Ain’t Capitalism Grand? Part 563- The Scent of Love

Like an alien anthropologist presenting artefacts left over from the dead Earth, I give you:-

Ironing Water
each 49p (1 litre, 49p per litre)
Simply pour some of this fragrant solution into your steam-iron’s water compartment and your laundry will smell fresher and sweeter.
Push/pull closure Available in: Meadow Fresh, Spring Fresh, Summer Breeze

I think this is a distant cousin of the tendency to gas ourselves in our own homes and pay for the privilege. Look, your clothes are clean, if you use tablets or pouches of soap powder you already have been made to use too much detergent so they reek of fake perfume anyway. How much more chemical crap do you want next to your skin? How offensive is the smell of humanity? Why is it better for a person to smell like (allegedly) a meadow or spring/summer ‘fresh’ romanticised pastoral idyll probably from some misconception inspired by asinine costume dramas? And if you really, really needed to scent the water in your frickin’ steam iron, do it your fucking self and let’s not burden the world with more useless consumer crap.

And, well this one speaks for itself, happy valentines day!

I’m so tempted to join as a glamorous young nymph and see what happens! First one to scam a grand wins the TenPercent Robin Hood challenge!

Boeing’s Torture Airways Protected From Justice By CIA

(Reuters) – A federal judge, saying the case involved a state secret, dismissed a lawsuit on Wednesday against a unit of Boeing Co that charged the firm helped fly terrorism suspects abroad to secret prisons. The American Civil Liberties Union filed a complaint in May accusing Jeppesen Dataplan Inc of providing flight and logistical support to the U.S. government with at least 15 aircraft on 70 “extraordinary-rendition” flights.

“In sum, at the core of plaintiffs’ case against Defendant Jeppesen are ‘allegations’ of covert U.S. military or CIA operations in foreign countries against foreign nationals – clearly a subject matter which is a state secret,” Judge James Ware wrote in a ruling issued on Wednesday evening.

The government argued the case should be dismissed because they could not confirm details of the operations. Those details “include whether any private entities or other countries assisted the CIA in conducting the program; the dates and locations of any detentions and interrogations; the methods of interrogation employed in the program; and the names of any individuals detained and interrogated by the CIA (other than fifteen individuals whose identities have been divulged so that they can be brought to trial),” the U.S. government said in its filing last year.

The judge mentioned he had reviewed a classified declaration from Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, in its assessment of the case. “The Court’s review of General Hayden’s public and classified declarations confirm that proceeding with this case would jeopardize national security and foreign relations and that no protective procedure can salvage this case,” Ware wrote.

‘could not’? Would not. Much like the telecoms immunity the government and corporations act together to protect each other in their ongoing war of terror, gaining control and profit. If only there were a word for that…Of course the courts are complicit in this, so justice might need to find extra judicial avenues to express itself in the widening gyre.

Burmese KNU Resistance Leader Assassinated

Karen National Union secretary-general Pado Manh Sha has been assassinated by two unknown men, according to early reports. At around 4.30pm today, two unidentified men entered Pado Manh Sha’s house in Mae Sot, Thailand and shot him twice in the chest. The men then left the scene in a vehicle.

The only eye witness, a Karen girl, said, “Two men climbed the stairs of his home and said ‘good evening’ (in Karen language) to Mahn Sha. Then they shot him twice in the left side of his chest. He died immediately.” The two men arrived in front of the house in a black car, while the other people were downstairs.

 (Reuters) – A leader of Myanmar’s biggest rebel group was shot dead at his home in a Thai border town on Thursday in an assassination immediately blamed on troops loyal to the former Burma’s military junta. Mahn Sha Lar Phan, secretary-general of the Karen National Union (KNU), was shot at his two-storey wooden home by two men who arrived in a pickup truck, his neighbour Kim Suay told Reuters at the scene. He died instantly.

“One of them walked up to the house and said in Karen ‘How are you, uncle?’ Then the other man joined him after parking the truck and they both shot him with two pistols,” she said, her voice shaking with emotion. In an interview with Reuters on Monday, he had predicted a possible increase in violence ahead of a constitutional referendum in the former Burma in May.

However, the KNU and its armed wing, the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), are riven by internal feuds and lethal vendettas. His son Hse Hse, another senior member of the predominantly Christian Karen rebel movement, blamed a Buddhist Karen splinter group which brokered a truce with the Myanmar junta in the mid-1990s.

“This is the work of the DKBA and the Burmese soldiers,”” Hse Hse said, referring to the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army. The Irrawaddy, an exile-run magazine based in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, said there had been several recent attacks and assassination attempts between mainstream KNU members and the breakaway 7th Brigade led by Htain Maung, which agreed a ceasefire with the junta last year.

“Last month, Colonel Ler Moo, the son-in-law of breakaway leader Htain Maung, was killed in a bomb attack while sleeping at a communications office near the group’s headquarters,” the magazine said on its Web site http://www.irrawaddy.org. The Karen have been fighting for independence in the hills of eastern Myanmar for the last 60 years, one of the world’s longest-running insurgencies. Thai police said they had the registration number of the truck and were setting up roadblocks around Mae Sot, a “wild west” frontier town of refugees, illegal migrants and gem dealers, to try to catch the two killers.

War Criminal Endorses Clinton

Via Lenin. Here is the Clinton campaign’s ad.

 one can’t help wondering why it took so long for the news media to begin asking questions about the Vietnam war record of Bob Kerrey. The Medal of Honor winner was elected governor of Nebraska in 1982, won a Senate seat in 1988, ran for president in 1992 and considered a second run in 2000. Yet the public did not learn until April 2001 that a dozen or more Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of then Lt. Kerrey’s seven-man Navy SEAL commando unit during a raid on a suspected Vietcong gathering.

The story, unearthed by reporter Gregory L. Vistica and published in The New York Times Magazine, was disturbing. (A version also was broadcast on 60 Min– utes II.) The magazine quoted one member of Kerrey’s SEAL team, Gerhard Klann, saying Kerrey had ordered and participated in a massacre of more than a dozen men, women, and children (including an infant) on February 25, 1969, in the hamlet of Thanh Phong. 60 Minutes II and other news outlets quoted Vietnamese villagers who also asserted the killings had been deliberate.

By contrast Kerrey and five other members of the team said the civilians had been killed accidentally in cross fire when an unseen enemy began shooting. In an apparent bid to limit damage to his reputation, Kerrey gave his version in a speech and TV appearances before Vistica’s story ran. Kerrey was, however, unable to explain why the dead civilians were found grouped together — as if they had been rounded up and shot.

Those killings were preceded by a separate, equally controversial incident. According to Klann, the SEALs stumbled across three children, an old woman, and an old man in an outlying hut and silenced them with knives. He said the old man struggled and Kerrey held him down so that Klann could finish him off. According to Kerrey, he did not order or participate in any such killings and did not see these civilians die. At the same time, however, Kerrey acknowledged that “Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with …. Kill the people we made contact with or we have to abort the mission,” he told Vistica. It is unlawful to kill civilians even if letting them live might jeopardize the mission, according to a section of the Army Field Manual that Vistica quotes.

Remember, it’s only terrorism when the enemy does it, when we do it- that’s heroism.

Tasers: Children Stunned By Encroaching Police State

Via RawStory–

Police have been given the go-ahead to use Taser stun guns against children. The relaxing of restrictions on the use of the weapons comes despite warnings that they could trigger a heart attack in youngsters…they can now be used against all potentially violent offenders even if they are unarmed.

It is the decision not to ban their use against minors that is likely to raise serious concerns. Home Office Police Minister Tony McNulty said medical assessments had confirmed the risk of death or serious injury from Tasers was “low”.

But he failed to mention Government advisers had also warned of a potential risk to children. The Defence Scientific Advisory Council medical committee told the Home Office that not enough was known about the health risks of using the weapons against children. The committee, which is made up of independent scientists and doctors, said that limited research suggested there was a risk children could suffer “a serious cardiac event”.

It recommended that officers should be “particularly vigilant” for any Taser-induced adverse response and said guidance should be amended to “identify children and adults of small stature” as being at potentially greater risk from the cardiac effects of Tasers. The Government scientists were also asked to test whether the weapons could cause a miscarriage if used on a pregnant woman.

While not saying whether police would be allowed to Taser an expectant mother, the Home Office said the DSAC committee had “specifically asked” for computer simulations to be carried out to analyse the effect on “a pregnant female”.

Now call me a troublemaker, but tell the anti-abortion mob about the expectant mother issue, hell any ally in pushing back this assault by authoritarians. Oh and to call the Defence Scientific Advisory Council ‘independent’ is some new hitherto unknown definition of ‘independent’ that someone should call the OED about (cross reference with the IPCC).