The BS Filter

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Kofi Annan & Rwanda Scientists Just Successfully Reversed Ageing in Lab Grown Human Cells https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/30026406 Report details decades of sexual abuse by priests and WTF is wrong with Catholics? Pentagon to return bells captured in the Philippines over 100 years ago & the bias of CNN Alex Jones & corporate censorship Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #14 2018-08-20 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part NINETEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – The Golden Triangle HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: In May 1971, a couple of U.S. congressmen returned from a visit to Vietnam claiming that maybe as many at 15% of U.S. troops stationed there were using heroin. That would be about 40,000 troops. One of them said that troops going to Vietnam faced a much higher risk of becoming a heroin addict than dying in combat. Personally, I’d pick the former over the latter any day. Bud Krogh, one of the lawyers working in Nixon’s administration, age 32, the guy who let Elvis into the building, the guy who was in charge of drug policy for the White House, heard what these Congressmen had to say and he summoned the Pentagon admiral responsible for military drug abuse to his office to give a report. Krogh was an interesting guy. A hardcore Christian who didn’t drink, smoke or take drugs. Is that the guy you want making drug policy? Someone who knows nothing about using drugs? Anyway… the admiral told Krogh that he thought there were maybe 100 or 200 troops in Vietnam who were addicts. So Krogh decided to go to Vietnam himself to investigate. He traveled over there without an entourage, just a pass that said he could go anywhere, as an official representative of the White House. He flew all over the country and watched American soldiers snorting and smoking smack or mixing it with alcohol and drinking it, everywhere he went. Everyone smoked pot as well. It turned out that the Pentagon was responsible for the heroin problem. In 1968, they had worked out that lots of the troops were smoking pot, so they tried to ban it. They had sniffer dogs, searched men’s bunks, arrested anyone caught in possession. So the men shifted from pot to heroin, which was harder to detect. It is odourless and far less bulky than pot. As we’ve seen during the series, when people have a need to get wasted, they are going to get wasted, at any cost. Ban alcohol and they will drink moonshine. Ban drugs and they’ll buy them from the mob at inflated prices. When it comes to drugs, prohibition has never worked. But now America faced a situation where 40,000 soldiers were going to come home, with PTSD, addicted to heroin, and trained how to shoot a gun. And, by the way, using drugs while in the military was a crime. Automatic dishonourable discharge. So Bud Krogh called Jerome Jaffe. Jaffe was a psychiatrist in Illinois who ran a clinic where they were treating addicts with methadone. One of Krogh’s team, another young Christian who didn’t drink or smoke, Jeffrey Donfeld, had reached out to Jaffe in 1970 to prepare a report for the WH on how to tackle drug addiction nationwide. Keep in mind that Nixon was elected on a “law and order” campaign and they had convinced themselves that drugs and crime were connected. So reduce the number of people using drugs and you’ll reduce crime – that was their theory. Jaffe didn’t believe the drugs and crime connection. In his experience, most criminals who were drug users were criminals before they used drugs. But he wanted to see addicts helped, so he agreed to write the report. Meanwhile Donfeld had commission another group to write a similar report. This was a group of people from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, the National Institute of Health and the FDA. Their report said that addiction was the result of root causes. Racism, alienation, a lack of opportunity. If the government wanted to do something about it, they should address the root causes. Pour money into housing, jobs, youth work, etc. In the meantime, they said, psychiatry was useful in dealing with addiction. But they were totally against methadone. It just treated the addiction without treating the root causes. It defined addiction as a disease suffered by individuals, not as a social pathology. And methadone, of course, was what Jaffe’s report recommended. BTW, it was around this time that the Nixon WH was also dealing with another problem. When federal agents made drugs busts, they usually reported them in terms of the weight they captured. So it might be 100 pounds of marijuana. But when they captured heroin, it was obviously a lot less, because it’s a stronger drug. So this is when they started reporting busts in terms of street value. But all that was a year ago. Now Krogh gets Jaffe on the phone and asks him to help them come up with a plan to deal with these soldiers who are heroin addicts. Jaffe told him that technology had been invented that could detect opiates in urine. The machines required to do it were huge – the size of an office desk. There was only one in use in the entire country. He recommended the army get one and start testing troops o

We’re back! On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Nine – Fairfax merger & media consolidation The Q Conspiracy,  What Is QAnon? The Conspiracy Theory Tiptoeing Into Trump World What is America’s most important problem? The Pope has a message for death penalty hypocrites Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #13 2018-08-05 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part EIGHTEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – Nixon and The King. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Lyndon Johnson’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice was a group of 19 people appointed by the President in 1967 to study the American criminal justice system. It was described as “the most comprehensive evaluation of crime and crime control in the United States at the time”. It suggested a range of reforms across all aspects of crime. Among other things, it recommended getting rid of mandatory sentencing for drug use. It also argued that marijuana was a “mild hallucinogen” and that there was no evidence that it lead to violence or crime. It shot holes in the argument that marijuana was a gateway drug – it said there were too many marijuana users who never went on to harder drugs for that to be true. The report also recommended much tighter gun control laws, including preventing the sale of military-type weapons. Some of those gun laws made it into LBJ’s Gun Control Act of 1968, which was talked about in our gun control series. But the drug law reform didn’t get far. Mostly because Nixon took the White House in 1969. He appealed to what he later called the “silent majority” of socially conservative Americans who disliked the hippie counterculture and the anti-war demonstrators. From his inaugural address: “We cannot learn from one another until we stop shouting at one another, until we speak quietly enough so that our words can be heard as well as our voices.” But Nixon’s Presidential run was based on the idea that LBJ’s “Great Society” was flawed. For the GOP to bury the Great Society, it would have to convince Americans that people are poor and violent not because of grand social pressures the mainstream can correct, but because they are bad individuals deserving only of discipline and punishment. In this context, drug use was the perfect crime on which to focus. While stealing to feed one’s family might conceivably be excused, drug taking could be framed as purely escapist and pleasure driven. In October 1967, the Reader’s Digest published an article that said “Our opinion leaders have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal, is to blame,” it argued. The country should stop looking for the “root causes” of crime and put its money instead into increasing the number of police. America’s approach to crime must be “swift and sure” retribution. “Immediate and decisive force,” the article concluded, “must be the first response.” Its author was former vice president Richard Nixon, on the eve of his campaign for the presidency. It is “incontrovertibly clear’ Newsweek reported in a dispatch typical of the day, that “the age of US drug users is dropping rapidly, sometimes reaching down into elementary schools.’ The article offered no data. Instead, on the same page as vivid photos of junkies overdosing in Harlem, the authors quoted principals saying they’d found young teenagers smoking pot in school bathrooms. Life magazine scrambled the stories further. “Drug abuse and marijuana, once confined to the shadowy underworld of junkie row, are now very much in the open,” it wrote. By the end of 1967 almost half of all Americans said they’d turn in their own kids to the police if they found them using drugs. LBJ knew he looked “soft on crime” and so he tried to get J. Edgar Hoover to add drug enforcement to the FBI’s mission. Hoover, though, refused. So Johnson took drug enforcement away from Treasury and the FBN and yanked the regulatory powers from FDA. He combined them to create an agency in the Justice Department called the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs, or BNDD — the predecessor of the Drug Enforcement Administration. Opposition to the move came from the left. Federal police and prosecutors had always answered to separate authorities —just as they do in state and local governments. The presence of the FBI in Justice was the only exception. Now Johnson wanted to put more enforcers — drug police — in the same department as the country’s prosecutors. Nixon knew he couldn’t campaign on Vietnam – the country was split down the middle. But he knew people were scared of change. They were scared of what the long haired hippies and the rockin and rollin and the civil rights protestors meant for them. So Nixon gave them an out. People steal, burn, and use drugs not because of “root causes,” he said, but because they are bad people. He would stand for the “forgotten Americans” who

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Supercomputer Aurora 21 will map the human brain, starting in 2021 The US Department of Energy is in the process of revamping the contract for the Aurora supercomputer, shifting its deployment from 2018 to 2021, and increasing its performance from 180 petaflops to over 1 exaflop. That will more than likely make it the first supercomputer in the US to leap over the exascale hurdle. https://www.top500.org/news/retooled-aurora-supercomputer-will-be-americas-first-exascale-system/ one exaFLOPS, or a billion billion calculations per second. Such capacity represents a thousandfold increase over the first petascale computer that came into operation in 2008 Exascale computing would be considered as a significant achievement in computer engineering, for it is believed to be the order of processing power of the human brain at neural level. It is, for instance, the target power of the Human Brain Project. China’s first exascale supercomputer will enter service by 2020 according to the head of the school of computing at the National University of Defense Technology (NUDT). Japan is also planning an exascale system for 2020. Canada just legalized marijuana. The measure legalizes marijuana possession, home growing, and sales for adults. The federal government will oversee remaining criminal sanctions (for, say, selling to minors) and the licensing of producers, while provincial governments will manage sales, distribution, and related regulations — as such, provinces will be able to impose tougher rules, such as raising the minimum age. What sets Canada apart, though, is it’s doing this as a country. Previously, the South American nation of Uruguay was the only one that legally allowed marijuana for recreational purposes. Canada, like the US, is part of international drug treaties that explicitly ban legalizing marijuana. Although activists have been pushing to change these treaties for years, they have failed so far — and that means Canada will be, in effect, in violation of international law in moving to legalize. It could also follow Uruguay, which has essentially refused to acknowledge that legalization violates the treaties. Despite warnings from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, no one has taken significant action against Uruguay for its decision. OR – they could just walk away – like the U.S. did with the UNHRC last week. US quits HRC Now that the US has pulled out of the UN Human Rights Council, has praised Kim Jong Un, loves Putin, praises Duterte, locks up babies in detention camps and attacks our allies, can we please stop pretending that we are some shining light on a hill? We need to recognise that we are now the cautionary tale. (Scott Martin) “Human rights abusers continue to serve on, and be elected to, the council.” – said Nikki Haley, the US ambassador to the UN, as her country separated 2000 screaming and crying children from their screaming and crying parents at the border. The same country that ran secret torture camps around the world a decade ago. Explain that the UN is a democracy. Explain that while it may be true that the HRC focuses more attention on israel than other abusers, Israel is still a human rights abuser. The US has just left it because they want to protect one of their client states who is a major abuser of human rights, according to Amnesty, Oxfam, the UN General Assembly, the members of the UN Security Council (except the US) and many other organisations. Are you going to leave the GA and SC as well? US will be the world’s biggest oil producer by the fall The United States will be the world’s top oil producer in just a matter of months. That’s the assessment of Pioneer Natural Resources Chairman Scott Sheffield, who told CNNMoney that he expects US production to surpass 11 million barrels a day within the next three to four months. If achieved, that level of output would move the United States past Russia and make it the world’s top oil producer. In 2017, the United States consumed a total of 7.26 billion barrels of petroleum products, an average of about 19.88 million barrels per day more than 25% of the world’s total. So the 11 million would be a little more than half of what the U.S. consumes. The United States is currently pumping 10.3 million barrels per day, according to the US Energy Information Administration. Russia pumps 10.6 million barrels per day, while Saudi Arabia’s production stands at 10.1 million. American production surpassed that of Saudi Arabia for the first time in February. What does that mean for the U.S.-Saudi relationship? And U.S.-Russia? Where does the U.S. get the rest of its oil? In 2015,  the U.S. imported 1.37 billion barrels of oil from Canada, while Mexico provides 277 million, and Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait combine for just 544.9 million barrels, which is a 39.6% decrease from levels in 2000. https://www.zer

Part SEVENTEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – The Beatniks and the Hippies. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: In the 1960s, as drugs became symbols of youthful rebellion, social upheaval, and political dissent, the government halted scientific research to evaluate their medical safety and efficacy. The Baby Boomers born after WWII had a different set of priorities. The counterculture made marijuana fashionable on college campuses. Other “hippies” sought to expand their minds with the use of hallucinogens like LSD. Many soldiers returned from the Vietnam War with marijuana and heroin habits. In short, the demand for drugs in America skyrocketed in the 1960’s. The boomers were the most educated generation to-date And they had a new sense of invincibility and quest for new experiences They also had a desire to make the world a better place Which is easier to do when you’re not dying on the front They fought for historical moral causes of the time: civil and women’s rights, the environment and Vietnam War protests. Using marijuana, and to a lesser degree LSD, baby boomers rapidly moved drugs from the fringes of society into the mainstream. On May 13, 1957, Life magazine published an article that documented the use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious rites of the indigenous Mazatec people of Mexico. Timothy Leary was a clinical psychologist at Harvard University who decided to go to Mexico to check that shit out. He returned to Harvard and experimented with the therapeutic potential of LSD and psilocybin. Beat poet Allen Ginsberg heard about the Harvard research project and asked to join the experiments. Leary and his colleague, Richard Alpert (who later became known as the guru Ram Dass), were fired from Harvard University in May 1963. After leaving Harvard, he continued to publicly promote the use of psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of the 1960s. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as “turn on, tune in, drop out” and “think for yourself and question authority”. Here’s a clip from Leary: https://youtu.be/Iy0nicDp1FM?t=4m14s But of course it wasn’t just Leary. Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception, First published in 1954, had a big influence. He talked about using Mescaline to tap into religious experiences. Of course that’s where The Doors got their name. And speaking of The Doors – Rock n Roll played a huge roll. The Beatles smoked weed. Do you know who gave it to them? Bob Dylan. On 28 August 1964 at the Delmonico Hotel on Park Avenue, near Manhattan’s Central Park. Do you know what that hotel is called today? Trump Park Avenue. The Haight-Ashbury district of San Franciso is where the hippies built a community based upon counterculture ideals, drugs, and music. The word hippie came from hipster and used to describe beatniks who moved into New York City’s Greenwich Village and San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district. Beatnik and hippie were terms both invented by the same guy – Herb Caen, a journalist for the San Francisco Chronicle. “Beat” was slang for “beaten down” or downtrodden, but to guys like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, it also had a spiritual connotation as in “beatitude.” Kerouac wrote: The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late Forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way—a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word “beat” spoken on street corners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America—beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction. Caen coined the term by adding the Russian suffix -nik to the Beat Generation. Caen’s column with the word came six months after the launch of Sputnik I. The Beat philosophy was generally countercultural and antimaterialistic, and stressed the importance of bettering one’s inner self over material possessions. Alan Watts introduced the Beatniks to Asian philosophies. Their soundtrack was jazz. And they smoked weed like jazz musicians, as well as dressing like Dizzy Gillespie, with the horn-rimmed glasses, beret and goatie. And they adopted the jazz slang – cool, cat, hip. Which is where they hippies came from. Hippies created their own communities, listened to psychedelic music, embraced the sexual revolution, and many used drugs such as marijuana, LSD, peyote and psilocybin mushrooms to explore alt

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Singapore summit: Donald Trump and Kim Jong-un document released after historic meeting – North Korea must open up to improve economy and living standards – Cheesiest video ever – All the Times North Korea Promised to Denuclearize Bitcoin’s 2017 Surge Was the Result of Manipulation, Experts Say More Than Just Russia — There’s a Strong Case for the Trump Team Colluding With Saudi Arabia, Israel, and the UAE Researchers at UCLA are successfully making and running a type of stochastic neuromorphic chip that looks like a brain’s neural connections under a microscope. 120 Nations Condemn Israel for Gaza Shootings, including Russia, China, France & 11 other European States Most Deepfake Videos Have One Glaring Flaw Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #11 2018-06-18 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part SIXTEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – Arnold Rothstein’s luck runs out. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: ON our last episode – Arnold Rothstein invented the modern drug gang. But On November 4, 1928, his luck ran out. He was shot in the groin or the stomach – depending on which source you believe –  during a business meeting at Manhattan’s Park Central Hotel at Seventh Avenue near 55th Street. One snitch told the cops later that the shooter had aimed the gun at Rothstein’s balls as a threat – but accidentally flinched, pulled the trigger, and shot him in the gut. He staggered to the service entrance and asked them to get him a taxi. When the cops came instead and asked who did it, he mumbled: “If I live, I’ll tend to it; if I die, the gang will.” He also told them: “You stick to your trade. I’ll stick to mine”, and “Me mudder (my mother) did it.” He was 47 years old. He died two days later. The shooting had something to do with a 3-day long, high stakes poker game he’d been involved in, a couple of months earlier. He hit a losing streak and ended up owing $320,000, about $4.5m in today’s money. Three men were reported to have been in the poker game with him. Red Martin Bowe, Willie McCabe – and Nigger Nate Raymond. Who was a white man. How does a white man get a nickname like that in 1928? Something to do with a dark complexion apparently. Some sources say he refused to pay up. He claimed the game was fixed. Other sources say he said it would take him some time to get that amount of cash together. And that they’d have to wait until after the NY election – he had money on FDR becoming Governor. One source I read said he refused because he said the game was fixed, then said “I’m not going to give them a cent. If they’re looking for me, I can be found any night at Lindy’s.” – his favourite joint. Rothstein didn’t have bodyguards and didn’t carry a gun. His power was that he was untouchable. The Chief of Police in NY immediately said they knew who shot him and they could pick him up at any time. But no-one was arrested. Maybe because the police and politicians were worried that if the actual shooter was arrested, he might talk. About THEM and their connections with Rothstein. A two bit gambler, George McManus, was eventually arrested for the murder but later acquitted for lack of evidence. Still to this day, nobody knows who shot Rothstein. But what he started, lives on. With him gone, his former associates split up his empire. Famous names – Meyer Lansky, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Erickson, Legs Diamond. From the moment that Rothstein was shot, drug dealers would be engaged in a constant conflict to control the distribution of drugs. And every time the new Rothstein is killed, a harder and more vicious version of him emerges to fill the space provided by prohibition for a global criminal industry. As Harry Anslinger wrote in 1961: “One group rose to power over the corpses of another.” Johann Hari called it: “Darwinian evolution armed with a machine gun and a baggie of crack.” And, I’d add, insane amounts of cash. When people think of “drug violence”, they often think about drug addicts committing acts of violence, because they are high or because they want to rob someone to get money to buy drugs. Professor Paul Goldstein of the University of Illinois conducted a detailed study in which he and his team looked at every killing identified as “drug-related” in New York City in 1986. It turned out 7.5 percent of the killings took place after a person took drugs and their behavior seemed to change. Some 2 percent were the result of addicts trying to steal to feed their habit and it going wrong. And more than three quarters—the vast majority—were like gang attacks. They weren’t caused by drugs, any more than Al Capone’s killings were caused by alcohol. They were caused by prohibition. But it wasn’t just the drugs gangs that lived on after Rothstein. It was the other side of the equation as well – the other drug gangs – the ones made up of police and politicians. Pay attention to the dates. The Brain died at the end of 1928. Harry Anslinger launched the Treasury’s Bureau of Narcotcs unit 18 months later, in 1930. And the second event was driven by the first. Many of Rothstein’s secrets were revealed as a result of his bookkeeper’s penchant for keeping accurate records. These bureaucratic developments began when certain documents were found at a realty company Rothstein used as a front for his illegal enterprises. This company happened to own 80 city blocks in Queens. The documents confirmed that Rothstein was financing an international drug

Bourdain, suicide and The Three Illusions MormonLeaks: LDS Church connected to at least $32B in U.S. stock market The Mormon Church came out HARD against Utah’s medical marijuana initiative. Last week, MormonLeaks leaked a doc proving the church owns nearly a billion in big pharma stocks. Utah has highest rate of mental illness in US Which I’ve always suspected might be connected to the church’s stances against homosexuality, caffeine, alcohol, therapy, sex before marriage and logical thinking. So they keep the membership depressed, then invest in Big Pharma. Nice business model. Police Say Soldier Stole Armored Vehicle And Led Them On 2-Hour Chase It has recently come to light that Yabut has a background in infosec. U.S. Diplomats Suffering From Mysterious Illness Evacuated From China Recording from Cuba  (17 seconds mark) https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/dec/06/us-embassy-attack-cuba-brain-abnormalities-victims Wired magazine talked about it years ago. Also see this, this, or this. “But the biggest issue from the microwave weapon is not the radiation. It’s the risk of brain damage from the high-intensity shockwave created by the microwave pulse.” The Voice of God weapon Nasa Mars rover finds organic matter in ancient lake bed The guy accused of putting out the hit on Babchenko is connected to Mogilevich Summit, world’s fastest supercomputer Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #10 2018-06-11 appeared first on The BS Filter.

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Weezer Records Africa Samantha Bee called Ivanka Trump a feckless cunt and I’m offended. Cockroach Milk Has More Protein And Nutrients Than Regular Milk: The Next Superfood Trend? Arkady Babchenko “murder”  – Why he left Russia Congressional Candidate In Virginia Admits He’s A Pedophile Google won’t renew its military AI contract – another example of the military industrial complex and how vast it is Seymour Hersh’s Three Lessons The powerful prey mercilessly upon the powerless, up to and including mass murder. The powerful lie constantly about their predations. The natural instinct of the media is to let the powerful get away with it. Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #9 2018-06-04 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part FIFTEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – Arnold Rothstein invents the modern drug racket. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Arnold Rothstein. As someone pointed out, Hyman Roth in The Godfather Part II is actually based on Meyer Lansky, not Rothstein. In the film, Roth’s original name is Suchowsky. When he was a toddler, his father saw him standing over his sleeping brother with a knife. As a small boy, he was a freak with mathematics. From the age of twelve, he knew that his father, who was a respected member Manhattan’s Jewish community, a wealthy cotton goods dealer, known as “Abe the Just”, wouldn’t dream of carrying cash from the setting of the sun on Friday night to the end of the Sabbath the next day, so Arnold stole the money from his wallet, played craps, and won so often and so big he could always replace the cash without anyone’s noticing. He left home at 17 to become a travelling salesman and gambler. “There are two million fools to one brainy man.” And he became known as “The Brain” He learned the greatest truth of gambling: the only way to win every time is to own the casino. So he set up a series of underground gambling dens across New York City, and when they got busted, one after another, he invented the “floating” craps game: a never-ending craps shoot that skipped from shadowy venue to dusky basement across the island. He carried the cash on him, up to a hundred thousand dollars at a time, and he obsessively counted the money, by hand, again and again. When he met his future wife at a party,  he told her he was a sporting man. “I thought that a sporting man was one who hunted and shot,” she wrote. “It wasn’t until later that I learned all a sporting man hunted was a victim with money, and all he shot was craps.” On the night of their wedding, he told her he would need to pawn her engagement ring to free up funds, and she handed it over without complaining. He guarded his money without a smile. One day, a gambler Rothstein knew called him long distance. He said was broke and desperately needed five hundred dollars to get back to New York and back in the game. “I can’t hear you,” Arnold said into the phone. The gambler kept repeating his request. “I can’t hear you,” Arnold repeated. The caller fiddled with his phone until the operator interrupted: “But Mr. Rothstein, I can hear him distinctly,” she said. “All right,” Arnold replied, “then you give it to him,” and hung up. At the racetrack, he would pay jockeys to throw the race, and gradually, year by year, he took this to a higher level. The bets got bigger and his winnings got more improbable, until he finally reached the biggest, most watched, most adrenaline-soaked game in America: the World Series. Fifty million Americans were listening in 1919 when, against all the odds and every prediction, the Cincinnati Reds beat the far-and-away favorites, the White Sox. Long after the gasps were silent and the stadium was full only of echoes, the reason emerged: Rothstein had paid eight White Sox players to throw the match. All eight players were charged with fraud—and all were mysteriously acquitted. Because Arnold had bought off enough cops and judges. And then Arnold was handed two of the largest industries in America, tax-free. He immediately spotted that the prohibition of booze and drugs was the biggest lottery win for gangsters in history. There will always be large numbers of people who want to get drunk or high, and if they can’t do it legally, they will do it illegally. “Prohibition is going to last a long time and then one day it’ll be abandoned,” Rothstein told his associates. “But it’s going to be with us for quite a while, that’s for sure. I can see that more and more people are going to ignore the law …. and we can make a fortune meeting this need.” He realised that people would be so desperate they’d pay good money for watered down booze. And he made a fortune out of prohibition. Then, when FDR realised the United States treasury needed to tax booze again to get out of the Depression, Rothstein turned to drugs. He knew they would stay prohibited for a lot longer. At first the street peddlers had controlled the trade, and they got their supply in one of two ways: by staging heists of legal opiates as they were delivered to hospitals, or by ordering in bulk from legal suppliers in Mexico or Canada under fake company names. In 1922, Congress cracked down on this. Rothstein saw that these small-time crooks were missing the bigger opportunity anyway: this, he concluded, was a task for industrial manufacturing and industrial-scale smuggling. He sent his men to buy in bulk in Europe, where factories could still legally make heroin, shipped it over, and then distributed it to s

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: The Coming Collapse Elon Musk doesn’t know how journalism works — but thinks he can fix it School shooting around the world Yes, Trump Aides Colluded With Foreign Governments ‘A lot of dial tones’: The inside story of how Trump’s North Korea summit fell apart  Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #8 2018-05-28 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part FOURTEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – Harry takes his war global – and ends up in Playboy. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: After WWII, Harry Anslinger started to wonder why his campaign against drugs wasn’t working. He had the doctors whipped into line, he had the politicians in his pocket. And yet people kept using drugs. Even in the one particular city that was his poster child – Baltimore – who adopted every piece of hard line laws he demanded – there was still a growing drug problem. Harry decided it must be the Commies. There’s a Red under the Bed – and he’s selling weed! Harry’s theory was the the Communists were trying to turn America into a land of drug addicts who could be used as a fifth column. In particular he thought Chinese communists were selling heroin into America to create addicts willing to commit treason in return for a hit. I read an article from 1954 where he’s blaming a guy called Judah Ezra for importing heroin from China into America. And the Ezra family is actually interesting. Edward Isaac Ezra, Judah’s older brother, was a wealthy Jewish businessman, who was at one time “one of the wealthiest foreigners in Shanghai”. He was the first member of the Shanghai Municipal Council actually born in China. The SMC was a group of Western businessmen who basically ran all of the business in Shanghai. They were mostly British. According to one report, Ezra amassed a vast fortune estimated at from twenty to thirty million dollars He made his money from opium, and successful real estate investments. He owned hotels, an insurance company, car dealerships, gas company, newspapers and lots of real estate. When he died in 1921, his younger brothers, twins Judah and Isaac, both moved to San Francisco, where they were among the very first to import narcotics from Asia to the United States. They had relationships with “Lucky” Luciano, the father of modern organized crime in the United States, and Frank Costello, and Meyer Lansky They also apparently had a relationship with Chiang Kai-shek and the Kuomintang, who were relying on opium profits. In 1933 the brothers were arrested in California and sentenced to 12 years for trafficking. When they were released, they were deported back to China, where they got back into the drug business. So when Harry is blaming Chinese communists for the heroin trade into America, he’s actually talking about a couple of British Jews. Hey speaking of Lucky Luciano – have you ever heard about the role he played in WWII? He’s in jail in the 40s on prostitution charges, and the U.S. Navy are worried about German and Italian spies getting into the U.S. via the New York waterfront, which the Mob controlled. So they did a deal with him – help us and we’ll commute your 50 year sentence. He agreed to help, to prevent any strikes on the docks during the war, and to provide contacts within the Sicilian Mafia to help with the allied invasion of Sicily. So in 1946 they let him out of jail and deported him to Italy. But six months later he moved to Havana where he held the famous Havana Conference, where they co-ordinated the Mob’s business in America. The heads of the major crime families gathered for a week to discuss business and to party with Frank Sinatra, who traveled there with a couple of guys from Al Capone’s family. Anyway… Back to Harry. Even his agents apparently told him there was no evidence that the Communists were behind America’s drug supply, but he didn’t care about facts. Whatever America was afraid of—blacks, poor people, Communists— Harry used it in his war on drugs. And then Harry took his fight global. He stood up in the UN and told all of the countries to help him fight Communism – by increasing their fight against drugs. OR ELSE. Why would the world listen to America? Because they were the sole economic superpower. Thailand, for example, flatly refused to ban opium smoking They said it was a long-standing tradition in their country, and less harmful than prohibition. So Harry started to twist arms. One of his key lieutenants, Charles Siragusa, said: “I found that a casual mention of the possibility of shutting off our foreign aid programs, dropped in the proper quarters, brought grudging permission for our operations almost immediately.” Threaten leaders of countries with cutting aid, or being cut off from selling any of their countries’ goods to the United States and see how fast they do the US’ bidding. Eventually every country caved to U.S. pressure. They all had minorities they wanted to point the finger at. And they all wanted to use the Communist boogie man as an excuse Around this time, Har

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: The Royal wedding Santa Fe shooting FBI spying on Trump Rock star physicist Carlo Rovelli on why time is an illusion Turning carbon dioxide into rock – forever Trump Defends ‘Animals’ Remark, Saying It Referred to MS-13 Gang Members  MS-13 Salvadorian civil war in the 1980s pitted a right-wing government against Marxist guerrillas. Hitler definitely dead Follow Cameron on Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #7 2018-05-21 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part THIRTEEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS – The Marihuana Tax Act of 1937 and The LaGuardia Report. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: * We’ve seen that in the 1930s, Harry Anslinger decided to make cannabis his new focus. * Despite the fact that most people had never heard of it. * Exploiting the yellow journalism stories about rapey negros and Mexicans with superhuman strength. * Up until 1937, cannabis products were legal to sell in pharmacies and drug stores, so long as they were properly labeled and regulated. * But in 1937, Harry personally drafted the “Marihuana Tax Act”, as new piece of legislation designed to make it nearly impossible to sell cannabis-based medications. * He also participated in the congressional hearings prior to the passing of the Act. * During the congressional hearings, there were only twelve testimonies for the entire discussion on the marijuana issue. * Out of the total witnesses, seven of them represented the Bureau, four corresponded to private industrial enterprises, and only one entailed a medical official perspective. * This last individual, possibly the most important and relevant of them all, was the legislative counsel of the American Medical Association (A.M.A.), Dr. William G. Woodward. * His statement within the process opposed and challenged the moral focus that had been exposed by all representatives of the FBN. * Added to his medical expertise, he based his claims in the fact that there was not sufficient empirical evidence “about a marihuana problem from either the Bureau of Mental Health or the Public Health Service.” * He concluded that marijuana “was largely an unknown quantity, but might have important uses in medicine and psychology. For this reason alone it should not be taxed prohibitively.” * Dr. Woodward’s testimony, of course, was rapidly dismissed by the committee due to its inconsistency with the Bureau’s official perspective of the problem. * He was ridiculed and accused of being insensitive to the medical and moral needs of Americans. * Interesting: * MR. DINGELL: I am just wondering whether the marihuana addict graduates into a heroin, an opium, or a cocaine user. * MR. ANSLINGER: No, sir; I have not heard of a case of that kind. I think it is an entirely different class. The marihuana addict does not go in that direction. * So even Harry didn’t think marijuana was a gateway drug. * The Act was signed into law by FDR. * It placed a tax on the sale of cannabis. * Farmers could acquire tax stamps for the cultivation of fiber hemp, physicians would be charged a tax for prescribing cannabis, and pharmacists would be required to pay a tax for selling cannabis. * Annual fees were $24 ($637 adjusted for inflation) for importers, manufacturers, and cultivators of cannabis, $1 ($24 adjusted for inflation) for medical and research purposes, and $3 ($82 adjusted for inflation) for industrial users. * Selling marihuana to any person who had previously paid the annual fee incurred a tax of $1 per ounce or fraction thereof; however, the tax was $100 ($2,206 adjusted for inflation) per ounce or fraction thereof to sell to any person who had not registered and paid the annual fee. * So here’s your baggie of weed, Ray. * It’s be $50 plus $2200 tax. * Anyone selling cannabis without a tax license, could get a fine of up to $2000 in 1937 dollars, and five years’ imprisonment. * But it wasn’t about collecting the tax. * There were also excessive regulations. * Doctors who wanted to purchase the one-dollar tax stamp so that they could prescribe it for their patients, were forced to report such use to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics in sworn and attested detail, revealing the name and address of the patient, the nature of his ailment, the dates and amounts prescribed, and so on. * If a doctor failed to do so immediately, both he and his patient are liable to imprisonment-and a heavy fine. * Obviously, the details of that regulation make it far too risky for anyone to have anything to do with marijuana in any way whatsoever. * You don’t have to ban something to stop it – you just make doing it too difficult. * But the Act didn’t criminalize the possession or usage of hemp, marijuana, or cannabis. * Which was okay, because by 1937, most states already had laws against possession. * The Monroe News-Star Monroe, Louisiana * Monday, September 6, 1937 One thing that fascinates me about the media coverage of marijuana – it’s exclusively negative. Now we *know* there were doctors and others who refuted the extreme negative aspects of Anslinger’s propaganda. But you see ZERO sign of that in the media coverage. It’s uniformly fear-mongering. And then politicians and Anslinger use the media coverage as evidence o

    On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Revenge of the Laughable Bumblefucks Trump nukes Iran deal Iran is responsible for a significant portion of the world’s oil, and sanctions will reduce the amount they’re able to export. The big threats to our planet are the Republican Party and Christianity. Also see: http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/how-the-faithful-voted-a-preliminary-2016-analysis/ Trump has a tiny dick, which explains everything Black cube America believes in free speech – unless it’s Russians talking to Americans Also see: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/05/11/what-we-found-facebook-ads-russians-accused-election-meddling/602319002/ Follow Cameron on Micro Blog and Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #6 2018-05-14 appeared first on The BS Filter.

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: * ‘We’re doomed’: Mayer Hillman on the climate reality * Are You Ready To Consider That Capitalism Is The Real Problem? * The enduring legacy of Marx * Also… https://qz.com/1269525 * The Korea Peace Deal * Also… https://www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/559181/ Follow Cameron on Micro Blog and Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #5 2018-05-07 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part TWELVE of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS, talking about Billie Holiday. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: * The jazz and blues singer Billie Holiday aka Lady Day. * GOD BLESS THE CHILD * She had a tough, tough life. * She was born in 1915 to an unmarried teenage couple, Sarah Fagan and Clarence Holiday. * Her father left soon after, to pursue a career as a jazz banjo player. * Her mother was kicked out of her parent’s home for getting pregnant, and she moved in with her older, married half-sister. * She took jobs working on passenger railroads and left Eleanora – that was Billie’s birth name, Eleanora Fagan – to be raised by her half-sister’s mother-in-law. * When Eleanora was ten she was raped by a neighbour. * Then she ended up working a job running errands in a brothel. * By 13 she was working as a prostitute herself – in the same Harlem brothel where her mother was also a prostitute. * Around the same time, she started singing in clubs around Harlem. * She took the name Billie from an actress she admired, and the name Holiday from her father. * She was discovered by the legendary Columbia Records music producer John Hammond and made her recording debut, at age 18, in November 1933, with Benny Goodman, the famous American jazz clarinetist and bandleader known as the “King of Swing”. * They recorded two songs – one was a hit. * RIFFIN’ THE SCOTCH * Billie quickly became a sensation. * Remember this is 1933 – FDR is elected, the Great Depression is still going on, prohibition is ending, and Harry Anslinger is trying to make the transition from oppressing drinkers of booze to oppressing users of drugs. * Billie really is one of the greatest vocalists ever, up there with Sinatra, also born in 1915, and Ella Fitzgerald born in 1917. * In fact, Sinatra said in 1958: With few exceptions, every major pop singer in the US during her generation has been touched in some way by her genius. It is Billie Holiday who was, and still remains, the greatest single musical influence on me. Lady Day is unquestionably the most important influence on American popular singing in the last twenty years. * But her life was still hard going. * She had been addicted to booze and drugs since her early teenage years. * And she was tough. * One New Year’s Eve, a sailor saw her being served in a bar and asked: “When did you start serving nigger bitches?” She stabbed a bottle into his face. * Another time in another bar, a group of soldiers and sailors started stubbing out their cigarettes on her mink coat. She handed the mink coat to a friend to hold, picked up a diamond-shaped ashtray, and laid the sailors out flat. * I liked this line about her: “She sang a moment behind the beat and lived a moment ahead of it.” * So Billie is becoming a sensation – and Harry is looking for a headline. * He hears Billie is a drug user, so he sends one of his agents. * A BLACK agent. * Jimmy Fletcher * Harry didn’t like hiring black guys, but if he sent a white agent into Harlem, he’d stand out like Ray at a Harlem Globetrotter’s convention. * But Harry had a policy – a black agent would never be a white agent’s boss. * He’d let them into the bureau, but they would never get promoted off the street. * Jimmy is allowed to carry drugs and even sell drugs, to win the confidence of his targets. * So Jimmy gets close to Billie over a period of time, watches her drinking and snorting cocaine, then one day he goes to her apartment to bust her. * When Jimmy was sent to raid her, he knocked at the door pretending he had a telegram to deliver. * She told him to “Stick it under the door!” * He said “It’s too big to go under the door!” * She let him in. She was alone. Jimmy felt uncomfortable. * “Billie, why don’t you make a short case of this and, if you’ve got anything, why don’t you turn it over to us?” he asked. “Then we won’t be searching around, pulling out your clothes and everything. So why don’t you do that?” * But Jimmy’s partner arrived and sent for a policewoman to conduct a body search. * “You don’t have to do that. I’ll strip,” Billie said. “All I want to say is—will you search me and let me go? All that policewoman is going to do is look up my pussy.” * She stripped and stood there, and then she pissed in front of them, defying them to watch. * Jimmy apparently felt bad for her and offered to talk to Harry privately to try to get her off. * He failed. * And he regretted it for the rest of his life. * She was sent to prison, banned from performing when she got out because she was a felon and wasn’t allowed to work anywhere that served alcohol – which of course included all jazz clubs – and had a series of abusive boyfriends and husbands,

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Semion Mogilevich, the alleged “boss of bosses” of the Russian mob and his connections to Donald Trump Read more: https://trump-russia.com/2017/05/22/the-russian-mobster-who-hid-out-in-trump-tower-and-the-taj-mahal/amp/ http://www.citjourno.org/page-1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semion_Mogilevich?wprov=sfti1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Sater?wprov=sfti1 https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/who-is-holding-robert-levinson Online dating closers https://qz.com/1247382/online-dating-is-so-awful-that-people-are-paying-virtual-dating-assistants-to-impersonate-them/ The Incel Rebellions https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/24/world/canada/incel-reddit-meaning-rebellion.html https://www.vox.com/world/2018/4/25/17277496/incel-toronto-attack-alek-minassian Follow Cameron on Micro Blog and Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #4 2018-04-30 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part ELEVEN of our series on the WAR ON DRUGS. And we’re still talking about a man who tried to stop the war on drugs way back in 1938 – Dr Henry Smith Williams. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: In his 1938 book “Drug Addicts Are Human Beings: The Story of Our Billion Dollar Drug Racket”, he drives home the point that being addicted to drugs has nothing to do with a lack of morality. Henry Smith Williams, angry sane person The clearing away of the MORPHINE-MORALITY SUPERSTITION would do for the victim of drug addiction disease what the clearing away of the DEMONIACAL-POSSESSION SUPERSTITION did for the INSANE. Now of course thinking about addiction as a medical problem was pretty novel in the 30s. The founders of AA, Bill Wilson and Dr. Bob Smith, had the same approach in 1935. The American Medical Association (AMA) declared that alcoholism was an illness in 1956. But the idea goes back to the early 19th century. American physician Benjamin Rush, a signatory to the United States Declaration of Independence, wrote that “habitual drunkenness should be regarded not as a bad habit but as a disease”. Anyway, back to the arrest and conviction of Dr Edward Williams. Harry wanted Edward Williams to be broken more than any other doctor, because he was widely respected and many people listened to him. Anslinger wrote “The moral effect of his conviction,will most certainly result in greater circumspection.” His idea was that you only have to destroy a few doctors to silence the rest. Go for the top. Maximum intimidation. This was always Harry’s way. Howard Diller, one of his agents, said later: “Anybody that came out with any academic work that could be critical of him, his Bureau, or his philosophy, had to go to prison, Or be beheaded.” Henry went to see Harry to plead for him to lay off his brother. While he was in Harry’s office, Anslinger claimed no knowledge of the arrest and blamed it on his underlings. The buck stops… Over there, waaay over there. But when Henry left, Anslinger apparently made fun of him to his staff. Another doctor once visited Anslinger’s office with a gun hidden in his jacket, ready to shoot him. But Harry saw it coming and disarmed the guy. So in Henry’s book he eventually claims Harry was taking his instructions from the Mafia. If you want to know how this scam works, he explained, you need to look at the story of Chris Hanson. He was Harry’s bureau chief in California, and he masterminded the mass round-up of doctors there, including Edward Williams. And we now know why he did it, wrote Henry Smith Williams. Not long after he shut down the clinic in Los Angeles, it was proven in court that Big Chris was secretly working for a notorious Chinese drug dealer named Woo Sing. He was taking bushels of cash from the drug dealers, and in turn he was doing their bidding. The dealers paid Big Chris to shut down the heroin clinics. They wanted him to do it. Hanson was sentenced to 10 years in the Federal penitentiary at McNeill Island and a fine of $9,000. So there you have it. At the start of the drug war, the man who launched the drug crackdown in California did it because he was paid to—by the drug dealers themselves. They wanted the drug war. They wanted it so badly, they would pay to speed it up. Williams figured Anslinger must also have been in the pay of the Mafia. But as it turns out, wrong on this one crucial detail. There is no evidence that Anslinger ever worked for the Mafia, and it’s fair to assume it would have emerged by now if he had. Anslinger wasn’t corrupt. He was just a cunt. Henry spent his remaining years setting up a group to campaign for an end to the drug war, but Anslinger’s men wrote to everyone who expressed an interest in it, warning them it was a “criminal organization” that was “in trouble with Uncle Sam.” Henry Smith Williams died in 1943. Drug Addicts Are Human Beings remained out of print and largely forgotten for the rest of Anslinger’s life, and ours. But you can find it, like I did, on archive.org. The book contained a prediction. If this drug war continues, Henry Smith Williams wrote, there will be a five-billion-dollar drug smuggling industry in the United States in fifty years’ time. He was right almost to the exact year. The size of the global illicit drug market was estimated to be US$321.6 billion in 2003. It’s about 1% of the global GDP. The story of the Williams brothers, and all the doctors who were crushed alongside them, was so successfully wiped from America’s collective memory that by the 1960s, Anslinger could say in public that doctors had always been his allies in the drug war. He told a journalist: “I’d like to see, the doctor who claims he was treated in anything but the kin

On BULLSHIT FILTER THE NEWS this week: Special guest Sherlock Ortiz comes on to school us about political correctness. Or does he? Cameron rants about the “Whataboutism” Vs Tu Quoque Allison Mack, Smallville actress, charged over Nxivm sex trafficking Read more about NXIVM Raul Castro, President of Cuba retires But the U.S. MSM still can’t tell a straight story Meanwhile… The U.S. Provides Military Assistance to 73 Percent of the World’s Dictatorships  Finally… Alex Jones, Backtracking, Now Says Sandy Hook Shooting Did Happen Alex also said Trump crapped all over “us”. Because he bombed Syria. Follow Cameron on Micro Blog and Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #3 2018-04-23 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part TEN of War on Drugs series. And we’re talking about a man who tried to stop the war on drugs way back in 1938 – Dr Henry Smith Williams. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: We’re still talking about Harry Anslinger. The first American drug czar. As we’ve seen in previous episodes, cocaine, opium and heroin didn’t have much of a user base in the U.S. In 1930. And Harry wants to build a little empire in the Treasury. He sees stories in the tabloids about how cannabis is driving the blacks and the mexicans crazy and how white women who smoke it want to have sex with the black men and mexicans. So he decides to make it his cause celebre. When his attempts to bust jazz musicians fails because they won’t rat on each other. Eventually he’s going to go after a celebrity target – Billie Holiday. But before we get to that. Let’s talk about the current state of marijuana. Today of course, the medical use of cannabis is legal (with a doctor’s recommendation) in 29 US states, the District of Columbia, and the territories of Guam and Puerto Rico. The recreational use of cannabis is legal in 9 states (Alaska, California, Colorado, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington) plus the District of Columbia, and decriminalized in another 13 states plus the U.S. Virgin Islands. Commercial distribution of cannabis is allowed in all jurisdictions where cannabis has been legalized, except Vermont and the District of Columbia. However the Drug Enforcement Administration still considers it a Schedule I drug. As of today, March 2018, it’s still illegal in most of Australia, but is decriminalised for personal use in the Northern Territory, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory, and Victoria. Still illegal in the UK and mostly illegal in Canada. However the laws in Australia are considered “lax”. At a national level, there is no overriding law that deals with cannabis-related offences; instead, each state and territory enacts its own legislation. Australia has largely avoided a punitive drug policy. In New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and Tasmania, possession and use of cannabis is a criminal offence; however, it is unlikely that anyone caught with a small amount will be convicted. Medical marijuana is now legal here, but it’s pretty restricted You have to have MS, epilepsy, cancer, or HIV/AIDS and there’s a push to decriminalise it entirely. But earlier this year Drug Free Australia executive officer Jo Baxter said she hopes the drug will remain illegal in Australia. she said – “It’s actually quite a harmful drug and if we think we make it more available, that’s the way to do it, it is a gateway drug.” As of today, some of the countries with the laxest cannabis laws were Australia, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, the Czech Republic, India, Israel, Jamaica, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Uruguay, and some U.S. jurisdictions. Some of the countries with the strictest cannabis laws were Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, France, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United Arab Emirates. These days even the New York Times is in favour of the legalisation of marijuana. It took almost a century for them to go from printing anti-marijuana propaganda to contemptuously rejecting it, along with the ban built on that foundation of lies. Which raises the obvious question: If the Times could be so wrong for so long about marijuana, what other mistakes has it made? Plenty, including exaggerating the hazards of pretty much every drug that has ever been a subject of public concern while conflating the effects of drug use with the effects of prohibition. Okay back to 1930. In the 1930s, as Harry was prosecuting his war on drugs, a doctor called Henry Smith Williams started challenging Harry’s drug narrative. Williams was apparently a pretty well known doctor and a pretty prolific author. He’s written over 100 books, Including being the editor of a book called “The Historians’ History of the World.” Which sounds like the name of our next podcast series. Anyway, his crusade against Harry started in 1931 when Henry’s brother, Edward, also a doctor, was arrested. Edward had helped to build a free clinic for addicts, and he volunteered his own time there. He wrote his prescriptions for whoever needed them. And he waited to see the results. One day a man came into the clinic, obviously suffering badly from heroin withdrawal symptoms, which Edward was a known expert about. “The man is a wreck, at the verge of collapse,” Henry wrote. “He is deathly pale. Sweat pours from his skin. He is all a tremor. His life seems threatened.” So Edward

On BFTN this week: Trump Strikes Syria Cate Blanchett’s “Penis Facial” Was There a Civilization On Earth Before Humans? More Gaza Protests Former Israeli soldiers wrote an open letter Elizabeth Warren Calls on Israel to Exercise Restraint Against Palestinian Protesters ‘Boy Who Came Back From Heaven’ Is Suing Christian Publisher to Get His Name Removed From Phony Bestseller American Bots Follow Cameron on Micro Blog and Facebook. Follow Ray on Facebook. The post BFTN #2 2018-04-16 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Welcome to our new series – Bullshit Filter The News! Based on the positive response to our spontaneous “Uncle Cam’s Corner” episode a couple of weeks ago, we decided to make it a weekly thing. We’ll pick the top stories and events that have grabbed our attention over the last week and just chat about them. No crazy research, we’re just giving you our off-the-cuff thoughts on these stories and what they mean. Kind of like the format of my old G’Day World podcast from 2004. 2004 is back, baby!   On this week’s show: X-Files Finale The Skirpal Poisoning Israel Threatens More Force After Gaza Protests Leave 16 Dead Here’s Who the Democrats Want You to Vote for This November Sinclair’s script for stations Political correctness and Jordan Peterson Frontline The post BFTN #1 2018-04-09 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part NINE of War on Drugs series – more on the history of cannabis. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: HARRY ANSLINGER As we mentioned in an earlier episode, after WWI, Harry Anslinger ended up working for the Prohibition bureau, in the Bahamas. He eventually came back to the US and was the Assistant Commissioner of the Prohibition Unit. In early 1930, the guy in charge of the narcotics division of the prohibition bureau, L.G. Nutt, got fired for padding his arrest record. Harry took over his job. Then on June 14, 1930Harry Anslingerwas made the head of the new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an agency of the Department of the Treasury, thanks to his wife’s uncle who was the Treasury Secretary at the time. Here’s a question – Why would a drug czar be under the Treasury and not the Dept of Justice? His original brief was to police the relatively new laws against using cocaine and heroin – the Harrison Narcotics Tax Act, 1914 and the Narcotic Drugs Import and Export Act, 1922 (aka Jones-Miller Act). So it’s about taxes. Just as today, the illegal trade in alcohol (then still under Prohibition) and illicit drugs were targeted by the Treasury not primarily as social evils but as losses of revenue since they could not be taxed. Appointed by department Secretary Andrew W. Mellon, his wife’s uncle, Anslinger was given a budget of $100,000 and turned loose. On July 1, 1930, a few weeks later, the Prohibition Bureau was transferred FROM the Treasury Department to the Department of Justice. Obviously it’s not making money. It’s about cracking heads. It was later moved to the FBI for a short period before Prohibition was repealed, then it was moved back to the Treasury. Remember why prohibition ended? Great depression. FDR wanted the tax revenue. BTW, do you know who created the FBI? Attorney General Charles Bonaparte – grandson of Jérôme Bonaparte, the youngest brother of Napoleon Bonaparte. Now it seems like Harry was a smart guy. Like most people, he knew that prohibition was on its way out. So he needed to build this whole narcotics thing into a big deal. But the problem was that cocaine and heroin weren’t used by a lot of people. How do you build a huge department out of that? But then he starts to read stories in the papers about marijuana. The New York Times jumped on the hysteria bandwagon, printing headlines like “Kills Six in a Hospital:  Mexican, Crazed by Marihuana,  Runs Amuck With Butcher Knife”  and “Mexican Family Go Insane:   Five Said to Have Been Stricken  by Eating Marihuana” It explained: “A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant, according to doctors who say there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life.” The mother had no money to buy food, so she decided to eat some marijuana plants that had been growing in their garden. Soon after, “neighbors, hearing outbursts of crazed laughter, rushed to the house to find the entire family insane.” And he sees marijuana as an easy target. Harry had long dismissed cannabis as a nuisance that would only distract him from the drugs he really wanted to fight. He insisted it was not addictive, and stated “there is probably no more absurd fallacy” than the claim that it caused violent crime. He wrote to thirty scientific experts asking a series of questions about marijuana. Twenty-nine of them wrote back saying it would be wrong to ban it, and that it was being widely misrepresented in the press. Anslinger decided to ignore them and quoted instead the one expert who believed it was a great evil that had to be eradicated. On this basis, Harry warned the public about what happens when you smoke this weed. First, you will fall into “a delirious rage.” Then you will be gripped by “dreams . . . of an erotic character.” Then you will “lose the power of connected thought.” Finally, you will reach the inevitable end point: “Insanity.” You could easily get stoned and go out and kill a person, and it would all be over before you even realized you had left your room, he said, because marijuana “turns man into a wild beast.” Indeed, “if the hideous monster Frankenstein came face to face with the monster Marijuana, he would drop dead of fright.” A doctor called Michael V. Ball got in touch with Harry to counter this view, saying he had used hemp extract as a medical student and it only made him sleepy. He suspected that the claims circulating about the drug couldn’t possibly be true. Maybe, he said, cannabis does drive people crazy in a tiny number of cases, but his hunch was that anybody reacting that way probably had an underlyin

Part EIGHT of War on Drugs series – more on the history of cannabis. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: * I like this one from The Indianapolis News, 15 Jul 1904, Fri * The Pittsburgh Press Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Sunday, December 25, 1904, warns that hasheesh will drive you MAD! * This one is from The Box Elder News Brigham City, Utah, Thursday, July 6, 1905 * The Tampa Tribune Tampa, Florida, Saturday, March 6, 1926 * As listeners of our Syria series might remember, the connection between ‘hashish’ and ‘assassins’ is considerd to be bullshit by modern scholars. * It was coined in the 11th century to describe the Hashshashins – the group of Ismaili Shia who waged guerilla warfare agains the Sunni and the Christian Crusaders. * It’s where we get the word “assassin”. * It was claimed by some sources, including Marco Polo, that the leader of the order would get his assassins to use hashish before they went on their assassinations. * Now – anyone who has smoked a joint knows how likely THAT is. * And modern scholars think the connection between the two words is just confusion because the words for hashish and assassins sounded similar. * Detroit Free Press Detroit, Michigan, Sunday, December 30, 1928 * So what was driving these increasing stories of the horrors of cannabis? * We all know they are bullshit – although it’s true that some people can have psychotic episodes, the vast majority of people don’t react that way. * Is it the media just looking for something to drive fears into the hearts of the population? * Cannabis only started to become a public issue in the US after the Spanish American war when more Mexicans started to immigrate to the US. * The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) then increased the flow: war refugees and political exiles fled to the United States to escape the violence. * Mexicans also left rural areas in search of stability and employment. * As a result, Mexican migration to the United States rose sharply. * The number of legal migrants grew from around 20,000 migrants per year during the 1910s to about 50,000 – 100,000 migrants per year during the 1920s. * This was partly driven by American capitalists looking for cheap labour. * The 1924 immigration bill lowered the number of immgrants coming in from Europe, to industry turned to Mexico. * Especially the railroads and the sugar beet industry. * They could get Mexicans to work for a lot less than Americans would demand. * The protests against the Mexicans most came from the labor movement, ultra-patriotic groups and civic groups in the Southwest who blamed Mexicans for an increase in crime. * So A lot of Mexicans immigrated to the States and the usual “whites only” crowd started up with the typical anti immigration rhetoric. * And as the Mexicans likes to smoke cannabis, so it started to get associated with evil Mexicans coming to take your jobs and rape your women. * In 1914, El Paso Texas became the first jurisdiction in the U.S. to ban the sale and possession of marijuana. * This ban gave police the right to search, detain and question Mexican immigrants without reason, except the suspicion that they were in possession of marijuana. * Here’s the Belvidere Daily Republican, Belvidere, Illinois * Saturday, September 4, 1915 * I found this great article in the Santa Ana Register, Santa Ana, California from Monday, September 20, 1915 * It claims to be a letter to the Sheriff of Orange Country from a Spaniard, warning him about the dangers of the “murder weed”. * In one section he says: * The plant was first outlawed statewide in Utah in 1915, and by 1931 it was illegal in 29 states. * The Sun New York, New York * Thursday, August 26, 1915 * Now educated medical people knew well before this that cannabis didn’t cause psychosis in most people. * The Indian Hemp Drugs Commission Report, completed in 1894, was an Indo-British study of cannabis usage in India. * The Government of India convened a seven-member commission to look into the effects of cannabis, commencing their study on 3 July 1893. * The report the Commission produced was at least 3,281 pages long, with testimony from almost 1,200 “doctors, coolies, yogis, fakirs, heads of lunatic asylums, bhang peasants, tax gatherers, smugglers, army officers, hemp dealers, ganja palace operators and the clergy.” * They visited asylums all over India to study the prevailing belief that consumption of ganja causes insanity. * Their report stated: In respect to the alleged mental effects of the drugs, the Commission have come to the conclusion that the moderate use of hemp drugs produces no injurious effects on the mind.” * They also concluded “In regard to the moral effects of the drugs, the Commission are of op

Taking a break from our War On Drugs, Cam wanted to talk about a few current news items, in particular, Cambridge Analytica, Putin’s election, and the Austin “bomber”. Welcome to Uncle Cam’s Corner. Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Uncle Cam’s Corner.1 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Part seven of War on Drugs series – the history of cannabis aka marijuana aka kush, dope, grass, herb, gage, tea, reefer, chronic, hashish. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: What time is it, Ray? That’s right – it’s 4:20. In 1971, Steve Capper, Dave Reddix, Jeffrey Noel, Larry Schwartz, and Mark Gravich, five high school students  in San Rafael, California,   calling themselves the Waldos   because “their chosen hang-out spot was a wall outside the school”,  used the term in connection with a fall 1971 plan to search for an abandoned cannabis crop that they had learned about,   based on a treasure map made by the grower. The Waldos designated the Louis Pasteur statue on the grounds of San Rafael High School as their meeting place, and 4:20 p.m. as their meeting time. The Waldos referred to this plan with the phrase “4:20 Louis”. Several failed attempts to find the crop eventually shortened their phrase to simply “4:20”, which ultimately evolved into a codeword that the teens used to mean marijuana-smoking in general. And today we’re talking about MARIJUANA PASS THE DUTCHIE, MUSICAL YOUTH We’ve talked about prohibition, heroin and cocaine. Let’s talk about weed. dope, grass, herb, gage, tea, reefer, chronic, hashish Or should we call it Cannabis? Apparently the name marijuana was popularised by our friend Harry Anslinger in the 1930s to strengthen the connection between the drug and the nasty smelly Mexicans. Some people think name comes from the linguistic root of the Aztec word mallihuan, meaning “prisoner”. Other suggestions trace the possible origins of the word to Chinese ma ren hua (‘hemp seed flower’), possibly itself originating as a loan from an earlier semitic root *mrj “hemp”. The Semitic root is also found in the Spanish word mejorana and in English marjoram (‘oregano’), which could be related to the word marihuana. This is also known in Mexico as “Chinese oregano”. The original Mexican Spanish used forms with the letter ⟨h⟩ (marihuana). Nothing to do with Mary Jane. Cannabis is a flowering herb. believed to have originated in the mountainous regions in western China or the Himalayas The number of species within the genus is disputed. Three species may be recognized: Cannabis sativa, Cannabis indica, and Cannabis ruderalis. Cannabis plants produce a group of chemicals called cannabinoids, which produce mental and physical effects when consumed. But not all cannabinoids are involved in getting you high. tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) is the one that is Responsible for the ‘’high’’effect (psychotropic), it amplifies all sensory functions such as sight, hearing, color sensitivity, and promotes a greater sense of well-being. But there are 85 different cannabinoids in cannabis and they all do something different. For exampleCBD has medical effects but does not make people feel “stoned” and actually counters some of the effects of THC. It turns out the human body has an entire endocannabinoid system that processes cannabinoids. The endocannabinoid system regulates many of the functions of the human body: appetite, food intake, motor behavior, reproduction and much more. As a drug it usually comes in the form of dried flower buds (marijuana), resin (hashish), or various extracts collectively known as hashish oil. You can smoke it, you can eat it, you can vaporise it, inject it, use a patch and you can stick it up your butt. Hemp is alsoCannabis sativa – the drug and industrial hemp both derive from the species. They both contain the psychoactive component tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), they are distinct strains with unique phytochemical compositions and uses. Hemp has lower concentrations of THC and higher concentrations of cannabidiol (CBD), which decreases or eliminates its psychoactive effects. Hemp was a major crop in China going way way back. The oldest Chinese treatise on agriculture, the Xia Xiao Zheng, written around the sixteenth century BCE, named hemp as a main crop. In The Book of Songs and The Annals, written during the Waning States period   (475-221 BC), mention is made of the six crops commonly planted: cannabis is one of them. They used it for clothing and rope, bow strings and paper – whether or not they used it to get high is unknown. But it’s hard to imagine people having hemp and not stumbling across that aspect of it. BTW, I learned that hemp was used to make canvas for sails. And the word “canvas” comes from “cannabis”. The earliest written records of people using cannabis to get high comes from the Greek historian H

Part six of War on Drugs series, we’re now talking about the history of heroin, opium, laudanum, and the other good shit that comes from the humble poppy. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Okay let’s talk about opium, aka the black spice, and its derivative, heroin. Other common names for heroin include big H, horse, hell dust, and smack. You can inject it, you can sniff it, snort it, or smoke it. Some people mix heroin with crack cocaine, a practice called speedballing. Which I thought was what you did in a Vegas hotel room where they charged you by the minute. Heroin enters the brain quickly and binds to opioid receptors on cells located in lots of different areas, especially those involved in feelings of pain and pleasure and in controlling heart rate, sleeping, and breathing. People who use heroin report feeling a “rush” (a surge of pleasure, or euphoria). Unlike Cocaine, Heroin has a LOT of great pro-heroin songs. Opium comes from the seed of the poppy plant Papaver somniferum. Poppy seed have been found in the “Bat Cave”, in Spain, which is where Bruth Wenn first set up shop before moving to Gotham later in this career. Anyway these poppy seeds have been carbon-14 dated to 4200 BCE. The first known cultivation of opium poppies was in Mesopotamia as long ago as 3400 BCE. Pretty much the first thing early humans did when they made it to the fertile crescent was start growing drugs. Because let’s be honest. When you’ve spent the last 50,000 years walking from Africa to Iraq, you deserve to get fucking high. Tablets found at Nippur, a Sumerian spiritual center south of Baghdad, described the collection of poppy juice in the morning and its use in production of opium. The Sumerians called it the “joy plant”. Do you know what the Sumerians SECOND favourite thing was apart from opium? CONAN CLIP Opium was sometimes used with hemlock to put people quickly and painlessly to death, but it was also used in medicine. The Ebers Papyrus, c. 1500 BCE, describes a way to “stop a crying child” using grains of the poppy plant strained to a pulp. Sponges soaked in opium, were used during surgery. The Egyptians cultivated opium in famous poppy fields around 1300 BCE. It was then traded to around the Mediterranean Sea, including Greece, Carthage, and Europe. By 1100 BCE, opium was cultivated on Cyprus, where surgical-quality knives were used to score the poppy pods, and opium was cultivated, traded, and smoked. Opium was also mentioned after the Persian conquest of Assyria and Babylonian lands in the 6th century BCE. From the earliest times, opium has appeared to have ritual significance, and anthropologists have speculated ancient priests may have used the drug as a proof of healing power. “What do you mean you don’t believe I have magic? Smoke this pipe and tell me it isn’t magic.” In Egypt, the use of opium was generally restricted to priests, magicians, and warriors, They ascribed its invention to Thoth, the god often depicted as a man with the head of an ibis or a baboon, and if that isn’t a reason to get fucked up, I don’t know what it. But by the way – how awesome is it to have a religion that says “sure, our gods gave us drugs because they love us and want us to feel good” – instead of this Judeo-Christian shit trying to make you feel guilty for wanting to rub one out on your sister’s tits. The Egyptians also said opium was given by Isis to Ra as treatment for a headache. He said “not now, honey, I’ve got a headache” and she said “shut the fuck up and take a hit of this, then get your clothes off and come rub one out on my tits.” The Minoans had a “goddess of the narcotics”, who wore a crown of three opium poppies, around 1300 BCE The Greek gods Hypnos (Sleep), Nyx (Night), and Thanatos (Death) were depicted wreathed in poppies or holding them. Poppies also frequently adorned statues of Apollo, Asklepios, Pluto, Demeter, Aphrodite, and Kybele. BTW, congrats to Pluto on becoming a planet again last week, mighty effort there Pluto. In 460 B.C.  Hippocrates, “the father of medicine”, acknowledged its usefulness as a narcotic and styptic in treating internal diseases and diseases of women. In 330 B.C.  Alexander the Great introduced opium to the people of Persia and India. It was introduced to China by Arab traders in the 5th century CE. The Chinese have been using opium for medicinal purposes since the 7th century. 800 years later, in the mid-fifteenth century, one Chinese scholar wrote: It is mainly used to treat masculinity, strengthen sperm, and regain vigour. It enhances the art of alchemists, sex and court ladies. Frequent use helps to c

Part five of War on Drugs series, still looking at the history of cocaine up until 1930, asking the cui bono – who benefited from the ban on cocaine? HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Johnny Cash’s cover of the old T. J. “Red” Arnall song from 1947 Cocaine Blues from his live Folsom Prison album. So that’s a song about a guy who snorts some cocaine, then kills his wife, goes on the run, gets caught and goes to prison. I like how at the end of that song, the convicted prisoner advises his fellows to stay off the cocaine, not to murder, mind you, but to avoid the cocaine; but he seems ok about the murdering your wife part. And of course JJ Cale’s song. Some more recent songs are more positive about cocaine – Lit Up by Buckcherry So who benefited from the ban on cocaine? On the surface, we might think that the major benefits went to the people who continued to sell it on the black market, and the manufacturers of other kinds of drugs – especially alcohol. Which was still legal – Prohibition was 6 years away. Police and federal law enforcement budgets got a boost, and this grew massively over time, as they had to police the banned substances But one kind of person who benefited is often over-looked. Politicians. Especially WHITE politicians. Remember that all of this happened not long after Emancipation. Slavery was outlawed, but Black men could vote. The Democrats who controlled the South started to introduce various forms of Jim Crow laws to prevent African Americans and poor whites from voting. BTW, for non-American listeners, Jim Crow laws were state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in the Southern United States. They were Enacted by white Democratic-dominated state legislatures in the late 19th century after the Reconstruction period, and these laws continued to be enforced until 1965. The name Jim Crow comes an old song from 1832, Jump Jim Crow, which was performed by a white man, Thomas Rice, who dressed up in blackface. It was the start of the minstrel movement. The laws enacted to stop blacks from voting and being represented in the political system including literacy tests,  all-white primaries and Felony disenfranchisement – which is when anyone with a felony record is banned from voting. Mississippi’s 1890 constitutional convention was among the first to use felon disenfranchisement laws against African Americans. When cocaine became a substance you could be jailed for possessing, it meant more black men would get arrested and then couldn’t vote. In 1898, the U.S. Supreme Court implicitly endorsed Mississippi’s discriminatory disenfranchisement laws in Williams v. Mississippi, a case that legalized all-white juries. Alabama’s 1901 Constitution said: “The following persons shall be disqualified both from registering, and from voting, namely: All idiots and insane persons; those who shall by reason of conviction of crime be disqualified from voting at the time of the ratification of this Constitution; those who shall be convicted of treason, murder, arson, embezzlement, malfeasance in office, larceny, receiving stolen property, obtaining property or money under false pretenses, perjury, subornation of perjury, robbery, assault with intent to rob, burglary, forgery, bribery, assault and battery on the wife, bigamy, living in adultery, sodomy, incest, rape, miscegenation, crime against nature, or any crime punishable by imprisonment in the penitentiary, or of any infamous crime or crime involving moral turpitude; also, any person who shall be convicted as a vagrant or tramp, or of selling or offering to sell his vote or the vote of another, or of buying or offering to buy the vote of another, or of making or offering to make a false return in any election by the people or in any primary election to procure the nomination or election of any person to any office, or of suborning any witness or registrar to secure the registration of any person as an elector.” “What is it we want to do?” asked John B. Knox, president of the Alabama convention of 1901. “Why, it is within the limits imposed by the Federal Constitution, to establish white supremacy in this State.” He argued that manipulating the ballot to exclude blacks was warranted, because they were inferior to whites and because the state needed to avert the “menace of Negro domination.” QUOTE: “The negro is descended from a race lowest in intelligence and, moral perception of all the races, of men.” They didn’t fuck around these guys. Within two years, criminal voting restrictions disenfranchised nearly 10 times as many blacks as whites. And this isn’t just something that happened 100 years ago. Poll tax

Part four of War on Drugs series, still looking at the history of cocaine up until 1930. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: Back to our discussion about cocaine. In London in 1916, during WWI, the deparment store Harrods were selling a kit described as “A Welcome Present for Friends at the Front” containing cocaine, morphine, syringes and needles. The Times in London started worrying the use of cocaine would undermine the combat effectiveness of the British Army. In the February 12, 1916, issue, its journalist expressed no doubt that: [t]o the soldier subjected to nervous strain and hard work cocaine, once used, must become a terrible temptation. It will, for the hour, charm away his trouble, his fatigue and his anxiety; it will give him fictitious strength and vigour. But it will also, in the end, render him worthless as a soldier and a man.” And who was supplying the British soldiers with cocaine? Harrods? No, ZE GERMANS. After all, they invented the bloody stuff. It was all a secret plot by ZE Germans to ruin British combat performance, undermining military discipline, and ultimately causing a rapid decay of the army. Politicians and the media used drugs as an excuse for why the British army hadn’t been able to defeat ze Germans already. So on May 11, 1916, the Army Council issued an order banning any unauthorised sale or supply of psychoactive substances — mostly cocaine, but also codeine, hemp, heroin, morphine, and opium — to any member of the armed forces, except for medical reasons and only by prescription. Of course, if I was in a trench in WWI, I’d want to be on as many drugs as possible. This was all part of the DORA – Defence of the Realm Act. Which also ushered in a variety of authoritarian social control mechanisms, such as censorship: “No person shall by word of mouth or in writing spread reports likely to cause disaffection or alarm among any of His Majesty’s forces or among the civilian population” The great British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, was sent to prison for being an outspoken pacifist. Things included flying kites, starting bonfires, buying binoculars, feeding wild animals bread, discussing naval and military matters or buying alcohol on public transport, were all no longer permitted. And I don’t know about you, but I *always* by my liquers from guys dressed like hobos on railroad cars. They tell me it’s really limoncello and who am I to question them? But anyway, the talk about the soldiers taking drugs was all hype. DON’T BELIEVE THE HYPE A report done by the Select Committee on the Use of Cocaine in Dentistry – or the SCUCD – debunked the myth that cocaine addiction was hitting hard in the British forces: We are unanimously of opinion that there is no evidence of any kind to show that there is any serious, or, perhaps, even noticeable prevalence of the cocaine habit amongst the civilian or military population of Great Britain. There have been a certain number of cases amongst the oversea troops quartered in, or passing through, the United Kingdom, but there is hardly any trace of the practice having spread to British troops, and, apart from a small number of broken-down medical men, there is only very slight evidence of its existence amongst the general population. Why did the dentists care? Well because cocaine was the number one drug for the lower classes to take during dental surgery. And now it was illegal. And it stayed that way after the war as well. But In America you could still buy it in your local drugstore until 1916. At the time, the soda fountains of Atlanta pharmacies had become fashionable gathering places for middle-class whites as an alternative to bars. Various forms of cocaine-laced cola were mixed with soda water, and the drink quickly caught on as an “intellectual beverage” among well-off whites. The cola was distributed in bottles, and was accessible not only to wealthy whites, but also to African Americas who had been barred from soda shops due to segregation. From the New York Times: “Middle-class whites worried that soft drinks were contributing to what they saw as exploding cocaine use among African-Americans. Southern newspapers reported that “negro cocaine fiends” were raping white women, the police powerless to stop them. By 1903, manufacturers had bowed to white fears (and a wave of anti-narcotics legislation), removing the cocaine and adding more sugar and caffeine.” At the time, cocaine addiction was associated with negroes. “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace,” read a New York Times headline at the time Now anyone who has seen SCARFACE knows this is actually true. This was not the only headline of this

Part three of War on Drugs series. We begin the story of Harry Anslinger, the father of the War on Drugs. And we also talk about the history of cocaine. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Show Notes: * Which brings us to Harry Anslinger. * Harry was born in 1892. * His father was a barber from Switzerland. * His mother was German. * The family was poor and, when he was 14, Harry joined his father working for the Pennsylvania Railroad laying train tracks. * He later became an investigator for the railroad. * He performed a detailed investigation that found the $50,000 claim of a widower in a railroad accident to be fraudulent. * He saved the company the payout and was promoted to captain of railroad police. * It was during this time that he first heard about the “Black Hand”. * He was responsible by this time of a Sicilian work crew. * But one morning, Harry found one of his work crew—an Italian man named Giovanni—bleeding in a ditch. * He had been shot multiple times. * When Giovanni woke up in the hospital, Harry was there, ready to hear what had happened, but the workman was too terrified to speak. * Anslinger spent hours assuring him that he could keep him and his family safe. * Finally, Giovanni spoke. * He said he was being forced to pay protection money by a man called “Big Mouth Sam,” one of the thugs belonging to a group called the Mafia that had come to the United States from Sicily and remained hidden amidst the Italian immigrants. * The Mafia, Giovanni told Harry, were engaged in all sorts of crimes, and people on the railroad were being charged a “terror tax”—you gave the Mafia money or else you ended up in a hospital bed like this, or worse. * Anslinger went to confront Big Mouth Sam—a “squat, black-haired and ox-shouldered” immigrant—and said, “If Giovanni dies, I’m going to see to it that you hang. Do you understand that?” * Big Mouth tried to reply, but Harry insisted: “And if he lives and you ever bother him again, or any of my men, or try to shake any of them down any more, I’ll kill you with my own hands.” * After that, Anslinger became obsessed with the Mafia, at a time when most Americans refused to believe it even existed. * This is hard for us to understand today, but the official position of every official in U.S. law enforcement until the 1960s—from J. Edgar Hoover on down—was that the Mafia was a preposterous conspiracy theory, no more real than the Loch Ness Monster. * When WWI broke out, Harry tried to join the army but he was blind in one eye – his brother had hit him in the eye with a rock – and he was rejected. * But because he spoke German, he could still be useful. * he was offered a position as a diplomatic agent in Europe. * he traveled to Hamburg and The Hague, where his job was to ferret out information from local diplomats and to deal with local Americans in trouble. * Several discharged American sailors were brought to him to be shipped home because they had become addicted to heroin. * He spent the next ten years in a variety of policing roles overseas. * At the very end of the war, as it was becoming clear to everyone that the Germans had lost, Harry was sent on his most important mission so far: to take a secret message to the defeated German dictator. * The way he later told the story, Harry was dispatched to the small Dutch town of Amerongen, where the Kaiser was holed up in a castle and planning to abdicate. * Anslinger’s job was to pose as a German official and convey a message from President Woodrow Wilson: Don’t do it. * The United States wanted the Kaiser to retain the imperial throne, to prevent the rise of the “revolution, strikes and chaos” it feared would follow from his sudden departure. * The Dutch guards at the gates of the castle ordered Harry to show his credentials. * “Show me your credentials,” he snapped back in his fiercest German. * Frightened, assuming he was one of the Kaiser’s men, they let him through. * Anslinger managed to get the message through—but it was too late. * The decision had been made. * The Kaiser quit. * For the rest of his life, Anslinger believed that if he had gotten the president’s plea through only a little earlier, “a decent peace might have been written, forestalling any chance for a future Hitler gaining power, or a Second World War erupting.” * It was the first time Harry felt that the future of civilization hung on his actions, but it would not be the last. * In 1930, towards the end of Prohibition, he was appointed head of the brand new Federal Bureau of Narcotics, an agency of the United States Department of the Treasury. * Harry Aslinger is the man who started the War On Drugs. * After WWI, Harry was sent to the Bahamas. * This was in 1926. The middle of prohibition. * Something to d

Part two of third series. The Eighteenth Amendment is passed. And then repealed. Thousands of people die along the way. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts.   Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: A lot of the public resentment against alcohol was also a form of racism and white nationalism. The immigrant men who came to the country, particularly the Germans, Irish and Italians, tended to frequent saloons that catered to their particular nationality. In a backlash to the emerging reality of a changing American demographic, many prohibitionists subscribed to the doctrine of nativism, in which they endorsed the notion that America was made great as a result of its white Anglo-Saxon ancestry. The 1914 Congressional record states — Liquor traffic is “responsible for 25% of the poverty, 37% of the pauperism, 45.8% of child misery, 25% of insanity, 19.5% of divorces, and 50% of the crime. These are grave charges, and their truth has not been denied.” In March 1917, the 65th Congress convened, in which the dries – prohibitionists – outnumbered the wets – anti-prohibitionists – by 140 to 64 in the Democratic Party and 138 to 62 among Republicans. With America’s declaration of war against Germany in April, German Americans, a major force against prohibition, were sidelined and their protests subsequently ignored. In addition, a new justification for prohibition arose: prohibiting the production of alcoholic beverages would allow more resources—especially grain that would otherwise be used to make alcohol—to be devoted to the war effort. While wartime prohibition was a spark for the movement, World War I ended before nationwide Prohibition was enacted. A resolution calling for a Constitutional amendment, the 18th Amendment, to accomplish nationwide Prohibition was introduced in Congress and passed by both houses in December 1917. It called the production, transport, and sale of alcohol (though not the consumption or private possession) illegal. By January 16, 1919, the Amendment had been ratified by 36 of the 48 states, making it law, despite being vetoed by Woodrow Wilson. Eventually, only two states—Connecticut and Rhode Island—opted out of ratifying it. On October 28, 1919, Congress passed enabling legislation, known as the Volstead Act, to enforce the Eighteenth Amendment when it went into effect in 1920. Prohibition began on January 16, 1920, when the Eighteenth Amendment went into effect. A total of 1,520 Federal Prohibition agents (police) were tasked with enforcement. Winston Churchill believed that Prohibition was “an affront to the whole history of mankind” Of course, in the months between the passing of the legislation and its enactment, rich people were able to hoard massive quantities of it and stock it in their cellars. They bought the inventories of liquor retailers and wholesalers, emptying out their warehouses, saloons, and club storerooms. President Woodrow Wilson moved his own supply of alcoholic beverages to his Washington residence after his term of office ended. His successor, Warren G. Harding, relocated his own large supply into the White House after inauguration The poor, on the other hand, were fucked. They couldn’t afford to stock up. But they, like the rich, still wanted to drink. This of course lead to the development of a black market. And bootleggers like the Five Points Gang in NY. Five Points was started by Paul Kelly, born as Paolo Antonio Vaccarelli, an Italian American. Over the years, Kelly recruited youths who later became prominent criminals, such as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone and Lucky Luciano. Capone moved to Chicago with Torrio and ended up the boss of the Chicago Outfit at 26. And he ran as massive bootlegging operation including breweries and importing whiskey from Canda. He said “I am just a businessman, giving the people what they want”; and, “All I do is satisfy a public demand.” He based himself in in Cicero, Illinois. Good ol’ Cicero. We can’t let him go. Cui bono. And the authorities had never counted on such a huge illegal operation to supply booze to the poor. They hadn’t built up a big enough policing force to deal with it. people continued to drink—and in large quantities. Alcoholism rates soared during the 1920s; insurance companies charted the increase at more than 300 more percent. Speakeasies promptly opened for business. By the decade’s end, some 30,000 existed in New York City alone. Rigorous enforcement had managed to slow the smuggling of alcohol from Canada and other countries. But crime syndicates responded by stealing massive quantities of industrial alcohol—used in paints and solvents, fuels and medical supplies—and red

Our third series starts today. We’re going to be looking at the history of the “War On Drugs”. HOW TO LISTEN If you’re seeing this message, it means you aren’t logged in as a subscriber. If want to listen to the premium episodes of the series, you’ll need to become one of our Bullshit Fighters and register for one of our premium accounts. Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: * Once upon a time, less than a century ago, You could go to any American pharmacy and buy heroin and cocaine. * In the 1890s the Sears & Roebuck catalogue, which was distributed to millions of Americans homes, offered a syringe and a small amount of cocaine for $1.50. * The most popular cough mixtures in the United States contained opiates. * a new soft drink called Coca-Cola was made from the same plant as snortable cocaine, * in Britain, the classiest department stores sold heroin tins for society women. * Back in George Washington’s day, he grew hemp at Mount Vernon as one of his three primary crops. * In the 1850s, you could buy Medicinal preparations of cannabis in American pharmacies * By the 1880s, there were hashish parlors and opium dens in every major city on the east coast. * It was estimated there were around 500 such establishments in New York City alone. * An article in Harper’s Magazine (1883), describes a hashish-house in New York frequented by a large clientele, including males and females of “the better classes,” and further talks about parlors in Boston, Philadelphia and Chicago. * So When did the war on drugs start? * And why? * That’s the question we’re going to investigate in this series of thebullshitfilter * Our story starts with Prohibition in the 1920s. * Americans, apparently, used to be hard drinkers. * In 1830, on average, Americans consumed 1.7 bottles of hard liquor per week, which is three times the amount consumed today. * And this really bothered certain Puritan religious groups, especially the Calvinists and Methodists. * Throughout the first 1,800 years of Church history, Christians generally consumed alcoholic beverages as a common part of everyday life and used “the fruit of the vine”[1] in their central rite—the Eucharist or Lord’s Supper. * They held that both the Bible and Christian tradition taught that alcohol is a gift from God that makes life more joyous, but that over-indulgence leading to drunkenness is sinful or at least a vice. * In the mid-19th century, some Protestant Christians moved from a position of allowing moderate use of alcohol (sometimes called moderationism) to either deciding that not imbibing was wisest in the present circumstances (abstentionism) or prohibiting all ordinary consumption of alcohol because it was believed to be a sin (prohibitionism). * Many Protestant churches, particularly Methodists and Evangelical groups, started advocating abstentionism. * Which is weird. * The Puritans who migrated to America, were huge drinkers. * But then the Second Great Awakening happened. * This is the name given to the Protestant religious revival that started in the U.S. around 1790 and grew through the early 1800s * It was a backlash against the skepticism, deism, and rationalism that were becoming popular from the Enlightenment. * The religious preachers used enthusiasm, emotion, and an appeal to the super-natural. * This is when the Mormons were created along with lots of other movements, like the 7th Day adventists, the Church of Christ, etc. * They believed Christ would return to earth after the “millennium”, which could entail either a literal 1,000 years or a figurative “long period” of peace and happiness. * Christians therefore had a duty to purify society in preparation for that return. * It emphasized personal holiness and perfectionism. * The American Temperance Society was started in 1826 by a Calvinist minister, Lyman Beecher. * Father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. * He and his children were big supporters of the abolition of slavery, women’s rights, and, of course, not drinking. * They thought booze was one of the main causes of bad behaviour and violence. * Especially violence towards women. * They were the forerunners of the #metoo movement. * Within five years there were 2,220 local chapters in the U.S. with 170,000 members who had taken a pledge to abstain from drinking distilled beverages. * Within ten years, there were over 8,000 local groups and more than 1,250,000 members who had taken the pledge. * After a while, temperance groups increasingly pressed for the mandatory prohibition of alcohol rather than for voluntary abstinence. * The American Temperance Society was the first U.S. social movement organization to mobilize massive and national support for a specific cause. * A forerunner of the NRA. * After the end of the American Civil War, the national Prohibition Party was founded in 1869, and the Woman’s Chri

The sixth and final episode of our series on gun control and gun violence  continues our look at the United States. We explore the history of the NRA and develop our conclusions from the series. Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: NRA Let’s talk about the NRA, the National Rifle Association. Why is the NRA so powerful? A bit of history. The group was founded in 1871 as a recreational group designed to “promote and encourage rifle shooting on a scientific basis”. Apparently the founders had been appalled at how little their troops knew about guns during the civil war. The founders were Two Yankee Civil War veterans, including an ex-New York Times reporter, who felt that war dragged on because more urban northerners could not shoot as well as rural southerners. Civil War Gen. Ambrose Burnside, who was also the former governor of Rhode Island and a U.S. senator and the inventor of sideburns, became the fledgling NRA’s first president. The NRA’s path into political lobbying began in 1934 when it began mailing members with information about upcoming firearms bills. It started lobbying because of a couple of gun control acts that were going through Congress. Can you guess the position they took on those bills? THEY SUPPORTED THEM! In the early 1920s, the National Revolver Association—the NRA’s handgun training counterpart—proposed model legislation for states that included requiring a permit to carry a concealed weapon, adding five years to a prison sentence if a gun was used in a crime, and banning non-citizens from buying a handgun. They also proposed that gun dealers turn over sales records to police and created a one-day waiting period between buying a gun and getting it—two provisions that the NRA opposes today. The association supported two major gun control acts, the National Firearms Act of 1934 (NFA) and Gun Control Act of 1968 (GCA). In fact, the NRA helped write most of the federal laws restricting gun use until the 1980s. What happened to the Second Amendment during the first 100 years of the NRA’s existence? Maybe they didn’t learn about it until 1980? Do you know why they were supporting gun control in the 30s? It was introduced just after the repeal of Prohibition and was designed to get Tommy Guns off the streets. Do you know why they were called Tommy Guns? The Thompson submachine gun is an American submachine gun, invented by John T. Thompson in 1918. He built it for the Allies to use in WWI. In 1929, Al Capone’s St. Valentine’s Day massacre saw men disguised as Chicago police kill 7 rivals with machine guns. Bonnie and Clyde’s crime-and-gun spree from 1932-34 was a national sensation. John Dillinger robbed 10 banks in 1933 and fired a machine gun as he sped away. In 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt, made fighting crime and gun control part of his ‘New Deal.’ The NRA helped him draft the first federal gun controls: 1934’s National Firearms Act and 1938’s Gun Control Act. The NRA President at the time, Karl T. Frederick, a 1920 Olympic gold-medal winner for marksmanship who became a lawyer, praised the new state gun controls in Congress. “I have never believed in the general practice of carrying weapons,” he testified before the 1938 law was passed. “I do not believe in the general promiscuous toting of guns. I think it should be sharply restricted and only under licenses.” The legal doctrine of gun rights balanced by gun controls held for nearly a half-century. The 1968 Gun Control Act was initially prompted by the assassination of Kennedy in 1963. He was shot and killed with a rifle purchased by mail-order from an ad in the (NRA) magazine American Rifleman. Congressional hearings followed and a ban on mail-order gun sales was discussed, but no law was passed until 1968. At the hearings NRA Executive Vice-President Franklin Orth supported a ban on mail-order sales, stating, “We do not think that any sane American, who calls himself an American, can object to placing into this bill the instrument which killed the president of the United States.” BTW, you won’t find any of this history on the NRA’s website. The deaths of Martin Luther King, Jr. in April 1968 and U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy in June 1968 renewed efforts to pass the bill. It regulates the firearms industry and firearms owners. It primarily focuses on regulating interstate commerce in firearms by generally prohibiting interstate firearms transfers except among licensed manufacturers, dealers and importers. The nation’s white political elite feared that violence was too prevalent and there were too many people—especially urban Black nationalists—with access to guns. In May 1967, two dozen Black Panther Party members walked into the California Statehouse carrying rifles to protest a gun-control bill, prompting then-Gov. Ronald Reagan to comment, “There’s no reason why on the street today a citizen should be carrying loaded weapons.” It was the Black Panthers, not the NRA,

The fifth episode of our series on gun control and gun violence  continues our look at the United States. We explore the history of the Second Amendment and some of the common arguments Americans make for why they need guns. Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: Of course, Americans often point to the Second Amendment of their Constitution. Which protects the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Now of course, the first point is that the second amendment was written in 1791. The same year the first semaphore machine was unveiled in Paris, King Louis XVI and the French royal family were caught during an attempt to flee Paris during the French Revolution, Thomas Jefferson believed that “blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstance, are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind” but that didn’t stop him fucking his personal slaves, and John Fitch granted US patent for his working steamboat.” My point being that it was LONG FUCKING TIME AGO and the world has moved on in many ways. Whenever someone says to me “blah blah founding fathers blah blah second amendment”, my first though is always “why should I give a fuck about something someone though 250 years ago?” And by the way “founding fathers”?? That’s some weird shit right there. They were a bunch of tax dodgers who staged a revolution, that’s all. Nobody in Australia EVER tries to win an argument by saying “Well when Arthur Phillip was Governor of the Australian colony in 1788, he thought blah blah.” If you tried that here, we’d throw a can of Fosters at you and your kangaroo. And no-one in England ever refers to the opinions of King George III. Maybe because he was batshit insane, but still. Of course as everyone knows, the second amendment actually says “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” At the time of the American Revolution, there was no federal standing army, so the states had militias. The armed citizen-soldier carried the responsibility. Service in militia, including providing one’s own ammunition and weapons, was mandatory for all men. When the Revolutionaries started to cause trouble for the British in the late 18th century, the British tried to prevent trouble using a combination of gunpowder embargos and actual disarmament of some colonies. The first battles of the war, The Battles of Lexington and Concord, were around an attempt by the British to disarm the Massachusetts terrorists. After the Revolution, the new American government disbanded its army except for 80 guys and each state was left with a voluntary militia. The government did create a small standing army which grew over time. 700 men in 1784 rising to 5,104 in 1793. So in 1791, when the second amendment was written, militias were still a big part of the defense of the country. States passed some of the first gun control laws about 20 years later, beginning with Kentucky’s law to curb the practice of carrying concealed weapons in 1813. The first attempt to push the individual right argument of the second amendment happened in Kentucky in 1822 – Bliss v. Commonwealth. It was about the right of a guy to carry a concealed sword cane. The court found in favour of the individual right – but it referred to Kentucky’s Constitution, not the big one. It was was overturned by constitutional amendment with Section 26 in Kentucky’s Third Constitution (1850) banning the future carrying of concealed weapons, while still asserting that the bearing of arms in defense of themselves and the state was an individual and collective right in the Commonwealth of Kentucky. A couple of years later it was the defense used when a kid pulled out a concealed pistol and killed his brother’s teacher over an accusation regarding eating chestnuts in class. In State v. Buzzard (1842), the Arkansas high court adopted a militia-based, political right, reading of the right to bear arms under state law – but this applied to the Arkansas Constitution that declared, “that the free white men of this State shall have a right to keep and bear arms for their common defense”. The Arkansas high court declared “That the words ‘a well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free State’, and the words ‘common defense’ clearly show the true intent and meaning of these Constitutions [i.e., Arkansas and U.S.] and prove that it is a political and not an individual right, and, of course, that the State, in her legislative capacity, has the right to regulate and control it: This being the case, then the people, neither individually nor collectively, have the right to keep and bear arms.” After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment was passed in 1868, mostly dealing with the rights of form

The fourth episode of our series on gun control and gun violence  begins our look at the United States. Was the Wild West as violent as Hollywood has lead us to believe? How do daily mass shootings effect the national American psyche? Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: Okay, now we get to ‘Murica. Recording this on the fifth anniversary of Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre where  20 children between six and seven years old, as well as six adult staff members, were shot and killed. We all know American has a gun problem. Or does it? It certainly has a lot of gun deaths. But is that a problem? I guess it depends on your perspective. According to a recent Pew poll, Overall, half of Americans say gun violence is a very big problem in the United States, Let’s review the modern stats in the USA. 101 guns per 100 people. Australia: 13.7 guns per 100 people. UK: 3.78 guns per 100 people Canada: 25 guns per 100 population 35 – 42% of households have at least one gun. 10,000 – 11,000 gun homicides a year. You have 230 times the chance of being killed by someone with a gun if you live in America. And another 21,000 gun suicides a year. And of course there are the mass shootings. On average, about one a day, if you use the FBI derived definition: FOUR or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location, not including the shooter. The Gun Violence archive mapped 1,516 mass shootings in 1,735 days, there is a mass shooting every nine out of 10 days on average. If you limit the definition to where three or more victims are actually killed, not just wounded, by the attacker and you exclude shootings stemming from more conventional crimes such as armed robbery or gang violence, there is still about one a month. Since we recorded our first episodes in this series on 28 Oct, there have been 30 mass shootings in the USA, including one at an elementary school in California, where five adults were killed and several children were injured, and the one at the First Baptist Church in Texas where 27 adults and children were killed and another 20 injured. So the question is – why is America’s position on guns so vastly different from comparable countries? Now of course, we’re not going to even try to solve it. It’s a complex issue. I just want to try to understand the arguments for and against America taking the same kinds of steps the rest of the developed world has done to reduce gun violence. And the idea of gun control gets many people hot and bothered. Some people tell me that American is just different because it has a violent past and guns have always been a way of life. I think that’s intellectually lazy. Lots of countries have a violent past. America wasn’t the only fucking country with a Wild West. Australia was a convict colony. We tried to wipe out our indigenous population too. America isn’t the only country to have a revolution or a civil war. Germany has a pretty violent past too. Their firearm homicide rate is even less than Australia’s. According to The University of Sydney, in Russia, another country with a violent past, about 25% of homicides are committed with guns – in the USA, it’s more like 60%. BTW, Russia’s homicide rate is nearly double that of the USA. It doesn’t have many mass shootings but it has a lot more bombings than America. BTW – The homicide rate in Russia more than tripled between 1988 and 1994 and is now among the highest in the world. Any guesses why? The Russians are also the second biggest drinkers of hard liquor in the world. Want to guess who is number one? South Korea. I’d drink too if Kim was my neighbour. Up until a few years ago, there were pretty tough restrictions on gun ownership in Russia, but they loosened up a little in 2014. But a 2011 poll found that 81 percent of Russians opposed easing the existing gun regulations. Japan? Pretty violent history. They have 6 gun related homicides a year. So American stands alone when compared to comparable the UK or ex-British colonies. According to Gallup, In 2017, only 28% of Americans favored a ban on handguns. But it wasn’t always that way. in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on pistols and revolvers. What changed? For a long time, gun control laws were not controversial in the USA — they were the norm. Within a generation of the country’s founding, many states passed laws banning any citizen from carrying a concealed gun. The cowboy towns that Hollywood lionized as the ‘Wild West’ actually required all guns be turned in to sheriffs while people were within local city limits. Frontier towns — places like Tombstone, Deadwood, and Dodge — actually had the most restrictive gun control laws in the nation. In fact, many of those same cities have far less burdensome gun control today then they did back in the 1800s. A visitor arriving in Wichita, Kansas in 1873, the heart of the Wild West era

The third episode of our series on gun control and gun violence looks at the UK and Canadian experiences. They both had a significant mass shooting some decades ago, both tightened up their gun laws, and their experiences since then have been quite different in some ways – but quite similar in others. Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: UNITED KINDGOM England’s history of gun laws dates back to the assassination of William of Orange in 1584 with a concealed wheellock pistol. Queen Elizabeth I, who, like me, feared assassination by Roman Catholics, banned possession of wheellock pistols near a royal palace in 1594. The country has one of the lowest rates of gun homicides in the world. There were 0.05 recorded intentional homicides committed with a firearm per 100,000 inhabitants in the five years to 2011 (15 to 38 people per annum). Gun homicides accounted for 2.4% of all homicides in the year 2011. handguns were effectively banned after the Dunblane school massacre in Scotland in 1996 with the exception of Northern Ireland. Dunblane was the UK’s first and only school shooting. There has been one spree killing since Dunblane, in June 2010 involving a legally owned shotgun. On 13 March 1996, Thomas Hamilton, a 43-year-old former scout leader who had been ousted by The Scout Association in 1974, shot dead sixteen young children and their teacher, Gweneth Mayor, in Dunblane Primary School’s gymnasium with two Browning Hi-Power 9×19mm pistols and two Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum revolvers. He then shot himself. The four handguns used in the attack were legally owned. Nine years before Dunblane, there had been Hungerford, where Michael Ryan went on a rampage through the Berkshire town, killing 16 people in a series of random shootings before turning the gun on himself. He had been carrying a handgun and two semi automatic rifles, for which he had firearms certificates. Public petitions after Dunblane, most notably by the Snowdrop Campaign, founded by friends of the bereaved families, called for a total ban on the private ownership and use of handguns in the UK. Signed by 750,000 people it was symbolic of the weight of public opinion. But John Major’s Conservative government went one step further and banned all handguns, with the exception of .22 caliber single-shot weapons, in England, Scotland and Wales. The Labour government that followed banned the .22 caliber guns as well. After both shootings the government called a gun amnesty, compensating owners for their weapons. After Dunblane, more than 162,000 handguns were surrendered. There has been only one mass shooting in the country since the laws were tightened. Derrick Bird killed 12 people in northern England’s Whitehaven in 2010. Fully automatic (submachine-guns, etc.) are “prohibited weapons” and require explicit permission from central government to permit ownership. Generally, such permits are not available to private citizens. Today there are about 3.78 guns per 100 people. In Northern Ireland, possessing a firearm with a Firearm Certificate issued by the Police Service of Northern Ireland is legal. The laws there are less restrictive. But unexpectedly, after the 1997 gun laws were introduced, there was a 105% increase in recorded handgun crime  between 1998 and 2003. Although in Scotland, handgun offences fell by almost 80% in the five years after Dunblane. On the surface, crime statistics in the years after the ban was introduced appear to support the theory that it had little impact at least in terms of crime. Gun crime rose sharply, to peak in 2003/4. But researchers found that a large proportion of “armed robberies” were carried out by offenders with imitation or non-functioning firearms. The rise in handgun crime had nothing to do with the handgun ban and everything to do with the rise of non-firing “realistic imitation” firearms. After that the number of crimes in which a firearm was involved fell consistently, to 4,779 offences in 2013. There is general public consensus against ownership of handguns, which is enforced under strict legislation. Annual crime figures show that the homicide rate has fallen steeply over the last decade, from a high in 2002 when 172 deaths were identified as likely to have been caused by the family GP and serial killer Dr Harold Shipman. More broadly, overall crime dropped to it’s lowest figure in two decades. This might have something to do with a significant increase in police added in the early 2000s. But the numbers of police have significantly DECREASED in the last 7 years, and the crime rate has stayed down, so it’s not that simple. I sometimes read that “In the UK there are 2,034 violent crimes per 100,000 people. …The US has a violent crime rate of 403 [violent] crimes per 100,000 residents.” Which makes it sound like the UK has five times as much violent crimes as the US. But again this is misleading. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Re

The second episode of our series on gun control and gun violence, finishing up our chat about the Aussie experience. Did the gun restrictions put into place in 1996 have an impact on reducing gun homicide, suicide, other forms of homicide and crime rates in general? Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: The NFA placed tight control on semi-automatic and fully automatic weapons, although permitted their use by licensed individuals who required them for a purpose other than ‘personal protection’. The law created a national firearm registry, a 28-day waiting period for firearm sales, and tightened firearm licensing rules. The law requires anyone wishing to possess or use a firearm with some exceptions, be over the age of 12. Owners must be at least 18 years of age, have secure storage for their firearms and provide a “genuine reason” for doing so. A gun buy-back scheme started on 1 October 1996 and concluded on 30 September 1997. It was mandatory for illegal firearms – eg semi-automatics – but not for legal guns. A lot of people surrendered their legal guns they no longer needed anyway – it was a chance to get paid for them. The government bought back and destroyed 650,000 firearms. Today we only have 13.7 guns per 100 people. Still sounds like a lot to me. A recent study revealed that Australians now own as many guns as they did at the time of the Port Arthur massacre. So we took guns out of the system but they have crept back in. Anyway… Between 1991 and 2001, the number of firearm-related deaths in Australia declined 47%. In 2014, 35 people were victims of firearms homicide, compared to 98 people in 1996. Since then, we haven’t had another mass shooting – in 21 years. Non-gun homicide rates fell by 59% and gun homicides fell by the same 59% Gun suicide rates have fallen by 65%. Today, 20 years later, none of our major political parties have an issue with The National Firearms Agreement Although some of our minor political parties do have an issue with it. How did the people feel about it at the time? In an Age poll of 2058 Australians taken on 3-5 May 1996, 90 per cent of those surveyed supported a national ban on all automatic and semi-automatic firearms. How do they feel about it today? In a 2015 poll of over 1,700 people, Essential Research found 40 per cent thought Australia’s gun ownership laws were “about right’ – while a further 45 per cent believed they were “not strong enough’. Just 6 per cent of those surveyed responded that current laws are too strong, while 10 per cent said they didn’t know. Interesting, those who thought they were about right or not strong enough were pretty equally spread across the voting spectrum. And just a few months ago, we had another amnesty, where another 26,000 firearms were surrendered. But Did it really have an effect on Australia’s crime / murder rate? The national homicide rate has decreased from 1.8 per 100,000 people in 1989-90 to 1 per 100,000 in 2013-14. This trend is supported by longer-term Australia Bureau of Statistics datathat shows the use of firearms in homicides remains at historically low levels. In contrast, UN data indicates that about 40% of global homicides are caused by firearms. But it’s also worth pointing out that the homicide rate in the U.S. has been falling as well during the last 20 years. Data from the ABS also indicates the rate of suicide by firearm fell by 67 per cent from 2.1 deaths per 100,000 of the population in 1996 to 0.7 deaths in 2014. But there are studies that suggest homicide rates and suicide rates were already falling before the NFA and that it may not have had much of an impact. In terms of suicide, other factors like suicide help lines, mental health programs and suicide prevention might have played a larger role. Research shows that people who attempt suicide and fail, usually regret the attempt later. And it’s must harder to fail if you have a gun. But in terms of homicides, the research is inconclusive. Some studies say the buyback had an impact while others say it didn’t. However, I’d argue that while the impact on homicides might be hard to determine, it has had an impact on the national psyche. Mass shootings just aren’t something that Australians worry about. Neither is gun violence in general. Just a few days ago, there was a shooting at the University of Utah. I have a niece who goes there. She lives on campus. That kind of shit just doesn’t happen here. Or at least very, VERY rarely. We don’t have to deal with the daily occurrence of asking ourselves if we could have done more to prevent the deaths of kids in a school or of dancers at a nightclub or of people enjoying country music – as if enjoying country music is actually possible in the first place. It contributes to the overall feeling of safety in the nation. In the 2017 “most livable cities” survey, Australia had three spots in the top ten. As did Ca

The first episode of our series on gun control and gun violence in four countries – Australia, UK, Canada and USA. We’ll explore the history of each country and look at the evidence as to whether or not gun control has lead to less gun homicides, less mass shootings, and lower crime rates. This first episode is mostly talking about the Australian experience. Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi Show Notes: Let’s talk about guns. Be clear – we’re not having a go at America. We’re trying to understand the arguments for and against limiting the access people have to guns and to see how the actual evidence stacks up. On the surface, the numbers are quite interesting. The world’s crime figures are collected by the UNODC – United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime – through its annual crime survey. People killed – homicides, not including suicides – on average in one year by guns: Australia: 35, UK 42; Germany: 194, Canada: 200, USA: 10,000 – 11,000 Now, yes – the USA has a larger population. But it’s population of 323 million is only 5 times the size of the UK’s 65 million. And yet its gun death number is 231x the UK’s. You have 230 times the chance of being killed by someone with a gun if you live in America. The Small Arms Survey collates civilian gun ownership rates for 178 countries around the world, and has ‘normalised’ the data to include a rate per 100,000 population. It shows that: With less than 5% of the world’s population, the United States is home to roughly 35–50 per cent of the world’s civilian-owned guns, heavily skewing the global geography of firearms and any relative comparison You often hear that the US has the highest gun ownership rate in the world – an average of 88 per 100 people. But that’s actually misleading. Less than half of American households own one. This is the rate of gun ownership that matters: how many Americans actually possess a firearm? It’s not 88 percent or 100 percent – it’s 47 percent. While the US has the most guns per capita, it does not have the highest rate of gun ownership. That puts it first in the world for gun ownership – and even the number two country, Yemen, has significantly fewer – 54.8 per 100 people But the US does not have the worst firearm murder rate – that prize belongs to Honduras, El Salvador and Jamaica. In fact, the US is number 28, with a rate of 2.97 per 100,000 people Puerto Rico tops the world’s table for firearms murders as a percentage of all homicides – 94.8%. It’s followed by Sierra Leone in Africa and Saint Kitts and Nevis in the Caribbean. Australia has only 0.14 gun-related homicides per 100,000 people. England has only 0.07. Which means the USA’s rate is 42x that of England and 21x Australia. How do those numbers relate to the overall homicide rates in those countries? USA has 4.88 intentional homicides per 100,000. Number 94 in the world. Australia only has 0.98, number 179. UK 0.92, number 183. USA homicide rate is roughly three times as high as Canada (1.9) and six times as high as Germany and Italy (0.9). Compared to other countries identified in the report as “developed”, which all had average homicide rates of 0.8 per 100,000, America is a much more violent country. BTW if you want to really be safe, move to Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino or Andorra. Rates are zero. Monaco has an armed national police force consisting of 515 men and women for 35,000 people – Monaco has the largest police force and police presence in the world on both a per-capita and per-area basis. Trump likes to say that the U.S. murder rate is the highest it had been in 47 years. But in fact, the US homicide rate is dropping and is the lowest homicide rate recorded since 1963 when the rate was 4.6 per 100,000. It’s less than half the historical high of 10.2 in 1980. What he probably meant to say is that there has been an increase in the homicide rate in recent years, but it’s still way lower than it used to be. It went up by 8% in 2016 according to the FBI. And they seem to be down again in 2017. But homicide rates were considerably higher in the United States during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, and over the past 25 years have fallen nearly continuously. Meanwhile total gun ownership in the United States has increased significantly. Over a recent 20 year period, the number of new guns in the US that were either manufactured in the US or imported into the US increased 141 percent from 6.6 million new guns in 1994 to 16 million in 2013. That means a gross total of 132 million new guns were added into the US population over that time period. So what relationship is there between access to guns and homicides? There are a number of ways of looking at it. And there are a bunch of arguments for and against gun control that we always hear. So let’s try to break them down. One way is to look at

The final episode! Trump launched 59 cruise missiles at Shayrat Air Base, but he first warned the Russians who in turn warned the Syrians. So the attack was mostly for show. Putin suggested the attack was an attempt to distract the world from civilian casualties in Iraq. An American-led bombing in Western Mosul on 17 March 2017 killed hundreds of civilians. But the American media obediently got behind Trump and called the bombing “beautiful”. Good luck to the Syrian people. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi  This content is shown to everyone except authorized members.  The post Syrian Civil War 1.25 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Second last episode! On 8 October 2015, the U.S. officially announced the end of the Pentagon’s $500 million program to train and equip Syrian rebels in an acknowledgment that the program had failed. The Pentagon admitted that it had trained only four or five fighters inside Syria and that others had surrendered to rival groups and handed over the their weapons when they crossed the border from Turkey. But other covert and significantly larger CIA programs to arm anti-government fighters in Syria continued. Trump became President and his attitude towards Bashar changed – at least for a brief period. Especially after the 4 April 2017 gas attack at town of Khan Shaykhun. 72 hours later, Trump launched 59 cruise missiles at Shayrat Air Base, which U.S. intelligence claimed was the source of the attack. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.24 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Third last episode! In June 2014 Syria had a presidential election. Guess you won? On August 19 American journalist James Foley, who had been captured in Syria, was beheaded in a video by ISIL member “Jihadi John”. That started a run of ISIL beheadings and threats to America and the UK. On 30 September 2015, at an official request by the Syrian government, the Russian Aerospace Forces began a sustained campaign of air strikes against both ISIL and the anti-Assad FSA. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.23 appeared first on The BS Filter.

After the Obama administration decided against a full out attack on the Syrian forces, they began to revamp a failed policy. In the end, the Obama administration spent $1 billion, according to the New York Times, on what the CIA called a train-and-equip program, trying to build a rebel army, code-named Timber Sycamore. It was one of the costliest covert action programs in the history of the CIA – and it failed dismally and was eventually shut down by Trump in 2017. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.22 appeared first on The BS Filter.

At a minimum, the Obama administration exaggerated its case to justify a military attack on Syria. At worst, the White House fabricated intelligence. Bottom line: no one has yet presented convincing evidence of who perpetrated the horrific Al Ghouta attack. But one thing remains clear: the Al Ghouta massacre changed US policy, just not in the way President Obama intended. Bashar agrees to destroy all of Syria’s chemical weapons within twelve months – even though the United States hasn’t destroyed their own chemical weapons, which they agree to do 20 years ago. And ISIS starts taking cities in Syria and fighting against the other rebel groups. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.21 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Obama’s “red line” and what happened after the Ghouta attack. On 31 August 2013, the US military was ready to make strikes on Syrian targets. But Obama blinked. Maybe because Donald Trump tweeted that attacking Syria would “look very bad”. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.20 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Syria were one of seven countries that had not joined the 1997 convention banning chemical weapons. They were widely believed to possess large undeclared stockpiles of mustard gas and sarin nerve agent. Fast forward to March 19, 2013: There’s a gas attack in the town of Khan al-Assal in northern Syria.  It resulted in at least 26 fatalities including 16 government soldiers and 10 civilians, and more than 86 injuries. And then, in the early hours of 21 August 2013, two opposition-controlled areas in the suburbs around Damascus, were struck by rockets containing the chemical agent sarin. The Ghouta Attack. Estimates of the death toll range from at least 281 people to 1,729. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.19 appeared first on The BS Filter.

More clips of Barbara Walters’ 2011 interview with Bashar where he explains why Syria is “the faultline” of the Middle East and how he ended up President. We cover the major events of 2012, including the Benghazi attack on the U.S. embassy in Libya which, according to Seymour Hersh, may have had to do with the existence of a “rat line” funneling weapons from Libya into Syria, operated by the CIA. And we talk about the role of Saudi Prince Bandar bin Sultan and Obama’s “red line”. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.18 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Late 2011, Bashar al-Assad did a lengthy interview with Barbara Walters, in which he explained his perspective on the violence engulfing his country, how he ended up as President, and his plans for the future. It’s a fascinating and disturbing interview, and we play a few selected clips on this episode. At the time, the death toll was around 4000. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.17 appeared first on The BS Filter.

Here’s my interview with Muhannad Saker, a Syrian from Lattakia, an Alawii, who was in Damascus during the early years of the civil war. I chatted with him a few weeks ago to get an eyewitness account of the events. Hey our show is now listed in iTunes as “The BS Filter”. Click here. You should be able to find it in most podcast apps by searching for “BS Filter”. Leave us a clever, witty review on iTunes and you might win yourself a thank you gift! Theme music: Holy Deep by The Passion HiFi The post Syrian Civil War 1.16 appeared first on The BS Filter.