[MSM Hobbes]

Do you comment upon our comments regarding these issues that may be of interest, no matter their degree of significance, just to troll about? FWIW, gjw, I care not one bit about the size of many things or the count of the posts herein - its the quality, honesty, sincerity, enjoyment, and whatever educational aspect that matters, at least to me - its called a discussion, a debate between those that do care to throw their opinion and/or facts into the virtual ring here to potentially enlighten others and themselves. But, hey, thanks for asking tho' - 'cause, wow, another post count for me!!!

[josdegr]

Originally Posted by bonzobob999

Don't know if anybody has mentioned this in this thread, but.................have a look on ebay at the price of these tickets........ebay should ban the sales of these tickets.

AP
EBay Withdraws Tickets for Live 8 Concert

Tuesday June 14, 3:31 pm ET

Internet Auction Site EBay Withdraws Tickets for Live 8 Concert After Criticism From Bob Geldof


LONDON (AP) -- EBay Inc. said Tuesday it will stop posters from selling tickets for the Live 8 concert on July 2.
Tickets for the much-sought-after show, intended to raise the profile of poverty in Africa, were being sold for inflated prices on eBay, angering concert organizer Bob Geldof. The musician urged a boycott of the auctioneer, accusing it of "sick profiteering."

EBay managing director Doug McCallum said the company had decided to take the tickets down.

"The bottom line is that we've listened carefully to our customers over the last few days. Overwhelmingly the voice is that they would like us to take down the listing, so we are going to do our best to do that," McCallum told Britain's ITV television.

More than 2 million people applied by text message for the 150,000 tickets to the concert in London's Hyde Park in what The Guinness Book of World Records said was the largest text-message lottery in history.

Tickets began appearing on eBay shortly after recipients began learning by text that they had been successful.

More than 100 pairs of tickets had been listed by early Tuesday and some had attracted bids of up to $1,800.

"It is completely against the interests of the poor. The people who are selling these tickets on Web sites are miserable wretches who are capitalizing on people's misery," Geldof said.

EBay said reselling charity concert tickets was not illegal under British law.

Geldof said eBay's decision to allow the listing of the tickets in the first place had been "a sort of example of corporate arrogance that it thought it could operate outside the morality of its audience."

"I am glad it's stopped and well done for taking them down but it was despicable and they should have thought about it before they did this," Geldof told Sky News.

The $5.4 million raised by the ticket lottery will go toward the Prince's Trust, a youth charity established by Prince Charles and to Help A London Child, which campaigns to improve children's mental health, as well as on materials for the concert.

Live 8 agreed to donate to the Prince's Trust in return for the cancellation of Party in the Park, the Prince's Trust's annual concert in Hyde Park.

Other Live 8 concerts on July 2 will be held in Paris, Berlin, Rome and Philadelphia.


http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/050614/ebay_live_8.html?.v=1

[lighthouse]

I've seen the Floyd do a multi-megastar gig like this.........and you watch all the other stuff - enjoying the show, but you know that - at some point - this awesome band will be on. When they arrive - with the synth intro to "Shine on....." you get that tingle down your spine because you instantly realise just how immense they are. With this show you'll get McCartney brilliantly playing old Beatles faves, along with some Wings stuff. The 90s/00s bands will strum away to their guitar jangle pop, all whistful irony and NME poses, Madonna will do "Immaculate collection" and "GHV2" taking us through the 80s and 90s Hollywood style, U2 will be big - but perhaps without some of the mystique they once had as they've inhabited the Tabloids perhaps a bit much in recent years, Oasis will be McCartney 2 - and everything else from the Faces to the Stone Roses. Elton John, Sting, etc will get the usual stalwart applause, some will be just a little dull and uninspiring, and REM will surprise everyone by playing their back catalogue. Then, a dramatic silence ensues as these guys who've seen it all - from the UFO club underground in 1967 London, Pompeii, and Wembley stadium take to the stage and you get a sublime awesomness from the band that define, no - ARE - the ultimate rock band. Suddenly - and you've already known this anyway - everything else begins to look like the support band.

Cambridge 4 - RORRW (Score in decimals).

There is one thing though. If the Politicians are already pledging the debt reduction - as they have in recent days - does this make Live 8 a campaign to make a difference or a big party to celebrate the Political decision?

Having said all of that I still reckon the lack of an ethnically representative act somehow seems like a lost opportunity to show the world how brilliant these people are.

Re: Ticket story............well that's gotta be a good result!

[lighthouse]

And - of course there's no bul***t about the Floyd. No Psuedo culture, and no celebratocracy manipulation. Just an honest band who got to be huge on merit and not default. It's rock and rolls 50th birthday this year and when the ultimate band play the ultimate rock and roll show that's it! They don't need the publicity, and this is the line up that wrote "the Nile song" "Set the controls..." "Careful with that axe Eugene" "Echoes" "One of those days" "Time" "The great gig in the sky" "Money" "Wish you were here" "Shine on....." "Another brick in the wall" etc.

And I don't care if the hideous trendy (dubious) types who hijack peoples lives and use up valuable media space read this either. You are the cause and not the answer to poverty in the UK - you're own people - how can you have any legitimate claim to want to solve the poverty of other peoples? You can't!

[lighthouse]

"Set the controls for the heart of the sun" = one of the first rhythmic pieces of music 20 years before the whole dance thing happened. Intro to "Let there be more light" - erm - Chemical brothers "Block rocking beats" - but 30 years before. That tune from Ummagumma (I think) using lots of samples put on tapes and varispeeded etc long before computers rendered the whole process ridiculously simple for "remixers" and 90s producers.

A band that wrote the book that many others have been reading ever since. This is the most exciting reunion in popular music since - erm - popular music!

Coldplay are OK I guess - but there was this early 90s movement in the UK called "Shoegazing" and Slowdive etc are predecessors to Coldplays sound by about 8 years.

[SlackAli]

With you on everything you say about Floyd Lighthouse.

I saw them play a free gig in Hyde Park in the early '70s, which was only spolit by knuckle-grazing Hell's Angels taking it on themselves to 'police' the event.

Got the dvd of 'Strat Pack' a couple of weeks ago, which was the concert at Wmbley Arena last year to celebrate 50 years of the Fender Stratocaster. Really good stuff on it including Joe Walsh, Phil Manzanera, but the highlight is Dave Gilmour playing Marooned, Coming Back to Life, and Sorrow. Playing Strat serial no 0001, you realise what a truly awesome talent this man was and is. Assuming it's on TV, I'll watch Live* solely for Floyd

[MSM Hobbes]

Regaring Floyd - heard the other day that they are doing 4 songs, and 4 songs only... lets see, at ~$2.5k for the flight and lodging and vittles and ticket, that equates to about $625 per song. Hmmmmm... Tempting, cause these guys are gods of music... but, kinda doubtful. Guess I'll just spend it on a big flat-screen and a dish for this event.

[SlackAli]

Originally Posted by MSM Hobbes

Regaring Floyd - heard the other day that they are doing 4 songs, and 4 songs only... lets see, at ~$2.5k for the flight and lodging and vittles and ticket, that equates to about $625 per song. Hmmmmm... Tempting, cause these guys are gods of music... but, kinda doubtful. Guess I'll just spend it on a big flat-screen and a dish for this event.

Quite agree. If you went to the event - which is unlikely due to the dictates of His Holiness Gelldof - you'd be surrounded by beer-sodden morons and would have to endure the tedium of Sir Elton 'hairpiece' John and the bedwetters Coldplay. Get a plasma screen - it's forever; well a year or two anyway

[MSM Hobbes]

LOL!!! Course, them thar beer sodden morons would have to deal w/ a sober freakish hillbilly who is fanatical about Floyd, getting high on the music...

BTW, great descriptions!

[MSM Hobbes]

http://www.sundayherald.com/50283

Sunday Herald - 12 June 2005
When it comes to Africa, Bush has more on his mind than aid
By Torcuil Crichton


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the United States, the balance sheet of what comes out of Africa far outweighs what goes back in. Oil, raw materials and the expansion of the free market are the principal reasons the US engages in Africa, anything else is pretty much incidental.
Chancellor Gordon Brown may have wrung significant support from the US for the debt relief deal he announced after yesterday’s meeting of G8 ministers, but in the balance book of persuading the richest nation on Earth to help the poorest continent, the bottom line is not all that encouraging.

America will have nothing to do with the commitment to providing 0.7% of GDP (gross domestic product) for aid which the European powers have signed up to. The US will have nothing to do with Gordon Brown’s International Finance Facility (IFF) which would use the sale of gold reserves to speed up the rate of aid delivery. According to aid agencies, the Bush administration’s agreement on debt cancellation simply makes more economic sense than the European proposals for debt relief which would see the impoverished African nations picking up the repayment baton again halfway through the next decade.

In the same way as it blindly ignores the Kyoto targets on climate change, the US government is pursuing its own unilateral agenda on Africa and poverty reduction.

This, however, does not necessarily support the conclusions about American intentions most of Europe has already come to before George Bush steps foot on Scottish soil for the G8 summit at Gleneagles next month.

“Bush has a reputation in Europe, for grudgingly accepting that Africa has to be dealt with, but in practice he has a fairly benevolent policy in terms of aid,” says Martin Meredith, whose book, The State Of Africa, a study on the 50 years of post-colonial independence, was published this month.

It’s not as if Bush, who arrived in office as one of the least-travelled presidents, doesn’t know where Africa is. He toured part of the continent in 2003, emphasising the tough-love approach to poverty reduction, insisting on the entrenchment of democracy and on cleaning up state corruption.

Bill Clinton was the first US president to tour Africa while in office, and although he made large gestures about working with the continent, they amounted to very little in reality. Bush has actually delivered on promises – over the last three years the US aid to Africa has trebled.

Within the US itself, there is a perception that the world’s superpower does deliver a lot for Africa. Survey after survey shows that Americans do care, do think that something should be done for Africa, do think that the US government is putting its shoulder to the wheel.

In sheer volume terms the world’s largest economy is sending the largest amount of foreign aid to Africa, but as a proportion of national wealth only 0.16% of the US budget goes on aid, far short of the 0.7% of GDP that is the UN target.

A ridiculously small amount of US aid, far less than 1% of its total aid budget, is spent in sub-Saharan Africa, the poorest place on Earth. A lot of the funds go to Pakistan, to Israel, to countries that assist in the US’s strategic interests. In that respect, foreign aid is, as it always was, a tool of foreign policy.

In stark contrast to Britain, which brought a wealth of diplomatic and technical know-how to post-colonial Africa, and France, which bought influence throughout the continent with generous financial support, for most of the 20th century the United States brought only guns.

The US bears a historical responsibility for numerous regional and tribal conflicts that have destabilised countries such as Angola, Liberia, Congo and Somalia.

Africa does not loom as large in the collective American conscience as it does for Europeans. For most of the last two centuries Africa was ruled by Britain and France, with Portugal and Belgium picking up the remnants of the map. Slavery and Liberia excepted, the US had little geo-political interest in Africa until the continent became a playground for cold war politics as the colonial control waned and the Soviet Union sought strategic advantage.

When the US was involved in a proxy war against communism any leader who served as a bulwark against the spread of Soviet influence was deemed good enough for money and guns. When twinned with multinational demands to continue to exploit Africa’s mineral wealth, the US cold war policy for the continent often led to bizarre contradictions such as having Cuban troops guarding Angolan oil installations operated by American companies against rebel insurgents armed by the US government.

Dictators have received billions of dollars of military aid and there are enough small arms in the continent for one in 20 people to have their own personal weapon. In the two years following September 2001, the amount spent on military training for African officers has increased by over $2 million to $11.1m.

Manganese for steel, cobalt for chrome and alloys, gold, fluorspar and germanium for industrial diamonds – Africa remains a treasure trove for the world’s sophisticated economies. The US continues to rely on Africa for raw materials, and for American companies there are tremendous profits in the current trade agreements that continue the age-old exploitation of the continent by the rich world.

Sub-Saharan Africa, the world’s poorest place, is also its most profitable investment destination. According to the World Bank’s 2003 global development finance report, the huge continent offers “the highest returns on foreign direct investment of any region in the world”.

The trade and aid agreements reflect the continuing imbalance between Africa and the West.

“There is obviously poverty reduction rhetoric but when you look closely at the way aid is tied to contracts for US companies you can see that it is a different way of benefiting the domestic economy. It is being done for the benefit of US business and not for the poor of the countries receiving the aid,” says Peter Hardstaff, head of policy at the UK-based World Development Movement.

The exploitation of Africa has a long and sordid history, dripping in blood and corruption and with enough blame and guilt to share between all the participants – Western governments, multinational companies and national leaders. On trade the US still does extremely well from the plunder of Africa’s raw materials.

The African Growth and Opportunity Act, which sounds like a benevolent multilateral trade agreement between the US and Africa, forces participants to remove subsides from their industries (while allowing the US to subsidise its own) and insists on privatisation of social services such as water even in countries that face drought.

The non-government organisations working in the continent have described the agreement as a colonial imposition that provides the US with cheap labour and goods and tax-free energy. Of course, over 90% of the sales under the agreement in its first nine months were oil exports from Nigeria and Gabon.

Not all the deals are cynical. The Bush administration’s $15 billion commitment to Aids in Africa and the Caribbean, the biggest single pledge by any US administration, undoubtedly benefits America’s pharmaceutical companies, but few seriously doubt that its main aim is to improve the wellbeing of the people of Africa and the planet as a whole.

But there are other riders to US aid. Some of the aid money – $86m of the $865m apportioned to fighting Aids in 2004 – goes to Christian faith-based organisations who promote abstinence as a means of preventing sexually transmitted disease. Most Aids prevention programmes more realistically focus on education and protection.

The over-riding American concern in Africa, as it is across the entire globe, is oil security. Oil, its extraction and supply, will always be the top priority for the US. The biggest returns, and the most important product out of Africa for the coming decades, will be petroleum. The returns are not for Africans though. While 70% of Nigerians exist on a dollar a day, Shell continues to make megaprofits from oil drilling in the country, taking an estimated $30bn out of the ground since the 1950s.

At present 12% of US oil comes from Africa and by 2015, when the UN’s Millennium Goals to halve world poverty will be laughably incomplete, that proportion will have reached 25%. To control the security of oil supply will, in all likelihood, require a large US military presence near the oilfields.

Fortunately for the US most of West Africa’s oilfields are offshore, and so less vulnerable to sabotage, insurrection or local instability. The oil has the added benefit of having shorter transportation routes to US refineries and not having to travel through vulnerable areas of the world.

As the world passes peak oil production, and some analysts believe the top of the graph is already disappearing in our rear-view mirror, the race for oil will become paramount. Rapidly industrialising China, the US’s chief competitor in the future, has already recognised the need to have Africa as a key source of mineral wealth. Agreements are already in place with the government of Sudan to provide oil that will fuel Chinese economic growth.

With oil becoming an economic weapon, there will be no shortage of regime changes, human rights abuses and privately sponsored coup attempts to control the flow of the most precious commodity.

Poverty and the needs of the African population will take second place to US geo-political strategy. In the lexicon of aid and trade, the NEPAD agreements and the AGOA, there are only three letters that really matter to the US in Africa, they are O-I-L.

[Moby]

Originally Posted by SlackAli

you'd be surrounded by beer-sodden morons

We'd put up with you as long as you kept the noise down

[lighthouse]

Pink Floyd V U2.

I like both bands - the Joshua Tree is an astounding album and a journey into the soul of rock and roll (In gods country, Streets have no name, Red hill mining town, Still haven't found...........) Deep, brooding, and the album that proved 80s Cetic rock was capable of very much more than Mullets and echoey guitars. Both bands are huge in the rock and roll universe - but the Floyd have the edge (erm - er??- erm - ahem! ). Why? Perhaps the Floyds stuff has retained an integrity that is unsurpassed by many other bands. They haven't had their songs mauled - sorry - remixed by chart DJs, and apart from that non too flattering cover of "Comfortably Numb" by the Scissor sisters they haven't been 'interpretted' in a bad way either - that Wycliffe Jean take on "Wish you were here" was really good. U2 songs have been remixed a few times in recent years and some of them haven't been particularly good - most cringeably being that one that uses "With or without you". There was also that rather vapid cover of "Streets have no name" by the Pet shop boys, which totally blandified a song that wasn't really meant to be poptastic. They have been tabloid people rather a lot over the last few years which destroys a bands mystique - something they had by the bucket load around the mid-late 80s, then there was that TFI interview!

Roger Waters quit the Floyd when U2 were still touring their first album - and admittedly the guys from Cambridge established themselves long before words like celebratocracy first appeared - but even that says something about them. U2 are awesome on a scale of - say 80%, but the Floyd perhaps 95!

They're only doing 4 songs? So who's going to speculate which 4?

[SlackAli]

Originally Posted by Moby

We'd put up with you as long as you kept the noise down

Thank you for those kind words. Actually my beer consumption is down to pitiful proportions compared to the heroic efforts of my youth.

[SlackAli]

MSM Hobbes - just saw your post Just checked-out your photo: you look quite normal to me, and wouldn't have any problem getting through Heathrow immigration. As long as you adopt an East European accent which seems necessary to get into the country nowadays.

Lighthouse - personally I've always thought U2 were just an over-blown pub band who made some cracking early singles but lost the plot bigtime when they adopted this semi-mystical talk-to-the-trees pomposity. And Bono has got to be one of the most irritating people around.

[DiSaidSo]

Originally Posted by SlackAli

MSM Hobbes - just saw your post Just checked-out your photo: you look quite normal to me.....

.....give it time.....