to make extreme poverty history.

How is that different from previous G8 meetings? Seattle? Genova? Has Blair’s government succeeded in sidetracking the debate about the legitimacy of the G8 as an organisation by making a bunch of conditional offers and fudged statements about poverty reduction, so instead of telling the G8 to fuck off, we’d start asking them to help?

I’m feeling very uncomfortable about the whole thing right now. Uncomfortable that I hadn’t really thought about it in these terms til I started musing on the state of affairs with the protestors in Scotland, and found myself thinking of them negatively as disrupting the process, rather than positvely for disrupting the process. Are we naive to think that anything will change?

Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?

I so hope that something will change. We’ve seen in South Africa that the impossible is possible if the will of the people is overwhelming. Can it happen this time? Is anything going to cause the psychotic murdering moron in the White House to recognise the need for change that might damage the billions of his oil business scumbag friends, but will ultimately save the planet? Is he ever likely to join the dots between poverty, war, climate change and US cultural imperialism?

These are dark days, blog-peoples, dark days. And here I am listening to Bruce Cockburn singing songs he wrote over 20 years ago that spell out what’s happening now.

Nothing changes.

Maybe the people smashing shit up in Scotland have got the right idea. I dunno. Answers on 100% recycled paper postcard to the usual address….

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Edinburgh MPH March/Live8

So, despite it being Wimbledon finals weekend, I didn’t see a stroke of tennis played… But for good reason.

On Friday I drove up to Berwick–On-Tweed (the Lawson ancestral home), in order to go up to Edinburgh on Saturday for the Make Poverty History March and rally, arranged to coincide with the G8 summit meeting in Gleneagles this week.

Estimates on the attendance at Edinburgh vary working upwards from about 200,000, but that’s the figure for Fringe Sunday in August, and this was WAYYYY more crowded than Fringe Sunday.

The march itself was just huge – for a lot of people, they were waiting for almost three hours just to get out of The Meadows (that is, a secret location, known only as ‘the meadows’). The atmosphere was fabulous, though the food was a bit crap for veggies (I’ve got too used to ‘london food’). The first people to set off on the march were back at the start by one o’clock so the continuous white band lasted for a good few hours.

The talk from the stage was largely good – Billy Bragg was on form as always – talking not playing (at least not that I heard, sadly), Jonathan Dimbleby was marvellous. Some twat from the Church Of Scotland was congratulating Gordon Brown on all he’s done so far… hello? Done what exactly? Announced a supposed debt relief package so tied to IMF trade and services liberalisations that it’s virtually worthless? FFS, stop pandering to these goons – they’ve done just about nothing as yet, the situation is still brutally inequitous, and so far Gordon Brown has done pretty much sweet FA.

Anyway, the rest of the talk was good.

We got back into Berwick, and in front of a TV at the time The Killers were on at Live8, who made no impression whatsoever. The evening was definitely all about the old guys showing the youngsters how it was done – Floyd, Robbie, The Who and Macca all rocked the party that rocks the party, while the Scissor Sisters were dull, Velvet Revolver were shit-on-a-stick, Joss Stone and Mariah both did well and Peter Kay was the only Accapella singer of the day and lost the americans royally.

I was struck by how little comment was being made about the cause, both between bands, and by the bands. Now that I’m watching the AOL online feed of the show, I see just how much the BBC had edited out in the name of impartiality. Good God, I hope I never rely on the BBC’s impartiality to save my life from rapacious world trade laws. How can you be impartial on this? Grrrrrrrr.

So all in all, a monumental event – the biggest ever public protest in Scotland, the biggest ever worldwide TV audience for a show, millions and millions of people signing up th the MPH campaign. Surely this will send a message to the tossers in the G8 that things need to change?….

…apparently not, that arch-enemy of freedom, democracy and all things decent, George Bush, has announced that there’ll be no climate change deal in the G8 – you know, right now, I’m wishing someone would blow up Gleneagles. I know something of how Bruce Cockburn felt when he wrote ‘If I Had A Rocket Launcher’, with it’s censor-baiting line, ‘if I had a rocket launcher, some son of a bitch would die’ – why does the G8 even exist? The idea that there is a coalition of the wealthy deciding the mortal future of over half the planet is disgusting. That fuckers like George Bush would come into the meeting saying he’ll be doing what’s best for the US only…

From the bbc news site –
‘But he rejected the idea he should support the British prime minister’s G8 plan in return for his support during the war in Iraq.

“Tony Blair made decisions on what he thought was best for keeping the peace and winning the war on terror, as I did,” he told the programme.

“So I go to the G8 not really trying to make him look bad or good, but I go to the G8 with an agenda that I think is best for our country.” ‘

He’s an evil, pernicious, twisted blight on the planet, and anyone who voted for him should be seriously ashamed of themselves. There is a political will within sections of the G8 to improve on these issues but while Bush, under the influence of his PNAC cronies, undermines anything that makes the rich accountable, that makes the rich empire-building countries of Europe and North America feel any sense of responsibility for the fuck-up that is modern day African economics. The most resource-rich continent on earth is its poorest. It makes me cry.

If the G8 don’t listen, who’s in for a revolution?

Soundtrack – The AOL Live8 stream.

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More of file sharing and the multi-nationals

From BBC news –

“The US Supreme Court has ruled that file-sharing companies are to blame for what users do with their software.”

This was apparently a surprise, because a similar case happened with the advent of home videos, where people could record off the TV. Then, the ruling went in favour of the Video manufacturers.

This time, I guess because the inventors of grokster, morpheus, limewire etc. aren’t mulitnationals themselves, the increasingly erroneous US Supreme Court have ruled in favour of the millionaires.

Now, the interesting thing here is, does this mean I can now sue Sony if someone uses a Sony CDR to copy one of my CDs? Of course not, because Sony have more money than me, so naturally they are in the right. But it’d be a fun test-case – I’m sure I could argue quite convincingly that they were facilitating the exchange, at least as much as limewire facilitate the downloading of my MP3s. Limewire can be used for legal exchange as well as illegal.

But no, Sony were happy to sell CDRs, because then they were making the money. The artists weren’t, but who gives a shit about artists? They claim to, but clearly don’t. When the blank CDR/cassette/video market became an obvious source of funds, they stopped protesting and started making blank media. At least they’d make the money. if you had shares in Sony, you’d still win, even if the artists they claim to care about so much didn’t make anything.

But file sharing is different. No-one’s making any money off it. The programs are free, the files are exchanged for free. So because they can’t take over, the prosecute. Any illusion of recourse to the law is pure BS. It’s all about control, nothing to do with artist’s rights. How many of these companies are fighting for fair trade laws? How many are fighting for the rights of people who work in CD plants across the developing world. No, they are talking about hardworking pop-stars, who might not make that extra few million quid, about hard working video directors, who might have to start charging as little as $200,000 for a three week shoot, instead of their customary cool million.

If anyone is wasting the artist’s money it’s the labels. The deception is huge, and the logic flawed. Who is going to get the money when the file sharers are sued? The artists? the little labels, the little venues? yeah, right. More money for the multi-nationals. That’s what the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll is all about.

Bollocks to them all.

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The beginning of the end for the BBC?

Today the sale of BBC broadcast to “an Australian business consortium” was finalised (subject to government approval).

I’m against the idea of selling off any public services, but some of the quotes in the article above are particularly disturbing –

“But new owner Creative Broadcast Services has agreed to a one-year moratorium on compulsory job losses.”

and

“As well as a moratorium on compulsory job losses, Mr Thompson said the consortium had also agreed to protect workers’ contracts for three years, continue to recognise unions and offer a “broadly comparable” pension scheme.”

one year? what kind of bogus short-termism is that? ‘it’s OK, we’ve sold you down the river, but you’ll have your job for a year’.

And I’m not sure what the second quote means – does that mean they’ll recognise the unions for three years or permanently? And what’s a ‘broadly comparable’ pension scheme? I really don’t like the sound of this at all.

Compounding this is that the sale was for £166 Million, even though “BBC Broadcast has contracts with the BBC up to 2015, worth over £500m.”

Why are British public services sold off in this way? I so cannot understand it. For some reason, the government/governing bodies seem to think that to sell of a public service we have to give the investors 10 times what they’d get in any other low-risk investment, and then make sure that even that low risk isn’t there. If these morons are going to try and play at being in business, the least they could do is make those who are making the money shoulder some of the responsibility and risk.

It’s like these insane PPP schemes where the investors are guaranteed super-high annual returns on their investment, so if they bollocks up the job, the government has to bail them out via the terms of the contract. How else are Jarvis still in business? How else did the contractors get away with putting lifts in Coventry’s PPP hospital that are too small to get a hospital bed in???

It makes no sense whatsoever, and it’s ruined my day, given that our last hope is that the government blocks it. Sadly given their track record on getting things right, there’s about as much chance of that happening as there is of Blair admitting that the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqis is illegal and he really out to be up in the Hague on war crimes charges.

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Celebs in need of a wake up call…

OK, so Oprah Winfrey was stopped from going into a paris shop after-hours because they were getting ready for some press thing. No big deal? Not to Oprah. According to ‘a friend’, it was “one of the most humiliating moments of her life”.

Hold on – so not being treated like a puffed up overblown star demanding luxury and special treatment is ‘humiliating’. How about being stopped and searched for just for being black? How about being forcibly strip searched, or arrested and tortured? How about suffering from panic attacks or epilepsy and having an attack in a crowded place?

Good God, how to these celeb losers sleep at night??? How can anyone get worked up over not being let into a chic shop? So you can’t get in – so what, it was closed anyway!! Ah, but you’re Oprah. Sorry, nobody still gives a shit.

another choice quote –

‘Winfrey’s friend Ms King said the TV presenter has no intention of shopping at Hermes again.

“Her position is ‘I will shop where people appreciate my business, and I don’t believe that any longer includes Hermes’,” she added.’

Oh please! just PISS OFF. No-one wants to hear multi-millionaires whinging about not getting the star treatment, you sad out-of-touch waste of oxygen! Go and work in a homeless shelter or do relief work for a few months to get some perspective, you tragic spoilt showbiz mannequin!

Loser of the week, methinks…

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Should the words 'Big Brother' and 'Role Models' appear in the same sentence??

From the BBC News site,

“Reality TV show Big Brother portrays role models with values that inspire its viewers, the chief executive of Channel 4 has said.”

OK, Andy Duncan is a christian, who was talking to a christian group about C4’s religious output. Surely this is just bollocks? I don’t think Andy has anything to defend from the point of being a christian – I’ve never really thought about it from that point of view – but to suggest that there’s anything ‘wholesome’ about BB is clearly rubbish.

The contestants this year in particular have been chosen because they are likely to get hammered, show their boobs and hopefully start shagging at some point. They weren’t chosen because that posessed any qualities that people aspire to…

Why do Christians always come out with this nonsense? If he’d just said ‘look, I might be Chief Exec of C4 but I didn’t start the station, and there’s only so much I can do to change it. It’s a commercial station, and BB brings in huge revenue from the ads – I couldn’t cancel it if I wanted to. However, if I want to have any kind of positive influence here, I’m going to have to put up with broadcasting the odd hour of drivel now and again, OK?’

It would be more honest…

(oh, and in Tennis news, Andrew Murray has just taken the first set in his second round match… it’s looking good.)

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Do you have it in you to be a torturer?

Browsing a bass-discussion site yesterday, I came across a random link to the Stanford Prison Experiment – a very famous sociological experiment into what happens when you take 18 ordinary men, divide them arbitrarily into 9 prisoners and 9 guards, and monitor their behaviour.

The site is brilliant, in that it walks you through the stages of the experiment, and even draws parallels with the abuse in Abu Graib Prison in Iraq.

And, especially with the abomination that is Big Brother back on UK TV for it’s 6th (sixth?????) series, it shows us how bizarrely people can behave when new social heirarchies are imposed upon them, and how abusive the BB experiments can be, when BB decides to be ‘evil’ just to up the ratings a bit.

So, boycott it, and read the stuff on the Stanford Prison Experiment website instead.

Soundtrack – Prefab Sprout, ‘Jordan – The Comeback’; Juliet Turner, ‘Season Of The Hurricane’.

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