This week: • TWOT™ • Lights On •
• Photospinoza • IceBerg • Stuff •

 

TWOT™ focuses the mind

Far be it from us to be lobbing a conspiracy theory your way but once again did anyone else clock the neat timing of the past week’s UK terror alert thrusting the threat of terror back into the international conscience?

The US-sanctioned Shit-is-Burning show has extended deep into Lebanon, Afghanistan is out of control and senior American generals were telling Congress last week Iraq has basically descended into civil war. A senior politician, Joe Lieberman, had just been voted out because of his pro-Iraq war stance. Both the US and UK general public were increasingly sceptical and disenchanted with the so called War on Terror™ (TWOT™) — Lieberman’s loss stirring public debate on Iraq. The Republicans are in dire straits ahead of the November 7 congressional elections. Then of course there is the impending emotional fifth anniversary of 9/11. Two days prior to the terror captures a British minister resigned protesting US bomb flight stopovers in the UK and the policy on Lebanon.

The nebulous, hidden face of terror is a political masterstroke that delivers elections almost as efficiently as Diebold, the electronic vote counting machine that gave Bush Ohio and thus the presidency in 2004.

The 18 months prior to the 2004 presidential election witnessed a barrage of those ridiculous colour-coded terror alerts, quashed-plot headlines and breathless press conferences from Administration officials. Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge’s terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention.

And then not long after the champagne corks stopped popping at Bush campaign headquarters, terror alerts seemed to go out of style until mired in scandal and with ratings at all time low they reemerged this summer. There was the Sears Tower “plot” out of Miami, the New York tunnel “plot”, plus other busted “plots” in Australia and Canada. And in most of these cases, the supposed “plots” were initiated and encouraged by government informers who acted as agent provocateurs and entrapped the alleged conspirators.

As ever the mainstream media has lapped up this latest terror twist hook, line and sinker without nary a question such as if the threat posed by the plot was considered dangerous enough to warrant raising the terror alert in the UK from “severe” to “critical” and to code red in the US, why were no arrests made for five days since the administration claims it first found out about the “plot”? And why was the terror alert only raised after the arrests were made and not before?

Now Bush returns to his war president image and Americans will obsess about how under siege their nation is from terrorists. In an amusing kettle calling the pot black moment Bush said of the thwarted UK “plot” that it was a “stark reminder that this nation is at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who love freedom.” Islam and fascists — hmmm, that’s gonna go down well with Muslims.

Perhaps most damaging to the credibility of the threat is the simple fact that London’s Metropolitan Police were behind the arrests — the same force that executed an innocent Brazillian, and shot an innocent Bangladeshi in the chest.

The saddest thing from our point of view is where are we going to get our cheap litre of Stolychnaya now that duty free is maybe a thing of the past.

 

 

HK greens’ darkest hour?

The loudest sound come 8pm on the 8th of August up on the Peak where organisers of the Lights Out Hong Kong campaign had gathered was sadly the tapping of watches, and murmurings like “Are you sure it’s eight o’clock already?”

Instead of the former British colony being plunged into darkness, making the world’s largest ever protest, at the anointed hour the Special Administrative Region was suddenly bathed in light as the bloody nightly lights show kicked in around Victoria Harbour leaving a crestfallen atmosphere among those who had toiled so hard for the previous five months to make this visual protest against the SAR’s declining air quality happen.

Residents of Hong Kong received their just desserts for their apathy the following morning with the pollution as bad as an early 1950s London peasouper.

Regardless of the lack of lights turned out on the day we should not view the campaign as a failure — in a very short amount of time Alastair Robins, the man behind the protest and a very likely contender for Canned Revolutions’ Person of the Year, was able to thrust the issue of air quality into the public arena, create debate and make the leader of the territory look stupid.

When HK chief executive Donald Tsang refused to turn his and the city’s lights out, saying that to do so would send the wrong signals “to the international community that protecting the environment is inconsistent with modern life”, Robins brilliantly lambasted the bow tied leader. “Does that mean that he is happy with the air pollution?” Robins mused at a packed press conference, “Because if he isn’t, he would support the campaign.” Tsang surely knows that Hong Kong is sliding fast down the ranks of most liveable city thanks to the bad air, yet he refuses to properly face the issue.

Robins’ good press handling has been a real eye opener and now once the team has had time to rest from all the exertions behind this debut protest thoughts must return to how to further the cause. One way mentioned is not to focus so strongly on a one-off event, such as the three-minute voluntary lights out but work towards a date further off, like 2008 — the year of the Beijing Olympics — and set targets like educating the public, getting corporations to come onboard, converting buses to cleaner fuels, reducing the excess air con use everywhere, etc, etc. This targeted way delivers clear results rather than focusing too much attention on a one off event in a society as apathetic as Hong Kong, where despite polls saying 62% of the public would switch their lights out, less than 10% did.

“When you can see the air you breathe, something has to be done,” Robins memorably said last week. We couldn’t agree more.

For more on Lights Out click here and for ludicrously simple tips that YOU can do to pollute less click here.

• One Canned Revolution roving correspondent reports in this video on Hong Kong’s darkest hour.

 

 

Spinoza: Photoshopped

The world reverberates with epistemological hate as charge and countercharge fly concerning Lebanon in a way that seems sibling-like and irresolvable by an absent father (Mom, he’s doin’ it again). Dice are rolling, the knives are out: would be patriarchs are all about.

You have to do a form of quantum reasoning which deals in fuzzy ranges and takes into account your own position as the observer to get anywhere at all in an internet sandstorm of data.

OK, so an Associated Press photographer of Muslim leanings used Photoshop to make the skies over Beirut seem worse than they are. By the logic of American hate radio, this is supposed to prove that the Muslims are liars who have no case.

The stunning induction from one case to a general conclusion is made with amazing ease, almost as if there was a predisposition. Nawww…

But wait a minute. Arf a mo. The skies over Beirut were made to appear worse than they actually were and are. The problem here is that the skies over beautiful downtown Beirut (the observer/writer takes note of his own American tendency to normalize things) were worse than they actually were if you needed water or if your kid were killed.

Yeah, you got that right. If we see through an emotional layer that is not captured in any layer in goddamn Photoshop there are situations, which as experienced by actual suffering people in the black rain in which the skies are worse than they actually are.

Here is what is happening under the black rain:

“Samra had been sitting with friends elsewhere. He raced to the building and frantically began to dig. He found his five-year-old daughter, Sally, torn apart.”

Let’s see. Unless Sally, a Muslim girl with a Western name, was rather unusual she probably was before this war grave and radiant. Now she’s garbage.

he usual justification for this uses a form of logic which is quite a novelty. Sally’s death is supposed to be a trade-off for peace and security. We’re supposed to be WWII style operations researchers at Bletchley with slide rules, and if we were at all honest with ourselves, we’d slip the old stick to calculate, as Leibniz would say, that yes, indeedy, Sally who had big eyes alternately grave and radiant, happy and gay is now

torn apart

according not to Photoshop but according to a US-based newspaper, dateline August 9th 2006, biased towards Israel and in which editors fact check up the ass.

Sure, the death of a child to avoid a worse evil could be licit in some situation. Kid’s been keeping you up all night on a transpacific flight by kicking your seat, falls asleep, wakes up saying, “Where’s Mommy” and you are tempted to say, “Right out that door sonny boy!”

Seriously, the death of a child to avoid a worse evil could be licit in some contrived thought experiment, but I prefer not to speculate being no Peter Singer. The point being that Israeli policy has over the past fifty years normalized the exceptional, one-time trade-off of revolutionary and liberatory terrorism into a frozen state terrorism.

This isn’t operations research. It’s human sacrifice.

Editor’s note: The little red email is of the opinion that the IDF had a lot more to do with altering the amount of smoke in skies over Beirut than a Lebanese photographer and his copy of Photoshop did. The mountainous molehill of photoshopping is explored in Stuff.

 

 

Beer on the rocks

Whoever said there were no joyful things that global warming will bring? The parts of Britain, for instance, that will not be submerged — Ben Nevis — will enjoy balmy climes. You’ll never have to worry about being clawed to death by a polar bear anywhere either as they’ll be extinct. But perhaps our favourite plus side from all this global warming hullabaloo can be seen in the Danish-owned semi-autonomous giant country of Greenland where a brewery is producing beer using water melted from the Arctic ice cap.

The brewers claim that the water is at least 2,000 years old and free of minerals and pollutants. Allegedy Greenland beer, officially launched in Copenhagen last Monday, has a softer, cleaner taste than other beers, because of the ice cap water. The first 66,000 litres of the new dark and pale ales are on their way to the Danish market. The novelty beer does come at a hefty price mind — about £3.40 per half-litre bottle.

It is the first ever Inuit microbrewery — located in Narsaq, a hamlet 390 miles south of the Arctic Circle. A rival operation is set to churn out its first drafts this week too.

With the rate that the glaciers are disappearing in Greenland (see this week’s weird weather at the bottom of Stuff) the Inuit will soon have enough water to brew more than Denmark’s major brewer, Carlsberg, which is just as well, as a) Carlsberg is pretty rough and b) those Eskimos will probably be basking under tropical conditions on the tundra in the not too distant future.

• Read about Canned Revolution’s Czech beer spa treatment here.

 

 

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.

 

A mountainous molehill: those shock Reuters photo alterations et al
Altering photos is dishonest. All photos are altered. The question is, are they altered to tell a different story. Frankly the furore over the photos is needless hairsplitting.

Original:

Doctored to :

It would seem that the biggest culprit in altering the amount of smoke in the sky of this photo is the Israeli armed forces.
Likewise Little Green Footballs has made much of the staging of children’s bodies by “Green Helmet” hinting he’s a Hizbollah PR guy.
Whilst the level of pedantry, paranoia and research invovled in the story is commendable, what they don’t cover is a rather glaringly obvious question: where did “Green Helmet” and his mates get all the dead kids necessary for the wicked duplicitous “staging” of the photos from?
The reason they don’t cover that particular question is that the dead kids were provided courtesy of the Israeli armed forces, a photo credit the folks at Little Green Footballs would rather you forgot: because it might make you think that it is Israel that plays the largest and most amoral role in this sinister media conspiracy to make Israel look bad.

 

Gorgeous George gives Rupert a run for his money
Love him or loathe him George Galloway knows how to scorn the mainstream news on their pro-Israeli coverage — here he hits Murdoch’s Sky News. Odd times indeed when Gorgeous is a beacon of truth and righteousness.

 

Vindaloo, vindaloo!
If, like Murdoch’s Sky News and the people at Little Green Footballs, you’re becoming forgetful in your old age, have a Curry. According to Singaporean research, eating curry will help you to avoid Alzheimer’s.

George is crap — Prescott
John Prescott alledgedly said that George Bush had been crap on the Middle East “peace process.” Irony fans will note that Prescott is also W’s Nazi banker granddaddy’s name. Prescott denies the allegations, and the little red is prepared to believe him on this: We don’t think the word “crap” even begins to cover it.

 

Mailbox bust
The little red email recently got this in our inbox:

We replied with our own take on TWOT™:

 

Ad & Ads
Not content with helping children become obese, Masterfoods, the makers of M&Ms, latest idea is to make their chocolate sweets available for corporations to brand on. Ads on sweets? Where will all this stop?

 

Bush Candy
There’s hope for Dubya from Germany where a scientist is close to launching the world’s first anti-stupidity pills.

 

Florentino and the Mystic Dwarves
No it’s not a concept album from some weird prog rock group from the 1970s. Florentino Floro is a Filipino trial Judge based in Manila. The mystic dwarves are Armand, Luis and Angel, and they are alleged to have helped carry out healing sessions in Florentino’s chambers during breaks in the judge’s schedule. Floro lost his appeal to keep his job as a judge, with the Supreme Court of the Philipppines ruling that dalliance with dwarves would erode the public’s esteem of the judiciary and make it an object of ridicule. Floro claims he is the victim of injustice and is the patsy in this dwarf conspiracy. He has a six part video on youtube.com purporting to be the true story.

 

Video Terrorism by any other name smells just as rank
Lebanon — Looking Through The Fog Of War is a documentary Lebanese Doctors and Civilian’s Speak Out against the Terrorism they are facing from Israel. Shocking Documentary About the War in Lebanon and the tragedy in Qana.

 

Sports desk
Alright, we don’t normally comment on sporting matters here at the little red email, but we’ll make an exception for this one. Remember that headbutt by French captain Zinedine Zidane in July’s football World Cup final, now the French have gone mad for Coupe de Boule, a song commemorating the moment of madness which is currently topping Les Charts en France. Beats Jonny Halliday, at least!

 

Disposing of binary liquid explosives the TWOT™ way
Whilst Heathrow’s shutdown was a splendid farce, this little gem is pure Vaudeville: so how do US security personnel get rid of those liquids and gels which are all potentially dangerous "don’t-mix-them-together-whatever-you-do" binary explosives? Why they pour them all into a big bin in the middle of the crowded airport, of course. Which is safe because the chemicals are perfectly safe to handle… er… unless they’re mixed together… ah.

 

Airport shock horror: cui bono?
An interesting blow-by-blow account of the politics of terror, which also alerted us to the story above. The Daily Kos puts it even more succinctly with their article Give the Republican National Committee $500 or Terrorists Will Attack You.

 

UK finally admits it’s in Europe and under threat
Actually this might just be John Reid’s shaky grasp of geopolitics. Let’s face it, when he says the EU faces a “persistent and very real threat across Europe” from terrorism, he really means the UK. As the only European country actively involved in occupying Iraq as well as its role in Operation Keep Mohammed Down, the UK is seriously in a league of its own in the terror target stakes. The rest of Europe certainly doesn’t “face the same threat” and far from “standing shoulder to shoulder in [their] determination to fight it” the rest of the EU don’t even see eye to eye with the UK. The flights in the latest “plot” were bound only to the US, not Europe; and the flights were from only one European country: the UK. Extra comedy gained from his characterisation of the terrorist threat which could equally be talking about TWOT™: “unconstrained in its evil intention, and given the means of destruction on a massive scale which is available through modern technology and biological, chemical and other means is virtually unconstrained in its capacity and its ability to do immense harm, death and destruction.” Shock and Awe in a nutshell.

 

Israel: evil or incompetent?
Whilst the standard US political arguments on Lebanon run along the “Hizbollah deliberately target civilians therefore they are terrorists, whilst the Israelis do their level best to avoid civilian casualties thus they are the good guys” line, the body count tells an entirely different story:
Lebanese deaths: 1,071 (Lebanese govt) 900-1,150 (news agencies)
Hizbollah deaths: 65 (Hizbollah) 180-530 (IDF)
Israeli deaths: Soldiers: 114 (IDF) Civilians: 43 (IDF).
Which leaves us with these two stark choices:
1) Israel’s armed forces do not deliberately target civilians but are hugely, almost farcically incompetent at aiming; or
2) Israel’s armed forces deliberately target civilians and are terrorists.

 

Threat levels: security forecasting for terrorists
Having just finished Greg Palast’s excellent Armed Madhouse, watching all the threat level nonsense in the US and UK gains extra irony. Palast had the obvious-once-you’ve-heard-it pointed out to him about threat levels by an Israeli spook: they are fearmongering that is only useful if you’re a terrorist trying to work out your chances of success on any given day. No one else checks, and even if they check, they don’t alter their plans. After all, almost no one is going to cancel a business trip or a holiday because the threat level is high. However, a terrorist might hold off til the threat level goes down.

 

Dahr Jamail on Lebanon
“I care about my people, my country, and defending them from the Zionist aggression,” said a Hizbollah fighter after I’d asked him why he joined the group. I found myself in downtown Beirut sitting in the backseat of his car in the liquid heat of a Lebanese summer. Sweat rolled down my nose and dripped on my notepad as I jotted furiously.
Dahr Jamail paints an entirely different picture of the war from the mainstream media, read more here.

 

Eco disaster hidden by war
Finally with the war over, the Israeli-induced Exxon Valdez spill of the Mediterranean can be dealt with. It’s probably too late to do much though. If there’s any justice in the world the slick heads South.

 

Adbust IT Final Solutions from IBM
It wasn’t just IG Farben and Prescott Bush that profited from the Nazi-run genocide. IBM made a rather unsightly penny from Nazi Germany by the sale of its punch card systems, used to make possible the Holocaust and help liquidate Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and anyone else the Nazis didn’t like.

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 is Greenland’s ice sheet melting at a rate of 239 cubic kilometres per year, three times faster than the last measurement in 2004?