This week: • Osama • Oil • Iraq •
• UFOs • SpongeBob • Stuff •

 

Hey kids! It’s the Osama & Bush show!

The brilliant cartoon epic that is the Osama and Bush show (opening credits along the lines of the Itchy and Scratchy Show) was wheeled out again at a most propititious time to remind the folk back home that there is a jolly evil fellow out there who will do jolly nasty things unless we spend trillions fighting “Terror™” in oil rich far away sandy places. Osama’s image immediately triggers 9/11 images in most TV viewing public’s minds — the new Pearl Harbor event necessary for the War on Terror™ (TWOT™) to be unleashed. It is remarkable how Osama springs up, whether by video or audio tape, at just the right times, to bolster whatever Dubya is saying and give him his ‘war president’ mojo back and to turn the attention away from myriad scandals and waning popularity. 

For instance America’s most wanted said this time round, “The war against America and its allies will not be confined to Iraq. Iraq has become a magnet for attracting and training talented fighters.” Osama here helps reinforce Bush’s bullshit that Iraqi insurgents and Al Qaeda are one and the same thing.

Later on Osama says: “But I plan to speak about the repeated errors your President Bush has committed in comments on the results of your polls that show an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But he [Bush] has opposed this wish and said that withdrawing troops sends the wrong message to opponents, that it is better to fight them [bin Laden’s followers] on their land than their fighting us [Americans] on our land” and then he says: “Your president is misinterpreting public opinion polls which show that the vast majority of you support the withdrawal of your forces from Iraq. If your desire for peace, stability and reconciliation was true, here we have given you the answer to your call.”

Bush’s mantra of late has been that supporters of withdrawal are aiding the enemy, and that opposition to the war plays into the hands of terrorists. How convenient that this tape will now be used to support that absurd notion with the likes of Fox News no doubt using this to beat down any one against the war, with the underlying message being anyone who opposes the war is doing bin Laden’s bidding.

By warning of future attacks fear has been pedalled once again to wipe out growing dissent.

The CIA’s greatest asset continues to sing from the approved hymn sheet at just the right moments, even quite possibly from the grave as this must see website espouses.

 

 

Expect lots more blood for oil

Iraq is but the first of a succession of oil wars the world must brace itself for as demand will definitely outstrip supply by 2050, according to a report, The State of the World in 2006, released by the Worldwatch Institute.

The report notes how China, which was nearly self-sufficient in the mid-1990s, but over the past decade its consumption has doubled and it has now overtaken Japan as the second largest importer of oil with 3.2 millions barrels a day in 2004. With India growing economically at a tremendous pace, the report suggests that the world will not be able to produce enough oil to meet demand by 2050, when consumption will have grown from the current 85 million barrels a day to 200 million barrels.

“Few geologists believe that output will reach even half those levels before beginning to decline,” says the report, hence China seeking out every evil regime in the world and the US invading or threatening to invade so many oil rich nations at the moment.

The report draws the parallel between Japan in the 1930s and China today. Back then, Japan’s inability to secure its oil supplies from southeast Asia that prompted its entry into World War Two. Today Beijing is spending big on its navy to protect its energy supplies, shipped from every corner of the globe.

“Our analysis shows that if the two countries [China and India] were to use as much oil per person as Japan does today, their demand alone would exceed current global oil demands. And if their per capita claims on the biosphere were to match those of today’s Europe, we would need a full planet Earth to sustain these two countries,” Chrsitopher Flavin, the Worldwatch president wrote in a preface to the report.

“Unless we find a couple of spare planets in the next few decades, neither of these projections will come to pass … We therefore face a choice: rethink almost everything, or risk a downward spiral of political competition and economic collapse.”

We have allowed oil to become vital to virtually everything we do. Ninety per cent of all our transportation, whether by land, air or sea, is fuelled by oil. Ninety-five per cent of all goods in shops involve the use of oil. Ninety-five per cent of all our food products require oil use. Just to farm a single cow and deliver it to market requires six barrels of oil, enough to drive a car from New York to Los Angeles.

Yet where is it going to come from for future generations. Consider these five points, pointed out by the excellent author and former oil man turned solar power propenent Dr Jeremy Leggett. The biggest oilfields in the world were discovered more than half a century ago, either side of the Second World War. The peak of oil discovery was as long ago as 1965. There were a few more big discovery years in the 1970s, but there have been none since then. The last year in which we discovered more oil than we consumed was a quarter of a century ago. Since then there has been an overall decline.

The fact is there’s a whole lot less oil than we are being told — not 2.6 trillion barrels as the US Department of Energy would have us believe but nearer to just a trillion of proven reserves worldwide, meaning the peak in production is this very year and cheap oil prices are but a distant memory and war a constant reality.

 

• A good repository of all things peak oil-related can be found here.

 

 

Iraqi Freedom: plus ça change…

To add to its endless demographic woes Iraq has been labelled the nation where minorities are most at threat. A new report, compiled by British advocacy organisation Minority Rights Group International, found that violence was targeted at religious, ethnic and other minority groups in three-quarters of the world’s conflicts in 2005. Iraq topped the report’s list of areas where minorities are under threat, scoring the highest total of a combination of factors which include “major armed conflicts” and “rise of factionalised elites”.

Mark Lattimer, the group’s executive director, told a press conference on Thursday: “In every world region, minorities and indigenous peoples have been excluded, repressed and, in many cases, killed by their governments. In war today, the targeting of minorities is no longer the exception, but has become the norm.”

The top 15 affected countries, in descending order of threat, were Iraq, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Myanmar, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, Burundi, Angola, Indonesia, Ivory Coast, Uganda, Ethiopia, Russia and the Philippines, it said.

In Iraq, the top concerns were the violent repression of Sunni Muslims and others considered opponents of the US-supported government, and the forced displacement or intimidation of smaller minorities, it said.

Lattimer cited a series of mistakes since the US-led war in 2003 which “helped encourage a division by ethnicity or by religion” starting with the decision to split up membership of the Iraqi governing council by religion.

He said it has continued with one-sided criticism of insurgent killings of Shia but a failure to criticise human rights violations against Sunni civilians “by the governing forces in Iraq”. More than 110,000 Iraqis have died since the illegal invasion of the country.

In the region surrounding Iraq, Lattimer said governments are justifying suppression under the guise of fighting terrorism.

Those governments have in effect transformed “what should be a struggle against terrorism into a war on minorities”. Ah, The War on Terror™ (TWOT™) a useful receptacle for dictators the world over to bury their undesirables.

 

 

Identified Flying Objects: UK-made

Prepare for a spate of UFO sightings in the UK. British scientist Geoff Hatton, from Cambridgeshire, has spent the past five years building a flying saucer and according to news reports he is now in talks with the American defence chiefs for using his invention for military reconnaissance purposes although of course the Pentagon has had its own UFOs since the 1940s.

Hatton’s flying saucer works by allowing a blast of air to be blown over its thin surface. It means the electric-powered unmanned craft creates very little wind turbulence, is aerodynamically stable and has no external rotor blades. According to The Sun Hatton said: “I believe in keeping things simple and this uses simple principles. The Americans hadn’t seen anything like it and were extremely impressed and excited.

“As far as we know this is the only flying saucer of its kind in the world and there could be any number of uses.” Come now Mr Hatton, surely any flying saucer nut could not be so disingenuous? The Pentagon have been proud owners of flying saucer-esque things since at least the 1947 Roswell incident something that, at the time, the air force even issued a press release about, saying it had captured a UFO. This was quickly buried, and replaced by a weather balloon scenario.

Officially, the only UFO-related activity by the USAF is the study of sightings, under Projects Sign, Grudge and Blue Book, and the Condon Report. Unofficially, there is much speculation over both Roswell and the infamous Area 51, Dreamland and Groom Lake, and many hold that Operation Majestic-12 has covered up the first extraterrestrial contact, and subsequent technology advances gained from these.

 

• Techno-freaks who want to know how Geoff’s saucer works can get the skinny on the Coanda Effect here.

 

 

SpongeBob FatPants

We have never really got the whole SpongeBob SquarePants phenomenon. But then I guess we’re no longer five-year-olds anymore, though we might act like ‘em at times. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned animal cartoon characters. But like Disney characters, SpongeBob has been whoring himself to the highest bidder, and advertising all sorts of muck that passes for food in America. Now the folk at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) have had enough of the obesity inducing, cash guzzling SpongeBob and are publicly telling kids and parents alike that this yellow creation is not your friend. Along with the Boston-based Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and two parents, a lawsuit has been filed in Massachusetts against Viacom, the maker of this Pied Piper of glutton, and Kellogg, who feature SpongeBob on cereal packages, Pop-Tarts and cookies.

“It’s unfair because kids under five don’t even know it’s a commercial,” said Stephen Gardner of CSPI. “They think it’s a very short SpongeBob program. And it’s unfair because at a very important time in their physical and psychological development, kids are being encouraged to eat food that is just not good for them.”

CSPI’s research showed that 98% of Kellogg’s ads on Saturday morning television promoted highly sweetened foods like Apple Jacks and Frosted Flakes cereals.

The CSPI executive director, Michael Jacobson, said: “Their marketing tactics are designed to convince kids that everything they hear from their parents about food is wrong. It’s a multimedia brainwashing and re-education campaign — and a disease-promoting one [obesity] at that.”

 

 

Stuff we like

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.

 

For those who can’t afford a shirt…
There is a new chance to win one, as a fresh competition begins today.

 

The Emperor’s old clothes
Mark Fiore has a new flash animation out looking at W’s constitutional record, called Greater Georgelandia.

 

Baghdad Burning 15 years on
This Girl Blog from Iraq looks back at the 15th anniversary of the First Gulf War (in fact the second — the Iran-Iraq war was the First Gulf War), and how the first round of reconstruction only took two years, without the aid of spare parts, and despite the sanctions.

 

Further bad habits promoted by SpongeBob
Well actually it’s SpongeBong Hemppants, but it’s much the same thing really.

 

9-11 expose
An interesting and well-researched compendium of the things that just aren’t right about 9-11 can be found at tyrannyalert.com.

 

John Walker Lindh’s dad speaks out
Frank Lindh finally breaks silence over his son, and tells how the American Taliban was transformed into a terrorist by the politicians and the media, bringing into question how strongly the US defends its citizens’ rights.

 

Paxman and Powell powwow
Jeremy Paxman has been speaking to Former US Secretary of State Colin Powell — about Iran, rendition, the decisions that took the US and Britain to war, and that notorious presentation to the United Nations on Iraq’s weapons programme. Colin Powell can be relied upon to be a good little soldier, churning out the party line and ignoring the facts on all manner of scandal: from cutting his teeeth on covering up the My Lai massacre, denying Iran-contra, up to the most recent episode of king-sized pork pies: blatantly trying to hoodwink the UN on Iraq’s WMD capabilities, and coming through all this duplicity relatively spotless. Watch as he weasels through Paxman’s fingers.

 

The horror … the horror
A homegrown adbust this week: everybody loves the smell of coffee in the morning, right? Smells like … victory. Once that shot of caffeine hits your brain, you’re ready for anything, even if the Apocalypse happened now, and it turned out that this is the end, my friend. Police Chief Lt. Colonel Nguyen Ngoc Loan swears by Starbucks with his doughnuts. Right, that’s enough of this: we’re going to stop before someone finds this tat offensive. Ahem.

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
This week, we ask: if the there’s-no-global-warming-honest,-no,-really,-we-might-be-funded-by-big-energy,-but-trust-us brigade are right, then how come Japan has so far had 105 winter deaths, a two-decade high? The last high of 131 deaths was during an el Niño, this year there is none. And the winter has been the coldest ever on record with more snow than ever before which was good for the little red email to indulge in such non-proletarian activities as skiing in Nigaata prefecture on the weekend.