This week: • Papua • Global Warming • Bangs on Bongs •
• Spinoza • BeerSpa • Cigs2meds • Stuff •

 

Western Papua wants to be free

The world’s largest Muslim country, Indonesia, is a fractious nation with multiple ethnicities cajoled by fearsome police and military to live under one flag. Of its more than 17,500 islands, as much as one third of them have some separatist feelings — and at the moment nowhere is that more apparent than Western Papua — an island annexed by Indonesia in 1969 that has been screwed ever since. Their slice of the mining profits has never been properly handed out.

These feelings were aired in the last couple of weeks with massive demonstrations against the US-owned Freeport mine — the world’s most profitable mine. These protests should not be taken as a single gesture against the profit taking of a mining conglomerate — they run far deeper than that and are the result of nearly 40 years of government neglect and a greater desire to separate especially following neighbour East Timor’s departure from the Indonesian union three years ago.

n the same week, in a major backlash to multinationals, Indonesians elsewhere rallied against another mining company, Newmont, and ExxonMobil — citizens of the archipelago are sick at the pollution of these giants and at their wholesale profit taking.

In Papua, as the government gets increasingly concerned aboth the threat of another ‘East Timor’ there has been a massive troop build up including the dreaded secret police all of which is impossible to report on since western journalists have been banned from the region pretty much for the past two years. The only way these Papuans will make their voices heard is in collective protests as evidenced this month. However loud they protest, we won’t be able to hear their screams when they are brutally silenced. Another East Timor is simply not allowed in the powder keg that is Indonesia.

 

 

Swimming: the new walking

Take to the hills! The water is coming! Run for your lives! Remember Katrina last year: that’s a paddling pool in comparison to what’s to come. The latest projections by the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research show the polar caps are melting way faster than we had anticipated and the global effect of this could see sea levels rise six metres (20 ft) by 2100, more than six times as much as what most doomsayers had been predicting. If this prediction came true, you could forget about the Thames Barrier — London would be a gonna, as would New York, much of Florida, Bombay, Tokyo, Bangladesh, the Netherlands and many islands in the Pacific. Birmingham would be the capital of the UK — a scary prospect!

The exhaustive research combines computer models of rising temperatures with records of the ancient climate between 129,000 and 116,000 years ago, when the Arctic last warmed to temperatures forecast for 2100.

While the Greenland ice sheet is expected to start melting as summer temperatures in the Arctic rise by 3C degrees to 5C (5.4F-9F), most models suggest that the ice sheets of Antarctica will remain more stable.

The historical data, however, show that the last time that Greenland became this warm, the sea level rise generated by meltwater destabilised the Antarctic ice, leading to a much higher increase than can be explained by Arctic ice alone.

“Although the focus of our work is polar, the implications are global,” said Bette Otto-Bliesner, of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, who led the study. “These ice sheets melted before and sea levels rose. The warmth needed isn’t that much above present conditions.”

Her colleague, Jonathan Overpeck, of the University of Arizona, said: “This is a real eye-opener set of results. The last time the Arctic was significantly warmer than the present day, the Greenland ice sheet melted back the equivalent of two to three metres (6ft-10ft) of sea level. Contrary to what was previously believed, the research suggests the Antarctic ice sheet also melted substantially, contributing another 6ft to 10ft of sea level rise.”

The findings, which are published in the journal Science, have emerged from a study that used data from ancient coral reefs, ice cores and other natural records to reconstruct the climate during the last gap between Ice Ages. In this interglacial period, between 129,000 and 116,000 years ago, temperatures in the Arctic were between 3C and 5C above present levels — a similar level to that predicted for the end of this century. Expect properties on higher plains to gain substantially in price soon.

 

 

Muslim Smoking tips with Yahuda Bangs

It’s Ten PM in and I’m smoking a hookah in the pavilion of the Al-Sadds restaurant in Guangzhou. I’ve been here for an hours or so, taking down notes in my journal for a project I’m doing in my other guise as a travel writer and exhaling voluminous columns of apple scented smoke into the already thick Guangzhou air.

Guangzhou has a sizable Middle Eastern population, 20,000 souls by some counts. Indeed, unlike Beijing or Shanghai, where the dominant foreign population seems to be drawn from the west, in Guangzhou most non-Chinese faces I saw were of Arab and African, colonialism’s former victims rather than the children of the colonizers themselves.

Two dozen or so men are sitting at tables all around me doing the same, men are from various points around the Middle East and Northern Africa. Mine is the only white face, possibly for blocks around, and nowhere in the chatter of Babelic variety being spoken in the pavilion is either English or Chinese, the only two languages I understand.

All the chatter stops suddenly as one of the patrons, a heavyset businessman with thick jowls, white sleeves rolled up over his elbows, clicks a remote control and changes the channel from one showing world sports broadcast in Arabic to Al-Jazeera. The images on the screen overcome the language barrier. Corpses in what appear to be police uniforms. Men clutching small, bleeding bodies. Wailing, beating of breasts, gnashing of teeth.

The announcer, a woman wearing a light hajib, comes on the screen and says Something something something Bush something something something Iraq something something something something…

I try to fill in the massive blanks, wondering how it corresponds to the CNN report saw this morning in my hotel. In Washington, President Bush said he was confident that the situation in Iraq was stabilizing, freedom on the march nine-eleven nine-eleven. But one retired army general came out against the president, saying that Iraq was sliding deeper into civil war and escalating sectarian violence.

The businessman clicks the remote, switching back to sports. Conversation resumes, slightly more somberly than before the news broadcast.

I draw so deeply on my hookah that I nearly choke. “My kingdom for a Maple leaf,” I think, for all the good it would do me.

I wonder if the men smoking around me even suspect that there’s an American in their midst, a Hebrew no less. Chances are that they couldn’t care less. But it would only take one to raise the cry, perhaps one of the Saudis in the far corner barking orders at the disgracefully unveiled Chinese woman bringing out fresh burning coal for the pipes.

A cry would go out, about the only word of which I’d understand would be Allah!, and the next — and last — thing

I’d see would be these peaceful men preparing to rip me apart like the zealots in Kabul are going to rip apart Abdul Rahman, the poor Afghani geek who picked a bad time and place to find Jesus.

Perhaps I should start a dialogue before its too late. Find some common ground.

Like them, I enjoy smoking, though perhaps not quite as regularly. And I, too, pray daily for certain newspaper cartoonists to meet with horrible deaths. If anyone will understand my visceral loathing for Jim Davis, creator of the insipid Garfield cartoon, it will be these men.

But there are certain subjects not to be taken lightly in the Muslim world. Jihad, for one, religion, for another. And Israel / Palestine (or Israelstine, as Muammar Qaddafi, one of the rare Muslim leaders who seems to have perhaps too highly a developed sense of humor, suggested it be called)… best not to even go there.

Irreverence does not seem to be high on the virtues list among most Muslims.

In another, better world, I might be able to suggest that the Muslim world as a whole could stand to lighten up just a tad.

Perhaps massive rioting and burning the embassies of certain Scandinavian countries over a series of offensive cartoons was just a bit on the heavy side, I’d like to be able to say. How about a strongly worded letter to the editor?

Or Say, you do know that when your religious figures call for a man to be “torn to pieces” for becoming a Christian, it makes your faith seem just a tad, um, medieval. How about if merely suggesting he be barred from certain clubs?

But this isn’t a better world. It’s a world of diplomacy through air strikes and car bombs, where only the voices of extremists on all sides are heard above the clamor. And extremism is spreading around the world, like some rampant virus. No-one is immune. It might be time to leave this place, lest my fellow smokers notice that I’m making inadvertent strangling gestures with my hands, thinking about how much today’s Family Circus pissed me off.

 

 

Spinoza and tattoo hullabaloo

I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.

My Yi number one first and former wife has informed me that my twenty-something Er number two son has a tattoo. In our former marriage and the continuing relations created thereby I am no tyrant but a Constitutional prince, like Prince Charles or Rupert of Hentzau, so I can only express opinion.

First of all, as an old fart, were I to get a tattoo I would first get drunk in Wanchai and then wake up in the Chung King Mansions with two tattoos. One would be the name of first Yi former only wife over a flaming rose, and the French for eternity. You see, while today we conduct our business like civilized divorced people, on our first date, my Yi first former told me she was an ‘incurable romantic’.

I cured her of that, but I remain one myself.

On the other arm would be HMS Dreadful burning in the roads, and under that Kiss Me Hardy. Keep ‘em guessing, I always say.

I want to warn Er number two that I know British matelots and Army gentlemen who were tattood years ago “when men were men and the women were glad of it” and the sheep were nervous, here in jolly old Hong Kong, and who today lament the tattoo: it depresses them.

But I can only stalk the Internet like Hamlet’s father and groan warnings from the battlements.

I do remark in the Style section for the Stylish, in my International Herald Tribune, that the tattoo is quite fashionable now for Yuppies and other toilers, a sort of fashion accessory that announces “I am so much more than the Turner Downer for Pathetically Small Loans at the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank: I not only redesign our queueing models so as to humiliate the poor on Lamma Island, as they wait for Noodle Lady to get a mortgage at the teller window: there is another Me who stays up all night and doesn’t watch television.”

This troubles me as a Structuralist. I can see that a Tattoo asserts self-ownership. Self-ownership is a good thing. My Er Number Two Son is good (you have no idea, you never saw him shining when he was a little kid).

However, the self-ownership is asserted by self-mutilation as if the Self can only assert in the Noir register.

The lifestyle dodge is a louche response produced by the absence of real opportunities to use our full personalities in other than a Noir register, as if redemption were permanently on hold, and, here we are, with our tattoo, on hold in the voice mail of the world spirit.

I’m not saying Er number two son was wrong in getting a foo tattoo. But I am not about to mark myself so, and make it easy for the cops to find me.

My grandfather’s religion, Catholicism, said that getting a tattoo was a mortal sin. The mystical theology of the resurrection of the body answers, for some Catholics perhaps, the body’s commodification, in which we are all for sale, whether we are Dior models, aging Bond clones like me, or resources for modern day grave robbers in hospitals who take our organs to pay for a bedwhich should be a human right.

The body seems to others like a physical object. But to me, and to my father in his assisted care facility, the body is the ship: all else is the sea. It is not to me an object, instead a Kantian limit. For me to mark it would be to put a price on it; concentration camp inmates were tattooed. Structurally, it asserts a false reconciliation with commodification, a false aufhebung and a missed dialectical opportunity.

Why is all this so? Muss es sein? I’m the Daddy (ich bin der Geist deine Vater), that’s why es muss sein.

 

 

Brewing health trend

We’ve never been of the spa-going type, thinking such trips were for overpaid wimps. But now we might have to change our mind, and it could even be in the name of research. Among myriad commitments, your reporter is the Asia correspondent for Beers of the World magazine, something that takes innumerable litres of diligent research. In the name of beer scribing, I may well hop on over to the Czech Republic and check in at the world’s first beer health centre which has opened in the cellar of a family brewery.

Beer baths, beer massages and beer cosmetics are on offer at the spa at the Chodovar Family brewery in Chodova Plana.

The converted cellars include seven huge Victorian style baths where guests can swim in beer while enjoying a pint poured at a bathside bar.

Guests on £80 weekend packages can indulge in a range of health treatments including beer wraps, starting at £12 per session.

Owner Jiri Plevka said: “Beer can treat a range of conditions, particularly skin conditions, and the health centre should appeal to men who are put off by ‘posh’ traditional spas.

“I have heard of some places in other countries where people can swim in beer but it’s just a gimmick.

“We believe in the healing properties of beer and we offer the full range of treatments. We are a fully-fledged beer spa.”

Sounds just the ticket to the brew-loving, in-need-of-pampering little red email.

 

 

Xi’an turns fake fags into heart drug

A raft of environmental taxes were implemented last week by the Chinese government — all of which were highly commendable especially the 5% raised on disposable wooden chop sticks. The production of disposable chopsticks uses up China’s forests at a rate of 70.6 million cubic feet of wood each year, something the world’s most populous nation can ill afford as desertification continues to be a real threat. China sells 10 million boxes of wooden chopsticks domestically and exports about 6 million boxes each year.

Another wacky tale of environmental improvements on the mainland received less attention last week though is equally intriguing.

Xi’an, in the northwest, is crushing fake cigarettes to make medicine. City officials are using the counterfeit cigarettes to extract solanesol, a compound found in tobacco which is used to treat cardiovascular disease.

“We used to incinerate the fake cigarettes, which is wasteful and causes air pollution,” Xinhua quoted Zhou Yaqing, vice director of the provincial tobacco monopoly, as saying.

A kilo of solanesol is worth about $200, and 30 tons of tobacco leaf can produce up to 120 kilos, Xinhua added.

China is the world’s largest cigarette producer, with a growing market of about 320 million. Chinese cigarettes are also among the cheapest in the world — a packet can cost as little as 8 US cents — and smoking kills 1.2 million people a year in China, according to the World Health Organization.

Fake cigarettes, made of poor quality tobacco and often topped up with wood chips, are commonly sold on Chinese streets.

Two out of the three little red email founders have recently had a sudden relapse on the fags front — a quick restorative dose of the magical Allan Carr and his books, and we are back to normal. If you haven’t read him and still smoke please click here it is astoundingly easy to purge oneself of this most addictive of drugs, and that way you won’t have to worry of you’re smoking dodgy Chinese counterfeits too.

 

 

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.

 

Iraq Year Three Roundup:
IY3 Time’s Person of the Year 2003 up for war crimes?
Time Magazine exclusively revealed that it has evidence of a massacre perpetrated by their Person of the Year 2003 (with a lot of help from Time’s Person of the Year 2000 & 2004). Time has released a video it claims shows a civilian massacre by American marines last November in the town of Haditha. The video shows heavily bloodstained rooms, and bodies of the alleged victims wrapped in rugs at the house and in the local morgue. The USMC claim that the civilians were merely “collateral damage”, their santised way of saying innocent civilians killed by mistake. Although prior to Time’s exposé, the USMC official report claimed they were killed by insurgents (and were no doubt cast as victims.

 

IY3 Video The 50 Billion Dollar Robbery
Three years after the start of the Iraq war, where has the 50 billion dollars of reconstruction money gone?
Following the Iraq war, billions of dollars of Iraq’s money was directed to American companies to rebuild the country.
But much of it remains unaccounted for, and Peter Marshall has been investigating startling allegations of post war profiteering for the BBC.

 

IY3 Video Beneath Iraq and a Hard Place
Rory Bremner takes another satirical look at the Iraq invasion and its aftermath, including the missing billions, the missing reconstruction and the pork barrel projects.

 

IY3 Video Iraq’s Missing Billions
Not to be outdone by the Beeb, Dispatches has it’s own report on the missing moolah, by Dr Ali Fadhil, a 29 year old Iraqi doctor. He uncovers a shocking story of fraud, incompetence and corruption, unscrupulous foreign contractors who made millions from dodgy contracts, and literally billions of dollars which cannot be properly accounted for.

 

IY3 US government debt
According to the BBC, who didn’t make much of this story (and curiously categorized it under “Middle East”), the US government is so far in debt it came close to defaulting on its IOUs (treasury notes). The way out? Raise the debt limit a further $781bn to nearly $9 trillion, of course.

 

IY3 Insurgents overrun govenment buildings in Iraq
According to Middle East Newsline, Iraqi insurgents struck government buildings and security facilities northeast of Baghdad last Tuesday. At least 20 Iraqi officers were killed in the attacks in Al Muqtadiyah in the Diyala province.
The offensive was said to have been conducted by at least 50 masked attackers. Officials said the insurgents arrived in 10 vehicles and were armed with rocket propelled-grenades, AK-47 assault rifles and mortars.
Officials said the insurgents stormed the governor’s office, court, police headquarters and prison in Diyala. They said the police and security forces quickly ran out of ammunition and either fled or were killed. Ten insurgents were also said to have been killed.

 

IY3 Bell on Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), torture & those Labour funds
Steve Bell waxes ascerbic on Iraq’s third year of *ahem* liberation, cynical on the US’ human rights record. He’s also on the money over the Labour party funding scandal.

 

Flash Washington gets its groove back
The new Mark Fiore animation “Doing the Bush Bash” has just been posted.

 

Fear & Loathing in Bolivia
There are strange goings on in Bolivia involving yanks and bombs and hysteria. Guerilla News Network has the skinny.

 

The History of the House of Rothschild Part I
One of the famous kingpins of many a conspiracy, the Truthseeker takes a look at the Rothschilds.

 

Operation Enduring Freedom* (*Religious freedom not included)
The Afghani who converted from Islam to Christianity has had his case dismissed on the grounds of insufficient evidence and other technicalities, as well as questions over his sanity. Which means that one can still be executed for converting from Islam. Good thing the US got rid of those religious extremists who used to run the country.

 

Website of the Week These guys got the light outside No. 10 to change
CRed is a measure of how more and more folks are waking up to the global warming issue in the UK.

 

The Big Ask campaign
A call for a legislated 3% cut in carbon emissions is afoot, run by Friends of the Earth. One frontman for the campaign is Thom Yorke from Radiohead. If you’re from the UK you have the opportunity to hassle your MP by email on the site.

 

Is America waking up to Global Warming?
The post-Katrina rise in the US media remembering that journalism is more than just regurgitating press releases, seems to have spread to global warming. This 60 Minutes report on how US administrations have been editing the effects of global warming comes almost simultaneously with Time Magazine’s running their global warming story on the cover (essentially Science’s report). Global warming may have just become a problem that mainstream America acknowledges as real. But as the Time poll points out, there’s still a long way to go to convince them that this might be our fault, and that we really need to do something.

 

Flash A little Tom Lehrer
Spring is very much in the air, and as the world lives in fear of Avian Flu, we thought you’d enjoy this timely tune, with animation.

 

Conspiracy of the Week Advertising agency fans of Canned Revolution?
No we didn’t get royalties for this campaign.

 

Play Patriot Act: the game
The board game that brings the thrill of trampling the Constitution right into your home... newly updated for 2006 to include NSA wiretaps and renewal of provisions!
Download your copy today!

 

A trip to the mall?
This adbust from the Billboard Liberation Front appeals to the little red email for some strange reason.

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 Amazon rainforest is slated to become a savannah shortly?