Beware of Global Strategies of Tension

Balancing power with an informed, active, pragmatic citizenry is key to thwarting neo-imperialism in all its forms. 
an editorial by Tony Cartalucci

May 15, 2012 – As the financial oligarchs of the West push forward in their year-long global geopolitical reordering of North Africa, the Middle East, Central and Southeast Asia, the globe is being divided into two primary camps. Those behind the West, or the “Washington-London consensus,” and those behind what might be described as a combination of the BRICS nations and the Shanghai Cooperative Organisation (SCO). Ideally, what the countervailing forces against the West claim to represent is a multipolar world order built upon mutual benefit and solidarity, preserving the traditional concept of the nation-state rather than one of neo-imperial domination and supranational-consolidation under a one-world financier oligarchy.

However, the people of the world in general must recognize corruption, monopolies, and imperialism in all of its forms, regardless of what flag is being flown and be ever vigilant against these dangers. While geopolitical analysts today may consider BRICS and the SCO as essential for maintaining a multipolar balance of power against the West, the risk of a strategy of tension creating increasingly centralized supranational blocs “facing off against each other” may leave whomever prevails with the capacity to carry out global despotism on an even grander scale.

Image: A Russian nuclear missile. It was mutually assured destruction – the ultimate balance of power – that prevented catastrophic war from breaking out between East and West. Balancing power, offering deterrence against aggression and exploitation has been the study of tacticians for thousands of years and is a subject the global elite are well versed in. The masses must also familiarize themselves with such concepts and formulate their own means of balancing power locally and nationally to keep in check powers both foreign and domestic that seek domination through exploiting economic, social, and tactical disparity. (source: Wikipedia)

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Worldwide, people must begin identifying national and international special interests, and rejecting them all entirely. They must begin devising local alternatives by leveraging technology and collaboration where possible, and realizing that nationalism, localism, and borders in general represent indispensable protective bulkheads with which to stop the spread of abuse of power, exploitation, military aggression, corruption of all kinds, and both social and financial dysfunction.

Like a fleet of compartmentalized ships, a world of nation-states is able to cooperate, communicate, and collaborate efficiently, “traveling together” when desired, but maintains the option of changing course to avoid collisions, and “sealing off” sections internally to prevent a single hole from compromising an entire vessel. Global cooperation, communication, and collaboration does not require “globalization” and foolish interdependencies that leave all nations vulnerable and at risk when any single point falters or if globalization’s centralized institutions become corrupted. We need not pick between “isolationism” and “globalization,” we can meet in the middle and enjoy the benefits of both, afforded to us by the modern nation-state and traditional diplomacy, while hedging against the risks each option represents individually.

An Informed, Active, & Vigilant Citizenry Is Needed 

The world must perform a careful balancing act to ensure Western financier oligarchy is kept in check, or ideally rolled back, while ensuring in our haste or zeal we do not create its replacement in the process. An international, multipolar balance of power requires that each nation-state acquires, maintains, and continuously expands a certain degree of independence in terms of economics and defense. Within a nation and its provinces, to achieve such balance, a certain degree of independence amongst individuals and their communities is required. To enhance individual and local independence, we can do everything from being responsible firearms owners, growing a garden, patronizing local businesses and industry, learning a trade, and simply learning how to organize and work with our neighbors to solve our own problems.

While we are faced with immense, overwhelming global problems stemming from monolithic powers – these powers are fed by each and every one of us individually when we pay into multinational corporations and their contrived institutions, laws, and regulations. If our collective actions can create and compound these problems, surely they can solve them.

It is disparity that is used to sell globalization; disparity in climate, in the resources present within one’s borders, of the quality and education of one’s work force, and the disparity between nations in their ability to defend themselves. These are all factors that govern the form globalization takes, including all of its supposed benefits and the serial exploitation it leaves behind. We are told that globalization’s interdependent relationships governed by centralized international institutions are the keys to solving these disparities. This is not true.

Policy never has and never will solve our problems as a species. Instead, it is through technological research and development, innovation and invention, investment in defense, infrastructure, and education that these disparities can truly be reduced or all together eliminated, creating stronger communities and in-turn a stronger nation-state while deterring aggression and exploitation at our borders. Trade and collaboration with one’s neighbors becomes a supplement to a strong independent nation, not a necessity and certainly not a liability in a time of crisis.

We must ask our elected representatives why these obvious measures are not being taken to address these disparities. Why are we exploiting poorly educated workforces for cheap labor instead of leveraging technology and education to create the same products domestically, better and cheaper? Why are we importing certain goods instead of devising ways to produce them locally? Why are we struggling for fuel abroad instead of making a serious effort to develop alternatives at home? The questions could go on ad infinitum and illustrate just how globalization has been sold as a ready-made solution to artificially created and/or perpetuated problems. It also illustrates the necessity for regular people to boycott the corporations and institutions perpetuating such flawed policy, and devise solutions themselves. 

 

Photo: Neil Gershenfeld of MIT’s “Fab Lab” project seeks to provide modern manufacturing technology to people around the world to solve local problems with local, technological solutions. Fab Labs and “maker spaces” are turning up in communities around the world, literally putting the means of production into the masses’ hands, and are a good place to start for people interested in organizing locally, sharing knowledge, and collaborating on projects that leverage technology to the benefit of everyone. Balancing power need not involve weapons of mass destruction or violent uprisings – an informed, educated, technically competent self-sufficient population starves the forces of parasitic elitism out of existence.

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It is essential to examine the state of modern technology today, from communication and education, to manufacturing technology, to see what can be leveraged by people on a local level so that communities can not only devise their own programs to address their problems, but so that they can begin implementing solutions on their as well. As communities grow stronger, their ability to influence pragmatic positive change provincially and nationally will increase and a balance of power may be struck.

Demanding change from a position of weakness, without even the means of sustaining one’s existence without the very corporations, institutions, and governments change is being demanded from, is strategically untenable. Individuals and local communities must build-up their capacity in terms of education, economics, politics, and their ability to provide for themselves adequate order and security (through effective Constitutional sheriffs for instance). Only then will the people possess a sufficient deterrence against exploitation, as well as possess the leverage needed to make demands or simply achieve on their own what they desire.

Conclusion

There is already the European Union and the African Union. There exists an informal North American Union and a transatlantic partnership. The excuse of a rising China has spurred Southeast Asia into forming the ill-advised ASEAN bloc, complete with European Union-style institutions, ready to fail just as spectacularly both politically and economically. Even the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation comes with it the potential of consolidating the “other side” of the world into a growing supranational bloc.

People must inform themselves of the differences between international cooperation, and recklessly lashing their ships together while gutting the watertight compartments within their own hulls. Generally, such self-defeating exercises are coordinated by piratical elements who find such consolidation and the removal of obstructions convenient for subsequent plundering – as the banks in America and Europe are currently doing to Western nation-states.

Recent tensions with Russia herald the rise of not individual superpowers this time, but the rise of “superpower blocs.” We must ensure we do not fall for a strategy of tension that leaves us all at the mercy of a terribly powerful, supranationally-consolidated victor, be it East or West. Alliances that pose as anti-fascism or anti-imperialism must make the appropriate assurances that a multipolar world order will prevail, strengthening the nation-state and the individual, not undermining them.

Simultaneously, we as individuals must be resolved to taking our fates into our own hands, taking back the responsibilities demanded of a free citizenry that we have long ago traded in for the convenience offered by monopolies of all kinds. It has been our collective negligence that has led to a world of such disparities – it must be our collective resolve that rectifies them.

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For more information on solutions, please visit the Land Destroyer Report’s “Solutions” archives.

Minnesota police accused of giving out pot to watch behavior

MINNEAPOLIS (Reuters) – A Minnesota training program that teaches police how to identify drug-impaired drivers is under fire following allegations that a participating officer gave marijuana to a test volunteer.

The allegation, leveled by another officer in the program, followed reports from anti-Wall Street demonstrators that police plucked Occupy Minneapolis members from a plaza in downtown Minneapolis for the training, gave them marijuana and watched them use drugs.

Minnesota has launched criminal and internal public safety investigations into the single allegation and suspended the program, in which officers use citizens off the street as test subjects. There are similar programs in 48 states.

Authorities have not directly connected the Occupy allegations to the investigation, but have said officers identified test subjects at the plaza where Occupy has been meeting as well as other locations.

Forest Olivier, an Occupy protester, testified at a Minneapolis City Council committee hearing on May 2 that he went with police to a training site voluntarily several times.

“They gave me a full bag of weed and they gave me a pipe to smoke it out of,” Olivier told the hearing.

A 35-minute video produced by Minnesota independent media groups, including Twin Cities IndyMedia and Occupy Minneapolis, and released this month showed uniformed officers picking up and dropping off young adults from the plaza in marked squad cars.

Occupy demonstrators interviewed on the video, including Olivier, said they were given drugs and then observed by dozens of officers. No officers are shown offering people drugs.

In one exchange, a protester tells an officer that other police had given him drugs, and the officer responds that he was only looking for people who are already impaired.

Minnesota public safety spokesman Bruce Gordon said: “If additional information becomes available we will widen the scope of the investigation.”

Public Safety Commissioner Mona Dohman suspended the program on May 9 “pending the outcome of these investigations and until we revisit and review the curriculum of the program.”

The program trains officers to act as drug recognition evaluators through classes and a dozen evaluations using volunteers from the community.

The investigation was launched after an officer who participated in the training reported witnessing a Hutchinson, Minnesota, police officer give marijuana to a potential test subject. Hutchinson Police Chief Dan Hatten said on Monday that the officer remains on scheduled duty.

FBI may charge George Zimmerman with hate crime

SANFORD, Fla. —

VIDEO: U.S. Army soldier brutally beaten in Fla by Black Teens

Tampa, Florida — Police want your help finding four men who teamed up to beat a young U.S. Army soldier in a South Tampa street.

It was an awful welcome to Tampa Bay for a young soldier. Police say the victim of a violent beating caught on camera is 24 years old and has lived in Tampa for less than a month.

He’s a U.S. Army soldier assigned to MacDill Air Force Base and lives not far from the base at Dale Mabry Hwy. and Interbay Blvd.

Police say Sunday morning, at around 3 a.m., the soldier’s car broke down a few miles from home along Westshore Blvd.

The attack came when he was walking home and using Iowa St. to get from Westshore to Dale Mabry. At the intersection of Iowa and Renellie Dr., the man came into the view of a neighbor’s motion-activated security camera.

A group of three young men is seen walking ahead of the soldier. Police say one of the men in the group doubled back and asked to soldier to borrow a dollar. When the soldier reached for his wallet, the first punch flew.

The first, tremendous sucker punch laid the victim onto the ground. The other two men joined in, punching and kicking the soldier.

A fourth man comes sprinting into view from the left edge of the video. The new attacker — a man the soldier said he had walked past earlier — joined in the beating.

Tampa Police officers say the crooks stole the soldier’s wallet and cell phone, then took off south on Renellie Dr. When he eventually got to his feet, the victim had to knock on doors to find someone to help him call 911.

The soldier was taken to Tampa General Hospital with cuts and bruises on his face and head. Police say he is expected to make a full recovery.

Police say they haven’t gotten many useful details about the suspects from the video.

The victim was not able to tell police much more: they’re all in their late teens to early 20′s. Two were black men with an average build, police said. One attacker was possibly Hispanic, also with an average build. The fourth man was also black, but with a heavier build.

Police are hoping someone knows about this brutal beating and will call Tampa Police at 813-354-6600 to help them find the attackers.

Grayson Kamm, 10 News

Iran Executes Accused Israeli Spy

Press TV, a satellite broadcaster, identified the man as Majid Jamali Fashi and said he had been convicted of killing the scientist, Masoud Ali Mohammadi, in January 2010. Mr. Mohammadi was a 50-year-old professor at Tehran University whose role in Tehran’s nuclear program was unclear. At the time of his death, Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said he had no role in the nuclear program.

The case seemed to be part of a shadow war played out between Iran and Israel, which has shown growing impatience with Western efforts to employ diplomacy and sanctions in the enduring crisis over Tehran’s nuclear program. Iran says the program is for peaceful purposes, but Western leaders suspect that Tehran is seeking the capability to build a weapon.

At the time of Mr. Mohammadi’s killing, state media in Iran reported that a remote-controlled bomb attached to a motorcycle went off outside his home in north Tehran. Iran blamed the United States and Israel for the attack. A State Department spokesman in Washington dismissed the accusation of United States involvement as “absurd.”

Press TV said Mr. Fashi had been executed at Tehran’s Evin prison. He had also been found guilty of “receiving training from Mossad” — the Israeli spy agency — inside Israel and of being given $120,000 to assassinate the Iranian scientist. He had also confessed to using forged documents, received in Azerbaijan, to travel to Tel Aviv, the broadcaster said.

The Iranian state news agency accused Mr. Fashi of traveling abroad “on several occasions” to be trained.

The killing was one of several apparently aimed at Iranians associated with nuclear research. The latest came in January when Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, 32, who was deputy director of the Natanz uranium enrichment plant, was killed on his way to work in rush-hour traffic in Tehran.

While Israel generally declines comment on such assassinations, Iran routinely blames Israeli agents for seeking to derail its nuclear program.

Iranian news accounts said that a motorcyclist slapped a magnetized bomb on Mr. Roshan’s car, killing him and mortally wounding his driver and bodyguard, identified as Reza Qashaqei.

The execution of Mr. Fashi came weeks after Iran’s state media announced that 15 people, including Iranians and unspecified foreigners, had been arrested in connection with what the country’s Intelligence Ministry described as a “Zionist-regime-linked” plot to assassinate one of its “specialists.”

The report by the state broadcaster IRIB also said Iran’s intelligence services had uncovered an Israeli spy base in a neighboring country, without elaborating.

The execution also coincided with talks in Vienna between Iranian envoys and officials from the International Atomic Energy Agency to discuss the agency’s desire to inspect facilities that it suspects have been used to test explosives capable of detonating a nuclear charge, which Iran denies.

The talks, set to continue Tuesday, however, are also seen as an informal precursor to talks scheduled this month in Baghdad, between Iran, the United States and other nations.

TSA Agents Conduct ‘Full Monty’ Pat-Down On Henry Kissinger

Finally the TSA Goons find a REAL Terrorist – and let him go…

 

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger speaks to introduce China’s Vice President Xi Jinping to leaders from the private and public sectors at a luncheon co-hosted by the US-China Business Council and the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations with the support of several cooperating organizations in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 15, 2012. (credit: JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

NEW YORK (CBSDC) — Even a Nobel Peace Prize winner can’t avoid a pat-down.

Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got searched by a Transportation Security Administration employee while going through a security checkpoint at LaGuardia Airport in New York Friday, The Washington Post reports.

Kissinger, who was in a wheelchair, was told by a TSA agent that he needed to be searched.

“He stood with his suit jacket off, and he was wearing suspenders,” freelance reporter Matthew Cole told the Post. “They gave him the full pat-down. None of the agents seemed to know who he was.” Cole added that Kissinger was given “the full Monty” search.

Kissinger negotiated the Paris Peace Accords which helped bring an end to the Vietnam War.

Earlier this year, Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., was detained at a Nashville airport after refusing to be searched by TSA officials.

Colonized by Corporations

Illustration by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

VIA Op Ed News

In Robert E. Gamer’s book “The Developing Nations” is a chapter called “Why Men Do Not Revolt.” In it Gamer notes that although the oppressed often do revolt, the object of their hostility is misplaced. They vent their fury on a political puppet, someone who masks colonial power, a despised racial or ethnic group or an apostate within their own political class. The useless battles serve as an effective mask for what Gamer calls the “patron-client” networks that are responsible for the continuity of colonial oppression. The squabbles among the oppressed, the political campaigns between candidates who each are servants of colonial power, Gamer writes, absolve the actual centers of power from addressing the conditions that cause the frustrations of the people. Inequities, political disenfranchisement and injustices are never seriously addressed. “The government merely does the minimum necessary to prevent those few who are prone toward political action from organizing into politically effective groups,” he writes.

Gamer and many others who study the nature of colonial rule offer the best insights into the functioning of our corporate state. We have been, like nations on the periphery of empire, colonized. We are controlled by tiny corporate entities that have no loyalty to the nation and indeed in the language of traditional patriotism are traitors. They strip us of our resources, keep us politically passive and enrich themselves at our expense. The mechanisms of control are familiar to those whom the Martinique-born French psychiatrist and writer Frantz Fanon called “the wretched of the earth,” including African-Americans. The colonized are denied job security. Incomes are reduced to subsistence level. The poor are plunged into desperation. Mass movements, such as labor unions, are dismantled. The school system is degraded so only the elites have access to a superior education. Laws are written to legalize corporate plunder and abuse, as well as criminalize dissent. And the ensuing fear and instability — keenly felt this past weekend by the more than 200,000 Americans who lost their unemployment benefits — ensure political passivity by diverting all personal energy toward survival. It is an old, old game.

A change of power does not require the election of a Mitt Romney or a Barack Obama or a Democratic majority in Congress, or an attempt to reform the system or electing progressive candidates, but rather a destruction of corporate domination of the political process — Gamer’s “patron-client” networks. It requires the establishment of new mechanisms of governance to distribute wealth and protect resources, to curtail corporate power, to cope with the destruction of the ecosystem and to foster the common good. But we must first recognize ourselves as colonial subjects. We must accept that we have no effective voice in the way we are governed. We must accept the hollowness of electoral politics, the futility of our political theater, and we must destroy the corporate structure itself.

The danger the corporate state faces does not come from the poor. The poor, those Karl Marx dismissed as the Lumpenproletariat, do not mount revolutions, although they join them and often become cannon fodder. The real danger to the elite comes from declasse intellectuals, those educated middle-class men and women who are barred by a calcified system from advancement. Artists without studios or theaters, teachers without classrooms, lawyers without clients, doctors without patients and journalists without newspapers descend economically. They become, as they mingle with the underclass, a bridge between the worlds of the elite and the oppressed. And they are the dynamite that triggers revolt.

This is why the Occupy movement frightens the corporate elite. What fosters revolution is not misery, but the gap between what people expect from their lives and what is offered. This is especially acute among the educated and the talented. They feel, with much justification, that they have been denied what they deserve. They set out to rectify this injustice. And the longer the injustice festers, the more radical they become.

The response of a dying regime — and our corporate regime is dying — is to employ increasing levels of force, and to foolishly refuse to ameliorate the chronic joblessness, foreclosures, mounting student debt, lack of medical insurance and exclusion from the centers of power. Revolutions are fueled by an inept and distant ruling class that perpetuates political paralysis. This ensures its eventual death.

In every revolutionary movement I covered in Latin America, Africa and the Middle East, the leadership emerged from declasse intellectuals. The leaders were usually young or middle-aged, educated and always unable to meet their professional and personal aspirations. They were never part of the power elite, although often their parents had been. They were conversant in the language of power as well as the language of oppression. It is the presence of large numbers of declasse intellectuals that makes the uprisings in Spain, Egypt, Greece and finally the United States threatening to the overlords at Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and JPMorgan Chase. They must face down opponents who understand, in a way the uneducated often do not, the lies disseminated on behalf of corporations by the public relations industry. These declasse intellectuals, because they are conversant in economics and political theory, grasp that those who hold power, real power, are not the elected mandarins in Washington but the criminal class on Wall Street.

This is what made Malcolm X so threatening to the white power structure. He refused to countenance Martin Luther King’s fiction that white power and white liberals would ever lift black people out of economic squalor. King belatedly came to share Malcolm’s view. Malcolm X named the enemy. He exposed the lies. And until we see the corporate state, and the games it is playing with us, with the same kind of clarity, we will be nothing more than useful idiots.

“This is an era of hypocrisy,” Malcolm X said. “When white folks pretend that they want Negroes to be free, and Negroes pretend to white folks that they really believe that white folks want ‘em to be free, it’s an era of hypocrisy, brother. You fool me and I fool you. You pretend that you’re my brother and I pretend that I really believe you believe you’re my brother.”

Those within a demoralized ruling elite, like characters in a Chekhov play, increasingly understand that the system that enriches and empowers them is corrupt and decayed. They become cynical. They do not govern effectively. They retreat into hedonism. They no longer believe their own rhetoric. They devote their energies to stealing and exploiting as much, as fast, as possible. They pillage their own institutions, as we have seen with the newly disclosed loss of $2 billion within JPMorgan Chase, the meltdown of Chesapeake Energy Corp. or the collapse of Enron and Lehman Brothers. The elites become cannibals. They consume each other. This is what happens in the latter stages of all dying regimes. Louis XIV pillaged his own nobility by revoking patents of nobility and reselling them. It is what most corporations do to their shareholders. A dying ruling class, in short, no longer acts to preserve its own longevity. It becomes fashionable, even in the rarefied circles of the elite, to ridicule and laugh at the political puppets that are the public face of the corporate state.

“Ideas that have outlived their day may hobble about the world for years,” Alexander Herzen wrote, “but it is hard for them ever to lead and dominate life. Such ideas never gain complete possession of a man, or they gain possession only of incomplete people.”

This loss of faith means that when it comes time to use force, the elites employ it haphazardly and inefficiently, in large part because they are unsure of the loyalty of the foot soldiers on the streets charged with carrying out repression.

Revolutions take time. The American Revolution began with protests against the Stamp Act of 1765 but did not erupt until a decade later. The 1917 revolution in Russia started with a dress rehearsal in 1905. The most effective revolutions, including the Russian Revolution, have been largely nonviolent. There are always violent radicals who carry out bombings and assassinations, but they hinder, especially in the early stages, more than help revolutions. The anarchist Peter Kropotkin during the Russian Revolution condemned the radical terrorists, asserting that they only demoralized and frightened away the movement’s followers and discredited authentic anarchism.

Radical violent groups cling like parasites to popular protests. The Black Panthers, the American Indian Movement, the Weather Underground, the Red Brigades and the Symbionese Liberation Army arose in the ferment of the 1960s. Violent radicals are used by the state to justify harsh repression. They scare the mainstream from the movement. They thwart the goal of all revolutions, which is to turn the majority against an isolated and discredited ruling class. These violent fringe groups are seductive to those who yearn for personal empowerment through hyper-masculinity and violence, but they do little to advance the cause. The primary role of radical extremists, such as Maximilien Robespierre and Vladimir Lenin, is to hijack successful revolutions. They unleash a reign of terror, primarily against fellow revolutionaries, which often outdoes the repression of the old regime. They often do not play much of a role in building a revolution.

READ THE REST HERE

SRM (State Run Media) Declares Ron Paul out of the Race? Its Not True (technically)

Just watched Fox and Shep Smith “report” that Ron Paul suspended his Campaign. Drudge has a picture of Paul with a blazing headline that reads “Paul out.” This really isn’t true because Paul is not suspending his campaign. The Paul team simply announced that they are not going to spend money on the remaining primaries (or states that have voted), but will focus on delegates instead. Reason offered – lack of funds…

From the Paul Campaign today:

Brave New World: Devil’s Breath Drug (Via Columbia) Erases memory and Free Will

The most dangerous drug in the world: ‘Devil’s Breath’ chemical from Colombia can block free will, wipe memory and even kill

• Scopolamine often blown into faces of victims or added to drinks
• Within minutes, victims are like ‘zombies’ – coherent, but with no free will
• Some victims report emptying bank accounts to robbers or helping them pillage own house
• Drug is made from borrachero tree, which is common in Colombia

Daily Mail

A hazardous drug that eliminates free will and can wipe the memory of its victims is currently being dealt on the streets of Colombia.

The drug is called scopolamine, but is colloquially known as ‘The Devil’s Breath,’ and is derived from a particular type of tree common to South America.

Stories surrounding the drug are the stuff of urban legends, with some telling horror stories of how people were raped, forced to empty their bank accounts, and even coerced into giving up an organ.

Scroll down for video

 

Danger: ‘The Devil’s Breath’ is such a powerful drug that it can remove the capacity for free will

 

Deadly drug: Scopolamine is made from the Borrachero tree, which blooms with deceptively beautiful white and yellow flowers

VICE’s Ryan Duffy travelled to the country to find out more about the powerful drug. In two segments, he revealed the shocking culture of another Colombian drug world, interviewing those who deal the drug and those who have fallen victim to it.

Demencia Black, a drug dealer in the capital of Bogota, said the drug is frightening for the simplicity in which it can be administered.

‘You can guide them wherever you want,’ he explained. ‘It’s like they’re a child.’

Black said that one gram of Scopolamine is similar to a gram of cocaine, but later called it ‘worse than anthrax.’

In high doses, it is lethal.

 

It only takes a moment: One drug dealer in Bogota explained how victims are drugged within minutes of exposure

 

Victims: One Colombian woman said that under the influence of scopolamine, she led a man to her house and helped him ransack it

The drug, he said, turns people into complete zombies and blocks memories from forming. So even after the drug wears off, victims have no recollection as to what happened.

One victim told Vice that a man approached her on the street asking her for directions. Since it was close by, she helped take the man to his destination, and they drank juice together.

She took the man to her house and helped him gather all of her belongings, including her boyfriend’s cameras and savings.

‘It is painful to have lost money,’ the woman said,’ but I was actually quite lucky.’

According to the British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, the drug – also known as hyoscine – causes the same level of memory loss as diazepam.

In ancient times, the drug was given to the mistresses of dead Colombian leaders – they were told to enter their master’s grave, where they were buried alive.

 

Devil’s Breath: The drug is odourless and tasteless and can simply be blown in the face of someone on the street; their free will vanishes after being exposed to it

 

Dangerous: Vice’s Ryan Duffy traveled to the capital of Bogota to find out more about the drug

In modern times, the CIA used the drug as part of Cold War interrogations, with the hope of using it like a truth serum.

However, because of the drug’s chemical makeup, it also induces powerful hallucinations.

The tree common around Colombia, and is called the ‘borrachero’ tree – loosely translated as the ‘get-you-drunk’ tree.

It is said that Colombian mothers warn their children not to fall asleep under the tree, though the leafy green canopies and large yellow and white flowers seem appealing.

Experts are baffled as to why Colombia is riddled with scopolamine-related crimes, but wager much of it has to do with the country’s torn drug-culture past, and on-going civil war.

Watch video here: WARNING: CONTENT MAY BE UNSUITABLE FOR SOME READERS

Stop and Frisk policy turns NYC into 5th amendment free zone

Opponents of the New York Police Department 's "stop, question and frisk" policy march through the Bronx on January 27

New York (CNN) — New York police on Sunday touted the impact of their much-criticized “stop, question and frisk” policy, claiming it has contributed to a spike in the number of firearms confiscated and coincided with what is shaping up to be a historically low murder rate.

Comparing numbers from the first three months of 2012 to the same period last year, the number of such stops increased 10% while the number of illicit guns taken away went up 31%, according to a New York Police Department statement from Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne.

Meanwhile, New York’s murder rate has plunged 21% year-to-date as of last Friday — meaning, if the current trend continues, the yearly number of murders in the city would be the lowest since such statistics first were recorded, as such, in 1963.

“New York City continues to be the safest big city in America, and one of the safest of any size, with significantly less crime per capita … than even small cities,” the department said.

Police cited Operation Impact and the “stop and frisk” policy as key reasons for the improving crime statistics. But the policy has been criticized sharply by some as grounds for racial profiling.

Donna Lieberman — executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which has described the practice as “unlawful and racially biased” — blasted the latest release of data, accusing the police department of trying to “massage the numbers to make this look like an effective and worthwhile program.”

“What (this policy) does is terrorize moms of color about the well-being of their sons, who have to navigate how to survive unwarranted intrusion into their activities by a police department for doing absolutely nothing wrong,” she said Sunday in a statement.

Added Darius Charney, senior staff attorney for the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, “It is mind-boggling that, after years of public outcry and in the face of strong evidence that stop-and-frisk violates people’s rights and does not make them safer, the NYPD has doubled down on this discriminatory and ineffective practice.”

Another critic, City Council member Jumaane Williams, earlier this year questioned how the policy affects the police department’s relations with minorities in the city.

“Communities are losing trust with the police, which is one of the biggest crime-fighting tools that we have,” Williams said.

Minorities are far more likely than whites to be questioned under New York’s program, according to police department statistics. Of those stopped and frisked — 93% of whom were males — 54% were African-American, 33% were Hispanic, 9% were white and 3% were Asian.

Yet the police department, including Commissioner Ray Kelly, has argued that the policy ends up disproportionately protecting those in minority communities. African-Americans and Hispanics made up 96% of all New York shooting victims and 90% of murder victims last year, police said. Therefore, a drop in such shootings citywide would logically equate to fewer minorities’ being killed.

New York police pointed out there were 124 murders this year in the city through April 29, compared with 158 in Chicago — which, with about 2.7 million people, has less than one-third of New York’s population.

Those figures couldn’t be clearly matched on the city of Chicago’s website. Official crime data from Chicago did note 120 homicides in that city through April 20, while the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye website recorded 169 homicides as of May 9.

“The continuing murder decline in New York is vindication of the NYPD’s policy of engagement, which includes Operation Impact, police stop and questioning and use of the Real Time Crime Center to get timely information into detectives’ hands as quickly as possible,” New York police said in their statement Sunday.

Civil liberties advocate Lieberman acknowledged progress regarding crime, but disputed the idea that this can be credited to “stop, question and frisk” — or that such trends aren’t evident elsewhere without such policies.

“Crime has gone down and stop-and-frisk has gone up, but that doesn’t meant that stop-and-frisk is (the) reason for reduction in crime. It’s gone down in almost every city in the last decade,” she said. “It’s time for (Mayor Mike Bloomberg) and Police Commissioner Kelly to treat people of color as if they were their own families.”

While 31% more firearms were recovered in the first quarter of 2012 compared to the same stretch one year prior, only 13% more weapons total were confiscated, according to police statistics. That is because most such seized weapons are knives, at about seven times the rate for guns.

The vast majority of those stopped, questioned and frisked walk free without punishment. According to data from 2012′s first three months, 5% of those ended up being arrested and another 5% were served summons. Both rates are slightly below those from the previous year.

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