From the crisis in Ukraine to the ISIS in Iraq, from increasingly extreme weather to surviving in a world ruled by psychopaths, your hosts, their colleagues (and occasional guests) explore the deeper truths driving world events by exposing the manipulations behind what passes for 'news'.
Running Time: 02:06:00
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript:
Niall: Hi and welcome to SOTT Talk Radio. I'm your host Niall Bradley. My co-host Joe Quinn.
Joe: Hi there.
Niall: And we're joined this week by SOTT editor, Harrison Koehli.
Harrison: Hi there.
Niall: So, it's been another mental week out there. We're going to be looking back at some of those events this week, not least the launch of yet another US war. It's hard to say if the war actually was re-launched or just never stopped. When you look back at American history in Iraq it's now a quarter century of sanctions, bombing, occupation, more sanctions, and now more bombing. So the ISIS threat has come to a head and we heard statements earlier this week, a formal address to the nation from the naked emperor himself, emperor Obama, the last. On Wednesday he gave a statement to the American people about why the US was again bombing Iraq.
Joe: Yeah, absolutely.
Niall: Do you want to hear it?
Joe: Yes, we do want to hear it. Why was Obama talking about bombing Iraq again?
Obama: Thanks to our military and counter-terrorism professionals America is safer. Still we continue to face a terrorist threat. We can't erase every trace of evil from the world and small groups of killers have the capacity to do great harm. That was the case before 9/11 and that remains true today. And that's why we must remain vigilant as threats emerge. If left unchecked, these terrorists could pose a growing threat beyond that region including to the United States.Joe: A broad coalition of...
While we have not yet detected specific plotting against our homeland, ISL leaders have threatened America and our allies. Our intelligence community believes that thousands of foreigners, including Europeans and some Americans, have joined them in Syria and Iraq. Trained and battle hardened, these fighters could try to return to their home countries and carry out deadly attacks. I know many Americans are concerned about these threats. Last month I ordered our military to take targeted action against ISL to stop its advances. Since then we've conducted more than a 150 successful air strikes in Iraq.
But this is not our fight alone. American power can make a decisive difference but we cannot do for Iraqis what they must do for themselves. Nor can we take the place of Arab partners in securing their region. That's why I've insisted that additional US action depended upon Iraqis forming an inclusive government, which they have now done in recent days. So tonight, with a new Iraqi government in place and following consultations with allies abroad, and Congress at home, I can announce that America will lead a broad coalition to roll back this terrorist threat.
Niall: The willing?
Joe: Of the liars and manipulators. That's kind of ridiculous.
Niall: Note that it's retrospective. He's making the announcement, "Oh just by the way, for the last month we carried out 150 bombings".
Joe: Yeah, he doesn't need to let any Americans or anybody, no political leader or anything like that, anybody know that they're bombing anybody else around the world. That's none of their business really, you know?
Harrison: He just slips in there about the regime change in Iraq. "Oh, they need a new government and they've got one now".
Joe: Yeah, the only reason they need to let people know is to scare the people, which is one of the points of the entire ISIS or ISL or ice cream or whatever you want to call it, is what it's about. It's basically about the elite maintaining their positions of power, and control and wealth, over resources. And ultimately it's also indirectly or semi-directly about keeping Russia and other non-US-aligned countries in the Middle East at bay, keeping them down and thereby maintaining the western elite's positions of privilege and power. That's their goal and the way they get people to at least acquiesce in it, is by scaring them. If you think about this IS group, what's so scary about them? They're just a bunch of Muslims, right?
Niall: They behead people.
Joe: Well exactly. The only reason why they shouldn't just let them do whatever they want, right? It's democracy. Let them sort it out. That's what a lot of people would say, "It's none of our business. Let those people in the Middle East sort out their own problems". But the only reason that it is shoved under the noses of western audiences is because westerners are being beheaded. Without that, you would be entirely justified in saying "Well it's none of our business. What are we doing there?"
Niall: Yeah. Well he addresses that by saying "There's no specific plotting..."
Harrison: "That we've detected yet."
Niall: But, all those noises you heard in the last month about the enemy at the gates, ISIS on the border with Mexico.
Joe: That's all nonsense.
Niall: Of course, of course. But it's a throwaway line to previous hints and threats. (whispers) Maybe they're out there. Boo!
Joe: There you go.
Niall: Booga booga. About one of the beheaded captives, James Foley, his family just made a faux pas by going public and saying that they were trying to negotiate directly for a ransom until the US government blocked them.
Joe: Of course.
Niall: Either because they knew he was dead, or they wanted him dead or whatever. It was going against...
Joe: Well he was their main propaganda piece in the Middle East. Obama couldn't have made that statement that we just listened to, without James Foley and...
Harrison: Sotloff.
Joe: And Haines, this most recent English guy. Without those three having been "beheaded" on video, he wouldn't have been able to make that speech and have it be believed essentially, or have it take root in people's minds, or at least have people say "Well, yeah, they are kind of scary. They do behead people so we better do something about it".
Harrison: But the way they blocked it was horrible. They threatened the family with funding terrorism if they were to pay the ransom.
Joe: Yeah, 'we don't negotiate with terrorists'.
Harrison: Yeah.
Niall: This is unbelievable gall from the same people who gave these guys all of their weapons. Indirectly, and directly, in Syria.
Joe: Yeah. It's kind of ridiculous because the only way, if you think about it, if this IS group are a genuine bunch of just fundie Muslim radicals like - what do you call that guy in the US, the "god hates fags" group?
Niall: The Westboro Baptist Church.
Joe: They're kind of like them, multiplied by 100 or 1,000, in terms of numbers. And the only way it could happen, that the Westboro Baptist Church rising to a position of power and influence or being able to spread through the country, would be if the infrastructure of American society was destroyed largely or largely broken up, or essentially bombed exactly like Iraq was, and then they somehow had backers and funders who gave them lots of money and weapons, if the Westboro Baptist Church was to do the same kind of thing in the US.
The only reason that IS was able to do what they're doing in Iraq is because Iraq was completely destroyed through 10 years of US occupation. And then that opened the field for them to be given money directly and indirectly from the US and arms and training and stuff because it suits their purposes. They want to be in the Middle East. They want to control the Middle East and they're fighting against nature essentially, because despite what western powers would say, the nature of the Middle East is to be like any other part of the world, which is for people to live in countries or communities peaceably. Ultimately that's what would happen. And when that happens America is cut out of the game because it's a country thousands of miles away. It doesn't have any direct interest, at least from the people of the Middle East's point of view, it doesn't have any direct interest in the Middle East and has no right to interfere in the Middle East.
So that's what would happen naturally in the Middle East and the US has to stop that from happening. So it essentially has to stop normal society from forming in the Middle East. And that's what they've been doing since 2003. They were doing that before that under Saddam, but really it took off in 2003 and it's sick. And not in the American sense of 'sick' there, by the way. Because somebody posted that on a comment on Facebook "That is sick" about some kind of funny video that I thought was quite good. And he said it was sick. I was going to write "Do you know what the actual dictionary definition of sick is? Have you looked it up?" But I realized engaging in the weird, topsy-turvy world we live in where sick means good, whereas traditionally and even in some places where people actually get sick, it's not a good thing. I digress.
Niall: Well part of the narrative Obama's speech writers put into that speech was the direct opposite of the dynamic you just described; namely, "Oh well I suppose stuff has flared up in Iraq again! Ah... I guess it's up to us to go in now, but what we really need is governments and allies in the region who will help us. So, who's willing?" It's presented as: "We have to be there. There is no other possibility." The more shrill they get about that though, the more they run the risk of this awareness, that the very last people who need to be anywhere, other than within the borders of the United States, are the American military.
Joe: Yeah, it's very transparent what they're doing. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister said today, after this British guy David Haines was "beheaded" on camera, "Britain will take whatever steps are necessary to keep the country safe". It's such theatre, it's getting to the point where even you're kind of still holding out hope that the average person in the street will start to say, "This doesn't sound sincere. This sound a bit like a set up. It seems a bit too convenient that this kind of stuff is happening and the way that politicians are responding to: 'We will take direct action!'" A bit melodramatic about it and even referring to, as Cameron said, "Whatever steps are necessary to keep Britain, the UK safe".
That's talking directly to the hearts and the minds of British people. "We are here to keep you safe" and that's the only thing they can hang their hats on these days because so many people are disenchanted and frankly disgusted with politicians in general in the west. The only thing they can fall back on is to try and scare people and then tell them "We're here to keep you safe. We're the ones with the money and the weapons that will keep you safe against the big, bad bogey man with the British accent in front of the camera cutting peoples' heads off." That's scary. If they went any further with this piece of theatre, make a video with scary sock puppets or something, going "Graaahhhh, I'm going to eat you!" That's the next stage basically because this is as far as they can go and keeping it somewhat believable. If they pushed it any further, a green screen would suddenly batch and appear behind one of these videos and you'd see a couple of politicians from the west walking around there directing it. That's how bad it's getting. Really, for me anyway.
Harrison: They've been repeating the same story since 9/11 now and it's just getting old. It's the same thing over and over. And Obama has just made this statement that sounds like it was written by George Bush's script writers.
Joe: Yeah.
Harrison: But even in that statement, pretty much every sentence is either directly wrong or obviously twisted. And when he was talking about the same thing Cameron was talking about, about keeping America safe, he even had to admit that "Okay, well we've made great strides towards keeping Americans safe from terrorism, but we actually haven't because there's still all these terrorist groups. And the situation's pretty much the same as it was 14 years ago."
Niall: Yeah.
Harrison: it's ridiculous.
Niall: And "There's still evil out there in the world"; the implication being "our role and our mission, what we're trying to do here, is to eradicate evil in the world". When someone says something like that, you've got to be thinking 'this person is mentally unhinged'. That this is what all totalitarian-type dictators, whatever brutal, oppressive leaders down through history, it's been the centre of their mission, to eradicate the 'evil other', whatever it is. It's nebulous. It's not really defined, but he came down to and said "Well it's a war against evil".
Harrison: By the very definition of that, in the terms that he's phrasing it, it is an endless war.
Joe: Yeah.
Harrison: Because there's always going to be these pockets of murderous bandits or terrorists.
Joe: Yeah, it appeals to people a lot, that kind of rhetoric and that kind of use of language 'eradicating evil in the world'. It appeals to people I think at a psychological level because...
Harrison: There is evil.
Joe: Well, there is evil. People aren't aware of what the true nature of evil is and it's almost like people, through their governments, they project onto their governments, in a sense they see them as acting in their name. That's what supposedly governments are elected for. It's a version of a tribal community, expanded out into a nation. People can look to the leaders of the tribe to take action in their name, even to absolve the community of any guilt and stuff. And by going around the world fighting evil, it appeals to people in a way that kind of absolves them of their own personal guilts in the same sense of sins. Where they're just willing to get it as well. That's why they often throw in the idea that 'god' told me to do this, like John Kerry did recently. He said that the mandate for what the US was doing was, specifically in relation to global warming, and to saving the world from global warming, that it was 'god's mission' essentially, that the US was doing.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: So they throw all this stuff in because it appeals to people at a very deep psychological level. And it works. All you have to say for the average person is 'we're fighting evil' and at least show them an example of evil. That's why you have the beheadings, you need a little example of "This is the evil and we are fighting it". And then people think "Yeah, that's good because ultimately I want to be a good person and I want to fight evil as well." It kind of absolves them in a way.
It's projection. It's like a narcissistic projection in a certain sense, where you're beating down the evil in the other, or you project it onto the other, and beat it down and kill them and beat them, and in some way you think that you're absolving yourself from the evil beast that you have hidden in your closet.
Harrison: Scapegoat.
Joe: Yeah, it's all very freaky, psychological processes working around it. I'm sure Obama and people like that haven't taken classes in psychotherapy or psychology or anything like that to understand this. But they understand it in a visceral kind of way themselves. I suppose it goes back to the whole system 1 and system 2, your unconscious motivations that play out. And nobody's really aware of their own motivations and what's going on in their own heads, essentially why they do certain things.
And psychopaths in power like Obama and the people behind him, they're projecting outwards as well, their own kind of demons. But there's no decency in them. They just simply have a destructive principle operating. Their basic substratum is to control and destroy other people. And that motivation is channelled through their conscious - these are officially quite intelligent people and can come up with quite smart, intelligent narratives to justify this primitive drive to control and destroy.
So in a certain sense there's a match there. On the one hand the ordinary people feel guilty about their own shortcomings and their own sinfulness and everybody's told in the Christian west that you're born with original sin and fundamentally, fatally flawed. And are reminded all the time by the media and society as to what's good and what's bad. And most people are crossing the line a lot of the times in terms of the ten commandments and stuff in a way they feel guilty about.
Harrison: They don't want to admit it to themselves so then they find this external group...
Joe: Exactly.
Harrison: ...that is doing something similar then they can punish to expiate their own guilt.
Joe: Yeah, exactly. So the ordinary people are getting something out of their leaders going off and killing the 'evil doers' around the world. Because "that makes us good because if we're killing evil doers we're good. So I can feel better about myself."
But that's not the motivation. You can see how that's in a way genuinely or fundamentally motivated by a sense of wanting to do that or wanting to do good. And that's the motivation of ordinary people in supporting this. But the psychopaths in power, their motivation just happens to coincide with that but they simply want to dominate and control others.
Harrison: Well that's what psychopaths do. When they do something it's almost like this automatic mechanism. I have no idea how it works, but they will blame their victim for what they themselves are doing. When you read transcripts or see interviews with them, it seems totally genuine. And yet how much of it is just this conscious lie, that they're totally aware that they're the ones who have done that and just to make the crime against the victim even worse, they blame the victim for what they themselves have done.
Joe: Well they see themselves as all good because fundamentally that subconscious level, system 1, I think it's referred to as in the literature, right? System 1 is just pure primal motivations. And if it comes from the self and there's no self doubt or self reflection in that way, no questioning of the self, which psychopaths don't really have, well then that has to be good. It comes from them, therefore it's good. It's what they want, therefore it's good. So no matter what they do, it has to be spun by them, by their system2, their conscious mind, gets fed this motivation of "I want to destroy and kill and dominate other people", so they go ahead and do it. Then the narrative has to reflect how that is good. "Why is it good? Because it's what I wanted. How could it not be good? If I want something, it's for me. It makes me feel good. Therefore it is good. And when I explain it to you, I'm going to explain it in terms that make it good."
So when you look at it from that level, it's kind of scary because they are essentially just mostly robotic, unconscious people, and this applies to most human beings as well. Everybody needs to read those books Thinking Fast and Slow and Strangers to Ourselves to understand just how unconscious pretty much everybody is; how there is a hidden, primitive, unconscious drive within your psyche, that wants certain things. And they're all fairly basic, selfish, needy kind of things, basic desires, basic needs and your conscious mind serves the role of justifying those things to yourself and to other people. That's all it does. And the problem is that's the only part of you that you're aware of.
So all you hear is the narrative, the bullshit excuse as to why you did what you did to get what you got. And it's very smart and can come up with all sorts of complex reasons to explain why you did what you did, but ultimately it's just because "I wanted this", and the basic drives in human beings. That's what the explanation is. That's where it came from. But you can come up with all sorts of highfaluting, complicated, even noble reasons why you did [what you did] when in fact, all it really was, was "I wanted some". Like Gurdjieff's raspberry jam or strawberry jam. Which was it? Raspberry jam? When you break people down and almost talk to this subconscious, the real you, the real driver, the real motivator, the one that has the power and the drive to influence your actions and your thoughts and your deeds, when you break it down and you can maybe through hypnosis or something, talk to someone like that, all you'll get out of them is basic "I want the Twinkie".
Harrison: This makes me feel good.
Joe: Why? Because it makes me feel good, because Twinkies are good. I want sex. I want...
Harrison: Money.
Joe: ...money. I want to be important.
Niall: Somebody figured this out because this is precisely the level of communications that advertising takes place in.
Joe: Of course, yeah. Somebody knows that. But I think it's the marketing people who know it, the people who actually develop strategies. You go back to Edward Bernays and stuff. There's certain people throughout history who understood this, who looked at people. I can't say all of the people who looked into this side of human nature. But certainly you could imagine how a psychopathic mind observing other human beings and their motivations and the kind of foibles they have, and how they are very simplistic in their needs and desires; you can imagine that a psychopathic mind would be very well suited to spotting that behaviour in ordinary people, the basic yes or no questions and answers based on their basic drives and needs, and to then define it and write about it like Bernays did in the book, and then develop a strategy to exploit it.
Harrison: It's like scientists and lab rats. They see "Oh, they really like that bit of food so I'm going to see what I can get them to do so that they can get that food, and then afterwards I'm going to cut off their head and study its brain."
Joe: Yeah, but all the people who feel the same thing aren't so able to take that detached, scientific observation of course because they themselves feel the same drives. When they hear someone talking about their own needs and the narrative of it, they say "Yeah me too".
Niall: Yeah. "I know how you feel".
Joe: There's a commonality there. So they don't see themselves as different. They're not observing other people with that kind of "Here's a strange creature. Watch how it reacts when I say this to it or when I present this...
Harrison: Twinkie.
Joe: ...Twinkie to it."
Niall: "If I just talk to it in a certain tone, it seems to change state almost. And then I suggest something. I don't even tell them what I want them to do. I just suggest it and then of his own volition, he repeats it back to me as if it was his own idea". "I know, let's go and do this."
Joe: Exactly. It's very much from the point of view, like Harrison just said, of a scientist being able to observe lab rats and do it from that position of really observing, totally detached, seeing the object of your observation as a separate species, which in the case of lab rats, it is. But it's very strange to imagine one human being doing that to another human being because it kind of presupposes the idea that they are in some way another species. They don't think in the same way, because people are programmed to recognize their own species and they're supposedly built all the same way and most people can understand each others' motivations and drives and needs. But it seems to be that there are certain people who can look at other human beings as a separate species and then devise ways to exploit them, in the same way a scientist exploits a lab rat.
Harrison: And it's a recipe for disaster because on the one hand you've got all these people with these system 1/system 2 dynamics going on, and they've all created this mutual system of support almost, as you're saying "Yeah, yeah, it's just like me. I know how you feel". And so you've got this mutually reinforcing system of self deception and delusion. And then on the other hand you've got psychopaths, essentially another species, who can see all that and then just use it for their own benefit. And then when you go to the geopolitical sphere, even just politics even just in one country, you get this system that is just completely opposite to the truth, where everything is backwards. So you can have this speech from Obama where everything is completely backwards. There's no truth to it.
Niall: And yet it doesn't stand out to sufficient numbers of the population because it is actually in tune with where they were at. It completely jars the head of someone who is looking at it on the side, who's already seen the pattern and is just sick to the stomach again of hearing the same old lies. And yet when they hear it, it's in synch with what they know, the way they're feeling about it.
Putin brought up the lab rat and scientist analogy in passing at a press conference shortly after the Crimea situation in March or so. I'll never forget it. He's sitting there, casually in a chair, and it's kind of an informal press conference. He's taking any questions. And he just sort of stops at one point to reflect a bit, and then he brings up that analogy. Maybe he's been asked about what the US is trying to do and he says "Really, sometimes it's like there are people over there on the other side of the pond (laughing), the "pond", the Atlantic Ocean, and it's like they see the world as a laboratory and they move the pieces." He kind of trailed off and left it at that.
It's good to know that someone other than us is at least thinking about it in these terms because it means that he's thinking and at least responding or taking it onboard. He in turn wouldn't react then and at least not be as much of a pawn to it because they have so much power ranged behind them, military, economic and so on, that it is kind of frightening.
I think the only thing that can break that kind of spell for the masses of American people who remain in synch with this, is a very serious shock, a sudden shock. There'll be no coaching them out of this. There'll be no decent-ish person rising to power within a couple of generations. It will take a profound shock. Where are they going to get it? They won't find it from an enemy. There is no threat from Russia or anyone else.
Harrison: Well, an internal threat then, like stemming from the system itself. So I don't know, maybe economic collapse; something close to home. Because like you said, there's very little likelihood of an actual external attack from a real external enemy.
Joe: They've got the world sewn up basically. The only nations in the world who could pose any kind of a threat in some way or other to the US really is, on a practical level and on an ideological level - in that they're ideologically in the right position, or somewhere in the right position to be able to do it - is Russia or China. There's pretty much no one else. Europe is pretty much fully in the US/Anglo American camp. Africa, South America. None of them are big enough really. And the US has made sure that even though there are some big countries around the world, look at India, for example it has over a billion people, but the US has made sure that militarily it's able to deter threats from any country by building up their own military by spending a massive amount of money on the military and projecting their power around the world and going around invading other countries and stuff.
It's interesting because I don't think they did all of that over the past 70 or 80 years specifically to protect against external threats. It wasn't primarily that. Primarily it was greed that sent them around the world. And if you want to go around your neighbourhood, plundering other people's houses and stealing from them, you probably quickly realize that to do that, you need to be well armed. So if you want to go out and steal from all of your neighbours and dominate the neighbourhoods, you need to have the guns to back it up. But your primary motivation there is getting stuff from other people; stealing other people's things; controlling and being the most wealthy person in the neighbourhood.
But then the weapons stash that you have accrued or acquired for that purpose acts as a deterrent from anybody trying to get their stuff back or bring you down a notch or two. So America being what it is, it had to do that, because it's over there across the Atlantic on its own, separated by the Atlantic and the Pacific from the rest of the world, more or less, apart from South America. But from the majority of the rest of the world it's separated by two large oceans. So it had to project its power around the world because it wanted the best of everything and wanted what other people had and wanted to control the world. And it was uniquely positioned to be able to do that, or to be able to think in that way because of where it was.
Countries in Eurasia, which is at least fifty percent of the world, and even in Africa, which is very close to the Eurasian land mass, countries there are probably less likely to think of dominating the entire land mass or controlling it, because they realize it's made up of different peoples, different nation states. You're never going to be able to do that or hold that for long enough. The reality on the ground is "Well we have to cohabit here. We're all on one big chunk of land we've all got our own little spaces" type thing. Where the US is over there, one big country, on its own.
I just find it strange the way history has evolved in terms of putting America where it was, having the rise of America, the elites from western Europe, particularly the British, their direct genetic descendents and certainly their ideological descendents of the British in particular, are now in power in the US. They're that white, Anglo-Saxon protestant, maybe, I don't know if they're protestant, but white Anglo-Saxon anyway. They're the people who rule supreme and have done for the past 300 or 400 years.
Niall: Yeah. The other thing that's amazing about it is in the space of 20 minutes we've boiled down this to the simplest essence of it, and yet on a planet of some seven or eight billion people, their system 2/system 1, the narrative creator, has such enormous lateral width to create a complex system - and it is a complex system - to take over the world ideologically; full spectrum dramas at media level; financial level; military; it's a vast, vast array. In the end it's a tiny planet, but it's still a big job. So it's amazing the scope with which it can take over, even though at its simplest, it's something that's not hard to see. And if it were seen by a lot more, the thing would implode and not work. The day after tomorrow, it would be finished.
Joe: Yeah, it's interesting, just in terms of the IS group and the way the US and the British in particular, and the Israelis, have been managing the Middle East for the past 60 years, particularly since the end of the second world war. History is full of examples of fifth columns, Trojan horses, essentially a group...
Niall: The enemy within.
Joe: Yeah, in terms of two warring powers. And war has defined human history for pretty much ever. But generally speaking, it was a kind of a genuine war for whatever stupid or selfish reasons. It was a war between the leadership of two powers, let's say, and certainly between the ordinary people who did the fighting, and then this idea of the fifth column or putting an enemy within. When you have a genuine enemy, you plant your infiltrators or your spies or your group within your enemy's country. You try and build it up so that it can then at a certain point in time betray your enemy in your favour. And that's fairly normal and standard. That's happened throughout history and it's not unusual. But I'm not sure there's too many examples of what the US and also the Israelis have done, which is to create an enemy to the extent that they have done, to essentially go about fabricating an enemy and then giving it life, kind of like the Frankenstein monster. That's kind of strange because usually throughout history there's no shortage of enemies to fight against, who want to invade the Middle East.
What should be happening now is that all of the powers of the Middle East, all the countries of the Middle East, should be at war with the US. Or there should have been a war, but that's not really the way it's gone. There was no war in Iraq. There was simply an invasion and an occupation. There was no war in Libya. It was simply NATO bombing Libya. And they do all these things, generally speaking, on the basis of a fabricated enemy that they themselves have had to create. It's like the psychopaths in power in the west and the US find themselves in a position where they want to dominate and control the rest of the world, but the rest of the world doesn't want them to dominate them and control them, but also doesn't want to fight them.
Niall: Yeah, they would happily accept crappy terms and just get on with life.
Joe: Yeah. And they can't just, for whatever reason, they can't just walk in and take over places and say "We're taking over this country because we like it and we want all the goodies that you have in your country and we want to use you all as slaves." It would be much better if they did that, because then people would say "Okay, well no, we're going to fight against this". But they can't do that because we live in such an enlightened age, right? And this is part of the deception, that they get to do that by promoting the idea of democracy and freedom and all this kind of stuff. So it's very convoluted. We're much more evolved. We live in the modern world, we're civilized, not like the past.
Niall: Yeah. Essentially...
Joe: But when you're espousing that, how do you do what you really want to do, because the reality of psychopathic leaders or certain groups wanting to control the neighbourhood or steal from their neighbours has never changed and hasn't changed in all of history. It's exactly the same today as it was how ever many thousands of years you want to go back. But it's strange. Sometimes I wonder did we even evolve? Has anybody evolved? There's the lie of evolutions. There's technological evolution but in terms of human evolution? Evolution of consciousness? Human beings actually becoming better people? That hasn't really happened. They talk about it, but it hasn't actually happened.
People can talk about the enlightenment and all this kind of stuff, and science. Okay, science has gone some way down the line, but technological evolution isn't actually true evolution. Some new toys. It's like giving a monkey a cell phone, and because the monkey holds the cell phone he's more evolved. No he's not. He's still a monkey. He just has a cell phone and he's figured out how to use it to call his friend and go make monkey noises down the phone.
It's not evolution, but they talk about evolution, about freedom, noble ideals. And human evolution theoretically is going from an atavistic kind of state of being where you don't really think very much; you just go out and do the system 1 thing "me want food", "me want man's wife", "me want whatever anybody else has", and get it. Evolution from that would be we start to not do that. We start to not kill and destroy. It's very hard to define what evolution should be, but theoretically it's that human beings should become more civilized, i.e., not fight with each other, not kill each other, not destroy, start creating more things and being creative.
So that's what civilization is. Has it happened? They talk about it, freedom and democracy and we live in the civilized world, but all they do is talk about it. When you look at what they do, what they do for example in Iraq, for 10 years from 2003 until 2013, they destroyed it. So it's no different from a bunch of Neanderthals beating the heads of each other 5,000 years ago, or 20,000 years ago.
Harrison: Well I think there's a couple of things going on. I think you're right that there's been no real evolution. It's pretty much just the words have changed. But I think maybe the reason that's happened is everyone once in a while probably there's a genuinely decent person, or two, that comes along and says "We shouldn't be killing people. We shouldn't be doing these things". And so then what happens is people get behind that idea. Then the people in power say "Okay, well now we've just got to adopt these words and still keep doing what we're doing". So gradually over time we develop these concepts of democracy and freedom, civil society and all these kind of concepts that just become code words. And then they just keep doing what they've been doing. So no, I don't see any real evolution. Only the words have changed but if you look back there have been people that have tried, said a few of the right things, but it doesn't seem to have taken it to the point where any real change has been instilled into the actual system.
Joe: No, exactly. How long ago...
Niall: Even the words are the same. The Roman Republic, the demos, the citizens voting, the fact that it was called a republic, while it had an empire that pretended not to be an empire. The depleting of the optimates, the rulers of the time, the way they got the people in synch with them was, "Oh but we do what we do to protect you from subversion, foreign enemies at the gates", of which there were from time to time, but as a response to their imperial plundering abroad and so on. And also subversion, democracy, they even talk about it in terms of humanitarian values. It was a given that what they did was for the good of all. But even after 2,000 years, their words are being read by our classics academic "experts" and taken at face value. And those academics and scholars today will want to train their Rumsfelds and their Cheneys and their Bushes - well I don't think he took classics. But they are believing the same narrative. They're not actually getting the irony that no, back then those florid terms were also a ruse. Essentially the same kinds.
Joe: Yeah. The point I'm trying to get at, is that if you went out onto the streets and asked most people if we are more civilized and more evolved today to a much greater extent, or we are more evolved than say the ancient Egyptians, people would say yes. Or pick any people from one or two thousand years ago, going back as far as you can, pick the name out of the book, everybody would say "Yeah, of course we are". But we're not. We have the terms that you just described, we think these terms go along with our more advanced civilization and evolved state of mind; freedoms and democracies and all this kind of stuff. But like you just said, they were being talked about as far back as you can go and that probably the kind of things people were saying back then as well.
I just think it's an important point for people to realize that nothing has changed from the dawn of modern human civilization. I don't know if this even goes back far enough, goes back into the mists of time and you can't define it but as far as is recorded in history and different civilizations, etc., there's no difference today from then, in terms of the average person in the street. Look at the stuff on Black Friday. Look at the way people react. They're just reaction machines. People are pretty much in their own primitive state that they began in when homo sapiens first formed. That state that they developed into, from an evolutionary perspective, at that point and time, they are exactly the same today. No difference. It doesn't matter if they've got a cell phone or an iPad stuck to their face. They're exactly the same.
Niall: Studies on the extreme version of the monkey you're describing, psychopaths, are fascinating because there are so many reports where well-meaning researchers and therapists and doctors have people they suspect to be psychopaths, brought into some kind of group therapy. And in talking through their problems, the psychopath will convince the therapist that he's now safe to be released back to the community. And he is. And then in retrospect the researcher realized, to his horror, that what was going on was that the psychopaths were learning and acquiring new information and they were "evolving" to become better psychopaths. So you have here the polar opposite movement to what is assumed when people talk about evolution and progress towards a certain goal. If the whole polarity of others amongst us is going in the opposite direction, any idea of group civilization-wide evolution is therefore not even on the cards. It's not in the system. It's not programmed into it.
Joe: It only appears sporadically with odd members of the herd. Like a bunch of buffalo thundering across a plain for no apparent reason, but just because they got spooked by something. And one of the herd stopping and stepping outside and looking at all the rest just charging ahead one following the other, and one of them stepping aside and going "Why are we doing this? Remind me again why we're charging mindlessly down this prairie?"
So that seems to be what happens. But in a certain sense, if that's an apt description of human beings, essentially there's a herd mentality and they're very easily spooked and programmed and directed in one way or another, then the first step of true evolution would be that one buffalo/human stepping outside, stopping and looking at that dynamic and seeing its own part in it, and seeing itself as now having stepped outside of it and wondering about those kind of things; simply thinking, truly critically thinking for yourself and not just following the dictates of an authority or whatever spooks you, which is usually in human terms an authority that spooks people in one way or another.
And by spooks I mean yeah, it can be fear-based but it can also be desire-based or carrot-on-the-stick-based, whatever; simply being able to stop and see yourself as your own authority essentially, for a moment. That for me, I'm not saying it's the only one, but it could be the first step in evolution. But right now it would be very useful to be the right first step because of the conditions on the planet; for people to stop and question the authorities and think of themselves as their own authority and not have that visceral need to believe in authority and to have an authority, as David Cameron just said "Keep everybody safe. We will do whatever is necessary to keep you all safe even if it means throwing you all in prison. We will keep you safe in prison."
Harrison: But I think if you were to ask a member of that herd before they take off on the prairie, they'd all tell you "Oh, you know I wouldn't take off. I wouldn't go with the herd." And the way that plays out is that we've got a society in the States that thinks of themselves as more evolved and more civilized. They live in their suburbs and they go and buy their groceries and their everyday life is pretty uneventful. But they don't see just how fragile that whole system is. If we go over to the east Ukraine and just see what has happened in such a short period of time. And this dynamic plays itself out in country after country where there's some sort of crisis situation, the civil and political situation is destabilized and then people become monsters. Or more accurately I think, the monsters come out of the woodwork. And then you get people just committing the most vicious, horrible crimes in this war zone and it's something out of a horror movie. Then people from these civilized countries look over there and say "Oh, well look at those monsters over there", when they were exactly the same before this started.
Joe: Yeah. And they don't realize that can happen to them, that that's in them as well, in fact just on the edge.
Harrison: Exactly. It's frightening.
Joe: That's why it's so important to observe all of this and that's why understanding and reading these books we're talking about, and modern cognitive psychology and how it explains many of the actual secret teachings of esoteric groups, mystical groups. There's a few others, but one of the primary ones would be about the nature of human beings and how they are and what their nature is. And if you don't understand your own nature, well then you're a slave to it.
Harrison: Yeah.
Joe: So there seems to be a real dividing line there. I'm not saying anybody can turn around and wake up in this way. I'm just saying that it is possible obviously, because there are examples of people who do do this, but there are many more examples of people who don't. They simply run with the herd and think they're choosing to run with the herd. "This is my choice. That's why I'm running with the herd because that's what I choose to do." But they don't understand the reasons that they're sticking with the authority, sticking with the herd, sticking with the status quo because it makes them feel safe and comfortable. That's too much to get into all of that now anyway.
Niall: No, it's important. There's some kind of fundamental polarity at the base of it all. While those scenes of American journalists being beheaded are aired across 300 million-plus people in the US, the primary function of it is to produce fear. At a subtle, low-level. It's horrible, it's in your face, but it's not happening right next to you. Nevertheless, the programming is fear. I don't know if we included it in our short script of it, but in his speech Obama reminded people that thousands - his quote - thousands of people from the US and Europe are going to Syria and Iraq to partake in it.
I've got another report here from a French newspaper. Just in the last 10 days or so, another thousand French people, mostly male teenagers, early 20-somethings, are flocking to Syria. They see this and they go "Awesome! Oh, I cannot wait to get involved in this!" It's the opposite reaction. Of course then there's the question of how it is they actually get to go there. We already know the answer, or we suspect it's because they are more than facilitators.
Joe: Yeah, I think at a deep psychological level when people see these beheadings or hear about them, whatever, what they're being told is: "This is you. This is what you could do. At a deeper level this is your human nature because you're a part of the human family, right? So this is your own darkness within you being displayed on the screen here. And we're going to go and kill it. Don't you want us to kill your darkness? Kill all your sins and all your evil? Let's go and kill it." But there's a con involved in that because it's a lie and by getting people to acquiesce or condone the killing of this evil projected outwards, but what they're doing is killing ordinary, innocent people who aren't like that. So they create this bogey man, this caricature of the evil that they say, or which probably is within most people, but not generally manifested and people fight against it and people have another side as well. But psychopaths in power only have that evil side and they want to encourage people to participate in the evildoing by deception. They manipulate them psychologically to participate in the deception.
For example, most Americans, if they could get anybody associated supposedly with IS into Guantanamo Bay for 10 years of torture, they would be fully supported. And when their leaders say "This is what we're doing. We're having to torture. We torture some folks" as Obama said, well that's okay.
By this manipulation they're actually getting people to participate in evil by convincing them that they're fighting against evil. And there's different levels in that. Obviously consciously people say "Yeah, let's fight against evil". But there's an emotional component to it and people are emotionally enthusiastic about putting down evil because it makes them feel better at an emotional level that they can't really describe. And it's only when you look into the details and see what's actually going on and you realize that you're actually being a partner or an accomplice in committing the evil that you want to eradicate, that people will go "Oh shit, maybe I shouldn't do that".
Niall: Few are the numbers who come to that insight.
Harrison: Going back to this coalition, do you guys know who so far is onboard with it? Because I know that...
Joe: They don't say.
Harrison: I think Canada and Australia pledged allegiance.
Niall: Of course. It's the Anglo-Saxon club.
Joe: Well there's a western coalition but there's also 10 supposedly Middle Eastern or Arab states that are part of it as well, but they haven't said who it is.
Harrison: I think Turkey has said they weren't going to be a part of it. And I think that came as something of a shock. But there have been a few countries that have said no they won't.
Joe: Well I'm pretty sure most of the monarchies in the Middle East will be happy to go along with it. It's bizarre, you know, that the US is doing a number and Israel is right in the middle of this as well. They're doing a number on these monarchies. Saudi, Qatar, Bahrain in particular and Jordan. They create this IS group which very clearly has the potential to get rid of these monarchies they just so happened to have a brainwave one day in the form of a US state department cable telling them that they should invade Saudi Arabia, the Saudis see this as a threat. So they're only too happy to be part of this coalition to wipe them out. I'm sure they're aware.
That's why there's been a reluctance all along. The Saudis didn't take any part in the invasion or attack on Iraq in 2003 or at any time thereafter. They allowed their bases to be used by the west, by the US, but they didn't actually take part in any direct attack and have been quite reticent about involving themselves in attacking any other Middle Eastern country, including any Muslim groups or al-Qaeda - any other name you want to come up with - because they probably realize that this is just an absolute charade. They don't know what game precisely is being played here or don't know what the intentions are. They're very suspicious of the intentions of the US as far as they are concerned. "Can we really trust the US?" Well the Saudis can't trust the US because you know what? The Saudi monarchy with its king and his 5,000 children and cousins and second cousins who are all the leaders of that society, they could all be gone in a day and someone else could be waiting to just take their places. It doesn't matter to the US. And the same for Qatar and Bahrain.
Niall: A US senator yesterday said "The reason why America was 'blindsided' by the rise of ISIS" - it wasn't of course but it gets the statement out - "The reason we didn't see this coming is because we have been ignoring the Saudi role in 9/11". They're keeping that on the back burner. There have been a few noises in the last year. "Anytime now we could let our people know and therefore give ourselves just cause for doing whatever we like in the kingdom". I don't think they'll oust the kingdom though.
Joe: They're a bunch of...
Niall: .They're too fanatical. They're too good in that sense and useful.
Joe: They're a bunch of crooks. They're like the mafia, you know; mafia gangs doing deals with each other and then at the drop of a hat would screw each other over. That's pretty much the game they're playing. And in terms of cutting people's heads off, in the couple of weeks prior to the first beheading of James Foley, Saudi Arabia's state government cut the heads off of 19 people. And of course Saudi Arabia is best friends with America. Saudi Arabia chops heads off almost every week.
Niall: Head cutting comes from Saudi Arabia.
Joe: Yeah. It's a direct link to the origins of this IS group and the ideology. And the ideology is simply money and wealth and power. That's all they want. Forget about Muslim or Islam or religious ideology. They don't care. It's about control and power.
Harrison: And a lot of the funding that's gone from the States towards the so-called moderate rebels in Syria, and all these groups that have kind of morphed together to become ISIS or IS, that support gets funnelled through Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Turkey. So it's like the US is kind of one step removed. And I think that's another thing kind of like the statement about the whispers of Saudi Arabia's role in funding 9/11 or whatever connection they allegedly have. It's that "Okay, we've put you in between us and..."
Niall: The bus. And we could throw you under it.
Harrison: Exactly.
Niall: At any moment.
Joe: Yeah, they're just planning of who can out-psychopath the other, who can out-strategize in that cold, clinical, psychopathic way of thinking, where you don't have any emotional considerations at all for what you have to do to get what you want. And that is a massive advantage to these people, to this species of human being where they have no foibles, no qualms, no emotional considerations whatsoever. And it makes making war extremely easy, even though they have to involve themselves in all sorts of deceptions and duplicity. That's second nature as well because they just think of the way they want it to be and then they tell everybody that that's the way it is. That's a deception, but for them, it's just straight up "This is the way it is because we create our own reality", etc. etc.
And compare that to the kind of considerations and thought process that someone like Putin has to go through. Because it seems to me that Putin actually does care about civilian casualties. He does care about ordinary people. He doesn't just run roughshod over civilian casualties and not give it a second thought. It's a major concern for him. For example in Ukraine, I can imagine how difficult it was for Putin and the people around him to develop a strategy for helping the eastern Ukrainians, helping the rebels, without igniting a full-scale war where a large number of civilian deaths would be ultimately on his hands or he would feel responsible for it, at least 50% responsible.
If he floods eastern Ukraine and gives the rebels all sorts of weapons and airplanes and tanks and everything so they can just march through Ukraine, obviously he's going to meet resistance. And NATO and the US are going to respond in kind. Right there you have a recipe for a major, major conflict in a country of 40 million people and you're going to have hundreds of thousands of dead civilians. You don't have to be too smart to see that's where it would go.
So how do you develop a strategy to try and win the conflict, or at least get a stalemate where you haven't lost what you were trying to achieve, without causing a large number of civilian casualties? It becomes extremely difficult, extremely murky, extremely problematic. The problem is if you have a conscience about things. If you're giving the order to send weapons to a country, people don't do that enough. When people are trying to analyze the kind of geopolitical situation on the planet right now, they don't put themselves in the position of the people making the decisions enough. They don't really think about "If I was doing it." Follow through with the permutations. Think really what you would have to do. Think about all the implications of your decisions.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: And people should do that because if they did, then they would quickly realize they would the difference between the way Putin acts and the way the west acts. The west acts in a clean, clinical, unemotional, psychopathic way. And Putin doesn't.
Niall: On that note, people who are basically cheerleading whatever Putin's strategies are towards Ukraine have come out criticizing his move for a peace conference, that resulted in the talks in Minsk and the nominal ceasefire that is currently in effect in Ukraine. "But why? You have the upper hand. The militias were doing well." As if it were that simple.
Joe: I know, but people believe it's that simple. People don't understand what's really going on and the fact that Ukraine is a part of a much bigger picture. It's a part of a struggle between east and west, between the Anglo-American empire on one hand and Russia and its allies, whatever allies it might have, on the other. And it's a struggle for survival essentially, because if the US is allowed to continue on as it has done, then we're all screwed. The entire world is screwed. They're going to run it into the ground and then just walk away, without any regret whatsoever. They won't care. So Putin and his people see that, have seen that happening for a long time, and are trying to do something about it. And Ukraine is part of that. Ukraine is one battle in that broader war.
And once you start looking at it from that point of view, well rebel leaders in eastern Ukraine may want an independent Novorossyia. And they said "Well why can't we have one? We shouldn't settle for anything else." They think that it's just about eastern Ukraine and their independence. They don't realize, probably a lot of them - you would think that the higher level leaders would be communicating with Russia and try and understand but I think in recent times there has been some kind of a dispute or disagreement between Moscow and the guys in Donetsk; especially in terms of the ceasefire that you mentioned, because there's that mismatch or lack of understanding between the two in terms of Moscow's fighting essentially a world war, and the people in eastern Ukraine are simply fighting for independence of eastern Ukraine.
But the bottom line for the people in eastern Ukraine is that they need the support of Russia, so they have to play the game the way Russia sees it. They have to take a back seat, essentially in the broader war and follow the strategy that the Russians are employing.
Niall: In this regard, the charge from the west that they are under the thumb of Moscow is correct. And thank god, because without it the world would already have imploded.
Joe: The eastern Ukrainians are under the thumb of Moscow?
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: Of course they are, yeah. You notice that the ceasefire was announced or brokered by Putin just as they were heading further west, down towards Mariupol. You're going into Mariupol and your support there is not so clear cut anymore. It's not 90% or 95% in support of an independent eastern Ukraine. You're still in eastern Ukraine but you're pushing into the centre and if you don't have the support of the ordinary people, you're really going for a real kind of civil war at that point. There's no civil war in Ukraine right now because it's simply the Ukrainian army against people who want to be independent. And ultimately if the had their way, they would be independent. So it's not a civil war. What would be a civil war would be if all the people from eastern Ukraine, with the backing of Russia, spread further into Ukraine and you had people who are extremely or decidedly against the idea of independence and wanted to be Ukrainian, if they started taking up arms; then you have civil war.
And I think that's what Putin wanted to stop, to not see happen. And that's why he brokered the ceasefire and that's why some of the eastern Ukrainians aren't happy with it. But they didn't understand that because they're not that clued in about the implications of it. They don't have the high position of Putin to see the broader picture.
Harrison: And the push to Mariupol had happened after a series of pretty stunning successes on the part of the Novorossiyan armed forces. There's rumours about what really happened but it seems like Strelkov was forced out in some way, to resign. And then right after that you have Zakharchenko and a whole host of new leadership that gets put in place in Donetsk and Luhansk and then they go on the offensive. They end up taking a whole bunch of regions and towns and cities that they had lost beforehand. So they were really kind of riding on a wave of success. So then they've got all this adrenalin. They're going down to Mariupol and was almost like a suicide strategy. I don't know if this is what happened or not but this ceasefire came right at the right moment, not only to buy some time right as the NATO summit was happening in Wales, but also to stop what could have been a disaster from happening.
Joe: Yeah.
Harrison: And so like you're saying Joe, most of the people don't think above a certain level and so they can't see that there's a bigger strategy going on, even for their own protection, that that came at the right time. And even if the ceasefire which hasn't really been followed by Kiev or Donetsk, there's still fighting going on, and I think just today there was a big fight going on in I think it was the Donetsk airport, after eight days.
There are a few interesting things that came about from this ceasefire. One was that Russia was actually a part of making the document. So officially Russia is now involved in some way. If there's a break in the ceasefire, Russia has a legitimate tie to the situation. They've got a legitimate reason for taking some further action. Also, while Zakharchenko and the other guy, I can't remember his name, who's there representing Luhansk, while their positions weren't listed and there's no reference of the people's republics, the fact that there was this collaboration or even just talks between the two of them, it gives a certain legitimacy to the fact that they were brought to the table.
So there's actually some interesting things going on with this whole agreement, even if the wording isn't right, even if it probably won't last that long. I think it's an interesting precedent to set by bringing in the leaders from Novorossiya and Russia.
Joe: Yeah, like you said, a lot of people don't think a few moves ahead. But you have to. And you have to have had the experience that allows you to think in that way, essentially by making mistakes or being in situations where you took some action and then didn't foresee the implications of the knock-on effects. And to be in a position like Putin is, looking at it from a global perspective and knowing your enemy and being able to see a few steps or a few moves down the road and having that longer term strategy, is very important. Because if you're just impulsive and act in the moment, then you're very often these days, playing into the hands of your enemy because they have seen that you're essentially reacting emotionally.
And you can imagine that eastern Ukrainians, most of them fighting just from the ordinary guy up through the ranks, whatever kind of system they have, that they're all very much identified with having an independent country. They've fought and they've seen their friends and their families killed by Kiev. They've seen their fellow rebels killed. That creates a very strong identification and emotions associated with what you're fighting for, have sacrificed so much, and that's why you need somebody above you who can take a more detached view of it while still sympathizing and empathizing with it.
Niall: It's even more emotionally charged than that because consistently the Kiev forces are playing dirty; really, really dirty, whereas for the most part, the rebels are - of course it's their country, it's their people - they're not going out of their way to actually terrorize the local population, unlike Kiev. At least most of its members would have far less of an emotional attachment to those people.
Joe: They have none.
Niall: That ceasefire, no sooner was it announced than Kiev broke it right away and have consistently baited and baned it.
Joe: Yeah. Because they have nothing to lose from civilian dead. They have everything to gain from dead civilians in eastern Ukraine. The more dead civilians the better, as far as they're concerned because it's from those civilians that the rebels get a lot of support for what they're doing. They can't do anything. By definition the fact that when a group of people can wage guerrilla war against a state power in an area and do it for a long enough amount of time, by definition that means those people deserve, are entitled, have a right to, what they are asking for because it means that the majority of the population in that area, even if it's a small area, want it. It's not a terrorist operation. It's not a terrorist organization. It's not, as Kiev called it, an anti-terrorist operation that they're fighting. They're fighting against the will of the majority of the people in eastern Ukraine to decide their own future. And that's fundamentally unjust.
Everybody has to face some hard choices and harsh reality now and again, but the fact for Ukraine is that the history of the country means that it was never really cohesive in any way. And therefore tough shit. If you want to be a good person, if you want to be decent and honourable, then you let eastern Ukraine have its independence because everybody there wants it. What are you going to do? Kill them until they don't want it? If you kill them they're going to want it even more. How stupid do you have to be?
Harrison: But that seems to be playing into the bigger picture here because one part of the bigger picture is that Kiev and the west has been baiting Russia into a war. It's like they want Russia to enter a big military conflict. And so by committing so many atrocities against the east Ukrainians, they are fostering this really strong wish for independence which acts as a pull on Russia to get involved, which would bring about exactly what they want, which is an armed intervention to start a big military conflict. So the rebels and the rise of Novorossiya is almost playing right into the hands of the west by creating such a demand for Russian intervention.
Joe: Well that's what they tried. I'm sure they thought about that, but what they don't seem to have bargained for is the way Putin has played it.
Harrison: Exactly. And that's why they have to make stuff up.
Joe: Yeah. As long as you know. They may have had this sneaky plan to do what you just described, but it's not a sneaky plan if Putin knows about it. Sorry, it doesn't work because he's seen your plan and has chosen a course of action that essentially thwarts your plan. So you've got to come up with an even sneakier plan. And eventually you run out of sneaky plans and you've just got to go in and say "Weapons of mass destruction. We're going in."
Niall: "He's a Hitler."
Joe: "Let's bomb him."
Niall: "Munich. Appeasement." They're running out of crappy historical analogies.
Harrison: Well now they're taking pictures of combine harvesters and calling them artillery.
Niall: Yes. Grainy satellite images of farm equipment.
Joe: Grainy being the operative word. Maybe a grain launcher. (laughter)
Niall: Well, someone in Kiev, the Kiev defence minister, blurted out the obvious by saying that NATO started supplying weapons to Kiev. And then he was quickly told to shut up by the US state department. To keep a pretence that that's not what they're already doing. But as you pointed out yourself recently Joe, part of the game is that Russia pretends that it is not doing the same.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: And it is.
Joe: Well of course it is. But Putin is simply playing the game according to the rules established by the west, which is that you lie, and lie a lot, and lie big. So he's not so stupid as to say "Well okay, I'm going to counter lies with a big load of truth" because he realizes that the war is essentially for people's minds. And the only way you're going to win essentially is to disinfect the minds of western people, and as many people in the world as possible, of these lies that they've been infected with from the west. Like calling Putin, Hitler; Putin's trying to re-establish the Soviet Union, blah, blah, blah. He has to not give any evidence for western people that that defamation or that slander is true. Therefore he can't invade Ukraine and say "Yes, I'm going to invade and blah, blah, blah" because that will be responded to with "Well you see, he's Hitler. He's trying to recreate the Soviet Union".
So he's in a very difficult position where he has to consider many, many variables and many steps down the line and he has to play the game. He wants to change the rules of the game, but to get to the point to be in a position where he can change the rules of the game, he has to for a while play by the rules of the game. Just say, "This has nothing to do with us. There are no Russian soldiers in Ukraine. There is no Russian weapons in Ukraine, etc. etc." when clearly there is. But is that not what the US is doing or has been doing for decades? Arming groups around the world to do exactly the opposite of what Putin is trying to do? Putin, if he is arming, which he probably is, arming eastern Ukrainians, he is doing it for the purpose of supporting their desire for independence and true freedom and democracy, or at least a truer version of it than they have right now. Whereas the west, the US in particular, for decades has been arming and funding groups around the world to get rid of...
Niall: To thwart democratic expression.
Harrison: And they're open about it. They talk about, "We need regime change in this country" and they openly fund the rebels in Syria. And they're totally open about it. They say "Oh, and we're increasing how much money we're giving to the rebels in Syria to take down Assad."
Joe: Yeah, but the point being those rebels are not fighting for freedom and democracy in Syria. They're fighting for their own positions of power. They want to be in power. They don't care and they're willing to kill as many people of any orientation, Sunni, Shia, etc., to get there.
Niall: Now and then US officials actually come out and reveal the true strategy, what they're really trying to do. It's generally former members of the cabinet, government, or senators. Let's listen to what Condeleezza Rice describes going on geopolitically back in May or so.
Rice: We need to have tougher sanctions. And I'm afraid at some point this is going to probably have to involve oil and gas. The Russian economy is vulnerable. Eighty percent of Russian exports are in oil, gas and minerals. People say well the Europeans will run out of energy. Well the Russians will run out of cash before the Europeans run out of energy. And I understand that it's uncomfortable to have an effect on business ties in this way, but this is one of the few instruments that we have. Over the long run you simply want to change the structure of energy dependence. You want to depend more on the North American energy platform, the tremendous bounty of oil and gas that we're finding in North America. You want to have pipelines that don't go through Ukraine and Russia. For years we've tried to get the Europeans to be interested in different pipeline routes. It's time to do that.Joe: So there's basically two stalls in a market and people prefer one stall over the other and the guy who has a stall that's less favourable, he or she's coming up with a plan to screw over the guy beside them who's getting the business because it makes sense and people want his business.
Niall: By putting sanctions on his ability to sell.
Joe: By identifying, as she said herself, his vulnerabilities and exploiting them. Now, by any standard...
Niall: That's said simply. Absolutely no thought for all the suffering that would create. Just go ahead.
Joe: Yeah, go. By any standards that's not nice, not fair. And this is what I've often thought. I wish that people would come out and say more of the things like that, that Condeleezza Rice just said. Like you just said, people who are now out of government feel they're freer to talk and stuff, and they let slip in private interviews, etc., because they're not going to be called in and given a load of crap for saying it. But it happens so rarely. But I wish they'd just come out and state clearly what they want. But they realize that they can't come out clearly and state what they want, and how they're going to go about getting what they want, because everybody in the world would say "That's not fair. Hang on a minute. That's not nice. That's not freedom and democracy. That's not noble ideals that America was founded on."
Niall: It's not free market.
Joe: No. But it would be so much easier. But of course I'm living in la-la land because in that reality, like I just said, it would be plain for everybody to see who the bad guy was, and who the guy was who was simply trying to get along and say "Listen, if I'm just graced by the gods that I have lots of products that people want to buy and people like my stuff, well then, lucky me. And if you don't have it, well okay, that's not good but maybe we can work something out." That kind of fair dealing basically. Yeah, la la land.
Niall: Those tremendous resources in North America. What are we talking about here?
Joe: Yeah, tremendous resources.
Niall: The tar sands or whatever they're called, up in Canada that's destroying the place there?
Joe: Fracking.
Niall: Fracking that's causing earthquakes all over the place.
Joe: And polluting people's water, setting it on fire.
Niall: They're literally driving America into the ground.
Joe: That's what's going to happen. And what's amazing is that Putin talks about a multi-polar world where people do business relatively fairly and get on. He's trying to present the image of a better world and trying to, at this point, make it a reality over a longer period of time. And because he sees that because the US is a bunch of psychos, they don't see - it's not that they don't see, maybe they don't see, but they certainly don't care about the results of their actions. If they get some data that conflicts with what they would like to be the truth, well then they completely ignore it. "That's not real. It can't be real because I don't want it to be. What I want to be real is that America has just discovered a bounty of oil and gas and Twinkies growing under the ground and we're going to sell them to the entire world. And it's a never-ending Twinkie hole".
Niall: When I first heard her say that - it's a video interview so I could see her expression. Her face lit up and you notice there's a change in her voice, sort of like pitching it like a sale, like she was willing herself to believe that to be true or something, is creepy!
Joe: She absolutely believes it to be true because it's what she wanted to be true. It's really hard to get your head around just that simple concept. It's not simple, but it's mind-boggling for a normal human being, that people would simply reject external reality, facts on the ground, because they conflict with what they want to be true. That's not normal for human beings. Human beings have eyes and ears and other senses that are designed to take in objective reality.
Niall: And read it.
Joe: And to modify their actions based on that reality. These people don't have that. Their reality is what is in their heads which is motivated by their primitive drives. And unfortunately their primitive drives aren't for sweetness and light and bunny rabbits. Their primitive drives are for domination, control, destruction, etc. And that's what they push for and they create narratives and go on TV and spew out those narratives; complex, highfalutin, noble ideals, a complete perversion of what their primitive drive is, which is just pure evil essentially. And it comes out and it's twisted and defined in a very noble way by their conscious minds and they give it to people. And people suck it up.
And the only way to figure out that that's the case is to look at the results of their actions. Freedom and democracy in Iraq. One-point-five million people dead and the country destroyed and now supposedly overtaken by a group that's cutting the heads off people and going to invade the USA? That's freedom and democracy? That's what they brought? Ask Dick Cheney. He'll still tell you "We brought freedom and democracy to Iraq. It's was good thing that we did what we did in Iraq." Look at the results. Look at Libya. When he looks at the results, he doesn't care. "Well, it's not my fault. We did a good thing anyway. But now even though there's stuff going on there as a result of the crazy people in the Middle East, we'll just do it again." They obviously didn't get a big enough dose of freedom and democracy. They need some more.
Niall: I think so.
Joe: And this is the way people like Putin see this and they see a monster marauding across the planet doing that, with that effect. He may or may not care about the rest of the world, I'm sure he does because he lives on it, but certainly he see Russia in the sights of that same monster. And he's trying to take a stand against it. But it's a real slippery beast, you know? It's sneaky and divisive and it has that massive advantage over ordinary people, which is that it does not care. It's like he said himself, it looks at everything on the planet as a scientist looks at a lab rat, observing its moves, observing its reactions and programming or basing its strategy on the way that those lab rats...
Niall: Respond to stimuli.
Joe: Yeah. And the only way that anybody's going to defeat it is to no longer be a lab rat, no longer react to those stimuli in that unconscious way. And that's why everyone on this planet needs to do the same thing, which is no longer react to the crass stimuli of dodgy videos supposedly cutting the heads off of westerners on TV. That's like a shock. That's Pavlovian dog stuff where the western populations are being shocked. That's all it is, to get you to do something. That's what Pavlov shocked his dogs for, to try and completely control the dog, so that he could get it to do whatever he wanted it to do. And that's what their intention is and that's what these stupid videos are.
So you need to look at things and consider the situation and like we were saying earlier on, consider it in the context of Saudi Arabia in the same Middle East, cutting the heads off women and men for stealing. Or cutting their hands off. Cutting body parts off all over the place. It's not strange. And there's a picture I posted on Facebook of a British soldier in Malaysia in 1953, holding the heads of two Malaysian villagers.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: I'm not saying it's not real. The shock is real, just like Pavlov's dogs, the shock was real but you need to find a way to understand what the motivation of giving the shock is and learn to not react to it. The reason I posted that picture was because it was to try and point out that it's not so shocking. It's hyped in the way the videos are produced and stuff to try and really shock people and the responses from western politicians is to increase that shock by providing the salve: "We will protect you. This is extremely dangerous. They pose the biggest threat to the west since Hitler."
Niall: Since Osama.
Joe: Since Osama bin Laden. But just don't react to it. And understand that people being decapitated in war is not strange. A guy in the Falklands war, at least one of them, probably many more, a British soldier in 1983 in the Falklands war, was cutting the heads off Argentinian soldiers. So this is the reality and there are people like this. War is not nice. Most people are turned into animals in war and the problem is that war is promoted and created by these same psychopaths in power because that's what they like to do; Psychopathization of the entire human race, or the attempt at it.
Niall: Moving on to something else.
Joe: Yeah, go ahead.
Niall: But we'll see how can be related into the grand chess board. In a few days time the Scots are voting on (bagpipes playing Flower of Scotland in background) - here we go.
Joe: That's all you get. That's what happens when you say "Scots".
Niall: (singing) Oh flower of Scotland. Yes, Scotland is voting for independence on Thursday, I think. The question being put to voters is simply should Scotland be an independent country. Yes or no. Now in the terms of it, Scotland would remain a constitutional monarchy, but the queen is head of state. So as such, the United Kingdom will remain the United Kingdom. However, as a few commentators are pointing out, if it is a "yes", and it's starting to look like it will be a "yes", I think there's probably going to be some momentum behind it for complete separation from the UK.
Joe: For what? For Scotland? Of course. That's what it's for, complete separation.
Niall: It is.
Joe: Complete separation. Do you mean geographically?
Niall: No. (laughter) They would retain the queen as head of state.
Joe: Retain a bridge.
Niall: In a sense. That's only symbolic. They probably would retain the pound, so financially that's a big tie. But the reason why I think this is excellent, and if you're Scots you should definitely vote "Aye", is because anything that is a kick in the nuts to the financial elites who have used London as their European beachhead, for domination in Europe and elsewhere in the world, is a good thing. So I want to see the Westminster government kicked every which way by a Yes vote.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: And there are obviously also other consequences. At that point Wales could be looking at secession from England also. I think many English people would be happy with it too and of course the consequences for the six county states in the north of Ireland are also interesting because they'll be now the most diehard unionists and they'll be on a different island and they'll be even more isolated. So I think it's interesting for Ireland and the UK, but also there's more than that. I think it's another notch in the rise of nationalism. Now the rise of nationalism is generally equated with "Oh my god! Racialism. Hitler. That's bad. Bad juju." But even in the heat of debate taking place in the UK about this, that is almost completely absent. There have been a few snide remarks from people in London, chiding the Scots for this; equating their leader Alex Salmond with Nazi ideological drives.
Joe: It doesn't take much to...
Niall: It doesn't take much to tarnish anyone.
Joe: To bring out the Hitler.
Niall: But across Europe you've got increasing expression of nationalism, in a good sense, in the sense that it's a reaction to this western Atlantic, European Union tied with NATO, tied with US world domination. I don't think the Scots are thinking of it in those terms. I think it will be part of the European Union once it secedes. Nothing will change there. It will also probably apply for NATO membership which is scary, although maybe they're just playing that tune to keep the Americans happy and therefore their media and power out of the debate going on in Scotland.
Joe: Yeah, it remains to be seen. It's unlikely that Scotland as an independent country would be able to go it alone. Obviously they have much of the same kind of ties with the rest of the world, with Europe that it has as part of the United Kingdom. But I think from an ideological point of view it's important. I think many people in Scotland are actually seeing a lot people who want to vote "yes" are motivated by simply a dislike of the English.
Niall: No! (sarcasm)
Joe: Well I think that's a major part of it in that they don't want to be associated with the United Kingdom.
Niall: I think they're fed up. They always voted in droves in support of a labour government in the 20th century, the Scots, because as a smaller nation or community, if you like, there is less of what is expressed in England to Toryism.
Joe: Well that's what I'm saying.
Niall: It's elitist, pathological, warmongering.
Joe: That's why the don't like the English.
Niall: Yeah. So they voted in Tony Blair in droves in '97 and they were pissed with the results. As were most English people of course. But the Scots have had enough. And they're saying "We don't want our name behind what the UK government does".
Joe: Well who would? A bunch of warmongering war criminals; genocidal maniacs basically. Why would you want to be a part of anything that they do or say? And when I say they don't like the English I mean they don't like everything that England stands for as espoused by the English government. Okay, maybe they don't blame English people, but the bottom line is English people are represented by their government and no matter how many protests there are against war, it doesn't change. So the next best thing they can do is to secede essentially, and become independent and at least have the ability to elect their own leaders who have an independent voice. But like I said, Scotland has less than five-and-a-half million people. That's big enough for it to be a European nation. Other European countries have less than that.
Niall: Iceland goes alone. No problems there.
Joe: Yeah. They could do that. But being part of that island off the coast of Europe, there would be a lot of...
Niall: Natural ties.
Joe: Natural links to the rest of England and Wales and then to Europe. It could happen, be a kind of an Iceland, go it alone, have that very different approach to the fat cat bankers, etc. bailouts and whatnot. But that would be ultimately a struggle for them to achieve that after independence.
Niall: One of the first things to go will be several trillion worth of oil and gas.
Joe: Yeah, for the UK.
Niall: In the North Sea.
Joe: That's why from my perspective...
Niall: Bye-bye Shell.
Joe: Yeah, well hopefully. Not being Scottish myself, but I was with Scottish people in sticking it, like you were saying earlier on, sticking it to Whitehall, to London, to the seat of government because clearly they don't want this to happen. They would lose a lot of revenue and just general land and the power. Five-and-a-half million of the population is not a lot but it's something. So. my motivation in wanting it to happen is yeah, to stick it to the UK, to give them something that they don't want to happen, to force it on them, and to force them to put their money where their mouth is, freedom and democracy, right?
Niall: Yeah. Oh they're in a bind right there because what can they really do? They've had a dirty campaign, but they haven't gone to the extent of what they would do abroad and really up the dirty tricks by killing people for example.
Joe: They should send IS in there you know.
Harrison: Al Qaeda in Scotland.
Joe: Al Qaeda in Scotland, yeah. Mix it up. That's worked in the past.
Niall: Well Joe, someone this week said there's an ISIS threat in Ireland. (laughing)
Joe: Oh yeah?
Niall: I'm serious.
Joe: What do they want? They hate us because of our potatoes?
Niall: They hate us because of our whiskey.
Joe: Ah, whisky and the Guiness. Well it is an infidel activity, drinking, so I would imagine, but actually people wouldn't mind.
Niall: Yeah, so bring it on Scotland. Freedom.
Joe: Yeah, where's William Wallace when you need him?
Niall: Well, we're not under any illusions that this is going to bring any kind of nirvana for Scotland.
Joe: It's better than the situation they're in right now.
Niall: It would take two years to come into effect anyway, I think 2016 the separation would take place. It's the power of saying no, even if the reasons why different people say no differ substantially, it's a no to the status quo. The status quo while it historically has been stable and reaction to it has been fomented by the wrong elements, in our world the status quo is the evil, is the reactionary force. So vote yes for a healthy no.
Joe: Yeah, pretty much. Like we said, Scottish people came out in their thousands in 2003 against the Iraq war; the government in London ignored them. For me that alone is justification for saying "Okay, listen. We're not friends anymore. You don't listen to us. You don't agree with us. You don't want what we want. Bye-bye."
Niall: Yeah. Moving on to a weather report, "Here's Tom with the weather". (laughing) So a couple of weird things; they're not so weird to our listeners but they are always exciting when they happen. So there were a major spate of fireballs in the last week. We had noticed a couple of weeks beforehand that things had gotten quiet in the skies. There seemed to be a couple of months with lesser activity and then boom, boom, boom, right at the end of August.
Last week I think on September 11, there was a big fireball over the States and the US Strategic Command, NORAD, I'm not sure, somebody like that said "That was just a Russian satellite disintegrating". Blame the Russkies. Blame Putin. On September 7, in fact in the middle of last week's show apparently, there was supposed to be a really close, but not so close, fly-by of an asteroid. This is one they'd spotted a few days before and said "Oh yeah, don't worry. Asteroid RC 2014" - whatever it was called - "it's going to fly by at such and such a distance. Absolutely no harm will come to anyone". That day there was a smack, an actual impact in Nicaragua; not a very large crater but the Nicaraguan government just said "Yeah, we've just been hit by something". In the course of the next few days they said yes it was a meteor. They found a meteorite.
And the same day, last Sunday in Spain there was a massive fireball as well, caught on camera, also seen across the Pyrenees here in France. And then another one, the biggest one I think I've seen probably since the one in Russia a couple of years ago. You might have seen videos of these kinds of things. It's where there's a large body and it creates a kind of triangular mist-like plume behind it.
Joe: Looks like a comet.
Niall: Well this is the thing. The very first reports, people get excited about it, they're on Twitter and peoples' descriptions of it was "I don't know what that was but the first thing that comes to mind is that looks like a comet." And I think they were spot on. There's very little video footage of it, even though it was seen from the north of Mexico the whole way to Washington State along the western side of the US with most reports coming from California. It was reported September 12. There's video footage from a security camera and somebody got some hand-held camera footage also. They sent it to a local news team in Nevada who reported the day after that the US navy said "Oh, that? That was us. We fired two trident missiles from a submarine off the California coast. Just a test." The peoples' comments under the story - they were definitely lying - the peoples' comments under the story was not that they didn't believe it as such, they were angry because "What the hell are you doing firing missiles over California into somewhere in Nevada? Please military, we love you. Please let us know when you're going to do something like that." But to me it didn't quite fly.
Joe: Yeah, it was Al-Qaeda in Nevada. They were firing missiles at Al-Qaeda in Nevada from California. I swear to god. That's really, really what was happening.
Niall: Yeah.
Joe: I have inside sources with the department of defence and that's what they said.
Niall: They've reported them...
Joe: They pretty much just saved the entire population of Nevada. Just be thankful. (laughter)
Niall: They've done this before. I've reported on comet sightings immediately being, within the day at least, being claimed to have been missile tests of some sort or another. In this case though, it was really, really poorly done because it was a day late. It had already been carried in California media as a comet/meteor of some description. To then come the next day, it's not going to fly.
So what's going on here? Well there are a few other people besides SOTT that catalogue these things and they've noticed a major upswing in the last 10 days or so. Interestingly, there was a mainstream report in the UK - I say mainstream i it came from the tabloids, so people said "Oh god, it comes from the daily express therefore it's trash". And it was in fact a trashy article because the gist of it was the earth in the next several decades is going to go through a period of extreme close encounters and an increasingly high risk of an actual impact from some large body or other. This was easily rubbished, but I've also seen other comments from astronomers, let's say, earlier this year who are also noticing the general upswing in fireball sightings. And they're not interested in predicting when asteroid X or comet Y is exactly going to pass us by. They're just noticing that the overall level of space debris flux is far higher.
Joe: And they're parlaying this into over the next 90 years?
Niall: They're parlaying it into their concerns to keep the funding coming, i.e., "We serve a function as your astronomers to keep an eye on the skies. You give us the money and we'll be able to track the 10,000 asteroids we know about". But it's all nonsense because they have no clue just how much is out there.
Joe: But the report was over the next 90 years? Was that it?
Niall: Ninety or 100 years is the general timeframe.
Joe: There's going to be a general upswing in...
Niall: Yeah, with a serious chance of something hitting.
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: But that's entirely the wrong way to look at it. We're being hit every single day right now by smaller objects some of which are fairly large. They can at least shatter glass. Fragments can at least hit the ground.
Joe: That one in Nicaragua...
Niall: That hit right next to their airport.
Joe: That one in Nicaragua was the first one that I remember seeing where an actual crater was at least all over the media.
Niall: Yes.
Joe: I don't remember there being one before. There was the Chelyabinsk one which exploded in the atmosphere but that's the first one that I remember in the past, forever basically, since the Carolina Bays of seeing a crater. It wasn't a very big crater. What was it? 15 feet across or something like that?
Harrison: Twelve metres.
Joe: Twelve metres. Okay well then it was 40 feet across. For me that's a marker of something. That's the first time that's happened. Because all of this is a very strong component I think in terms of human consciousness. And when something like that happens where everybody at least has the opportunity to see an actual crater, that's a step...
Niall: It's a marker.
Joe: It's a further step along the line of "This is really real". Because before it's like big shooting stars and then there was Chelyabinsk which was in the atmosphere, okay but didn't hit the earth so whatever. But psychologically, something actually hitting the earth and creating a crater, should make a lot of people sit up - not that it will - and say "Hang on a minute. A 12 metre crater. What if it was a 120 metre crater? What if it was a 1,000 metres? What if it was a kilometre-wide crater?" I just see the evolution of it.
Niall: It's kind of an unveiling.
Joe: Yeah, it seems to be following a process of bit by bit becoming more and more real. And you wonder at what point, how bad it has to get for people to actually sit up and take notice. Because you'll know when people sit up and take notice because when you go on your Facebook or your Twitter feed, you'll see everybody talking about it. And when you see that happening, then you know it's real. Then you know the big one has come. The billboard has fallen on people's heads. When that's going to happen, I don't know. But it's progressing.
Niall: There were a couple of major explosions and fires at chemical plants again. We noticed it last year. And there was one that stood out because a fireball had been reported at the same time in the same area. Now I'm not suggesting that this particular fireball impacted the site. As we've described before, they can...
Joe: Have an electrical...
Niall: ...explode in the atmosphere and have a discharge, almost like send a bolt down.
Joe: Or not even explode.
Niall: Not even explode...
Joe: ...to have an electrical discharge.
Niall: The passage of it carries so much charge potential that's different from the ground. So there was a massive explosion in Germany last week, unexplained in the sense that of course they haven't investigated it yet. But at least in general when something happens, they can more or less pinpoint, they have systems in place that can tell "Oh well this tripped first, therefore it was that." But it's unexplained in the sense they have no idea. It just exploded out of nowhere. Another one in Bridgeport, Connecticut a couple of days ago.
Joe: Somebody on the chat room just said that there were 300 fireballs from an unknown meteor shower over the US alone. From an 'unknown meteor shower' 300 fireballs.
Niall: That's right. There was spaceweather.com, I think it's an offshoot of NASA, monitoring. They have an All Sky fireball network and on one day alone last week they had 305 sightings in one night. Something like a tenfold increase on their nightly average. And it's funny, they have a kind of model map that they use. And the computer will plot each concentric circle of wherever it came from. He couldn't make out anything on the map because it was just a spaghetti hoop of loops and loops. And the story that went with it, was they came from all directions and we have no clue...
Joe: "Incoming".
Niall: ...about what that was. So call it a hunch, but I think we're not about to be, but in a massive debris stream or number of streams. So it's denser out there. We're going to have more fireballs in the coming days and weeks.
Joe: And possibly more impacts. Maybe a big one.
Harrison: More Russian satellites.
Niall: More Russian satellites. If in doubt, blame Putin.
Joe: When you see the headline in the New York Times saying "NASA surprised at number of Russian satellites in the sky". "NASA official said that he was surprised that Russia had so many defunct satellites" (laughter) "that were coming down in the last week". But you know...
Niall: Just Russkies.
Joe: But those Russkies. Anyway the point is, it's not a threat. It's just Russian satellites.
Niall: Final weather wrap up. Winter's come early. It's snowing in Canada and Dakota.
Joe: South Dakota?
Niall: The earliest...
Joe: Wyoming?
Niall: ...ever, ever.
Joe: The earliest ever in South Dakota, yeah.
Niall: I don't know. Several inches of snow.
Joe: Well just the earliest snow in September. The earliest winter snow coming on whatever it was, the 7th or 8th of September.
Niall: Volcanoes are going off everywhere. I haven't kept count, but every other day there seems to be a new hurricane along the west coast of the US. Is that normal?
Joe: No, it's probably electrical in nature because of all the fireballs.
Niall: Hurricane season, I've always thought was the Atlantic coast. But in the west, one after the other.
Joe: No, there's not usually that many on the west coast but also hurricane season is not finished yet, but it's kind of wrapping up because hurricane season's the warmer summer months, particularly. And once you get into September/October it starts to fade. Although we didn't have hurricane Sandy until October 31st. I think we can forget about...
Niall: Seasons.
Joe: ...seasons anymore. We're going to have one on Christmas day somewhere.
Niall: Last month they were telling us "meanwhile in Arizona where monsoon season is still ongoing". I was like "Monsoon season in Arizona? Since when did that start?!?"
Joe: Yeah, it's Arizona, India.
Niall: This is the same Arizona where the drought has taken place right?
Joe: Yeah.
Niall: Okay.
Joe: Monsoon one day, drought the next.
Niall: Everything makes sense. It's fine. Just watch X Factor.
Joe: It's all gone...
Niall: And keep shopping.
Joe: It's all gone a bit topsy-turvy and that's why people need to really pay attention increasingly. All of our listeners need to be paying attention to what's going on and as best as you're able, not identifying with it, not getting too worked up about any of it. You're an observer, you're a spectator. It's interesting. It's a good show.
Niall: Well you've got to get a little bit mad.
Joe: Well you can enjoy the show, but you don't have to feel like you're part of it in that sense.
Niall: Okay.
Joe: An excited spectator, enjoying the show and shouting at the actors and stuff, but not thinking that it's real, like you're going to jump up on stage and start taking part and get the bad guys and start beating them up and stuff. It's a play, generally speaking.
Niall: Okay, we're going to wrap it up here.
Joe: Yeah, I think we'll wrap it up there for this week. Thanks to Harrison for being our most excellent...
Niall: Co-panelist.
Joe: Co-panelist and our guest/host/what...
Harrison: Thanks.
Joe: We will be back next week with another show on an associated topic or topics. So until then have a good day/night y'all, and take it easy.
Harrison: Bye-bye.
Niall: Bye-bye.
Reader Comments
to our Newsletter