This week: • Lights out • Suez • Keep Out • Spinoza •
• Dictator rights • Iraq=Kyoto+ • Hayfever • Stuff •

 

888: the code for lights out

Thursday morning, we rose, shuffled off to the ferry, boarded, peered out and were stunned by the amazing clarity; sights across the bay long hidden in the Hong Kong haze were in sharp focus as if a cameraman had adjusted his aperture and all of the former British colony had greater depth and definition for 36 hours. The reason: Typhoon Chanchu gave us Hong Kongers brief breathing space, blowing out all the crap.

The popular myth that continues to dog concerted efforts to reduce pollution in Hong Kong is that we are helpless since the vast majority of the pollution comes from the surrounding manufacturing heartland of the Pearl river delta: this is incorrect. 70% of roadside pollution comes from dirty vehicles and 50% of Hong Kongers live near a road. 50% of all Hong Kong’s pollution comes from the two power plants of which one third is for air con. (FACT: Hong Kong has the coldest offices in the world). Finally, of course, it should be pointed out that 70% of all factories in the Pearl River Delta within 100 miles of Hong Kong are Hong Kong-owned. So what’s to be done?

The little red email fondly remembers its first sighting of the Hong Kong Island night skyline — a shimmering testament to architectural verve where money plays no object in the pursuit of aerial sculpture perfection. Now a band of folk from our own Fantasy Island have come together to make the most visual of protests at the deteriorating air quality — one where YOU can assist.

Lights Out Hong Kong wishes to create a public protest that will put the democracy marches into the shade.

The organisation is asking the general public to turn off their residential and office lighting on the 8th of the 8th at 8pm for 5 minutes only. A citywide black out will unify the public’s voice against the increasing pollution. “In the darkness the government will have to listen,” says the organization.

“I feel at this point the snowball is well and truly rolling,” says Alistair Robbins, the man behind the 888 plan. “People want this. We are not asking for people break a sweat. Just spend five minutes in the dark. The birth rate may even go back up, although that would break a sweat.”

A volunteers meeting will take place this Tuesday (May 30) at 8 pm at Delaney’s in Wanchai. Come along if you value your lungs.

 

 

50 years on: lessons from the Suez Crisis

A half century ago this October the world watched on as old imperial powers swooped into the Middle East to try and strong arm an errant leader. Are their lessons pertinent to today? Back then an outspoken, youthful Middle Eastern leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser, wrested control of the Suez Canal from the French and British by nationalising the waterway which accounted for three quarters of the oil transiting to western Europe. Ring any bells to the current Iran imbroglio?

A swift military response by the two European countries plus Israel was curtailed by a furious President Dwight Eisenhower of the US, who, angered at being kept in the dark, called a halt to the invasion leaving the ageing imperial powers of France and Britain red faced, their two leaders resigning and marking the eclipse of European empire building.

Does Mohammed Ahmadinejad’s (ironically born in October, 1956) actions as Iranian leader — as both nationalist and vocal defender of Iran’s nuclear ambitions — make him a “Nasser for our times”, a gambler intent on pursuing uranium-tipped, pan-Islamic ambitions? And does the US’ blind intent on invading Iran mark the eclipse of the American century? Stay tuned.

 

 

Keep out

The US continued its lurch towards a corporate police state last week with Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and Northrop Gruman all vying for a lucrative $2 billion contract to try and shore up America’s porous borders.

Whenever a ruling party slumps in the polls the contentious issue of immigration is brought forward to shore up support (Tony Bliar is using the immigration card at the moment too). Bush is touting his Secure Borders Initiative as a way to curb Mexicans illegal entry into the US, and in true Bush style giving the contracts to private military contractors.

The irony would be when it emerges that in that time honoured fashion the military contractors subcontract cheap labour from south of the border to do the manual work.

Through its Secure Border Initiative, the Bush administration intends to not simply buy an amalgam of high-tech equipment to help it patrol the borders — a tactic it has also already tried, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, with extremely limited success. It is also asking the contractors to devise and build a whole new border strategy that ties together the personnel, technology and physical barriers. More fences will be built and more National Guards sent to patrol. Showing that this is clearly a Karl Rove populist move, all this borders bluster was plucked out the hat clearly since in the previous fiscal year, Bush had reduced the borders budget.

“We’ve been presented with expensive proposals for elaborate border technology that eventually have proven to be ineffective and wasteful,” Representative Harold Rogers, Republican of Kentucky, said at a hearing on the Secure Border Initiative program last month. “How is the SBI not just another three-letter acronym for failure?”

A relief then that finally someone in Congress has caught on to the fact that the president’s three word names for his initiatives usually describe the opposite of those programs’ actual effects, vis the effects of the Clear Skies Initiative, the Healthy Forests Initiative, the Clean Energy Program, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Indeed, the only way we’d have any confidence in one of Bush’s proposals is if he called it the Sure-Fire Guaranteed Failure Initiative.

 

 

Spinoza teaches Zionism to the kids

Roosevelt University, were it in Britain, would be called a “red-brick” university, for like many schools in Britain, it was founded for the working class as part of the expansion of educational access after WWII. Roosevelt, true to the red-brick metaphor, is housed in an old, landmark Chicago skyscraper of the 1890s, originally built as a hotel and theatre by Louis Sullivan.

Working class universities are down-market in the Yupped out city Chicago has become. In the Yuppification of the 1980s, a journo reported with horror that a docklands, Navy Pier, had been actually transformed postwar into a state university, of all things, for the lower orders, of all people. Today, Navy Pier to the north of Roosevelt has accordingly been transformed into a shopping mall.

David Noble, a Canadian critic of what an IWW man long ago called the “hire” education and its corporatization, assails the way in which increasingly, college students are both mistreated (overcharged for required classes that are difficult to schedule) and underserved by the assignment of part-time adjunct faculty to teach survey classes. What I’d add to Noble’s analysis is that the process is much more intense at lower tier universities, with the result, in the US, that degrees from low-status institutions are a bit of a joke.

This was the intention, for in 1970 Harvard students and other playing-field beauties were quite anxious about blacks and wymyn with hairy legs, and the in-your-face: the humour of the old National Lampoon and the early Saturday Night Live reflects this anxiety.

Recently, at Roosevelt, the chair of what is now the “history, philosophy, religion and art history” [sic] department contacted adjunct (part-time) teacher Doug Giles, because a disgruntled student had complained about a discussion of Zionism in a class in World Religions.

The chair instructed Doug to not allow any free discussion at all. In particular, she said that the word Zionism wasn’t to be mentioned. Doug refused to obey and was fired: his case is under union grievance.

This incident is the end point in a historical process. I taught in Roosevelt’s Philosophy department in the early 1970s. But owing to cutbacks, and the false consciousness of disinterest in all subjects except “pre-wealth”, the humanities departments had collapsed and merged into one, the actual elimination of their core survey classes not being possible if Roosevelt was still to offer accredited degrees.

When I taught, the Philosophy department at Roosevelt was enmeshed in a post-Sixties Kulturkampf in which students interested in other than English and American analytic philosophy, with its indvidualistic and computer-like view of the world as atomic facts and nothing else, were discriminated against in favour of the quiescent. Fortunately for me, I was hired only to teach Logic and I found it apolitically amusing to play with myself and with the formalisms of both ancient and modern logic, and a relief from what seemed to be the undecidable debates of my hippie assed friends.

It was only later, after a uniquely painful divorce, that I realized that “vague” words and “vague” concepts, such as the needs of grubby little kids, have an iron core of meaning.

In the 19th century, “Zionism” was used by actual Zionists like Theodore Herzl to refer to a Jewish desire to have a Jewish and socialist state that would be based not on religion but on ethnicity, making a home for non-observant Jews, and, for some Zionist thinkers, for other people who needed a refuge. Today, however, Jews who strongly support Israel don’t seem to like to be called Zionists. Instead, the more extreme use the term “Eretz Yisroel” to refer to their lust to conquer all of “Judea” and destroy the Palestinians.

However, the college administrator at Roosevelt University was probably, like many Israelis and Jews, moderate but somewhat frightened about a nameless problem of Israel’s viability…which, as Edward Said has pointed out, is a semiotic problem: “Israel’s” borders were in fact never agreed upon in any formal sense. The current map of “Israel” is undrawable.

The result, in college classrooms of the working class, will be that many topics will be like sex used to be: undiscussable. Instead, the students will get a worthless piece-of-paper used at best to sort the complaisant from the badass, and, he won’t know what the hell “Zionism” is.

How convenient it is to deprive the working person of a language!

 

 

Dictators run new UN human rights body

This past week saw a new UN body come into being to try and make human rights a more substantive part of the global body rather than the dithering that has been the hallmark of the UN’s efforts to deal with tragedies in the past such as Rwanda, Burundi or the former Yugoslavia.

Yet how can Kofi Annan expect the recycled Human Rights Council to be taken seriously when 10 of the world’s worst violators of free expression — Algeria, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, China, Cuba, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia — have been elected onto the council.

“It is outrageous that 10 countries that violate the rights of journalists and free expression on a massive scale should have been chosen to ensure that human rights are protected throughout the world — we foresee nothing good coming from this council,” the press freedom organization, Reporters Without Borders, said. “There is no difference between the composition of the former Human Rights Commission — whose work was unanimously condemned by NGOs, and by many countries as well — and that of the new council,” RSF said. “They have taken the same countries and started over. What is more, seven of these 10 countries have been elected for three-year terms, the longest envisioned under the Council’s rules, terms that can be renewed once. So the reforms adopted by the United Nations are clearly insufficient. The UN will not guarantee respect for human rights in the world in the future any more than it has in the past.” The organisation said the system of regional quotas and election by a simple majority were responsible for the planet’s most repressive countries being elected to the council, which will meet for the first time on 19 June. “What a victory for them, and what a defeat for the United Nations,” the organisation said. “We are deeply disappointed, even if the result is not surprising. We had already voiced our concern last week about the candidacies of certain countries.” RSF continued.

“And let us add a final, disturbing figure: about 90 percent of the capital punishments carried out worldwide in 2005 took place in a single country that is a member of the new Council.” China and Cuba are the world’s two biggest prisons for the press. Censorship is the rule in Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, where journalists are exposed to harsh reprisals if they overstep the mark. In Russia, the Kremlin has already taken over the leading news media, starting with the TV stations. There is almost daily violence against journalists in Bangladesh, Nigeria and Pakistan. Dozens of journalists are in constant risk of imprisonment in Algeria, where the most critical media are repeatedly prosecuted. The murders of two journalists in Azerbaijan in 2005 remain unpunished.

Having the likes of China being guardians of human rights strikes the little red email as about as effective as having a failed, ex-drunk, dumb businessman, with a faux Texan demanour and a rich kid past as the leader of the world’s only superpower — ie a recipe for disaster.

 

 

Iraq war surpasses Kyoto costs

The Kyoto protocol has pretty much gone up in smoke with so many of those who signed the treaty struggling to make their commitments and of course there are also the ones that never even signed in the first place, most notably the world’s largest polluter the United States. The treaty was ratified by 163 nations, accounting for 62% of all worldwide carbon dioxide emissions (as of 1990), but it’s useless without implementation by the United States, which single-handedly accounted for 36% of those emissions.

Bush, at the time early in his reign, cited the huge costs of adhering to the protocol as his primary reason for dodging the treaty, not, you understand, having anything to do with his extensive big oil background.

Yet the cumulative cost of the Iraq invasion in barely four years, compared to the costs projected by the Bush administration for adhering to the Kyoto protocol over its entire lifetime show what a fallacy this excuse was. For the United States, the cost of the Iraq war will soon exceed the anticipated cost of the Kyoto Protocol. For both, the cost is somewhere in excess of $300 billion.

In his pursuit of oil, Bush opted to sell the environment down the river in favour of a bankruptingly expensive war. Philosophers call Bush’s approach undertermination — Bush’s war costs more than saving the global environment; Bush opposed saving the environment because of costs; Bush supports the war in spite of costs. And the  war, of course, is in pursuit of something — oil — that harms the environment.

The planet itself — the entire livable environment — has been left teetering in the balance, for reasons that have no more substance than the WMDs and other fantasies of the non-reality-based community that inhabits the White House.

 

 

Sneezing summers thanks to warming

Oh the fond memories of yesteryear, frolicking in the sun for that all to brief a period known as the British summer. We were lucky though, never falling prey to that whole sneezing fit phenomenon known as hay fever, something that is becoming far more commonplace in the UK thanks to global warming, according to the Independent. Now, 13 million Britons suffer from runny noses and watering eyes as the pollen from trees and grasses that produces allergic reactions is increasing with rising temperatures, according to the UK’s leading pollen specialist. Pollen seasons are lengthening, and the pollen itself is provoking a more powerful reaction — a situation already being reflected in rising GP consultation rates for hay fever, according to Professor Jean Emberlin, director of the National Pollen and Aerobiology Research Unit. All across Europe record pollen counts are being reported this year. This is the first official health scare linked to global warming to hit Britain — it won’t be the last.

 

 

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.

 

Audio Flight 93 rebuttal ahead of Hollywood version — let’s roll, my ass
Daryl Bradford Smith of the oddity that is The French Connection interviews Christopher Bollyn of the American Free Press, on the subject of United 93. And they have some interesting questions, although there is a strong Zionist conspiracy bent to it all. Together they run through “the evidence that the Zionists — not the Jesuits — are the masterminds of 9/11.” Listen in here.

 

Video Who killed the electric car?
We don’t going to subscribe to the idea that an electric car produces no emissions: the cars themselves might not, but power stations do. Nor are they really an alternative to fossil fuels: the power stations still use fossil fuels. On the other hand they are more efficient and less polluting, thanks to the economies of scale. So this documentary promises to be an interesting indictment of the ethics of the oil and motor industries. More info here.

 

Video Robert Newman’s history of Oil
Even if you don’t agree with what he’s saying, kudos goes to Rob Newman (he of History Today and the Mary Whitehouse Experience) for having his show powered by cyclists. We at the little red email do agree, particularly in his biting assessment on oil alternatives: namely, “there is no way out.” And his take on the reasons behind the invasion of Iraq (both times). Most illuminating was finding out that of the 95 years since oil was discovered in Iraq, Britain has been at war with or occupying Iraq for 45. Enjoy the history of oil.

 

Video Dispatches: Iraq — The Women’s Story
This documentary from Channel 4’s Dispatches show is a depressing exposé on what the US and UK invasion of Iraq has meant to the women of Iraq. Once perhaps the most liberated women in the Arab world, they have seen a giant leap backwards in rights.

 

Video Holy anti-semitism all round, Batman
Hey kids, it’s the Saddam and Osama show. This little propaganda piece is dreadful but funny. All the more funny for its distinctly anti-semitic poke at the Arabs for… you guessed it… being anti-semitic.

 

Stat of the week
The other week we trundled up the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, heart of the manufacturing centre of the world, the Pearl river delta. We marvelled at the wholesale prices of the sample goods we snuck away with — a Krups style espresso machine for just US$10 and a decent blender for a mere US$8. Then we read James Kynge’s China Shakes The World and came across this sobering stat: in real terms Chinese workers earn just half what workers in Chicago made ... in 1850.

 

Video Internet imperilled
In the next few days US Congress votes on a bill that will potentially damage the virtual democracy that is the internet. The Death of The Internet?
Major telecommunications companies are spending millions lobbing the U.S. congress to make the Internet into a private network. In political lingo this means abandoning what is called “Net Neutrality”. In common sense terms it’s about the government withdrawing our right to Internet Freedom, it’s about the Death of The Internet.
This V-Doc (viral documentary) is about the current threat to Internet Freedom and how we can hold on to the open Internet and our right to communicate. The only way the telecommunications companies will be successful is if we fail to raise awareness about this situation.
If people find out that we are about to lose our Internet Freedom there is no way they will allow congress to do this. This congressional decision will set a monumental precedent, and thus, impact not just U.S. citizens, but citizens all over world.

 

Phone bill tapping just the tip of the iceberg
“The snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration’s Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.”
Read the rest of this great Greg Palast article.

 

Video The Corporation
Watch The Corporation today, 145 minutes of simply mind-blowing, fact-packed, eye popping information.

 

Remember the Congo? MSF does.
Médecins Sans Frontières highlight the plight of the people of the Congo, and the effects of the civil war that is to all intents and purposes still raging, despite its official cessation in 2003.

 

Video Baghdad ER
The uglier truth of war: death, maiming and so forth, rarely makes it to our screens. This HBO documentary goes some small way to encompassing the true cost and horror of the invasion of Iraq, although it deals exclusively with a US Army CSH, the replacements for the MASH unit, and thus only the US’ and its supporters’ military casualities.

 

Shock News Halliburton Solves Global Warming
Yes that’s right with the new Survivaball™. This high-tech answer to global warming was revealed at the Lexis-Nexis “Catastrophic Loss”conference in Florida recently. More details about this adbust of the year so far, perpetrated by the Yes Men are available here.

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 we were hit by the earliest severe typhoon ever.