This week, join our hosts as they discuss the freak show world we live in, where practically everything we think we know is wrong, where obvious lies get peddled as truth, and the truth is almost always the total opposite of what we are told, in science, politics, history, religion, and more.
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.
Live every Saturday from 2-4pm EST / 11am-1pm PST / 8-10pm CET.
Running Time: 02:03:00
Download: MP3
Here's the transcript of the show:
Harrison: Welcome. This is The Truth Perspective. I am Harrison Koehli. Joining me today, my co-host...
Elan: Elan Martin; hey there.
Harrison: And also, we have back William Barbe.
William: Hi there.
Harrison: And joining us for the first time of many, SOTT editor, Shane Lachance.
Shane: Hello everybody.
Harrison: So, it is April 11th, and we're going to be talking about a whole bunch of stuff today. But, to start out: We didn't get a chance to mention it last week, I don't think - unfortunately; very sad news, just came to our attention last week - now we get to inform you of it.
Elan: Very sad.
Harrison: It's very sad. We've been mourning, actually, the past week or so, because the loveable Jen Psaki of the State Department propaganda room: That's right - she's moved on to greater and higher things - a post in the White House. She's got some kind of spokesperson position in the White House, but thankfully, at least she's left behind her pretty able replacement/substitute, Marie Harf. She makes as much a fool of herself as Psaki ever did... Well, maybe not quite as much; I mean, Psaki has a special place in my heart for just being a total moron.
Elan: Well, she's also left behind a new word, I understand. A new terminology, which enriches our understanding of reality in this time and place, I think.
Harrison: Yeah, 'being Psaki', two words. With the attention span of people these days, two words might be too much, so let's just call it 'Psaki'. I mean, this whole world seems to be pretty Psaki at the moment. I mean, things just 'Psak' (suck). So, yeah, we're going to be talking about the 'Psakier' side of life and the world today... Were you going to say something Elan?
Elan: You know we could just keep on expanding the definition as it suits the discussion. It's got all of these different connotations and it's just rich.
Harrison: Yeah, we've got another word too, because whenever you see something that's just so 'Psaki' it's unbelievable, it just makes you want to 'Harf'. So, thankfully, we've got Marie Harf to aid in the process: It's like a purgative... is that the word? It's just something that can expel all of the bad stuff out of you. You know, every once in a while, you just need to 'Harf' to get all of that 'Psaki' stuff out of your system.
Shane: Well, that's pretty funny that whatever Jen's new position was, I believe it was on April 1st - April Fool's Day. So, the nation got a little April Fool's present.
Harrison: Well, speaking of Psaki, you know, just to celebrate her moving on to better things and just to remind her of all of the things that we'll be missing from now on in the State Department, we've got a clip we're going to play. This was from February 23rd, so just a week before her leaving the State Department. This is Psaki responding to a couple of questions about the situation in Yemen. This was prior to the US/Saudi bombing of the place. So, let's just take a listen to the 'Psakiness'.
(Audio from press conference)
Journalist 1: There were a couple of events that happened over the weekend. President Hadi seems to have escaped from house arrest in Sanaa and is now in Aden. First, I wondered if you could speak to that and whether for the United States he remains the President of Yemen and what your position is on that.
Jen Psaki: Well, technically speaking, it's our understanding that until President Hadi's resignation is accepted by the parliament under the Yemeni constitution, he remains the president and his cabinet remains the legitimate cabinet of the Yemeni government. Now, we all are aware of how fluid and volatile the situation is on the ground, so that's just the technical analysis.
Journalist 2: Jen...
Jen Psaki: (Is this a question) On Yemen?
Journalist 2: On Yemen, yes: and frankly, I've got another subject. On Yemen, how come if this president, when he left his capitol, is still technically president in his country, how come the Ukrainian president was not in the same position?
Jen Psaki: That's the Yemeni constitution and what the Yemeni constitution says, so I'll encourage you to take a look at the Yemeni constitution if you're interested.
Journalist 2: And the Ukrainian constitution said the same thing: Until constitutional proceedings are followed, the president is the president.
Jen Psaki: I know you like to revise history here in this case, but I'll just reiterate that President Yanukovych left his own country - we all remember what happened here - I'm sure we can provide you with a specific details if you'd like. Go ahead...
Harrison: Yeah, Yanukovych left his own country, like Hadi did - I mean, they were both no longer in the country afterwards.
I don't know the name of the journalist that was asking the question, but he was right. And when you actually watch the clip, Psaki gives this really kind of forced smile when he mentions it - when he says the thing about the constitution...
Shane: She knows where he's going.
Harrison: She knows where he's going. But I think the thing is, is that she knows she's wrong. I mean, I call her a moron regularly, but I don't think she's actually stupid. She knows that she's lying; she knows that she's just spouting the things that are written for her; so you've got to kind of feel sorry for her to be in a situation like that where you know that you're wrong but you just absolutely can't tell the truth.
Elan: I don't feel sorry for her at all. I heard three 'Psaki's' in that little speech. The other thing that she does is she kind of turns the tables on the press guy and says, "You can look at the constitution as you well know.'' These are like classic, or not so classic, debating tactics that are just rhetorical and deflect from the truth of the situation. He was asking a perfectly good question, and frankly, I'm surprised that they even allow this guy in there to ask these questions: I'm surprised he's not off somewhere without credentials, disinvited to ask these things.
Harrison: Well, first of all, she responded with the constitution thing, because that's probably one of the talking points that she has: You know, "You mention that constitutionally, he's still the president." And then, this guy brought up the perfectly reasonable point that that exact situation applies - or applied - to Ukraine and Yanukovych - Yanukovych was constitutionally the president of Ukraine, still, while this whole coup was going on. And so, you can't respond to that, right? There's no plausible thing she can say - so that's when she says, "Oh, well, you have a tendency to revise history on these things so we're just going to move on.
Shane: Which is really ironic, considering that's pretty much what the State Department does, you know: Revise history - with this whole situation in Ukraine and Russia in the news. That's all that they've been doing is revising history.
Harrison: Well, do you have some examples? Some recent ones, Shane?
Shane: Sure. It's 2015, March, the 70th year anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany, so naturally there's been different news items marking the commemorations. I think in January there was the incident in Poland when they were remembering the liberation of Auschwitz, and they excluded Putin and I think it was their foreign minister who even went as far as to say that it wasn't Russia that liberated the camp, it was actually Ukrainian soldiers. It just ties in with these incidences of revising history over and over and over again.
I think it's kind of interesting that World War II has been popping up, its memory; and it kind of serves as a reminder for anybody that's paying attention and actually remembers history of what we're seeing play out today in Ukraine and it's just pretty baffling to see the lies come out over and over again.
Harrison: The funny thing about World War II and revisionism in general - the guys on Behind the Headlines talked about this a few weeks back - because there are a lot of things that we don't know, or that the general public doesn't know about World War II that should generally be known. And so, when they come out about, say, allied atrocities or things like that, it's the things that kind of get covered up from the Allied side that we really should know about. So, there's a good revisionism and a bad revisionism. There's the revisionism that brings out the truth of what actually happened and things that may have been covered up, and then there's the revisionism that tries to cover up things that have already come out.
So, there's two sides to that, I think.
Shane: Well, it's funny too, in high school history classes, I don't remember anything mentioning Russia playing much of a significant part in defeating the Nazis and as it turns out, they tore out the guts of the Nazi regime and I think that was even Winston Churchill who said that. So, once you start digging into this, there's a whole perspective that's missing from the public mind in America.
Elan: A 'truth perspective'.
William: Yeah, it's even gotten the World War II veterans from Russia really concerned about this revisionism, that they're wanting to tell their story, their side of it, of their defeat of Nazism and fascism, and they're trying to get younger generations more aware of what actually happened, and don't let these people try and revise history.
So, hopefully, their voices will be heard.
Shane: Well, I believe May 9th marks Russia's victory day, so there's going to be some ceremonies in the Red Square and the US of course has been pushing to boycott the event. There have been some European leaders who are still going to be going. I believe the prime minister of the Czech Republic, he initially came out and said he was going to be going and he got some flak from the US ambassador and he basically kicked him out saying what right do they have to dictate foreign policy in his foreign visits and foreign relations to the leaders of different countries?
Harrison: Every right!
Shane: Yeah, apparently! Well, what's interesting: I don't know if I'm getting mixed stories but today I saw that he is retracting. So, it seems like maybe they do have some pull or something that's preventing him from going.
But still, there are I think around thirty or so foreign leaders, both from Europe and other parts of the world who still will be attending. But one of the more absurd stories I saw, there was I think three previous Ukrainian US ambassadors who were suggesting to hold the commemoration in Ukraine instead of Moscow. It's just so absurd to think that this Nazi-backed Kiev is the place where they want to be holding this. It's pretty insane.
Elan: Well, on the subject of absurdity and insanity and the lies that are put forth as truth in an attempt to revise history from the present, we have a pretty informed audience. Folks, if you're interested in calling in today, by all means do so. The number here where you can reach us is (718)508-9499. Call and share with us your feelings of frustration or anger or thoughts on anything that...
Harrison: Makes you want to Harf.
Elan: Yes. You can also just chime in on the chat room on blogtalkradio. We read your notes and we can comment on them on air, so, looking forward to hearing from you.
Harrison: Well, just in general, this whole Psaki/Harf thing, Joe and I wrote an article on SOTT - it's up there - just a couple of days ago, where we kind of talked about these things, and just listed very briefly a dozen or so, or more, just topics, and how the mainstream official version of them is just completely wrong. And that seems to be a general tendency in our world today. No matter what field you look at, no matter what branch of knowledge or just ways of looking at the world or understanding things, every single conclusion seems to be totally wrong; at least the official conclusion and the official story - the ones supported by the major institutions or governments.
And this can be governments or big corporations and institutions; so, everything related to any kind of product or commodity or science, even, because science serves these corporate interests and government policies. So, any time you look at these corporate interests and government policies and so any time you look at any of these issues and when you really look at them, it turns out that these guys are just completely wrong; it's a total lie.
And so, two of the ones that we mentioned were things that we were just discussing briefly that have been brought up: Yemen and Ukraine. So, in Ukraine, there's the official story propounded by Western governments the world over, and more, that the coup in Ukraine was totally legal and justified; that the biggest problem over there is Russian aggression and Putin, and Putin shot down MH17 and all of this is just total bullshit.
What really happened is that it was a violent, illegal Ukraine (read: coup?) by these fascists supported by the US government; that Yanukovych was the constitutionally valid president; it's just been a total joke, everything that has happened since then. Pretty much everything you hear from the Western media and from politicians and windbags like Jen Psaki and Marie Harf is a total pack of lies - you can't put it any more simply than that; it's just totally wrong.
So you can pretty much bet that anything they say - on this topic, at least, and many others - is just totally wrong. So, take whatever they say and just turn it completely backwards and you'll get the truth of it.
So, you'll actually be pretty smart - you don't even have to do much research - you just take what they say and turn it backwards and then you're automatically smarter than like 99% of the people that just listen to the news or what their governments tell them.
Well, it's interesting, because yeah, it's all kind of tied in together. There's all these fields and once you start pulling some threads on one particular aspect, then that opens a whole can of worms and you have to question all these other aspects and nobody wants to do that because then your whole reality comes crumbling down.
Harrison: So then you create a new reality - one that's actually based on facts and conscience and values and just REALITY. We live in this non-real reality that's been created for us by these opinion makers and reality creators that has no resemblance to the real world.
Elan: Robert Parry, the famous journalist recently just came out and said that, in the three or four decades that he's been writing, he has never seen as much groupthink in the media in particular, as pertains to Russia. And he's just trying to point this out as a major problem - which it is. But it is refreshing to hear other voices that have been looking at things for a very long time recognise the same problems.
Shane: Well, it's also interesting because it's not just Psaki-ing in the news, we see it in our entertainment as well: Whether it's the Netflix show, House of Cards; I heard this third season is kind of creating this super-psychopath, Russian leader and we're going to be rooting for our own psychopath over this Russian one.
Harrison: "Because our psychos are better than their psychos!"
Shane: Apparently. And then there's all these other shows that are pretty obvious propaganda. NBC has some new show: Allegiance, or something like that and there was a clip I had recently seen from SNL...
Harrison: Well, actually, Shane, let's hold that for a minute; we've got a caller. We've got Lee. Lee's got his own blog show and he's from California.
So, Lee, hi, how's it going? And do you have a question or do you just want to rant for a couple of minutes?
Lee: First of all, you guys sound great, man. I was in the chat room going, "What the hell are these guys using?"
Harrison: Thanks. Good.
Lee: Anyway, yeah, I just love the whole kind of open-ended themes that you guys have posted. But I just want to really quick talk about the notion of fear and how fear filters into our political system. For example, if we take a look at the Iran deal and what's going on with that and the kind of jockeying that's going on between the administration and then the congress republicans and trying to get in there. You know, the whole neo-con mentality is extremely destructive and so quick to be used that it really is, I think, an eye-opener when the president - and this was not a pitch for Obama - but when you go the diplomacy side, somehow that's construed as weakness, you know. And so, this whole, quick, itchy trigger finger, to just get in there and impose our will and use our military, it's all predicated on fear, you know. And the whole Netanyahu fear mongering speech; granted, he is in a bit of a pretty bad geographical location, but he's got two hundred atomic warheads.
So, yes, there could be an arms race, but the whole notion of fear is quite destructive in our culture and gets used quite a bit to make people form decisions. And I just think that goes unnoticed and I wanted your opinions on that.
Elan: I think that's a really good point, Lee. And the irony is that all of these policies are playing on people's fears - get them to accept the policies and the aggression. And of course, very few people in the media are actually pointing out that security and stability is even worse than it was prior to all of these policies being instituted. And so, the track record shows otherwise.
And the other part, of course, is that people don't even realise that they're being played or primed. You see some atrocity on the news and you react. You have no critical faculty or background or experience with thinking about what you see on the news as possibly a lie or a manipulation.
William: Yeah, and a few shows, weeks back, we even talked about how what's the most likely cause of your death, and they took a poll and people almost unanimously agreed that it was terrorism. But when you look at the actual facts, that doesn't even make it on the list.
Harrison: Yeah, you're more likely to get shot by a US cop.
Lee: Well, you know, if you look at the Slater execution, in South Carolina; Walter Scott; it's fascinating, because you think of law enforcement and ideally - certainly not branding every officer to be Slater - but, you know, in the confinement of that secluded area, so far what the video reflects is gunning down of a fleeing human being and the fabrication of a so-called "altercation" where his stun-gun was taken, and had he not been videotaped, that would have been the reality that would have been pushed out to his superiors and that case now becomes a case of self-defence. And you have to wonder how often that happens in this country.
Shane: Yeah, how often do we not see clips because somebody didn't have a video handy, you know? I'm sure it happens all the time, just the things that we are catching on video. And still, where is the outrage over these things?
Lee: That's what the black community, I think, is finally starting... And I really sense - I have a premonition - that if things don't start to change with instances like the Eric Garner case, the only reason the indictment was not reached by the grand jury on that was because he physically touched the officer's hand; had he not resisted at all - and they used an illegal choke hold on him and basically choked him to death, which was shown on video - but because of the fact that he actually touched and resisted, then the argument became, "Well, if you don't resist, then there's no problem." Once you resist, all bets are off.
So, I just worry about that and the direction of this country because it hasn't reached its boiling point yet. And so, once these things happen, we get the partisan, politic-talking pundits going from either side and then it becomes, "There is no racism," "There IS racism,". In this case, I don't think there's going to be much of an argument, and that guy should face whatever punishment that he faces, but the fact that it happened is a bit scary to me, because you wonder how often that happens, you know?
Harrison: And I think that's the big point here. You started off mentioning how politicians basically manipulate fear, and that's really probably one of the big reasons, one of the big things that lies behind all of these lies that we're talking about and we're going to talk about for the rest of the show, is that a lot of these lies are created to basically put a population into a state of fear to get them to go in a certain direction, and that can take any number of forms - either politically or scientifically or with your health or whatever. But, what that does is it covers up and it masks and it's like a magician's trick to take your attention off of the things that actually would be pretty healthy to be afraid about.
Lee: Oh, absolutely right.
Harrison: Yeah, because just the whole police thing: Just in March, the US police killed 111 people - and it could be more than that - but 111 people, that's more people killed by the police than the police in the UK, for example, have been killed in the last hundred years. As many people in a month as the UK police kills in a century.
Lee: That's a staggering statistic. You know, I appreciate you guys giving me this time; just to add, if we look at like, for example, fear, and we see how it permeates into our culture and society and how many people don't even stop the film and say, "Is there something behind this?"
Let's take for example, the incident in the Indiana law, with the religious freedom act by Pence; I think Pence wanted to use that to prop up his own political status. He was being mentioned as a possible presidential candidate and all I've heard - and I've covered that - all I've heard come out of the conservative community is that somehow their belief system was being threatened; that their freedom of religion, their first amendment right, was being threatened. And then, that just built up this momentum and then they had a 'GoFundMe' fund - that fund's almost a million dollars - and the whole notion of being a public business and then also being a Christian establishment gets confused and then the religious evangelicals come out and start joining the bandwagon, and now we have civil rights-like discrimination, because of somebody's sexual orientation, without any thought to how you're going to be able to discern customers coming in who are gay and how does serving somebody in a business transaction where you're catering their food present a threat, where that fear comes in again; that fear belief system.
What if it was the other way around? Turn the tables and instead of a Christian establishment, it's a gay establishment and a Christian couple comes in to be serviced: I don't think we'd have the same outcome.
So, this whole notion of fear is a very strong negative energy that I think people really need to start looking at realistically and not buying in to the kind of façade that's being thrown out, because it's a very strong energy and a lot of people buy in to it. So, keep doing what you guys are doing and exploring this because I think this is the key to change that's going to occur in this country.
Harrison: Alright. Well, thanks for your comments, Lee; good stuff that you had to say.
Lee: Alright, take care.
Shane: Thanks Lee.
Elan: Thank you.
Lee: Bye.
Shane: I think Lee's pretty spot on with the use of fear. It literally does shut down critical thinking. It reminds me of one of Martha Stout's books, The Paranoia Switch, and you know, she talks about how as a community or even on a macrosocial scale, that this 'paranoia switch' can be turned on, for example, after 9/11, any time the Bush administration wanted to pass some piece of legislation, all of a sudden, they'd ramp up the fear and turn down the critical thinking and that's what it does to the brain: It just shuts it off and you just get this automatic response from people.
Harrison: Well, I just have one more comment about the police; it's one of the points that we made in our 'Freak Show' article on SOTT. Are all cops bad? Are there some good cops? I don't think it really matters to ask those kind of questions because as it is, if you just look at the facts on the ground and just the number of people killed by cops, for example, the cops are no better than an organised crime mob - like a mafia - and well, you know, they're actually worse, because at least the mob, some kind of gang element or mob, at least they're running away from the cops; there's a fear at some level that they might get caught and punished. But with the cops, they are the law and they can get away, they can lie, cheat, steal, murder, rape, and there's very little that people can do about it. Every once in a while, they may have some kind of P.R. campaign where one cop will get some kind of minor punishment for it, but, I mean, really, if these were ordinary citizens doing the same things that they're doing, these guys would be in prison for life, or worse.
William: Well, it's a shame that the new catchphrase is, "If you've got problems, don't call the police."
Harrison: Yeah. I mean, that says something about the world that we live in, if something's going wrong, don't call the cops. I mean, that's Harf-inducing. The whole thing is Psaki.
Shane: Their whole line is, "protect and serve", but in reality, who are they protecting and serving? It's more often the predators and themselves. And it kind of reminds me: There was the case with the New Orleans football player, and it was just this horrific account of... he's basically this serial rapist and it went back years and years and what the case was about was just this systematic covering-up or not following the leads and it was happening over and over again in multiple, multiple states; and it really made it clear just how infected the police as a whole are. It's not just that it's one department here and there, it's happening all over the country.
Just another sign of the times.
Elan: There's a story, which reminds me also, a parole officer who would sexually assault the women who he was in charge of or working with. And the one story that came out because he was caught, finally, lead back to many other incidents of assault that he was guilty of. So, yeah, I mean, this is the tip of the iceberg and unfortunately, I think, after 2001, there's kind of a culture of abuse that somehow trickled down and how it's happened exactly and what the mechanisms were and how we've come to the situation in the present day would make a very interesting study. But, it's undeniable.
Harrison: Well, before we move on to more general themes, do we have any more topical news stories from the past week or so?
Elan: Funny you should ask. We were talking a little bit about Russia and how black is white and how the US has been portraying Russia in a certain light for the past how many years. There was a story that ran on CNN regarding Russian hackers are on the state department in the White House. And this story was put out by Evan Perez and Shimon Procupecz, and basically the story was that via the state department's computers, some hackers had managed to send some phishing emails to the White House. And actually, the story is a few months old and it just seems to be evolving.
Back in October, CNN Money had a piece about just hackers in general; and then that seemed to have been conflated into Russian hackers. And you know what, I have no doubt that there are Russian hackers who are pretty smart and do what they do. But there are criminals of all stripes and there's espionage being committed by all governments that have computers and know how to look into stuff.
But anyway, what makes this story kind of significant is the language that these guys, Evan Perez and Shimon Procupecz, used in establishing the idea that it was, in fact, Russians who broke into the White House and with very little supporting evidence. They never named their sources; the information is very nebulous; the White House comes out and says, "Well, yes; there was a hacking attack but most of our secure information was never accessed and the more general information was," and so the little piece that these guys wrote in their CNN article - which, by the way, had been reported on by a number of Western media outlets this past week - the piece was that... It didn't have anything to do with NATO; it didn't have anything to do with military information or anything you might imagine a Russian government-sponsored hacker might be hacking into the White House or the state department to be looking for; no, it was all about Barack Obama's schedule - that they had access to Barack Obama's schedule.
And I thought that this was suggestive of something, maybe suggestive of nothing, but it is kind of really insidious that Russians should be accessing this information and some of this information included Obama's schedule.
I mean, think about it for a moment. What does that really suggest? That they're possibly keeping tabs on Obama's comings and goings? And why would they do that?
And so, coupling that with what we know about the murder of the Russian political opponent, Boris Nemtsov, a few months ago, and this little piece of bullshit that came out about Nemtsov being afraid of Putin killing him - which was completely misquoted, and a falsehood; he never said that - you have to wonder if this new little bit of data that's been put out there on the subject of the Russian hacking is setting us up for something else.
It's a bit speculative - maybe even conspiratorial - but, you know, I don't put anything past these guys today, and their intent to achieve their aims in any way possible. So, there it is.
Harrison: Well, it could also be a message or a warning. We've seen similar things in the past but, I mean, we don't even know if this story happened, first of all; if it did, we don't know who the Hackers were. It could have been an 'inside job' so to say. But, to put that out in the media, that they had Obama's schedule, Obama's going to know that. And if he knows that it wasn't Russians, or if he knows whatever, then he's like, "Okay"; he can get the hint that someone is making a public statement that someone is looking at his whereabouts. And while I don't personally like Obama at all, or agree with many of his policies, or non-policies, he seems to be - at least on the surface - taking less extreme courses of action or proposing less extreme policies in certain areas than certain other War Hawks in the American government.
I mean, you can just look at this whole Iran joke going on too, which is one of the reasons that Netanyahu gave his joke of a speech in the US a couple of months ago. So, I don't know; there could be a lot going on behind the scenes on this one, or as you said, it could just be all a bunch of Psaki Harf.
Shane: It was interesting that just a week prior, Obama had signed a new executive order for placing sanctions on countries that have these cyber terrorist attacks and in that statement, he singled out Russia and China and a few others. So, it's kind of interesting that this whole internet clamp-down, or talk of it happened just a week prior to this news popping up.
It's actually quite an old story, but all of a sudden, these anonymous officials know that it's Russia.
Elan: Yeah, I guess we'll wait and see. That part about the schedule could just be incidental to the whole story and like you said Shane, it's just a kind of confirmation of why they need to push through that legislation.
Shane: Or it could be working it along multiple lines. They're killing so many birds with one stone.
Harrison: Well, speaking of Iran for a minute, the whole thing is just a farce. And again, we talked about this a little bit in the article. But, I mean, for one, if you just look at the premises: Let's say two people have an argument; usually they've got an argument over something that actually happened. But, when the argument is based on just complete fiction, then it enters the realm of the absurd, and that's the case with Iran because 1) it has no nuclear weapons programme; 2) has no plans for any nuclear weapons programme, and 3) it would be totally stupid if it had either 1) or 2).
It's a non-issue: There's no nuclear weapons programme. It is entirely a figment of Bibi Netanyahu's gigantic pathological imagination, which I wouldn't want to see, in any way, because he's just a crazy man: He's not a serious person.
So, yeah, I just wanted to say that: That the whole Iran situation is a Psaki farce and no, you don't have to be afraid of Iran getting a nuclear weapon because it's just a joke.
Elan: Well, from Israel's point of view, the underlying message is, "Iran gets The Bomb. And then, as soon as it gets The Bomb, it's going to bomb Israel." I mean, first of all, Israel is the only known nation in the Middle East that's known to have nuclear weapons; so, what? Iran is so vehemently anti-Israel and anti-Zionist that it's going to take the first opportunity it has to bomb Israel out of existence without expecting that its own existence is going to be destroyed simultaneously? It's absurd. It's insane.
And yet, that's exactly, exactly what Bibi would like us to believe. And this goes back to fear. It's playing so strongly on the fears of Israel First-ers, many of whom probably... I mean, how many of these guys actually believe, really, that Iran is going to, at the first opportunity, take such a measure? It's ridiculous. But, they use that, and that's been one of their weapons of mass distraction.
William: Yeah, they've been doing that for twenty years. It seems to me that the underlying reason, and there's more, is to keep Iran economically depressed; keep them from being a rising nation, which they can very well be because of their strength in the area. And so, Israel's got to do everything they can to try and keep Iran down.
Elan: And folks, if you haven't heard it yet, last week we had a very interesting show with Brandon Martinez who spoke in some depth about this subject. So, just a little plug for last week's show about Israel's larger goals in the Middle East.
Harrison: Well, speaking of Iran, there's the whole thing going on in Yemen, which Psaki talked about at the beginning of the show - thank you, Jen - and the narrative there is kind of similar to the one in relation to Russia. So, in East Ukraine, we've got Russia allegedly running their troll, mercenary/proxy army in East Ukraine, which is, again, total Harf. But, the narrative in Yemen is that it's that it's Iran backing these Houthi rebels; which again, is a load of Harf.
What's actually happening is that there's a wide, wide range of the population in Yemen that do not support the current president, Hadi. So, yeah, Iran might be supporting them in some way, just like Russia does support, in some ways, the rebels in East Ukraine; but, it's putting a totally fallacious spin on the situation, because you're missing all the context of what's really going on and that Hadi was a US stooge and that Saudi Arabia and the US have certain plans and designs for Yemen. And when the Houthis started gaining ground and got rid of Hadi, what are you going to do in a situation like that? When your vital interests are at stake in a country that you control from halfway around the world, you've got to do something.
So anyway, just another bunch of moron stuff.
Shane: Well, behind all this, it is interesting to see how the world is taking shape without US control and dominance. China, I think they're going to be signing a deal with Iran and Pakistan to get their 'Peace Pipeline' going again, which has been blocked by the US for about twenty years. So, it's interesting to see these relationships that have really been tainted by US influence for decades and decades just starting to take shape and move on without the United States.
William: Speaking of China, they've been pretty surprising here for the last couple of weeks, projecting their rising superpower status to the rest of the world.
They made a bunch of history three times last week alone by agreeing to sell some five billion in subs to Pakistan and by getting to start the country's first nuclear submarine patrols. And also, by swooping in and rescuing more than two hundred evacuees in Yemen, which of course, the United States refuses to help their own thousands of citizens that are there. And then, to top it all off, of course, was their AIIB bank membership drive which ended at the end of March, but we've got three new countries joining in: Spain, South Korea and Austria.
Now, President Obama, in a response to all this news about China: What's he got to say?
"Where we get concerned with China is where it is not necessarily abiding by international norms and rules and is using its sheer size and muscle to force countries into subordinate positions."
Harrison: Oh, how dare they!?
William: Oh, my goodness gracious... Speaking of irony? I mean... "Do as we say, not as we do!"
Elan: Well, apparently, for this May 9th victory day celebration in Russia, the president of China is going to be having a sit down with Putin as well. Considering how things are ratcheting up, alliances and exchanges of information are going to be made and deals being sealed. Because, as it looks right now, just in Eastern Europe, you have the whole... NATO Quick-response teams to doing exercises with Czechoslovakia, and mobilizations and these little kinds of shows of American military might going through the streets of Czechoslovakia, and people actually coming out and saying, "Get out of here! We don't want you! We don't want war and we know what you represent!"
So, everything is kind of quickening in that direction right now. As Harrison was saying a little earlier, it may be that Obama is not doing things as fast as certain other controlling interests would like, but you could have fooled me. I mean, things seem to be developing pretty quickly and there seems to be a race going on concerning how much influence Russia and China and BRICS and some of these other European countries have versus the US and floundering Merkel(Germany) and Hollande(France) and Cameron(UK) and it ain't looking good for the West.
Harrison: Well, Russia just asked Iran to join the Eurasian Economic Union, just as another one of those things going along on the side, and then of course, we've had the recent meetings with Putin and the Greek leader, Tsipras, and there were questions before that if Russia would basically bail out Greece? And they didn't go in that direction, but they came to the agreement to kind of use the Turkish Stream gas pipeline, in that it will basically run through Greece and Greece will make a whole bunch of money by being the way-station for those gas shipments. And what struck me about that was that last year, when we heard about the whole South Stream deal falling through, it kind of came out of nowhere, but at the same time, Putin did it in such a way that, he's kind of got that Midas touch, where he can turn a bad situation into something that's actually good, and so we saw that with the deal with Turkey, and now when you look at this whole thing with Greece, it's like the Golden Goose that keeps on laying, or something.
Because, not only did it avoid the situation with Hungary and the whole EU attitude that basically put the kibosh on the whole deal - we got this new project going on, and now it comes at such a time and in such a way that it's able to help out Greece at the same time, and I wonder if these are the kind of things that these guys think about when they're planning these things, and say, "Well, in four or five months in the future, we might have this opportunity and might be able to gain an ally here..." It just kind of boggles my mind.
Shane: Yeah, I wouldn't doubt it that they do have these plans made far in advance and Putin's a smart guy and he's got really smart advisors - way, way smarter than the leaders in the West - and he's just kind of out-manoeuvring them a move at a time, and it's been pretty fascinating to see.
William: Yeah, that the IMF and European banks are kind of upset too that Greece is paying off these loans and are willing to sell assets to Russia to help generate more funds to keep paying off these loans. So the IMF and the European banks aren't going to get those assets that they were probably trying to get their paws on.
Harrison: And then at the same time, Russia benefits from having Greece, which Tsipras has been vocal about in not supporting the sanctions on Russia and so Greece is in a position to potentially make a big hubbub about that.
Elan: Well, yeah; there's been talk about just how geo-strategic Greece is and the sea around it and how there may be a kind of agreement with Russia and Greece in where Russia can bring in its military or parts of its navy. So, it doesn't look like things are going according to the plan of the IMF, World Bank and the European Central Bank, and all the kind of powers that are behind that.
So, yeah; talk about turning things around. It will be interesting to see where that goes.
Harrison: Moving on; any other stories? No news? Yeah, no, it's been a slow week.
Well, maybe now we can move on to some more general stuff, because, like I mentioned, like we were talking about, it's not just one area of life that we encounter these lies in; it's pretty much all over the place; it permeates everything; it's like a bad smell, a bad odour that just gets in to everything. And so, we've looked at some politics. I mean, Russia... let's do a little experiment, here:
So, pretend, everyone - including the guys here in the studio - pretend you're just an ordinary average person that doesn't really listen to the news so they don't really look into things too much, but they just have the general kind of odour of whatever's going around the US. So, what's the first thing you think of when you hear of Russia and Putin?
Shane: Well, Hitler!
Harrison: Yeah.
Elan: KGB.
Harrison: Hitler. KGB.
William: World domination.
Harrison: World domination. Yeah, all those three: False.
So, I mean, like you were saying Shane, Putin just seems to be leagues ahead of any other politician on the scene these days. And I'd say so much so that if you were to put all of them in some kind of graph - a flow chart or something - Putin would just be like way above everyone else in pretty much every quality. And I'd say every good quality. It doesn't necessarily mean that he's like a saint or anything, but when you compare everyone together, he pretty much is - comparatively.
So, not only is the official line on Russia and Putin wrong, it's kind of "not even wrong" in the sense that he's actually kind of good. He's doing things that actually benefit not only his own country, but are actually a positive force for other countries in the world and what other country can we say that about, that actually has a little bit of good in there and actually exports that 'good'?
Well, that brings to mind a world, immediately, to me - or two words - and that is 'freedom' and 'democracy'. So, what comes to mind when you hear the words freedom and democracy?
Shane: Well, as a regular Joe, or...
Harrison: As a regular Joe, yeah. Start there.
Elan: Well, the U S of A, of course!
Harrison: Ah, yeah! And the US just loves to send its freedom and democracy over to wherever it will reach, right? It's like one big, giant freedom and democracy hug that embraces the world.
William: "I can vote for who I want! I can write what I want to write! Say what I want to say!"
Harrison: Um hmm. And I can give that gift to every other country: to all those poor savages who don't have it.
Shane: That's kind of the basis for just Westernism in general; this liberal idea that what we have, everybody else should have and we should be the ones to enforce it on others even if they don't want it.
William: It's... you've gotta get in on-line line to get the new Apple watch.
Elan: Never mind the costs involved. But I want to just go back to what you were saying about Putin, because I think that he probably had, and has, good intent to Russia when he came into power in the late 90s, and I also think that by necessity, he realised that his situation in Russia was not unique, and subject to many of the same forces that many other countries were subject to, economically, politically, socially; i.e., the imposition of freedom and democracy, Western style. And I think that what he realised was that, in a very real way, Russia can not do it alone. So, he kind of grew into this part that he was writing for himself, year by year.
So, if it's true that he was Russia-minded when he started, and not particularly idealistic - or even not particularly good - I think that the events and forces that he's battling just to keep Russia viable as a sovereign place, has shaped his world-view, shaped his methods of doing things, and he's grown as a result - personally - as an individual.
A few weeks ago, we were talking about The Road Back, the documentary on Crimea and what really happened there, and I have to say, I was really touched by the ending. The interviewer asked Putin, "What do you wish for the people of Crimea?" and he said, "Happiness." And it was one of the most sincere sounding - to me - and utterly believable simple messages he could give and I just think that that's become Putin; he just wants to turn around a tide of everything that's made the world messed up by the US and the West for the past how many years.
William: It seems to be getting noticed: We'll find out on Monday who time magazine chooses as the person of the year, but Putin is, again, the front-runner for that. Of course, he's being followed closely behind by a South Korean pop star. And the Dalai Lama is in seventh place with Barack Obama in eleventh place and Angela Merkel's way down in twenty-fifth place. So, it does seem that he is getting some notice.
Harrison: We've got a caller; this is Cole from California.
So, Cole, welcome. How are you doing? Do you have a question or do you just want to rant for a couple of minutes.
Cole: Yeah, I have a question actually. Do you guys know... (followed by unintelligible gobbledygook trolling)
Harrison: Yeah, okay. Thanks.
I just want to come back to the point that you were making, Elan, about Putin. And I think that, there's the saying "power corrupts". and we've talked about it before; it's not a very good saying because I think Frank Herbert said it best - I can only paraphrase him - but, it's not power that corrupts, it's... what is it?
Shane: "The corrupted attracted the power"?
Harrison: Yeah, something like that. But I think that any person that gets put into a certain position - especially one of power and social responsibility - there are two general paths that they can take. And one, depending on their nature, one is the path to more corruption and to just being a puppet or a stooge or just one more appendage of the corrupt system that they're a part of. But, there are those few individuals when put in a position like that, who tend to see, ever more clearly, the responsibility placed upon them and it brings out a sense of self-sacrifice and work and energy.
And we've seen this in a few politicians in the past - they tend to be the ones that get assassinated; or just great, social critics; or people like MLK or JFK or even a guy like John Lennon: A person who comes to a certain position in life where they have a lot of influence, and then use that influence for something good.
And we saw that with Dag Hammarskjöld, who, when he became the UN Secretary General, he kind of had this moment in his life where his personality kind of changed and he found an immense amount of energy to just work; he got very little sleep and he just worked non-stop because he knew what he had to do and he knew how much responsibility he had and we see the same thing with Putin who just works non-stop, and any time he takes a little break, it becomes news because he's not working. And even on those breaks, it turns out he probably is working, so...
And he mentions that in the few interviews that have come out recently, like the one in the Crimea documentary, I mean, just the number of times that he stays up all night just working on some kind of crisis that's going on. And I watched a clip from John Oliver's show and he was kind of joking about Putin and how - I think this was about a year ago or maybe less - but, Putin arrived late at some dinner in Italy or something, and so he made this fashionably late entrance and he's the last guy in there and so, of course, he got a lot of media about that. But then, after that, he goes to another meeting with, I think it was with Angela Merkel, and then after that, he went to meet Silvio Berlusconi; and so, he was up until three o'clock in the morning, at first just doing these meetings, and then, I guess, having a little chat with the shady Berlusconi - but they apparently go back.
Shane: Well, you were talking earlier about maybe Putin's not a saint, but I kinda wonder if we might need to redefine or revise what a saint is. We have this notion of a sainthood as the kind of people who are not involved in politics and maybe going off to some secluded area and just navel gazing or whatever. And in reality, you have these leaders like MLK or Putin and JFK and others who really make a difference in people's lives and what's more powerful than that? You're not going to necessarily get there by just navel gazing.
William: Yeah. One has to admire his strength and his perseverance. Anybody who's attempted what he's done has been thoroughly crushed, yet he's managing to just slip through and out-manoeuvre everybody and attain what his goals are.
Elan: I think it's been said before: If Russia and Putin hadn't been under the incredible amount of pressure with the Western-supported oligarchs and all the other kinds of interests and forces that have been working to suppress Russia, where would that country be today? What would it be putting its energy towards? What would the United States be putting its energy towards if it wasn't so brainwashed and militarised and police-stated and so, if you can ask yourself those questions and know for yourselves how much we've been deprived of real forces for constructive change, you might imagine a very different world from what we're living in right now.
Shane: It's interesting to see how the west has dug its own grave and really kind of created this space for Putin and Russia to come into their own and use these energies for good. It's fascinating because the West is just as responsible for all these dynamics that we're seeing play out as Putin is taking advantage of these opportunities.
Elan: Well, I think that's just it: I think seeing them as opportunities. I think Harrison mentioned a little earlier, having the 'Midas Touch'; finding a way to turn everything around, it's a gift. Someone teach me! How do you do that?
Shane: Yeah, it's certainly a good lesson to see. We see it play out on the world stage, but how much of that can we apply in our own lives as well? We're faced with the monstrosities just on a personal level every day, and we could look at it in the same light; we could take responsibility for our own part in the Universe, see where we can apply our own abilities and grow and meet those challenges.
Harrison: Yeah, there's a book on that. Well, I was kind of joking, but one of the topics that I wanted to talk about was psychology, because just as in every other field, I'd say that the state of psychology in the world, just the general understanding of psychology, is pretty narrow, pretty wrong, and there's so many different directions we can go with that, but one is just the one that we talk about a lot, which is the awareness of psychopathy - or the lack of awareness of psychopathy - and what it is, and why it's such a danger to the world.
But just in general, there's not a lot of psychological insight that you see in the world, in the media. I mean, everything is just so shallow, and even the people that you see on the news channels, they're just, like, hollow inside; it's like they're not even real people. And thankfully, there is, every once in a while, a good movie or a good T.V. show that actually has some psychological depth, but how much of that actually filters down to the general population? I don't know, because I think most people like watching reality T.V.
There's no model for what is possible for a human being, and not only possible, but what might be actually the ideal - so, something to strive towards; something to use as a measure for comparing yourself to yourself so you can actually look at yourself and see what you do wrong, what you can do better, and to have an image in your mind of what you can aspire towards. I think that gets to what you were saying, Shane, and I think part of that has to do with what I'll call self-affirmation and self-denial: That there are parts of every individual that should be denied in certain situations, and parts that should be affirmed. And when you can find that part of yourself that is higher than the rest, and more noble and more strong, more conscious and aware, and to affirm that part of yourself and actually identify with it, that's when you can start seeing what to do in certain situations.
Shane: That role of denial and affirmation has kind of been reversed in everyday life. We have these ideas of affirming - making these affirmations - and it's funny because I saw an article not too long ago about how people who do these affirmations are pretty delusional and so we affirm these parts of ourselves that are really hindering us and harming our being while we deny the things that can help us grow and we block those things out; we don't want to see the things that might challenge our ego and it's really a backwards thing.
Elan: There was a study that came out some time ago that measured the health and well-being - physiologically and psychologically - of individuals who gave a certain amount of their time every week volunteering - helping people that were infirm or handicapped or old - and the study's conclusion was that those individuals who gave of themselves in such a way actually suffered very little from stress, for one thing. So, putting your energy into something that is constructive, altruistic, caring for others...
Shane: Not so caught up in yourself.
William: But that's been so clamped down on, nowadays, that even considering doing some of these actions, you'll be labelled as a terrorist.
Elan: Feeding the homeless.
Harrison: You'll get arrested.
Well, speaking of putting in the hard hours... speaking of Putin in the hard hours, in the chat room, Zoya put a link to a quote.
So, Putin once said, "All these eight years, I worked like a galley slave from morning until night and with full expenditure of energy."
Elan: Interesting. And, he was his own slave-master, but saw the purpose and the meaning behind what he was doing, and the necessity. And I'm thinking that in addition to the idea that the West just has Putin all wrong, it's that there's so little in the capacity of most people to recognise these qualities in a person when they do something right. Why would someone care to make themselves a galley slave from morning to night for so long when they can be having fun, by the definition of having fun that they have? So, it's an interesting quote; thank you.
Shane: When you can "buy stuff"; you can buy fun.
Harrison: Well, Elan, you mentioned psychological studies - there's something else I want to talk about. I'm sure we all do, but I've got several pet peeves about certain lies that just really get to me and make me want to Harf. And one of those has to do with one of my topics of interest, which is parapsychology: you know, the crazy stuff, the weird stuff.
The official view of parapsychology is that it's all bogus. Now, of course, you get a wide disparity between the official view and the folk/common view, so I think most people think that that kind of stuff is real...
Elan: Harrison, give us a quick definition of parapsychology for those who may be unfamiliar.
Harrison: Okay, so we'll get there. So, what is it that the official people think is bogus and that most people think, "Yeah, this stuff happens,"? It's weird stuff - so, parapsychology is officially defined as weird stuff... no...
Anything from like apparitions, telepathy, psychokinesis. Now, there are actually real, flesh and blood scientists that look into these sorts of things: it's not just the kind of ghost hunters stuff you see on T.V. which is often just a load of bull anyways, but this stuff actually happens. Not only does it happen - which is why most people accept it, is because it happens in their lives - but it's been tested by many scientists over the past 150 years. And so, when you actually look at the science behind it, read the reports, read the articles published, the books published, there's just a ton of evidence: it's indisputable that these phenomena actually exist.
So, we can talk about things like I mentioned like apparitions, telepathy, psychokinesis.
So, apparitions can be anything like, well, pretty common example is like a death bed apparition; so if someone close to you dies, anywhere, it's very common to have an apparition of that person. So the person knows that person died because basically that person came and told them and like appeared in their bedroom or they had a conversation with them or something. It's so common - I don't know the percentage - but it might be as high as forty or fifty percent of people have experienced something like that in their life. Whatever the percentage is, it's pretty big, but that's kind of one of the anecdotal forms of evidence.
There's also the stuff in the labs to test telepathy and psychokinesis. So, one example of psychokinesis will be a test subject having a big statistical influence on something like a random number generator. They've done meta-analyses on these types of experiments to show, without a doubt, that there is a huge effect. The effect doesn't look big when you look at it; so a random number generator might give like fifty percent yes's and no's and the effect of all these psychokinesis experimenters and their subjects might push it up to 51 percent, but when you factor in all the trials, it's actually a huge effect to have that much effect on a random number generator. That's a tiny example.
When you look at the so-called parapsychology in everyday life - the anecdotal stuff - that's when you get the so-called 'macro-effects'. So, you can look at the history of research into like séance phenomena or macro PK, so this can be stuff like ectoplasm and levitating objects. D. D. Home was a famous guy of this sort who could... and tested by rigorous scientists - real scientists - in very controlled situations; levitating objects, levitating himself; he could make the keys on an accordion play without touching it. These examples are very well documented - they're solid.
So when I hear the off-hand dismissal of these things, it really bugs me because when you start looking into it, there's just no question that these things actually happen.
Shane: Well, it's kind of strange that these things that are kind of a part of our daily lives are relegated to 'the weird'; there's kind of a contradiction there. It's kind of bizarre how we've got here through spiritualism... that was kind of the 1900s?
Harrison: Yeah, like late 1800s, early 1900s, yeah.
Shane: And right at that point, materialistic science really took shape and kind of directed things away from that. So it would be interesting to see what if things changed differently and people could talk normally about what are these weird but normal experiences.
Harrison: Well, not only "weird but normal" but just fascinating. I mean, when you read this kind of stuff - for me at least - it's cool. I mean, just to see what kind of things are possible in this world - not only are possible, but that actually happen - and that the general public and that officialdom in general has no curiosity or interest in them? It just strikes me as a shame and atrocious at the same time.
There's one example - I want to read something. This is not necessarily a psychic phenomenon, you can look at it in certain ways. There was a woman in the early twentieth century named Pearl Curran and, again, she was subject to various numbers of tests, like with scientists, and researchers trying to get to the bottom of what was happening with her, and she was a relatively uneducated, otherwise intelligent woman, who got involved with a friend of hers who wanted to try out a Ouija board. She didn't want to at first, but eventually she did, and the stuff that ended up coming out of this Ouija board was pretty phenomenal.
So, let's say, even if we took the position that there's no such thing as the paranormal or like contacting dead people or channelling or mediumship or anything like that, this case is just one of the most remarkable, interesting examples of anything that I've ever read, just because it's so weird but fascinating.
So I'm going to read this. This is a little bit from a book called Crimes of Reason, this was actually the last book written by Stephen Braude; he was on the Behind the Headlineslast year, sometime. Let me just read a bit about Pearl Curran.
She allegedly channelled a woman named Patience Worth, so just keep that in mind.
So, he's talking about how this could be a demonstration of the power of dissociation to liberate otherwise hidden or latent abilities - so that's one interpretation of this.
So, "Although all the Patience Worth communications exhibit a distinctive and consistent personality, as well as common verbal traits, Patience expressed herself in several different linguistic styles."
So, Patience, the alleged being that was talking through this ouija board with Pearl Curran, actually just wrote stuff - so, poems, novels, just witticisms, just anything.
"In fact, one of her works was a Victorian novel, despite the fact that as the book's dust jacket wryly noted, Patience was a pre-Victorian author. Most of the time, however, Patience communicated in an unprecedented style, rooted in archaic, Anglo-Saxon idioms."
Remember that Pearl herself had like an eighth grade education.
"Much of her vocabulary was appropriate to the seventeenth century, but some of it seemed to belong to a period several centuries earlier and some of the words Pearl used on those occasions were tracked down by contemporary scholars only after they appeared in the Patience Worth scripts.
"Many consider Patience's literary works to be of exceptional quality, easily the best literature ever produced in a case of mediumship, but what matters here is that Patience Worth's poems and novels, and indeed, her entire personality, betray an intelligence and psychological style profoundly different from that displayed by Mrs Curran.
"Furthermore, Patience's abilities and skills go well beyond anything Mrs Curran, and arguably anyone else, ever exhibited. In fact, Pearl, or Patience's compositional and improvisational abilities, seem unprecedented in literary history. Patience was able to compose often exquisite poems on the spot in response to requests to write on particular topics.
"She could compose several works - sometimes in distinct, literary styles - on the same occasion, alternating passages of one with those of another. She could write part of a novel for a while, leave off in mid-sentence to converse or work on something else, and then days later return to the novel exactly where she'd left off.
"More impressively still, with almost the sole exception of a beautiful child's prayer, written haltingly and with a few revisions, Patience produced her entire corpus or thousands of poems and several long novels - one of which was over six hundred pages - without ever making a correction.
"She also performed astonishing compositional stunts. On one occasion, she was asked to compose a poem with each line beginning on a different letter of the alphabet, from A to Z, omitting X. After a pause of a few seconds, the poem came through the Ouija board as fast as the scribe could take it down.
Now, that's just a really general overview of the whole Patience Worth case, but just those few examples just show, to me, just how much there is about the human personality and the human potential that we don't know about - that most people don't know about.
Can you imagine being able to produce a six hundred page novel, first of all in a kind of trance, but without having to do any corrections? Now, one of the things about Patience Worth, or Pearl Curran, is that these novels were actually published - so, she had a publisher - an even the publisher didn't make any revisions: They were published as is, in perfect form, and so even if we disregard any kind of paranormal explanation for this, it's just, to my mind, just a remarkable phenomenon that there's something going on there.
And Stephen Braude, he also writes a lot about dissociation and Dissociative Identity Disorder, and the similarities between these either paranormal or seemingly paranormal phenomena with phenomena that we see in psychopathologies like so-called Multiple Personality Disorder. Because if you think about even just the idea of Multiple Personality Disorder, just the phenomenon of it, is pretty remarkable, that a person can split their personality into several different personalities - some are aware of others, some aren't. And the type of personality changes that that effects.
So, one can be right handed, another can be left handed. Now think about that: Where does that ability to be able to write with your other hand, perfectly, with no training and no practice come from? There's so much hidden beneath the surface that it just kind of boggles my mind.
William: Yeah, and there's other physical manifestations as well, like diseases or things like that that one personality has but yet the other one is completely clear or that disease when it appears. It's fascinating.
Elan: Well, all of this certainly begs the question, because there is a lot of information out there that documents a lot of this stuff. But, getting back to what we were taught in school, in addition to real history, I've never been taught about any of this stuff, or even the suggestion of it.
Shane: Well, it's weird!
Elan: I guess, once you label it weird, you don't have to think about it anymore. You've been given permission to relegate it into a dark corner of "shit happens" or "how does it impact me in my everyday life?" and the answer is that it probably impacts us in myriad ways that we're not even aware of.
Harrison: Well here's... you got something to say? Because I've got one example of that.
Elan: Go ahead.
Harrison: Well, I think we can accept the phenomena of telepathy and psychokinesis as just facts: They exist. We may not be able to explain exactly how or why they happen, but we know that they do.
Now, one of the possible implications that Braude talks about in his book which just kind of blew my mind was, first of all, the role of what scientists call 'experimenter effect'. So, in these experiments, they'll get people to basically try to have a paranormal effect on a random number generator or some kind of equipment, or even a person or a thing. Now, when you accept that these kind of things can happen, and also the fact that they do happen in everyday life and they may happen a lot more than we actually think about or are aware of, just what parts of our life might they be having an influence on? What phenomena in the world that we don't accept as paranormal that we just see as regular, ordinary stuff happening, what percentage or what examples of those can be influenced in a way like this?
The example he gives is this 'experimenter effect', where, when scientists or a groups of researchers are doing an experiment - doing some kind of scientific test on something - it's a well-known phenomenon that their expectation of a certain result may affect the results that they get; so that's why we have things like blind and double blind experiments and repeat trials, blah blah blah... all this kind of stuff.
But, if we accept the reality of psychokinesis, then really, there may be no such thing as a blind or double blind experiment. If the experimenter doing this test or anyone involved in this test, has some kind of paranormal/psi effect on it, it can totally skew the results. So by not taking into account these phenomena, it could be that all these scientific tests that we have where we see these small but significant effects aren't real effects: They're like the scientific equivalent in physical studies or drug trials or something - they're like equivalent to a placebo effect but it's actually the experimenter or someone else in the experiment producing those results there when they're not actually real results.
So, another one of my pet peeves, of course, is just mainstream science and especially diet science or health science, and the whole publishing, peer review system in general, where it can just be exploited and you can have totally fake papers written, results just made up for whomever wants them to be made up and they're quoted in the mainstream as, "Oh, you know, this drug does this thing, blah blah blah..." So, you've got that level of just total fraud that is very hard to sift through because just looking at a published paper or result, we can't know if it was totally fabricated or not.
On the other hand, for those that aren't fabricated, we have no idea of knowing if theirs is an actual real effect or if they just got that effect because of some kind of P.K. influence in that experiment. So just the possibility of it can throw all these scientific studies up in the air if they don't have the right methodology.
So it's kind of interesting but scary at the same time, and maybe that's one of the reasons that P.K./psychokinesis is not officially a real thing, because when you accept it, there's so many possible implications and that's just one of them.
Elan: But, it would seem to me that if someone was sincere about studying the subject, then they would be asking these questions; the curiosity would overcome any kind of reticence to engage and experiment just because it can go wrong. They would be doing their level best, probably, to think about all the possible influences on that experiment.
Harrison: And that's why parapsychologists often have better methodologies than mainstream scientists, because they're aware of these things. And so, when mainstream scientists criticise parapsychologists, the parapsychological studies are actually better done than the mainstream studies. And Rupert Sheldrake put out a paper on this just showing how bad a lot of the blind experiments in various mainstream fields are, and that parapsychologists actually are just better scientists; because they're aware of these things, they know how to structure their experiments in such a way to avoid these certain kinds of things.
So really, science would be in so much of a better state if these kinds of things were acknowledged and then they would refine the methodology and would get better results in all of these studies, but it just doesn't happen.
Elan: Well, I think the other thing about these parapsychologists is that they're kind of forced to make these experiments as rigorous as possible because of the nature of what they're studying. If they're not thinking through all the types of questions that materialist scientists would be asking to poke holes through the experiment and pooh pooh it, they would feel like they're not really doing the good job that they know they have to do to gain any kind of credibility in the field.
And it's very interesting that you bring up Rupert Sheldrake, for one because the man just gets attacked, left and right...
Harrison: Sometimes literally.
Elan: Yeah.
Harrison: A guy tried to stab him several years ago.
Elan: Is that right?
Harrison: Yeah.
Elan: Well, I don't know, that poses an interesting question for me anyway, and that is, you don't really see the vehemence of the other side; in other words, you don't really get the fervour or anti-biological materialism from the folks like Sheldrake or the people who learn about psi powers as you do from the other side. It's kind of like a psychological fascism: "This other world CAN'T exist alongside material laws and science. It just CAN'T! It can't be allowed to."
Harrison: "Therefore, it doesn't!"
Elan; "Therefore it doesn't, because we say so!" What is that? Is it pathology?
Shane: Well, it seems that that there's a pretty strong degree of pathology or authoritarianism. It's like, "What we say is God. We're the Gods of science and accept our rule."
Harrison: I think it might also come back to the lack of psychological depth that I was talking about; maybe not in all cases - it's hard to make a generality - but I think that maybe in general, people who lack a certain amount of psychological depth can't see these kinds of things - and I include probably psychopaths among those - in that it takes a certain amount of, first of all, open-mindedness, to see past the official dogma from the scientific/priestly class; but that open-mindedness goes to a whole range of other things, including being a spiritual person and understanding what spirituality is, because for a lot of people, spirituality is just the social experience of going to church and having a bunch of people and a pastor to tell them they'll go to hell if they don't do certain things - this very external set of rules that doesn't really have any kind of inner motivation or inner awareness or self-awareness - it's just this external law that you've got to follow. And so, I think it may be that a lot of the resistance comes from the fact that a lot of these scientists and a lot of the people in positions of power just don't have the psychological depth to see either the possibility of these things or maybe they do see the possibility of these things and they actively deny them for ulterior motives.
Shane: I guess that kind of brings up the question for me too: Is there some relationship between psychological depth and psi-phenomena? Have you come across anything like that, Harrison?
Harrison: That's interesting. I don't know. But, one interesting little statistic: There was a hypnosis study. The purpose of the study was to see if you could have a hypnotic effect on someone's talents or abilities. So, they took like a hundred people with various abilities; they were artistic abilities, so music or drawing or sculpture, thing like that. And so, they divided the group up and first of all found that around fifty percent of them couldn't be hypnotised at all or very well, and then twenty-five percent mildly to medium hypnotic ability. And then the other twenty-five percent were very hypnotisable. Those were basically told to play as if they were a professional or someone at the top of their class, and the highly hypnotisable individuals who were given the suggestion actually improved in their ability to play their instruments and some of them retained this higher level of playing after the study. But the ones who weren't hypnotisable, there was no effect; they didn't get any better.
And so one of the control studies was just to not hypnotise a person and just tell them to play as if they were a world-class musician and they didn't have any effect either.
So the question there that came to me is: What is this ability to be hypnotised? Is it a good or a bad thing? And for those that weren't hypnotisable... because I think most people would agree that it's probably a good thing not to be hypnotisable because you're less suggestible, you're more able to make your own decisions and not be at the control of someone else - most people would agree that's a good thing - so it just made me wonder where all these dividing lines are.
Shane: Maybe they're tapping in to something - those who are easily hypnotised. Maybe they have an easier time tapping in to some kind of group energy.
Harrison: Yeah, and that's not necessarily to say anything bad about those who weren't able to increase their skill because of hypnotisability, it may just be that those individuals, they have to work for it and they may even get greater results as a result of putting their own will into it and maybe coming to a state of mind in the future where they then are able to access more of that creativity, but as a result of their own will and not the hypnotist.
Shane: And it might be more of an element of something of their own involved. So it does require more work.
Harrison: Yeah, I don't know. But it's interesting.
Elan: Well, maybe the ability to be hypnotised is just like raw intelligence or any type of intelligence; it can be influenced in one way or another. If a politician had grown up thinking and meditating and concentrating on ideals and using models of other politicians who really tried to make change, that had mentors that were savvy and well-intended, they might realise some kind of potential. And by the same token, a person who's got all these evil values instilled in them but with a similar amount of raw intelligence or computing/cognitive power, can be directed in a different direction and use those same latent abilities but serving forces of entropy and selfishness. So, interesting questions.
Harrison: I just think that hypnotic boils are an interesting thing.
I mean, the whole, so-called, mind/body connection. The idea that you could hypnotically induce a person to develop a burn mark on their skin? I mean, where's the heat? How does skin burn without a match pressed up against it?
Shane: Yeah, with all these things, it's like the human brain must have some pretty amazing capacities for everybody that we just are completely disconnected from.
Harrison: But instead, we are focusing on "Evil Russia" and "ISIS" and coming up with new and improved drugs and ways of killing people.
Shane: And fear and propaganda, and it kind of makes you wonder, are all those things a replacement for that dissociation, because there's an element of dissociation with hypnosis and it can be used for creative purposes or it can be used just as a distraction and to keep people in their own world, in their own bubble. And when you inject the population with fear, they just move inward.
Elan: And this reminds me of The Men Who Stare at Goats: The military is interested in these types of phenomena, if only to know how better to weaponize it. There isn't - I don't think - a kind of natural curiosity about it that would seek to learn it just for knowledge's sake; it becomes this thing, this bullet, this new armament, this new weapon against communists or what have you.
Shane: And it's funny, what are those experiments used for and might there be more normal applications that they've used these paranormal insights for?
Elan: Well, if we weren't on the cusp of a whole number of paradigm-shifting events on the planet, I would say, all things staying where they were or not getting so terrible, in forty years, you'd buy your psi-ring at Walmart and you'd be taking classes in levitation to impress your girlfriend.
Shane: Have some Jedi classes.
Elan: Yeah.
Harrison: Yeah, I don't know. Well, I think that might just about wrap it up for today unless we have any final words?
Elan: Just an observation. We went from Jen Psaki to psi science and it's kind of an interesting development, there - a little surprising; but, you never know what'll be said on The Truth Perspective.
Harrison: Yeah, psi isn't Psaki.
William: Now I can go to a restaurant and order a sake without people looking at me funny?
Harrison: Oh, but you know what? There is something we forgot.
Shane, I interrupted you earlier in the show to take a call, but you were talking about Saturday Night Live.
Shane: Ah, yeah. So, yeah, we were talking about just the overt propaganda directed towards Russia. And yeah, it's in the news, but it's also been in our entertainment. And I recently saw a Saturday Night Live skit where it was just pretty outrageous. They were depicting what Russia was like and it was just such a backwards and even obscene depiction of what Russia today is like, when it was kind of looking or imagining or taking notes from what Russia might have been like decades and decades ago, maybe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
So, I've got just a little clip from Saturday Night Live...
Russian Lady: Like all Russians, Colin, I have been planning my funeral since I was a little girl. As I am buried I will have them play the most popular funeral song in Russia: "At laaast!"
Presenter: Oh yeah, come on, Russia can not be that awful.
Russian Lady: Oh yeah? You know District 12 in Hunger Games is based on richest neighbourhood in my village. In Russia, do you know what Fifty Shades of Grey is about? My teeth. Even Ebola would not come to Russia. It almost came and then it was like, "Nah, too easy".
Shane: I mean, you listen to that and you don't get any sense of humour from that. It's just bad.
Harrison: And yet, people laugh.
Shane: Well, that's what I wonder too, you know? Was that really the audience laughing or is that just canned?
Harrison: Yeah.
Elan: Maybe it was people really laughing in their canned way.
Shane: Yeah, giving a more mechanical...
Elan: Yeah, there was a comedian in the 1980s, a Russian comedian named Yakov Smirnoff, who was pretty popular for a while. And his big shtick was he was playing up the persona of someone who came from Russia to the US and was impressed with everything. And so, everything that he sees, he would say, "What a country! I have this and I have that". But he never disparaged Russia in any way - to my memory, anyway - it was all just about affirming those things that he felt were opportunities in the '80s when he came here, or the '70s. And that's the only analogue to this bit that I can think of.
Shane: Well, even during the Cold War, at the height of it, I heard different commentators talk about this issue and how the spitefulness and the derogatory depictions of Russia - what's going on now, what we see now. Like, even then with Regan and stuff, these types of things weren't so rampant, then.
Harrison: It wasn't as bad as it is today.
Shane: Yeah, this Saturday Night Live skit was just like, I really think that's awful; come on.
Elan: It's banal.
Shane: Yeah.
Harrison: Well, I think we'll wrap it up there. And, to take us out today, on this show, we've got a special song from the Rollins Band that I hope you'll all like. And I think it'll just sum up... How would you sum it up, Elan?
Elan: Uhm... the mind-set of psychopaths. Of course, as artistically interpreted by Rollins Band.
Harrison: Alright, so, with that, we will see everyone next week; thank you, and tune in tomorrow and Monday for the other shows on SOTT radio network.
See you, everyone. Take care.
Shane: Take care, guys.
Elan: Thanks for listening.
William: Bye bye.
Song:
"Liar" by Rollins Band:
So you think you're going to live your life alone
in darkness and seclusion... yeah, I know
you've been out there and tried to mix with the animals
and it just left you full of humiliated confusion
but the feeling of loneliness never leaves you
it haunts you everywhere you go
and then you meet me and your whole world changes
because everything I say is everything you've ever wanted to hear
so you drop your defenses, and you drop all your fears
and you're so busy feeling good that you never
question why things are going so well
You want to know why?
'Cause I'm a liar, yeah, I'm a liar
I'll tear your mind out, I'll burn your soul
I'll turn you into me, I'll turn you into me
'Cause I'm a liar, a liar, a liar, a liar...
I'll hide behind a smile and understanding eyes
and I'll tell you things that you already know so you can say:
I really identify with you, so much...
I'll come to you like an affliction but I'll leave you like an addiction
You'll never forget me... you wanna know why?
'Cause I'm a liar, yeah, I'm a liar
I'll rip your mind out, I'll burn your soul
I'll turn you into me, I'll turn you into me
'Cause I'm a liar, a liar, liar, liar, liar liar...
I don't know why I feel the need to lie and cause you so much pain
maybe it's something inside, maybe it's something I can't explain
'cause all I do is mess you up and lie to you
I'm a liar, oh, I am a liar
but if you'll give just one more chance I swear I will never lie to you again
'cause now I see the destructive power of a lie,
that's stronger than truth
I can't believe I ever hurt you, I swear I will never lie to you again
please, just give me one more chance, I'll never lie to you again, no,
I swear... I will never tell a lie, I will never tell a lie, no, no...
Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ho Ho Ho Ho! Sucker! Sucker! Sucker!
I am a liar, yeah, I am a liar, yeah
I like it, I feel good, I am a liar, yeah
I lie, I lie, I lie... oh, I lie,
I'll lie again, I'll again and again...I'll keep lying, I promise.
Reader Comments
to our Newsletter