I wasn’t going to mention him again before that old boys’ reunion concert next month, but it’s good to see the world’s most prominent spiritual leader telling the Pope what to do…

http://au.launch.yahoo.com/050621/11/4×5n.html

This has to be the most bizarre act of convergence I’ve ever come across. Bob Dylan and Norah Jones are performing in a concert in Seattle on July 16 to mark the tenth birthday of Amazon.com, which will stream the event live on its homepage. Billboard has a report, while the Pantheon of New Consumerism will have progress reports. (What, no black artists, you say? And how can you have a Show of Thanks in Seattle without any Seattle musicians? Where is Kurt Cobain when you need him?)

And this, while I am still coming to terms with the fact that the audiobook of Mr Zimmerman’s autobiography is read by Sean Penn, currently being serialised on ABC Radio National’s excellent morning talk program Life Matters.

You’ve got to hand it to John Winston Howard - when he’s not blatantly lying about events he’s doing his darndest to shift the blame onto others. I don’t think I’ve seen anything for quite a while that encapsulates the John Howard mindset better than this exchange from last night’s 7.30 Report on the ABC. It comes during an interview by Kerry O’Brien about the Government’s announced changes to mandatory detention for asylum seekers:

KERRY O’BRIEN: Well, in that same regard you talked on Friday about hindsight. You’ve had alarm bells going off all over the place over years. You’ve had serious psychiatric warnings, quite serious ones, from whole groups of psychiatrists, particularly about children, you’ve had the Human Rights Commission, you’ve had other groups saying - and having made the admission that the changes are - not just overdue but long overdue, which suggests a long period, have you stopped to ask yourself how many of these children now face life as seriously damaged human beings, not to mention their parents?

JOHN HOWARD: Well, Kerry, perhaps their parents should have stopped to ask themselves whether they should have tried to come to this country in an unauthorised way in the first place.

(Full transcript is here.)

From The Register:
Robot runs riot at California hospital

Staff and patients at San Francisco’s UCSF Medical Center were left fearful and shaken last week, when a robotic nurse threw off its shackles and went on the rampage.

“Waldo”, a robot used to dispense pills and potions to medical stations at the top notch medical facility, refused to return to the pharmacy to pick up a fresh stash at the end of his rounds, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

I’m going to try and make this my final word on Barnacle Bob Geldof and the Good Ol’ Boys concerts, brought to you by AOL, Clear Channel, and Corporate Boxholders Unlike You.

Not to mention the following corporation. This press release overnight from the India Resource Centre:

Coca-Cola Must Not Sponsor Live 8
Coca-Cola’s Egregious Record in India and Colombia Antithetical to Live 8 Goals

June 15, 2005 (London): The India Resource Centre and its allies are expressing serious concerns over news that Live 8 is in negotiations with the Coca-Cola company to seek sponsorship for the Live 8 concert.

Coca-Cola’s sponsorship of Live 8 is completely antithetical to the goals of Live 8 and the India Resource Centre and its allies are demanding that Live 8 organizers immediately discontinue negotiations with the Coca-Cola company.

The Coca-Cola company is the target of intense campaigns by community groups in India and internationally.

Thousands of rural Indians are facing severe water shortages and polluted groundwater and land - directly as a result of Coca-Cola’s operations. The company has also distributed its toxic waste to farmers around its plants under the guise of fertilizer, and Coca-Cola sells products in the Indian marketplace with high levels of pesticides that could never be sold in the US or EU because they do not meet US and EU standards.

Coca-Cola’s crimes in India are no small matter. In a country where over 70% of the population still makes a living related to agriculture, taking away the water and poisoning the remaining water and land is a sure recipe for disaster. Thousands in India have lost their livelihoods, and in a country where over 40% of the population lives below the poverty line, the difference between life and death is a fine line.

Coca-Cola’s main Latin American bottler, Panamco, is on trial in the US for hiring right wing paramilitaries to kill and intimidate union leaders in Colombia. Since 1989, eight trade union leaders from Coca-Cola bottling plants have been murdered by paramilitary forces, and the lawsuit, filed by the United Steel Workers of America, charges that the paramilitary worked with the blessing of, or in collaboration with, company management.

A formidable international campaign has emerged to hold the Coca-Cola company accountable for the serious crimes it is committing against humanity.

It is simply not acceptable to the India Resource Centre and its allies that Live 8 seek the sponsorship of a company that is perpetuating poverty in India and promoting a reign of terror in Colombia.

The Live 8 organization will become the target of the India Resource Centre and its allies if it chooses to proceed with an invitation to the Coca-Cola company as a sponsor.

“Coca-Cola is responsible for creating severe water shortages and pollution in India, and thousands have lost their livelihoods as a result. It is absurd to think that a poverty creating company can sponsor a poverty alleviating endeavor such as Live 8,” said Amit Srivastava, director of the India Resource Centre which campaigns with Indian communities to hold Coca-Cola accountable.

The India Resource Centre is a bi-national (India-US) campaigning organization working to support local struggles against corporate abuses.

For more information, visit www.IndiaResource.org

Finally, this thread from the Guardian’s newsblog.

Geldof condemns sale of Live 8 tickets on eBay

Yes, people touting their free Live8 tickets on eBay is a low act. But also perfectly legal. A mass boycott of eBay for a week in retaliation, eh Bob? Yeah right…

In other Live 8 news, that totally innocent collector of gay erotica, Michael Jackson, is rumoured to be keen to take part in the Musical Parade of the Dinosaurs next month. Being a white musician these days, his chances of being invited are greatly improved.

He’s probably hoping, however, for the G8 to arrange the retirement of all his debts…

Talk about bringing world peace. News this morning that the Live 8 Leviathan will bring Roger Waters together with the rest of Pink Floyd on stage for the first time in 24 years.

Who cares???????

Now if Syd Barrett were to join them in concert…..

“Naive and stupid” is an expression I generally associate with the totality of Shane Warne’s off-field career. But it fits perfectly in describing Bob Geldof’s approach to his latest competition entry for the Nobel Peace Prize… namely the Live 8 concerts.

A noble (no pun intended) cause for sure, publicising the issue of third world poverty and timed to coincide with the G8 meeting in Edinburgh. So why has he announced, at short notice, a string of Boring Old Farts rock concerts which sound sadly like Live Aid 1985 revisited.

I have nothing against the original Live Aid. I enjoyed it. I put it all onto VHS tape, complete with titles inserted via software on my Commodore 64. (64K of RAM, one 170K external 5.25 inch floppy drive, no telecomm connection… sigh those were the days!) Mind you, the tapes have long since been chucked out by virtue of old age. And that’s what should be done with the Live Aid approach. It’s so 1985…

Geldof’s myopic vision for Live 8 was borne out when his original guest list was released. (I do look forward to the National Geographic documentary on The Disenbalming of Midge Ure.) No non-white artists, no one from the continent whose children the father of Fifi Trixibelle, Peaches Honeyblossom and Pixie is endeavouring to save.

One can just imagine the reaction at Chateau Geldof:
Oh. Erm. Woops. Let me make a quick phone call…….. Of course we’ll have African performers at Live 8. Youssou N’dour is going to appear in my concert. In fact, he’ll appear in two concerts!

So Youssou N’dour is once more, as he has been for nearly two decades of stadium charity gigs, the Token African Artist.

As a Geldof spokesperson was quoted by the Guardian on June 2 as saying:

“Bob had just three weeks to put it all together, and he went to his address book and rang the people that he knew…”

Lots of questions beg there. And I haven’t even started on the silly stunts of sending rowboats over the English Channel to bring protestors to Edinburgh (let me check that map of Great Britain again), or of getting the schoolkiddies of the UK to wag two days of school to wave placards in front of distant barricades miles from the G8 conference.

The danger here is that third world poverty will be deflected into becoming another “cause celebre of the month”, which is a fate that seems to have befallen the victims of the December 26 tsunami in the eyes of the West. If Bob Geldof is not careful (and he hasn’t shown much care to date), Live 8 will succeed only in trivialising a serious global crisis and adding another line to his annual Nobel Prize nomination CV (which, hopefully, the Nobel Committee will never fall for).

Today’s kiddies and MIX-FM jocks seem oblivious to the fact that Geldof’s band, the Boomtown Rats, recorded many - and better - songs other than “I Don’t Like Mondays”. May I commend the song entitled “Elephant’s Graveyard”…

A few references for further reading: the Guardian’s coverage of the leadup to G8, Geldoffest and all; the G8 Gleneagles website; the UK Make Poverty History website; the Inter Press Service’s development news section; and the official Live 8 website.

Peter Costello is hazardous to your health! This from yesterday’s House of Reps Hansard:

Ms BIRD (Cunningham) (3.14 p.m.)—Mr Speaker, are members of this House covered by occupational health and safety legislation? Does the volume of the microphone conform to these laws when the Treasurer is screaming at the dispatch box?

The SPEAKER —I thank the member for Cunningham for her question. I will seek further information and come back to her.

I’ll keep you posted.

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister, is the deployment of 15 troops to Sudan a preliminary deployment? Are there going to be more?

PRIME MINISTER: Well I wouldn�t rule out more but equally by saying that I�m not concealing the fact that we have already decided to send more. You get my meaning? You�ve got to be careful with these things.

- Press conference, Imperial Hotel, Tokyo, 20.4.05

This is the only reference I can find of John Winston Howard discussing the crisis in Sudan anywhere over the past twelve months. And that piece of doublespeak only when a reporter brought it up. A search for “darfur” on either the Prime Ministerial website or under speeches etc by Howard in Federal Parliament comes up blank.

And yes, the Australian Government has contributed a massive 15 troops to the United Nations peacekeeping force in Sudan. Here’s the press release from April 20 issued by Defence Minister Senator Robert “it was an interview not an interrogation” Hill and Global Village Idiot Alexander Downer. (And the bipartisan support from the ALP.)

Our Prime Minister does so much (or, in reality, so little) that we as Australians have every right to be ashamed about. His apathy towards the world’s worst humanitarian crisis is but one of them.