This week: • Kill • Cure • Work •
• Bangs • Hemp • Stuff •

 

Plan A: Spend $492 billion killing people

“The military industrial complex had grown fat from the Cold War, and was caught short with the collapse of the USSR. Ever since, a right-wing clique has schemed to get the US back on the road to war. War equals money equals greatness equals POWER, so the thinking goes. Before, the government fed the military beast. Now, the complex IS the government! And the complex will use anything, absolutely anything, to ensure war is perpetual a constant in Johnny Average’s mind, blaring on every news channel…
“The current War on Terror™ is a recurrent fear trick that Republican cronies like to play on stupefied electorates. McCarthyism, The War on Drugs, the War on Terror™ — all agendas of the right to suppress and dominate.”
— Written in 2003 for Canned Revolution’s War on Terror™ (TWOT™) section.

And so it came to pass that the four-and-a-half-year-old War on Terror™ (TWOT™) officially became the New Cold War this past week with Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld telling the National Press Club that TWOT™ will be a generational conflict like its anti-Communist fight from decades before, one which the Pentagon has taken to calling the Long War.

With no sense of irony, Rummy told the assembled poodle journalists a day ahead of releasing the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR): “Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs.”

Laughingly, Rummy likened al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden to Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin and with his begging bowl out — as it was revealed the Iraq war is now costing $100,000 per minute — Rummy told those attending not to underestimate the threats that terrorists pose to global security, and said freedom is at stake. Freedom, and its overuse, has become the new F word here at Canned Revolution.

The QDR, mandated every four years by Congress, opens with the declaration: “The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war.”

Peddling fear for tax dollars the QDR focuses on defending the US homeland against “catastrophic” attacks such as with nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.

The White House said last Thursday that it plans to ask Congress for an additional $70 billion to pay for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, driving the cost of military operations in the two countries to $120 billion this year, the highest ever.

Most of the new money would pay for the war in Iraq, which has cost an estimated $250 billion since the US invasion in March 2003.

All this means that Bush has spent almost half a trillion dollars on war in the four and a half years since 9/11, almost exactly the same as was spent in the entire 13 year Vietnam War, allowing for inflation adjustments and of course the sensational Arthur Andersen-esque accounting techniques.

Currently, the Defense Department says it is spending about $4.5 billion a month on the conflict in Iraq, or about $100,000 per minute.

Current spending in Afghanistan is about $800 million a month, or about $18,000 per minute.

Compare these stats with the number crunched approximations we have come up with for the US’ overseas aid — clocking in at $1.75 billion a month or $40,509 a minute which works out at just a quarter what the UN has set as a 0.7% of GNP global target.

Lockheed Martin, Halliburton, Raytheon, Boeing et al are raking it in from the Department of Defense — the US’ largest employer with more employees than ExxonMobil, Ford, General Motors and GE put together — and its specially created Cold War replacement while more than a billion people in the world scrape by living on less than a dollar a day. Seriously misplaced priorities from the world’s most powerful and selfish nation. Plan A? This looks about as well-thought-out as Plan 9 From Outer Space.

 

 

Plan B: Spend $161 billion saving Earth

Demographics and the current capitalist system will hasten the end of the world, no question. We breed too much and spend too much on stuff that takes way too many resources to produce. However, moves are afoot to restrain some of the worst offenders and alternative ways of living are also gaining momentum.

Last week a group of 211 institutional investors with assets of $31 trillion under management wrote to 1,800 of the largest quoted companies in the world by market capitalisation, asking for the disclosure of investment-relevant information concerning their greenhouse gas emissions.

Commenting on the information request, Paul Dickinson, the project coordinator, said: “The numerous indications of accelerating human induced climate change make it clear that there are business risks and opportunities that have implications for the value of investments in corporations worldwide. The Carbon Disclosure Project aims to encourage the development of a common emissions measurement methodology and to facilitate its integration into general investment analysis.”

The reports of all the firms who reply will be made publicly available at www.cdproject.net from September 2006.

Lester R. Brown and his Earth Policy Institute is one of the most apocalyptic forecasters of environmentalists, yet he has alternatives which he has just updated in his revised book Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble.

“Our global civilization today is on an economic path that is environmentally unsustainable, a path that is leading us toward economic decline and eventual collapse,” Brown notes.

Of greatest concern to Brown is the rise of China.

Among the basic commodities — grain and meat in the food sector, oil and coal in the energy sector, and steel in the industrial sector — China now consumes more than the United States of each of these except for oil. It consumes nearly twice as much meat (67 million tons compared with 39 million tons) and more than twice as much steel (258 million to 104 million tons).

These numbers are about total consumption. “But what if China reaches the US consumption level per person?” asks Brown. “If China’s economy continues to expand at 8 percent a year, its income per person will reach the current US level in 2031.

“If at that point China’s per capita resource consumption were the same as in the United States today, then its projected 1.45 billion people would consume the equivalent of two thirds of the current world grain harvest. China’s paper consumption would be double the world’s current production. There go the world’s forests.”

If China one day has three cars for every four people, US style, it will have 1.1 billion cars. The whole world today has 800 million cars. To provide the roads, highways, and parking lots to accommodate such a vast fleet, China would have to pave an area equal to the land it now plants in rice. It would need 99 million barrels of oil a day. Yet the world currently produces 84 million barrels per day and may never produce much more. In the Traffik-esque oil thriller movie, Syriana, an American executive notes the only reason China isn’t growing faster at the moment is because it can’t source more oil, something the American is personally proud of.

The western economic model — the cheap fossil-fuel-based, auto-centered, throwaway economy — is not going to work for China. If it does not work for China, it will not work for India, which by 2031 is projected to have a population even larger than China’s. Nor will it work for the 3 billion other people in developing countries who are also dreaming the “American dream.”

And, Brown notes, in an increasingly integrated world economy, where all countries are competing for the same oil, grain, and steel, the existing economic model will not work for industrial countries either. China is helping us see that the days of the old economy are numbered.

We musty shift fast to a renewable energy-based, reuse/recycle economy with a diversified transport system. Business as usual — Plan A — cannot take us where we want to go. It is time for Plan B, time to build a new economy and a new world.

Plan B has three components — (1) a restructuring of the global economy so that it can sustain civilization; (2) an all-out effort to eradicate poverty, stabilize population, and restore hope in order to elicit participation of the developing countries; and (3) a systematic effort to restore natural systems.

The War on Terror™ (TWOT™) is also to blame. “If we fail to build a new economy before decline sets in, it will not be because of a lack of fiscal resources, but rather because of obsolete priorities,” Brown maintains. “The world is now spending $975 billion annually for military purposes. The US 2006 military budget of $492 billion, accounting for half of the world total, goes largely to the development and production of new weapon systems. Unfortunately, these weapons are little help in curbing terrorism, nor can they reverse the deforestation of the earth or stabilize climate.”

If the United States were to underwrite the entire $161 billion Plan B budget by shifting resources from the $492 billion spent on the military, it still would be spending more for military purposes than all other NATO members plus Russia and China combined. Instead, Rumsfeld and Co will continue annihilating Muslims while the planet burns.

 

• As an addendum to this argument we highly recommend reading this article in The Guardian by Robert Newman who calls for an end to capitalism if we are to survive.

 

 

Spinoza on why work sucks

My son the bike messenger explains his job in terms of Newton’s Principia being after all a chip off the old block in some regards, with a significant genetic contribution from my former, only, Yi number one wife, who is herself a ringer for Morticia Addams.

My son, mein Irische Kind, says that for him, bike messaging is merely a different form of inertia. For him, to be in orbit around the white dwarf of a paying job is not qualitatively different from being in orbit around the moon of underemployment in some Web development job waiting for the user to make up her stupid mind.

I did not need to tell him how a somewhat older Chicago business associate put it on the David Mamet line for me when I complained in the Seventies of the lack of dynamism or even meaning in software development jobs in the toddlin’ town, for he said, “they call it work because it sucks. If it did not suck and did not blow, then they would call it something else, like ‘sex’ or ‘martini’“.

The Seventies were the dawn of an epoch narrated much later by the interesting waterfly, the useful idiot, Francis “end of history” “don’t call me Francis” “any you HOMOS call me Francis I’ll killya” Fukuyama.

He said in the 1990s that what-ho, we are now living at a time when we can so name the ideal society, coupled with its actual realization in the Britain of John Major and the USA of Bill Clinton and the France of Jacques Chirac (sic. sic! sick!!) that there is really no point in living in time, and either fearing dystopia or planning Utopia.

Bernard Henri Levi, in writing on Fukuyama, says that the state is best described as Uchronia, no-time, because human time is NOT Newtonian, it is if meaningful just chock full of events.

In Uchronia, you will get let’s say some damn sort of corporate job and rather than growing or improving as a result of your (Hegelian) struggle with the real world, you will find yourself, if you are honest, at 55 emotionally less stable than you were at 25 and significantly dumber, listening to Bill O’Reilly on the expressway to work while your car overheats because, dumbo, you didn’t get the oil changed, did you. D’oh!

It would be a surprise if the content of computerized and corporatized work did not change. In my generation, and as in fact narrated by Fukuyama in “pop” form, a necessary split appeared between people content with minimal “recognition” consisting in giving that same recognition to others, and not rocking the boat, and the Yuppies from Hell: people like Steverino Jobs and Rupert Murdoch who demanded mega-recognition while being unable to understand ordinary human dignity.

Fukuyama, being an idiot, thinks this is just great. He doesn’t realize that the demand for what he calls “megathymos” (look at me!) cannot coexist with what both Hegel and Kojeve meant by “recognition”...because when a friend had lunch with the Jobster, Steve just had to snarl at the mere waitress.

The fate of the employee here is to define his task in terms strictly of exchange value and to experience a strong disassociation between Marx’s use value (how your work product meets human needs) and exchange value (how you get the munny).

Today, though, people in the metropolis, including even the *flaneurs* and bike messengers, are so saturate with news from afar that they assume that the poison or the cure is everywhere, and therefore that it is too much trouble to investigate the non-metropolis any further apart from having a sort of Live Aid sympathy for its distress.

When yet another Yuppie-swine condo was recently erected in Kowloon, the developers rejected the original, Mexican-inspired design, because today, the sort of person with the money to live in this place dresses in black, and sports a silver cell phone. Bright colours are considered louche and a British friend advises me that my multicolored scarf can get me beat up in the UK.

The result is a sameness and an othering of the Other, a relegation through the law of comparative advantage to the margins, which are urged to shape up or ship out.

Well, it is true that there is a Walmart in Shenzhen, lacking only a gun shop for verisimilitude but otherwise laid out just like the Walmart in Valparaiso, Indiana: and, chances “r” that there is a Walmart in Valparaiso, Chile. There are no Walmarts in India: this is but a glitch: Indian law tries to preserve the idea of shopping first at the bread shop and then at the fruit shop and then, perhaps, at the gun shop, even as in Fiji, you have to shop on Saturday morning; in Suva, Fiji, because of a nineteenth century Sabbatarianism which is only a dim memory in the USA, everybody closes down on Saturday afternoon, gears up for a wild Saddy Night, and staggers to Church in the morning to sing hosannas.

But this is only a veneer and the variety and difference of the world remains the same, perhaps exacerbated by the top-down forced march into economic sameness.

As Bernard Henri Levi points out, the “end of history” in the metropolis is one thing: it’s boring as hell but at least it means that, post-Starbucks, I can get a decent cup of black coffee in Asia (and so there: this is Politically Incorrect, but it’s the truth).

But it *ist ein Anders*, quite another thing, in places defined as NOT the metropolis with no shot at being a new, hip, destination. Places like Kigali, the capital of Rwanda.

For Levi these are Uchronic places in which “freedom fighters” have forgotten what the hell they were fighting for:

And it’s one two three four, what are we fightin’ for
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn, next stop is Vietnam.
— [Country Joe and the Fish]

The fact is that history continues and what feels like inertia is a choice. This may be outdated Sartre but it is this week my last word. I’m the Daddy, that’s why.

 

 

Bucky Bangs and the Canada threat

Last week I received an alarming late night call from my mother, Sylvia Bangs. She was worried that my eccentric uncle Binyamin “Bucky” Bangs, who runs the only Kosher delicatessen and all night laundromat in Niagara Falls, New York, had finally flipped his lid. “He’s been calling everyone he knows, warning them to keep their eyes peeled to the north, talking his meshugeh talk about ultimate showdown. I tell you, Yahuda, you need to call him. This time he’s going to get himself in trouble.”

Uncle Bucky has a rare disorder called “Canada-phobia.” In a misguided attempt to overcome this fear in the mid 1980s, Uncle Bucky decided to actually move to Canada, but lost his nerve at the foot of the friendship bridge and was unable to go any further. Unable to acknowledge his own rapidly calcifying mental disorder, Bucky decided that his inability to cross the border was the result of some sort of high frequency ray being emitted from Toronto’s CN tower. Mother and I traveled upstate, where Bucky had holed up in a seedy trailer park on the outskirts of Buffalo with a spent piece of white-trash ex-stripper who called herself Shirella. We tried to get Bucky to come back to the city with us, but he refused to budge. “I’m staying here with Shirella, right by the border. Somebody needs to man the gates. Somebody not afraid to stare down danger’s door.”

Eventually Bucky and Shirella got married and opened up a gun store. This lasted until Bucky was arrested for taking potshots at passing cars with Canadian plates. He managed to keep out of jail by agreeing to sign over his share of the gun store to his wife, who promptly divorced him as soon as the ink was dry. Since then, he’s lived in a motel close to the border. I suspect he’s managed to stash away some firearms from the old shop, so naturally I shared my mother’s concern when I learned of Uncle Bucky’s ranting, and called him immediately. He answered the phone on the first ring, never a good sign.

“Pentagon?”

“Uncle Bucky, it’s your nephew. Mom tells me your acting crazy. You want they should lock you up again?”

“Yahuda, thank g-d you called. I’m on the front line, and let me tell you, these bastards are preparing for something big! Did you hear about this guy they just elected?”

“What, their new Prime Minister? Harper. Sure, he’s conservative, but a conservative Canadian…come on.”

“What have I always told you, Yahuda? What have I always said?”

Uncle Bucky was referring to his decade long obsession that somehow the Canadian penchant for cleanliness, politeness and overall civility was, in fact, part of what he called a grand misinformation plot, designed to mask Canada’s true intent — a sneak attack followed by a full scale invasion. I tried to humour the old man.

“Uncle Bucky, are you skipping your meds again?”

“I flushed the pills, Yahuda. I need to be sharp. What’s the first thing that bastard Harper did? He sent icebreakers to the pole. Icebreakers, Yahuda! And what do icebreakers do…?”

“Um. Break ice?”

“Exactly! And why would the Canadian military be choosing now, this particular time, to break ice?”

I realized then that my Uncle Bucky had gone off the deep end. A few years ago, he’d caught wind of the Canadian government’s medicinal marijuana program, a government sponsored plan to grow cannabis for distribution to ill citizens. He’d heard about the plan from a copy of the Toronto Globe and Mail that had wound up in his laundromat. The paper had a picture on the front page of Canada’s minister of health surrounded by thousands of cannabis plants.

“You see, Yahuda!”, he’d raved at the time, “They have a three thousand mile border with us, plenty of cheap hydroelectric power, and now, tons of dope.”

Then as now, I tried to humour my insane uncle.

“So what your saying is that the Canucks plan to put huge fans all along the border, set tons of high grade pot on fire and smoke out every American city north of the 35 degree line?”

“Exactly!”, he answered, “From Boston to Baltimore, Chicago to Denver, Seattle to San Francisco, America will be stricken stoned! Our people will drop into a drooling, donut eating stupor, and the Royal Canadian Mounted Horde will saddle up and trample forever the light of American liberty!”

We’d figured that five years without this absolutely unlikely scenario coming to pass — combined with a handwritten (and extremely polite, considering the circumstances) letter from the Canadian Minister of Health promising that Canada had neither the stockpile of cannabis nor the intention to conquer America — would have cooled Uncle Bucky’s paranoia. But apparently it was just lying dormant, gaining strength.

“Look, Uncle Bucky. I don’t know why the Canadian Navy would send icebreakers up to the arctic. Maybe they’re planning a big cocktail party, and need a lot of ice.”

My uncle let out a maniacal chuckle, the kind that only a true maniac can plausibly make.

“That’s just what they want us to think, my boy. Those ships are breaking the ice for one reason alone. The Canucks have figured out that they don’t even need to invade America to beat us. They don’t have to send over one damned red booted Mountie.”

“I’m not following…”

“They’re going to move the North Pole, Yahuda,” my uncle raved. “Once they do that, the whole planetary axis will shift, and bam! Their cities are in the tropics, while down here in the good old US of A we’re in the deep freeze. THE DEEP FREEZE, YAHUDA.”

Although I realized then that my uncle was beyond reason, the conversation left a deep impression on me. Would it be so bad if America were to somehow be conquered by Canada, totally disarmed, paying 15% sales taxes and forced to accept socialized medicine as a way of life? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Still, there was no point in mentioning this to Uncle Bucky, who was in no state to appreciate such musings.

“The sun is going down here in Hong Kong, Uncle Bucky,” I lied, “It’s almost Shabbat, I gotta hang up.”

“You’re a good boy, Yahuda. Tell your mother I say hello.”

And with that, I hung up. Like most members of the Bangs clan, he was the authorities’ problem now.

Little red email correspondent Yahuda Bangs can be contacted at yahuda@cannedrevolution.com.

 

 

Put that brick in your pipe and smoke it

Whoever said pot was evil? As well as making fetching bags and being the choice of fashion for hippies the world over hemp could help South Africa’s homeless.

An NGO working in southern Africa has suggested the abundant marijuana grown throughout the kingdom of Swaziland could be used to build homes in South Africa.

In ancient times handfuls of cannabis were added to clay to strengthen bricks for building; more recently the practice has received a fresh impetus, but the hemp is now compressed into bricks and used for construction.

“With five years’ experience in dealing with government and housing, and the bureaucracy in between, I can say I am expertly aware of the controversial nature of this project. However, there are homes built from this technology in England, Spain, France, Turkey, Australia, California and South Africa,” Andre du Plessis, a project coordinator with the NGO, InternAfrica, said.

Swaziland has the highest cultivation of cannabis per capita in southern Africa, according to the Swaziland Council on Smoking, Drugs and Alcohol (COSAD). Swazi Gold, while not quite as mind blowing as Malawi Gold, holds a fond place in the little red email’s recreational recollections.

“The controversy regarding cannabis is easily resolved when used industrially — the plant is harvested at the onset of autumn [1 March] before flowering and the creation of the drug content. Naturally, once the crop has been used industrially and is combined with lime, it cannot be smoked or used as a drug,” du Plessis explained in party pooper fashion.

If one looked beyond the spliffs and the bucket bongs there is a hell of a lot more the humble marijuana plant could improve this planet … and we don’t just mean by everyone living a peaceful, harmonious, high life.

In his book, The Emperor Wears No Clothes, Jack Herer states that hemp can save the planet. He says that hemp grows easily anywhere, including marginal land, with little water and no fertilisers or insecticides. He says that hemp, an annual crop, could supply humanity with everything that it needs, and that there is no need to exploit the planets dwindling resources. Herer offered $10,000 to anyone who could disprove this — no one has been able to. Get planting those seeds now, especially of it happens to be the potent Swazi stuff!

 

 

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.

 

The State of the Burrow
This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union address occurred on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out: “It is an ironic juxtaposition of events: One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, while the other involves a groundhog.”

 

Tell US Congress to wake up!
Sign the Peak Oil Awareness — Solutions for a Post Carbon Economy Petition.

 

Kill Bill’s Browser
The top 13 reasons to use Firefox over Internet Explorer.

 

Gulf of Tonkin revisited
The Guardian exclusively revealed last week that Dubya came close to pulling an LBJ style Tonkin Bay manoeuvre to get into Iraq. In a leaked January 2003 memo Bush told Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of “flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours”. Bush added: “If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]”.

 

Video: Disney in China
This is a Disney film that won’t leave you with a smile on your face.

 

Life imitating cartoons (an equal opportunities offender)
An odd week of hypocrisy all round for cartoons. Muslims around the globe protested and showed their anger at having the prophet Mohammed portrayed as being a terrorist by a cartoon in Danish newspaper Jyllands Posten. Many complained that this was blasphemous as well extremely discriminatory, and thus just another example of the West portraying all muslims to be a bunch of crazed, blood-thirsty extremists. The little red email had to agree with them on the second point, and Robert Fisk was a voice of reason on the subject. Extremist Muslims took to the streets to protest, calling for the deaths of those involved, and even setting fire to Danish and Norwegian embassies. Which seemed a rather risky PR method of proving the cartoons wrong. Talking of crazed, blood-thirsty extremists: the Pentagon, and the Joint Chiefs of staff (those champions of freedom of speech) were protesting over a cartoon in the Washington Post portraying a dismemebered serviceman saying it was “beyond tasteless” (actually dismembering servicemen — a major part of the Joint Chiefs’ raison d’être — is fine, apparently). But no shot at offensiveness is complete without the anti-semitic label (a term which is often a priori hypocritical, as both Jews and Arabs are Semitic). British MPs and Jewish groups protested a cartoon in the UK paper Muslim Weekly, portraying Ehud Olmert, Israel’s acting Prime Minister, as a hook-nosed figure wearing a giant Star of David. Pot, Kettle, Black all round.

 

Would the real Adolf Hitler please stand up …
Which leads us nicely into this week’s Adolf Hitler contest. Rummy thinks Chavez is Hitler, although the similarity seems a little flawed: after all the Bush family isn’t making any money with Chavez. Which means Rummy’s closer to home when he likens bin Laden to Hitler. But a little digging shows Rummy may think everyone is Hitler: Lenin, and al Zarqawi are also Hitler. Perhaps Donnie Darkside is the Andy Warhol of the age, preaching that in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes. Chavez on his part thinks Aznar is Hitler. This Venezuelan reckons Bush is Hitler. He’s wrong of course: Hitler had lots of charisma and was an amazingly effective public speaker.

 

Double(u)speak translator
Given the public speaking abilities of the US primate, you might like some help translating that State of the Union speech.

 

Guess The Politician
A politician recently assessed the challenges and threats facing the people of the world in the 21st century. See if you can guess from his remarks who he is:
“The prevalence of military domination, increasing poverty, the growing gap between rich and poor countries, violence as a means to solve crises, spread of terrorism — especially state terrorism — existence and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, the pervasive lack of honesty in interstate relations, and disregard for the equal rights of people and nations in international relations, constitute some of the challenges and threats.”
On the role of government: “Government belongs to all the people. It has to address the problems of every part of the country. All parts of the country should move forward simultaneously. Every (citizen) is entitled to equal right, especially in developing individual talent.”
On nuclear weapons: “A nation which has culture, logic and civilization does not need nuclear weapons. The countries which seek nuclear weapons are those which want to solve all problems by the use of force. Our nation does not need such weapons.”
On morality: “Human excellence, the excellence of human society comes about in the light of justice and spirituality. Measures that are taken outside religious morality — politics minus morality, economics minus morality, culture minus morality — only turns the world into a hell for nations and humanity.”
Who is it? Read the answer here.

 

Google and Yahoo: bring a taste of China to the West
Are Google and Yahoo helping censor the truth behind 9/11?

 

The new $64,000 question
Fancy earning $64,000? Check out this Egyptian businessman’s website and enter the competition by annswering the following question: Give at least one Bible verse which proves that Christ or any one of His disciples sanctioned the transfer of the holy Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday.

 

Antichrist Architecture Spreads Across The Globe
That’s right, it’s all a masonic plot to build courthouses with creepy addresses. The little red email’s Occult Department shuns this 333=666 nonsense: everyone knows 333 is the great god Choronzon. Does no one in the conspiracy community read Crowley or the Illuminatus! Trilogy any more?

 

Toast the earth
In the week Exxon and Shell announced bumper results... that exceed the GDP of countries such as Denmark, Friends of the Earth released this timely cartoon.

 

Green quiz
Are you an eco-warrior or an eco-worrier? Try this Friends of the Earth quiz to see how you could be greener — and richer!

 

Dear Pyongyang
In case you somehow missed the Sundance Film Festival this year, you may want to look out for the film Dear Pyongyang.

 

Living in denial, celestial style
Why did NASA scrap a global warming monitoring project?

 

Video: 9/11 Skepticism
This Dutch TV special brings a couple of heavier than usual names to the 9/11 skeptics’ table: Michael Meacher, former Labour minister and Andreas von Bülow, former German secretary of defence.

 

Double usage?
OK so it’s not really an adbust, but as a subversion of the original brand name to reveal the true picture behind the hype, it doesn’t get much more on the button than this: “Of course!” we thought. “What else would the W stand for!?”

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 Russian polar bears are getting so tetchy that they have had to be shot?