This week: • Scientists • Spinoza • USAID •
• Coal • Nigeria • Stuff •

 

Dead scientists & the rise of bird ‘flu

Dr Jim swaps his surgeon’s mask for his tin-foil conspiracy hat as he ponders the mysterious deaths of countless key microbiologists, something that gets him clucking.

Microbiology has never been one of the most popular specialties in medicine. Microbiologists’ image in medical school was that of a somewhat eccentric doctor specialising in the analysis of assorted unmentionable samples. They also tend to get far too excited when discussing bacteria. However, in recent years a much better reason not to enter the field has emerged. The leaders in the field of microbiology all seem to be dying. No less than 40 have passed away in suspicious circumstances in four years. There seems to be a cluster amongst those specializing in vaccines and bio-weapons research.

Some of them were world leaders in developing weapons-grade biological plagues. Others were striving to protect millions from dying because of biological weapons while yet more microbiologists were experts in the theory of bioterrorism. All of them are dead. The most recent of these was Leonid Strachunsky. He died after being hit on the head with a champagne bottle. Strachunsky specialized in creating microbes resistant to biological weapons. He was found dead in his hotel room in Moscow, where he had come from Smolensk en route to the United States. Investigators are looking for a connection between the murder of this leading bio weapons researcher and the hepatitis A outbreak in Tver, Russia in 2005.

Award-winning microbiologist David Wynn-Williams, 55, was killed by a vehicle while out jogging in England. In 2000 he was appointed leader of the Antarctic Astrobiology Project, which explores the effects of environmental stress at the limits of life on Earth. Wynn-Williams had assessed the capability of microbes to adapt to environmental extremes, including the bombardment of ultraviolet rays and global warming.

Microbiologist Dr David Kelly, 59, was found dead after seemingly slashing his wrist in a wood near his home at Southmoor, Oxfordshire, days after being named as the Iraq dossier mole. An investigation into the circumstances surrounding his death continues. Dr Kelly was Britain’s leading expert on Baghdad’s weapons programs.

Dr Steven Mostow, 63, was one of the country’s leading infectious disease and bioterrorism experts and was associate dean at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Centre. He died in a plane crash near Centennial Airport. The list goes on.

Steve Quayle is the author of Breathe No Evil, a book on bioterrorism. He continues to chronicle the number of dead scientists on his website and believes that there is a decidedly sinister motive for these killings.

His interest began on October 4, 2001 when a commercial jetliner travelling from Israel to Novosibirsk, Siberia was shot down over the Black Sea by an “errant” Ukrainian surface-to-air missile, killing all on board. The missile was over 100 miles off-course. Despite early news stories reporting it as a charter, the flight, Air Sibir 1812, was a regularly scheduled flight. According to several press reports, the plane is believed to have had as many as five Israeli passengers who were microbiologists on board. Both Israel and Novosibirsk are centres for cutting-edge microbiological research. Novosibirsk is known as the scientific capital of Siberia, and home to over 50 research facilities and 13 full universities for a population of only 2.5 million people.

“This is the greatest murder mystery in history.” Quayle believes that the victims were all working on genetically specific weapons, i.e. weapons that could target certain ethnic groups. He claims a terror group wants to release a bio-plague that will annihilate 90 per cent of the planet’s population and they wanted to remove people who could facilitate a cure.

The little red email believes that there are certainly unanswered questions on this subject, and the role of Avian flu in this conspiracy is at the top of the list.

 

• This episode of the UK documentary series, Equinox, takes a look at the seedier, more cloak-and-dagger side of medical research, and questions whether the death of a biochemist in California was connected to industrial espionage.

 

 

Beach Blanket Bingo with Spinoza

There’s an old Monty Python sketch in which a husband is getting the Third Degree from his Missus, when he exclaims “I wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition!”

The stage erupts in the screams of recalcitrants being boiled in oil, and the Master of Ceremonies cries, “no-one expects The Spanish Inquisition!”

Monty Python was able to sense the truth of the Dialectic of Enlightenment; barbarism doesn’t lie in the jungle to re-emerge, it erupts at the bleeding edge.

Caspar Milquetoast wasn’t expecting the Spanish Inquisition. Nor was I, as an American, expecting to hear grown-ups discuss whether giving a suspect a head-first swirlie in the loo was torture.

There has always been, of course, international and domestic doubt as to whether my nation represents the bleeding edge of the Enlightenment… commencing, perhaps, with Charles Dickens’ horror during his American tours of the uniquely American habit, of taking a wad of tobacco in the mouth, and then (I am not making this up) expectorating a brown stream of juice on my lady’s carpet.

However, any national custom from riding to hounds to eating cold rotten fish in Scandinavia to female circumcision, can seem barbarous; American rites are no exception. The fact remains that America is post-enlightenment.

However, in recent years, the apparent fact that human affairs proceed in dialectical jumps have caused terrifying and sudden reversals of Enlightenment in America at advanced points, in unexpected ways.

Wild-ass Fundamentalist Christianity isn’t piped out of the American hinterland, for the most part, and to the extent it is, it takes on new vigour in cities where a half-educated jaded irony, insufficiently prepared to deal with life by narrowing educations, cannot “deal” and sets off simultaneously in search of Roots, and Tradition, and individuals who represent the disavowed past.

Here’s an illustration. In 1998, at the Oak Street Beach in the most “sophisticated” arondissement of Chicago, a town with great pretensions today to urbanity, I emerged from Lake Michigan clad in Speedos. As a runner and swimmer I found Speedos convenient.

I was set upon by a young drunk chap who loudly demanded that I take my skinny butt to the fag beach. He went on to say that there were children at the Oak Street Beach.

His girlfriend walked up with the lifeguard. His sweetie called him an asshole. Sizing up the situation, Baywatch Beefcake said, “Don’t say anything” to me, and, to the Taliban, said, “Hey, man, you must chill, this twink has a right to wear Speedos”.

I wasn’t “up” for a battle royale. So, I silently put my running shorts and shoes on while the Talib continued his closet-case homophobic rant, to the considerable amusement of the onlookers. Having finished both run and swim, I then did my best to leave the scene with dignity, like Rupert of Hentzau, or Prince Charles.

No-one expects the Spanish Inquisition. In my direct experience, redneck American beaches are more Speedo-friendly… more tolerant overall. In my direct experience in Idaho versus Chicago, homophobic and Bush-sodden rage erupts more in the faux-hip venues of Wicker Park than in Boise.

It’s in Wicker Park and Lombard Street in San Francisco where Enlightenment has colonized what were retreats of anti-rationalization irrationality, whether the coffeehouse or bookstore, and made them computer-controlled sweatshops where crazed aging Baby Boomers think it’s cool to sit in Starbucks… but who get all nervous if a stranger talks to them, and are anxious to reassert Traditional Values, and Forget The Sixties (eek!).

I’m old enough, and naïve enough, to simply want a quick-drying pair of swim trunks. But unbeknownst to me, the very idea of wearing close-fitting and brief swim shorts has made me a token of a type: the Sixties beach bum, the homo, the Other.

Beware of pundits who talk about old hatreds versus our new and modern way of doing things. Today, it’s the old folks who are more tolerant, and the Spanish Inquisition is a new idea, that has emerged organically from modernization.

I wasn’t expecting fag bashing; I am not even gay although I am happy now and then. I wasn’t expecting my luggage to be rummaged-through while flying to China, Speedos, and all. Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition.

 

 

USAID (US Against Improper Democracy)

With South America turning red quicker than a road kill, those boys in Washington have taken fright and are doing all they can to ensure that no other nation votes in a left wing government.

Nowhere is this more evident than in Peru where presidential elections are slated for next month. Leading left wing contender Ollanta Humala, no friend of the US and an indigenous peasant not from the usual circles of the ruling Peruvian elite, has suddenly been hit with a number of spurious human rights violation allegations, knocking him down from his perch at the top of the opinion polls. It just so happens that Humala’s accusers are subsidized by the US government-funded stealth regime changers, the Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

Humala has already met with his left wing counterpart in Bolivia, the stripey jumper wearing recently elected president Evo Morales and he shares similar ideals including gaining greater control and at least 49% of profits over Peru’s natural resources as well as promising a national referendum on the recently-signed free trade deal with the United States, which is widely believed to favour US corporate interests over those of Peru. Humala has also met with Canned Revolution’s Person of the Year 2005, Hugo Chavez, the leader of South America’s anti-imperialist backlash towards the US.

On February 15, Humala was accused of a series of war crimes. The charges included forced disappearance, torture and attempted murder that are alleged to have taken place when he commanded a jungle counterinsurgency base in 1992 at the height of the bloody civil war with the extremist Maoist Shining Path and Guevarist MRTA that engulfed Peru through much of the 1980s and 1990s. It is a charge that Humala vehemently denies, but it is a charge that has stuck and rapidly knocked him down to second place in the polls.

The “non-governmental organization” (NGO) that led the charge against Humala was the National Coordinator for Human Rights, the umbrella organization for several human rights groups commonly known as the “Coordinadora” — and sponsored by USAID and NED for over a decade, the two bodies responsible for covert regime change in Eastern Europe, Central America and Africa in the past. Peru is just the latest nation — and certainly not the last — to have its democracy interfered with by Washington.

 

• For all you ever needed to know about NED click here.

 

 

Old King Coal here to stay

It is an undeniable fact that coal, one of the worst carbon emitters, is here to stay for the foreseeable future as a primary source of energy, especially as the price of oil will not relent ever again, and because both the US and China — fearful of energy security — have abundant supplies of coal.

Naturally, in an ideal world, we need to switch immediately to renewable energy with the tipping point of environmental apocalypse upon us but this is, let’s face it, not going to happen when oil and coal industrialists forming such strong lobbyists. A new large (1,000 mega watt generating) coal fired power station produces six million tons of CO2 annually. Just last week it was revealed that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is at a record high after a massive rise. New data from America shows that CO2 levels are now at 381 parts per million (ppm) — 100ppm above the pre-industrial average, with 2005 registering the largest gain ever

The world’s total output, 6,000,000,000 tons of CO2 per year, could double over the next few decades as the USA, China, India and many other countries construct new power-generating stations. Hence why we are in favour of vastly increased sums being spent into the technology of carbon capture — taking CO2 out of power plants and burying the gas deep underground in disused mines or under the seabed.

The world’s biggest carbon capture plant was unveiled this week. The EU-funded Castor pilot project will capture carbon dioxide emissions from Denmark’s coal-fired Elsam power plant. Much of the EU is struggling to meet its Kyoto Protocol commitments and fossil fuels are expected to provide 85% of Europe’s energy needs in the foreseeable future hence the urgent need to reconfigure power plants throughout the region (and the world) so that CO2 damage is greatly reduced.

The Chinese government, who burn more coal than anyone else and have 16 of the 20 most polluted cities on Earth, have started looking into the EU’s carbon capture technology which is just as well given it and India’s explosive economic growth.

We currently emit about 6 billion tones of carbon with 6.5 billion people, by 2050 there will be around 9 billion people and we need to reduce emissions to 2.2 billion tones if we are to avoid global catastrophe.

For a typical new power plant it is expected that carbon capture and storage will cost around $25-30 per tonne of CO2 — a not inconsiderable expense, but inconsequential when faced with the end of mankind.

 

• One area of CO2 research that strikes the little red email as obvious and seriously lacking is developing the storage and use of CO2 as a refrigerant for use in cooling for buildings or industry — something that no firm has brought to market yet.

 

 

Nigeria next on TWOT™ list?

The War On Terror™ (TWOT™) might also be called Thirsty Western Oil Thuggery™. Nigeria may well be next up on the list for US/UK troops killing in the name of oil security. Don’t fall for any rhetoric about American troops heading anytime soon to the west African nation for humanitarian purposes — the continued civil strife and rampant corruption in the Niger Delta is affecting Nigerian oil output — the world’s eighth largest, and not something the White House can stand for much longer.

Chevron and Shell, the two largest foreign oil companies operating in the Niger Delta, are targets of citizen rage, not the least because Nigeria’s government has ignored social needs and political protest in the region for many years. Tensions are high, and disorder threatens to engulf the region. As the Council on Foreign Relations, a leading foreign policy group, observes in a new report, “The suppression of dissent in the [Niger] Delta, together with armed violence and the existence of armed militias, makes for a potentially explosive combination.”

Chevron and Shell have raped the delta without putting anything back into the local society. Most local people lack electricity, running water, decent schools for their children and job opportunities. Perhaps most galling to people living in the Niger Delta are the frequent gasoline shortages caused by the Nigerian government’s failure to refine enough crude oil to meet its own domestic needs.

American dependence on Nigerian oil is anticipated to grow rapidly in the years ahead as new fields come online. In 2007, Nigeria expects to hold a presidential election. President Olusegun Obasanjo has not ruled out that he will run for office again, even though he has exhausted his two-term limit. US officials have openly expressed dismay over the possibility of another Obansanjo election victory, saying he should abide by Nigeria’s constitution and step down.

A new report on the future of US-Africa relations, by the influential Council on Foreign Relations, calls for the US to launch a “pilot program for interdiction and to curb (oil) piracy.” Such a program might involve ships and personnel from the US Navy or Coast Guard.

And the US should be alarmed by greater rivalry for Nigeria’s black gold. Last year, the Chinese, who have been scouring the globe for secure oil supplies, signed a deal to receive 30,000 barrels of oil a day from Nigeria.

Insurgent attacks on oil operations have reduced output by 20 percent, and the threat of further conflict has raised oil prices globally.

The next time you hear Condi Rice, for whom Chevron named a tanker (since renamed) after her that traded to west Africa, talking passionately about human rights violations in Nigeria remember Washington’s ulterior motives — as so often it all comes down to oil.

 

 

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.

 

British bombers busted again
Adding a bit of fossil fuel to our theory from two weeks ago on the Samarra bombings, British soldiers disguised as Iraqis have apparently been nabbed again trying to plant bombs near the headquarters of the moderate Iraqi Islamic Party in Basrah.

 

Flash NeoConMen
The latest flash animation from Mark Fiore takes a look at what the NeoConMen have achieved.

 

Flash Salad Fingers Compendium
All you favourite weirdness from David Firth in one easy menu. The burgeoning Salad Fingers series of animations, is both the slickest and the sickest animation we’ve come across. We’ve yet to have Beef Stroganoff... but we still like it when the red water comes out.

 

Video The Great Warming
The Great Warming is a new film, sponsored by Friends of the Earth and a number of other groups, examining the impacts of global warming on the lives of people worldwide.

 

Inside the US’s “Regime-change” school
A surprised Iranian women got a mistaken invite to the US school for overthrowing governments they don’t like. It makes the little red email wonder if it’s as hard to get off the CIA reading list as Reader’s Digest.

 

Conspiracy of the Week George H W at the Schoolbook Depository?
What was George Bush Snr doing on Nov 22, 1963? Is that really him standing there?

 

Bliar: God told me to do it
Normally the "God told me to do it" defence is strictly for the clincially insane sociopath, with no real moral compass... and this case played out on that toughest-of-the-tough political interviewers, Parkinson, looks like no exception.

 

Coke spotlighted on HFCs
This is a canny use of the lovable polar bear ad series used by Coca-Cola, highlights its rather poor environmental track record. Visit cokespotlight.org for more details.

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 close to a fifth of Bangladesh is set to disappear?