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Broadcasting from deep in the heart of the American Empire, join your host Harrison Koehli and fellow Sott.net editors as they discuss everything from current events and the latest machinations and manipulations of the global elite to history, science, and religion, and how it all fits together.

This week, join our hosts as they discuss the assassination of Martin Luther King and recent events around the globe.

The Truth Perspective is brought to you by the SOTT Radio Network and SOTT.net, your one-stop source for independent, unbiased, alternative news and commentary on world events.

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Running Time: 01:58:00

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Harrison: Welcome to the Truth Perspective on the SOTT Radio Network, it's January 24th 2015 and today we are going to be finishing up our marathon three week discussion about Martin Luther King and today we'll be focusing on the assassination. Then we'll get into a bunch of other stuff. In the studio today we've got some regulars, Caroline, William, Elan and I am your host Harrison Koehli. [Hellos] Let's just jump right into it.

For the last couple of weeks we played some clips from Martin Luther King, some of his more famous and not so famous speeches and discussed a bit about his life, what he did and the things that he was really speaking out against, which was a lot more than he started; and ruffled a lot of feathers doing that. Then of course he was assassinated, what a big surprise. To give it some context - Elan?

Elan: As we said, he was ruffling a lot of feather towards the end of his life, he was connecting the economic situation amongst millions of black and non-black people in the US with the drive for war, particularly in Vietnam at the time. This is a major part of his life and work that has been largely taken out of the history books. You read articles today and 9 out of 10 of them that discuss King and Martin Luther King Day don't even really broach the subject. That's a little bit of what we are going to discuss in connection to his assassination. We have a clip today, it's a news bite from 1997 and it's basically a little bit of a face-off between Dexter King, Martin Luther King Jnr's son, and a writer named David Garrow.

David Garrow is a Pulitzer Prize winning author of a book called Bearing the Cross - Martin Luther King Jnr and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference as well as Protest at Selma and The FBI and Martin Luther King Jnr. So a very interesting background in research and writing and especially interesting considering some of the things that he says in the clip we are about to hear.

Just to set it up a little further, it was just prior to this interview that Dexter King went to meet with James Earl Ray in prison to talk to him.

Harrison: Who is James Earl Ray?

Elan: He was the alleged assassin of Martin Luther King Jnr.

Caroline: Which he always denied.

Elan: Yes.

Harrison: Well kind of, but we'll get into that.

Elan: Yes. So with that, let's hear the interview and we'll take it from there.
Presenter Jane Paulie: Dexter King's 1997 meeting with the man in prison for killing his father was a breakthrough in James Earl Ray's long fight to be heard. But many saw it as a bizarre, disturbing footnote to a great tragedy. One week after the meeting on the eve of the 29th anniversary of the assassination Today's Matt Lower spoke with Pulitzer Prize winning King biographer David Garrow.

Matt: You said that the scene of James Earl Ray and Dexter King shaking hands was "sad and surreal" why?

David: Yes Matt. I think it's very sad that the King family and the King children are so uninformed of the history that they could be open to believing that Mr Ray was not involved in Dr King's assassination. Mr Ray was someone of long standing racist, segregationist affiliations and as the house assassinations committee very correctly concluded 19 years ago, Mr Ray was probably the trigger man for a wider segregationist conspiracy to kill Dr King.

Matt: But Dexter King and his family members are not the only people who have been asking questions for the last 29 years. If there are some doubts, why is it a betrayal to Dr King's legacy to meet James Earl Ray face to face and at least try and get some answers to those questions?

David: Unfortunately Matt, we can find people who deny that slavery was bad for Afro-Americans, people will deny that the holocaust happened in Europe. Unfortunately people just don't have a good enough historical recollection of how many times and how thoroughly this has been investigated. Mr Ray testified for three days on live national television in 1978 and I think it's fair to say, made a laughing stock of himself. Mr Ray could tell the truth if he chose to.

Matt: Hang on now for one second because joining us now is Dexter King. Dexter, good morning to you.

Dexter: Good morning.

Matt: Mr Garrow seems to think that you and your family members are being duped by James Earl Ray and his attorneys, what's your reaction.

Dexter: Well, I am very disturbed by his comment that anyone in this day and age of victim's rights would suggest that it is wrong for a family to question who killed their loved one. The fact of the matter is I guess I'm really not surprised because Mr Garrow for whatever reason, is doing his job and frankly he is an agent for those forces of suppression who do not want this truth to come forward.

David: Unfortunately the King family has not looked at the record that the House Assassinations Committee compiled 19 years ago. There is really no dispute amongst people that know this history well about Mr Ray's guilt. The real questions that we should be pursuing, and Mr King should be putting to Mr Ray, are, who encouraged and who funded Mr Ray to kill Martin Luther King Jnr? That should be our focus.

Dexter: I think what is really appalling here is that Mr Garrow has built a platform on exploiting my father's legacy. If it were not for my family, Mr Garrow would not have gained access to my father's papers and many other things that have given him a platform to speak out and to now come back and say that we are misinformed is totally appalling.

David: What we have here and what people need to remember is that Mr Ray, like other segregationist terrorists from the 1960's, did a tremendous amount of harm to the black freedom struggle and for Mr King to be misled into believing in mafia conspiracies is so unfortunately ignorant of the real picture.

Dexter: I have met Mr Ray, he is not a segregationist; I have met segregationists. This man was not born in the South as the media portrayed it at the time. The fact of the matter is he was born in Illinois, I met his family, they are not people who strike me as racist. The fact of the matter is this man was set up and we need to deal with this so that we can move on. The American public deserves the right to know, certainly the family of the victim deserves the right to know what happened to their loved one. We need to stop living in denial in this country and once and for all face this injustice.

Matt: The reverend Jessie Jackson agrees somewhat with Mr Garrow in saying that James Earl Ray does not deserve a trial until he begins to tell the truth, among other things saying that Raul never existed. Would you at least agree with that, that he does need to tell a little bit more of the truth before a trial is warranted?

Dexter: Well first of all, Raul has been located. As I said there are so many people who are talking about this case as if they are informed. They are the ones who are uninformed, they do not have the up-to-date latest information.

Jane: As with that other great tragedy of the 60's, the assassination of John F Kennedy, the death of Martin Luther King is a wound that will not heal. For some there will always be a search for the latest information, the clues to a conspiracy, the evidence of some rationale to an otherwise senseless tragedy. Did James Earl Ray kill Martin Luther King? Thirty years after the assassination the third official investigation into the killing found that Ray did commit the murder and that he acted alone. What matters most of course is that King is gone. That's Time and Again for now, thanks for joining us, I'm Jane Paulie and we're history.
Elan: And thank you Jane Paulie for concluding that news segment with some wonderfully predictable spin that would completely undercut anything that Dexter King was trying to say. What's interesting about King's meeting with James Earl Ray is that it was really part of a much larger strategy on the part of the King family to bring the truth to light. Just some of the facts that they were aware of that David Garrow, who is probably a paid agent of cointelpro...

Caroline: What a scum. Listening to him you would think "you are just in it for the money" and probably more.

Elan: He got a Pulitzer Prize for the bios' that he had written about King. We have, just to name a few, some very interesting facts around the actual assassination:

► The 111th Military Intelligence Group were at the location of the assassination at the time;
► A Special Forces group had an eight man sniper team at the assassination location at the time;
► The usual Memphis police special body guards were advised that they weren't needed on the day of the assassination so there were a number of black police officers in the area whose job under usual circumstances would have been to police the area, who were called off duty that day;
► Military intelligence set up photographers on the roof of a fire station with a clear view to Dr King's balcony where he was shot;
► The room that Dr King was supposed to be in at the motel he was staying at was changed from the secure first floor room to an exposed balcony room and no one knows who actually called the hotel to change that reservation;
► The crime scene was sanitized;
► The bushes across the way just adjacent to the hotel were cut down the night after the assassination;
► The rifle that James Earl Ray delivered was not matched to the bullet that killed Dr King and was not sighted to accurately shoot.

At one point in the interview we heard of Raul. If any of you have watched the incredible, indispensable film Evidence of Revision you'll know that Raul is the name of James Earl Ray's handler who he was probably engaged in petty crimes with and had a history with. Interestingly, Raul has ties to Jack Ruby. Yes, Jack Ruby of the JFK assassination.

Caroline: I was just going to say there is a remarkable pattern here that we have seen before.

Elan: It's just incredible. So fast-forward a couple of years to 1999 and the King family manages to have a civil suit and the civil suit was designed to clear James Earl Ray of the assassination and to also suggest that there were members of the local state police and the government at the time that were in fact involved in the assassination, and they won. Twelve jurors deliberated for 1 hour after 30 days of testimony and decided correctly, given all the evidence, that in fact it was elements of our government that were responsible for the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr.

There were a couple of things that were said at the trial verdict in December of 1999, one of them was by William Pepper, who had represented the family in the law case and what he said was this:
"Ladies and gentlemen, this great republic has throughout its history, has been afraid to face the issues that Martin Luther King Jnr tried to confront at the end of his life. Dexter King said quite frankly that Martin King "opposed the war in Vietnam and sought to bring the poor to Washington to rally for their cause in the halls of congress." They took up tents in the shadow of the Washington memorial to remind the lawmakers that forces of power in this land do exist and they have rights which were being denied to them. Because he took on those forces, powerful economic forces that dominated politics in this land, they killed him.

He was killed because he could not be stopped. He was killed because they feared that half a million people would rise in revolution in the capital of this country and do what Mr Jefferson said needed to be done every 20 years "to cleanse this land". This land has not been cleansed. This nation has not faced the problems that Dr Martin Luther King Jnr died trying to face and confront. They still exist today; the forces of evil, the powerful economic forces that dominate the government of this land and make money on war and deprive the poor of what is their right; their birth right. They still abound and they rule.

The jury heard the background of Dr King's quest, they understood finally the reason why he was stained. He was not a civil rights leader when he was stained, he was an international figure of great stature, he had a moral banner that he was waving and it was heard and seen all over this land. Here and in Europe, he had that kind of compelling presence. He was a danger and a threat to the status quo so he was eliminated."
That is one of the major reasons why we don't know, most people don't know, this particular law case and what it meant. I think if they did we could speculate. I don't know how people would react, probably with great anger and a renewed energy in picking up what King was trying to do.

Harrison: A little bit about James Earl Ray. When he was caught originally, he entered a plea bargain, so he actually pled guilty originally. But the reason he did so was because his lawyers and the people involved in the case told him that if he didn't, he would be getting the death penalty and that there was a chance, I think, that his father and brother would be implicated as well and investigated and possibly charged.

So he took the plea bargain and then found out that he was the only person being charged and that he wouldn't have a real trial and so he immediately recanted his plea bargain but they wouldn't let him. So he basically got stuck with it. Ever since then he has been adamant that he is not guilty.

Caroline: He didn't exactly have a free choice there did he?

Harrison: No.

Caroline: Not at all. The thing that stuck me about Jane Paulie asserting that "the Third House Committee has found that James Earl Ray..." Committees are struck specifically to bury the truth. We have seen that over and over with the Warren Commission and with King and with 9/11 so any time you hear a government committee's findings, you can pretty well conclude that there is nothing remotely resembling the truth there. They might have marshalled the facts but have reassembled them in such a way that it has no application of what actually happened. So this blithe news-head saying "oh yes, the Third Committee..." Just like, oh please!

Harrison: Then 2 years later, thankfully, we had this civil trial.

Caroline: But again, nobody's heard about it.

Harrison: And no one's heard about it. I don't think any newspapers or national media covered it. There was a total news blackout after the announcement. I was shocked when I heard about it, I had no idea about it.

Caroline: Just going back to Garrow; what a slimy person. Just questioning why they would ever want to go and see Ray. Even if there was not any of this behind it, these are staunch Baptist Christians and one of the first Christian edicts is to forgive your enemies. I don't think he went there for forgiveness, he went there for information but to even disparage that and then claim that the principal family involved in this tragedy was "misinformed" just uuugh! It's just coming out of his mouth and either he has absolutely no idea what he was saying or it was just cruel.

Elan: He could have probably said those same things, even if he truly believed them and wasn't a paid agent, he probably could have afforded to be a lot more sensitive to the fact of who he was talking to.

Caroline: I know, it's awful, awful, awful.

Elan: At that press conference of the trial verdict, there was something that Coretta Scott King had said when she read her speech and she doesn't mince her words , she spares no sentiment. Do you want to read that Caroline?

Caroline: Sure I can do that. She was a wonderfully eloquent woman on her own, Martin certainly had his match in her. These are the words of Coretta Scott King:
"There is abundant evidence of a major high level conspiracy in the assassination of my husband Martin Luther King Jnr and the civil court's unanimous verdict has validated our belief. I wholeheartedly applaud the verdict of the jury and I feel that justice has been well served in their deliberations. This verdict is not only a great victory for my family but also a great victory for America. It is a great victory for truth itself.

It is important to know that this was a swift verdict, delivered after about an hour of jury deliberation. The jury was clearly convinced by the extensive evidence that was presented during the trial that, in addition to Mr Jowers, the conspiracy of the mafia, local, state and federal government agencies were deeply involved in the assassination of my husband.

The jury also affirmed overwhelming evidence that identified someone else, not James Earl Ray, as the shooter and that Mr Ray was set up to take the blame. I want to make it clear that my family has no interest in retribution, instead our sole concern has been that the full truth of the assassination has been revealed and adjudicated in a court of law."
If no one hears about it, it is somewhat of a tainted victory.

Harrison: It's like what we were talking about last week when we were discussing propaganda techniques and the way they work. By not making information like this available, sure some people will manage to find it, but it will never be enough to make a difference. By clamping down on certain stories and making sure they don't' get any airtime, it just ensures that the people as a majority don't know it and aren't aware of it. With that you can get away with anything.

Caroline: You just carry on with the view that you have already fed them.

Harrison: It's the same thing with the JFK assassination, RFK, all these big events. They have so many thing in common and even the idea that James Earl Ray was a patsy, well we've seen that that is standard operating procedure and it has been for generations now, probably even longer than that but especially in these past few years with all these alleged terror attacks going on.

You have the shooter and he or they are almost immediately identified and then they are killed. They learned their lessons since after the JFK/RFK assassinations. You can't let these guys who are innocent stick around. They were a bit late with Lee Harvey Oswald. If they wanted to get their story straight they should have taken care of that a bit earlier, but then with SIrhan Sirhan and James Earl Ray, I guess that shows that even if you don't kill your patsy you can still get away with it.

Now they are a lot more efficient, they take out the patsy within a couple of days and then there's no trial, no real investigation. It makes it a lot easier to control the information to the public and in any trial or court case that ends up coming up, they can say whatever they want.

Caroline: You have an inquiry. Actually it's a nod to how dumbed down we have become, that it's only been a feature of the latest ones, starting with 9/11, where you conveniently leave a piece of identifying information. Before you actually had to go through the motions of having a police investigation and picking up clues and finally getting your guy but now "Hey! Here's his passport, here's his driver's licence, we've got him!" You don't have to sweat any more.

Harrison: The level of criticism or discourse in the media is just astounding when you look at this. If you talk to any police officer detectives, you can have planted finger prints and planted evidence. These are all things that a real investigator has to consider and look at when dealing with something like this, but in a trial by media, the information's just there and there is no questioning it. You're branded as a conspiracy theorist or a lunatic for even questioning the idea that maybe we should look into this a bit closer, maybe it's not what we actually think it is. But no, each piece of evidence that makes it into the media is designed just to confirm the idea that this guy is guilty and this is exactly the way it went down.

You have to look to the so-called alternative media in order to get to see anyone asking the question; "Could this identification have been planted there? It seems awfully convenient." That should be the first question a real investigator would ask, but in the media? No, I guess not.

Elan: I remember several years ago there was this idea that you can't trust the internet and that's certainly true to some degree. You have to be discriminating but it's just like the idea of "conspiracy theorist". Once you've put this idea that "you can't trust the internet" in the minds of people who might have questions , all of those questions and places where you would be finding alternative information, real, good information that you're not getting in the major media, it's no longer a possibility for them if they accept that.

Caroline: The next slur after "you're a conspiracy theorist" is "oh, you read that on the internet didn't you?"

Harrison: That bugs me so much when you hear someone say that and I find it comes up most often, and we discussed it here yesterday, if you're talking about medical things, if you're talking about vaccines or diet, they ask "oh, did you read that on the internet?"

Talk about a total non-sequitur, I mean you could say anything and you could respond "oh, did you read that on the internet?" because you can read anything on the internet. You can read about the Big Bang theory and how vaccinations are good and all this stuff. So what? Did you guys read that on the internet?

I'd say more often than not about all the things that you say that would get that response, it's not just the internet. If you look at the people saying it, they have the credentials of people who would say things otherwise, which are published in mainstream journals that you can get on PubMed. Yeah it's on the internet but it's a published journal. You can find it in books published by so-called respectable university presses.

So it's just a way of saying something so that the person saying it doesn't have to think about it. They have a really easy way of ignoring what that person is saying, for no good reason but it sounds like a good reason, because they have heard other people say it.

Caroline: It doesn't say that you don't have to think, there is a tiny bit of validity in that, definitely when there is an event, in the first couple of hours on the internet you start to get a really good raw data dump. Some of it is junk, some of it is good but you get your hands on it before the media has a chance to spin it so that's been one of the values of the internet, while we still have it.

Harrison: Speaking of media spin, I want to move on to something else, unless we have anything else to say about Martin Luther King? Ok so moving on, first of all there have been a lot of things happening in Ukraine this past week or so. I think we might have touched on it last week. I know the Behind the Headlines guys, Joe and Niall, touched on a bit of it last week.

Things are continuing, the forces of Novorossia, Donetsk and Lugansk have re-taken the Donetsk airport. We have talked about this a few times but this has been a contested area for pretty much the entire war so far, with some Ukrainian troops and mercenaries holed up there; stranded basically and not leaving. The Donetsk authorities offered several times to open a humanitarian corridor to let these guys leave and that was refused several times. They had a troop rotation I believe about a month ago and it was overseen by the OSCE. They let out the injured, tired and starving guys from the airport and replaced them with fresh troops and it has been a constant source of conflict there with fighting pretty much every day.

Just a week or so ago the Donetsk militias there re-took the entire airport. They took prisoners of war and basically killed anyone that was fighting there and totally regained control of the airport. Now battles of this sort where the Donetsk guys have some kind of victory at the airport, are always portrayed in the Ukrainian media and the West as something that it was not. So the Ukrainians are always in control of more than they actually are; they don't lose very many guys; there are very few killed or wounded in action and basically the Kiev army is just this great fighting force.

So about a week ago the Ukrainians lose control of the airport because the Ukrainians really wanted to keep control of this airport for whatever reason, maybe it was just a public image thing that they control this important area or who knows what.

Caroline: It was built as a military airport, there was a lot of underground construction in there and that was what made it so hard to get these folks out of it. [They were using it] as a base of operation and they were shelling all of the nearby villages. I was watching one of the videos, if you want good videos then you find the Ukraine videos and hopefully they have subtitles. One of the colonels of the Novorossia army remarked that somehow the shelling was much lighter on the actual army and that the villages around them were taking a lot more damage and death.

Harrison: They were using those locations from the airport and the vicinity of the airport to basically bomb civilian areas. In response, the Ukrainians launched this pretty big offensive, in part to re-take the airport but also to bomb more civilian areas. For the past week there has been fighting along the entire front between the Ukrainians and the militias, bombing of civilian areas like in Gorlovka. They experienced 14 hours straight of shelling, one of those days.

What do the Ukrainians do? In the media they're saying "we've still got control of the airport" when they don't. This is the story, a group of 8 to perhaps 16 guys get sent. Do you want to read the transcript?

Caroline: Yeah, there is a wonderful article on Signs saying that Novorossia is winning and some pretty awful things came out of it. There's 3 different videos so I transcribed a little bit of 2 different ones. The first video you will see actually looks like raw footage of grabbing these 8 guys. There is a lot of yelling and screaming and a lot of swearing which gets beeped out; so we don't know how to swear in Russian at this point.

So one of the big prizes was this Colonel Oleg Mikats and he was very high up in the command and they had grabbed him and when they realized who they had, they got really excited and they basically were interrogating him standing right there with his hands zip tied behind him. It starts out with the news guy doing the intro and he says "hey, here's these guys" and the leader of the Novorossia group that got him was screaming at them for a few minutes and then you hear him saying to evacuate the airport.

Harrison: That's why they were sent.

Caroline: That's why they were sent. Their code word for injured is "the 300's" so then Givi who was the guy who was talking to him says "so you were told the airport is under your control, right?" and Mikats nods "and when you entered who turned out to be here? The army of the Donetsk Republic". And this guy is looking crushed and Givi says "you have been sent to the slaughter, you have been destroyed and under your distraction." This is the translation "they have attempted to send their tanks, the ones that we have just burned just now".

So this very, very high ranking colonel I believe he was, had been lied to. They were told that they were just going to evacuate the injured and get them out of there and that was all it was going to be. When they got there, in an interview with the second soldier, he said "we moved out from Vodianova , we had to take our men out from the airport and that's it. Simply to take them out and that's it." When they got there, they were just met with withering fire. There were no injured, they were sent unknowingly as a decoy for this other operation that they had going.

Harrison: Who knows? It could be that the Ukrainian commanders and generals were just that stupid that they believed their own propaganda, but it could have been a distraction like Givi had mentioned. So this Oleg Mikats guy, there a news clip of him back last year sometime talking to a journalist that was found in Peski, which is a small town near the airport; this is where a lot of the shelling was coming from. Mikats saw this guy there and threatened to personally kill any journalist he found in the city.

This was also the guy that was at the troop rotation in December that was overseen by the OSCE and you can see him in a video in the background. So one of the Donetsk guys - Motorola call sign - was there and shook hands with the battalion commander and Oleg Mikats is in the back watching with this grumpy look on his face, like he is not enjoying being there or seeing his subordinate, the battalion commander, shake hands with this "bandit" as they call Motorola. I don't know, I had a smile on my face when I saw that he was caught.

Caroline: That video was very odd too. It just had these echoes of the Christmas truce in 1914, these two soldiers with buildings blown up in the background; just like "this sucks and we don't want to do it we've got our orders - Yeah I understand. We just want to be peaceful with our family but we've got a job to do." It was bizarre and everybody on both sides is like "this really sucks and we want to back to our families, what choice do we have?" It was strange; very strange.

Harrison: The difference in mind sets between the two sides is striking. I would really recommend that listeners check out the YouTube channels South Front and Kazzura. Those guys translate a lot of the news coming out of there and footage of the streets and interviews with the militia men and with the Prime Minister of Donetsk.

After all these POWs were taken, Zakharchenko who was the Prime Minister and seems like a decent guy, said that the POWs that were found would be released immediately to the families; the families had to come and pick them up though. They wouldn't wait for a prisoner exchange because that's how they have been dealing with most of the POWs; they have prisoner exchanges for their guys that were captured and civilians that were arrested for no reason by the Kiev forces.

You can watch the video; there was a Ukrainian mother who I believe had come to pick up her son and Zakharchenko paraded her around the city and showed what her son and the people and the Kiev forces are doing; "here are all the buildings that had been bombed by your people, here are the coffins and what did we ever do to you? You guys are coming here. We never came to you."

There is a level of humanity there that is totally lacking in the Ukrainian perspective on this war that is going on. It's a perspective that you won't get in the western media and that is that the guys that the West is supporting are the ones going into these self-declared, independent republics and bombing civilian residential areas; killing people.

Just a few days ago there was another attack on a bus, it was shelled; 15 people dead. I recommend watching the videos if you still aren't aware of what's going on and if you think that Kiev are the good guys in this.

Caroline: What is amazing is how despite all of their suffering these people are still keeping their humanity alive. I saw another video, it's in the same article and it's Zakharchenko doing a press conference and he pulls up three of the eight captured soldiers and just interviews them and he is so tired; oh my goodness, this man is so tired. But he treats them with such respect; they were kids, like 21 and 23. He says "you've seen what's happened, you've seen what's going on." And those three Ukrainian soldiers are just devastated, you can see it in their faces.

He did not crush them. He could have crushed them publicly and he said "look, I know that you were sent under false pretences. You believed that you were doing a job, you behaved as good soldiers. I have respect for that." An amazing thing to watch, just an amazing thing that he could still see the humanity of each of these kids who were sent out in a situation they had no idea about. One guy told that he had been trained for a month, he had been at the front exactly 14 hours from the time he got there to the time he was captured; 14 hours and he had survived and nine of his group had died; unreal.

Harrison: After they had gained control of the airport they found numerous American made weapons and each of the Ukrainian guys that were there, had a little solar powered device with readings from an American preacher translated into English and Russian; it wasn't in Ukrainian for some reason. So each of these guys was given this little Christian propaganda device telling them that they're doing the right thing and that it's ok to die. I couldn't find a time period but they said that they recovered 600 bodies at the airport from the Ukrainian side. I'm not sure if this was from recent fighting or if it was cumulative over all the battles that had taken place there but they said they found guys in NATO uniforms in addition to other foreign mercenaries.

Caroline: And yet Russia is condemned for sending help. NATO will contract foreign mercenaries, apparently the latest incarnation of Blackwater, which is Academi, sent 400 mercs in May.

Harrison: I'll give you a little timeline. I think it was a day before the newly launched offensive that the Ukrainian government had basically said the Minsk protocols were kaput; there was no deal with that any more. So then they launch this offensive and totally get their butts kicked. It's hard to know the exact figures but except for civilian deaths there were very few militia deaths but just staggering numbers of Ukrainian dead and injured and tanks lost and weapons. It's just kind of a rout at this point.

So Poroshenko then says "oh my God, Russia has invaded again! Nine thousand Russian troops are helping the militias to fight this war." Which is totally nonsense. What's curious about that is that this time the US State Department refused to confirm this. Usually they'll get right behind this stuff and say "oh yeah, we know it's true even if we can't share the evidence" but no they said "we can't confirm that" because it's totally BS.

Elan: Maybe after a dozen times of saying "Russia invaded", people are starting to catch on that Russia has not invaded and that it probably hasn't happened this time.

William: The OSCE even confirmed that there were no Russian troops.

Caroline: Poroshenko is really between a rock and a hard place. There is no way the Ukraine is ever going to go into the EU, they are such a basket case that the EU could never afford to help the country with the kind of help that it needs. Yet he knows that he could get a substantial amount of help from Russia, but if he goes in that direction he's got the insane Right Sector Azov battalion ready to lynch him if he does, so he is really screwed.

Elan: He also has Prime Minister Yatsenyuk plotting against him and planning a new Maidan - or so the stories say - to coincide with the one year anniversary of the prior Maidan. So he's got pressure from these literally Nazi battalions who are ready to go in there and murder the subhuman Novorossians, he's got the US and NATO pressing against him to make him unleash the dogs further; not that I feel any sympathy for Poroshenko whatsoever.

Caroline: What is he going to do?

Elan: A planned coup. He also has monetary interests of his own since the guy is an oligarch and after all he is the "Chocolate King" with Russia. Maybe, maybe there is an ounce of common sense telling him that Ukraine really can't survive without Russia's support in a number of ways.

Caroline: Here is some more "I read it on the internet"...

Elan: Here we go.

Caroline: These are interesting little tid-bits but they didn't have enough legitimacy to actually put them on Signs but there was a tweet about forced conscription in Ukraine now and you are being served with papers and they literally ambush you. You will be served with papers and they will be calling you up; anybody between 20 and 60. They will serve you at work. One guy said that he got served papers as he was picking up his kid from day care and they're not in for it; they're not going for it.

The lines outside of doctor's offices and clinics for people trying to get medical deferments are huge. People are sneaking away any way they can. Men are going to relatives in distant cities and some people are trying to get to Russia. There is no appetite within the populace for this war at all. So trying to full fill the troop requirements they need to make up for what they've lost and what they need to actually do something serious in Donbass; it's not happening.

Russia is concerned because on the one hand they have been so welcoming to refugees, amazingly welcoming even to the point of guaranteeing if you were getting a pension in Ukraine you would still get your pension [in Russia]. If you're a retired little granny who was living on whatever a month you would still get it. The concern is that with this huge influx of mostly men - although I don't know if women are being called up or not; I wouldn't doubt it after a while - that there will be subversive elements moving into Russia and while they're safe from military duty they could then begin their subversive activities there. So there is a huge amount of concern on the Russian side.

Harrison: One of the downsides of conscription - this was the first engagement for a lot of the guys that were captured. They were trained in September and this is their first military engagement, their first operation and they get captured or killed. They're obviously poorly trained, young and new. How many fresh recruits are they planning in the next few month?

Caroline: 200,000.

Harrison: Something like that. They're just going to be cannon fodder. One of the results of this is somewhat interesting, Russia isn't the only country that Kiev has debts to and isn't paying. They owe China about $3 billion for grain purchased a couple of years ago. So China put out $3 billion for grain and some other stuff and Kiev has paid about $150 million of this and that barely covers the interest. So they owe $3 billion worth of grain to China.

Caroline: How is Ukraine, the bread basket of the world going to import grain? How did that happen?

Harrison: Well China actually had a lot of deals with Ukraine before the coup. They had a cosy business relationship that got totally turned upside down afterwards. So China can call in this debt and basically bankrupt the government or the country but the thing is that the people that are growing the grain and the people that make Ukraine its money are the ones that are being put into military service and being killed.

They need to win this war because they've got the IMF and the US telling them that they have to. Poroshenko is totally powerless over the situation. He has to continue the war which is totally unsuccessful and he won't be able to do it and if he isn't successful then he's got Turchynov and Yatsenyuk and Kolomoyskyi just waiting to come out and take his place. So it's just a mess; a total mess of a situation. I don't know.

One of the funny things about the Minsk protocols - like I mentioned, the day before this attack they were talking about the Minsk protocols then they started losing and they lost the airport and all of a sudden Poroshenko was like "oh we need to have some more Minsk talks". I just thought that was funny. That's all I wanted to say about Ukraine. The fighting is still going on so we'll have more news as it happens.

Caroline: The assessments that I have been reading says that this has got another year to go bar some black swan event that may make it collapse in a day or it may drag on for a year which would just be tragic.

Harrison: Moving over, do you want to give us our economics update for the week William?

William: Alright. Speaking of the Ukraine going into a collapse - that could head off or start another war which is kind of what happens when you have currency wars, which is what's going on right now. Some interesting news out of Europe is, right before the EU decided to do a whole bunch of quantitative easing, the Swiss Franc decided it didn't want to be pegged to the Euro anymore and that sure caused a lot of eyebrows to be raised and a lot of banks are scrambling.

Caroline: A lot of hedge funds died.

William: Let me talk a little bit about what a currency peg is or in other words what a fixed exchange rate system is. That is usually when a currency's value is fixed to another currency or a basket of currencies or the weight of gold and it is usually fixed at a pre-determined value to keep those values stabilized, which helps make trade and investments more predictable and it's pretty useful for the smaller economies.

Now most of the fixed exchange rates are gone except for the European exchange rate mechanism and that's temporarily using the Euro to establish a conversion rate and they usually allow a plus or minus 15% fluctuation amongst the different currencies. The gold exchange rate prevailed from 1870 - 1914, of course right after that we had World War I. Then after World War II, another one was tried, that was the Breton Woods which replaced the gold and used the US dollar and of course the birth of the IMF.

That was set up as an exchange but that fell apart in the early 70's when good old Nixon decided to not have dollars backed by any kind of gold. The argument of using gold is that it ties the world price levels to the world's supply of gold and this then prevents inflation unless of course there's a major gold discovery.

Caroline: What it means is there's a known amount of gold and you can only have so much currency for that known amount of gold.

William: Right.

Caroline: Okay.

William: That supposedly keeps everything pretty stable. I was just looking at some of the different currencies and their rates compared to gold and as we know gold is topping $1300 US lately. For the past 4 months it's been on the rise.

Caroline: Can I just interject one thing because this is something I'm still trying to get my head around. If you've got yourself tied to gold that means that you declare that you have 5 pounds of gold and you only have so much currency that you value to gold that you put in circulation. Is it against all gold or a countries gold?

William: That's why banks have to keep a gold reserve to back up the currency that they are printing. They usually go by ounces. I was just looking at the gold prices and the Euro to gold, in the last 4 months it's gone up 24% as well as the Canadian dollar versus gold and as well as the Australian dollar. The Swiss Franc as well as the UD dollar and the Chinese Yuan, the Japanese Yen and the Indian Rupee are all about 13-15% climbs in the last 4 months.

Caroline: So does that mean that they have printed more money to match the amount of gold that they have?

William: Right. This is all part of the currency war plus the Euro has got their own pegged currency. But the Swiss Franc was up 14% as well until they decided to remove the peg to the Euro, now all of a sudden they are back to where they were 4 months ago. So the Swiss Franc really went up in value.

Now it's interesting that the US dollar seems to be on the rise; it has been for the last couple of months yet gold is still going up versus the dollar; so that's interesting.

Caroline: That sounds strange.

William: It does sound strange because usually when a currency de-values the gold goes up. But there's no transparency in these gold markets, so it's hard to determine what exactly is going on there.

Caroline: So the only other mechanism would be - more people want dollars for the dollar to go up?

William: For the dollar to go up? Well you've got that, more and more countries are not using the US dollar any more plus there is a very high demand for gold lately as you know. Russia and China, India are accumulating a lot of gold; almost all of what the world can produce. You have some European countries now repatriating their gold, Germany was successful in repatriating even more, a little bit ahead of their delayed schedule that they had previously, which was kind of a surprise.

It just makes you wonder what's going on in the background in the world as far as possibly some major re-set occurring. If they have that, then the gold has to be spread out amongst all the nations before something can be done, otherwise you're going to have a lot of chaos. In fact Jean Claude Trichet mentioned back in November that the global economy and the global finance is at a turning point in a way. New rules have been discussed with all the advanced and emerging economies including the most important - China.

It makes one wonder if the US and China are somehow suppressing the price of gold to allow China to amass gold but that doesn't explain what's going on with Russia where we see their Ruble really devalued quite a bit and gold to Ruble went up 63% in the last 4 months which is quite astounding.

So what does the World Economic Forum and Davos think about all this kind of stuff? Well for the last 6 or 7 years in their top 5 global risk in terms of likelihood of it happening, the top 1 is asset price collapses and severe economic disparity. Somehow this year it changed, now it's interstate conflict with regional consequences. We all see what happens when countries engage in currency war, we end up with a real war. The same went with their top 5 of global risk in terms of impact, again for the last 5 years they have been worried about fiscal crisis, asset price collapses and major systemic financial failures but this year it's a water crisis. They have taken their focus away from the finance and they are looking at the world from a little bit of a different perspective.

Harrison: Looking at that chart one thing I noticed is that it looked like up until 2011 climate change and disasters weren't even on the radar. Then in 2011 all of a sudden we see they occupy 2 or 3 of the main five threats for the last 5 years.

William: Yeah, it's been off and on. In fact it fell off completely in 2015. It's rated number 5 now of failure of climate change adaptation.

Harrison: What does that even mean? [Laughter]

Caroline: We're not going to try to fix it any more we're just going to deal with it.

William: Actually it is number 2 on their terms of likelihood; extreme weather events. Number 3 is failure of national governance, number 4 is state collapse or crisis and the 5th one is high structural unemployment and underemployment. In the terms of impact number 1 was water crisis, number 2 was rapid and massive spread of infectious diseases - that's the first time that that popped up, number 3 is weapons of mass destruction, number 4 is interstate conflict with regional consequences and the 5th one was failure of climate change adaptation.

Elan: So this group at Davos, are they sponsored by the IMF or so other?

William: It's generally a group of economics companies and banks.

Caroline: Yeah but who organises it?

William: You got me there, I didn't look into that.

Caroline: Because a lot of different people get invited there every now and then, like Bilderberg. Not only do you have your scientists and your economics guys and political guys but actors and writers get invited; that's just really odd.

Elan: Like Bono with greenhouse gases and carbon emissions.

Caroline: So they have an influence of a particular demographic?

Elan: Yeah.

Caroline: Okay.

Harrison: He who shall not be named Elan. No Bono! [Laughter]

Elan: That's right.

Caroline: So in your research do they find that these conferences have influence policy and that all these people go back to wherever they go back to and start implementing the ideas?

William: Well that's the theory. There is no way to confirm that.

Caroline: So they hold this big conference without figuring out whether or not it's effective?

William: No I mean it's not broadcast. It's not something that we can all know; what is discussed, what the plans are.

Caroline: Okay.

William: And what the marching orders are that were given.

Caroline: Alright then.

William: They just name the risks but they don't say how they're going to be resolved or what they are going to do about it.

Caroline: But it was a swell party.

Harrison: Poroshenko was there but he left early.

Elan: His creditors were after him.

Harrison: He had important business to take care of when he found out that his offensive wasn't going as he had planned. Anything else on that William?

William: Well we've just got to keep an eye on stuff because commodities are down 48% lately. That includes energy, metal, copper, cotton, crude and rubber. Of course you have the accumulation of debt of consumable and non-productive assets and of course that fails to create any kind of future stream of revenue to repay any of these kinds of debts. It just keeps going up and up and up.

We have stagnant wages so people aren't able to repay their growing debt. There is just no way that this can go out in any calm fashion.

Caroline: So when you have so many basic commodities not being in demand then that implies the fact that there is no manufacturing demand for them. No products can be produced because people don't have the money to buy them.

William: Hence the high unemployment. There is no easy way out of this without some grand reset or probably some major war.

Caroline: Well it worked the last time for a while.

William: There is some curious news with Russia. Putin was criticising the head of the monetary policy at the central bank for not moving fast enough when the Ruble started to decline.

Caroline: So he doesn't get to give them orders? Interesting.

Harrison: No he doesn't.

William: Same as the Federal Reserve here. He selected a new head called Dmitry Tulin and he's a veteran of the central bank and was the deputy head just after the USSR failed in the Soviet Union in 1991 and he had to deal with a very high inflation. He is considered a maverick who can't be pressured by the Kremlin, the government, banks or companies so it's going to be something to keep an eye on as well to see how he handles the monetary policy in Russia.

Caroline: If Putin appointed him this could be a "keep your enemies closer" situation.

William: It was the boss of the monetary policy that recommended him and Putin approved.

Caroline: Okay.

Harrison: I guess that's a "wait and see".I just wanted to give an update on one of the recurring themes - the Jeffery Epstein scandal. Just a little refresher - he is a convicted human trafficker, paedophile billionaire. In 2008 it turned out that there were at least 35 female minors that he was accused of trafficking; basically pimping. The youngest of which was 12 years old. Since 2008 he - with the help of his big shot lawyer Alan Dershowitz - has managed to settle more than 30 lawsuits with these victims out of court. Since then the scandal has erupted because of certain names being attached to it - Prince Andrew, Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz himself.

More documents were just published online; you can read the article. It was published on Gawker.com it was written by Nick Bryant and we are carrying it on SOTT too so you can see it there. For those of you who don't know Nick Bryant is an investigative journalist and he wrote a giant, amazing book on the Franklyn scandal called The Franklyn Scandal.

He has got a lot of background and experience researching these paedophile rings and sex scandals and just how dark and twisted things are beneath the surface of people in power. So he wrote this article giving the latest updates on what's going on with Epstein and Clinton.

It turns out that in these documents there are the flight logs for Epstein's so-called sex jet; there are various names for it but he had this private jet that he flew people around in. It was known that Clinton had flown in it several times but now there are the actual logs so you could see who the pilots had listed as being on the plane for any one flight. So Clinton was on the plane at the same time, several times with an acquaintance of Epstein's who is a soft core porn actress. I'm not sure if he and Dershowitz were ever on the flight together but they are both on the flight log as being there with several more of Epstein's acquaintances.

Now in Epstein's little black book he has the names of dozens and dozens of women under the heading "massage". Listed under these are some that we know of who are underage girls or people that were involved in the previous lawsuits. In addition to Dershowitz and Clinton there are several other high level people who would appear on these flights with accompanying names of just first names of women or an unidentified female or something like that. Former Treasury Secretary and Harvard President Larry Summers was on, Naomi Campbell, Steven Pinker who is a famous psychologist and writer; famous atheist too.

Clinton made several trips with these people and he was on flights with two women and one of these women was basically a pimp for Epstein. She was accused of finding these girls and recruiting them.

Elan: What was the word they used for that?

Harrison: I can't remember, I've got it here somewhere. Anyway Clinton was on the flight with them. When it came out the Dershowitz was implicated and named in the statements when one of these new people had come forward he of course denies everything. In one interview he gave the impression that he only met Epstein this one time because there was some big donation being given to the University so he met Epstein because of this.

Then it turned out that he had known Epstein for years before that. Even in different interviews Epstein is apparently the only person outside of Dershowitz's family that he sends his book manuscripts to; he knew him intimately. They were close friends for years before he'd implied that they were actually together so Gawker actually contacted him and being the lawyer that he is he had a perfect explanation for everything.

Caroline: He got all het up and this just cracked me up, he said "I never would have been on a flight like that, I always travel with my wife. We have been married for 35 years and we are so devoted wherever I go to give a lecture or whatever she goes with me" except that she wasn't listed on these logs.

Harrison: Then he said "oh well I don't go everywhere with her, every once in a while...."

Caroline: "I go almost everywhere" oh give it up!

Harrison: In the article they've got the questions that they put to Dershowitz so here is his lawyerly speak - he originally said that he'd only met Epstein because of this Harvard thing in 2003 but now he acknowledges that he first met Epstein in 1997 so he says "my first substantive contact with him was to fly with him to Les Wexner's house to attend dinner with Shimon Peres and John Glenn." As for who else was on these flights Dershowitz couldn't recall.

Hazel, one of the girls who was listed on the logs? "I don't know" ; Claire? "I have no idea"; Tatiana? "I think that was a woman in her 20's who was Epstein's girlfriend but I never flew with her". Then the unidentified female? ;"That could have been my mother." [Laughter]

Caroline: Dershowitz travelled with his mother, that's a good one. I like that.

Harrison: I'm watching this with some interest because I don't like Alan Dershowitz.

Caroline: There was another thing on Twitter and I have to grab the link but this was supposedly breaking news, I can't quite remember how the situation got out, it was one of those private YouTube channels. I think it was called ring of fire; I should be able to find it.

A South Miami law firm who knew the guy who was doing the YouTube video is now suing Alan Dershowitz for either slander or libel and they're also going to sue on behalf of some of the victims of the situation because when Epstein had made the original plea bargain, none of the victims involved were informed. They are hoping to force out more documents by bringing this law suit so that should be interesting.

Harrison: The 2 women were Ghislaine Maxwell and Sarah Kellen. They were accused in court filings as acting as pimps for Epstein and they made at least 11 flights in 2002 and 2003 with Bill Clinton. Sorry Billy.

Caroline: And Alan.

Harrison: No.

Caroline: You're going down.

William: You said Naomi Campbell was on one of those flights? Wasn't she the world famous model?

Caroline: Yes, I think Ghislaine Maxwell was involved in the modelling world where she found a lot of her "material" if you will.

Harrison: I can't remember if Dershowitz was involved in this part or not or if this was the part that he denied being involved with and said that he just kind of advised, but they had almost like a "gag order". They immunised any co-conspirators in this human trafficking thing so anyone that could have been involved is now immune from prosecution.

Caroline: And that was set up years before any of the names could come out. That's part of what this Miami law firm is so het up about because that's totally against the law, you shouldn't be able to do that; that is a completely illegal agreement and it should be subject to prosecution.

Harrison: Actually that was the thing that Dershowitz claimed he wasn't involved with because it looks like he would have been arguing for his own immunity if he was involved. Again he had a lawyerly response to it saying that "obviously that wasn't me, because if I was involved as they say I am, I wouldn't be a co-conspirator, I would be a perpetrator", like a John basically.

Caroline: You think?

Harrison: It's funny watching him use his psychopathic view of how to work the law in order to get out of things and argue his way out which you can see in any of the debates that he has with the speeches that he gives. It's just amazing the lengths that he will go to to justify what's going on in Israel and what has been going on.

Elan: That reminded me of a video I has seen the other day of Norman Finkelstein giving a talk and recalling how Dershowitz has actually stated on the Harvard University website that Finkelstein's mother was a Nazi collaborator, which was a deeply insulting and egregious lie designed entirely just to hurt Finkelstein, who has had a long standing feud with Dershowitz on the subject of Israel.

Of course Dershowitz has been trying to prevent Finkelstein from getting tenure at some universities. So basically both of Finkelstein's parents were survivors of Auschwitz - a concentration camp during World War II - and Dershowitz comes out with this horrid statement that is untrue; stating that Finkelstein's mother was a Nazi collaborator? So Finkelstein basically writes to the president of Harvard and tries to address this with her and gets stonewalled. It just speaks to how low Dershowitz is capable of going in order to hurt his enemies and make his position better.

Harrison: Like I said, I don't like the guy.

Elan: With good reason.

Harrison: That's why I'm watching this case with open eyes. Finkelstein actually made a statement recently on the Charlie Hebdo thing. I'll get to his statements in a bit but just for an update as to the whole Charlie Hebdo thing - last week we talked about cognitive biases and heuristics and how they are used and manipulated for propaganda purposes by people in the media and government.

One of the examples we gave was the availability heuristic. This is something where if you hear an example of something that happened, people tend to take that example as representing a much larger sample as if that's just the way things are. Of course this can be easily manipulated by people in the media because they can present an isolated incident and then it gets ingrained in people's minds to the point that they see it as much more statistically significant than it actually is.

This is the case with pretty much every terrorist attack ever because terrorism isn't that big a deal when you look at it statistically. A poll run by the Pew says that 76% of people in the US believe that tackling terrorism should be the top priority this year. So 3 out of 4 people think that terrorism is the biggest issue. Of course we know why they believe this because of the media; that's all they hear but just to give a little bit of perspective I've got a list of statistics here. I won't give the real numbers, I'll just round them a bit because long numbers are a pain to say.

You are 35,000 times more likely to die from heart disease than a terrorist attack. You are 34,000 times more likely to die from cancer. You are 23,500 times more likely to die from obesity. You are 6000 times more likely to die from medical error. You are 5000 times more likely to drink yourself to death, 2000 times more likely to die in a car accident, 2000 times more likely to kill yourself, 450 times more likely to die from risky sexual behaviour, 350 times more likely to die from falling while doing something idiotic [Laughter], 300 times more likely to die in a workplace related accident, you are 110 times more likely to die from eating contaminated food and 9 times more likely to die by being killed by a law enforcement officer than being killed by a terrorist.

Caroline: Oh my.

Harrison: So you are more likely to die from the cops killing you than you are from a terrorist and 76% of Americans think that terrorism is the number one top priority?

Caroline: Jeeze.

Harrison: I mean that just shows how good these people are at manipulating people and using these cognitive biases and heuristics in order to get what they want and fulfil a certain agenda. Obviously this anti-terrorism thing is an agenda because it is not a big deal when you look at it in the grand scheme of things. It is only a big deal because the events make the news and they become big stories.

Caroline: They are made into big stories.

Harrison: They are made into big stories. Americans should be focusing more on police brutality, you are more likely to die from that. They should be installing surveillance cameras in bathrooms everywhere to prevent people from slipping and dying in the tub. I think that would be a good investment; round the clock bathroom surveillance. Think about how many deaths you could prevent that way, it would make such a difference.

Caroline: Or you could ban bathing; enough of slippery surfaces. That would make about as much sense.

Harrison: So that's the propaganda and it is obviously working, things are going according to plan. We mentioned over the last couple of weeks that there was a rise in anti-Muslim attacks in France. In January there was a 110% increase in anti-Muslim attacks and incidents - so that's violence - compared to last year.

To give you a little bit of the details, in France there were 116 noted confrontations in January, 28 attacks on places of worship and 88 threats made to Muslim individuals or groups; just in January. France isn't the only country to have this, it's also happening in the UK. The sole UK charity monitoring anti-Muslim hate crimes said that it recorded a significant increase in incidents in schools in the wake of the killings in Paris with both parents and teachers reporting verbal and physical attacks against Muslim students.

These students are increasingly likely to be taunted as terrorists, paedophiles, or immigrants. There have been 112 reports of physical or verbal violence. Graffiti saying Islam must die featuring a Nazi swastika was found last week. So things are going according to plan I guess.

Caroline: Then you add American Sniper on top of it and they've got America covered there. Somebody put up a collection of Facebook posts about how it's not just the anti-Muslim thing but the idea people are actually motivated, they want to go out and kill themselves some "rag heads" and it's scary.

William: Even the UN is holding a very historic meeting at the moment. Even though it's only voluntary and only about half the members are there but it's all for tackling anti-Semitism.

Caroline: Anti-Semitism?

William: Anti-Semitism.

Harrison: That's the big problem today.

Caroline: Really, I see. Such a big problem.

Harrison: Just some examples of what's been going on in the UK. A different charity said that it had strong anecdotal evidence of growing anti-Muslim prejudice including the result of word association exercises in which children increasingly responded to the word Muslim with answers like terrorist, pig, praying and immigrant.

So that's the priming we were talking about last week and the unconscious associations made between certain words that translate into certain behaviours. Children are making the connection between Muslims and terrorists, pig and immigrants. A second anti-racism group said that Islamophobia has been on the rise for at least 4 years with children increasing viewing Britain's Muslims as a homogenous group. So all these people are the same and this is the way we see them; as terrorists, pigs and immigrants.

No individuality, no differentiation between different sub-types, all one group and all evil. A formal complaint about one incident has alleged that one of the teachers in these British schools had expressed his desire to purchase t-shirts with cartoons of the prophet Muhammed as a way to "challenge Muslims who are offended".

Shortly after the pupil was confronted by a number of boys in the year above him and slapped. When the victim had asked why he had been attacked it was alleged the same boy slapped him twice more before calling him a Paki and a terrorist.

Caroline: Great.

Harrison: This is why I think that all of the statements from people like Hollande or the leaders who say "oh yeah, Islamophobia is a problem, we have got to deal with it." They are just hollow words because something far greater has to be done than making statements like that. This has been going on for so long that these are entrenched and ingrained subconscious beliefs that people have and it can only be changed by a massive change in the world view that is presented and that won't happen as things are going right now.

Whenever you hear someone like Hollande say something like that and acknowledge the problem, and then you feel good about it and think okay someone is doing something about it, that's not the way it is.

Caroline: He's not doing anything about it.

Harrison: He's not doing anything.

Caroline: That's just for media consumption too.

Harrison: Even if it wasn't, even if he was genuinely sincere about it, it wouldn't make a difference because this issue is bigger than what some president thinks or says. It is massive and it is happening and progressing to a point where atrocities are going to happen.

I wrote about this in a recent SOTT series called Holocaust 2.0 coming soon and you can read that on SOTT. It's just thoroughly depressing to see what's going on and disheartening and doesn't leave much room for hope.

Moving on to what Finkelstein had said; he's a clever guy, he's funny and says things so I'm going to read this out. First of all he is talking about satire because the Charlie Hebdo cartoons were apparently satire right? Nothing wrong with satire.
"Satire is when one directs it either at oneself, causes his or her people to think twice about" the things that they are doing or saying is what they need to think twice about "or directed at people who have power and privilege. But when somebody is down and out, desperate and destitute and when you mock them, when you mock a homeless person, that is not satire. That is the word 'sadism'. There is a very big difference between satire and sadism. Charlie Hebdo is sadism, it's not satire."

So two despairing and desperate young men act out their desire and desperation against this political pornography no different than Der Sturmer, who in the midst of all this death and destruction, decided it was somehow noble to degrade, demean, humiliate and insult the people. I'm sorry, maybe it is politically incorrect, I have no sympathy for the staff of Charlie Hebdo. Should they have been killed? Of course not but of course Streicher shouldn't have been hung. I don't hear that from many people."
Like we mentioned last week Streicher was the owner of the Der Sturmer Nazi propaganda rag in the 30's who was hanged after being tried at the Nuremberg trials.

Caroline: For incitement to murder.

Harrison: So Finkelstein pointed out the contradictions in the Western world's perception of the freedom of the press by giving the example of the pornographic magazine Hustler whose publisher Larry Flint who was shot and left paralyzed in 1978 by a white supremacist serial killer for printing a cartoon depicting inter racial sex. Finkelstein says "I don't remember everyone celebrating 'we are Larry Flint' or 'we are Hustler'. Should he have been attacked? Of course not but nobody suddenly turned this into a political principle of one eye to another." I just thought that was a really pithy and he gets across the point really well.

William: He sure does.

Harrison: It's not an issue of free speech and to say "we are Charlie Hebdo" - I think I mentioned it last week when I wrote the article - comparing that to saying "I am Goebbels" is like the same thing as saying "I am Larry Flint". Well, no you're not, are you really?

Caroline: It's saying "I support sadism".

Harrison: The prediction is, things are going to get worse. Because I'm now depressed, we've got a new SOTT editor joining us at the table right now - Adam.

Adam: Hey guys.

Harrison: Maybe you can explain to me why I'm depressed [Laughter].

Adam: Why are you depressed?

Caroline: Too much reality.

Harrison: I think it will fit into this.

Adam: There is a drug for that you know. I read it on the internet.

Caroline: Bring it out!

Harrison: You read that on the internet? I don't trust you. [Laughter]

Adam: So there was an article that I posted recently on SOTT - Addiction Rooted more in Social Isolation than Chemical Dependency - and I was thinking in terms of what is going on in France since the Charlie Hebdo event, there is a lot of social isolation going on again in the Muslim population. It's really interesting to see the connections between social isolation and not just the propensity for a chemical dependency and seeking some kind of comfort in that, but also the effects on your health.

Starting off with the effects of social isolation, I found an article that says "loneliness is deadly, social isolation kills more people than obesity", but still terror should be the top priority of our government?

Harrison: Hold on Adam, I'm going to interrupt you because I think we've got a caller and they might be talking about something that we were just discussing so before we get on with that we have Juan from Chicago. Hi Juan what's up? Do you have something you want to ask us or talk about?
Juan: You guys were talking recently about terrorism in America and I was thinking Allah Akbar.

Harrison: God is good. So what do you mean by that? Oh he's gone. Thanks Juan.

Caroline: That was a little comment, I'm not quite sure how to take it.

Harrison: We won't read too much into that.

Adam: So getting back to the loneliness issue, there was a bunch of research into loneliness and social isolation and there is a lot to conclude. "Those without adequate social interaction were twice as likely to die prematurely, they had an increased risk of premature death caused by heart disease, they had impaired immune function and increased inflammation." The list went on and on, your ability to think and to focus is reduced when you perceive yourself as being lonely.

So that was really interesting, it's not a chemical thing by any means in terms of loneliness but it still has this great effect on you. When you look at Charlie Hebdo and you look at what is going on in France you can see what's going to happen in the Muslim population because they're being ostracised for no reason at all; their health is going to start to decline. At least that is what I think is going to happen and I don't want to happen.

William: You can already see that a little bit in France as prescriptions for tranquilizers has gone through the roof.

Adam: Oh yeah.

Harrison: Humans tend to forget that we are social animals. If you look at mammals and the amount of what I call affection and touching that goes on between them; they form a little tribe or group or community. You can watch some nature documentaries to see how it actually happens and compare that with how humans live with the so-called nuclear family where the parents are out during the day and then sit down to dinner; maybe.

Caroline: Maybe.

Harrison: Probably not.

Adam: You mean sit down in front of a TV.

Harrison: So what sort of social interactions do you really have? You go to work and you talk to some people there on your lunch breaks but you're in your cubicle doing whatever for however many hours a day and then for the rest of the time you're on your cell phone. Contrary to what you might think, being on your cell phone isn't social interaction. Our bodies are designed and have the memory of millions of years of spending time with other actual bodies, looking into their eyes and hearing their voices and feeling their touch. By looking into a little computer screen and tapping on it is just not the same thing; your body doesn't register it as the same thing.

Adam: Laughing is not the same as hitting a like button. [Laughter]

Harrison: Typing LOL.

Caroline: A little winky face.

Adam: Yeah a little winky face. Another interesting statistic that came out last year, the study featured 1500 face to face interviews and more than a quarter of the respondents - more than 1 in 4 - had no one with whom they can talk about their personal problems or triumphs and if family member are not counted the number doubled to more than half of American who have no one outside of their immediate family with whom they can share confidences.

When you were talking about most people's interactions with other people, it's just kind of chit chatting about the weather; just shooting the shit so to speak. That's not the kind of interaction that we need to be whole.

Caroline: It bespeaks to how endangered people feel in social situations that they can't get past the weather. That if they let anything more personal out then the vulnerability is just too scary so they don't. They don't know what's going to be made of it.

Adam: A little further on in the article there was a Rabbi Daniel Lapin who laments that "today's generation of young people is incapable of integrating their past and their future. Living instinctively in an almost animal like fashion only in the present." He notes that "it is virtually impossible to connect time and space in a way that enables them to build their present thus they wander aimlessly without connections; physically, emotionally or spiritually."

Which I thought was really interesting because researching for this you look at some of the effects of social isolation, be it for torture or in a prison or something like that. Social isolation is used to torment and terrorize these people.

Harrison: To break people down.

Adam: So we are seeing that in the larger population, partially because there is no need for interaction any more. I can just go on Amazon and order the books I need instead of going to the library. I can order groceries online and have it delivered!

Harrison: What were you saying about the tendencies of people in relationships these days and how they have changed over the years? Do you want to talk about that?

Adam: There was an interesting little article that said; a third of Americans would give up sex for their cell phone. I'm almost speechless at that. It's like the comment on the article which said "I don't know if this is an addiction to the cell phone itself or this bespeaks how few healthy relationships there are in which sex can be an expression of that."

Caroline: Or a cell phone is the only safe way to have a "relationship".

Adam: Text you - "I love you, I miss you." Winky face, kisses.

Harrison: 50 years ago if you were going on a date, the guy would....

Adam: It was interesting the way courtship has changed. Instead of courting suitors at the house where you would essentially be sitting in a parlour with the young lady and her family, it's now like you go to a coffee shop just to meet up before you go to someone's place and hook up.

I couldn't really find any hard statistics on it but in my interactions with people and the way that they speak about what they call dates, it's completely different from what we see for example in films back in the 60's and the 50's; it's a completely different thing. Even if you are on a date, the chances are the phone's on the table and you're texting other people.

Harrison: That's why one third of Americans would apparently give up sex for their cell phone because they don't have any real meaningful relationships.

Adam: When you retreat into your cell phone for all of your interactions you're not building any kind of real ability to connect with people or to have the social skills necessary to have a functional relationship let alone a romantic relationship. Again going back to the statistic that half of Americans don't have anybody outside of their family that they can talk to, if you don't have any interactions with people and they can't learn that they can trust you then of course this is the stuff that we're going to see.

Harrison: Looks like we've got another caller so we're going to take that. This is Phil from Minnesota. Hi Phil, welcome to the show!
Phil: Hello, I have a recommendation for you guys. I think you should take a plane and fly into two building shouting Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar, Allah Akbar!!!

Harrison: So apparently we are getting trolled and pranked. Sorry Phil but I cut you off there.

Caroline: Hey! We made enough of a splash that we are getting trolled! Okay, this is good.

Adam: Maybe they just needed some more human interaction.

Harrison: There was research on trolls that says they have more psychopathic qualities than the general population.

Caroline: And a lower boredom threshold. Oh lord. I wanted to go to something that the Rabbi had said about young people living instinctively and in the present and it struck me that that is so much more easy a situation to manage for the powers that be or through the media. It's very easy to spook a herd.

Adam: Oh yeah. As soon as you get them into the herd mentality all the higher cognitive functions just go out the window.

Caroline: Right and if your focus is only on what is immediately in front of you then that's very easy to manage. That's a scary thought right there.

Adam: I thought that it was a really eloquent point and spoke on a lot of different levels. Hurray for Rabbis.

Caroline: The other interesting thing to this is kind of tangential but when you do this kind of social isolation it struck me that if the isolation is directed at members of a group then that would cause that group to bind more tightly. It's like the Irish became more Irish when they came to America than people in Ireland because they only had a limited number of people. So you tended to bind to the folks that were like you and you tended to exaggerate for your own confidence, the markers that made you part of that group. That would also re-enforce the stereotypes that other groups held about you. It's a downward spiralling situation.

That was the accusation against the Jews for centuries, that they were this clannish type group that didn't interact with the outside so people were free to form their stereotypes of them which reflected the view that they presented. It's very confusing but you can see the Muslims possibly going that way too; "okay we have to stick together because everyone's against us" then that just re-enforces the stereotype back and back.

Adam: I completely agree with that. It's going to cause them to retreat into their own culture so to speak which is then going to cause them more ostracization.

Caroline: Yet they are doing it intuitively for their mental health.

Adam: I just wanted to share that little bit because I want to do my part to help humanity and if the only little bit that I can do is to share the information that can stave people off seeking drugs or other things like gambling or pornography or help prevent people from seeking those things as a tranquilizer....

Caroline: Or a way of making connections.

Adam: All it takes is asking somebody to go out and go bowling or take a hike.

Harrison: I'm glad you gave your reason for wanting to do this because in addition to real social interaction and bonding with others, one of the things that makes people mentally healthy and gets rid of depression is to have some purpose in your life; some greater purpose because most people don't have a greater purpose. Their purpose is just to get paid in order to survive.

If you put together having a greater ideal - and I think the highest of which is to help other people - and interacting with other people, then it's the best thing possible. So thank you.

Adam: I think that the way you pointed that out was really interesting because in the article that was posted on SOTT.net there was the rat experiment where they had rats put into isolated cages and they had two water bottles, one had cocaine in it and one was just plain old water and because they had nothing else to live for, they just went straight for the coke and they kept going back until they died. But as soon as they retried the experiment, where it was a group of rats together and they actually had things to do, they didn't want the water laced with cocaine because it interrupted their ability to interact with the other rats. Granted I read this on the internet [Laughter] and this is rats and not people, but I think that we could take something away from that.

Caroline: We is all mammals.

Harrison: So yeah, get some friends. If you have already got friend s, text them up.

Adam: Facebookings don't count.

Harrison: Then get them to come over to your house or something and do some karaoke.

Caroline: Text them and say let's go and do something real.

Adam: Danceoke.

Harrison: Hey, we're living proof. Singing and dancing and playing music together is fun, so do it.

Adam: I feel a lot less lonely.

Harrison: I think we are pretty much exhausted of topics for today, so if no one else has anything to add..... Let's stay on for just a little longer because it looks like we might have another call coming up. Can we take bets on whether it's going to be another troll?

Adam: I bet one slice of bacon and a fat bomb that it is.

Caroline: I'll raise you one fat bomb. [Laughter]

Harrison: Till we have confirmation of that, we'll be on next week again and we forgot to mention the last couple of weeks that on SOTT Talk Radio we have a new show; The Health and Wellness Hour every Monday at the same time as this show; 2pm Eastern. It's great so tune in, it's got everything about health.

Caroline: They are discussing vaccines, they are discussing the best diet for your metabolism. If you can't tune in, download it, they have some very, very qualified experts.

Harrison: Check that out on Monday and of course tomorrow we've got Behind the Headlines. We do have another call, this is Lesley from North
Carolina. Hi Lesley how's it going?

Lesley: Hi guys, how's it going? Hi everybody.

Harrison: Thanks for calling in.

Lesley: No worries. I was just listening to your talks about isolation and rat studies and it reminded me of two interesting articles that I've come across lately. The first one was published in The Washington Post and the title is "Text Neck" is becoming an Epidemic and could Wreck your Spine and they give an interesting little summary; the human head weighs about a dozen pounds but as your neck bends forward , the weight on your cervical spine begins to increase.

At a 15 degree angle this weight is about 27 pounds and so on and so forth. At 60 degrees the weight of your head is about 60 pounds. So basically what they are saying is as we are all hunching over our media devices that we are using to "stay connected" we are actually putting this terrible pressure along the cervical vertebrae in our spine and over time this poor posture can lead to wear and tear, degeneration and even surgery. They are seeing it more commonly in young people now which is interesting. This is more motivation to get off your phone and get off your device and get out and interact with other people.

One of the doctors in the study said that it is really profound in young people and it's the equivalent of carrying an 8 year old around your neck for several hours a day; that's the average weight of an 8 year old. Smart phone users tend to spend an average of 2-4 hours a day hunched over reading emails, texts or checking social media sites. Don't forget to look up and stretch your neck and look around and see where you are.

Adam: That's actually really interesting because when you think about the posture that you assume in order to look down at your phone - like you said you're very hunched over so you're going to be lurching your shoulders forward which is going to prevent you from breathing properly. As we know from vagal nerve stimulation, if you're not breathing then you're causing all sorts of other problems.

Lesley: It's really hard to belly breathe if you're hunched over and you're looking at your phone. It's hard to belly breathe when your rib cage and your spine are rolled in like that. I thought that was interesting.

The other article that I was going to throw out there was this interesting article that I found in the New York Times and it's from quite a while ago but it discussed this phenomena that Japan as a country has seen more and more on the rise over the past 10 years. Young males particularly were the target of the article and they are becoming complete shut-ins.

Adam: I think I read that.

Lesley: I'm probably going to mispronounce the Japanese word for it - hikicomori which translates as withdrawal. They are literally going into their rooms for upwards of 6 months at a time and they don't come out of their rooms; their mothers simply leave their food at the door.

It's pretty intense, I don't know if you would call it a condition. It has become so widespread in Japan that in response to that, an industry has actually sprung up and they are literally support groups for parents and psychologists who interact with these shut-ins through the internet. Then they also have groups who literally come to your house, knock on your door and just sit there and talk to you. This is how intense this feeling of isolation is.

Caroline: So they have to re-train them into socializing?

Adam: Yeah pretty much.

Lesley: Exactly.

Adam: Go figure that the Japanese birth rate is plummeting through the floor. If nobody is talking to each other, then how can you make them babies?

Lesley: The article goes on to talk about how it's affecting population growth etc. They call them rental sisters and there are these women who are more patient and who are better and more nurturing but they are called rental sisters; they are outreach councillors. They go and talk to the hikicomori and try to coax them back out into the world and to interact again with society and that really was reminiscent of the rat study that you mentioned earlier where the rats in the pitiful cage of course got hooked on the drugs because they had no other interactions going. Even if the rat was in the healthy social environment and still presented with the opportunity to do the drugs it chose not to.

Adam: So really all they need is a little more social interaction and then on their own, assuming everything is wired correctly so to speak, they would choose the social interaction because it's a lot more fulfilling than interacting in a 3D computer screen.

Lesley: One of the most interesting quotes in the article referring to the young shut in who was saying "he sat in his room all day and nothing was expected of him and he did nothing to show his value". We can get into trouble there of course with the "show your value" type thing but the point was that he was not required to interact with anyone. There was no motivation.

Earlier I think that Harrison was pointing out that at our core, humans are social creatures; we need that interaction.

Harrison: And when we lack the ability to interact socially, you can have horrible results like becoming a troll and calling into radio shows and spewing nonsense. [Laughter] If your first resort is troll then as a second resort what you should do is you should start just texting, get some friend and text with them because that's the next best thing. Then get some real friends and have some real social interactions.

Adam: Get a good pair of dancing shoes.

Lesley: Thanks guys for all that you do.

Harrison: Thanks.

Adam: Thank you Lesley.

Lesley: Thank you, bye, bye.

Caroline: Bye, bye.

Adam: I owe somebody a piece of bacon and a fat bomb. [Laughter]

Harrison: Thanks to our callers, thanks to our trolls for livening things up a bit.

Adam: Thanks guys.

Harrison: Thanks to Caroline, William, Elan and Adam for joining us on the show today.

Adam: Thanks for having me guys.

Harrison: We will see you next week, have a good week and keep your eyes on the signs. Bye, bye.