This week: • WTO • 2005 Review: news • HRW spooks •
• Bangs bird • 2005 Review: weirdness • Stuff •

 

This is the last little red email of 2005, hence the review of the year, the silly hats and all the usual Xmas malarky. We wish you all a merry whatever it is that you celebrate and a happy new year.

 

WTO again

Thousands upon thousands of words have been written about last week’s non-event that was the World Trade Organization get together in Hong Kong.

Nothing was achieved inside the meeting rooms, with the wealthy countries of the world each claiming they were waiting for another developed nation to make the first move on getting rid of agricultural subsidies and actually engaging in the free trade they so often play lip service to, whilst the developing world refused to do anything to further the developed world’s free trade until they tried it themselves.

In light of the predictable impasse, the little red email’s photographers reported from the streets instead, where at least there was some action.

Click on the image for a gallery of protest.

 

 

2005: through little red goggles

As our erudite columnist Mr Bangs observes below 2005 has indeed been a cruel year, one of devastating tsunamis, hurricanes and war. Indeed the four horsemen of the apocalypse have been out in full this year and the end of the world is nigh if we carry on screwing with the environment as at present.

Given the position of strength that he started out from, one of the few positives to come from this troubled 12 month period, is the dramatic weakening of the presidency of George W Bush whose second term line up has been populated by Iran-Contra crusties such as John Negroponte.

Rocked by scandal after scandal such as the Valerie Plame affair, with approval ratings at all time lows, more than 2,000 US soldiers dead in Iraq in under 1,000 days and the economy teetering the president has hit lame duck status mercifully early in his second tenure. We believe that to pep things up a bit Cheney may soon go to be replaced by Mr Burns-look-alike Condi Rice.

The US tried to give the pretence that Iraq was entering an era of democracy this year with three elections thus far in 2005. Yet the farce of the whole democracy push in this little red article entitled Electile dysfunction and brilliantly lampooned by the Guardian’s cartoonist extraordinaire Steve Bell here shows just how warped the Bush administration’s goals and realities are in the mire that is Iraq.

The US’s partner in crime Britain had an equally tumultuous year and similarly farcical elections where Tony Blair won 33.5% of vote yet received 55.5% of the seats in the House of Commons. The UK became even more of a police state, following the July bombs which we noted had a distinct Mossad connection (the Israeli secret service were also in evidence at the Jordan bombs this autumn too) with help from the establishment and there is way more to the July London bombs than was reported by the mainstream. Britain’s version of the Patriot Act was far more draconian than the controversial one across the Pond

Already the most CCTVed place on earth, the UK is now installing microphones into lampposts.

The greater War on Terror™ (TWOT™) looked to spread its wings of destruction to pastures new with Israel goading Washington on to strike at Iran on more than one occasion this year.

Fleshing up our Axis of Evil coverage we had author Paul French discuss where North Korea was headed and we even visited the Hermit Kingdom ourselves and provided a typically contrarian report from Pyongyang.

Syria has also been in Bush’s sights on repeated occasions.

And then time and time again our Latin American hero Senor Hugo Chavez, president of Venezuela and Canned Revolutionary of the Year made many a reference to impending US inspired attacks such as the two reports here and here.

With oil prices zooming, surpassing US$70 a barrel, Central Asia came to the fore as China and Russia squared off with the US for hegemony of this resource rich region.

Kyrgyzstan followed Ukraine and Georgia in a US-inspired regime change in the new Great Game for Central Asia which saw this summer the opening of the giant Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan pipeline, an artery of oil heading to the West but this was about the last piece of good fortune the US had in the region all year as most states switched allegiances to Russian and China.

This switch of allegiances is perhaps endemic of the perceived supernova the US is about to enter in its imperialist denouement. The US, as the world’s only superpower, is spending its way to an early grave.

The US economy is on the brink with Bush having borrowed cash more than the previous 42 presidents combined — an untenable amount of money that will have enormous repercussions for future generations of Americans.

China continued its climb up the GDP ranks. But its open economy has not meant a more open society. On the contrary, we argue that the current leadership under Hu Jintao is far more repressive than his predecessor Jiang Zemin something we turned to on more than one occasion this year.

Closer to Canned Revolution’s Hong Kong home, Tung Chee-hwa went and Mickey Mouse entered while democracy continued to be barred at the door.

The little red email scored a major exclusive about the huge radiation risks on non-stop transpolar flights from Asia to the east coast of the US which was followed up by three national newspapers.

The rise of China, and increased flights continued to ravage the environment which suffered a bad year on the international regulation scene with the US getting other massive countries to opt out of the Kyoto Treaty.

A fella by the name of Phillip Cooney inspired us to set up our regular Meteor-illogical Office report near the bottom of the email. Mr Cooney was in the pay of ExxonMobil before joining the White House to advise on environmental denial matters before returning to the oil major later this year. Oil majors paying for false non-climate change reports were picked up on regularly here at the Revolution. 

The Inuit in the Arctic went to court to try to preserve their land which is melting beneath them. Global warming even led the Swiss to cover up some of their mountains in tin foil this summer like giant Toblerone slabs to protect their glaciers while islands in the Pacific began to disappear leading cartographers everywhere to stock up on erasers.

All this depressing environmental woe news has not necessarily rubbed off on the little red email as we found out we are not especially saintly in this department with our ecological footprint being rather large and our personal CO2 emissions equally alarmingly high.

If global warming won’t kill us then the mainstream media would have us believe that the impending apocalypse from avian flu will but in that typical little red email way our own personal physician Dr Jim questioned who the winners from all this bird BS is and found that one Donald Rumsfeld, as the former CEO of the patent holders of the alleged cure for avian flu, Tamiflu, stood to gain rather a lot.

Among those who passed away this year before the four horsemen could wreak their terrible vengeance on the Earth was Peter Benenson, founder of the worldwide human rights organization Amnesty International, as well as the one, the only Hunter S Thompson to whom it seems wildly appropriate to leave the final words of our 2005 news roundup. Here is the good doctor ruminating on the stupidity of re-electing Dubya:

“We have become a Nazi monster in the eyes of the whole world — a nation of bullies and bastards who would rather kill than live peacefully. We are not just whores for power and oil, but killer whores with hate and fear in our hearts. We are human scum, and that is how history will judge us... No redeeming social value. Just whores. Get out of our way, or we’ll kill you.
“Who does vote for these dishonest shitheads? Who among us can be happy and proud of having this innocent blood on our hands? Who are these swine? These flag-sucking half-wits who get fleeced and fooled by stupid rich kids like George Bush? They are the same ones who wanted to have Muhammad Ali locked up for refusing to kill gooks. They speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us — they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.”

 

 

Spook Rights Watch: trust no one

“You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis. I put it to you that the United States is without doubt the greatest show on the road.”
— British playwright Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture, on winning the Nobel Prize for Literature.

 

Just how far can the US government go to limit any form of the truth getting out? This week we have learnt that even such a seemingly august body as Human Rights Watch is likely to be part of the government propaganda toolkit — a counter voice denying the most flagrant excesses of the Bush administration. Its original incarnation back in the 1970s was clearly dodgy, but now in the 21st century it still looks highly questionable — its independence debatable.

Gabriele Zamparini, founder of the great investigative Cat’s Blog sent Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, an open letter this month questioning exactly what someone such as Marc Garlasco was doing in HRW. Garlasco’s position at HRW is senior military analyst.

On December 2, 2005 the New York Times published an article with the title “Rights Group Lists 26 It Says U.S. Is Holding in Secret Abroad”. The article quotes Garlasco saying:

“One thing I want to make clear is we are talking about some really bad guys,” Mr. Garlasco said. “These are criminals who need to be brought to justice. One of our main problems with the U.S. is that justice is not being served by having these people held incognito.”
Mr. Garlasco said, “Our concern is that if illegal methods such as torture are being used against them,” trials may “either be impossible or questionable under international standards of jurisprudence.”

The Cat’s Blog rightly points out: “Did we get to the point that even Human Rights Watch doesn’t care for the presumption of innocence? Is that really HRW’s concern about torture?”

Closer examination of Garlasco’s past shows he “recommended thousands of aimpoints on hundreds of targets during operations in Iraq and Serbia [and who] also participated in over 50 interrogations as a subject matter expert”. Hardly senior management material at HRW, surely?

Garlasco’s biography reads:

Before coming to HRW, Marc spent seven years in the Pentagon as a senior intelligence analyst covering Iraq. His last position there was chief of high-value targeting during the Iraq War in 2003. Marc was on the Operation Desert Fox (Iraq) Battle Damage Assessment team in 1998, led a Pentagon Battle Damage Assessment team to Kosovo in 1999, and recommended thousands of aimpoints on hundreds of targets during operations in Iraq and Serbia. He also participated in over 50 interrogations as a subject matter expert.

According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, Garlasco had also an interesting role in damaging a study “published in The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, concluding that about 100,000 civilians had been killed in Iraq since it was invaded by a United States-led coalition in March 2003.” The Chronicle of Higher Education writes:

The Washington Post, perhaps most damagingly to the study’s reputation, quoted Marc E. Garlasco, a senior military analyst at Human Rights Watch, as saying, “These numbers seem to be inflated.”

As HRW’s denier-in-chief Garlasco even told the BBC: “To the best of our knowledge no banned weapons were used during either battle of Fallujah.” Since when were white phosphorous rounds, chemical gas, and napalm deemed legal, we wonder.

“After embedded journalists, shall we have embedded human rights organizations? Shouldn’t Caesar’s wife be above suspicion?” Zamparini concludes.

HRW has long been a shill for American power, dating back to its origins as Helsinki Watch, highlighting all of the human rights abuses of the Eastern Bloc, of which there were many, and eliding those of the so-called Free World, of which there were arguably more.

The Helsinki Watch Committee was formed in 1978 to monitor the Helsinki Accords, an agreement between the major superpowers over some basic human rights guarantees. “It was a product of the Jimmy Carter presidency that sought to deploy a velvet glove of human rights concealed around the iron fist of US imperialism,” as this document testifies.

Unlike Amnesty, as Diana Johnstone points out in “Fool’s Crusade”, HRW can barely be described as “non-governmental”. Prominent HRW members include Morton Abramowitz, a former undersecretary of state, Warren Zimmerman and Paul Goble, director of Radio Free Europe. Major contributors include: ABC, Reebok, Coca-Cola, Warner Brothers and other corporations with a peerless human rights track record.

HRW was the ‘liberal’ body crucial in the demonisation of Yugoslavia whose erroneous reports helped give Clinton and NATO reason to bomb.

We have always deferred to Amnesty International for all things human rights related. We will now be way more sceptical with the myriad HRW releases we get, wondering: cui bono?

 

• A very detailed article on the murky organization that is Human Rights Watch can be read here.

 

• Carter founded HRW, while Reagan formed the even dirtier National Endowment for Democracy, a misnomer if there was one. Click here to read all about it.

 

• And then of course there is the scandalous history of the American Red Cross to bear in mind.

 

 

Flipping bird-flu the bird

A Yahuda Bangs Hanukakwanzaatmas Tale — Vegetarians close your eyes, click your ruby slippers together and chant “There’s no place like home”.

2005 has been a cruel year, one of devastating tsunamis, hurricanes and war. As it prepares to leave under the looming spectre of a global bird-flu pandemic, it seems appropriate that this year’s culinary darling in America (if the food networks are to be believed) is something called a turducken. This is a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey. As the Roman Empire imploded under its own weight, parties got gaudier and consumption more conspicuous, I find the turducken an appropriate mascot for this cruel year of our lord. To celebrate the passing of the kidney stone that was 2005, I prepared this brutal and gruelling dish for my family in America.

The Bangs clan is an extended family, especially around the holidays, so I ordered a twenty pound turkey, a six pound duck, and a five pound chicken, all freshly killed and gutted. With clean hands and sharpened scalpel (hygiene is especially crucial when perverting nature) I set to work de-boning the birds. I attacked the chicken first, ripping out back-and-breastbone before turning the drumsticks inside out and shoving the bones out through the now-hollow chest cavity. The wings proved more difficult; after mauling them, I wound up just chopping them off for stock.

Then came the duck. My de-boning skills honed on the chicken, I set about carefully removing Donald’s spinal column, leg bones and wings. The result resembled more a neat and square meat packet than any creature that ever quacked or swam, let alone flew far enough to carry a highly contagious and potentially lethal strain of influenza across international borders.

My carving skills sharpened to Hannibal Lecter-like acumen, I was ready to work on the big bird; for this one, appearance was key. With loving care I carefully sliced out the spine of the bird that in a just world would be our national symbol, then removed its breast-bone. The recipe called for removal of its thigh bones to create a hollow cavity for stuffing, but after the results of my earlier de-boning work I found myself lacking the confidence to do the job poetically. The leg bones stayed intact, along with the wings.

Before me lay three de-boned birds of varying size with some resemblance to once-living creatures. If all went according to plan, in 14 hours, the Bangs family would be feasting on their neatly layered carcasses. I wrapped the birds up tightly in cellophane and placed them in a refrigerator door I’d emptied out earlier before wiping the preparation area down with a solution of bleach and water. Again, cleanliness is next to godliness, particularly when one is mocking the gods.

But the ménage à trois of meat is but part of the turducken’s complex appeal. What makes this gruelling act of holiday culinary cheer truly memorable is the trifecta of stuffings layered between the individual birds. Included in my unholy trinity of stuffing were oysters, pecans, apricots, dried cherries, portabella mushrooms, raisins, Craisins® and chestnuts. Along with these I threw in the usual suspects of holiday stuffing; onions, celery, croutons, and of course, the bloody gizzards of the three birds.  When my orgy of chopping and mixing was done I had three pans of separate stuffings, each containing a delightful and different taste combination. It was midnight by then, and in the morning, this amalgamation of produce, grains and corpses would be sewn into a new life form.

I entered surgery before dawn. After an hour of cramming, sewing and swearing, I had before me three birds and three layers of stuffing held together with sharp wooden spikes and hemp string (hemp being both politically progressive and flavourful). In all the recipes I’d perused before taking on this monstrous project no message was stressed more heavily (next to frequent hand-washing) than to pack the stuffing loose. But in my pre-dawn mental haze I’d haphazardly crammed the space between the duck and turkey with as much oyster stuffing as physically possible. By the time I was awake enough to register what I’d done, the Frankenbird had been in the over for two hours. I consulted my notes and discovered that the reason behind the overstuffing prohibition was pure physics; as moist things heat, they expand — ergo, an overstuffed turducken runs the risk of exploding.

As this is a holiday tale I’ll spare the reader undue tension by revealing the fact that no explosion took place. Instead, eight hours at 300 degrees (with frequent basting) later, the Frankenbird came out of the oven out of the oven golden brown, meat thermometer registering a salmonella (and hopefully H5N1) killing internal temperature of 185. After letting it cool down for half an hour, all eyes were on me as I sliced down the centre of the mutant bird. As the guests stood in awe of this unholy trinity of meat that was my holiday labour of love, the blade revealed six distinct layers; savoury stuffing, chicken, fruit and chestnut stuffing, duck, oyster stuffing, and finally, turkey. But as always, the proof is in the pudding. To paraphrase one diner, “the nature-defying interplay of light-and-dark meats interspersed with the mélange of stuffings has produced a dish that is at once fragrant, delicious, and completely insulting to nature.”

And that comment alone, dear readers, made the effort worthwhile. Happy Hanukakwanzaatmas to all, and to all a good night.

 

 

2005: through little red goggles (Part II)

As well as providing you lucky folk with our analysis of the news, the little red email serves another purpose — to provide our subscribers with whacky, almost unbelievable tales from around the globe. 2005 saw no shortage of strangeness. Who can forget the news that US soldiers were being treated with ecstasy to free them of flashbacks and recurring nightmares as well as improve their dancing capabilities. The Pentagon did not make clear whether it would be distributing whistles with the pills.

Then there was the weirdness out of the Ukraine where the US installed leader Viktor Yuschenko was caught trying to fix the kitsch-fest that is the Eurovision song contest.

We also told you about the BBC requesting for a Bob Marley interview this year, more than 20 years after he had succumbed to cancer which brought forward an especially fine Photoshopped Marley zombie image.

Animal tales are a recurring feature of the little red email. There was the news from the US about www.live-shot.com where armchair hunters could move their mouse, click and kill live animals while a week later Singapore scientists unveiled their Touchy Internet system that allows web surfers to touch chickens of all things over the net.

A string of stories relating to evapozoology appeared throughout the year. Evapozoology is the military-inspired disappearance of animals for carnage purposes originally part of Project X-ray. You might recall the tales of Luz, the fugitive cat in Chile or the exploding toad phenomenon in Germany and of course the explosive dolphins trained by the US military who went missing after Hurricane Katrinaor indeed the rogue, rampant, evil roaming Russian squirrel rabble.

In other animal-related news we told you how the WWF is actually not an organization looking after fluffy pandas but a bunch of eco-Nazis, headed by the Duke of Edinburgh, intent on reducing the world’s population dramatically.

We also told you how Russian cows were being fed pot this winter, how a German scientist had invented a fuel that was made from dead cats and how Bush was being used in a campaign for stray dogs in Romania alongside Hitler and Ceausescu with the tag line ‘A dog loves you just the way you are.’

In short, for whacked out animal tales look no further than your little red email.

But, the conspiracy-focused publication that this is spreads its net far and wide. Hence the tale about the UFO spaceport under construction in Puerto Rico and another extra-terra tale on space the final frontier … for advertising and how the US moved to make one last place free of advertising mercifully ensuring no cola eclipse of the moon just yet.

And one final (and it could be very final) space tale was the news that the world could end in 2029 if an asteroid makes a direct hit.

Here’s some New Year’s resolution suggestions for you — make the most of your time it could all come crashing to an Earth-thudding halt in 23 years!

 

 

Stuff we like of the year 2005

A hotchpotch of stuff we’ve found and enjoyed recently on the Weird Wide Web.

Get your lovely T-shirts while they’re hot!
Everybody loves a winner. Nobody likes a loser. Nobody likes to be a loser. So with this in mind, Canned Revolution have set it up so that you can now buy your own Canned Revolution T-Shirt, and pretend that you won it in our competition. We’ll back up any claims to being a lucky winner by anyone who purchases a freshly tinned t-shirt to help the cause.

Owning your own Canned Revolution shirt could be a great way of life for you — imagine the friends, the opportunities, the fame, the copious offers of gratuitous sex.

Don’t delay! Buy your way into coolness today by clicking here.

 

Kiwi Santas on the rampage
For a topical moment, click here to learn of Santarchy and the alledged Santa Riots in Auckland.

 

Best tune:
Camilla, Queen

 

Best Cartoons:
The perry bible fellowship.

The continuing adventures of Salad Fingers.

And jib jab’s year end round up sees Bush singing and dancing his way through a tough year for him.

Bush dancing is also featured here and singing here.

And talking of white boys dancing, check this one out — oh, the embarrassment.

Bushflash was especially pertinent on the Bush-fascism ties.

Bush the Devil meanwhile can be viewed here.

A frightening map of how the US corporate scene interconnects can be viewed at www.theyrule.net

 

Sticking it to the man
The Belgians invented Bush urinal stickers this year providing a much needed opportunity to piss on the president.

 

Oh the stangeness
The John Birch Society

www.thesneeze.com — half zine, half blog and half not good with fractions but full of fun.

ChavScum — a user’s guide to to Britain’s new ruling class on which we just came across this iChav animation that we highly recommend for all its Burberry adbusting wondrousness.

For those living inside the biosphere that is the US head on over to here to find out what the rest of the world makes of your country.

 

Funniest scam of the year
Has to go to the Save Toby appeal.

 

The Bush administration…
…In a single sentence.

 

Funniest North Korean story
(and dear God there’s a lot of them) had to be the fake snowmen one.

Tis the religious season and the president needs all the help he can get right now, so thank God for the Presidential Prayer Team.

Forget babelfish, here’s the dialectizer.

 

Conspiracy stuff
What really happened to the WTC? — and what TV News lies makes of it all or this far reaching article here or indeed this physics professors sound reasonings how come it didn’t burn like the massive office block fire in Madrid or were the planes just flown via remote control into the towers as this far out conspiracy suggests.

 

Videos of the year:
Breaking The Silence: John Pilger cuts through the BS and goes for the jugular as he analyses the war on terror.

Legacy of Fallujah: This amateur video was shot on the first day of one of the biggest festivals in the Muslim year. But instead of buying new clothes for their children and visiting family and friends, the men of Falluja are digging graves.

“Falluja — The day After” shows the total devastation of the Iraqi town, the corpses of the victims, the mass graves, the exhumation of many corpses by local rescue teams in order to try to recognize some of the victims. The last corpse shown in this video belongs to a 14 year old girl.

The War Party. Panorama investigates the “neo-conservatives”, the small, unelected group of right-wingers, who critics claim have hijacked the White House.

Mr Cheney being told in no uncertain terms to go away, post Katrina.

“The Panama Deception” Part I: This film shows how the US attacked Panama and killed 3 or 4 thousand people in an invasion that the rest of the world was against.  (Sound familiar?) It won the Academy Award for best documentary.

Secrets of the CIA looks at

Will Ferrell as the president, discussing global warmings [sic].

 

Quotes of the year
“In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.”
—Philosopher Ivan Illich

 

Games: Escape Neverland
Help Michael keep the kids in neverland.

 

Adbust of the week
This week’s adbust comes from our very own photographer-in-chief, and his comment on the WTO.

That’s right! You too can get one of our t-shirts. Simply brush up your Photoshop skills and send your corporate subversion images to adbusting@cannedrevolution.com, such as the one above to stand a chance of being selected the weekly winner of our brand new little red adbuster of the week competition. The winner will be chosen by the revolutionary collective here on our own Fantasy Island. Alternatively, for those who don’t fancy your chances of winning but are still budding anti-establishment artists and hanker for one of our shirts, you still have hope. Simply send us five of your designs in five consecutive weeks and, so long as the images, are yours (and we have ways of checking!), a t-shirt will be winging its way to you.
Adbusting — the choice of a new generation. For more on adbusting, click here.

 

The Meteor-illogical Office report for 2005
This final email of 2005, we decided the most illogical weather had to be the July snowfall in Somalia. Puntland, the northeastern part of Somalia, had never recorded snowfall before July 2005, when snow storms with high winds destroyed homes in Rako town leaving a blanket of snow on the ground and many bewildered, shivering residents.

 

the little red email Osama bin Laden Sweepstakes Shirt Contest!
Don’t forget: if you fancy a free Canned Revolution t-shirt, you can win one by simply guessing the date of Osama’s media debut as a US prisoner. Send your expected date of bin Laden’s first television appearance as an American prisoner to osamasweepstakes@cannedrevolution.com.