Day: June 28, 2005

A timely excerpt from David Sheff’s September 1980 Playboy interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

Sheff Just to finish your favorite subject [the Beatles], what about the suggestion that the four of you put aside your personal feelings and regroup to give a mammoth concert for charity, some sort of giant benefit?
Lennon I don’t want to have anything to do with benefits. I have been benefited to death.

Sheff Why?

Lennon Because they’re always rip-offs. I haven’t performed for personal gain since 1966, when the Beatles last performed. Every concert since then, Yoko and I did for specific charities, except for a Toronto thing that was a rock-‘n’-roll revival. Every one of them was a mess or a rip-off. So now we give money to who we want. You’ve heard of tithing?

Sheff That’s when you give away a fixed percentage of your income.

Lennon Right. I am just going to do it privately. I am not going to get locked into that business of saving the world on stage. The show is always a mess and the artist always comes off badly.

Sheff What about the Bangladesh concert, in which George and other people such as Dylan performed?

Lennon Bangladesh was caca.

Sheff You mean because of all the questions that were raised about where the money went?

Lennon Yeah, right. I can’t even talk about it, because it’s still a problem. You’ll have to check with Mother [Yoko], because she knows the ins and outs of it, I don’t. But it’s all a rip-off. So forget about it. All of you who are reading this, don’t bother sending me all that garbage about, “Just come and save the Indians, come and save the blacks, come and save the war veterans,” Anybody I want to save will be helped through our tithing, which is ten percent of whatever we earn.

Sheff But that doesn’t compare with what one promoter, Sid Bernstein, said you could raise by giving a world-wide televised concert – playing separately, as individuals, or together, as the Beatles. He estimated you could raise over $200,000,000 in one day.

Lennon That was a commercial for Sid Bernstein written with Jewish schmaltz and showbiz and tears, dropping on one knee. It was Al Jolson. OK. So I don’t buy that. OK.

Sheff But the fact is, $200,000,000 to a poverty-stricken country in South America…

Lennon Where do people get off saying the Beatles should give $200,000,000 to South America? You know, America has poured billions into places like that. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. After they’ve eaten that meal, then what? It lasts for only a day. After the $200,000,000 is gone, then what? It goes round and round in circles. You can pour money in forever. After Peru, then Harlem, then Britain. There is no one concert. We would have to dedicate the rest of our lives to one world concert tour, and I’m not ready for it. Not in this lifetime, anyway.

(h/t colby cosh)

Canada will become the third country in the world to officially sanction same-sex marriage. Let the exodus begin.

That’s the title of the post put together by Dave @ Garfield Ridge. I know I said earlier that I would comment on Bush’s speech, but after reading Dave, I don’t have to. He’s got it right, so why repeat it. Head on over…

I’m listening to the speech now. I plan to take the transcript and comment later this evening.

John Kerry uses the New York Times to give advice to the president.

Heh.

“Congressmen who willfully take actions during wartime that damage morale and undermine the military are saboteurs and should be arrested, exiled, or hanged.” – Abraham Lincoln

Richard Cohen of the WaPo writes that the increasing sales of Ed Klein’s book about Hillary Clinton exposes the anti-Clinton people as village idiots of our time. He notes that “it takes one to buy this book”.

As much of a liberal as I know Cohen is, this article is surprising–notwithstanding the title, his hate of and disdain for “conservatives” and anyone who challenges Hillary really comes through here. I guess the bright side is that people who are this filled with hate and contempt usually don’t make effective advocates or usually aren’t too good at persuading people.

Actually this book is a cunning Democratic plot to expose all of Hillary’s peccadilloes well in advance of her 2008 run so that they will all have run out of steam by then. Hillary’s record must be used against her if we have any hope of derailing her power grab. As we’ve seen too many times before, controversy lifts the Clinton’s, it doesn’t bring them down.

Vitamin C gets a bad rap.

Another truism of personal health care — that vitamin C effectively prevents and treats the common cold — bites the dust.

New research, which reviews 65 years of data, concludes that there is no evidence that high doses of vitamin C ward off colds or lessen the symptoms — except in cases of extreme physical exertion such as running a marathon in the winter.

The study, published in the medical journal Public Library of Science Medicine, questions the wisdom of the popular practice of popping vitamin C supplements.

“New Research Says…” Code words written by the big pharmaceutical companies who make billions of dollars pushing their over-the-counter meds for the common cold.

Vitamin C has been a life saver for me. I take handfuls of the stuff when I feel a cold coming on, and it stops it dead. The key for me is to start immediately because if I wait too long it won’t work.

Oh, and it helps ‘keep things movin’ too, if you know what I mean.

’nuff said.

Ever since the wacko married his 8-year-old daughter, does anyone give a rip about anything Woody Allen says anymore?

I’m so tired of stories like this.

Diana, Princess of Wales, took cocaine and was worried it would kill her, according to new claims today.

Friend and confidante Simone Simmons makes the claim in her controversial book Diana: The Last Word, in which she also alleges the Princess had a relationship with John F Kennedy Jr.

In the book, serialised in The Sun, Ms Simmons insists that Diana told her a boyfriend, who was a habitual user, once urged her to try the drug.

She said the experience was so frightening for the Princess that she vowed not to use it again and help addicts.

The 49-year-old said: “Diana just said he offered it to her and she asked, ‘What do you do?’ and he told her.

“It made her feel so ill. It made her feel sick, dizzy and breathless. She felt she was going to have a heart attack and die when she tried cocaine.”

The lady is DEAD. As in No Longer Living. Oh, and another thing – her KIDS ARE STILL ALIVE, and they read this crap. Worst of all, their mother cannot defend the allegations, so they just sit out there as fact. Yeah, I know she was a celebrity and all, but so what.

She’s dead, let it be.

It used to be that when the president notified the media that he was going to make a speech to the American people, the major television networks listened. They would immediately clear their schedules and make room for the commander-in-chief. Oh the times, the are a changin. Nowadays, the big man has to compete with the likes of the ‘Average Joe’.

Three of the four broadcast networks had yet to decide late Monday whether they would carry President Bush’s speech on Iraq Tuesday in front of soldiers in Fort Bragg, N.C. By then, only ABC had said it would carry the address.

The White House formally requested an hour of primetime at 8 p.m. ET for Bush’s speech at a time when public opinion polls show the tide turning against the war in Iraq. While there was no question that the cable news channels would cover the president’s address, the broadcast networks were a tougher sell.

CBS, NBC and Fox all said they would decide sometime Tuesday whether to carry the speech. Concerns centered on the potential newsworthiness of the speech and the fact that it was being given not in the Oval Office but far from Washington.

“You want to be certain you are broadcasting something that is newsworthy and vitally important to the American people,” said one network executive who asked not to be identified.

The networks, unconvinced in initial talks with the White House late last week that the speech would be newsworthy, asked for more information. Sources said a conference call was held at 12:30 p.m. ET with officials from the Bush administration and the networks’ Washington bureau chiefs.

But that might not be the only reason for the networks’ holdout. While CBS was in repeats at 8 p.m., NBC was faced with the possibility of having to pre-empt or reschedule the heavily promoted original reality series “Average Joe: The Joes Strike Back.”

Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, said Monday that it was a tough decision for the network bosses.

“On the one hand, they recognize if the president actually is going to make substantial news on Iraq, they probably should cover it,” Sabato said. “But on the other hand, they realize this White House is famous for constructing political rallies and convincing the networks to cover them with the sole beneficiary being the president, not the American people.”

Sabato is right. This cynical behavior on the part of the TV networks isn’t bias. It’s the fault of the White House, and politics in general. Politicians have cried wolf too often, and have duped the media into covering ‘news’ under false pretences.