US power 'to decline by 2025'

US economic and political power is set to decline over the next two decades and the world will grow more dangerous as the battle for scarce resources intensifies, a report by US intelligence agencies has predicted.

The current global financial crisis is the beginning of a weakening of the US dollar to the point where it becomes "first among equals", said the National Intelligence Council's (NIC) Global Trends 2025 report published on Thursday.

One of the main conclusions of the report is that "the unipolar world is over, [or] certainly will be by 2025", said Thomas Fingar, the NIC's deputy director, at a press conference in Washington DC.

China and India were likely to join the US at the top of a multipolar world and compete for influence, the report added.

Russia's future was less certain, but Iran, Turkey and Indonesia were also seen by the report as gaining power.

"The world of the near future will be subject to an increased likelihood of conflict over scarce resources, including food and water, and will be haunted by the persistence of rogue states and terrorist groups with greater access to nuclear weapons," said the report.

"Widening gaps in birth rates and wealth-to-poverty ratios, and the uneven impact of climate change, could further exacerbate tensions."

Nuclear risk

The reports are produced every five years and based on a global survey of experts by US intelligence analysts.

This year's was more pessimistic about US status than on previous occasions.

It also highlighted the risk of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East where a number of countries have considered developing or acquiring technologies that would be useful to make nuclear weapons.

"Over the next 15-20 years, reactions to the decisions Iran makes about its nuclear programme could cause a number of regional states to intensify these efforts and consider actively pursuing nuclear weapons," the report said.

It also said some African and South Asian states could wither away altogether and that criminal gangs could take over at least one state in central Europe.

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(via Information Clearing House)

Dershowitz: I helped keep Carter silent

Why didn't Jimmy Carter speak from the podium at the Democratic National Convention? Alan Dershowitz said he had something to do with it.

In an interview with Shalom TV, the Harvard Law School professor says he "pushed" Barack Obama "very hard to make that decision," Dershowitz said in an interview with Shalom TV. "Barack Obama had to make a choice between his Jewish supporters and his anti-Israel supporters like Jimmy Carter, and he did not choose Jimmy Carter. And that was an embarrassment for Jimmy Carter and a show of disrespect."

"It was a good decision, a wise decision, a moral decision," Dershowitz added.

Carter did appear in the convention hall after a video of the former prersident helping with Katrina relief was shown at the Denver gathering. But he did not make any remarks from the podium.

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The most dangerous drug in the world?

You decide.

From 'The Most Dangerous Drug in the World'

Scopolamine is a colorless, tasteless, odorless drug. It is also known as hyoscine and is classified as a tropane alkaloid. The drug can be obtained from plants in the Solanacea (nightshade) family. Most scopolamine comes from jimsome weed, or as in Columbia, borrachero trees. The plants it can be derived from are many, and abundantly available. This makes its use widespread, and exceedingly dangerous. It is, surprisingly, one of the most feared substances in what is arguably the drug capital of the world, Columbia. In Columbia alone, there are over 50,000 reported cases of Scopolamine drugging, although rarely does this receive media attention, in Columbia or elsewhere. The drug is used almost primarily by criminals as a way of making victims so docile that they have been known to help thieves rob their own homes and empty their own bank accounts. Additionally, women have been drugged repeatedly and held as sex slaves, or have been convinced to willingly give up their own children. The most horrifying side effect of the drug is not is ability to make zombies of its victims, but the complete amnesia it causes.

“BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone. In the case of Fernandez, the mother of three was rendered submissive enough to surrender her youngest child.”

Scopolamine can be administered easily into a victim’s drink, or food. It’s powdered form can also simply be blown in a victims general direction. The result of this type of drugging is typically either immediate death from overdose, or severe intoxication. There have been reported cases of women putting scopolamine on their breasts, and then enticing their male victims into licking their breasts, thereby drugging them. The following is a short documentary about the drug Scopolamine as produced for VBS.tv. It takes a look at the drug, its prevalence in Columbia, its uses and its dangers.


From 'Kill your television'

"Do you know we are ruled by TV?"
-- from the poem An American Prayer by Jim Morrison

"They put an off button on the TV for a reason. Turn it off . . . I really don't watch much TV."
-- President George W. Bush, C-SPAN interview, January 2005

"American children and adolescents spend 22 to 28 hours per week viewing television, more than any other activity except sleeping. By the age of 70 they will have spent 7 to 10 years of their lives watching TV."
-- The Kaiser Family Foundation

"You watch television to turn your brain off and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on."
-- Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer and Pixar, in Macworld Magazine, February 2004

"Everybody’s got values . . . The thing that frightens me is the way that an eroding public school system . . . and television on all over the place is leading to a steady dumbing down of the American public and a corrosion of basic critical thinking in the population."
-- Jamie Raskin, American University law professor, November 2004 on the Democracy Now! radio program

"Protestant clergy named divorce, negative influences from the media, and materialism as the three greatest threats to families in their communities."
-- from an Ellison Research study of 695 Protestant church ministers nationwide, October 2004

"The media can wreak great harm on the family when it offers an inadequate or even distorted vision of life, of the family itself and of religion and morality."
-- Pope John Paul II, May 2004

Average daily allotments of household and individual television viewing increased from the previous year to reach all-time highs during the 2005-06 season.
"These results demonstrate that television still holds its position as the most popular entertainment platform," said Patricia McDonough of Nielsen Media Research. "At this point, consumption of emerging forms of entertainment, including Internet television and video on personal devices, seems not to be making an impact on traditional television viewing."
The total average time per household in 2005-06 was eight hours and 14 minutes per day.
-- Reuters (September 22, 2006)

The power of speech

Everett's discovery of the elegant linguistic theories of Chomsky was his second conversion experience. At the time, Chomsky was not merely known for his trenchant, left-leaning political activism but was revered as the father of modern linguistics for his theory of "universal grammar". Following Chomsky's idea that humans are innately programmed to produce language according to a fixed and finite set of rules, Everett studied for a doctorate in the 80s and took advice from Chomsky. Gradually, however, as he spent more time with the Pirahã, he came to doubt Chomsky's claims of universality.

These doubts exploded three years ago, like "a bomb thrown into the party" in the words of psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker, who initially welcomed Everett's findings against Chomsky before becoming more critical. In 2005, Everett published a paper about the Pirahã that rocked the foundations of universal grammar. Chomsky had recently refined his theory to argue that recursion - the linguistic practice of inserting phrases inside others - was the cornerstone of all languages. (An example of recursion is extending the sentence "Daniel Everett talked about the story of his life" to read, "Daniel Everett flew to London and talked about the story of his life".) Everett argued that he could find no evidence of recursion in Pirahã. This was deeply troubling for Chomsky's theory. If the Pirahã didn't use recursion, then how could it be a fundamental part of a universal grammar embedded in our genes? And if the Pirahã didn't use recursion, then is their language - and, by implication, other languages - determined not by biology but by culture?

Thirty years of living with the Pirahã has taught Everett that they exist almost completely in the present. Absorbed by the daily struggle to survive, they do not plan ahead, store food, build houses or canoes to last, maintain tools or talk of things beyond those that they, or people they know, have experienced. They are the "ultimate empiricists", he argues, and this culture of living in the present has shaped their language.

Everett's claims created a furore. Chomskyites rushed to defend universal grammar and academics cast doubt on Everett's view of the Pirahã. Nineteenth-century anthropologists had judged exotic peoples similarly, saying they had no creation myths and apparently crude languages that could not count or convey abstract thought, before it was proved it was our erroneous understanding of these "primitive" societies that was primitive. "By framing his observations as an anti-Chomsky discovery rather than as un-PC Eurocentric condescension, Everett was able to get away with claims that would have aroused the fury of anthropologists in any other context," wrote the increasingly sceptical Pinker, who argued that even if there was "a grain of truth" in the Pirahã's preoccupation with the here-and-now, it was by no means unique to their society. In other words, Everett was an almost racist throwback to the days of, well, missionaries.

Yet Everett's life with the Pirahã didn't just cause a gradual disenchantment with the Chomskyan intellectual framework he had once cherished: it also triggered another, even more dramatic, de-conversion.

Soon after he first arrived in the Amazon, Everett was nearly killed when the Pirahã discovered he was ordering passing river traders not to give them whisky. The Pirahã were rarely violent, but intensely rejected any kind of coercion. Crucially, Everett came to see his religion as fundamentally coercive. His academic studies were ultimately designed to help him translate the Bible into Pirahã. When they heard the word of God, his evangelic mission believed, they would be converted. Everett translated the Book of Luke, read it to the Pirahã and they were utterly unmoved. By 1985, he had privately lost his faith.

"It's wrong to try and convert tribal societies," he says. "What should the empirical evidence for religion be? It should produce peaceful, strong, secure people who are right with God and right with the world. I don't see that evidence very often. So then I find myself with the Pirahã. They have all these qualities that I am trying to tell them they could have. They are the ones who are living life the way I'm saying it ought to be lived, they just don't fear heaven and hell."

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1979: Mob destroys US embassy in Pakistan

BBC On this day:

A mob in the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, has burned the US Embassy to the ground, killing a US marine.

The five-hour siege began as an organised student protest outside the locked gates of the embassy compound.

But the demonstration grew violent as protesters pulled down part of the outer wall and broke into the compound itself.

Gunfire broke out, and the marine, who was standing on the roof of the building, was shot.

Radio report

The attacks are believed to have been triggered by a radio report from the Iranian leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, saying Americans were behind the occupation of Islam's holiest site, the Great Mosque in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, yesterday.

The US State Department has described the broadcast as "irresponsible, outright, knowing lies".

The Saudi Arabian authorities have also issued statements saying the Mecca incident was the work of Muslim fundamentalists and no Westerners were involved.

American relations with Pakistan are already at a low point after the US cut off aid in April over Pakistan's nuclear ambitions, and criticised the human rights record of Pakistani leader General Mohammed Zia ul-Haq.

Trapped

As the protesters began smashing windows and setting fire to the building, more than 100 embassy staff took refuge in a steel-lined and windowless vault on an upstairs floor.

Those trapped in the room included US diplomats, Pakistani staff members and a visiting journalist from Time magazine.

The Ambassador, Arthur W Hummel Junior, was outside the building when the attack began.

Staff inside were able to contact him, and it was Ambassador Hummel who raised the alarm and requested help from Pakistan's government.

Meanwhile, protesters found their way onto the roof of the building, and staff members later said they began firing bullets down ventilation shafts.

Rescue

General Zia ordered the Pakistan Army to rescue the trapped Americans, and soldiers brought the situation under control at about 1800 local time (1300 GMT), about five and a half hours after the attack began.

Several other American institutions in Pakistan were also targeted in what appears to have been an orchestrated day of anti-American violence.

Tensions are running high since 66 American citizens were taken hostage by Iranian radical students, who seized the US embassy in Tehran just over two weeks ago.

President Carter yesterday threatened the use of force for the first time after the Ayatollah Khomeini accused the American hostages of being "spies" - effectively handing down a death sentence on them.

In Context

During the search of the embassy compound following the siege, a further five bodies were found. One was an American, two were Pakistani staff members, and two were protesters.

Relations between the US and Pakistan remained uneasy until 2001, when Pakistan agreed to support the US-declared "war on terror", and helped overthrowing the Taleban regime in Afghanistan.

Pakistan has also captured more than 500 members of al-Qaeda and handed them over to the US.

However, extremist groups within Pakistan continue to target US establishments there. In 2002 alone, there were seven attacks against the small American community which still lives and works in Pakistan.

The American embassy in Islamabad is now one of the most heavily-fortified in the world. US intelligence officials and diplomatic security staff analyse as many as five potential attack threats a day.

The Iranian hostage crisis caused a breakdown in diplomatic relations between Iran and the US in 1980.

The remaining 52 American hostages remained in captivity for 444 days, until their release on 21 January 1981.