This week: • TWOT™ • TWOT™ NOT • NASA •
• Spinoza • Penguins • Stuff •

 

Has Danish ham cooked TWOT™ goose?

The Islamic world is up in arms over some harmless cartoons. Thus goes the Western media rhetoric. And it misses the point. Such is life in the fairy tale world of The War On Terror™ (TWOT™). Always look at the Islamic story in a vacuum. Ignore the invasion of two Muslim countries — who would be upset by that; ignore al Qaeda’s stated issues — they hate us for no reason. Pay no attention to the past 100 years of foreign policy gaffs, blunders and disasters, and the ruthless suppression of democracy for selfish motives — they hate us for no reason. Pay no attention to the torture of Muslims — it’s just like fraternity hazing, and the regimes we back do it to them too. Pay no attention to those elephants in the corner.

The cartoons were not very good, and the message not particularly strong or requiring the depiction of Mohammed. All in all, publishing them was fairly pointless, and given the risk of inciting hatred, they were certainly not worth reproducing in order to “safeguard press freedom”. It is argued that Western governments can’t punish the newspapers, as it is their solemn duty to defend and uphold the freedom of the press. Beautiful rhetoric, but TWOT™ is brought to us by two governments that bombed al Jazeera offices on two occasions, and planned to do so on a third. It also occurs the same week a Muslim cleric in the UK was jailed for inciting violence (something the cartoons have certainly done).

The backlash was entirely over the top if we only take into account the cartoons. But step back a moment and consider the Muslim view: perhaps most feel its over the top, but there are a growing number that are coming to the conclusion that al Qaeda has a point: the West is entirely out to get the Muslim world. And over the past few years the West has seemed to be going out of its way to prove them right.

Without meaning to, the Danish paper may have sparked a monumental turning point in TWOT™: it may be the moment the West lost the war. For a war on terror is by definition entirely a fight for the upper hand in opinion polls. TWOT™ cannot be won on a battlefield: it is a battle for hearts and minds, it is a conflict of ideas and ideologies. It can only be won through negotiations, and good, believable PR. Military force will recruit more terrorists in a fairly direct proportion. Terrorists are born from unequal conflict, and are removed through negotiation and compromise.

So how is TWOT doing on the hearts and minds? The cartoons have crystalised opinion in the muslim world, to the point where even moderates are falling into the anti-western camp. At the same time they are a PR coup for any extremist groups: a big “told you so” for them. There are people burning down embassies, others burning flags. Governments are expelling diplomats. The cartoons also serve as an abject lesson to the hardline religious on the dangers to their faith of democracy and free speech. They’re not exactly a 9-11 event, but they don’t have to be: Iraq and Afghanistan have already provided that scale of human tragedy several times over; they serve the purpose of inflaming public opinion to the “with us or against us” levels. Is this irreversible? Only time will tell.

 

 

LA terror plot shot down

The prim and proper voice of the BBC World Service announcer trilled over the splashing warm shower the little red email was enjoying Friday morning with the latest deception from the White House to fuel fear and ignorance among the American public. “The US president told the nation how a terrorist plot using pilots with shoebombs had been foiled in 2002 that had threatened to crash into LA’s Library Tower,” the BBC said.

“Bullshit,” the three comrades of Canned Revolution yelled out in near unison from different parts of Fantasy Island. Yet, every mainstream media outlet ran the story as the president had wanted — straight and unquestioning.

Another landmark building, more crazed A-rabs, planes as missiles, and a war president saving the nation from evil. Hmmmmm.

Yet there was one lone dissenting journalist voice calling into question the official story at a White House press conference with Scott I’m-no-Ari-Fleischer McClellan. The full transcript of the event can be seen at the White House’s own site here — and unsurprisingly the following Q&A brought the conference to a close, shooting the terror plot out of the sky, yet failing to be mentioned anywhere in the mainstream.

Q: Scott, I wanted to just ask a follow-up about the LA plot. Is there something missing from this story, a practical application, a few facts? Because if you want to commandeer a plane and fly it into a tower, if you used shoe bombs, wouldn’t you blow off the cockpit? Or is there something missing from this story?
MR. McCLELLAN: I don’t know what you’re referring to about missing. I mean, I think we provided you a detailed briefing earlier today about the plot. And Fran Townsend, our Homeland Security Advisor, talked about it. So I’m not sure what you’re suggesting it.
Q: Think about it, if you’re wearing shoe bombs, you either blow off your feet or you blow off the front of the airplane.
MR. McCLELLAN: There was a briefing for you earlier today. I think that’s one way to look at it. There are a lot of ways to look at it, and she explained it earlier today, Alexis, so I would refer you very much back to what she said, what she said earlier today.

The timing of the terror announcement was as subtle as a sledgehammer. Ratings perilously low, Bush struggling to justify his increased spying on Americans by the National Security Agency, trampling of civil rights under the USA Patriot Act which was due for controversial renewal, and validating the massive buildup of the Department of Homeland Security, now the nation’s largest federal bureaucracy.

And of course this is an election year — the Republicans could lose Congress this November, just like they could (and err probably did) have lost the presidential election in 2004.

Back then, in August of that year, just as the Presidential campaign was about to heat up, the Bush White House raised the terror alert, claiming attacks were imminent on major financial institutions. The alert, timed to steal thunder from Democrat John Kerry’s nomination for President, was withdrawn after administration officials admitted it was based on old information from a discredited informant.

The discredited information dated back to the same period when intelligence agencies began receiving reports of a planned attack against Los Angeles.

“The President has cheapened the entire intelligence community by dragging us into his fantasy world,” a longtime field operative of the Central Intelligence Agency told Capitol Hill Blue. “He is basing this absurd claim on the same discredited informant who told us Al Qaeda would attack selected financial institutions in New York and Washington.”

An indignant Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Bush blind-sided his city with the claims.

“I’m amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels,” the mayor says. “I don’t expect a call from the president — but somebody.” Villaraigosa also said he has twice requested meetings with Bush to discuss security issues for Los Angeles and was turned down both times.

Even former Minister of Fear aka former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge admits the US raised terror alerts for the wrong reasons and now says he often disagreed with the timing of such alerts but was overruled by the White House.

“More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it,” Ridge says. “Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on alert, There were times when the White House was really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ’For that?’ We often lost the argument.”

Ridge left the ministry of fear in February 2005 and Bush replaced him with Michael Chertoff who agrees with the “cry wolf” strategy of the White House.

“Chertoff is a lackey,” says Kevin Riley, a retired New York City Detective who knew Chertoff during his days as a US Attorney in New York. “He’ll do whatever Bush tells him to do.”

Intelligence pros at established Washington agencies laugh at DHS operatives, calling them “Keystone Kops” and “overpaid rent-a-cops,” saying they lack any real expertise in dealing with terrorism.

“DHS is a political police force,” says a retired CIA agent. “They exist to enforce the political propaganda program of George W. Bush. That’s all they’re good for and they’re not very good at that.” The 21st century Gestapo in other words.

 

 

See no evil

It figures that the best way to view the Earth’s climate changing would naturally be from afar, from beyond the atmosphere so as to take it all in.

And while it is abundantly clear that the Earth is warming up there are folk in high up places who are going to extraordinary lengths to censor such concrete facts from gaining too much public recognition. We, of course, had Philip A. Cooney, the Exxon man who helped deny global warming for the White House for a number of years before returning to the oil major last year. Now we learn that the space agency, NASA, is being muzzled big time from reporting on climate change.

Last week we briefly mentioned in our Stuff We Like section how in January NASA had quietly terminated its Deep Space Climate Observatory, citing “competing priorities.” The only priority that we can think of that supersedes saving our own planet from extinction is finding another habitable planet fast before we all burn up and since that hasn’t happened let’s get back to monitoring our own backyard. The climate observatory cost just one thousandth of the price of the largely pointless International Space Station. Started in 1998 at the behest of then VP, Al Gore, completed in 2001, it was never launched as Dubya came to power on the back of large political donors who were none to keen to have the full damage of the planet made known to the great unwashed.

It then emerged this week that climate change censorship is common practice not just at NASA but at other vital environmental monitoring bodies too. James E. Hansen, the NASA climate scientist who sparked an uproar last month by accusing the Bush administration of keeping scientific information from reaching the public, said Friday that officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration are also muzzling researchers who study global warming.

“It seems more like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the United States,” said Hansen at a university panel discussion. He added that while NOAA officials said they maintain the policy for their scientists’ protection, “if you buy that one please see me at the break, because there’s a bridge down the street I’d like to sell you.”

Also on Friday, George C. Deutsch, 24, a NASA spokesman who resigned last week after allegations that he had edited scientists’ writings to conform to administration views — a la Philip Cooney — and tried to limit reporters’ access to Hansen, e-mailed reporters to say there is a “culture war” in the government over climate change. It was Deutsch, a member of Bush’s reelection campaign, who, amusingly, tried to get a staffer at NASA to add the word “theory” to every instance of Big Bang on NASA’s web sites. Deutsch resigned after it was revealed he had lied about a degree on his resume that he did not receive from a Texas university. To work for a federal agency, including NASA, extensive background checks are usually required.

The blogger who rumbled his faked CV was able to uncover the truth about Deutsch in one phone call, which suggests the Bush acolyte must have been placed in his NASA position without any investigation. Another Gestapo instance.

 

 

Spinoza And Da Code

Nonsense prevails, modesty fails
Grace and virtue turn into stupidity
While the calendar fades almost all barricades to a pale compromise
And our leaders have feasts on the backsides of beasts
They still think they’re the gods of antiquity
If something you missed didn’t even exist
It was just an ideal — is it such a surprise?
— Elvis Costello, All This Useless Beauty

My students are all excited about The Da Vinci Code and because Hong Kong educational praxis so brilliantly combines strict and narrow focus with pandering to current frenzies in order to lend a pastiche of relevance, I must perforce dig up on and chill out with The Da Vinci Code.

But I point out to the children that there are paintings much older than the Mona Lisa or the Last Supper, by Fra Angelica and others, which are today as fresh and new as if they’d been painted yesterday, while much of Leonardo’s work is crumbling.

This was because Leonardo was more of a scientist than a guild craftsman and as such he liked to mess around, painting, for example, in egg tempera on plaster — a surefire way to link the fate of your art with the fate of the plaster.

I describe the guild praxis as seen in Vasari and elsewhere, the “indirect method” in which the artist starts with a block of wood, primes it with rabbit skin and then pure white gesso, transfers the line drawing from a “cartoon”, creates light and shadow with ink, builds the grisaille light and shadow with blacks and whites and only then uses color … translucent egg tempera, or, later, oil (Titian’s “svelatura, trenta o quaranta”: “glazes thirty or forty”.)

There is a curious collision between my nerdy take on art as labour, and the rage in cities to find messages in bottles, and indeed, to troop en masse to Paris and expose oneself, not to the range of art in the Palace Louvre, but to one or two famous, nay legendary, pieces which star in the media, and which, it is said, contain secret messages.

The collision is that there is nothing artistic about either listening to Beethoven in search of leitmotifs about which one has been told and that have occurred in a film, or examining The Last Supper for an extra hand with a shiv.

When one person goes to art museums in search of secret messages, she’s a nut, she’s a bag lady. But when a book mobilizes millions, modern psychiatry in its wisdom has no way (since dysfunction is defined statistically) of asking whether we’re all going off the rails.

News flash. Who needs a Code to tell you that the Catholic Church, founded on the empowerment of women, has since Constantine disempowered not only women but practically everyone else in the name of a salvation that is within us, that the church men would sell to us?

My homey Adorno on the occult says that the occult applies the reifying procedures of industrial civilization to our genuine need for transcendance and that if we feed on conspiracies and on codes, we are sure to disbelieve in a genuine Beyond, having domesticated the Beyond. That hurts, as does most of the stuff the old gasbag wrote, because we’re not generally taught, are we, that a complete sentence should contain a thesis and antithesis. Don’t worry, I don’t teach that for money.

Oops, we had it all wrong. Christ wanted priests to get married and settle down.

What this neglects is that IF “the kingdom of heaven is within you”, the Church could distort the message and we’d still go our own Way, as long as we weren’t beguiled into trooping to museums, there to gaze witlessly at the Aura.

Snobbish? Who, me? Well, you bet your sweet patootie I am snobbish. If snobbery means a rage to escape from a howling mob which is out for blood down a back-alley of discounted High Culture, then I am indeed.

But increasingly, museums like teachers have to pander. When I was last at the Louvre, I wanted to see David’s painting of the dire assassination of Marat, which shows him chilling in his tub after Charlotte Corday had done the deed.

But I was unable to see any paintings of the era of the French Revolution, for in preparation for yet another “blockbuster” exhibit, the Louvre had sealed off that epoch, so it could refurbish a later, and unspeakably vulgar, painting by David: of Bonaparte nicking the imperial crown from a Sad Sack pope, with La Beauharnais (Josephine, Boney’s girl) simpering and at prayers while thinking of her knickers.

The Louvre perforce, like Dan Brown, has to make a Big Thing (doin’ the Reification Rag) over Boneyparte: his injustice (his murder for example of Enghien) remains bankable while the quiet tears and sighs of a Watteau, or Poussin’s Stoics, molder in the Paris fumes in galleries unfrequented except by art nerds like me, thankfully.

We’re worshiping the Golden Calf and the Phallus, people, frozen power and force in which even liberatory messages perish. Like Lot-ze I say the heck with it. The water is within you.

 

 

Black and white love story

The little red email is all about equal rights for all, even when it comes to gay penguins! Hence our decision to contact Bremerhaven Zoo and tell employees there to lay off these polar birds who are coming under intense pressure to procreate with the other sex even though they have made their sexuality very clear. It emerged last week that Swedish female penguins have failed in their mission to seduce gay male Humboldt penguins at the zoo which contains too many male penguins, while Kolmarden Zoo in Sweden has an oversupply of females.

At Bremerhaven, the birds, which find new mates every year, form all-male pairs and adopt pebbles as if they were eggs.

“The Swedes are rather stand-offish,” said zoo chief executive Heike Kueck, not stereotyping in any at all, you understand.

Four local females were quickly snapped up but the rest of the 22 penguins ignored the newcomers and formed broody male couples.

Last year, the zoo was inundated with e-mails and protest letters, claiming it was interfering in the penguins’ freedom of sexual orientation when this initiative was first tried.

It’s a hard enough life being a penguin; let’s not add to that by forcing them into unwanted sexual acts.

 

 

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.

 

Kitten becomes pig
No this isnt a tale of genetic craziness: meet Fred, the undercover kitten.

 

Pot signs rival Abbey Road ones
Amsterdam authorities started putting up signs forbidding pot smoking, but found the signs became a popular item to steal. So they started selling them instead.

 

Greenpeace scoops double awards
Greenpeace picked up two gongs at the World Press Photo Awards, one for a photo of the Amazon dried out by climate change, and another of two children from Belarus, victims of the Chernobyl disaster, despite having been born years after the spill.

 

Your one stop shop for things Iran war related
should be the great Global Research site here.

 

Dude, Where’s My Advertising?
10 Disturbing Trends in Subliminal Persuasion by Martin Howard, author of How They Change Your Mind.

 

Video: The catalogue
This excellent independent video production looks like the not too distant future of tagged humans and a society without privacy.

 

Diana Digest
Spooks use laser to end Diana’s life, according to The Daily Express. The paper revealed this the day before the head of the Inquiry into Diana’s death had his Laptop which contained all his case files thus far stolen. The thieves left everything else in the building, according to The Daily Express. Which means he was probably on to something.

 

Conspiracy of the week
Is Dubya planning to change the law so he can stay in power beyond 2009?

 

Walken runs
A new psycho is preparing to take over from the current one, and this one is far more scary. Vote Christopher Walken 2008.

 

Video: American Civics II
A short informational filmstrip about the current US Administration.

 

Don’t believe everything in Wikipedia
Sadly, that information tool for the masses is being perverted by politicians as The Guardian explains.

 

Strangeness …
Kittens, motorbikes, yobs. Chill out!

 

How to dance properly
Need dancing lessons? Look no further. You’ll be swinging your pants in no time.

 

Hitch in the ‘Hai
In January the former Trotskyist and Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchens pitched up in Shanghai for a few days research. The old SWP class warrior looked lean and tanned (well, actually rather podgy and dishevelled) after his bruising December ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ over Iraq with Celebrity Big Brother reject George Galloway at Baruch College in New York. Hitch was on the look out for a VF feature on Shanghai but found time to tip his hat at the site of the First Congress of the CCP and enjoy some fine cuisine on the Bund. The author of a multitude of books also found time to address the ex-pat masses on his latest project, an argument against religion — all religion.

 

Video: Mapping the future of the US
This is a shocking video on so many different levels.

 

Video: Dog Judo
Yes it’s some sort of shameless advertising scheme. But we don’t care: as Judo purists, the little red email likes Dog Judo.

 

Bin Laden Supports Small Socialist Publishers
In his latest audio message sent to Al Jazeera, Osama bin Laden encouraged Americans to read Rogue State: A Guide to the World’s Only Superpower, by historian William Blum. An unsolicited publicity coup for Blum and for his UK publishers, Islington socialist collective Zed Books who have been churning out great titles years.
The al-Qaeda leader quoted a line from the writer calling for an end to US interference in other nations’ affairs. Blum said he was “surprised and even shocked and amused” by bin Laden’s approval of his work. In a recent interview he explained that “the book stands quite independent of any Islamic fundamentalist or any terrorist movement. It attempts to explain the motivations and the minds of terrorists. Now there are people who think that the anti-American terrorists are just mindless, irrational beasts with no good reason for doing what they do. But in the minds of these terrorists, there is a rational motivation and I attempt to explain that. And I think it’s important for Americans to understand that these people in their own minds have a very clear and good motivation.”
Blum left the State Department in 1967 in opposition to the Vietnam War and then edited the Washington Free Press, the US captial’s first ‘alternative’ newspaper and also spent several years in Chile exposing Pinochet’s regime and the CIA’s involvement in the murder of Allende.

 

The beatings will continue until morale improves
The UK forces got caught short with a new tape revealed by The News of The World, showing squaddies beating up some Iraqis who had been throwing stones at them. To the little red email’s mind the soldiers shouldn’t sign up to invade and occupy foreign countries if they can’t take a little stone throwing: it comes with the package. Possibly most worrying is the voiceover from the corporal filming it.

 

Media Lens Alert: Iran — The Media Fall Into Line
The people at media Lens are taking The Guardian and The Times and more to task over their one-sided coverage of Iran. Read it and weep right here.

 

Video: Votergate
For those of you who still think Bush won two elections, Votergate casts serious doubts on that claim, and on any victories for future candidates.

 

Aim higher
You have to love the full on subversion of this Air National Guard Advert. Mmm treason and treachery.

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 the whole of the northern hemisphere is experiencing its hottest decade for more than a millennium? We’re burning up in here!