This week: • Mibs • Pentagon • Coffee •
• McD’s • Spinoza • Stuff •

 

Strewth! Mibs dominate Down Under

There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often, or on what system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time.
— 1984, George Orwell

Australian leader John Howard, the lapdog of George Bush’s War on Terror™ (TWOT™), is as great an invader of civil liberties as either of his imperialist allies, Dubya and Tony Bliar. Australians are largely unaware of the intrusive nature of the government in their daily lives. Few would know, for instance, that a phone in Australia is already 26 times more likely to be bugged than a phone in the United States. And this intrusion is set to get a whole lot worse with spy agencies and police soon to be given powers, for the first time, to monitor the phone calls, email and text messages of people not suspected of any crime. The Telecommunications (Interception) Amendment Bill (text available here) was introduced to parliament on February 16. Under the bill, to qualify for your phone to be tapped, you merely need to be a “third party” to a serious crime — a spurious term that basically gives the government free rein to listen to everything any of its citizens say. 

New South Wales Council for Civil Liberties president Cameron Murphy said the powers are unprecedented. “It massively expands police surveillance and it’s directly targeted against innocent people who are doing nothing wrong.”

The law, if passed, is far more wide ranging than Bush’s phone tapping efforts. Only the UK, the land of the parliamentary dictatorship, is more invasive — just this past week the House of Commons voted in favour of a national ID card system which will contain key biometric details so that as well as watching and listening to you 24/7, the state can also track your every move.

By reverting to the age-old ‘Careless talk costs lives’ routine, the three perpetrating nations of TWOT™ have put the government’s eyes and ears in every household. Orwell was only a few years off.

 

 

Pentagon plans Rummynet

The internet is the one forum where open debate can take place, without pressure from corporates or governments. TV, radio and newspapers are all part of the Machine but the internet allows us to castigate, criticize and caution freely — to be opponents of the Machine. But for how much longer?

In its ongoing campaign, Operation Truth Suppression, the Pentagon has developed a comprehensive strategy for taking over the internet. The plan appears in a recently declassified document, “The Information Operations Roadmap”, which was provided under the Freedom of Information Act and revealed in an article by the BBC. The 78-page Pentagon report can be viewed here.

The Pentagon sees the internet (and folk like us Canned Revolutionaries) in terms of a military adversary that poses a vital threat to its stated mission of global domination. This explains the confrontational language in the document which speaks of “fighting the net”; implying that the internet is the equivalent of “an enemy weapons system.” Rumsfeld and his henchmen aims are to “provide maximum control of the entire electromagnetic spectrum”.

Information is power. Gird your loins for the upcoming virtual battle with the Pentagon.

 

 

Coffee: the drink for fat cats?

Start the day with your standard cup of branded Joe did you today? Made it a Grande perhaps because it is a Monday Tuesday (Ooops! late again) and you needed the extra boost. Wondering why you are not losing weight despite, being the ethical type of person you clearly are as a subscriber to this email, having long foresworn the evils of fast food? Well, get this: your coffee take away in the morning often has as much fat as a McDonalds double quarter pounder with cheese. Starbucks has the highest calorie coffee drink. A venti — or a 24-ounce — double chocolate chip frappuccino with whipped cream is 750 calories with 28 grams of fat.

“A frappuccino and all those other highly caloric, sugary drinks have just as much calories as a meal, often,” Majorie Nolan, a registered dietician told a local Boston TV station last week.

A Starbucks grande cafe mocha with whipped cream comes in at an alarming 400 calories and 22 grams of fat — that’s half an hour on a running machine set at a pacy 13 km/h to burn off.

Even if you take the ‘skinny’ route, opting for nonfat milk, don’t think that won’t expand your wasitline.

There are 320 calories, 12 grams of fat and 36 grams of sugar in a grande vanilla latte with whole milk from Starbucks. With nonfat milk, that same vanilla latte contains 230 calories, zero grams of fat and 38 grams of sugar. The grande white chocolate mocha with whole milk and whipped cream contains 510 calories, 24 grams of fat and 55 grams of sugar. With nonfat milk and no whipped cream, the same drink has 340 calories, five grams of fat and 54 grams of sugar.

Are you a sucker for that whole adding flavored syrups fad to ruin the already warped branded coffee taste, if so add an extra 20 calories to that cup.

In short, why not wait till you get to work and put the kettle on. You’ll save US$780 a year (based on one tall coffee of the day, five days a week), be slimmer and best of all you’ll not be a drone of the nasty corporate swine that is Starbucks.

 

• Nutritional information on each and every Starbucks creation can be found on their website here.

 

 

McD’s fries: where’s the beef?

French fries — made from potatoes, right? Nope, not over at the food subverters extraordinaire, McDonald’s who improbably add both wheat and ‘dairy products’ to their chips as part of some kind of flavouring agent.

New packaging rules by the US Food and Drug Administration forced McDonald’s to slyly add a few extra words on its website. An observant reporter at the Associated Press picked up that the words “contains wheat and milk ingredients” were quietly inserted to the nutritional information section last month at the end of a long list of ingredients, including partially hydrogenated soybean oil and dextrose. Previously, McDonald’s had always denied the presence of wheat and dairy products in its fries.

Following the revelation a Lombard, Illinois woman hired a Chicago law firm who filed suit in a Cook County court on behalf of Debra Moffatt, alleging consumer fraud. The suit seeks class-action status and unspecified damages.

Moffatt and her two kids suffer from celiac disease, which interferes with the absorption of nutrients and is triggered by eating gluten, a protein found in wheat, rye and barley.

As we have reported in the past, trans fats, caused by frying the chips at a high temperature, are the greatest problem with McDonald’s chips — both fattening and also cancer causing. It turns out that the fries have a third more fats than previously thought — another sly update at the McD’s website. Thus, as AP notes, the level of potentially artery-clogging trans fat in a portion of large fries is eight grams, up from six, with total fat increasing to 30 grams from 25.

“It makes it harder to trust McDonald’s if they suddenly have strikingly different trans fat numbers,” said Michael Jacobson executive director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

We’d recommend you head on over to the McDonald’s website here to view how they subvert food. Once there you’ll be able to see what we mean by food subversion — here for instance is what goes into ‘Chicken’ McNuggets:

Boneless chicken breast, water, modified cornstarch, salt, chicken flavor (yeast extract, salt, wheat starch, natural flavoring (animal source), safflower oil, dextrose, citric acid, rosemary), sodium phosphates, seasoning (natural extractives of rosemary, canola and/or soybean oil, mono-and diglycerides, and soy lecithin). Battered and Breaded with: Water, enriched bleached wheat flour (flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid), yellow corn flour, bleached wheat flour, modified corn starch, salt, leavening (baking soda, sodium acid pyrophosphate, sodium aluminum phosphate, monocalcium phosphate, calcium lactate), spices, wheat starch, whey, corn starch. Breading set in vegetable oil. Cooked in partially hydrogenated vegetable oils, (may contain partially hydrogenated soybean oil and/or partially hydrogenated corn oil and/or partially hydrogenated canola oil and/or cottonseed oil and/or sunflower oil and/or corn oil). Contains wheat, milk and soybean ingredients.

 

• For more on McD’s and the threat of trans fats click here and here. Other little red diatribes on the Golden Arches available here and this one regarding how far you’d have to walk to work off a Big Mac Meal.

 

 

Spinoza does Hollywood

Screenplay one: Who’s Afraid of Paul Wolfowitz?

We take you to the Bush family compound in Kennebunkport, Maine. In attendance are George Herbert Walker Poppy, Dubya Monkey, Laura, and Dan and Marilyn Quayle.

Poppy: Son, I must say, I didn’t buy you the office to be the worst President in history. Brent [Scrowcroft] has been telling me some real horror stories, and what the HELL do you think you are doing in the dagoe lands? You can’t overthrow Chavez and now we have this unemployed Llama herder in Bolivia!

Dubya: Aw gee Dad!

Laura: Marilyn, be a doll and fix me another one of those martoonies you make. Where is my Lark pack?

Marilyn: ngee hee umph snorkle

Dan: Yes dear!

 

Screenplay two: If You Would True Valour See: the Defence of Hong Kong, December 1941

Solemn and old-fashioned BBC announcer: on December 7th, the empire of Japan attacked the United States with no warning, and, on that day, Japanese torpedo and dive bombers sank HMS Prince of Wales. The British colony of Hong Kong was immediately written off as indefensible but it was decided by the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, that a “last stand” was required pour encourager.
Unfortunately, the British forces consisted of the Winnipeg Grenadiers, the Hong Kong Volunteers, an odd lot of Ghurkhas, and damned little else. The British declined to arm the Chinese, who then as now constituted the overwhelming majority, and who definitely were cheering for the Side having been brutalized three years prior at Nanjing.
Therefore in his wisdom, Winston created a forgotten disaster, for unlike Sir John Moore, whoever he was, Winston was skilled at the art of selfish triage, with the most important patient being the bubble reputation. Winston’s, that is. Not Sir John’s. (Voices off) Who was Sir John? Oh, I see, Corunna. Yes. Quite. Left the old boy alone with his glory? Right. Right? Right.
We take you now amidst this disorganization to the Nathan Road, December 1941.
Collapsing masonry and star shells exploding. You may use stock footage.
Japanese armoured car moves slowly down the road blazing away. Cut to a row of exhausted soldiers from many nations. Except Japan, of course. Oh, and China.

Japanese soldiers: Hey fuck you English homosexual pommie!

Canadian, unaccountably dressed in a handyman’s shirt from Joe’s Auto Parts in Thunder Bay, Ont., blazing away: Up yours! We’re Canadian! I’m bisexual! Fucking Lee Enfield piece of shit!

Canadian two, quietly dying: Well maybe if you held it right, hoser… mother…

French Canadian: Alouette, gentil Alouette, Alouette je te plumeraie. Je te plumerei le bec, je te plumerai le tec, et le tec, et le bec et le tec et la bec, la la la la you gonna get gentil alouette up ze ass as soon as Lucky Pierre cleans this grease off Madame la Machine Gun (shot) merde, je suis au poivre, I am peppered, j’expire tout et fini… je n’regrette rien….aaargh

American volunteer: This is fun… from the halls of Monctezuma to de shores of Tripoli, beats working…

Chinese onlooker from nearby window of flat: Ai ya! So brave!

Her son: Mama-ah! Get down from window!

A troop of Ghurkha infantry shows up grinning and polishing the naked kukri, but are sent by the Canadians for Chinese food…the Ghurkas, glowering and stamping rather petulantly at the hopelessness of their task, North American “Chinese” food being unavailable in Hong Kong, sheath their knives and depart.

Another voice from flat: Try the Kung Fu fighting! It is very frightening!

Eurasian adventuress, blazing away with a Thompson submachine gun, cigarette dangling from her lips, cheong sam torn, the nice bits exposed, you get the drill: Come on, are you not men? Are you sons of whores who mate with dogs? Jack, you pussy, you run up to that Black Maria and drop a grenade down the gas tank, willya? Eat leaden death, reactionary fascistic Japanese business administration majors!

But then Liberty Leading the People is knocked cold by a collapsing bamboo scaffold. T’other fellows hardly notice it because they have helmets.

Fade to black. Then a red ribbon with Victoria looking pop-eyed.

Pompous announcer with great portentiousness: This… is the Victoria Cross. They didn’t get it. They didn’t want it. They deserved it.

Cue rising hymnal tune, Who Would True Valor See. Words:

Who would true valour see,
Let him come hither;
One here will constant be,
Come wind, come weather
There’s no discouragement
Shall make him once relent
His first avowed intent
To be a pilgrim

 

High Concept: Deliverance, set in west Texas: Buncha guys, one gets shot by another, they also find a nude dead woman but neither event persuades them to hump to the Texas Ranger station because they are drunk.

 

 

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.

 

Cheney compendium: lock, stock and two smoking barrels
It would be too easy for us to do a whole story on the Dick Cheney shooting mishap. Instead, we bring you some of the best stuff culled from the ‘net on this incident, which spawned what the New York Times called the most surreal press conference in the whole Bush Administration last Monday with Scott “I’m-no-Ari-Fleischer” McClellan.
Over here, Cheney donned his best black clothes and  kept his word to the inmates at California’s maximum security Folsom State Prison. He played a one hour set with his band “Dickie and The Trigger Happy Birdie Killers”.
Elsewhere, the Dickster was with his homies in his rap guise as the Notorious Veep, with his smash album Get Quail or Die Trying.
Meanwhile, arch-satirst Jon Stewart and his Daily Show team could barely contain their glee. Jon was joined by the show’s very own vice-presidential firearms mishap analyst, Rob Corddry, who explained: “Tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Wittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush.
“And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington’s face.”
“In a post-9-11 world, the American people expect their leaders to be decisive. To not have shot his friend in the face would have sent a message to the quail that America is weak.”
Click here for the full sketch.
Even talk show hosts who haven’t been funny since the 1980s such as David Letterman couldn’t fail to capitilise on the vice president’s misfortune.
As ever, investigative ‘net hound Alex Jones hit the conspiracy button showing how Dick lied to the sheriffs. Cheney’s claims that he shot the 78-year-old from 90 ft are shown in this video to be a load of rubbish — 15-18 ft is more realistic.
Still shooting quail is a tough ol’ game. Think you could do better than the master shot VP — try this game here to see.

 

Mutant Rabbit Wars
In Germany, the world’s largest rabbit, Rudi, was unveiled at a whopping three feet one inch, weighing 22 pounds and at 12 months old is still growing with 12 inch ears and ‘paws like a lion’, you can view the beast here, but in true European form, the Brits hit back with their own thumper claiming Roberto (left) from the Bunnyland pet shop in Worcester clocks in at 35lb and is 3ft 6in long. Now wait for World Wide Super Rabbit Wrestling on your TV.

 

For all you budding authors out there
For those thinking of putting pen to papaer, or index finger to keyboard, with Africa in mind for a novel here are some witty suggestions to follow from a leading Kenyan author.

 

Udder Disaster
Cows With Guns - look out for the pair of bovine revolutionaries, including Cow Tse Tung.

 

Despotism & Democracy
From Encyclopaedia Britannica, this 1946 film, measures how a society ranks on a spectrum stretching from democracy to despotism, using the degree that power is concentrated and respect for the individual is restricted. Where does your community, state and nation stand on these scales?

 

Conspiracy of the Week: Morrisey predicted Diana’s death
That’s right, Mozzer — a chap who was always keen on the royals (not!) — predicted the death of Lady Di with his music years before the event. Read on in wonder here.

 

Video: weird lightning phenomemon
Despite it’s rather defeatist moniker, the Pratt school of Engineering has managed to capture the best pictures of sprites yet. Sprites are as yet unexplained phenomena, which occur above strong thunderstorms. Check out the pics here: not bad for a team of Pratts!

 

Be corrupted absolutely
by Absolute Power. Enjoy episodes one, two, three, four, five and six here.

 

Help save the world
If you are tracking down alien forms with SETI, then spare a few CPU cycles to help save this planet with the BBC’s downloadable climate change tracking device — a worthy cause.

 

Shades of freedom fries: Iran renames Danish pastries
Iranians love Danish pastries, but now when they look for the flaky dessert at the bakery they have to ask for “Roses of the Prophet Muhammad.”

 

Video: Why We Fight
What are the forces that shape and propel American militarism? This award-winning film provides an inside look at the anatomy of the American war machine.
Is American foreign policy dominated by the idea of military supremacy? Has the military become too important in American life?

 

Kimchi aircons
The stench of kimchi on someone’s breath is enough to make you hurl, but can it be used in the fight against bird flu? LG Electronics thinks so, hence its new kimchi air conditioner!

 

VP shooting for Hollywood stardom next?
In the spirit of the Cheney shooting, we celebrate a twist on the movie, Scarface. It comes with a movie too: what if Dick Cheney was Scarface?

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 why the hell are all Germany’s oaks dying off?